IanPBann

I have to disagree with your opinion on voluntary layoffs.

Here in the UK an employer has to inform the government and go through a mandatory redundancy process when laying off more than a given number of employees (I think it's 100 off the top of my head). At my last role I was put at risk of redundancy and went through the process. One of the first steps of that process was offering voluntary redundancy which had a higher redundancy package than if you received compulsory redundancy.

If someone was considering leaving, or was close to retirement leaving voluntarily gave them the opportunity to leave early and with a nice payout. Or if you had skills high in demand it gave you the opportunity to get a lump sum and walk into a new job.

This significantly reduced the need for the company to make compulsory redundancies.

If they're cutting staff at that quantity it's almost certainly to save money, and the money saved from laying off employees shouldn't be going towards funding new hires.

I would love to be able to filter results to remove articles written purely for affiliate links - if I'm looking for a new washing machine, I want an impartial article from someone with industry knowledge, not someone who has taken the five most popular machines from amazon to post with Amazon Associates links

I caught it in September when numbers here in the UK were quite low.

I'm not sure how I caught it. I had left my car into the garage a few days before I showed symptoms and had to get an Uber home, then back to the garage to pick it up, so my strongest suspicion is one of the Uber drivers or previous passengers had it or potentially a mechanic had it and it remained in the car.

The strangest thing is my girlfriend and I had spent the day before I showed symptoms together and she slept over that night but she didn't seem to catch it off me. She even had an antibody test about a month after which was negative suggesting she hadn't already had asymptomatic Covid.

The thing that stikes me about the naming of variants, is that to your standard person on the street, referring to the variants by the place they were first identified is going to be considerably more meaningful than calling them a greek letter, especially with the less common letters. It's also easier to mentally track the variant's progress if you know where it "originated".

While some advertisements may be dishonest, I don't feel that that can be said of advertising. Advertising is absolutely designed to part you of your money, but that isn't necessarily bad for you.

If I see an advertisement for a good or service which I purchase because of the ad and which subsequently benefits my life, yes the advertiser has profited, but so have I.

If I make a product which benefits humanity (say something that's a better quality, more environmentally friendly alternative to a popular product) is it not more selfish not not advertise and spread the word?

That was something I picked up from one of the more experienced software devs when I started - in his code there were far fewer comments saying "This section does x and y", than there were comments saying "We are doing x and y because ..."

The comment you replied to is correct based on what you said - if you start in a state in permanent summer time, travel south to a state in permanent winter time, keep travelling south to a state in permanent summer time, and so on, you will be going back and forth by an hour repeatedly.

Hypothetically, if you start just north of Sittard and east of the German/Netherlands border (in Germany), and travel in a straight line, almost due south to Geneva in Switzerland, you could, depending on what time member states choose to permanently adopt, potentially go from German summertime, to Dutch wintertime, to Belgian summertime, to Luxembourgish wintertime, to French summertime, to Swiss wintertime, all in under 350 miles and with not much deviation in longitude.

I first came across Petzold this weekend while watching a talk by Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin on the future of programming. Martin was discussing Turing's paper "On Computable Numbers" and recommended reading it and Petzold's "Annotated Turing". I currently have Petzold's book on my "to-buy" list so am glad to see it spoken of highly.

You can appeal against a conviction, but unless new evidence comes to light, a non-guilty verdict closes the case. At least that's my understanding.

Yes, the core idea of looking for someone who neither says they can do something difficult really simply nor says they can't do it is sound.

It's the idea of requesting the contractor to give feedback on a task that you have no intention of having them complete that people (including me) are taking issue with.

The title of the test is irrelevant - the test could easily be asking a contractor if they could develop an application that does abc in such-and-such a time-frame then turning round and telling them "I don't actually want an application that does that, I just wanted to see what you'd say".