Depends on your definition of marriage. Various places with common law automatically make you effectively married as far as family law and tax law are concerned, and insofar as people involve the courts.
After 1 year of cohabitation in Canada, couples are federally common law spouses for tax purposes. Provincially it depends, but after 2 years in some provinces you're technically and automatically spouses for family law purposes, which gives someone the same legal rights as an explicitly married couple in terms of asset division and parental obligations following a breakup (which is outdated and insane in many cases outside of having children, but whatever).
I interviewed at Palantir London about 10 years ago.
I am based in Europe and one of the younger interviewers let-slip that they will all be working during the local public holiday. lols. No thanks.
Also, I grew up in a mixed ethnic environment. For the last few decades there has been a focus on trying to make society more inclusive. Such that my school exam papers would have questions like "Susan has 6 apples and gets 6 more. How many does she have" or "Rohit is travelling at 50mph ...." So a variety of names and genders etc to reflect the people who live here.
Well, my Palantir interview information was about "networks of people that need to be tracked"... all Muhammads, Omars etc. These names were my school colleagues and friends, so this didn't sit well with me (just to be clear, I didn't want to work somewhere that seemed to be making software to track entire groups of people).
They really should have sanitised their material and made it about helping Susan and Rohit track financial crime or some such. Instead I got vibes of that tv show Homeland.
Cynically, it sounds like their interview process worked pretty well for selecting people who were quite happy to work public holidays and had no issue with tracking "people that need to be tracked"
I don't think cynicism is even needed. Public holidays are surprising - there's no legal way in Europe[1] to force someone to work during a holiday. And trying is a lawsuit waiting to happen. But tracking Muhammads? If someone has moral problems with that, they better resign before being employed. Because at best they will resign soon after joining, at worst they will become a whistleblower.
[1] I know Europe is big etc, but I used to work in UK on particular and everyone took bank holidays seriously.
There is a simple legal way, hire immigrants, they cannot sue if they are no longer resident.
Simply enough, I am a Blue Card holder currently, haven't filled my 5 years hence it is on the temporary state for now. I have been working many weekends/public holidays & whatnot. This was not even part of the original contract. I was presented an "addendum" roughly after 1 month into starting of work. This being moved from another country, including your family and home, and now either you sign or mutual termination of contract because this is the business needs situation. Not to mention the requirement to pay back _all_ relocation expenses (including their taxes).
If I didn't sign, I would be terminated with a notice of 2 weeks. I have to leave within 3 months of that (of find a new job). Even if I sued, I doubt my first hearing will be within that period... (And again, this is a new country, no contact, no lawyer and haven't been part of an union)
So, it is certainly possible to _force_ people to work on holidays. Larger the company is, higher the leverage... (ie. making the process longer so you'll run out of time)
> Well, my Palantir interview information was about "networks of people that need to be tracked"... all Muhammads, Omars etc.
I can't begin to describe how sick this makes me feel. At the same time, I'm happy that your upbringing resulted in you making the right choice of not pursuing such a horrible company.
I on the other hand was contacted by Helsing, which at the time sounded cool to me (????) (secret agent vibes???). The recruiter however failed to appear at the screening call 2 or 3 times, which I interpreted as a strategy on their part to select for persistence/yes-men (Occam's razor on the other hand is that the recruiter was overworked and/or shitty).
I told the recruiter off.
Only after a while I realized that it really, really was not a good thing that I even considered working for a company that in the end just kills people for money (I know, european defense yadda yadda). I have enough trouble sleeping as it is.
I'm curious what names did you expect for an intelligence op in Afghanistan or Iran?
Generally the police take care of things like financial crimes, so not sure why you expected this from a service provider to US three letter agencies
This worked really well for me at work. A new text file for each day, so I could explain what I did/plan to do during standup.
I struggle at home though. Because there's not as much pressure to do one task until it's done... so my text file gets forgotten about. Then I start a paper list. Then I forget that... rinse and repeat.
I once interviewed at the London office of a US based company. The best part was when they took me to lunch... I asked the young American what he was going to do on the long holiday weekend. He said they have to work. Lol. No thanks!
Hobby projects on super old / free hardware was/is fun. I remember using dumpster desktops as a student. I could SSH to my home PC from school. Ran a webserver. Even wrote C code to generate HTML for a website to host my photos. Fun times.
All my current desktops are ~8 year old corporate cast-offs.
I've seen a few stories of murders where the "smart" criminal turned their phone off during the exact window the crime took place. That and being seen at the scene of the crime was used as evidence.
So the intent part is definitely a thing if they simply turn off their phone.
My wife is also T1, diagnosed a couple years back with a week in ICU. She pulled through and now has a CGM and pump.
What really surprised me was her blood sugar rockets up when she has video meetings with a certain difficult colleague. While other chilled colleagues have no such effect.
That made me wonder if interacting with difficult people causes more physiological changes than I realised.
Epinephrine causes the body to release sugar into the bloodstream - it's one of the reasons you get shaky when your blood sugar gets low (if you're not T1DM at least) - your body is attempting to increase blood sugar by epinephrine. So in reverse, stressful situations that cause the release of epinephrine increase blood sugar.
There's a similar issue with e.g. running as a T1DM (as I understand it, not being one) - when you're running, your body will pump out sugar, but when you stop running, it doesn't stop instantly, so your blood sugar can spike high post-exercise. Or you can run out of sugar and crash hypoglycemic.
It's amazing that CGMs exist that can, to some degree, compensate for these things, but man the body's autoregulation on 50 different axes is fascinating.
There are observable changes in the structure of the brain when people take up meditation. Not to get too crass, but we are the meat in our heads and bodies.
I'm not into mediation, but I watched something that said the brain scans of meditating experts resembled someone having a seizure or something. But the person with sat quietly.
I'm not drawing any conclusions. But I found it fascinating.
