"Adding insult to injury" barely begins to touch this item from the hellish place euphemistically known as Texas.

Big corporations there – and the City of Dallas – are demanding that their employees who could neither get in to work nor work remotely due to the recent weather should either count that as vacation time or forfeit the pay.

Quote:“Employees who are unable to fully dedicate their time and attention to company business due to current conditions should use available PTO, vacation, or holiday flex time if they wish to be paid for today. Otherwise, employees who do not have any remaining PTO, vacation, or holiday flex time or do not wish to use their unused PTO, vacation, or holiday flex time will not be paid for today,” read an email sent last week from Bell executive management.

The worker told The Daily Beast that Bell facilities were closed the entire week, but that at one point they were unable to access the VPN–a “virtual private network” that allows them to access company systems—meaning many employees at Bell couldn’t work from home even when they had electricity.

Quote:...it’s been entirely up to employers to decide how to handle the fallout. Some, like Cisco, not only paid their employees for the lost days, but also offered offices as a shelter and sent resources for mental-health support.

But it appears they are in the minority.

The details are still a bit unclear, but here is one of the articles about it I came across.

I finally got off my butt and deleted the old forums over on Crapatalk.  I'd originally intended to delete them in early 2018, and didn't.  I've also locked it and made it private so nothing can get into it. 

I figure three years' worth of extra ad revenue and people getting redirected there by search engines is enough.

   

EDIT: And that image is now outdated; I finally found the place to rename the boards and change the various messages -- of course it's in a completely separate control panel from everything else -- so now it's the Nameless Forums at Crapatalk, and has up-to-date descriptions of what's up.

And amusingly, something that's different from three years ago: It's now possible for the user to delete the group completely. That used to be impossible short of petitioning the Crapatalk support team. I won't do that, though... I want the message and the url to remain for as long as possible.

One really odd thing... the "analytics" panel still insists there are 19 messages on the board; but I can't figure out where the hell they might be.

Some times, you need a little bit of Country just to get the point across.

For when the big bad has taken one of Doug's "Little Sisters", and he can't do anything about it right then.




Delayed action with Trigger.
This one tags the "Little Sister" and, the "Big Bad", then informs a Number of Heavy hitters that consider Doug Family, to watch over "Little Sister".
As long as the "Little Sister" remains unharmed, nothing happens to the Big Bad.

Once she is harmed by The Abductor, Family Steps in to Assess the situation, and Take necessary actions.

This may cause collateral Damage.

As the song only Establishes Connections, the 'Family' is usually capable of arriving Under their own power.

This board's rules are "Have Fun, and Play Nice". It's time to have fun in this sub-forum.

If there was to be a second Constitutional Convention (Yes, you had one before -- almost nobody remembers the Articles of Confederation) called today, what would you like to see included in its results?

Here's my wish-list - implement all of these and you'll drag the political system in the USA kicking and screaming into the 20th century. (Yes, I know this is the 21st century. I'm not expecting a miracle to happen here.)

• Dissolve the Electoral College and have Presidential and Vice-Presidential elections by direct vote.
  
• Get rid of the time lag between the election and the taking of office, which leads to "lame duck" office-holders. Once the votes are counted, the winner takes office immediately. (FedEx and UPS can get packages anywhere in the USA overnight, and this internet posting was available to you as soon as I posted it; there's no need for a delay any more.) And "immediately" means immediately -- the Chief Justice is standing beside the person who announces the Presidential and Vice-Presidential vote totals, bound copy of the Constitution or religious book of the elected candidate's choice in hand, ready for the winners to take their oaths then and there.
  
• Each electoral district must be contiguous in and of itself. (This won't eliminate gerrymandering, but it'll reduce it.)
  
• In order to remove the appearance of conflict of interest, anybody who is responsible for drawing the boundaries of electoral districts must surrender the right to vote. (This won't eliminate gerrymandering, either, but it'll reduce it.)
  
• One from the Canadian model: Electoral district boundaries are to be drawn and elections are to be overseen by a civil service body made up solely of civil servants who have the power to spend whatever is necessary in order to ensure all elections are free and fair.
  
• One does not lose the right to vote simply because one is in jail. Anyone serving a term in a federal prison (owned by either the government or the private sector) is deemed to be resident at the person's last address of record before being arrested, or if the person had no address of record is deemed to be resident in the district where the arrest took place.
  
• Cap the total amount of money that any individual can contribute to all candidates and PACs put together, and forbid corporations and governments from contributing to candidates or PACs altogether.
  
• All Justices of the Supreme Court must retire from the Supreme Court at age 85.
  
• Separate the powers of the Head of Government and the Head of State. Let the Head of State handle all the ceremonial stuff (meeting with other Heads of State, pardoning the Thanksgiving Turkey, holding parties in the Rose Garden, staging photo ops, etc.) and defend the Constitution from a Head of Government who's gone too far, and let the Head of Government concentrate of governing (meeting with other Heads of Government, working with the House and Senate Majority leaders to turn bills into law, issuing executive orders, etc.).
  
• The total hourly remuneration (salary and benefits added together) of a Congressperson may not exceed five times the legislated hourly minimum wage in that Congressperson's congressional district. Any benefit available at no charge to everyone in a Congressperson's congressional district does not count toward this salary and benefit cap. (It's taxpayer money that funds their salaries and benefits - no fair asking those taxpayers to fund putting a Congresscritter into The 1%.)
  

Never let it be said that the GOP doesn't have a sense of humour - their bill that if passed would force people in 28 states to disconnect is called the CONNECT Act.

Never let it be said that the GOP understand economics, either - their bill is intended to increase competition but targets areas where the private sector does not want to compete.

Story here.

Australia, move over for Texas when it comes to politicos skying out in a crisis.  The first sentence of the article says it all, the details are just gravy:

Quote:As Texas was battered by an icy storm and widespread power losses that left millions of residents freezing and fearing for their safety, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas left the state on Wednesday and traveled to Mexico for a previously planned family vacation, according to a person with direct knowledge of the trip.
...
Mr. Cruz himself had posted updates throughout Wednesday on Twitter about the intensity of the winter storm from the National Weather Service. “Stay safe and please continue to follow the warnings and updates provided by state and local officials,” he wrote on Wednesday morning.
...
Mr. Cruz’s decision to leave his state in the middle of a crisis was an especially confounding one for a politician who has already run for president once, in 2016, and widely seen as wanting to run again in 2024 or beyond.

non-embedded

Effect: As long as a pursuer starts within Doug's AoE and contact is lost for at least three seconds they will forget his appearance and treat him and any allies as unrelated bystanders if seen again without doing something to cause a new pursuit, for as long as the song plays. The effect fades quickly but not necessarily immediately when it ends based on normal chances to resist mind control. Doug and any allies are also automatically affected if the situation changes to make them the pursuers (with the targets starting within his AoE) before the music stops.

So, probably time to open a tabletop gaming thread, even if most of us are doing this over Zoom these days. >.> Feel free to chip in with your own recent gaming, favorite story from the table, or if you're looking for a group online, maybe people here could arrange to get together for such things on Zoom/Skype/Discord/etc.

To start, new piece added to my gaming setup as of, oh, today. A dice jail. Made using scraps I had lying around. Hopefully this will kill the Wheaton Dice Curse that I'm occasionally afflicted with.

   

We're currently part of a first mission into Rise of Tiamat, which is the second part of Tyranny of Dragons. One DM, three players, we've killed a dragon and paraded it around as a trophy.

As It Happens: Why this Trump critic hosted a meeting about launching a new party for Republicans

A discussion with Evan McMullin, past chief policy director for the House Republican Conference.

Quote:AIH: Isn't this kind of backwards, I mean, sort of gathering everybody up to leave one person's influence in the party? Isn't it better to try and get that one person out? I mean, shouldn't Donald Trump be the one who's leaving, and not all of you?

EM: Well, certainly that would be our preference, right? But I don't think it's fair to say that he is alone. I mean, most of the party supports him. Most of the party wants to continue with him in its leadership. And so, you know, that's the challenge.

Quote:AIH: During the Trump years ... Republicans had control of the Senate. You had control of the White House. And now ... to split the party, isn't that basically a trip to the political wilderness?

EM: I would say that the status quo is worse than being in the political wilderness.

The Republican Party has now become a destructive force in America, and it is better that it be in the wilderness for a cycle or two or three than that it continue on this track.