I would say that speaking like that will get you on an NSA watch list, except we're already all on NSA watchlists.

You are a seriously disagreeable person. Not because of your argument, but your entire attitude and personal attacks. Frankly you're an ass.

Nobody is saying that a product is immediately profitable the day it springs forth from someone's creative mind. But that's beside the point, and if you weren't such a clueless self involved ass, you'd realize it. AT&T didn't kill off it's nascent answering machine because it couldn't be profitable, they killed it off because it was a threat to their phone business. They killed it off, in fact, because they felt it would be profitable and popular.

As for your example, of how stupid you are, Toshiba didn't invest in flash as a hard drive replacement. It was a portable storage medium for cameras, as well as chipsets soldered onto boards. The idea of flash hard drives only became feasible in the last decade or so, but flash has been a profitable business venture for Toshiba and other companies long before technological advances allowed it to be used as a hard drive medium.

For that matter, early mechanical hard drives were not exactly impressive by today's standards. The first hard drive was created in 1956 by IBM, it was the size of 2 refrigerators, held 3.75 Mbs of data and IBM leased them at $3,200 a month, and made a nice profit off them for 13 years. So half a million dollars in revenue each over their lifespan and people were happy to have them! You braindead moron.

You assume, incorrectly, that corporations would pay your 'fair' tax rate, anymore than they pay the 'unfair' one. Corporations naturally want all the advantages they can get, and they will lobby for as many loopholes and tax dodges out of any tax code as they can, because screw society at large they're in it for the unbridled profit.

Some of you seem to feel that's admirable, but it puts quite a pinch on the rest of us who have to pay for things like roads (which are heavily used by corporations, sending their goods too and fro) and other public services.

Nice to know what a slackjawed lackwit you are sir, in that you can't compose a reply without resorting to a base slanderous personal remark. Perhaps you need to sit down away from the internets and stop taking it so seriously, you low brow pustule.

That being said, we will never know how profitable a phone answering machine, or the additional technology of the magnet tape medium would have been in 1934, or how much profit such technologies could have generated before other companies developed their own versions of the technology, because AT&T killed all development on them. While people may or may not have paid exorbitant sums for an answering machine, the spin-off technologies from such a machine are easily something that would have broken into several industries, even at a cost above the average consumer's means. Sadly a feces-brained fool such as yourself can't see that, as you are too occupied with the fascinating detritus between your toes to have developed any form of imaginative thought.

AT&T's monopoly was not "imposed" by the government, it was allowed by the government, with a great number of provisions such as requiring phone service in non-profitable areas and regulated pricing. This was mostly a concession to the costs of building out the phone system. Without that, lightly populated or poor rural areas would still be disconnected from the phone system.

It's fun when you read the footnotes:

The corporate income tax rate is approximately 40%. The marginal federal corporate income tax rate on the highest income bracket of corporations (currently above USD 18,333,333) is 35%. State and local governments may also impose income taxes ranging from 0% to 12%, the top marginal rates averaging approximately 7.5%. A corporation may deduct its state and local income tax expense when computing its federal taxable income, generally resulting in a net effective rate of approximately 40%. The effective rate may vary significantly depending on the locality in which a corporation conducts business. The United States also has a parallel alternative minimum tax (AMT) system, which is generally characterized by a lower tax rate (20%) but a broader tax base.

That rate is the highest possible rate, not what corporations actually pay. And if the cost of doing business is so much better in oh Bahrain, with it's 0% tax rate, why don't multi-nationals flock there? Perhaps because those services that government provides that they work so hard to not pay for, have some appeal. Perhaps because there are other costs not represented in this little chart of yours, that equate to a higher cost of living & doing business than simply taxes.

Technology would NOT have happened anyways. In 1934 an engineer at Bell Labs named Clarence Hickman created a machine that would answer phone calls and record a message on a magnetic tape. The first answering machine! It was large and clunky, but of course AT&T immediately saw the value of this device and started to work to put this highly profitable device in everyone's homes! Err... not. AT&T killed it because they saw no profit in the device. Worst of all perhaps, was the their suppression of the magnetic tape as a storage medium, which they perceived as directly in competition with their phone business. Why would people make calls, they thought, if they could record their voices and mail the tapes to each other. Magnetic tape recording wouldn't return to America until WWII, with German equipment.

That wasn't the only technology AT&T suppressed that could have changed our world, simply because the managers involved either couldn't see a profit in it, or felt it was directly competing with their own telephone service. Since AT&T had a monopoly on phone service, they kept anyone else from utilizing these inventions as well. Fiber optics, mobile telephones, digital subscriber lines (DSL), fax machines, speakerphones.. all developed or envisioned much earlier than you assume, and all suppressed as being dangers to AT&T's business model.

Those old modems where you put your phone set in acoustic cups? That was because AT&T owned your phone and would rip you apart in court for modifying or replacing their equipment. Even today they still drag their feet over letting equipment onto their networks, not because the hardware is risky (there are like 2 cellular radio chips, and every cell phone uses one of them but no you can't add an 'uncertified' phone to their network!) but because they are deathly afraid of disruption of their profits.

For every innovation that does break through, more are lost through endless litigation, buyouts and suppression. Businesses do not want to innovate, they don't want to create and R&D budgets have been steadily dropping. Businesses want to find a widget or an app that is indispensable, create a market around that with no exits or competition and then ride the profits for as long as possible.

I would like to point out to you that during those wonderful years without government intrusion, that the economy suffered regular cyclical booms and busts that devastated lives.

You could say that it was the effects of one of the greatest busts in history, the Great Depression, that kickstarted the government into creating the PWA, an organization that has done more public good than any Wal-Mart or Microsoft. Hoover Dam, Grand Coulee Dam, the Lincoln Tunnel, the Triborough Bridge, Fort Peck Dam, LaGuardia Airport.. just a few of the things that we depend on still, public projects that spurred further private growth at a time when private industry was deadlocked.

Microsoft would never have built a Hoover Dam, why would they? Where would the profit be for them? And that is the problem when you get to this Libertarian "The market will provide" nonsense. The market will not provide, and it will not provide for everyone, just the people who can pay for it.

Also, your sending men to the moon example? Back then businesses were paying about 40% in taxes and typical returns on investments were expected to be in the 5% range over a decade, not todays 30% returns every quarter and zero taxes nonsense. Because our grandparents and great grandparents respected the role of government in improving the lives of the citizens, and they had learned hard lessons from the Great Depression about relying too much on corporations. Lessons that we are throwing out as we sink further and further into corporate oligarchy.

It was a shame Brutsch wasn't a champion of not posting creepshots of teen girls though.

Hey, you want to protest how men are portrayed in video games, go for it! There's nothing wrong with having that view at all, so don't invalidate the fact that a lot of women speak out about it though.

Ahahahaha, talk about having a victim mentality! Oooo you poor guy, always having society's disapproving finger wagged at you! Why don't you take your own advice, suck it up and walk it off hoss.

She posts stuff on the internet, of course she seeks attention. But then, you posted a comment on a popular message board, so you're an attention seeker too!

Pretty much, or they are her tormentors.

Yeah, hi that's called "Existing every damn day as a woman" everywhere outside of feminist classes in college. The sad thing is you notice it sucks, but you don't connect that it sucks when guys do it to women. Not that all men walk around planning how to keep the ladies down, it's more insidious than that because the majority of the time we just don't think about it at all. That's how games get released with no female character options, or female NPC's with redonkulous boobs, because the guys making the game just never put in a second to think "how will women, who are a huge factor in life, think about this".

Okay, right there you've just justified every bad feminist example that you whine about. You are the problem.

The sad thing is that a lot of serious trolls aren't 13 year olds. They're 40 year olds, with kids and wives who you think would have some brains, but sadly still seem to get off on just being miserable pricks.