Word: making
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Most likely to fail in the middle of a billion-dollar deal. It was the technological breakthrough that made where people make their calls ("I'm calling from the freeway! The chairlift! The beach!") as important as what they had to say. The concept behind the cellular telephone is to divide a geographical region into overlapping "cells," each assigned its own radio frequency. As callers travel from one telephone cell to another, a complex computer system automatically switches their call from one frequency to the next. And with a little luck, the party they're talking to gets switched...
Least Timely Utterance. RJR Nabisco chief Ross Johnson, who was proposing a $25 billion buyout of the company, stood to make $100 million on the deal but failed to show much sympathy for the employees who might be transferred or laid off. They had, he said, "very portable types of professions." RJR's board decided Johnson did too. They fired him, after selling the company instead to leveraged-buyout specialists Kohlberg Kravis Roberts...
...land to support them. To ease the overpopulation, BLM in 1976 inaugurated a national Adopt-a-Horse program, under which 90,000 wild horses have been sold to private owners. But the mustangs taken off the range annually include many that are too old, crippled, ugly or mean to make good pets. Until two years ago, thousands of unadoptable mustangs were crowded into dusty feeding pens in Nebraska, Nevada and Texas at a cost to taxpayers of $13 million a year...
...corrals, the mustangs are rotated to one of twelve pastures, then moved periodically to allow the grass to regrow. "I'm a grass specialist," Day explains. "Though some people have romantic notions of the operation, I have to look at it as cash flow. It has to make financial sense." This year potential profits evaporated in the worst drought in memory...
...except with qualified guesses. What are the chances of rain tomorrow? Forty percent. Better take an umbrella. What are the chances of the Big One sometime in the next 30 years if you live along the San Andreas fault? High enough that you'd better check your insurance policy; make sure it covers acts of God. Gorbachev is to political earthquakes what matadors are to bulls. Wondering about what will happen to him -- or because of him -- is unlikely to inspire boldness in someone so naturally cautious and prone to overinsurance as George Bush. That, in essence, is what happened...