Marissa Mayer put a private nursery right next to her office. Not exactly a luxury afforded company wide.

Mongols invaded Baghdad, destroying their center of learning and culture, not to mention destroying irrigation systems that took thousands of years to build up.

Unless you care about how it could affect agricultural production. The boll weevil alone does $300 million in damage to cotton crops. The bark beetle and elm leaf beetle carry Dutch elm disease, which has devastated elm trees in both Europe and North America. Another beetle damages potato crops in Idaho. On the other hand, there are beetles that eat pests and the dung beetle saves the cattle industry $380 million every year in dung disposal costs.

Except that the labor saving measures tend to require better trained and educated employees. Take an adult from 100 years ago, put them in front of a computer, and you'll get all of nothing.

Now, I know what you're thinking: "Surely that's just a matter of training. The person from 100 years ago had different skill that were probably quite useful." And I'll say "Sure did, and capital had expensive equipment that became obsolete too."

Except that you can exclude the first $90000 or so of income from taxation and generally deduct foreign income taxes from your US taxes.

Sounds a bit like saying that your fire alarm is a problem because it keeps beeping and meanwhile your house is a raging inferno.

Corporations seem to work awfully hard to lobby against taxes they supposedly don't pay for.

Of course, you're also forgetting rule 0 about corporations: charge so as to maximize profits at all times. Raising prices from that would mean reduced sales and lower profits.

Beholder mages put out their central eye, though yes, the average beholder has a giant eye in the middle of their head.

I'll go back to not getting laid now.

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.

Wait... so they're encrypting the channels and then releasing the way to unencrypt it to open source projects? What exactly would be the gain here? I mean, the only thing it will do is mean that third party PVR makers will be put out of commission whenever the cable company changes it's standard... oh, I see.

And then immediately after, they set up hundreds to thousands of shell companies and transfer copyrights around and around whenever they hit that limit and you're back to square one. Oh, and for added fun, you'll get multiple DMCA notices from subsidiaries of the same company when they can't keep track of their own movement and which subsidiary owns what.

The earlier event which really decimated higher learning in the Middle East: The Sack of Baghdad by the Ilkhanate. Essentially the center of learning in the Muslim world was utterly destroyed. Libraries were burned down, books were tossed into the river, scientists and philosophers were massacred, and a canal and irrigation system that was built up over a period of thousands of years was completely dismantled. If you wanted to parallel it to an event in Europe, the closest analogue might be the sack of Rome (though even that isn't really comparable, as Rome had already fallen far from it's heights).

Give the rotation of the Earth, the revolution of the Earth around the Sun, the revolution of the Sun around the center of the Milky Way, and the movement of the galaxy through the universe, if you went forwards or backwards in time by pretty much any non-trivial amount there's a near certain chance that the point you're in is in the cold vacuum of space.

So I think it's probably reasonable to assume that a time machine can get you to somewhere else in the world.

Better yet, send out the response just a hair before the email comes in. People will think you're magical.

You mean that Social Security Administration ammunition story last week? It's a non-story. They've got 295 agents that make arrests, execute warrants, and investigate fraud and just happen to carry guns when doing so because people committing social security fraud aren't always nice and friendly. Given that it's around 600 bullets per agent, which includes all the ammo they'll use for training in a given year, it's not some extraordinary amount.