It’s the law: all employers in California have to provide work comp coverage for all their employees. Even Wolfram & Hart.

Normal law firms probably don’t have much of a premium. Evil law firms, however, might see a big increase. For this reason, I think they’re probably self-insured. That, and they can keep all medical treatment and administration entirely in-house (especially given that their “house” has locations on several worlds and lots of unofficial ties in this one), along with as much defense litigation as possible. I’d imagine they don’t incur many penalties either, since it’s likely they can turn back time to avoid late payments. And if an employee wants to argue that anything they’ve gotten is less than they deserve, I’d imagine the second phase of their employment isn’t long in starting.

Sample injured worker: Lindsey. Definitely injured on the job, so the injury is fully compensable. According to the California permanent disability rating guidelines, loss of the dominant hand between wrist and elbow, inclusive, where a prosthesis is possible, has a standard PD rating of 60%, meaning 60% of the jobs available wouldn’t hire you with that disability. When you adjust for age (assuming he’s just shy of 30) and occupation, both of which lower the rating, it ends up at 53%. This is, of course, not counting in psychiatric effects, which would probably raise the rating. So, if he settled his claim, which W&H would probably “encourage” him to do, he’d be entitled to at least $49,342.50 in compensation. And they’d have been in something of a bind later if he did settle, since he’d have ended up with minimal PD and they couldn’t legally recoup their money.

Way too much time on my (evil) hands.

Drumroll, please.

As of 8:30 this morning, I am officially down to the weight on my California ID card. (180, if you care. I’m not shy.) I haven’t yet officially lost 10% of my starting weight, but I’m betting that by next week, I’ll have hit that goal. Not bad for 12 weeks.

And a very nice birthday present, too.

As one of the many working stiffs who can access the internet from work but has to share a connection, I would like to make a request of the corporate world at large:

STOP REQUIRING FLASH TO VIEW YOUR SITE!!!!!!

Everything I look at on the net while at work has to go through a server in northern CA, which doesn’t have Flash capability and probably never will, because it would be even slower if the 250 people using it were allowed to view bandwidth-hogging all-Flash sites. With the economy being what it is, bandwidth costs being what they are, and connection power needing to be split at most offices, I’m not sure any company should be upping the ante this far in the name of pretty pictures. And the defense that people can look at it at home isn’t too great, either, since DSL is out of reach of more working stiffs than web geeks want to admit, and Deity-of-Your-Choice only knows when it might creep into affordability.

So, please do what you used to do, and keep your non-Flash site online after the upgrade, instead of routing us to a page exhorting the wonders of Flash and attempting to bully us into downloading it. (Baaaa.) You’ll widen your audience with very little effort–and hey, aren’t non-Flash sites easier to maintain?

I just looked up and found out that I was so out of it yesterday, I left my iPod sitting out on my desk here at work all night…..