nopehnnope

Everything can be a trade secret. They’re not labeled with a stamp that says “Trade Secret”. If you’re working on a direct competitor to something you make at work, you are almost certainly stealing trade secrets without even realizing.

Do you really need it explained to you how a bike is more dangerous to pedestrians than a runner? A bike has way more inertia, is harder to stop than someone running, and is a tangle of metal that can seriously injure someone, and more difficult to safely maneuver around short of standing the side and stopping to let them pass. Takes half a second of thought to realize all this but you chose to play incredulous instead.

It is literally called a duty of loyalty in many legal systems. Something you could have easily confirmed with a quick Google search in half the time it took to write your comment.

Quick Google shows this to be true in common law jurisdictions and every civil law jurisdiction I saw relevant information on.

This is a legal concept. You have to be loyal to your employer. You can’t intentionally undermine their business, charge them for hours you didn’t work, etc. It doesn’t mean that you have to go out of your way to advance their ends.

As an employee you have a duty of loyalty to your employer. I’m not sure about side projects generally, that is probably a Cyprus specific question. But I’d be shocked if it’s legal anywhere to release a product that competes with what you work on at your job. That’s just common sense. You would likely be violating not just your employment contract, but also trade secret, copyright, patents, etc. This is egregious enough behavior to even be criminally charged in many places.

Dell XPS’s are superficially nice machines but the power management is comically broken. They overheat and drain their battery while sleeping. You’re lucky if you close the lid in the morning and there’s still juice left by 5pm.

The disparity is much greater among EU countries. The average Bulgarian income, for example, is well below bare survival income in Western Europe. US geographic disparities are much smaller, and less geographic than racial (which then bears out geographically through different demographic mixes). Also, for the first 150 years of existence, the US was not a federal welfare state. The federal government was even limited to taxing states at an equal per capita rate until after the 16th amendment, ratified in 1909.

Some problems with that:

* The US had a single national language (despite regional linguistic minorities). In the EU, the closest would be English, which is the universal second language but very few people’s first language.

* Relatedly, the US in 1789 was very culturally homogenous by modern standards. Europe is not.

* The wealth disparity between countries inside the EU is absolutely massive. Federation would lead to unfathomably massive wealth transfers from the North and West to East and South. This would lead to resentment and rekindled nationalism that would create extreme political strife and tear the whole continent apart.

Union membership is down but anti-discrimination laws are as strong as ever. I was just saying that in companies that are unionized, there is a strong incentive for management to turn to rigid rules and documentation of minor transgressions.

In theory but most plaintiffs employment lawyers (working on contingency) aren’t going to invest that much time and money for a run of the mill anti discrimination lawsuit.