Agreed. This is a whole separate issue to the idea of “gift cards” as compensation in lieu of a cash bonus.
It is kindof annoying that I’d get a gift card to a specific thing vs just cash but, I kindof get it. If it’s purely a bonus and basically a ‘motivational reward/perk’ for going beyond your normal work scope, I can’t really knock it. Especially if it’s a small company and everyone is on board.
If a company normally would just pay overtime or something for putting in more hours, or had regular incentive goals to get holiday bonuses and then this year instead they just say “well we got a really good deal for these gift cards, enjoy” then yeah that’s kinda shitty.
In this case it seems the gift was strictly a gift. If it wasn’t these handguns-via-voucher then it might have been some other physical gift. Like Xboxes or electric scooters or some other thing. The gift was probably not compensation. And I bet there’s a few legal/financial distinctions to be made between a company giving all employees a special gift and paying a bonus.
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True, there is a difference between doing something nice to your employees as a token of appreciation, such as taking them out to a nice lunch, getting them a gift (whatever that may be) vs. something that should be expected as part of your normal salary/wages. Like you said, if the company had rules on what to do to get a bonus and instead of giving a bonus you get some silly gift, that would be utter bullshit (and a good bit of the plot of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, but I digress).
The first few years I worked for my previous company we would get 2x paychecks on the final paycheck of the year as a bonus. After the company was sold we got Starbucks gift cards. After that we basically got nothing.
About to find out what my new job gives within a month. I was told there was some kind of bonus, but no info was offered on how large despite asking around.
It’s gonna be a case of beer and a non-transferable pass to next year’s Twitchcon.
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I’ve never worked at a job that gave me any sort of holiday bonus. Usually our managers would just treat us to a nice lunch around holiday time.
I’ve always gotten a cash bonus and a fancy dinner or party. Even IBM in ancient times gave me a little bonus and we had a nice dinner.
Last year we got either a Yeti mug or a branded pullover.
We had an all you can eat Brazilian steakhouse experience.
Those are dangerously good. Like straight up eat so much I feel sick delicious.
What’s a bonus…
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Someone on this forum once sent me a wooden block puzzle.
Never got a bonus till I came to Japan. Still find it pretty odd, that people feel entitled to it. But we did do a work meal with the communal tips when I ran a restaurant.
IBM is a very old school company. Until relatively recently they even gave pensions to lifetime employees. They’ve been getting away from their old school nature more and more in recent years, but apparently some of it was still around when you were there.
So, this is mostly a hollow victory for gun control advocates. It does accomplish something, but, I don’t think it furthers any actual, meaningful gun control agendas.
Also found this quote rather amusing:
"Bump stocks turn semiautomatic guns into illegal machine guns,” an unidentified senior Justice Department official told CNN on Wednesday. “This final rule sends a clear message: Illegal guns have no place in a law-and-order society, and we will continue to vigorously enforce the law to keep these illegal weapons off the street.”
OK well, they diddn’t legally do that. They do make semiautomatic rifles act sortof like a machine gun, no debate there; and so the tangible effect is that it mimics a machine gun, but until anti-bumpstock rules are passed, the guns themselves are legal with or without said device. So the final part of the quote that says they are illegal guns that have no place well… they are legal guns. And the law makes one component illegal because the legal gun plus the sliding stock device results in a configuration that the people have decided has no place; and so going forward these features attached to otherwise normally legal rifles will be off store shelves.
But bump stocks are still easy to make if someone wanted. A lot of people were DIYing them to save from buying an expensive novelty stock. So when it comes to it, if someone is going to use one to cause harm in a situation similar to the inciting Vegas shooting, the lack of commercially available bumpstocks, or the legal status of them, is hardly going to do much if the rest of the gun is otherwise legal.
And to serious and legitimate gun owners, the core of the pro-gun contingent, they were a novelty anyway. They always figured they were going to either be banned or remain just a strange novelty for the plebs who couldn’t afford a real, legal, registered machine gun. So banning this is an easy concession from the pro2A groups; there’s no room to defend them on all but strictly legal grounds which means the law can just change. And their loss is hardly felt. To them its just business as usual, and by and large the actual industry and actual pro2A people are happy to let bump stocks take the prime spotlight because everyone is actually fucking around with arm-braces which actually do provide a lot of utlity and options for gun owners, while enjoing such a crazy confluence of legal loophole weaving and precedent stacking and product design specifics that I’m impressed and surprised that it exists at all. To put it more conceicely: they will happily let the anti-gun lobby run around talking about banning bump stocks while enjoying their subcompact CQB assault “pistols” with folding arm braces.
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On the one hand, boo.
On the other hand, it’s South Dakota. The state is so sparsely populated that gun violence really isn’t a thing there. I’m kind of with Howard Dean on this one when he said that gun control probably needs to be done more at a state-by-state level, so long as states have the power they need to appropriately regulate gun ownership. What is needed for New York City (or State even, though upstate is pretty rural) probably isn’t applicable to Vermont or South Dakota.