IANAL, but I'm fairly confident that you're wrong about CA requiring severance pay under the WARN act, and I don't think you should be giving legal advice if you're not a lawyer. Your post can mislead a lot of people on HN.
An employer must give notice 60-days prior to a plant closing, layoff or relocation. In addition to the notifications required under federal WARN, notice must also be given to the Local Workforce Investment Board, and the chief elected official of each city and county government within which the termination, relocation or mass layoff occurs. (California Labor Code Section 1401)
No one gives notice because of the risk that employees will do something malicious and instead just pay out the 60 days(with benefits including vacation accrual). I've done 3 sets of layoffs at my old company as a manager and was eventually layed off. At non California locations and offices that were too small to fall under WARN, we terminated employees with no severance except one month that was attached to an agreement not to sue. BTW, nothing i said was legal advice just simply stating that 3 months is standard for California.
Also, you did the exact same thing he/she did when you said you didn't think the warn act requires severance so even if what he/she did was giving legal advice, your comment would fall under the exact same category.
This isn't a courtroom; they use agreements. I could be parsey to hunt down and list all the exceptions, but my point is true for the general case of legal discussions on the Internet. "If you have no client relationship with the person offering the advice" just seemed kind of clunky, you know?
Actually, you don't understand Zynga since you're relying on rumor and hearsay. I've worked as Zynga. Things aren't as black and white as you think they are.
I don't think he has to have worked at Zynga to understand the problem. Zynga is hardly the only one, but they are one of the biggest of the new crop of startups that grew huge and IPOed to the benefit of very few employees.
Back in the "old days", even when you move the "old days" up to include Google's IPO, a company with such a massive liquidity event could be expected to result in a lot of wealth spread out among early employees. Even receptionists, chefs, etc could cash out big paydays.
With the way things are now, companies are often structured such that unless you're a founder with an ironclad paper trail of equity ownership, you probably aren't going to be walking away with much more money than what you'd get from a particularly good yearly bonus at a large company, and that's absolutely best-case. More likely is that a liquidity event will occur where nobody but preferred stock owners will see a single dime.
This perception is absolutely a problem for the overall startup ecosystem and plays into why everyone involved wants to be a founder and not just an early employee and this in turn plays into why all these startups all these founders are founding are having massive problems hiring non-founder employees.
As a potential startup employee, your biggest concern shouldn't be whether the company fails spectacularly. Failure sucks, but that's easy enough to get past psychologically. Your biggest concern should be what if the company is extremely successful and you get screwed anyway. Because while this is statistically less likely than spectacular failure, it is much harder to deal with and more common than a lot of people think.
I'm reading between the lines a bit. The theory of global warming is that the world's average temperatures are rising. The warming has been attributed in part to rising C02 levels.
Because winters consume the most energy of any season (in the article) to heat, we emit the most c02 during that season.
Given that the planet is warming, the winters are milder (quoted above) (see this article on 13 of the hottest years on record have occurred in the last 15). Because winters are milder (because global warming), they require less energy to produce for heating.
The section I'm referring to is: ""However, CO2 emissions during January-March 2012 were low due to a combination of three factors: A mild winter that reduced household heating demand and therefore energy use"
Average temperatures aren't a great predictor of energy consumption. Yes, warmer winters mean less heating requirement, but warmer summers mean greater cooling requirement. Not such a factor for Jan-Mar in the US, admittedly.
Typically heating and cooling degree days (temperature variations integrated over time) are used to normalize energy consumption data for the weather. Not average temperatures.
I wasn't trying to focus on energy consumption as much as the fact warming is happening in general, which isn't good. My point was the article title and data set (March - Jan) could mislead one to think global warming is reversing because of lower C02 levels from the winter. I'm saying it's likely not reversing, because the planet is warming overall and warmer summers will cause more energy production (like you said) and, overall, especially when you account for other nations, C02 production is still rising annually. Unfortunately, we only have one atmosphere and planet.
The mild winter is an effect because of the time period at which they're looking. Without additional data, one might expect that global warming implies both warmer winters and warmer summers.
Total heating in winter uses more energy than cooling in summer because there is a bigger difference between the outdoor temperature and the target temperature in winter than in summer. Just based on this article, one would expect the delta of warmer winters and warmer summers to roughly offset each other.
So it doesn't seem sound to conclude, based on this article, that, if the CO2 emissions were looked at over a full year, that the warmer winter would result in a net CO2 reduction.
Also, cooling systems are generally less efficient than heating systems, which would increase summer energy consumption (and CO2) more than the reduction in winter.
That's assuming the overall US climate (by which I mean population- or energy-consumption-weighted degree days) necessitated similar amounts of winter heating and summer cooling.
I agree global warming does imply warmer winters and summers. I'm not sure if you're addressing the article or what I wrote, but if you look at C02 emissions over a full year, I doubt the warmer winter would result in a reduction of total annual C02 production, because summers will now require more energy & C02 (to cool). I'm saying the title is misleading because just because a small reduction in the US' winter's C02 doesn't mean the planet is cooling (or global warming is reversing) ... especially if you factor in developing world emission growth, which I didn't mention before.
