My dad was offered a buyout when he was around my current age. It included 10 years seniority added to his pension and health insurance until Medicare kicked in. He never looked back.
Question from an European: Why did they need to be so generous? From what we hear over here you have at will employment so they can just fire you on the spot, no need to pay anything, no? But then I read stories like these which are the opposite. I'd kill for something like this over here.
Paying an expensive senior (older) employee to quietly and happily go away without raising a fuss may have saved money in the long term. I am sure they did not offer the same deal to everyone.
I think for them likely better to preserve a relationship rather than have it adversarial in future. It would definitely pay dividends over the potential issues it may cause.
To retain and recruit talent, and protect from lawsuits (you usually have to sign a release to receive severance/a buyout). Generally only difficult to recruit and highly in-demand employees get these packages - most people over here would also kill for something like this.
Wrongful termination lawsuits are a thing, and the law protects workers from various things, including age discrimination. There are also limits on mass layoffs. All of these combine to make firing people much harder than folks think, especially at larger companies, and especially especially when large numbers of people are affected.
In short, don’t believe Internet memes. The US isn’t the capitalist hellscape disaffected commenters pretend it is.
Just go to fark.com, a lingering glimmer of light from before the dead web. They are still aggregating human curated news and hosting reasonably civil discussions.
Then buy a Totalfark subscription so they don't need to bend over backwards to show more ads just to keep the lights on. See ya there!
Sorry, you have been blocked
You are unable to access fark.com
Why have I been blocked?
This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. The action you just performed triggered the security solution. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data.
What can I do to resolve this?
You can email the site owner to let them know you were blocked. Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page.
$35,000 for being attacked by a police dog, hospitalized and jailed for hours. Nope. I'd ride that to the supreme court. He is lucky he wasn't shot for a 'misread'.
To get a feel for this effect, activate an instant ice pack. Mixing ammonium nitrate with water is an endothermic reaction, instantly making the pack cool down. Being able to reverse a reaction like this simply by applying pressure is fascinating.
My US-born child qualifies for US-Canadian dual citizenship under Citizenship Act Bill C-3. I can see several upsides to having a Canadian passport but what are the potential downsides for a US citizen and resident that does not intend to relocate?
Currently, none as far as the US is concerned[0]. The child is a US citizen and while in or entering/exiting must use their US passport. If they move to Canada (or any where else), they are still required to fulfill US tax obligations.
You'll want to check if Canada has the same tax requirements for citizens living in a foreign country. In Canada, the child would be a citizen of Canada and US consular protections/services are unlikely to be helpful there. Same while in the US, they are only seen as a US citizen and are subject to the US.
However, a bill was introduced: Exclusive Citizenship Act of 2025. You may want to follow it (in-case it actually passes and is not simply grandstanding for maga). It would require US citizens to only hold one citizenship and dual nationals would be forced to renounce any others or automatically lose US citizenship. Which would be challenged up to the Supreme Court as US citizenship is protected in the Constitution and can only be voluntarily renounced. The provision saying it would be lost by missing the one-year deadline to provide a written renunciation of their foreign citizenship to the State Department -- is very likely unconstitutional.
If they’re us-resident there should be no problem, assuming the person travels on the us passport outside of Canada. They’d have to travel with two passports going to Canada, as each country expects to see their passport upon entry. Canada doesn’t tax non residents like the us so there’s no tax changes without moving into Canada, and there’s currently a tax treaty for that.
There was a Windows 2000 bug that would allow the computer to be crashed via a malformed IrDA packet. Of course someone crafted a Palm Pilot app to zonk all the vulnerable PCs in the vicinity. It worked on servers as well. Endless fun for a little while.
Some laptops had them, and came with IR remotes. Some of the marketing was around using those laptops as "media centres", and you could control them from the sofa while it was plugged into a TV.
It brings to mind the parable of the drowning man or "what do you want from me, I sent you two boats and a helicopter".
reply