The company has since fallen back to earth, and last year its share price was trading below the 1, 000-yen level for the first time in over two decades.

BBC: Sony sells Manhattan headquarters skyscraper for $1.1bn

The remarkable fact is that, even though the earth's population has more than trebled in a century, the best measure of the scarcity of resources price has fallen virtually throughout that time for just about everything extracted from or grown in the earth, yet has risen, in the form of wages, for the one thing that has become far more abundant: people.

ECONOMIST: A Survey of the 20th Century

But the A's have been back to the playoffs just once since 2003, while Tampa Bay has fallen to earth after a one-year joyride.

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