u/MegaMatt75

With 4 Day RTO starting up (I know not every Department is doing it at the same time), what are you choosing as your work from home day?

Are you choosing Monday or Friday, to keep all of the in-office time in one chunk? Are you choosing Wednesday to break up the days you need to commute? Is there some requirement that makes it easier for you to working from home on a Tuesday or Thursday?

Just curious what other folks are doing.

For myself, I find that the roads, parking lots, food courts etc are busier on Wednesday so I've chosen to work from home on that day.

It's probably because of the overlap between people who work from home Monday and Friday, but Wednesdays just seem to SUCK in terms of finding parking, getting a seat anywhere and lining up for food at lunch.

Someone was telling me that for every person that gets approved for ERI, their organization loses that position or that "box".

Say for example it was an IS-03 position at an office that employed 4 IS-03s, where none of these IS-03s are affected by any budget cuts. If one person applied for ERI and was approved, that office would save those salary dollars (and I know thoes dollars would be removed from that office's budget-or partially or whatever). Would the office then also only have 3 IS-03 boxes after that? Is that how it works? How does losing the box save money?

I had assumed that while there is a hiring freeze in place, they wouldn't be able to rehire someone to replace the departing IS-03 (obviously), and so there would be a savings in salray dollars. But we all know that some day the hiring freeze will be over and some of the positions will be refilled or replaced. If the box of the departing IS-03 is now gone, it makes for more HR hassles and expense to create a new box later in order to go back to the 4 IS-03s in my hypothetical office.

I could see some incentive then for the ERI of this hypothetical IS-03 to be refused, just on the basis of wanting to keep the box, especially since the team wasn't set to be reduced through budget cuts.

Is the person telling me this mistaken, or does every ERI granted not just mean a salary savings, but also a positon "box" eliminated?

I was thinking today about the novel and film Project Hail Mary and the implications its story have in terms of the Fermi Paradox.

&gt;>!!I was thinking about how the Astrophage might be (in that fictioal world) the Great Filter, an explanation of why the uiverse is so vast and yet we've not seen any intelligent life. Could the astrophage have stopped the evolution, or cause the extinction, of intelligent species before they evolved sufficiently to discover it?!<

>!On the one hand, if the astrophage is ancient and pervasive throughout the galaxy, then most stars would be infected and so in any civilization evolved they would like do so with the astrophage present around in their stars already and so not be threatened by it at all.!<

>!On the other hand, if the astrophage had an "infection front" that started a bit later and progressed across the galaxy from wherever it first evolved then it would function as a Great Filter to all the civilizations whose stars became infected during their evolution, unless they were sufficiently advanced to avoid the effects somehow.!<

>!It might also be possible that some civilization evolved in star systems where the astrophage was present and so were not threatened by it. As they evolved into a star-faring species, they might learn to harness the astrophage as a power source and means to travel to other stars. They might reasonably assume that all stars hosted astrophage and therefore see no reason to avoid using it as fuel to travel to other stars. But then that travel would aid the spread of astrophage to other stars, maybe the entire root cause of the spread in the novel and film was the travel habits of a single civilization!!<

>!Maybe that civilization then realised their error and chose to stop being a vector to the spread and stopped traveling to the stars, rather than contribute to the doom of countless other species.!<>!&#x200B;!<

!<

We were both on track to retire early in Canada (51) sometime in the late fall/early winter. But then she applied for a job in the UK and got offered it.

Now she's really excited and it looks like we're going to do that. I will still retire and do...something with my time in London...while she works a 3 years contract.

We understand that because she will have a work contract, I will be allowed to come and work (if I wish) as a spousal dependent? I'm considering going back to school - not for a new career but for interest's sake, but the college/univeristy system is currently a bit confusing to me. I was considering persuing a college diploma in Game Development here in Canada, but I can't seem to find an equivalent in London. Perhaps a Level 5??

We're excited about the ease of travel to the rest of Europe and plan to take many short little jaunts to the continent as time allows. We're keeping our home in Canada for the 3 year contract she's got at least (see after that). Any thoughts on what we should bring with us? Given that most appartments (flats) don't have a dryer we're thinking that bringing a ton of clothing might not be great (need space to hang it all to dry). But there are some units with dryers (though I've heard energy is expensive).

The worst bit is that we're having to make all of our plans rather quickly and it feels....like a lot. :)