In the US, there is no law or regulation. It’s decided company by company. We usually distinguish between vacation days and sick days, and the number of hours for each accumulate throughout the year based on the number of hours worked, with more senior employees having a higher ratio (meaning they accumulate hours faster). The total number of hours are generally capped (eg, they can’t go above 240), but they do carry over year to year. Some companies (and I believe this is required in some states, like California) must pay out the remaining vacation hours when the employee leaves the company, so that if you leave with 120 hours of vacation on the books, you get three weeks vacation pay in addition to any additional severance package. That does not hold for accumulated sick leave. These are both considered “paid time off” (PTO) because employees are paid their salary/hourly pay. When I left my last position, I did so with 240 hours of vacation that they had to pay out, which was in addition to my hiring bonus and moving allowance at my new employer. It came in handy.

Other companies do what’s called “unlimited paid time off.” This means there’s no pre-existing cap and that vacation and sick time get bundled together. It’s all at the manager’s discretion. Depending on the company, though, it can be a disadvantage. Corporate culture can be such that people are discouraged from taking time off, and there’s no vacation pay out if you leave, because you don’t have set hours on the books. Americans in general take long weekend or week-long vacations, sometimes up to two weeks. Depending on the role (and the nature of the vacation), they’ll still work some hours, because that’s often the cultural expectation.

The worst jobs - and this means the majority of service jobs - allow for either zero PTO hours, or will routinely deny employee requests to use them. The above applies to corporate jobs (eg engineers and designers), union jobs, and government work. The person making your pizza or telling you where the shoe department is probably doesn’t get those “benefits,” and if they do, they have to jump through a ridiculous number of hoops (including facing the wrath of their manager) to exercise them.

I’d like the US to have legislation to force minimum levels of PTO, and I’d like to have the culture change so one can say “I’m going to be in Greece for four weeks but will call you when I get back” rather than saying “I have stage three liver cancer and will be getting my organs replaced but I can make the meeting at ten.”

Manager at a FAANG here. Three days of sick leave (per year I’m guessing) is fucking insanely low. Just a flu will take someone out for a week easily. If you force them to come in or else take unpaid time off/risk being fired you’re going to a) get someone who is marginally productive at best and b) likely to get more coworkers sick, causing a bigger slowdown and costing the company more money. You also come off like the person who writes the memo that 40% of sick time is taken on a Monday or a Friday.

You’re Colin Robinson, the energy vampire of your office.

Bans work better on tobacco because unlike alcohol or drugs, they’re used habitually but generally not recreationally. That is, the role of cigarettes in society and individually is different from those of alcohol, cannabis, and the like.

I am going to hazard a guess that tobacco industry lobbying is responsible for this. They went into Eastern European nations and pitched the idea that tobacco control was bad for the country’s economy because without smokers they’d have to deal with more people who live to retirement age, and killing them earlier makes things cheaper.

Banning cigarettes removes them from convenience stores, making them much harder to buy. The work they’ve done so far has pulled the smoking population down to 8% from over 16% ten years ago, although it’s still 20% among Māori.

I would not be surprised if the ban cut that in half or more.

Found the parseltongue.

That bot is actually worse than useless because people read the god-awful summary and think they got the gist of the article. The bot has often left out the most important points.

It’s be better to just scrape the first Lee paragraphs and go with that.

I think the general idea would be to

1. Design a vehicle with as low a cost as possible. Maybe create a design challenge with a cash prize
2. Have the international community (mostly the US but it’d be reasonable for other countries to be pressured for this) subsidize the cost of the vehicles so they are competitive with ICE vehicles.
3. Infrastructure for charging and repairs. This is going to be incredibly expensive and we’d again have to look for subsidies to develop a power grid and charging stations, as well as creating local services to repair the vehicles.

The moral motivation for subsidies lies in the fact that the west in general is that the west has profited massively via wealth and resource extraction from Africa.

What an odd chart. Do the authors do any kind of correlation analysis on something like interest rates or median housing prices to explain the seasonality?

Most of the people I know who moved to Austin are looking to come back to the west coast due to concerns about their civil rights being removed and their overall safety. Blue city in a red state used to be a viable strategy, but several Republican governors are centered that the big centralized state government can tell the cities what to do, while simultaneously saying that the federal government can’t tell them what to do.

That gambling tower is defying the laws of physics and it will come crashing down.

Just like gambling, I guess.

If you haven’t yet, I recommend reading A Stitch in Time. It’s written by Andrew Robinson and the audiobook is read by him as well.

It is the song that doesn’t end.

Even at $30k per year it was ridiculously cheap. I have a friend of a friend that was going to do this for his retirement. $2500 per month for a room and board that allows you to spend your life sailing from port to port is actually a great deal, and if/when you need more medical care you simply move back off of the ship. The idea was that passengers could just buy another ticket and keep sailing for as many years as they wanted.

I called this one.

1. It sounded too good to be true. I had a feeling that they wouldn’t launch and if they did it’d be a floating Fyre Festival except with senior citizens who would not be able to escape.
2. Cruise ships are Petri dishes as it is. The idea of a cruise consisting of mostly elderly people who stay on board and mingle with crowds in the various ports of call sounds like a death cruise. Just imagine a viral outbreak on that ship that was killing passengers, resulting in a lockdown.
3. It was basically someone watching Wall-E and deciding that the dystopian part was actually a pretty idea.

Except in this case it’s actually working.

And to the degree it doesn’t, it’s because of people who “don’t care.” With Bobo giving a handjob in public and Trump seeing no negative impact from the indictments, and the J6ers still in Congress and getting reelected - it’s the people who “don’t care” who don’t hold the politicians responsible who make committing crimes and defending the criminals just a part of normal US politics.

Dear God, Hope you got the letter and I pray you can make it better down here.

As I’m sure you’re aware, many women are shamed into hiding the fact that they were sexually assaulted. It is extremely common for the woman to either blame herself, or feel disgusting, or to be afraid of not being believed or of the police themselves. A lot of women in these categories do not report their rapes. Only about 30% of rapes are ever reported. Many women feel they need to just move past it, and many are told that explicitly.

But when you see your rapist reaching a powerful and influential political office, like the mayor of New York or the president of the United States, you might feel compelled to finally come out and say something.

Judging by the length of the snood, this is most definitely a male turkey. Female snoods are quite short and rarely even dip below the beak.

This is either a male turkey in drag or a trans female turkey who has not yet elected to have tom surgery.

Against this scale of attack (that is, small and ineffective) there’s not a lot that you can do or that would be worth it. I think we flew one or two two-plane sorties that hit warehouses/storage units, but I wouldn’t expect anything more than that.

The point when we get truly involved is if Iran takes on a major role rather than just issuing press releases.

We were taught not to use any luggage or clothing that looked even remotely military when traveling.

However it is against international law to disguise yourself as a civilian mech while carrying out combat operations and you can lose the legal protections afforded POWs.

Here’s the basis of the finding:

Palm Beach county circuit court judge Reid Scott said he had found evidence that Tesla “engaged in a marketing strategy that painted the products as autonomous” and that Musk’s public statements about the technology “had a significant effect on the belief about the capabilities of the products”.

Judge Scott also found that the plaintiff, Banner’s wife, should be able to argue to jurors that Tesla’s warnings in its manuals and “clickwrap” were inadequate. He said the accident is “eerily similar” to a 2016 fatal crash involving Joshua Brown in which the Autopilot system failed to detect crossing trucks.

The bot that parses the articles creates a worse summary than you’d get by just reading random sentences.

In any case, we should note that this finding was reached after the recent media disclosures that Musk and Tesla deliberately created a false impression of the reliability of their autopilot capabilities. They were also deceptive in the capabilities of vehicles like the cybertruck and their semi, as well as things like range estimation, which might show a pattern of deliberate deception - demonstrating that it is a Tesla company practice across product lines. The clickthrough defense compared to what the CEO says on stage on massively publicized announcements sounds to me a bit like Trump’s defense that he signed his financial statements but noted that by doing so he wasn’t actually confirming anything and the people who believed him are the ones to blame.

Given his groundless lawsuit against media matters and his threats against the ADL, I think Elon might have started circling the drain.

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

I’m going to try to match your communication style here.

As the saying goes, if you were right, I would agree with you. I’ve been using mathematics professionally for a few decades now, particularly in the analysis of information propagation of human behavior and that sort of thing.

First of all it only doesn’t “logically make sense” if the sample you’re pulling is a random sample. It isn’t. When you disadvantage voters in order to suppress the vote, you don’t disadvantage them all equally. You leave polls open in rural districts and consolidate them in urban ones. You require ID cards because it’s harder for some people to get them than others. I suspect you’ve actually never studied statistics.

It has been demonstrated statistically and repeatedly that actions that reduce voter turnout - off year elections, ID cards, long lines - preferentially discriminate against Democratic candidates by disadvantaging Democratic voters. It is why they work to limit early voting and vote by mail. If your made-up reasoning about rural voters was at all correct, republicans would be the ones pushing for longer voting windows and mail in voting. They’re not. It is time to revisit your hypothesis in the face of what actually happens in the real world.

Here’s an article, and here’s the pull quote for you:

“In fairness to the Republicans, voter suppression has a long history in the United States that is not located in one party, but it’s located in one ideology, and that ideology is white supremacy,” Mitchell continued. “So for much of the post-Reconstruction period, until say 1970 or 1980 or so, that was either primarily the Democratic party – think of the old Dixiecratic south – or in both parties.

“It is only in the last 40ish years that it has become a Republican issue.”

Voter suppression targets minority voters, who for the past half century or so have been primarily Democrats. It’s why republicans have challenged and overturned key provisions of the Voting Rights Act. It’s why they try to cast doubt on the integrity of the vote without providing any evidence.

Here’s a Wikipedia reference. Here’s one from Rolling Stone.

Or just take a look for yourself about which party is trying to pass bills that reduce turnout, permit party-driven redistricting, and reduce the ways in which votes can be cast.

One of my favorite quotes is by physicist Wolfgang Pauli “This isn’t right. It’s not even wrong.” It’s used for ideas that are so ludicrous that they actually fall outside the realm of comprehension. Your idea doesn’t fall into that category. It’s simply wrong.