It's not like you can live the rest of your life on €51,000, but that doesn't mean that the people who can afford to spend that on Patek Philippe watches aren't rich.

$200k is more than the net worth of 70% of US households, even if they sold everything they owned, including their houses.

Also, Antarctic cruises are more like $20k/head - $30k gets you very top end. Again, while there are millions of people who can afford this, that doesn't mean they're not rich, unless you want to define rich as "no possible way you could ever spend it all in your lifetime."

Again, for any reasonable definition of rich, people who can afford to spend $200k for this jaunt are rich.

$200k is FOUR TIMES the median annual family income in the United States, and that's before taxes. Yeah, if you have $200k to spend on a discretionary jaunt like this, you're rich, by any reasonable measure. Doesn't mean there aren't millions of people who could afford it (it's a big country, and a big world), but they're without a doubt rich.

Agreed. I'd bet real money that the delta between the mean and median salary at Amazon is a lot bigger than at Facebook or Google.

Comparing Amazon to Google or Facebook, is really apples-to-oranges, given that they're in very different businesses.

Don't you think that distributors actually have thought this through, and have done a lot of research on price elasticity in games? Why would you assume that people for whom the pricing of games is a multi-million or multi-billion dollar question are totally wrong about optimal pricing, and instead that your own personal price elasticity curve holds true for the population as a whole?

You say that, for every "sucker" who pays $60, there are "100s willing to pay a sensible price." Modern Warfare 3 sold 6.5 million copies on its first day, in the US and UK, at $60/copy. You really believe that, at $10, it would have sold 650 million copies? That's more than the combined population of those two countries put together.

Good point, and I'd add that very smart, very well-meaning people have substantial disagreements about "what is necessary." I'm not talking about people (and there are a lot) who define "what is necessary" as "what will benefit me personally, or the people who pay me," but rather the fact that there's a lot of honest disagreement in the economics community about what exactly would "fix the economy and create jobs."

"In 2014 dollars the mid-level salary for recently-tenured faculty was about $300,000 / year"

I'm extremely skeptical. Look at the below link for data on the Ivy League (not exactly the bargain basement when it comes to faculty). Average salary for a FULL professor at Yale is $192k. Newly tenured faculty would be associate professors - average salary $118k.

http://oir.yale.edu/node/87/at...

Make the school jointly liable for their students' loans. So, if the student defaults, the college is on the hook. R

Exactly my point. People are willing to take on a substantial risk of death (about 1 in 70 for Everest) in order to pursue an extraordinary experience. Now, if Virgin Galactic had that kind of failure rate, it would likely dissuade quite a number of customers, but the fact that there is some risk associated with it doesn't mean it isn't viable.

Some climb with commercial sponsorship, but most are doing it for their own purposes. "Today roughly 90 percent of the climbers on Everest are guided clients, many without basic climbing skills. Having paid $30,000 to $120,000 to be on the mountain, too many callowly expect to reach the summit. A significant number do, but under appalling conditions." Don't see a lot of logos in this picture of the summit: http://ngm.nationalgeographic....

People die every year climbing Everest, and yet every year, people climb Everest.

Slippery slope fallacy FTW!

According to TFA, the software monitors the twitter feeds of people you follow, not people who follow you.

Not clear what's viewed as so oppressive about this - it doesn't gather any information you're not already getting, it just highlights certain tweets that you might otherwise miss.

The linked article makes the claim that a stalker could use it to identify when someone is vulnerable, and push them over the edge. I suppose that's a risk, but I'd imagine that someone who's focused enough on someone to actually want them dead would be willing to actually watch their tweets manually...

Actually, that's just the enterprise business of Motorola Solutions. Motorola Solutions continues to run the public safety business (i.e. police radios).

Not quite. There are two separate businesses. The business that made cable TV equipment was sold to Arris. The police radios business is still called Motorola Solutions, and it's a standalone company (ticker MSI).