General Release And Waiver Of All Claims: Fill & Download for Free

In addition to being a Luddite as Bruce Spielbauer says, he was also a victim of torture.In 1959, while he was a student at Harvard, Kaczynski was recruited into a three-year psychology experiment intended to find out how much psychological torture a person could take before having a psychotic break. The experiments were conducted by Harvard psychology professor Henry Murray, who had previously worked for the Office of Strategic Services during WWII, and after the war worked as a psychological profiler for the CIA. His work is instrumental to the modern practice of psychological profiling.Kaczynski and 21 other Harvard undergrads were asked to submit personal essays in which they described their ambitions, weaknesses, fears, personal failings, and most embarrassing secrets. Murray then used those essays to design what was effectively a system of psychological torture custom tailored to each of the study’s participants. The participants were not told what the study was about, what would happen to them, or that the study had been commissioned by the United States military to evaluate interrogation techniques for captured prisoners of war.During the experiment, Kaczynski and the others were wired up with electrodes, strapped down under bright lights, and subjected to screaming and beratement by multiple members of Murray’s research team, who used information from their personal essays to mock, humiliate, and degrade them. (Murray himself, in the experiment’s writeup, described these sessions as, quote, “vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive attacks.”)This experiment ran for three years. The student subjects were not permitted to resign from the study, and were coerced into participating. Murray went on to be called one of the greatest psychologists of all time, win many awards, and publish books.A lot of folks—unsurprisingly, I think—have suggested this experience drove Kaczynski’s hatred of academia in general and universities in particular.The Murray experiment and the Milgram electroshock experiment are what drove universities to create ethics review boards and impose strict ethical requirements on human experimentation. As astonishing as it seems today, Murray’s experiment was not considered wrong or even questionable at the time, and when it was done, no universities had any form of ethical oversight organization for human experimentation.Some of this story is told in this Psychology Today article:Is Psychology Responsible for the Unabomber?As I write this answer, someone on Quora is creating phony profiles that look just like mine, and using them to send abusive/harassing messages to people. If you receive an abusive PM or comment, check the profile carefully. It probably isn’t me. By signing this waiver, you agree to release the study organization from any and all claims of liability, direct or indirect.

It took 7 1/2 months of separation, $10,000, and gallstones to bring my husband home from Mexico.Americans (from USA) don't believe how difficult it is to get a US visa. They also seem not to realize how biased the system is against some countries of origin. So when I tell them about the struggle to get a visa for my husband, they are usually shocked and dismayed.My husband and I met just over 6 years ago, through Salsa dancing. You can read about how we met here:Miranda Marcus's answer to How can I get better at meeting girls when dancing Salsa?We were both 25. For some unknowable reason, we fell in love pretty quickly and demonstrated a strong, mutual commitment to our relationship. I admired him for building his own business, teaching himself English, and sending money to his family as often as he could. He admired me for some reason too.Here we are going out dancing. He gave me that coat because I liked it. We wear the same size clothes and shoes =]Early on, he revealed to me that he was in the country illegally, and being a worrier, I got an appointment with a high priced immigration lawyer to find out what our options were. The lawyer said there wasn't much we could do until we were married and we should expect a long separation and to spend a lot of money. Not exactly comforting.Soon after that, we got engaged, and set our wedding date for nine months later. Three days before we were to marry, my husband's mother had an accidental fall and died. My husband had to choose between his future with me or going to his mother's funeral. If he had gone, he would have never been able to come back.Once you come to the US illegally one time, you have forfeited all right to get a visa. If my husband had gone home, he would have been barred from returning for 10 years. Since we were not yet married, there was no way we could appeal the ban. It was heartbreaking.He told me how his mother had encouraged him to come to the US and to build a new life here. He hadn't seen her in 8 years, although they spoke often by phone. She was so excited for him to be getting married and had sent us hand embroidered decorations. I never got the chance to meet her in person.It was not possible to get visas for his family to come to our wedding. In order to just get a visitors visa from Mexico, you have to prove that you have a job in Mexico, a home, family that you are leaving behind, and generally reason to not stay in the USA. I have heard of families applying for visas for vacation and everyone gets approved but the Mom - to give them a reason to go back home.​Just after getting married. Fun fact, I made his titanium ring from scrap metal (with the help of an expert machinist).Three months after we married, we unexpectedly got pregnant. It was joyous, but also terrifying. Everytime my husband was late home from work I worried about him getting deported. I knew that the police in our area preferred to jail and release illegal immigrants after getting paid a bail fee rather than deport, but I worried about it all the same.I knew that the visa application process would necessarily result in my husband having to go back to Mexico for 3 months to 10 years. I didn't want to go through that when our kids were old enough to miss their father and remember that separation. A few months after learning I was pregnant, we started the visa application process. When our daughter was 7 months old, my husband left for Juarez ($300 in airfare).​When our daughter was two months old.Since he had entered the country illegally, we had to apply for a waiver of the 10 year bar. To do this we had to prove that it would be an "extreme hardship" to his American spouse if he could not live in the US. According to the government, just being separated from your spouse is considered normal hardship. Also, any hardship caused on children is not considered.Because I am a worrier, I insisted that we hire a lawyer, to make sure we didn't mess anything up ($6,000). We sent proof of the following things:I make enough money to take care of him financially (this was a requirement of the government)I was living away from family and had no support network (therefore needed my husband)I had a history of depression (in college)My husband had regularly paid his taxes (illegal immigrants can get an Individual Tax Identification Number "ITIN" from the IRS to use to pay taxes, employers and accountants can use this number as well. The IRS is not going to turn in someone who is paying taxes to the INS unless the INS has compelling evidence that some felony is being committed - living and working in the US without a visa is not a felony)We had to gather documentation of all his interactions with the police (pretty much all the times he was pulled over for being hispanic in a nice car and jailed for having no license - he was never pulled over when he drove his work van)Letters from my family and some people my husband worked with describing his quality of characterOur marriage license, our daughter's birth certificate, my husband's birth certificate, my birth certificate, and many other government documentsDocumentation of an ongoing eye disease I have which is degenerative and will likely cause blindness one day (could be fixed by a cornea transplant - 90% success rate last I checked)I may have forgotten some things we sent. It was a lot of paperwork and it took a lot of time to gather. Also, every government office had to be paid for the privilege of obtaining my husband's records (~$500). We also had some difficulty because my husband has two last names, which police here don't deal with very well. He was sometimes listed under his first last name, sometimes under his second with the first being listed as a middle name, and sometimes with both last names (only hyphenated). We had to make sure to go through every iteration because missing some records could be seen as a sign of intentional subterfuge by immigration, and no one wants that. I physically visited the county clerks office for 4 or 5 counties, just to make sure.His interview in Juarez was very short. I had sent him with a photo album of our family to prove we were a real family. The interviewer said he could choose two photos to put with our documents. With each interview he had to get vaccinations, regardless of the proof he brought that he had been vaccinated already ($200 each time).Then he went to Mexico City ($100 airfare) to wait with his family for some news. At the time, the average wait for a response was 3-6 months. We Skyped with each other every morning, afternoon, and evening. His father, sister and her two kids, brother and his wife and their two kids all lived in a two bedroom house. My husband slept on plywood in his father's work shop. Since we had lost his income, I was struggling just to pay the mortgage and daycare and could not send him money, which he never asked for anyway.​I took our daughter to Mexico City for her first birthday. It was great trip, until we couldn't go back to home together. This photo is from the Monumento a la Revolucion. At the time, there were "Yo Soy 132" activists camped below. Mexican general election, 2012We waited 6 months. And then, I had a weird thing happen to me. I had intense chest pains that lasted for hours. It was painful to the point that it impacted my ability to care for my daughter, not good for the sole caretaker! It turns out that I had gallstones and would need to have my gallbladder removed. The first thing I did was collect the record and xrays and send them off to the consulate in Juarez as additional evidence of hardship. I found out later that the documents arrived just two days after our case had been decided. We were referred.Referral means that they felt it would not cause "extreme hardship" to me if my husband couldn't return to the USA. We were devastated. After being referred the wait time was 6 months to 2 years before getting notice of a final acceptance or denial. We started doing a few things: we worked with our lawyer to prepare a "referral response", which is basically adding as much detail to our hardship claim as possible (Additional $1,500 in legal fees), and I started seriously looking into what it would take to immigrate to Canada. I found it grimly humorous that at the time, there was a billboard outside the US embassy in Juarez that proclaimed "We have work for you in Canada."Since I was not interested in being separated from my husband for any longer than absolutely necessary, I pressured my lawyer to apply for an expedite with our referral response. An expedite can be granted in cases of medical emergency where the immigrant spouse is needed to support the US citizen visa sponsor. On the government website they warn you not to apply for one unless you are actually dying, so my lawyer didn't think it was worthwhile, but I was insistent.​Yep, that's a gallstone.My doctor wrote a note saying that if gallbladder removal surgery is postponed for too long there can be serious complications. I wrote that I would not be able to get the surgery until my husband came home as you are prohibited from carrying weight over ten pounds for two weeks after and I had no one to carry around my toddler for me. I had this information substantiated by a coworker who had had his gallbladder removed a few years before.Additionally, I obtained the following new documents:Letters from my neighbors testifying they my husband is a good neighbor - he fixed the community mail boxes using his own money to purchase the supplies, he got me to go to the same Catholic church as them, and he was a good husband and father.Letters from my coworkers talking about the change in my mood since my husband left and worrying about my well-beingI tracked down my old counselor from college and got her to write a statement about my struggles with depressionBank statements showing a complete lack of money and growing credit card debtIt took two months to get the referral response together (mostly due to difficulty tracking down my old counselor).A month and a half later my husband got his visa. There was no way of knowing when it would come, so we only knew when he opened the package from immigration. He packed his bags and went straight to the airport and I got him tickets on the first flight I could secure ($400 on the 0% interest rate for a year credit card I secured before we started the whole thing). We were nervous, would something go wrong, would he be allowed back or would we be disappointed by an unexpected obstacle?I packed up our toddler (now one and half) and drove down to the airport to meet his flight which was due to arrive around 9pm. We waited for maybe an hour. We saw the rest of the passengers from the flight exit customs and be greeted by family. Then he came out. After seven and a half months of separation, he was home and we were a whole family again.​Home!Looking back, I think that sending extra evidence so soon after the referral kept our case in the Juarez consulate, instead of being sent to another embassy as usually happens when a case is referred. And the Juarez consulate seems to get through cases faster. We'll never know why we got our approval so fast after submitting the referral response, but I am grateful.At the time, I was on a forum where others going through the same process would share their progress. I remember there was a woman who had a child with cystic fibrosis, and her husband was referred. I remember there was a girl who had been brought to the US as a 5 year old. She fell in love and married an American at 18, then went back to Mexico to apply for a waiver of the ban. She was told she was two months late, and would have to wait in Mexico for the entire extended process. There were people whose spouses went to Juarez to apply, but were robbed and murdered while they were waiting for a response. Some US citizens moved to Mexico to be with their spouses, separated from their US families and their lives for years while waiting.I count us lucky to have made it through. And I am glad we did it early because now my daughter doesn't remember that there was a time when her father wasn't with us. For a while it seemed like Obama would bring some immigration reform, and we considered waiting to see what would happen. I am glad that we didn't.​Now we have a second kid =]There are thousands of Americans building lives with illegal spouses. And many will not pursue a visa, because they know how difficult it is, even if you are approved in the end. There are some for whom the illegal spouse is the breadwinner, and they cannot even pass the first requirement of proving that they make enough money to take care of their spouse (this is a requirement for a family sponsored visa outside of the waiver process).Here is a list of countries from which you don't need a visa to visit the USA. If my husband had been born in one of these places, we wouldn't have had to deal with the illegal entry ban and waiver process.http://travel.state.gov/content/visas/english/visit/visa-waiver-program.htmlIt used to be worse, though. There was a period of a couple years in the early 1900's when there was a law that any woman who married a Chinese citizen would lose her US citizenship. Imagine that!So anyway, most Americans can't believe that this is how the US immigration system actually operates.

Understanding Waivers Of Discrimination Claims In Employee Severance AgreementsThe document the employer is eager to have you sign in California, [and likely most jurisdictions] is a “Settlement, Waiver, and General Release of All Claims” in exchange for the “severance” payout. Basically, your signing of such a document gives up all rights you have to later sue. The federal anti-age discrimination law, the ADEA, however provides that an employee be given a minimum 21 days to consider the offer, and 45 days if there is a layoff of more than 1 employee. Further, there is a right to first consult an attorney, and even a right to revoke the signed deal for up to 7 days post-signing. The paperwork is also required by the ADEA to include a summary listing of those affected by the layoff by job title, their ages, as well as those “not affected” within the same relevant job category. This list helps you see if older workers are being targeted.But some employers omit the language and are willing to risk getting a release of all but the federal age discrimination claims, if any. So you may have to say what everyone knows to be true —you’ve just been informed you’ve been fired or laid off, you’re in a state of disbelief and likely shock, and unable to think clearly. Simply say you won’t sign anything under duress, and request a week to think it over. Some employers won’t want to give you the paperwork for taking home. If you work for that kind of employer, unless the money is really beyond your wildest hope, consider walking away. Generally, your consulting an attorney will not prevent the employer from renewing the original offer as it will still want to avoid the costs and risks of a lawsuit.