#hr core values

[bethechangehr]

Be The Change HR Core Values, Ethics, Vision and Mission

Our mission is to do great HR work, have fun, and change lives! We are HR consultants. We are life changers. We are here to help.

[punisheddonjuan]

So I forgot about/didn't get around to deleting one of the dating apps I had installed to see what the dating ecosystem was like after having been away for close to eight years and this morning I received a notification from said app. Said app poses a daily question for users to answer in a public thread. This was today's question:

Knowing that this would not be a positive experience but feeling compelled to look anyway, I steeled myself for the responses and dove in.

"Disabled man is bitter about the way society treats him, therefore he is a narcissist."

That's a lot of words to say "no, and the only reason people say yes is because they are trying to be woke, but everyone knows deep down that disabled people aren't desirable" also your name is Òdinn and you appear to live in the forests of Norway so there is a high chance that you're a Nazi.

This is such a typical response and I have no doubt in my mind that this guy would leave said hypothetical partner who became disabled in an accident, simply because the overwhelming majority of men will leave a disabled partner. Hell it's a very common r/relationshipadvice topic.

This response leaves me with many questions and no answers. Why would you need to change your perspective?

Jesus fucking Christ. I know this is supposed to be "a joke" but it's almost more hateful that way.

Way to throw in some weird "sexual market value" incel shit into the conversation there dude with "hot women can date rich men to escape lower economic divisions".

I guess points to this guy for honesty, but it still sucks.

I've not met a single disabled person ever, including myself, who prefers the term "differently abled". Not only does the feel patronizing and like it was workshopped by a cadre of guilt ridden HR managers, the language of that particular euphemism suggests, at its core, that a failure to thrive is more the result of personal failing than systemic barriers to employment, education, housing, or relationships. It's sprung from the same liberal eugenicist minds that gave us the phrase "the only real disability is not having a positive attitude".

Christ this is bleak.

Well at least I was reminded to delete the app.

You know, nine times out of ten, it's not worth it for a disabled person to try to date a non-disabled person. Your dating pool should really just be restricted to other disabled persons, and this is in many ways preferable, but because society wants you dead, there are structural barriers. Here in Canada you were already likely to lose your disability benefits should you get married, because supporting you should be the responsibility of your spouse (never mind that the disabled partner is at much greater risk of abuse and is now dependant on their abuser) and if you're both disabled, well you both risk losing your benefits. Two people pooling their meagre resources is considered gaming the system. Bleak.

It kind of makes you hate incels just a little more for co-opting a term coined by a mentally ill queer woman, who hit on a feeling a lot of people with structural barriers to relationships experience. There are a lot of people out there who are denied intimacy for long stretches of time or perhaps for the duration of their life for reasons rooted in the pervasive and systemic ableism throughout our culture and society. Reasons that are entirely outside of those persons' control. Instead the term is now the sole domain of broken men who blame their lack of partner on a "a few millimeters of bone" instead of their actual problem, being raging misogynist antisocial creeps who do things like shit on their laptops while livestreaming with other antisocial misogynist creeps. It's a shame it wasn't put to better use.

[blueskyportrait]

hi hi, posting an ask to clarify a few things: apparently the budgets for v9 and the JL league were separate and the real reason for v9's delay was the transition to working at home at covid. i dont like spreading misinformation (good lord the rwby fanbase has enough of it already) so i think this was fair to bring up. while i dont doubt the validity of the animators who worked on v9 and the JL cross over, i can't help but to feel weary due to the fact that this is freaking roosterteeth. a company notorious for their abuse of animators to the point of disability, how their shows are produced on slave labour, how they abuse their starry eye fans for cheap labour, how the higher ups of the company are very much either incompetent or rotten to the core. how can i in good conscious give this company the benefit of the doubt that the JL crossover didnt went through the same crunch or workplace issues? sure the animators got more worked, but were you guys properly paid for it? arianna fillipini's twitlonger details the MASSIVE amount of crunch (50 hr/weeks), how the pay was still below industry standard, how the leadership in v9 didnt help the animators, how everyone got laid off cus RT taking away full time employment, and this was all during VOLUME 9. something produced in 2020-2021, not 5 years ago. im glad the animators got a year of work, im glad they had an opportunity to network with other artists. im not upset that the JL happened, im worried that the same crunch and workplace abuse from v9 was carried over as a consequences of these crossovers being developed in house. while its really dumb to knowingly spread misinformation of RWBY's budget and production, i cant help feel this uneasiness towards every rwby fan on twitter just taking their word that the JL was 'totally a good thing!!!' and anyone upset by how they assumed that the JL took away resources for v9 (because it happened to v6 with gray smuggling money for gen:lock) are 'stupid little haters who use the poor animators at cudgels to flame roosterteeth!!!' am i supposed to trust the notion that suddenly all of the decades workplace abuse and mistreatment that persisted to it's latest season all went away? that suddenly the animators were given enough time and compensation for their work? that suddenly management became leagues better? suddenly all of our concerns towards the production of RT's shows and RT as a company are nonsensical? idk, the entire thing is really weird and the uneasiness i have towards CRWBY's production isnt exactly alleviated by the fact that the JL had a seperate budget :P at least we got to see the beacon designs again 🥃

@unovaslankiite your concerns are completely valid and you're not wrong feeling this way. Even if the budgets for vol 9 and JL were separate, that doesn't make what the animators revelaed just last year what they've been through all go away. Ar*yn Tr*che (who I personally belive is an RT shill so they can keep their job) should not be treated as the only source of info. Their words mean nothing to me. Like, ok, the JL and vol 9 budgets were separate. That doesn't excuse the animation department having to work double time during covid. Yeah you want to ensure they got work, and yet they were snubbed of their overtime pay.

And you're right, why should any of us believe Rooster Teeth? They've been proven over and over again to be liars, and it really isn't hard to notice the patterns of behavior over the years. They said crunch issues in production have been resolved and that was a fucking lie. The cuts to vol 9 and the production of the JL movie sound very similar to what happened to vol 5 when Gen Lock was being made. So people are right to assume the crossover movie affected vol 9.

Pointing all of this out doesn't make you "a bad faith rwby critic" or "wanting to pin blame on crwby" as some stans like to accuse others of. People like you and I are not content with just taking Ar*yn and K*rry's words at face value so they can continue to bury the truth. The stans who try to convince themselves that MKEK and the vas of crwby are separate from RT just want to ease their guilty conscious in wanting to continue to consume rwby content.

That's why they spam #greenlightvol10 on every rwby related post they make. It's a sign of sheer copium.

[bfpnola]

Hey! We're back with part 5, the final part! Better Future Program (@bfpnola) is officially looking for youth volunteers between the ages of 14 and 25 for our Advocacy Committee. Don't see a role that fits? Don't worry! We've got SO MANY opportunities, we had to split them up across multiple posts! Feel free to check our Linktr.ee for more positions or our "Apply Now!" highlight on Instagram in the coming weeks!

And if you don’t know who we are? Welcome! BFP is Black-, queer-, and woman-owned nonprofit, entirely run by youth! Since 2016, we’ve been accepting volunteers not just from Bulbancha (so-called New Orleans, Louisiana), but WORLDWIDE! Our mission is to globally expand peer-led political education, support, and imagination for marginalized youth!

To fulfill this goal, we offer over 3,000 free resources through our Liberation Library, design and execute mutual aid-based projects, and offer the safe space young activists need to ask questions and grow. If this sounds like something you’d be interested in, check out our International Youth Leadership Positions page in our bio!

Image description below.

[ID: All slides share the same background. There is a repeating list of BFP’s guiding principles and core beliefs in translucent, all-white, capitalized letters. BFP’s guiding principles include youth-centricity, self-liberation, transparency, accountability, horizontality, community, and intersectionality. BFP’s core beliefs include the right to organize, educational equity, youth liberation, anti-racism, religious liberty, disability justice, climate action, decolonization, gender equity, queer/LGBTQ+ liberation, bodily autonomy, fat liberation, abolition, caste abolition, anti-authoritarianism, and anti-capitalism. A plum purple to magenta-purple gradient overlays this list. A bold, white square frames the image with a white arrow pointing right in the bottom right corner.

Slide 1 reads: “LINK IN BIO. APPLY NOW! INTERNATIONAL YOUTH LEADERSHIP POSITIONS! REMOTE & IN-PERSON.” There is a BFP logo in the lefthand corner and the words “Part Five” in the righthand corner, as this is the first of multiple posts showcasing open leadership positions.

Slide 2 reads: "Resources Committee: Resource Hunters

Responsibilities Include:

Upload a multitude of free and easily accessible social justice, mental health, and academic resources each week

Stay up to date on up-and-coming authors, artists, creators, and influencers within marginalized communities

Collaborate with Topic Inspectors to ensure all information found is both verifiable and aligns with our core values & beliefs

Time Commitment:

Other than our weekly 1.5-2 hr meeting, usually on Sundays, you're free to design your schedule around your tasks!

Requirements/Eligibility:

BFP prioritizes the leadership of marginalized communities. Tap the International Leadership Positions page in our Linktr.ee for more information! Link in bio @bfpnola :)" Slide 3 reads: "Resources Committee: Topic Inspectors

Responsibilities Include:

Review and organize a multitude of free and easily accessible social justice, mental health, and academic resources each week

Ensure that all links are still accessible and replacing those that are "broken"

Delete repeats to keep our resources count accurate

Time Commitment:

Other than our weekly 1.5-2 hr meeting, usually on Sundays, you're free to design your schedule around your tasks!

Requirements/Eligibility:

BFP prioritizes the leadership of marginalized communities. Tap the International Leadership Positions page in our Linktr.ee for more information! Link in bio @bfpnola :)" Slide 4 reads: "Resources Committee: Image Description Writers

Responsibilities Include:

Write IDs and/or alt text for photos on our website

Write IDs for photos posted on our social media platforms

Collaborate with Advocacy Committee to stay up to date on inclusive terminology and the cultural practices of the communities we serve to ensure accurate descriptions

Time Commitment:

Other than our weekly 1.5-2 hr meeting, usually on Sundays, you're free to design your schedule around your tasks!

Requirements/Eligibility:

BFP prioritizes the leadership of marginalized communities. Tap the International Leadership Positions page in our Linktr.ee for more information! Link in bio @bfpnola :)" Slide 5 reads: "Resources Committee: Transcriptionists

Responsibilities Include:

Write transcriptions for videos & audio on our website

Write transcriptions for videos & audio posted on our social media platforms

Collaborate with Advocacy Committee to stay up to date on inclusive terminology and the cultural practices of the communities we serve to ensure accurate descriptions

Time Commitment:

Other than our weekly 1.5-2 hr meeting, usually on Sundays, you're free to design your schedule around your tasks!

Requirements/Eligibility:

BFP prioritizes the leadership of marginalized communities. Tap the International Leadership Positions page in our Linktr.ee for more information! Link in bio @bfpnola :)" /End ID.]

[ruthlesslistener]

not to keep vagueposting about animal welfare discourse, but i happened to run into one of the blogs that was shitting on scout for their cow husbandry and the shit they were saying was so fucking stupid...it was something along the lines of 'rabbits aren't social animals because their wild ancestors have a social group set entirely by mating/the HRS tries to force you to bond rabbits unnecessarily and is a peta-affiliated organization/its unnecessary to spay female rabbits because the 85% association between uterine cancer and not spaying is only supported by two studies', all of which may make sense for breeding rabbits is complete and utter bullshit when dealing with pet rabbits.

Rabbits are indeed social animals that grow anxious when alone and should have SOME form of companionship most hours of the day. This does not have to be another rabbit, and the urging to establish a bonded pair is typically done for people who are OUT OF THE HOUSE most of the day. HRS and shelters don't 'force' pairings, they encourage them because having someone around 24/7 isnt always viable in American households. When I tried to get Celeste bonded because I was worried about her welfare (this was when I was 14 and new to rabbits), both the HRS and shelters talked us out of it because she very clearly did not care about other buns, and didn't need to be bonded because there was always someone around them. But if you're a singular person who's away from home most of the time, then yes you need some sort of partner animal because it reduces stress in your rabbit.

Those social structures are ofc going to be different if you have unfixed breeding animals, but the core aspect of it is still the same. Rabbits are social animals. They are comforted by the presence of others around them, form bonds with other rabbits, and feel more secure in groups. Just because they are more territorial when unfixed (as they should!) doesn't reduce the fact that they are social prey animals, it just means that you need to keep them in different conditions than you would a fixed creature with less hormonal urges

The HRS is not aligned with PETA. They denounce affiliations with meat breeders because they're entirely based on improving the welfare of rabbits that are kept as pets. I can see why some might feel offended on their stance against meat rabbits, but rabbits are still primarily viewed as livestock, and after hearing enough comments about people wanting to eat my rabbit, I can understand why they'd be so clear on it. People are assholes about pets that are commonly viewed as feeder animals.

There is indeed a high risk associated between UNBRED unspayed female rabbits and uterine cancer. This is supported by several studies on animals with similar breeding lifestyles by multiple veterinary institutions. You won't notice it in your breeding females because the risk is SPECIFICALLY for unbred animals, aka most pets. So yes, spaying is necessary for your doe's health if you do not intend to regularly breed or have stopped regularly breeding

Even if there wasn't a very real danger to their health, you'd still need to get them fixed to reduce behavioral problems. Unfixed rabbits are much more territorial, destructive, and aggressive, making them more difficult to keep in a home environment. They will growl, they will lunge and bite (and rabbit bites are not something you want to fuck with- I have scars from Celeste's nips), they will piss and shit to mark their territory and it WILL be pungent and unsanitary even if they are litterbox trained. They can still be cuddly with you, sure, that won't reduce their value as pets, but a perpetually sexually frustrated and territorial animal is not fun to deal with and is arguably unethical for the rabbit. If you want a pet rabbit, you need to get them spayed. And I say this from personal experience- Celeste wasn't spayed when we got her, but after she did get spayed, she became much more manageable and less likely to bite. She was still manageable beforehand, but afterwards she was a hell of a lot more relaxed and not stressed

There's nothing wrong with having significantly different husbandry because you are a meat/fur breeder; unfixed animals have different temperaments, different needs, and are typically kept in different conditions that are more economically and behaviorally suited to turning a profit. But those care requirements change drastically when you have only one to two fixed animals in a home environment, which means that you cannot pass judgement on pet care requirements when you're a meat breeder, and visa versa.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Orphaned neurological implants

The startup world’s dirty not-so-secret is that most startups fail. Startups are risky ventures and their investors know it, so they cast a wide net, placing lots of bets on lots of startups and folding the ones that don’t show promise, which sucks for the company employees, but also for the users who depend on the company’s products.

You know what this is like: you sink a bunch of time into familiarizing yourself with a new product, you spend money on accessories for it, you lock your data into it, you integrate it into your life, and then, one morning — poof! All gone.

Now, there are ways that startups could mitigate this risk for their customers: they could publish their source code under a free/open license so that it could be maintained by third parties, they could refuse to patent their technology, or dedicate their patents to an open patent pool, etc.

All of this might tempt more people to try their product or service, because the customers for digital products are increasingly savvy, having learned hard lessons when the tools they previously depended were orphaned by startups whose investors pulled the plug.

But very few startups do this, because their investors won’t let them. That brings me to the other dirty not-so-secret of the startup world: when a startup fails, investors try to make back some of their losses by selling the company’s assets to any buyer, no matter how sleazy.

A startup’s physical assets are typically minimal: used ergonomic chairs and laptops don’t exactly hold their value, and there’s not much of a market for t-shirts and stickers advertising dead businesses.

Wily investors are more interested in intangible assets: user data and patents, which are sold off to the highest bidder. That bidder is almost certainly a bottom-feeding scumbag, because the best way to maximize the value of user data is to abuse it, and the best way to maximize a failed business patent is to use it for patent trolling.

If you let your investors talk you into patenting your cool idea, there’s a minuscule chance that the patent will be the core of a profitable business — and a much larger chance that it end up in a troll’s portfolio. Real businesses make things that people want. Patent trolls are parasites, “businesses” whose only products are legal threats and lawsuits, which they use to bleed out real businesses.

The looming threat of dissolution gives rise to a third startup dirty secret: faced with a choice of growth or sustainability, companies choose growth. There’s no point in investing in sustainability — good information security, robust systems, good HR — if it costs you the runway you need to achieve liftoff.

Your excellent processes won’t help you when your investors shut you down, so a “lean” startup has only the minimum viable resiliency and robustness. If you do manage to attain liftoff — or get sold to a Big Tech firm — then you can fix all that stuff.

And if the far more likely outcome — failure — comes to pass, then all the liabilities you’ve created with your indifferent security and resiliency will be someone else’s problem. Limited liability, baby!

Combine these three dirty secrets and it’s hard to understand why anyone would use a startup’s product, knowing that it will collect as much data as it can, secure it only indifferently, and sell that data on to sleazy data-brokers. Meanwhile, the product you buy and rely upon will probably become a radioactive wasteland of closed source and patent trolling, with so much technology and policy debt that no one can afford to take responsibility for it.

Think of Cloudpets, a viral toy sensation whose manufacturer, Spiral Toys, had a successful IPO — and then immediately started hemorrhaging money and shedding employees. Cloudpets were plush toys that you connected to your home wifi; they had built-in mics that kids could activate to record a voice-memo, which was transmitted to their parents’ phones by means of an app, and parents could send messages back via the toys’ speakers.

But Spiral Toys never bothered to secure those voice memos or the system for making new ones. The entire database of all recordings by kids and parents sat on an unencrypted, publicly accessible server for years. It was so indifferently monitored that no one noticed that hackers had downloaded the database multiple times, leaving behind threats to dump it unless they were paid ransoms.

By the time this came to light, Spiral Toys’ share price was down more than 99% and no one was answering any of its email addresses or phones. The data — 2.2 million intimate, personal communications between small children and their parents — just hung out there, free for the taking:

https://www.troyhunt.com/data-from-connected-cloudpets-teddy-bears-leaked-and-ransomed-exposing-kids-voice-messages/

Data leakage is irreversible. Those 2,200,000 voice memos are now immortal, child-ghosts that will haunt the internet forever — after the parents are dead, after the kids are dead.

Data breaches are permanent. Filling a startup’s sandcastle with your important data is a high-risk bet that the company will attain liftoff before it breaches.

It’s not just your data that goes away when a startup folds — it’s also the money you invest in its hardware and systems, as well as the cost of replacing devices that get bricked when a company goes bust. That’s bad enough when it’s a home security device:

https://gizmodo.com/spectrum-kills-home-security-business-refuses-refunds-1840931761

But what about when the device is inside your body?

Earlier this year, many people with Argus optical implants — which allow blind people to see — lost their vision when the manufacturer, Second Sight, went bust:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-eye-obsolete

Nano Precision Medical, the company’s new owners, aren’t interested in maintaining the implants, so that’s the end of the road for everyone with one of Argus’s “bionic” eyes. The $150,000 per eye that those people paid is gone, and they have failing hardware permanently wired into their nervous systems.

Having a bricked eye implant doesn’t just rob you of your sight — many Argus users experience crippling vertigo and other side effects of nonfunctional implants. The company has promised to “do our best to provide virtual support” to people whose Argus implants fail — but no more parts and no more patches.

Second Sight wasn’t the first neural implant vendor to abandon its customers, nor was it the last. Last week, Liam Drew told the stories of other neural abandonware in “Abandoned: the human cost of neurotechnology failure” in Nature:

https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-022-03810-5/index.html

Among that abandonware: ATI’s neural implant for reducing cluster headaches, Nuvectra’s spinal-cord stimulator for chronic pain, Freehand’s paralysis bypass for hands and arms, and others. People with these implants are left in a precarious limbo, reliant on reverse-engineering and a dwindling supply of parts for maintenance.

Drew asked his expert subjects what is to be done about this. The least plausible answer is to let the market work its magic: “long-term support on the commercial side would be a competitive advantage.” In other words, wait for companies to realize that promising a durable product will attract customers, so that the other companies go out of business.

A better answer: standardization. “If components were common across devices, one manufacturer might be able to step in and offer spares when another goes under.” 86% of surgeons who implant neurostimulators back this approach.

But the best answer comes from Hunter Peckham, co-developer of Freehand and a Case Western biomedical engineer: open hardware. “Peckham plans to make the design specifications and supporting documentation of new implantable technologies developed by his team freely available. ‘Then people can just cut and paste.’”

This isn’t just the best answer, it’s the only one. There’s no ethical case for permanently attaching computers to people’s nervous systems without giving them the absolute, irrevocable right to nominate who maintains those computers and how.

This is the case that Christian Dameff, Jeff Tully and I made at our Defcon panel this year: “Why Patients Should Hack Medtech.” Patients know things about their care and their needs that no one else can ever fully appreciate; they are the best people to have the final say over med-tech decisions:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_i1BF5YGS0w

This is the principle that animates Colorado’s HB22–1031, the “Consumer Right To Repair Powered Wheelchairs Act,” landmark Right to Repair legislation that was signed into law last year:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/06/when-drm-comes-your-wheelchair

Opponents of this proposal will say that it will discourage investment in “innovation” in neurological implants. They may well be right: the kinds of private investors who hedge their bets on high-risk ventures by minimizing security and resilience and exploiting patents and user-data might well be scared off of investment by a requirement to make the technology open.

It may be that showboating billionaire dilettantes will be unwilling to continue to pour money into neural implant companies if they are required to put the lives of the people who use their products ahead of their own profits.

It may be that the only humane, sustainable way to develop neural implants is to publicly fund that research and development, with the condition that the work products be standard, open, and replicable.

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[Image ID: The staring eye of HAL9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Centered in it is a medieval anatomical engraving of the human nervous system, limned in a blue halo.]

[marsiansweeney]

Human Rights in the Time of Palestinian Genocide

I would like to extend my heartfelt congratulations to the staffers at USAID, who seem to have finally noticed that they work for the PR arm of the CIA and not a mosquito net NGO; and all it took was the US government’s explicit (and in no way unprecedented) support and endorsement of a genocide for them to see it! At least, that is, the ones working for Samantha Power have noticed, to which all I can say is that they should probably stop taking their bosses’ vanity publications at face value; let’s just say Debbie from HR isn’t posting about the food bank on Linkedin because she cares about homeless people.

“Human rights” get a lot of play in academia and media, and if you dig past the pious mumblings of elite liberals and the Military Industrial Complex, they could be read as the core theological assumption of the West’s covert religious perspective, a perspective baked into the international institutions to which all nations are subjected. In a country where such apostles of Humanism as neuroscientist and socially-acceptable demagogue Sam Harris advocate first-strike nuclear attacks on Muslim civilians to protect those very civilians human “rights”, it should surprise us little that human rights only exist in an ideal realm where there are no actual human beings to whom those rights could apply. Somehow, however, people like Power and her minions continue to be well received when they peddle the idea that the single largest global exporter of military coups is actually the greatest defender of human rights and the only obstacle to new Holocausts. This, despite the fact that the period of US global dominance has seen dozens of genocides, some under the direct supervision and support of the “civilized” Western world and its regime of human rights. The key to this paradox lies in the method of genocide prevention and human rights protection advocated by such soulless characters: geopolitical power projection and direct military intervention.

From Russia’s “holy war” against fascism in Ukraine to George W. Bush’s “crusade” against terrorism in whichever country he decides invented terrorism, the justification of human rights atrocities with the concept of human rights is a recurring theme of contemporary global politics. Such justification is actually the primary instrumental purpose of this rhetoric, with political power balancing being the only real motivating factor for states and their puppeteers. The USSR loved communism, until they noticed anti-Soviet Trotskyists fighting the fascists in the Spanish Civil War; America loves democracy, until they notice pro-Soviet Marxists have been democratically elected in Chile; the Russian Federation is the bulwark against fascism, until some fascist paramilitaries offer up their services in invading Ukraine. The real question is one of power for states and political blocs, the ideological element is only a useful justification in the event that it supports the advancement of power politics.

In the case of the Palestinian people, one need only remember the moralizing about the Uyghur genocide that took the internet-based “discourse” by storm a few years ago. The Chinese detainment, ethnic cleansing, and cultural genocide of the Muslim Uyghurs, always justified with the logic of counter-terrorism and “self-defense”, directly paralleled the Palestinian genocide in many ways, until the Palestinians’ suffering escalated following October 7th. All the human rights crusaders who wanted “stand up to China” on the Uyghur question have changed their tune now. They aren’t just silent on the Palestinian question, most of the defenders of the Uyghurs are now vocally defending Israel’s genocide. This time, rather than cultural genocide in the form of forced reeducation and the destruction of Uyghurs’ culture and religious heritage, the Israelis are truly and explicitly committing a physical genocide of the people of Gaza. Now, over 30,000 people into an open act of genocide, the reactions of humanitarians like Power and Harris range from gentle critiques and calls for dropping crates on people’s heads, to condemnation of Islam itself as the real cause of the conflict, furthering the narrative of a clash between the “human rights” oriented civilization of the West, and the Islamic civilization of the faceless oriental Other. I hope that maybe as more innocent people are fed into the gears of the Israeli military machine, more beltway ghouls and mindless media consumers will notice that they are the very goosestepping fascists they so desire to see bombed, couped, and invaded out of existence.

[erastaffingsolutions]

The Small Business Guide to Employer of Record Companies

Navigating the complex world of international growth and human resources is a daunting task for any entrepreneur, especially when the expansion of your small business requires a deep understanding of local labor laws, payroll regulations, and compliance standards. This is where Employer of Record (EOR) services shine as the unsung heroes of global HR management. This guide, specifically crafted for small business owners, will illuminate the roles of EOR companies, detailing how they can streamline your HR operations and ensure your global growth is a success.

What Is An EOR Service?

Employee leasing, professional employer organizations (PEOs), and employer of record (EOR) services share a common goal – simplifying the employer's HR responsibilities. EOR steps in to become the legal employer for tax, payroll, benefits, and other HR purposes.

But what sets EOR apart from the other two is its international reach. When a small business expands overseas, the legal and administrative duties can be overwhelming. An EOR is the mechanism that allows companies to focus on their core business operations while a third party manages the legal nuances of international employment.

The key benefits of using an EOR company include:

Accelerated global expansion

Local compliance management

Mitigation of legal and financial risk

Comprehensive support for international payroll, taxes, and benefits

But with numerous EOR service providers in the market, it can be challenging to choose the right partner for your business. That’s why understanding the value proposition of each service is crucial.

Why Do You Need to Hire an Employer of Record Company?

Legal Compliance and Risk Management

When you're employing people in a new country, you need to adhere to unfamiliar labor laws and often complex regulatory requirements. Failure to do so can result in legal implications and financial penalties. EOR services ensure all aspects of employment meet local legal standards.

Payroll and Benefits Administration

Employee compensation and benefits vary greatly from one country to another. EOR companies have systems in place to keep you compliant and ensure your staff is fairly compensated according to local standards.

Global Expansion Support

EOR services remove the barriers of expansion, allowing you to tap into new markets without setting up a legal entity. This speed-to-market approach is critical for small businesses aiming to grow rapidly.

Focus on Core Business Activities

By outsourcing your HR administration to an EOR, you free up your time to concentrate on the activities that generate revenue and drive business growth.

Ongoing HR Expertise

EOR companies have a wealth of HR knowledge and can provide strategic advice and support for your international workforce.

9 Best EOR Companies to Smoothen Your HR Operations in 2024

Choosing the right EOR for your business is a significant decision that directly impacts your global operations. Here are the top nine EOR companies in 2024 that are well-equipped to support your small business in its international endeavors.

1. ERA Staffing Solutions

ERA Staffing Solutions focuses on creating customized employment solutions for companies of all sizes. With a strong presence in numerous international markets, ERA is known for its compliance expertise and hands-on approach to payroll and benefits administration.

2. Rippling

Rippling streamlines HR, IT, and Operations with an all-in-one seamless platform. Their focus on efficiency and automation makes them a favorite for companies looking to integrate global HR operations into their digital infrastructure.

3. Papaya

Papaya’s platform is designed to manage the entire EOR process from onboarding to payments. They place a strong emphasis on the user experience and have a user-friendly interface for both employer and employee engagement.

4. Multiplier

With a standout solution for high-growth startups and enterprise businesses, Multiplier takes a tech-forward approach to compliance and HR management. Their agile system adapts to the unique HR needs of your company as you expand globally.

5. Deel

Deel simplifies the complexity of employing a global workforce. It stands out for its user-friendly platform and comprehensive suite of services that cover every step of the employment process – making it a perfect fit for small businesses.

6. Oyster

Specializing in a human-touch approach to global HR, Oyster prioritizes the personal aspect of HR administration. Their clear and communicative service ensures that your employees feel supported in every location they’re based.

7. Remofirst

Through technology, expertise, and a strong emphasis on customer success, Remofirst ensures that companies achieve fast and compliant expansion into new territories. Their service is highly recommended for its structured and result-driven processes.

8. Globalization Partners

Globalization Partners offers a robust service that brings your international employees under one umbrella, providing a cohesive HR strategy that considers the unique cultural and legal aspects of different regions.

9. Remote

Remote values simplicity, enabling highly complex global employment setups with an intuitive and straightforward approach. Their customer service is lauded by clients for being responsive and helpful, guiding businesses through the complexities of overseas HR with ease.

In your pursuit of finding the best EOR company, always look for the one that best aligns with your small business's unique requirements and core values. The right EOR can be instrumental in not just managing your global human resources, but in driving your success in international markets.

@erastaffingsolutions

[wolfliving]

The Internet of orphaned things inside your body

*Via Cory Doctorow, who writes incredible amounts of this stuff.

Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/12/unsafe-at-any-speed/ _,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_ My publisher Tor Books and Goodreads are having a drawing for a giveaway of advance hardcopies of my next novel, "Red Team Blues," a Silicon Valley forensic accounting thriller about a cryptocurrency heist. If you're in the US or Canada, enter here to win a copy: https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/353941-red-team-blues _,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_ Today's links * Orphaned neurological implants: When the company that powers your nervous system decides to 'pivot.' * Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. * This day in history: 2002, 2007, 2012, 2017 * Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading _,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_ 🧑🏼‍💻 Orphaned neurological implants The startup world's dirty not-so-secret is that most startups fail. Startups are risky ventures and their investors know it, so they cast a wide net, placing lots of bets on lots of startups and folding the ones that don't show promise, which sucks for the company employees, but also for the users who depend on the company's products. You know what this is like: you sink a bunch of time into familiarizing yourself with a new product, you spend money on accessories for it, you lock your data into it, you integrate it into your life, and then, one morning - poof! All gone. Now, there are ways that startups could mitigate this risk for their customers: they could publish their source code under a free/open license so that it could be maintained by third parties, they could refuse to patent their technology, or dedicate their patents to an open patent pool, etc. All of this might tempt more people to try their product or service, because the customers for digital products are increasingly savvy, having learned hard lessons when the tools they previously depended were orphaned by startups whose investors pulled the plug. But very few startups do this, because their investors won't let them. That brings me to the other dirty not-so-secret of the startup world: when a startup fails, investors try to make back some of their losses by selling the company's assets to any buyer, no matter how sleazy. A startup's physical assets are typically minimal: used ergonomic chairs and laptops don't exactly hold their value, and there's not much of a market for t-shirts and stickers advertising dead businesses. Wily investors are more interested in *intangible* assets: user data and patents, which are sold off to the highest bidder. That bidder is almost certainly a bottom-feeding scumbag, because the best way to maximize the value of user data is to abuse it, and the best way to maximize a failed business patent is to use it for patent trolling. If you let your investors talk you into patenting your cool idea, there's a minuscule chance that the patent will be the core of a profitable business - and a *much* larger chance that it end up in a troll's portfolio. Real businesses make things that people want. Patent trolls are parasites, "businesses" whose only products are legal threats and lawsuits, which they use to bleed out real businesses. The looming threat of dissolution gives rise to a third startup dirty secret: faced with a choice of growth or sustainability, companies choose growth. There's no point in investing in sustainability - good information security, robust systems, good HR - if it costs you the runway you need to achieve liftoff. Your excellent processes won't help you when your investors shut you down, so a "lean" startup has only the minimum viable resiliency and robustness. If you do manage to attain liftoff - or get sold to a Big Tech firm - *then* you can fix all that stuff. And if the far more likely outcome - failure - comes to pass, then all the liabilities you've created with your indifferent security and resiliency will be someone else's problem. Limited liability, baby! Combine these three dirty secrets and it's hard to understand why anyone would use a startup's product, knowing that it will collect as much data as it can, secure it only indifferently, and sell that data on to sleazy data-brokers. Meanwhile, the product you buy and rely upon will probably become a radioactive wasteland of closed source and patent trolling, with so much technology and policy debt that no one can afford to take responsibility for it. Think of Cloudpets, a viral toy sensation whose manufacturer, Spiral Toys, had a successful IPO - and then immediately started hemorrhaging money and shedding employees. Cloudpets were plush toys that you connected to your home wifi; they had built-in mics that kids could activate to record a voice-memo, which was transmitted to their parents' phones by means of an app, and parents could send messages back via the toys' speakers. But Spiral Toys never bothered to secure those voice memos or the system for making new ones. The entire database of all recordings by kids and parents sat on an unencrypted, publicly accessible server for years. It was so indifferently monitored that no one noticed that hackers had downloaded the database multiple times, leaving behind threats to dump it unless they were paid ransoms. By the time this came to light, Spiral Toys' share price was down more than 99% and no one was answering any of its email addresses or phones. The data - 2.2 *million* intimate, personal communications between small children and their parents - just hung out there, free for the taking: https://www.troyhunt.com/data-from-connected-cloudpets-teddy-bears-leaked-and-ransomed-exposing-kids-voice-messages/ Data leakage is irreversible. Those 2,200,000 voice memos are now immortal, child-ghosts that will haunt the internet forever - after the parents are dead, after the kids are dead. Data breaches are permanent. Filling a startup's sandcastle with your important data is a high-risk bet that the company will attain liftoff before it breaches. It's not just your data that goes away when a startup folds - it's also the money you invest in its hardware and systems, as well as the cost of replacing devices that get bricked when a company goes bust. That's bad enough when it's a home security device: https://gizmodo.com/spectrum-kills-home-security-business-refuses-refunds-1840931761 But what about when the device is *inside your body*? Earlier this year, many people with Argus optical implants - which allow blind people to see - lost their vision when the manufacturer, Second Sight, went bust: https://spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-eye-obsolete Nano Precision Medical, the company's new owners, aren't interested in maintaining the implants, so that's the end of the road for everyone with one of Argus's "bionic" eyes. The $150,000 per eye that those people paid is gone, and they have failing hardware permanently wired into their nervous systems. Having a bricked eye implant doesn't just rob you of your sight - many Argus users experience crippling vertigo and other side effects of nonfunctional implants. The company has promised to "do our best to provide virtual support" to people whose Argus implants fail - but no more parts and no more patches. Second Sight wasn't the first neural implant vendor to abandon its customers, nor was it the last. Last week, Liam Drew told the stories of other neural abandonware in "Abandoned: the human cost of neurotechnology failure" in *Nature*: https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-022-03810-5/index.html Among that abandonware: ATI's neural implant for reducing cluster headaches, Nuvectra's spinal-cord stimulator for chronic pain, Freehand's paralysis bypass for hands and arms, and others. People with these implants are left in a precarious limbo, reliant on reverse-engineering and a dwindling supply of parts for maintenance. Drew asked his expert subjects what is to be done about this. The least plausible answer is to let the market work its magic: "long-term support on the commercial side would be a competitive advantage." In other words, wait for companies to realize that promising a durable product will attract customers, so that the other companies go out of business. A better answer: standardization. "If components were common across devices, one manufacturer might be able to step in and offer spares when another goes under." 86% of surgeons who implant neurostimulators back this approach. But the best answer comes from Hunter Peckham, co-developer of Freehand and a Case Western biomedical engineer: open hardware. "Peckham plans to make the design specifications and supporting documentation of new implantable technologies developed by his team freely available. 'Then people can just cut and paste.'" This isn't just the best answer, it's the only one. There's no ethical case for permanently attaching computers to people's nervous systems without giving them the absolute, irrevocable right to nominate who maintains those computers and how. This is the case that Christian Dameff, Jeff Tully and I made at our Defcon panel this year: "Why Patients Should Hack Medtech." Patients know things about their care and their needs that no one else can ever fully appreciate; they are the best people to have the final say over med-tech decisions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_i1BF5YGS0w This is the principle that animates Colorado's HB22-1031, the "Consumer Right To Repair Powered Wheelchairs Act," landmark Right to Repair legislation that was signed into law last year: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/06/when-drm-comes-your-wheelchair Opponents of this proposal will say that it will discourage investment in "innovation" in neurological implants. They may well be right: the kinds of private investors who hedge their bets on high-risk ventures by minimizing security and resilience and exploiting patents and user-data might well be scared off of investment by a requirement to make the technology open. It may be that showboating billionaire dilettantes will be unwilling to continue to pour money into neural implant companies if they are required to put the lives of the people who use their products ahead of their own profits. It may be that the only humane, sustainable way to develop neural implants is to publicly fund that research and development, with the condition that the work products be standard, open, and replicable. Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[william-r-melich]

Tik Tok Bill/HR 7521 - 03/16/2024

Bill HR 7521 passed 3 days ago in the house of representatives by a vote of 352 - 65. If this bill passes in the Senate, which looks likely, Joe Biden said he will sign it, which will purportedly ban Tik Tok. It wouldn't really ban it, but what it will do is force Byte Dance, the Chinese company that owns Tik Tok, to divest by providing a description of what assets would need to be divested to execute a qualified divesture. In other words, they would have to sell it. They would also have to shut down their internet hosting service. Someone in the U.S. would buy it. I've been on the fence with this one as well with whether or not Biden will remain on the ticket. After reading a portion of the bill I saw a loophole regarding what can be done with a foreign person. Donald Trump, who back in 2020 wanted to ban Tik Tok, he's now against banning it. He said that banning Tik Tok would give the government too much power and would make Facebook more of a monopoly. I sure hope his 180-degree shift wasn't partly made because he has a big campaign donor from Tik Tok. Elon Musk is against it. He thinks it will lead to the government having too much control of wording and censorship on all media platforms. He argues that it doesn't just involve foreign adversaries. Republican Congressman Thomas Massie on X posted this: "The president will be given the power to ban WEB SITES, not just Apps.--"The person breaking the new law is deemed to be the U.S. (or offshore) INTERNET HOSTING SERVICE or App Store, not the 'foreign adversary.' " The CCP (Chinese Communist Party) controls what content is allowed on Tik Toc, and the version that is used in China is very different to what's allowed on it outside of China, like here in the U.S. In China they're teaching their children strict discipline and loyalty to the CCP without other harmful content, brainwashing them into their collectivist ideologies. Outside of China they are allowing and promoting content that encourages self-harm and suicide. The big concern in Congress is that the CCP is using the platform to collect as much personal data as they can to be later used against us for nefarious reasons.

Bytedance is the parent company running Tik Toc, and it's former CEO, Zhang Yiming, in 2018 wrote an open public letter of apology to the CCP's headquarters. He was in trouble for not directing his tech companies to push the party's communist agenda far enough, including for what they termed as Xi Jinping thought. Here's some of that letter translated in English:

"I sincerely apologize to regulators, our users and colleagues. I have been in a state of guilt and remorse since I received the notice from the regulatory authority yesterday afternoon and stayed up all night."

"Toutino will permanently shut down the app and the Wechat account of Neihan Duanzi. The product has gone astray, posting content that goes against socialist core values. It's all on me. I accept all the punishment since it failed to direct public opinion in the right way."

"I blame myself for failing to live up to the guidance and expectations of the authorities. In the past few years, the authorities have given us a lot of guidance and help, but I failed to understand properly and to correct properly in the past that resulted in the repercussions today."

"I blame myself for failing the support and trust of our users. We one-sidedly focused on growth and scale without paying timely attention to quality and responsibility of guiding users to obtain positive information. We have failed to undertake corporate social responsibility, and lack emphasis and understanding of our roles in carry forward the positive energy, and guide public opinion properly."

"I reflect that the deep-seated problems for the company are: a weak understanding of the 'four consciousness,' a lack of socialist core values, and a biased guidance of public opinion. 'In the past, we have placed too much emphasis on the role of technology, and failed to realize that socialist core values are the prerequisite to technology. We need to spread positive messages in line with the requirements of the times while respecting public order and good practice.' "

The "four consciousness," to which he referred is described in the following CCP directive as translated into English; CCP Central Committee Publishers Plan for Deepening the Reform of Party and State Agencies. March 18, 2021:

"To deepen reform of the Party and state agencies at this new historical turning point, we must comprehensively implement the Spirit of the 19th Party Congress and persist in taking Marxism -- Leninism, Ma Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory, the Important Thinking of the 'Three Represents,' the Scientific Development Concept, and Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era as the guide. We must firmly establish political consciousness, consciousness of the big picture, consciousness of the core leadership, and consciousness of falling in line with party directives. We must resolutely maintain the authority and centralized unified leadership of the Party Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping as the core. We must adapt to the development requirements of socialism with Chinese characteristics for a new era, persist in the general principle of seeking progress while maintaining stability, and adhere to the proper direction of reform. We must persist in being people-centered, and persist in comprehensively ruling the country according to law."

It seems clear to me that the CCP wants to dominate the world and control how everyone thinks. We can't let that happen. The harmful content on Tik Tok can be found on some of the other platforms, but apparently on Tik Tok it's been more harmful and addictive to kids. Amnesty International 2 reports: "Driven into the Darkness: How Tik Tok Encourages Self-harm and Suicidal Ideation and the I Feel Exposed: Caught in Tik Tok's Surveillance Web - highlight the abuses experienced by children and young people using Tik Tok Outside of China. Between 3 and 20 minutes into our manual research, more than half of the videos in the 'For You' feed were related to mental health struggles with multiple recommended videos in a single hour romanticizing, normalizing or encouraging suicide."

Here's how a portion of the Tik Tok bill reads - HR 7521:

(iii) a subsidiary of or a successor to an entity identified in clause (i) or (ii) that is controlled by a foreign adversary; or (iv) an entity owned or controlled, directly or indirectly, by an entity identified in clause (i), (ii), or (iii); or (B) a covered company that -- (i) is controlled by a foreign adversary; and (ii) that is determined by the President to present a significant threat to the national security of the United States following the issuance of -- (I) a public notice proposing such determination; and (II) a public report to Congress, submitted not less than 30 days before such determination, describing the specific national security concern involved and containing a classified annes and a description of what assets would need to be divested to execute a qualified divesture. (4) FOREIGN ADVERSARY COUNTRY, -- The term "foreign adversary country" means a country specified with respect to a covered company or other entity is -- (A) a foreign person that is domiciled in, is headquartered in, has its principal place of business in, or is organized under the laws of a foreign adversary country. (B) an entity with respect to which a foreign person or combination of foreign persons described in "subparagraph (A) directly or indirectly own at least a 20 percent stake; or (C) a person subject to the direction or control of a foreign person or entity described in subparagraph (A) (B). (2) Covered Company -- (A) IN GENERAL -- The term "covered company" means an entity that operates, directly or indirectly (including through a parent company, subsidiary, or affiliate), a website, desktop application, or augmented or immersive technology application.

The loophole I see is that there are people here from China that are legal to work and live here (green card) and who have a residence in China. The President (Joe Biden) could divest any website or app operated by a company with such a person in its employ from China with a green card who happens to own at least 20% of that company. I haven't read through the entire bill, nor am I an expert on Congressional bills or policies, but there might be other loopholes to be found. Given all that I have considered on this, I think divesting Tik Tok is a good idea, but only with no loopholes or wiggle room. I don't trust the government, their too giddy about this and I suspect they may have something up their sleeves. Next to our own ability to destroy ourselves from within, I think China is our biggest threat. This is serious stuff and we're in some very dangerous situations. We've got to get this right and get the right leader in the White House, which, in my humble opinion, is Donald J. Trump.

[orange-coloredsky]

literally no one asked but to me the difference between smth like advent children & crisis core and whats going on with the remasters is.. shit now just feels utterly soulless. to be fair i wasnt old enough to recall anything about advent children's marketing and only just barely remember seeing stuff for crisis core psp, but the works themselves at least feel complete and independent of each other while still feeling grounded in ffvii's narrative. the added characters and plot devices exist to further the plot of the mini-story theyre contained in and nothing more.

is advent children ridiculous? absolutely. it's a confusing, reference bound video game lore movie. but it doesnt feel like its trying so hard to be more than that. its an scifi-fantasy action romp with painfully 2005 music and character designs. the remnants are stupid additional characters but they dont try to seem more important to the wider plot than they are. theyre there to tell the audience "hey, sephiroth's gonna be here soon but not yet", they disappear when sephiroth is on screen and die when sephiroth is killed. its a contained story that ends when the credits roll.

angeal and genesis have been. distorted. over time i feel but in the original crisis core they feel like theyre of similar value. angeal needed to support zack like how zack supported cloud, and sephiroth isnt evil yet so genesis is our major villain. theyre perfectly fine in these roles, they do their job, theyre effective at it and theyre reasonably good characters that (for the most part. side eyes genesis.) dont waste our time. crisis core is a perfectly fine prequel. i had fun with it, i had fun with the characters, and it should have been left alone.

the remasters do something similar but worse -- they fucking bait you over the span of 4 years now instead of over the span of a 2 hr movie or couple dozen hours of a video game. youre hoping to see your favorite character again, maybe this year the cryptic reference they made will be made clear but if not!! you bet your ass in 2030 theres gonna be another $70 game for you to buy to see if that plotline gets resolved! also we're going to post vague clerith for this months twitter announcement to get engagement and arguments going, and then next month we'll post vague cloti to make the arguing worse and keep those eyes on our game that means nothing anymore. but also this is going to be SOOOOOO important and life changing in the narrative so you best not look away! fucking attention span deletion method of telling a story. its sad

[37q]

so, funny story. idk if anyone else remembers my series of work related breakdowns b4 i quit in november, but some of it was due to my looming sense that career progression in that setting was neither possible nor desirable for me -- although the desirability realization came afterwards, so it was mostly just shame and no self respect. lotta misogyny, lotta dehumanizing business dynamics, whole lotta self destruction cuz self inflicted suffering feels more containable or controllable than the rocks and hard places of fucking corporate growth

it was a real struggle, like am i capable of improving my life with the work ethic, personality, sense of responsibility, initiative, efficiency, and expertise that i consider core to my occupational self? am i too unwell to do anything but stay where i am, if not get worse? what parts of me are destructive to capital growth but constructive to life, and what parts of me are destructive to both? dont i like that part of me...? :(

anyways whats funny is that my general occupational style works wonders at my current job! tiny tiny business my man runs it out of his house n he lowkey resents the mainstream world for shunning his meager progressivism so he like GETS it. no risk of labor suits means relaxed work conditions, my ability to convince anyone of anything doesnt work with HR departments but like, just 3 ppl tryin to make a mission work lends itself to forgiveness when everyone shows theyre all-in, but good-will and personal investment dont mean shit for VP's scanning their marketing trackers.

long story short i feel very valued and i have a lot of fun :) april is a slow month for us so im not working much but its literally chill and my efforts to seek out greater responsibility and investment and their complementary compensation are being rewarded three-fold ^_^

[spectrahr23]

"Washaway"

Washaway Group has experienced remarkable growth in recent years within the Indian market.

Under the business name "Washaway - Your Garment Care Experts," it have established itself as a premier provider of top-tier laundry and dry cleaning services.

Their journey began in 2021 when it was founded Washaway - Your Garment Care Experts' with the aim of becoming a comprehensive clothing care specialist. They have consistently offered a wide range of laundry solutions, including professional dry cleaning and specialized fabric treatments. Its operational headquarters are strategically located in Yeshwantpur, Karnataka, India.

Washaway - Your Garment Care Experts has emerged as one of the leading large-scale commercial laundries in India. Its commitment to service excellence is evident through their operations seven days a week. It firmly believes that convenience and customer satisfaction are at the core of its mission to serve their valued clientele.

Recently, the Human Resources department, under the leadership of Mr. Churiwala, conducted a recruitment drive to address staffing shortages resulting from increased workload demands.

Regrettably, these recruitments were expedited and carried out without due diligence, leading to the hiring of individuals with inadequate skills. Additionally, the training procedures were rushed during this period.

Tragically, an unfortunate incident occurred due to an employee's oversight, resulting in a dryer malfunction that led to the fatality of one of their workforce and left two other employees with severe burn injuries.

Task Description:

As the HR Manager of Washaway, you are tasked with addressing the following critical matters:

1. Compensation for the Family of the Deceased and Injured Employees:

• Formulate a comprehensive compensation plan for the family of the deceased employee and those who suffered injuries in the recent incident.

• Ensure that the compensation is fair, compassionate, and in line with legal requirements and ethical standards.

2. Explanation for the Ignorance Leading to Unskilled Workforce:

• Provide a detailed justification for the circumstances that resulted in the hiring of an unskilled workforce.

• Analyze the factors and processes contributing to this oversight and propose corrective actions to prevent such occurrences in the future.

3. Defense Strategy for the HR Department:

• Develop a strategy for defending the HR department's actions in the aftermath of the incident.

• Outline the steps taken to investigate the incident, improve recruitment and training processes, and reinforce safety measures.

Deliverables:

Prepare a professional PowerPoint presentation consisting of 6 to 8 slides to address the above-mentioned tasks. The presentation should adhere to the following guidelines:

• Each slide should be well-structured, concise, and include key points and visual elements to enhance clarity and engagement.

• Include data, evidence, and best practices to support your proposed solutions and defense strategy.

Deadline: 12:30 PM

Submissions must be made to this email: spectra23.hr@gmail.com

[kimhortons]

2022—Tuesday, October 18th

Got home from Bicol today. Medyo nagkaka separation anxiety ako, parang gusto ko na bumalik na agad dun since tapos naman na ako mag clearance, sana lang wag i-hold nung napaka kupal kong bisor yun para makuha ko agad last pay ko. 1 month lang dapat, magde-December na, wala naman na siyang kasing kupal kung ihohold niya pa yun hanggang December diba. Wala lang, feeling ko lang (wag naman sana) kasi nakakuha ako ng FOC kahit na ppina restrict niya ako sumakay ng libre. Pati HR pinag sabihan pa ako, alam ko naman na wala na akong privilege pero nasa core values naman ng company ng Malasakit, sana naman hanggang huli pinapanindigan nila, puro lang kasi malasakit sa kumpanya gusto nila, pag sa tao wala man lang ka-amor amor. Haha.

So anyway, meron akong dilemma ngayon, pag lapag na paglapag ko palang ng Manila pagkakita ko sa mahabang pila sa carousel ng pasado alas singko ng umaga at traffic sa Cubao ng pasado alas siete ng umaga, at sa sobrang crowded, nag cocontemplate na ko kung ano bang pipiliin ko;

mag-settle sa Bicol at maghanap ng trabaho na related sa course na tinapos ko (or kahit hindi basta may work) so provincial rate pero, minimal ang traffic, medyo mababa ang cost of living kumpara dito, very welcoming na pamilya ni J at tahimik na environment, which is isa sa pinaka aasam asam ko naman talaga ever since nag simulang mag kanda leche leche buhay ko dito.

[pros. italized above/cons. provincial rate, medyo worried ako sa iisipin ng ibang tao kung titira ako sakanila pero di pa naman kami legal na mag asawa huehue though wala namang problema sa family niya ako lang haha] not to mention na syempre kailangan ko rin mag share sa mga gastusin dun which is okay lang naman for me.

or maghanap ng work dito parin sa Manila, actually may mga nag hihintay na sa akin, mostly mga BPO company, at yung isa office work din sa isang Loan Processing company naman. Puro referral ng friend ko 'to. Meron pa nga sana parang Law Firm sa Australia na naka base dito sa PH, somewhere in Makati. Ang offer daw dun nasa 19k monthly, pero hindi ko na na-entertain dahil kaka uwi ko lang nun sa Bicol nung napakwento nga ako sa friend ko na galing din sa law firm na yun, kinabukasan iinterviewhin sana ako agad, para if ever pag balik ko dito may work na agad ako. Napressure ako, wala ako sa tamang headspace para mag take ng interview nun kaya pinalampas ko nalang muna. Tsaka parang na-overwhelmed agad ako sa Job Description, like shet nabobobohan ako sa sarili ko, parang wala akong tiwala na kaya ko, yung ganon ba, foreigner pa naman ang boss haha. Taaka malayo at mahihirapan talaga ako mag commute kung tatanggapin ko dun.

So ayun, going back, syempre its either manila rate or above minimum na manila rate. ito lang actually yung nakikita kong pros, sahod. pag dating naman sa cons, as we all know ang taas na talaga ng cost of living dito sa manila, sobrang lala pa ng public transpo dito, naiisip ko pa lang yung pipila na naman ako ng halos isang oras o mahigit, naiiyak na ko haha. Yung kailangan mo gumising ng napaka aga kung morning ang duty mo para di ka mahirapan sumakay or else makikipag unahan at gitgitan ka talaga. Sa mahal ng pamasahe at kung malayo ang byahe mo, lugi ka talaga. Tsaka yung relationship namin ng tatay at kapatid ko dito sa bahay, hindi ganon ka-okay, mas nahihirapan na ako makisama sakanila kesa sa family ni J. ang daming cons diba.

Kaya medyo nahihirapan ako mag decide kung pera ba o peace of mind at stress free environment? Huehue. Tsaka okay lang ba na magpahinga muna ako hanggang matapos 'tong taon na 'to bago ako tumuloy sa job hunting? hindi ba magiging off sa interviewer ko kung sakali, October 18 naman last day ko sa company sa nakalagay sa COE ko e, so parang almost 2 months lang akong matetengga ulit. Problema ko nalang yung mga bayarin ko, yung last pay ko nalang muna aasahan ko para mabawasan yun kahit papano.

Gulong gulo parin ako. Gaya ng sabi ni J, itulog ko na muna baka sakali pag gising ko may desisyon na ako. Haha.

[strelles-universe]

Asitatu, the Complete Grammar Guide

The Language of the Sky Kingdoms, when all the world’s creatures heard each other truly for the first time, the Sky decided to rebuild what had been broken. With a value of knowledge and unity, they painstakingly reconstructed everything they had. Nowadays, knowing the language is a point of pride and part of a Sky Born’s inheritance - the ability to speak of the Sky and to the other creations of the Sky Kindlers is something to pride yourself on.

Most kits will enter formal lessons when they’re about four moons old but have generally picked up the basic of the language about a moon before. Creatures who wish to stay in the kingdoms long-term are expected to take at least casual lessons in Asitatu and understand its significance to the Sky Kingdoms.

---

Part 1: Phonology and Phonetics

---

There are about 17 consonant sounds to Asisahala

And there are 5 vowels;

Phonetic Summary

Onset: m n p b t d sh x r h s z f v k g

R Cluster: hr mr nr fr lr vr pr dr kr shr xr

K Clusters: ky nk mk sk

Nucleus: a e i o u

Nucleus Cluster (a): aa ai

Nucleus Cluster (i): ii ia

Nucleus Cluster (o): oe

Nucleus Cluster (e): ei

Nucleus Cluster (u): ue ua

Coda: l n r k shs v

Coda Cluster: ss nn

(Some of these spaces are left blank to leave room for myself to continue creating new words. When I think I have enough combos, I'll stick to the combos I created)

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Part 2: Word Order and Compounding

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SVO Primary - The cat jumps over the tree

SOV Secondary - The cat, over the log jumps

Demonstrative - Noun

Numeral - Noun | This goat

Possessive - Noun| Your goat

Noun - Adjective | Goat big

Noun - Genitives | The sandwich of the goat (not, the goat’s sandwich)

Noun - Relative Clauses | The goat, who ate the sandwich is thick

Verb - Auxiliary | Go must (I go must | I must go)

Verb - Subordinate Verb | Went to buy (vs. to buy went)

Adjective - Adverb | Big really (really big)

Yes/No Particles - Final (End of a sentence)

Question Words - Final (End of a sentence)

Proper Noun - Common Noun | state Kansas instead of Kansas State

Modifier Order: Quantity - Opinion - Age - Size - Origin - Color - Material - Purpose + Noun

Modifier Example:Two pretty old large dutch white cotton goats.

Compounds: Forest (tree-place -> place tree)

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Part 3: Noun Class

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Asitatu has a very simple animate vs. inanimate noun class distinction. While a vast majority of nouns will go where you think it will (rocks are inanimate, but squirrels are animate), religious and social implications have created a few oddities. This is true in the case of fire which is considered animate and water happens to be situational.

Animate - Sun, moon, cat, wind, breath, dog

Inanimate - Rock, tree, snail, dirt, bedding

Now one thing to understand is that when it comes to living beings, it’s the soul that’s considered to be animate and mobile. As a result, when a being dies, the corpse itself is referred to as an inanimate object.

Viŕihem agaan vs. Viŕiki helaan

Green-ANI Eye-PL Green-INANI Leaf-PL

The animate modifier is: -he(m)

The inanimate modifier is: -ki(m)

The optional -m at the end of both affixes depends on the sound of the following word. If the next word starts with a vowel, then the -m comes in.

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Part 4: Grammatical Number

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Asitatu keeps grammatical number simplistic. There are three numbers that are inflected for - Singular, Plural and Paucal nouns.

Singular Nouns are mostly left blank, so an unmarked nouns like say Akush (friend) are always assumed to be singular.

Paucal nouns forms signify that there are a few of a thing - this can vary based on culture what “a few” is but the most accepted version of this is 2-4 things. Akushal (a few friends) -al

Plural noun forms are many of the thing - anything more than you’d identify as a few. Akusha (friends). -a(n)

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Part 5: Tense and Aspect

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Asitatu is rather simple when it comes to its tenses - it has a very simple past vs. non-past distinction at it’s core with the “distant past” being more of a storyteller’s tense implying a time long ago, usually along the lines of demigods.

Here's an example using the verb, -kori (to run)

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Part 6: Mood and Modality

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There are only two grammatical moods to Asisahala - Imperative and Optative used for commands and hopes respectively. 

Imperative: -ŕo 

Optative: -va

Both markers are left at the end of a sentence albeit, they can be used multiple times to convey emphasis.

Example: Taver-ŕo! (Dance!)

This is considered a light command - more playful than forceful and creatures though creatures will be inclined to go along with it. Something more like;

Yetaver-ŕo! Is forceful and translate to sometime like, “you must dance.”

The opitive marker -va can go on either the verb or at the end of a sentence.

Hravani siŕa sahraka-va (I hope rain comes)

Hravani-va sahraka (I hope rain comes)

This is mostly down to flow and emphasis - putting it at the end is usually a common wish while putting it on the verb is really emphasizing the action. The first one is hoping for rain in general while the second example is sincerely eager for rain to come.

Extra emphasis can be given when both the verb and the end of the sentence are marked.

Hravani-va sahraka-va (I really hope rain comes)

This sentence is desperate - maybe the speaker has been suffering from a drought in their home.

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Part 7: Pronouns

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The pronouns of Asitatu are among the most complex feature you’ll come across in the language. First and foremost, the pronouns are divided into two variations - Mortal and Divine. The mortal pronouns are used exactly as you’d imagine - they’re your common, everyday pronouns that everyone uses.

Separate from the mortal pronouns are the divine pronouns. These are frequently called the Prayer Set as they’re mostly used in prayers and rituals for the gods. The royal family is technically allowed to use this set but most consider it tacky and self-righteous to do so.

As such, when the royal family uses the Prayer Set, it's a very serious situation such as in an execution or a public sentencing.

Alongside the independent forms of the pronouns are the dependent forms that are tacked onto a verb. It's more common for speakers to use the dependent forms when being relaxed or casual and the independent forms when they're being more formal.

Like the independent forms, the pronouns are broken into two groups - Mortal and Divine.

This is the Mortal Set;

And this is the Divine Set;

Now these are the normal forms but there are also possessive pronouns however, unlike the basic pronouns, there isn’t a dependent form.

These are the mortal possessives;

And these are the divine possessives;

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Part 9: Articles and Demonstratives

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The articles of Asitatu are actually very simple. For one, there are only definite articles and anything left bare is considered a general noun. It looks like;

Ta is the definite singular article and refers to a specific noun.

Ta mifra (the cat) vs. Mifra (any cat)

Na is the definite paucal noun.

Na mifraal (the few cats) vs. Mifraal (a few cats)

Ba is the plural definite noun - referring to a large group of any objects.

Ba mifraan (the cats) vs. Mifraan (cats)

The demonstratives have a trial distinction - near, medial and distal although there are no inherent grammatical number distinctions like in English (e.g. this cat = one cat and those cats = many cats).

Yi mifra - this cat ifra - that cat Neya mifra - yonder cat

The grammatical number of course shown with using the proper number distinction. For example; Yi mifraal (these few cats)

[quietncopacetic]

some january wins:

i went to a lil indie alternative show at a shitty dive bar completely sober & alone (!!!!), made a couple of friends for the night and stayed the whole time!!!!

i’ve become a core volunteer for a grassroots harm reduction and overdose prevention initiative!! i feel like i have a place and i love my community a lot.

stood up to my bosses, filed a complaint with HR, then stood up to HR too. it payed off and i got what i was entitled to plus deserved compensation. i have a voice and needs and they deserve to be heard and valued.

i’ve started physio again, but this time at a rehab clinic twice a week. i am so determined to feel strong, and i want to be able to try rock climbing.

started taking certificate courses to help beef up my resume and play with the idea of school again. i love to learn but i’m not quite sure if i feel the need or desire to go back to university right now. college probably, but even then i’m realizing there are ways to find work in this field without the big paperwork. and most places that i would actually want to work with understand and value that. i feel good about my future, even though i don’t have a set plan.

visited ottawa for a few days and for the first time ever!!! barely even struggled with suicidal ideation before, during, or after the visit!!!! some fleeting thoughts but i wasnt longing to kms lol

my life is so different now. my life belongs to me!!