Unfurlough.us – Freelance gigs for furloughed employees

This. But if one still does it 'off the books' sort, it should still work (though there is risk of breaching the terms in employment contract with the gubment)

It appears that federal employees are not generally restricted from outside employment, and only need a waiver to engage in certain official acts which would affect the financial interest of an outside employer or entity with which they are in employment negotiations.

http://www.justice.gov/jmd/ethics/generalf.htm

Federal employees aren't the only ones furloughed! (Some) contractors (for example) are too!

Use common sense, and if necessary, put it on your annual ethics form.

I had an idea while listening to NPR the other day, but I don't know about its viability.

The NPR discussion was about the CDC having reduced capabilities to identify outbreaks of foodborne illness (since doctors have to send it sample data for analysis by experts). Then it occurred to me that maybe a sort of social mobile application might be able to help identify outbreaks.

The app would prompt the user for their symptoms, what they have eaten over the past several days (vegetables, meats, condiments, etc), and their relative location (locations services, postal code, or something) and the data is submitted anonymously.

The the database would have a public API for the data so developers could try to identify correlations and useful information (IIRC much like a game some developers made for identifying DNA mutations).

I don't really have the ambition to put in the research to see whether something like this is viable or not. There are obvious issues with this design since there's no way to identify molecular information until the iBloodTester is invented.

josh_fyi-

We partnered with @1776dc who started a Google spreadsheet to pull together the information. They had about 30 or so gigs and freelancers and we imported it to our site.

"Are federal workers eligible for unemployment benefits? Yes. Federal employees who are laid off, including those furloughed this week, are eligible to receive unemployment benefits. In general, for workers to be eligible they must have lost their job through no fault of their own, not quit or have been fired, and must have been employed long enough to meet state qualifications.

If Congress votes to reimburse federal employees, will they have to repay their unemployment benefits? Most likely, yes. States say they’ll attempt to recoup benefits paid to federal employees if the workers receive back pay once they’re back on the job. (Congress will decide that when it ends the shutdown.) States would notify workers that they owe the money back. Officials in several states said that if workers don’t voluntarily repay, the state would garnish wages, tax refunds and deny future unemployment benefits to recoup the money."

Source: http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2013/10/03/what-furloughed-wo...

Looks like it couldn't.

Your reference to making lemonade from lemons seems to imply that the people who made it were furloughed. This doesn't appear to be the case. It seems to have been built by people working for a private company: http://www.blencorp.com/

Hyundai is also deferring loan payments for furloughed employees. Good marketing too, it's the main reason I looked at and ended up purchasing a Hyundai this week.

dc_ploy-

the site is back up.. check it again.

So does "filibustered". We could definitely do without the use of the two in politics. :)

"Furloughed" is actually older than 1820, if you go here (https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=define%3Afurloug...) and click the drop-down box to see its history.

It comes from the dutch word verlof meaning "To conclude an engagement."

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/verlof

Good catch. We've updated it. Thanks for the heads up