a prorate fee will be billed to reactivate

To my reading, both ‘fee’ and ‘billed’ indicate the customer will be charged an amount to regain access. If it were as you suggest, I think it would have been worded differently, to provide more benefit to the customer. Maybe something along the lines of:

‘When you are ready to come back, your membership reactivation will be prorated to reflect freeze term payments.’

As it is, I can see both interpretations. Which might be on purpose to surprise people who turn up at the gym after a few months break, banking on an eye roll and the fee to be paid so they can get on with their workout.

Am I reading this right that to reactivate they’d be charging the difference they ‘lost’ during the freeze term? Wild.

“Privacy-centric” my elbow.

I will be adding this turn of phrase to my vocabulary, thank you.

That’s a cool service the restaurants provide, I wouldn’t have thought of that. Wish something like that was available everywhere, even seeing a show would be nice to be picked up and have a table waiting.

I wonder at what point it’s worthwhile to have a group to park at some mall and rent a van to drive to the stadium parking.

If any positive outcome is possible here, I’d be nice if this gets people accustomed to carpooling to such events. Sure would be nice though if these stadiums would be serviced by more effective transportation.

Well perhaps you’re right, though if I search for green apples and the first few results are from applecatelogue, I might not think that an ad so much as a search result.

I see your point though, multiple of the same domain can seem questionable.

I don’t see an ad in there but even so, why quibble on a dead man’s behalf that the communication method is called Vail’s cipher and not Morse code. It’s like taking up arms whenever a guillotine is mentioned.

Just a guess but, I wouldn’t consider anything that was an order of magnitude more expensive than what I was looking to spend.

It might have been the sixth closure of the day that person was involved in.

Golf carts in the city can be done well, with Peachtree City as the prime example. However they have infrastructure, and more importantly, laws surrounding the use of the carts.

Intoxication, unrestricted parking, and no rules combine to be a disaster waiting to happen. In your situation, I would attend city council meetings and speak out regarding the safety concerns you’re witnessing. It would be useful to also begin documenting misuse of these carts to present at these meetings.

Parks in my area have signage forbidding motorized vehicles. There’s no logical reason the people driving carts can’t leave them in the same area as cars. Driving across park fields is bound to become problematic in terms of lawn maintenance. Once your area implements laws, it could be nice to replace some of the vehicle traffic with cart traffic.

Agreed. The whole idea of these huge payouts could be eliminated and replaced with what exists for everyone else - severance pay. Calculated off a regulated minimum formula, based primarily on how long the person served the company.

I also agree with you that the top and bottom salaries should have a correlation. The C suite making the salary of a shelf stocker in one day should not happen. I think I could accept that the top gets somewhere around 10 or 20 times higher salary. Even 100x would be an improvement to the way it is now.

Like you point out, between stock options and whatever else, an executive salary could be a few hundred thousand, even if their total compensation is tens of millions. In fantasy land it would be nice if, once a company grows to a certain point, say a billion dollars in value, if it were required to convert to an employee owned cooperative entity.

It’s a shame things are the way they are. Maybe one day we won’t have politicians that can be bought. That’s a different discussion altogether.

In an ideal world, the penalties you describe are suitable. Though, gaming industry aside, for the executive level of most any corporation, being a scapegoat and handed a golden parachute is the worst case scenario for them leaving. In many cases floating across the street right into another executive position.

Jail time isn’t a likely outcome. It just isn’t the world we live in, unfortunately.

I see what you’re getting at but this would be difficult for a publisher to stick with in the event the game does horribly. Requiring them to keep their word to the date advertised would end up with them only guaranteeing a week, or send ramifications through all industries requiring truth in advertising.

A middle ground would be simply to legislate that when games require online connectivity for any reason, the appropriate software is released to allow a locally run server to enable online function at the time the company decides to decommission their servers. Then require them to hold these files in an accessible manner for at least as long as the servers had been active for.

That would be difficult in the event the company goes out of business, but I’m sure this would be a difficult thing to explain to most politicians so maybe not so simple after all.

I gave xManager a go, and while it doesn’t have ads interrupting your listening, it does still have all the Spotify pop up ads trying to get you to upgrade to premium. It’s fine when listening, but selecting what you’re listening to is still irritating.

When shirts are worn less than a dozen times on average before they get tossed in the landfill, those branded shirt companies should be paying you.

Convenient video from today about this exact topic.