I feel like it would look better if they just announced that a couple of services would be forked off of the regular Prime level. Fork Prime into a couple of service levels, give them fancy names to make people feel good, like "Prime One" or "Prime Alpha" etc. and INTRODUCE those levels are higher levels. Such as, they could potentially experiment with removing Streaming from the base Prime membership, but you could get it for only $5 a month. And they could use this time to also introduce a Prime level that comes with Audible membership, or a Prime level that comes with a credit card that gives you extra rewards, or a Prime level aimed at businesses that comes with a higher tier of AWS.

They still could have caught up if they had bitten that bullet and turned the Windows phone into a "loss leader" kind of device. Cut the price down super low, and allow them to become the cheap device of choice, build up a market, gradually work up the ladder. It's not like Microsoft doesn't have the kind of cash to have done that very thing.

I just have BlueCross but everyone keeps saying that hospitals can just bill whatever they want and the insurance will pay it, but I've never seen that happen. I've had a few procedures and office visits this year and every time the insurance pays a lower rate then what the hospital tried to bill them. I'll see hospital billed rate, negotiated rate, and what the insurance paid. Even for visits before I met my deductible. In what the article is referring to, the hospitals are just stuck with companies like Cardinal and the like because those companies are monoliths that sell the hospital EVERYTHING. That is where the control is. They threaten the hospital to raise prices on everything else if the hospital tries to stop buying drugs through them.

Not at all trying to downplay this, but some people get lightheaded and dizzy just looking at a needle. Like if my wife goes to the doctor if they stick her odds are she will get lightheaded and dizzy regardless of if they are drawing any blood or not.

Assuming they aren't interested or management isn't able to pony up a package to talk them into an early retirement (this is probably the route I would lean for at least one of them, then focus on the remaining person to retrain). Getting one of them to retire allows you to double up your training money on the one person. I would probably send them to onsite training, given their age most folks in that generation prefer in-person training. But depending on the person, if they prefer online stuff then I would allow them to take as much training as they could handle and still get their job done.

In this day and age no consumer should have any "expectation of privacy" with an off-the-shelf electronic device. The entire "IoT" movement is simply there to collect more data on consumers. Cellphones are the ultimate tracking device, Google Maps has done this tracking for years to determine areas of high traffic, how else did people think Google knew certain sections of the highway were "red" and backed up and others were "green" with no delay?