Fittingly for the ultimate piece of conspicuous consumption, the majority of superyacht owners are Americans.
What is specifically American here — though it's increasingly seen in other countries, too — may be the modern sense of equal citizenship, engendered by the illusion that we can sustain conspicuous housing consumption even among a majority of the people.
But little more than a decade since the collapse of the Soviet Union, with a vast majority of Russians barely subsisting, conspicuous consumption in the form of $1,500-a-plate dinners has its critics here.
Above all, though, it is an attempt to call time on the modernisers' conspicuous inability to connect their world with the majority of Britain that feels excluded, left behind and unappreciated by London.
At the same time, they afford the well-to-do an opportunity for self-righteous defamation – a practice of which right-thinking majorities are not slow to take conspicuous advantage.
While the majority of indels exist between species, a conspicuous 12 base-pair insertion in 454 contigs of H. m. malleti was found in exon 5 relative to the H. melpomene and H. erato BAC sequences (Additional file 2A).
These fibrils are seen in the majority of TectaC1619S/+ cochleae examined and whilst conspicuous are quite sparse in number (typically 1 5 per TM profile) and are often entirely absent from the basal half of the cochlea.
His antics set off raucous bickering in the governing alliance about the conspicuous consumption of a politically networked black elite in a country where the majority of young blacks do not even have jobs.
These conspicuous declines in diversity are referred to as mass extinctions; they are distinguished from the majority of extinctions, which occur continually and are referred to as background extinction.
But if Mr. Romney gets very little bounce and Mr. Obama gets a rather conspicuous one, it is simply going to look like Mr. Obama made the more persuasive argument to a majority of American voters.
