All this happened, more or less.

The vampire converts quality-live blood, vitality, youth, talent-into quantity-food and time for himself. He perpetrates the most basic betrayal of the spirit, reducing all human dreams to his shit. And that's the wrongest wrong a man can be.

Jack and Suzy Welch in BusinessWeek writing about Global Warming: If you accept it as reality, adapting your strategy and practices, your plants will use less energy and emit fewer effluents. Your packaging will be more biodegradable, and your new products will be able to capture any markets created by severe weather effects. Yes, global warming may not be as damaging as some predict, and you might have invested more than you needed, but it’s just as Pascal said: Given all the possible outcomes, the upside of being ready and prepared for a “fearsome event” surely beats the alternative.

via Freakanomics blog

The accepted inventor of the bank credit card was John Biggins at the Flatbush National Bank of Brooklyn in New York. The year, 1946. Mr Biggins developed the "Charge-It" program in which local merchants who accepted the card would deposit sales slips into the bank and the bank billed the customer.

1958
Bank of America, based in San Francisco, California, issues BankAmericard. With the state of California as its market, the card is an early success, and it is the first “revolving-credit” card with universal merchant acceptance, allowing cardholders the option of paying their account balance in installments with a monthly finance charge applied to the remaining balance.

1976
BankAmericard changes its name to Visa, a simple, memorable name with an international flavor that is pronounced the same way in almost every language.

civilisation, as we now callit, occured only after early man had begun to live in cities. Cities were far more competitive, experimental environments than anything that had gone before. The city is the cradle of culture, the birthplace of nearly all our most cherished ideas. Ibid. p.74.
In the classical definition, civilisation consists of three or more of the following: cities, writing, the specialisation of occupation, monumental architecture, the formation of capital. But this, while not wrong, ingores the underlying principle. Sometime in the late fourth millenium BC, people came together to live in large cities. The transition transformed human experience for the new conditions rquired men and women to cooperate in ways they never had before. It was this close contiguity, this new face-to-face style of cohabitation, that explained the proliferation of new ideas, particularly in the basic tools for living together - writing, law, bureacracy, specialised occupations, education, weights and measures. Ibid. p.75

"We don't want to make movies. We're about to get into television. As far as Lucasfilm is concerned, we've moved away from the feature film thing, because it's too expensive and it's too risky.

"I think the secret to the future is quantity," Lucas told Daily Variety. "Because that's where it's going to end up."
http://www.variety.com/VR1117951284.html

George Lucas, Oct 4, 2006.