IYKYK. We’re under a continuing resolution, so it’s not like there’s any money for buyouts, it’s not possible to pay what they’re proposing. It’s not severance, nothing about you getting to stop working but still getting paid. Be very thoughtful, talk to your union reps if you’re in a bargaining unit. Nobody be rash.
Edit: Link for interested folks - Reuters article
Also - unless folks complain, may put this kind of stuff in channel from time to time. Good to have a reasonably-anonymous forum for conversations that NOBODY SHOULD BE HAVING ON TEAMS. Teams chats are subject to govt review and FOIA requests, just in case y’all didn’t know.
As a (hopefully helpful) addition to this, any conversation you can’t have in Teams is a conversation you probably shouldn’t be having from a work network, to include any computer connected to a work VPN.
It’s common practice to have a man in the middle proxy on work networks to decrypt https traffic for network traffic monitoring/filtering and packet inspection. On government networks, the logs and captured traffic are potentially subject to the same kinds of review.
Be safe out there.
Yup. keep your work life and personal life separate in interesting times like these for sure.
https://www.torproject.org/download/
https://matrix.org/
As an outsider, I say go for it. Being fans of your work extends to wanting you all to have a safe space to discuss Union business.
If you need better privacy, you could also use this space to exchange some private GPG keys for encrypted emails, or pick a meeting place on a public XMPP server, before enabling OMEMO encryption.