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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 21st, 2023

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  • 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.


  • This the order in which you should try to access papers:

    1. Normal Internet search including quotes to force the title and components like “pdf”
    2. Organizational/lab pages of the authors. Very many people will put either full papers or preprints on their personal professional pages.
    3. Preprint services like arXiv. The ones you look at will be determined by subject area. Preprints will usually only differ from the published work in formatting.
    4. Just email the authors. Most of us are so happy that virtually anyone wants to read the paper we spent months on that we will happily send a copy. Because people are busy you might need to hit them up a couple of times, but most will be more than happy to send you a copy, and most publications specifically carve out to allow authors to do that.

  • You’re talking like a Sovereign Citizen.

    I’m talking about the very specific laws that prevent people from being evicted if they’ve been residing on a property for N months without following a very deliberate and drawn out legal procedure so that landlords cannot evict a family from their home of many years because of some missed rent payments or because they want to upgrade the place so they can charge more to a new tenant. Those are the laws that keep the sheriffs from just kicking down doors, at least in some states.

    I’m not taking a moral position on squatting. My friends and I squatted in an abandoned house while I was in high school, although most of us didn’t live there full time. If I noticed someone squatting tomorrow, especially in a corporate owned home, I would not have seen it. But the laws that I’m talking about were designed to protect tenants from having their lives unfairly disrupted, and I’m arguing that even if people are against squatters, we still need to protect tenants’ rights.

    I would have thought that was abundantly clear.





  • First, squatters of this type are taking advantage of laws intended to protect renters from predatory landlords. Wherever you stand on people appropriating unused property, these laws need to stay in place even if they’re made more specific.

    Second, news outlets like this will always quote a “guns and drugs” case and not the mom with three kids seeking employment or homeless vet cases.

    Third, with security cams and doorbells being so cheap, there’s no reason why this should be an issue, especially for a large real estate rental company. That alone puts me in “cry me a river” mode. Notice again that the article lists interviews with individual homeowners but is actually profiling the impact on a rental company.



  • I can’t tell if your question is intended to be sarcastic or not, but just in case the majority of trans persons, including a large majority of trans women, never get surgery. A larger portion of trans men get surgery (mastectomies) because it’s a lot harder to pass if you have prominent breasts. Trans men with smaller breasts, including younger people, will often use a binder, which compresses the breasts so that they’re much less noticeable.

    There are a number of reasons trans persons don’t get surgery. Some simply do not want it, and that’s okay. We don’t get to be gatekeepers on this issue. Being trans can be entirely about presentation. Some would ideally have it, but they’ve set up a lot of hoops for people to jump through. There can be a long series of consultations and exams that are required to determine if a person is going to be considered a candidate for surgery. It can be expensive, and isn’t always covered by insurance. As with all surgeries, there’s always a risk of complications and variability in outcomes.

    Again, I hope you were being sarcastic, but if not (or for others), I hope that answers some questions.






  • You should not discontinue medication until you speak with your healthcare provider.

    Neuroanatomy and neurochemistry are complex systems. A high level symptom like depression could be coming from any one of a myriad of causes. A given medication works against specific causes, but will not work if your symptoms are being caused by something not targeted by that medication.

    Until our technology and understand improves to the point that we can do some kind of neuroimaging to diagnose, the only thing we can do is to listen to your symptoms and make a best guess. If it doesn’t work, it means that guess was wrong, and you either need a dosage adjustment or a medication change. If it does work but has unmanageable side effects, that’s the same. Any continuing symptoms or side effects have diagnostic relevance, and you need to work with medical staff to dial it in.


  • The fact that virtually all of the developed world is operating under various systems of social democracy while not sliding into authoritarian communism is the most dramatic refutation of Serfdom that could exist.

    I read it. It’s cartoonishly simple - and I can’t emphasize that characterization enough. It’s still trotted out as a “proof” that Medicare will inevitably lead the US to having a Stalinist dictator.


  • I kind of want to learn some Middle English stock phrases to grill anyone who complains about the changing nature of English being just political correctness. Like, “You want to be a language conservative? Here’s some Chaucer-era language motherfucker.”