You're often in that condition anyway. If you're taken to hospital in a coma or stroke condition, they won't necessarily know who you are nor will you be able to consent to any procedures. They proceed on good faith in that case.
Because having a mass layoff is an easy way to reduce non productive people.
Otherwise you have to go through a complicated process for each individual, with a higher risk to be sued.
In practice, in my personal experience, mass layoffs are a nightmare for everybody, and end up affecting also those not directly involved (especially since in most cases they don't know if they are until the layoffs are done).
So:
- Many of the "productive" people will leave on their own accord for better pastures, even before the layoffs are carried out.
- The rest will find themselves with an increased workload (and the nagging feeling they should have followed the lead of the previous group).
Right-to-work states still distinguish between firing for cause and a layoff for unemployment purposes. If you just get rid of somebody because you don't like them or whatever, that's legally considered a layoff because they did nothing wrong and thus can still collect unemployment.
If you let somebody go just because you didn't like them but you lied and said it was for performance reasons, they'll have to fight to get unemployment, and they may very well sue you for their troubles. On a similar note, if you do want to fire someone for performance reasons, you better have that lack of performance well documented.
Because of this, a lot of companies don't bother claiming cause: they classify all firings as layoffs and don't contest anyone's unemployment. I worked for a company like that once.
There are some nuances to the terminology. Companies avoid the term "layoff" because it implies that people might be re-hired once the slowdown is over. Growing up near Detroit, I remember layoffs where the status of the laid off workers was specified in the union contract. I have not heard of this kind of layoff in recent times, outside of unionized companies.
Laypeople like me usually reserve "firing" for people who are fired "with cause." When companies fire people "at will," they often use words like "reduction in force."
Perhaps a better way of thinking about it is the consequences of being fired. If you are fired "at will," then you are entitled to things like unemployment compensation, COBRA benefits, etc. If you are fired "with cause," then you lose those benefits.
If an employee is a klunker, they will often wait for business to slow down, fire them "at will," and pay the benefits, to avoid potentially getting sued for false termination.
Also speculative, but Google probably has a set of equipments that don't work well with others.
When you play in the access and transport space, there usually a set of standard that you have to follow, in order for it to work together with others.
If Google owns the entire infrastructure, they can build their own equipments that are a lot simpler/cheaper to build, because they don't have to deal with all the standard-crap that other manufacturers have to deal with.
If they bought TWC, then they need to integrate all those devices, including all of the OSSes that are guarded by bureaucrats.
A bit of advise, you need to compare between capital gains vs stock loss. Most problems come when the stock is losing 40% of its value, and still keep it in order to avoid capital gains, ended up losing even more.
