You are very likely to be out the money. The bankruptcy proceedings will determine how giftcard owners are compensated. Hard to say if it will be favorable, but I suspect they may be even less senior than unsecured debt (or they may be categorized as unsecured debt). Consult an attorney, but it may not be worth their time.
Ask the initial buyer to file a chargeback if it was purchased via credit card. At least in the US, there's good protections that way for preventing folks from owing money for goods and services they didn't receive.
They're not assuming the risk, the merchant bank is. And the merchant bank should be mitigating that via holding back a portion of credit card receipts from companies for the specific purpose of honoring chargeback demands.
In certain states, money used to purchase a gift card is required to be held in escrow, which would be held separately in receivership. Definitely worth asking about.
Just to add to the others -- if the initial buyer paid with PayPal, they could have up to 180 days from the date of purchase to initiate a Significantly Not As Described (SNAD) claim.
It is just a fact of our protective psychological human makeup that we all have fragile egos and energy conservation always on. That will make us insensitive and upset with others (we respond rudely), and keeps us safe by not wasting energy on unimportant things (we don't submit).
Both you as the submitter who doesn't want to deal with the comments, and the person who is complaining back (and to be sensitive myself, I try to remember they may not be conscious of it) are both dealing with that.
For example, think about your job, and how often did you just let things go because you had to 'pick your battles' or even 'just too tired to deal with that'. Bosses do it too. This is human nature.
Answer: Retirement. Kind of kidding - kind of not! Some will be thinking this though...
Jokes aside - it can be tough. I recommend if you have not already done a reverse time based analysis, you do so. If you're wondering this at 40, what about 60? Think about where you want to be and how you will be perceived going forward, combined. That will help guide some of what you do with an eye towards your longevity.
Anyway, at 40 there is a high expectation to support and mentor - first and foremost. Help people see their bugs, secondarily improve their methods, and thirdly listen to their ideas to help you paint their strategy (rather than your own interpretations and strategies which may be dated).
Second, younger people may see you as the older guy with the stodgy ideas. Avoid fighting with them on that front, even though your role may ask for that. You are in a losing battle often with that up front, unless your upper management really supports your ideas. And even then be careful to be respectful - you may change your mind after some research and find you support their initially backward sounding idea.
I recommend supporting and contributing to your coworkers projects to highlight your solution methods, and show them you care. You probably have a lot of good to offer, and this will defray any potential hostility.
Keep seeing your therapist along this journey - it will help you 'take a time out' to think about your situation and validate your progress.
1. Break your fall.
Depression, and any 'invisible' illness, are highly distracting. Like trying to getting an A while getting electric shocks during every class and study. It can be done (not by me, but by some I guess) but it is really really hard. You'll miss obvious problems, solutions, and obvious signs that act as cues at other times. You need to turn down the voltage a bit.
First, quick fixes. These are antidepressants. They are a good temporary measure but not more than 3 maybe 6 months. Depression kills all forward progress, and antidepressants can release some of this pressure temporarily - freeing you to begin moving to long term solutions. That is really all antidepressants are good for.
2. Find out-of-the-box effective solutions to your depression - immediately.
First, I have been helped by western herbals (St. John's Wort is proven long term effective but takes time to get going), ayurvedic Indian herbal treatments (start with Ashwagandha), Chinese herbs, gut related bacteria and probiotics (strong ones like kombucha every day - not gentle 'nudges' like yogurt).
Focus on the medicine vs the doctor/treatment. Dr visits can take a month or more and are expensive - your health can't wait. Focus on the herbs themselves vs visiting the ayurvedic practitioner, acupuncturist, or Chinese Herbalist. Via the internet, I stole bits and pieces of the most effective treatments in non-western medicine and cobbled together my own solutions.
Second, Yoga exercise routines, and add the Yoga mindfulness stuff later if you can (but at least the exercise routines). You must do this. Yoga is proven and will help you - but you can't stop there (and will find it hard to start if you have not broken your fall yet). Exercise and treatment must always be combined.
Third, mindfulness. Know you will make it through. You may not know how yet, but you will make it. Fake it 'til you make it is a proven strategy - but not enough alone.
3. If you do not have the ability to share your focus with your job (balancing your health treatment and your job) get a quick fix (antidepressant) going right away to 'turn down the voltage'. And let whatever happens to you job - happen. Panic and anxiety about a job you may be losing is waste of your very precious and limited resources (you may even find your wrong about your fears!).
Remember your solution order -
1. Break you fall (quick fix) and turn down the voltage a little.
2. Come up with long term solutions/strategies to turn it down a lot, and keep it down.
3. And finally - focus on your job last. Your good health will do much more for your job and life than your very best but highly distracted efforts can ever do.
Best of luck - I will be watching for your updates.
You have a chronic problem - you must treat it like one.
In my job, I am cleaning up (maybe more like 95% throwing out than cleaning up) some 30 year old equipment pileup across 4 separate server rooms. Ancient workstations and servers, such as Sun SPARC's, SGI's, Sun Oracles, HP-UX, AIX, and even a mainframe or 2 that have sat turned on and running an OS and networked (so respond to ping), but are actually lying dormant, stuffed in a closed door rack and networked in (often with long forgotten passwords).
This tool was something I wished I had (and searched all over for) to quickly catalog the approximate age of each responding ping. I could use this to further say hey this set is 1-10, this one 10-20 yrs old, and the last set 20-30. I can safely de-rack the 10-30 now, and work on rooting in to the remaining 1-10 yr systems over time. Instead, I have to root one rack at a time, and guess/research at many of the ages of the systems, which increased the work significantly.
Why? A good question. Research scientists and interns deployed them for projects. And when the project was done, a research scientist doesn't want to lose valuable research data. Since they are paid for, why not just leave them up. That, and the old sysadmin just retired - think of The Bastard Operator From Hell, but in real life, 20 years on.
This seems like a really complex way to solve a simple problem. Have an intern spend a day creating Visio diagrams of each room capturing model numbers. Trying to do this from a network perspective just seems like an easy way to miss half the systems or whatever percentage isn't powered on or connected.
I think the primary point of the article is that this flexible planning is not functioning as an equalizer in the workplace (Title: Want Equality? Make New Dads Stay Home...) and that it could, and should. To turn it into more direct phrasing; a woman has to take a significant chunk of time off during a pregnancy by virtue of the condition, and this has a net effect on her career.
When a woman takes off for pregnancy it is known up front it is for several months, and she is also indisposed during that time (can't answer questions or take quick phone calls, because she is not able to perform at peak levels while convalescing). So an employer accounts for the loss of that duty in different ways such as shifting responsibilities. And many of these ways become a limit to career success. Imagine she is closing a large sales deal but has to leave before close due to pregnancy - so she is no longer the clear performer in that sale, as it is closed by someone else. This reduces her effectiveness on paper (becomes a detractor) due to gender differences (becomes unequal).
A man has been given flexibility to give and take that same time in a way that permits some juggling of work and family supporting efforts - i.e your example case. You worked part time, she could really not do that in her case. This lets you stay active in your role (little effect on your responsibilities) when she could not.
My point basically boils down to this: making parental leave about something other than enabling parents to recover and take care of their kids is really kludgey, and probably would have made our experience of raising our son more difficult unless it was really, really long (like one year long).
The wage gap is a problem, but there is nothing that says we have to solve it (or that it can be solved) using this particular knob.
I see your meaning clearly now - but your point then is obviously tangential.
To your argument I also personally don't know there is any reliable way to equalize this problem. Men and women are created differently, and nature is unfair - just ask the fly and the spider. The social contract means we so far mostly anyway agree it is better treat equally than to force equality (shades of Bergeron is poignant - and yes this inches us closer).
Any intervention like this won't be perfect for some people. Just like the status quo isn't perfect. The question is not, "Would change X be equally great for all people?" but "Is change X net less bad?"
If you think that there's a change X' that would be better yet, you should definitely propose it. But if you're just saying, "I don't care about fixing a problem that benefits me if the solution isn't perfect for me," you can see how that's not the most compelling of arguments.
> When a woman takes off for pregnancy it is known up front it is for several months, and she is also indisposed during that time (can't answer questions or take quick phone calls, because she is not able to perform at peak levels while convalescing).
So wouldn't it be ideal for the mother's partner to be able to participate 24-7 to help her recover and to help both parents bond closely with the child? And not be expected to be tugged back by ties to work?
FWIW I had a lawyer who was messaging with clients from the delivery room. So not sure about your stereotype.
I know for a fact pregnancy is hard on the body - my experience was nearly 12hrs delivery and my wife was in the ICU for 3 days following. It took months to recover completely.
In your rush to defend your personal 'stereotype'; I hope you understand that being able to message clients from the delivery room is unusual. No matter what your intent in saying this, never underestimate the serious nature of childbirth.
But women don't have to have children, in fact it would be much better if they didn't. You write your post as if it's all miraculous conception.
Women can make a choice to do something that will impact their career negatively. Men don't have that choice.
People who don't intend to have children subsidising people who do (who are on average already richer and more privileged) is deeply messed up. This only makes sense from a very narrow middle class upper-echelon-gender-equality is the most important thing in society lense.
But employers know that you might have children and if you are a woman that you will have a certain amount of time off work as a result. So they might choose to employ a man instead even if you don't plan to have children yourself. Obviously illegal in many jurisdictions but extremely hard to prove.
This is more of a problem of our current system of maternity leave being company funded rather than publically funded which would actually solve this problem overnight.
So if being born means that I have to approve of any measure which causes more births, then logically I should be in favour of for example reducing contraceptive programs in Africa, etc.
Being born doesn't automatically force you to support population increase or be a hypocrite. Even if you had a moral obligation to maximise (total number of people that will ever live), then that number is probably larger (because of humanity surviving into the future) if we drastically cut population in the present.
I get the feeling that droughts have happened before, are happening now, and will happen again; and we are just not able as humans to control the climate.
In fact I found this study that proves that history does repeat.
Thankfully, due to technological advancement though - it is nowhere near as damaging as it once was - in fact now these are barely a blip on the radar on human life. In times past, it is easy to forget that a simple drought halted all commerce, caused great famines, and without transportation and local food sources available, people were dying.
Just take a look at the history and see the trend lines for the evidence of improvement that advancements like electricity and internal combustion have given us:
I get the feeling that droughts have happened before, are happening now, and will happen again; and we are just not able as humans to control the climate.
Great! Hope you're not wrong. The vast majority of people who are in the best positions to know think you are.
I agree that humans can not control the climate. We are probably able to change it, unfortunately. We've sure punched up CO2 levels over the last hundred years.
Though I agree with your principle (ie this is not a complete analysis), in the authors defense it is accurately titled "African palm oil expansion is bad news for the continent’s primates."
Had it been titled "An analysis of the impacts of African palm oil expansion", your argument would have been poignant.
Yes and no. The Ars author cites a study that uses the highest possible number (from another study 9 years old from Corley) plus another high number for biofuels that does not take into account farming techniques or price elasticity, and then indicates that because of this, maybe Africa's habitat will be significantly eroded because it's "highly suitable" to palm oil based on their study of the climate. No cost accounting, political geography, etc discussed.
"Alarmist habitat erosion is good for clicks" is not a good reason to perpetuate hypothetical land use when there is plenty of actual non-hypothetical discussion to be had around the industry.
Do I need to go to the mat on this? Probably not, no, but it is symptomatic of a larger issue that I have trouble abiding: Oversimplified article associates two things together in the mind of information consumers who do not fully understand the problem. That association is for life. The correction / nuance never comes. Best to try and get to that nuance up front if at ALL possible, otherwise it's irresponsible.
