My boss has been trying to bully me to RTO for several months now. Unfortunately for him, he promised me verbally that this job was remote forever during the interview, and where I live verbal contracts are just as valid as contracts on paper.
Because of their bully tactics I've essentially been paid for doing absolutely nothing at home for 2 months now. They can't fire me for cause, because they did contract with me under the stipulation of WFH, and they can't lay me off without cause because they know perfectly well that I can and will sue them if they do because the reason is obvious even if not explicitly stated.
I guess the point of this post is that companies will cut off their nose to spite their face.
> Mere responding is evidently not enough, you need to cooperate.
Only if the request is coming from a country with a lot of power to effect its judgments internationally, or from a country you plan to personally visit. Whether or not you agree with it, ignoring legal requests from the US, China, and the EU (and debatably some other countries), isn't really an option in this day and age.
Until you wanted to visit a small country on vacation and forgot you ignored their court order 4 years ago.
Or you visit some random country and didn't check the extradition treaties they have with some other country you thought you'd never visit.
Or maybe new extradition treaties (yay!)
The sad conclusion I'm seeing in this story is: If you make an internet service, it's safer to just block off all the countries except the specific ones you're planning to operate in.
This really isn't a difficult question to answer: You remove the smallest subset of content such that you are allowed to operate in the markets in which you plan to operate/have a business presence in/plan to visit.
That's an imaginary simplicity since there is no such thing: determining a subset requires very high certainty in the rules (to be able to apply them and not run afoul), which doesn't exist in any real legal system
There are several jurisdictions in the world where the government has the power to force a provider to keep logs, and actively lie about it. We simply have no way to know if mullvad or any other logless provider is actually logless, because they can be legally forced to lie about it.
Aside, warrant canaries have never been actually tested in court and the common consensus is that they wouldn't fly in reality if they were ever contested.
Aware of what? Government says a file is illegal? Sounds like a censorship regime to me.
Not if the key is provided to the platform operators to confirm the contents. Otherwise yes anyone could claim any encrypted file contains illicit material and people would game that system.
For what it's worth the key may not need to be manually shared to the provider as referrers often leak where people learned about the file and that source location may also contain the key or password. All it takes is one person using a web interface or addon that leaks such information. Some addons break the referrer-policy header and many website operators don't even set the header [1] in the first place. Example header testing [2]. Please test the sites you visit and kindly ask the website operators to address any missing headers.
# nginx example
referrer-policy "strict-origin" always;
Often is the case but I would still suggest setting the referrer policy should the file be enticing enough for people to register an account assuming forum ranks and further actions are not part of the picture.
It is hard for me to see how this will in any way improve growth.
I know for myself that every day I do approximately 1/5th of the total amount of productive work I can do in a week while remaining happy and willing. If my work week were to be increased to 6 days, that amount would decrease to 1/6th, and the total amount of productive work that I can do in a week would very definitely not be going up, in fact I suspect it would be going down because of less unburdened time* for myself.
Here in Belgium, there's also hard upper limits to what you can earn depending on education, and job title. And since I am already making that limit, there is absolutely no chance that I will put in any more effort than the bare minimum to remain at this level.
*: I define unburdened here as time where I am not doing actual productive work, and I'm not doing busywork to fill the hours either. In other words, when I'm at home.
You are probably right about your own body (you are the expert, after all).
However the legislation described in the article seems to be about partially lifting a restriction that bans companies and workers on voluntarily agreeing what their weekly working hours should be.
At one extreme, there's quite a few jobs that mostly just require a warm body to be present. I see no reason to override people's own judgement on how many hours they think it's good to work, just like I see no reason to override your judgement.
> Here in Belgium, there's also hard upper limits to what you can earn depending on education, and job title. And since I am already making that limit, there is absolutely no chance that I will put in any more effort than the bare minimum to remain at this level.
Is that a social convention, or anything enforced by law?
Also from the article:
> “It knows that the majority of Greeks, on an average monthly salary of €900, can only survive until the 20th of the month. This latest barbaric measure is not going to solve the fundamental problem of labour shortages and a lot of us feel it is very unfair to unemployed young Greeks who may never have a job.”
This sounds like the same sort of fallacy that gives us the common lament of 'the foreigners are stealing our jobs.'
Well, the same threat works in the other direction: 'Agree to this, or I'm walking out the door.'
The ability to end a commercial relationship is an important tool for both sides. It's called voting with your feet. Also very important in politics. I voted with my feet to leave the country I grew up in, for example.
> there's also hard upper limits to what you can earn depending on education, and job title.
If you live in CA in the us there are hourly jobs and salary jobs. Not all salary jobs are the same. Some of them have "exempt" status. If you make less than (70k a year I think) and work more than 40 hours a week they have to pay you over time.
SO your a Jr programer at a game studio and they want to work you 100 hours a week. Well if you make 100k a year tough for you on over time.
By that same token I can negotiate a stupid high salary as "top talent" in tech. Regardless of what my title or qualifications are.
Most of the giant companies in the Vally got to their scale on the backs of a lot of late nights by a lot of people.
>> I know for myself that every day I do approximately 1/5th of the total amount of productive work I can do in a week while remaining happy and willing.
The answer to this is money. Not another 10k a year, rather the long bet of stock options. It isn't a bet you're making alone either. I can call up people from some of my more early 2000s start up days and they will move mountains if I ask them to. Because we survived those late nights the is a strange bond... The pay off isn't a bit of money or "FIRE" money, it's "fuck you money", it can be stupid!!! Lots of those types (the ones who won the stock options lottery) are still here working (and more than 40 hours a week) because they love the thrill (it's addicting).
Now look at China, pushed the same way. Its tech culture is 996. 9am to 9pm 6 days a week. It also is the home of "lying flat" ... so it is trying BOTH directions.
In the case of Greece, productivity per worker is appalling low... They not only need more jobs in general they also need more work out of the same folks. Does removing the cap make running a salary startup that is US style expectations viable? IDFK but it would be a step towards that.
Trying to understand China's 996 and lying flat movements, and how they coexist, (as someone from California) confuses me greatly. I also keep hearing that there is massive government overreach there, why don't they just squash the lying flat movement before it spreads?
IM going to guess that CA, Hacker news resident has you leaning left and affluent. Maybe even a (fellow) Bay Area resident.
Lets look a the bay. The tech boom. The bay is covered from Marin to San Jose with money. Tech, Film (Skywalker, Pixar), Wine.
That's the gentrified, affluent, peak Bay Area... Outside this one window the Bay Area has a long storied history of being grimy and hard.
WWI and WWII ... Spanish flu, a public safety officer shot a man for not wearing a mask. WWII had the Bay Area as a pretty bawdy town. It stayed that way, one of the OG strip joins was (is?) in the Bay Area. Look at the 50's and 60's Hells Angels, Black Panthers (the armed edition), Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army, The Altimont Speed Way murder (concert). Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple. Bill Graham has a venue named after him, but the murder around him getting his start is suspect... You get some "fun" fringe thinkers. The Grateful Dead (you don't have to like them) became a roving acid distribution system every summer (wall of sound, Owlsy acid). Burning man is latter day hippies (more gen X than anything else) who wanted to carry on that spirt and optimism. Neither of these groups are "bad" but they aren't the current afluent Bay Area set for sure.
All of this is to say that one should not be surprised when "bipping" is a very Bay Area thing to have happen to you, when you see the current "crime" in the Bay Area. You have affluence next to the people who are down trodden, defeated or simply who do not care, who are acting out against the system!
In china all the things that happen in the bay would get squashed. Lying Flat (doing the bare minimum) is their version of rebellion. Their 996 set is our tech scene (was, that's shifted somewhat now). The labels, the reactions, are different, are local... but the motivations and the underlying causes are NOT... Those who have a path and those who do not and the gulf between.
Why so complicated. Lying flat is just quiet quitting. 996 is all the overworking, crunch time shit. How can they possibly coexist in the same country....well, you see, a country consists of more than one person...
> I know for myself that every day I do approximately 1/5th of the total amount of productive work I can do in a week while remaining happy and willing.
Very curious given that our current calendar weeks are completely arbitrary. How do you explain such a coincidence?
If for historical reasons we today happened to have eight day weeks with six workdays how much work would you deliver every day compared to your baseline of a seven day load? I would guess (1/6)*(8/7).
Jokes aside, the fact that you won't deliver more results if working longer most likely reflects problems in the way your work is set. Capitalists who seek longer weeks normally make sure it's not the case in their organizations. The reason why we now mostly enjoy reduced hours is not the increased productivity per year (which is not true in general) but a belief that healthier citizens will put in more years of work while straining the healthcare system less. So an attempt to prioritize long-term interests while knowingly damaging the short-term.
It's also some kind of fraud in most jurisdictions, or subject to an extra fee if discovered.
Germany's new stamps aren't stamped any more - a QR code gets scanned and logged instead - so people thought they were lucky when they received unstamped letters and decided to re-use the stamp. They got hit with a fine.
Why would that help? Where I work we have a central server with some phones connected that act as the 2FA devices for every service where not all employees have their own account, with an internally developed browser extension that grabs the access code from this server upon login.
Or more primitively than that, I've seen small offices have an old shared phone with a bulging battery that's used for 2fa (or even just having it attached to someone's personal phone and just asking them for the code when you need to log in).
It’s also because there might only be one super admin account allowed, which also needs to be the most secure. But you don’t want the person with the 2FA codes to wander off with them one day!
