"Very mature, well-oiled capitalist machine" conveys Walmart-like acumen, not simply a lack of incompetence.

Also, the political Left has made "capitalist" a dirty word, in modern America at least, so, given the source (NYT) and destination (Slashdot), what I did think about is that it wasn't sensationalist just for click-baiting, for also for Progressive-frothing, in the hopes of sparking your average "Isn't capitalism always criminal anyways?" type discussions. It did afterall go from a sentence in a phone conversation to being selected for the article to being selected for the summary to being selected for the front page.

No, silly, in communist countries the ransom note always reads "If you ever want to see Jane again, you'll gather together the sum of 800 USD and distribute it to each according to his needs"!

But seriously, I like how TFA even arrived at that sensational characterization, in which apparently all your organization needs to do to be a "very mature, well-oiled capitalist machine" is to come up with a brand name and try some pricing.

I'm where I should be, all the time.

And when I'm not, I'm on Slashdot.

In my case, the doctor's office I'm leaving has already called in the prescription, or it's a 90-day jobber that auto-refills, and it's ready by the time I get there, but it's a variably long line to wait in to sign for it/pay for it/take possession of it.

Now that you mention it, if the drug store was smart, they'd allow you to take a number when you arrive, and then you could go shopping in the store while waiting for them to announce "now serving number so-and-so" over the PA system. I might have to be somewhere soon, and if my time is spent standing in line instead of shopping, I might have to pick up other items somewhere else later.

Mostly for the reason I wrote about, to avoid (some) discrimination in hiring. Someone may receive your resume and decide to look you up, and then decide to throw it in the trash because you're transgendered and they don't like that, or because you wrote in favor of legalizing marijuana and they don't like that stance.

Now you may say well I wouldn't want to work for someone who'd discriminate against me that way. And that's fine, for you. For me, I would work for someone who'd discriminate against Conservatives, if they were otherwise good enough bosses and the work was interesting enough and the pay was good.

I want to have maximal opportunities and also at the same time have maximal free speech, and ensuring that anything even possibly remotely controversial goes under a pseudonym instead of linkable to my true identity provides that.

The times I shop for groceries the lines are always short, but man would I love what you're talking about for the pharmacy. Oftentimes I'll go to pick up a prescription and see the line and just turn around and leave and try again later.

We need these for other places too, like oil change places and smog check places and tire places, where you could end up going at a very bad time.

Interestingly we all have our tolerance levels to exposure to risks of being scammed. As in how much surface area we're comfortable presenting.

I'm certainly on one extreme, except it's the one opposite "normalcy" nowadays. I worked with a 30-something that did his banking on his smartphone, and the 20-something that taught the iPhone 101 class said she had all her bank accounts and credit cards entered onto her phone. Imagine the shivers that gives to a guy who won't stand for even the idea of having a debit card*!

*When Bank of A-holes ticked me off and I moved my checking to Wamu, they initially issued me a debit card for my new account. I told them I don't want a debit card, and they told me to cut it up and promptly sent me just an ATM card. No idea if it would actually fail if attempted to be used in a debit transaction, but I like to think so!

You forgot to mention "rubber ducking" in this post.

The desire to see the expensive workers, that is. I.e. the ones getting benefits and making salaries commensurate with the cost of living in America.

Tell a manager that some function is being handled offshore by cheap foreign labor, and the trust issue seems to go completely away.

It works out about the same, as you said, so I guess you think they owed you a notice that they'd be extracting about the same amount of money out of you, just distributed a little differently. I guess it depends on where you think the burden belongs. They provide info on their plans on their web site, and if that's not enough you can answer Yes to the live chat popup prompt and grill a sales rep like I did in November to get it all explained. They aren't really changing prices on you, and if you're the one paying the bill, IMO it's mostly on you to lift a finger if you want to know the particulars. (You know that whichever way you go, contract or not, they're still going to want the same amount of money, for whatever profit margin they've targeting.)

This is the second time in two days I've seen that unusual web layout style in a featured article here. Yesterday's was TFA telling us to plant trees and meditate on John Denver, from this front-page post. Does Slashdot now have some new interest in this medium.com entity and sending views there?

IOW, Spartan becomes IE, and IE becomes IE ESR, effectively. I just question whether copying the others by adding a rapid release version with bleeding edge, non-interoperable features will really cause web development hipsters to embrace a browser made by MS.

Hey, so that's where all those score modifier settings are. Thanks, stranger. I completely forgot about that row of words under my karma line. <Insert rant about web designers who style things to make it easy not to notice what's clickable on a page>

On moderating, the only thing I can think of is that in the Messages section of one's preferences, I had Received Mod Points set to No Messages. I've set it to Web, and will see then if the system is using that as the indication of willingness now. (And then I guess there would be no way to specify unwillingness to metamoderate on this system anymore.)