"Anyone who wants to buy or move a franchise to Los Angeles has to include the likely cost of litigation in the overall budget, " says Carter, who has consulted for California municipalities on the subject.

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The real estate Hedgelets settle quarterly, letting a trader take a position on what the median single family home will cost in six markets: Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Diego and San Francisco.

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But that same money disappears fast for a two-earner family in a high-cost city like New York, Chicago or Los Angeles, with three children approaching college age and parents who may need financial help.

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So even though LA was able to do good business in 1984, it came at a tremendous cost to the people in South Central and Eastern Los Angeles.

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"The efficiency of conventional heat engines is limited both by the laws of thermodynamics and practical concerns over the cost of building and operating complex engines, " says Los Alamos researcher Scott Backhaus.

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With big players like Amazon and Google in the Cloud Service Provision business, and organizations as diverse as Reddit and the City of Los Angeles using those services, cloud computing promises huge savings in cost and complexity.

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The city hopes private donors will make up the cost as they did after a parade for the world champion Los Angeles Lakers earlier this year.

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Believe it or not, it cost more to live in Mumbai than it does to live in Washington DC, Los Angeles and South Beach, Miami.

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Not so the city of Los Angeles, where there are credible warnings of financial disaster, much of it from the escalating cost of public pensions.

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