More details here: https://allthemusic.info/faqs/

https://www.museumfuernaturkunde.berlin/en/research/naturbli...

Also, blackmail isn't the only way to have personal or intimate information used against you. As the absolutely massive advertising industry can tell you, knowing more details about people makes them easier to influence and manipulate.

The senior technical person from the customer would ask me a couple hard questions and I would be pretty honest in my responses. Afterwards our Sales Success Customer Account Manager would be unhappy with me, but at least I wouldn't have to go to another one of those meetings for a while.

The deal would go ahead anyway because our management had convinced their management to make the purchase even though what we were offering didn't really meet their needs. They would only need to pay us if we actually delivered so they weren't taking a lot of risk, other than wasting their time, and we got to make a multi-million dollar "booking."

In the end I would either get along with their senior technical person pretty well because we could be honest with each other, or else they would despise me for being unable to deliver what my sales people had promised (Hi Sven!).

I think this is common in many places where a significant portion of the population lives in low density areas (eg: American, Australian and Canadian suburbs.) Outside of major city centers it is very difficult to live without a car, so states and provinces choose to set a very low bar for acquiring and keeping a driver's license.

"HI! My name is Tracy! I'm going to be your server this evening!" as she flawlessly writes her name upside down in crayon on the paper tablecloth. Woah. I think this place needs to re-calibrate their flair.

I think of company wikis as a place where information goes to die.

A useful feature, which I'm sure exists somewhere, would be "freshness" checks on pages. A timestamp for the last time someone looked at this and said "yes, this is still valid". For pages that are important, a team could set up recurring tasks for people to do periodic freshness checks.

Surely this is already a common practice, although not any team I've been on. Undoubtedly there is some ISO-9000 process for this...

Luckily I didn't work with him very much. He was a technical consultant for a customer of ours. He was brought in to hold us to account so he wasn't going to be fun to work with even without the ego...

To be fair, I think the reason that it formerly sought to be a community hub was also motivated by profit-seeking decisions. Maybe when there were a handful of locations the comfy seating was motivated by something other than profit. I imagine by the time they opened store number 20,000 that the design of the store, including the comfy seating, was very careful designed to seek profit.

I'm pretty sure people have been saying exactly that for 15 years now. Maybe someday it will come true...

As a bonus you can set up simple filtering so that you don't get many spam calls. For me, all calls that have an anonymous or 800 number in the caller ID get redirected to a voice prompt that asks the caller to press 9 to talk to us; all other calls just ring our phone directly. You could also use whitelists, blacklists, etc.

It's both better and cheaper than a regular landline...

Perhaps the creators and operators of the machine also want it to have to complicated UX out of self interest. This could be a way of staying involved and/or retaining some control over the machine and its use.

I'm just speculating without any knowledge of the story in general...