My (soon to be ex) company gets around the rebuild step by doing annual layoffs.
Hard no. Huge privacy issues with all of those companies and questionable how useful/accurate the data you get back is anyway.
When I look at what they're creating, I can see that they are trying to protect a lot of the "in" leaders and so they're laying off too many workers and keeping too many leaders. I have no doubt they'll have to make leadership cuts next year since they are approaching this completely backwards, so I definitely don't see staying as "safe".
I'm optimistic that I'll be able to find a job quickly enough that the severance is actually a bonus, but I haven't looked for a job in a long, long time, so I might be deluding myself. I have enough connections in the company that I could probably land something else, but the idea of taking a little break sounds nice. We just had a major reorg last year (when they should have made this change) that has been brutal to implement. We are just now getting stable from that and this is going to hit my employees hard.
The headcount reduction was the major thing for me. We're merging 3 teams, which I expected for a long time now, but I expected more leadership cuts and fewer worker cuts. If I stay, I will have to significantly reduce the quality of work or drive my employees to burn out. I'm not very interested in either option.
Here's a what if for you all this week.
If you were given a choice to layoff 1/3 of your employees (with no reduction in workload) or take 9 months severance, which would you do?
I'm pretty sure I know what I'm going to do, but will be waiting until the last possible moment to commit in case I change my mind. In my case, I could live 3-4 years on my savings (not counting the severance), but that would set back my retirement plans substantially. I'm not looking for advice, just thought this would be a good discussion topic and I'm curious how others would handle this in their own context (not in my shoes).
Depends on your hairstyle, but I used to have my hair cut about once a month for $20-25. I bought a set of electric hair clippers for about $30 more than 15 years ago and learned to cut it myself and have saved thousands of dollars. Its a simple men's cut, so it works for me.
An electric razor or a quality safety razor are also possibilities. I used to use the disposable gillette razor cartridges at about $4 per head, which lasted 3-4 weeks (I used them until they hurt to save money). Now I have both a safety razor and an electric razor (I don't need both, the electric was a gift). The safety razor was $45 and and blades are about $0.10. Blades last about a week instead of a month, but it paid for itself in about a year. I experimented with various shaving creams as well, but eventually went back to canned shaving cream because the time spent creating a good lather in alternative forms was annoying and not worth the savings.
The electric razor may or may not pay for itself depending on how much it cost and how often you have to change the head and the cost of cleaning solutions, but I do enjoy having it for a quick shave. It definitely is not as good of a shave though.
Hey, I've been there! Related to Christmas, every year Nevada City has a Victorian Christmas celebration where they all dress fancy and neighboring Grass Valley has Cornish Christmas, that seems to celebrate the working class. Total speculation on my part, I'm guessing in the 1800s all the mine owners lived in Nevada City and all the miners lived in Grass Valley.
This looks great! Is the dead wood juniper also?
I'm a big fan of gardening with native plants. Here are a couple of sites that might help you if you want to try that:
https://npsnj.org/native-plants/plant-lists/ https://www.jerseyyards.org/jersey-friendly-plants/native-plants/ https://www.backyardgardenlover.com/new-jersey-native-plants-list/
From a design perspective I'd probably start off with a couple of small shrubs on either side of the steps that are either evergreen or have year-round interest. If you go with native plants, you could check out inkberry holly (need male & female plants to get fruit) or catawba rhododendron. I'm sure there are other great options, but I'm not from the area and just recognized those two from my region. For non-natives, cryptomeria globosa nana or gold mop cypress might fit well.
Beyond that, I'd find a good local nursery and tell them how much space you have to fill and load up with perennials. My personal preference would be to focus on creating a butterfly/hummingbird garden. Just buy 2-3 of everything and plant them in little groups using the recommended spacing as a guide. Then, load mulch between all of the plants and wait for it to fill in over the next 2-3 years. I like bark mulch, but currently use pine straw (that's the big thing here in the south); I despise rock mulch.
Another option is to get a seed mix from a place like prairemoon.com and just spread it and let nature take its course. It will take longer, but save you time and money compared to buying and planting individual plants.
From there you can just keep going and replace all your grass and never have to mow again! :)
Its not always sinister, sometimes its just the petty bureaucracy of HR trying to standardize things to benefit themselves. I once got switched from salary to hourly because HR was trying to align job titles across departments.
My title at the time was Sr. Analyst and they were switching to a numerical title system. My boss said to write up a justification for why I should be slotted as an Analyst 3, which would stay salary, otherwise I would be slotted as an hourly Analyst 2. I asked if there was any benefit to the higher title and was told no, so I declined and was switched to hourly. For me it was fantastic because I regularly worked over 40 hours and traveled frequently, so I started getting lots of overtime pay.
I pretty much only buy cables (of any kind) from Monoprice.
I would definitely like to see this community grow, but agree with the others about the challenges of increasing engagement for a niche topic when there isn't much action for each of us to take from day to day. Most of the active portion of FIRE seems to be at the start and end of each person's journey, the part in between is just slowly moving forward. It might help if we had more highly upvoted posts to catch people's attention on the main screen. Maybe we need to start cranking out FIRE memes like the Star Trek communities? ๐