Word: monsterous
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Alternative minimum tax. Designed to afflict only the superrich, this monster increasingly soaks the middle class. More than 1 million taxpayers will owe it this year, and 9 million by 2008--including many earning considerably less than $100,000 a year. Little more than a decade ago, fewer than 100,000 people were subject to the AMT. It's a complicated tax that targets folks who avoid most traditional income taxes through large credits and deductions. High earners in high-tax states are most vulnerable, but anyone taking a large deduction for business expenses can fall victim. Tip: consult...
...million years since we hominids separated from apes, our DNA has evolved less than 2%. But in the next century we'll be able to alter our DNA radically, encoding our visions and vanities while concocting new life-forms. When Dr. Frankenstein made his monster, he wrestled with the moral issue of whether he should allow it to reproduce: "Had I the right, for my own benefit, to inflict the curse upon everlasting generations?" Will such questions require us to develop new moral philosophies...
...once monster conglomerate that has been rapidly deconglomerating, has saved for future acquisitions some $1.6 billion earned by selling off two global automotive businesses this year. "A fair amount of that," says chairman Travis Engen, "will go to Asia. Much of the world's electronics is being produced there, and our footprint there in electrical connectors is rather modest. So that is an area where we would specifically like to make great investments in acquisitions." Asia supplies about 5% of ITT's global revenues, but Engen foresees that rising to a third in about 15 years--or in less time...
Mittermeier the scientist is all seriousness and wonder. He has written or co-written several books, including a gorgeous, monster-size photographic work called Megadiversity, and hundreds of monographs on his beloved monkeys. A recent paper on a newly discovered species of marmoset, Callithrix humilis, shows the monkey at age two months: studious eyes, a tight, alert face and an aureole of gray and white hair. It looks a lot like Mittermeier, who would not mind the comparison...
...marketing wizardry, Gates blundered in displaying the same attitude that doomed certain robber barons. As writer Ambrose Bierce once gibed of Hearst, "Nobody but God loves him, and he knows it." Likewise, Gates' Xanadu has helped transform the boyishly charming geek into the Microsoft Monster, who is being chased by torch-bearing mobs brandishing antitrust suits. Nowhere in Gates' overwired palace is there a program to inform him how to act in the nation he lives in: the U.S. of A., in which throngs cheered the heavy-metal band Motorhead when it performed Eat the Rich and where Garth Brooks...