Insurance. Sell the phone, then report it stolen & claim the insurance.

You're assuming companies must operate at a fixed profit level and have price setting powers--most do not.

Consider the opposite scenario--if we suddenly lowered corporate taxes to zero. Would corporations pass these savings along to consumers by lowering prices and increasing wages? Perhaps to some degree, but in a non-monopolistic market, prices are dictated more by supply, demand and competitive pressures. Companies may use the extra money to pay down long term debt, invest in property, plant & equipment or pay larger dividends. The interest rate and credit environment will have a large effect on what they decide to do.

The larger driver of wages is competition in the labor market. Companies will pay as little in wages as they are legally able to while still finding suitably skilled employees. Simply having more cash on hand is not an incentive for a company to raise its wages across the board.

Raising taxes on a profitable competitive corporation doesn't directly affect wages, it reduces their profits.

Stephen Baxter's (and Arthur C. Clarke, but he barely wrote a word of it) "The Light of Other Days" explores something along those lines. It's a good read.

You can pasteurize eggs and meat at home using any of the precision temperature cookers on the market for Sous Vide cooking. (Immersion circulators, water ovens, crockpot + PID, etc.)

New channels will probably have to be free initially, or I imagine we won't see completely granular ala carte pricing, just smaller and more specific bundles.

"No true Scotsman..."

Or they could've just given about $120 to every man woman and child in the state of Mississippi.

I don't understand why "patches" are hundreds of megabytes and often multiple gigabytes to download. Isn't the vast majority of a modern game's data the assets? (Textures, images, sound, video,etc.). Actual code should be a tiny fraction... How do mere bug fixes weigh so much?

Your phone is a sample size of one, compared to countless iPhones. It would be more meaningful to compare the average breakage rate of all Galaxy S2s sold vs its contemporary iPhone model's breakage rate.

I not-uncommonly print event tickets, shipping labels and recipes from my phone and tablet (my phone or tablet display recipes fine, but I'll invariably spill something on them if I have them near me while cooking so I prefer something disposable). While I could always fire up the desktop, my smartphone is usually right at my fingertips. While it's not a very frequent use, mobile device printing is convenient enough that I appreciate having the feature.

They can't be deleted (without rooting) so that they still get restored along with the rest of the system when doing a factory reset.

What's the benefit of baking all these apps into the system partition? I've found that even after an OTA update, most have been replaced by newer versions in the data partition within a few weeks. Why not just provide the barest core apps and default to asking to download the rest? I vaguely remember Froyo or Gingerbread doing something similar.

Didn't this same idea already fail in the 90s? I recall Aerosmith's 9 Lives came with some goofy "interactive" exhibit in the remaining space on the disc. This just sounds like a downloadable version of the same thing.

^Per IRS rules, the highest permitted out-of-pocket maximum for eligible plans is $6,350 for 2014 for individual plans and $12,700 for family plans.

We have an incomplete description of this bronze plan. To qualify as an exchange-eligible plan, there will be a yearly out of pocket maximum after which insurance pays 100%. It's probably in the vicinity of $8k or so. It also must cover defined "preventative care" items 100% and those items are not subject to the deductible. The idea here is to get people to go to their doctors regularly in the hopes of catching issues early when they are the least expensive to treat. It's also intended to keep people who do have serious issues from being bankrupted by $100k and up medical bills.