Sometimes you can. A decade or so ago when California ran out of money, they issued warrants to their payees, and lots of banks accepted those at face value.
In practice, most people in the US use credit (which means spending can go unpaid for about 25 days without any costs incurred) and most people bank with a national bank (so they are screwed if all federal employees stop paying back loans at the same time).
That said, food banks are gonna see lots more foot traffic and federal employees might start looking for other work.
Practically speaking, you are correct, but interestingly all dollars are literally an IOU from the US government, so you do buy food with an IOU from their employer. Debt from or to a sovereign is the basis for all money.
I have no idea what it's like now, but I went to an open day there years ago and it was incredible. What I learned is there are some extremely ugly Apple varieties that would never get picked up by supermarkets, but tasted unlike anything else I've sampled - literally like candy. Looks like Heritage Fruits still do antique apple tastings periodically: https://www.heritagefruitssociety.org/Antique-Apple-Tastings...
Whenever I've been in seriously challenging situations at work, having real, deep, personal relationships with my team made it far easier to have difficult conversations.
Forging real bonds gives you a foundation that you can actually build a strong team on top of: you can have tough conversations from a position of empathy and compassion; and if you need people to just "get it done", it's much easier to ask a friend to do you a solid and just get the work over the line.
> it's much easier to ask a friend to do you a solid and just get the work over the line.
Not just that, but people are willing to go above and beyond for empathetic leaders without being asked/cajoled/whatever.
Yeah, the article is right that laying off your friends, who likely did nothing wrong, sucks, but I think everything else can be done more or as effectively if you take time to build a better relationship with your team.
In a lot of situations (not every situation) I think the right thing to do is refuse to lay people off. If people above me want to lay someone off, they can look that person in the eye while they do it--I refuse to do harm to others on your behalf because you can't deal with seeing the harm you're causing. "I was just following orders" isn't an excuse for the kind of person I want to be.
Another possibility in situations where it is possible, might be approaching your team and saying, "I've been ordered to lay off one person from this team. None of you deserve to be laid off. I want to discuss if there is anyone who has other opportunities available and how we can help that person land on their feet, and I want to be clear that I can be the one to go if that's the best option."
Of course, either of these decisions happens in a context that has to be considered. For example if you have kids who will legitimately go hungry if you don't lay people off and get fired, you have to balance your responsibility to your coworkers with your responsibility to your kids. There are no silver bullets.
I think that part of my salary and title is being the one to sit with my team and let them know they’ve been laid off, and why. It sucks, but it’s the job. If you don’t want to do it, you shouldn’t be a manager. If you don’t think it should be allowed, you should go work in government or run for office. If you don’t think it should be done, you should start your own company and never make any mistakes and perfectly predict everyone else’s mistakes.
This isn't about never making mistakes, it's about taking responsibility for your mistakes when (not if) you make them. If you really have no choice but to lay people off, then you can do it yourself, to their face, with a clear conscience.
People at the top of organizations make the decision to lay people off, but it's middle and lower management that delivers the news. That's not right, and it's part of a pattern in corporations of upper management taking the profits and credit from success, and taking none of the costs or blame for failure. If that's what you want to do, you can do it without me.
I work for a company with full pay transparency – well, complete transparency across all parts of the organisation – I can't imagine working in an opaque environment ever again. I love it.
My nephew built this as one of his first Mindstorms projects. It works amazingly well, especially given the limited components - quite extraordinary to see in action.
I love this idea. I did a quick pure-CSS implementation, not bullet-proof by any means - biggest downside is it's reliance on the `required` attribute: http://jsfiddle.net/thetron/qpsnH/
I started using Airmail[1], and I love it. Mainly for label support with Gmail, but there's lots of little bits of UI features that I love about. Definitely worth the $1.99 or whatever it is on the App Store.
Thanks for mentioning this! I had completely missed the announcement. That's really exciting, I wonder if pin.net.au will adjust their pricing to match Stripe's. Good to have some healthy competition locally.
Pin will need to drop its prices to below stripe's or drastically improve the product. I started in integrating pin payments into my SaaS app and gave up when I realised pin would send an ugly email to my customers _every_ time I charged them. Ugh, no thanks.
