Collecting all this data is a huge diversion of people and resources.
For the past four years two huge diversion projects have been under way to bring water from the Yangzi River basin to northern China.
"It's a huge diversion of management's time," Mr. Buffett adds, "but I don't think the earnings power of Wal-Mart will be materially affected by the outcome of the investigation".
Using Gen, a former member of his street gang who has become an aide to Admiral Yamamoto, chief of Japan's navy; and engaging in some breaking-and-entering, books-altering skulduggery of his own, Harry has managed to implant the suspicion that American oil companies had arranged a huge diversion of deliveries from Japan to secret storage tanks in Hawaii.
Requiring Microsoft to submit such a plan will cause a huge diversion of effort by Microsoft's executives at a critical time when Microsoft is attempting to change its entire business and programming model to remain competitive in the Internet age.
The cult is both fascinating and horrifying (as well as being a huge diversion of scarce resources), but the central question today lies elsewhere: is Kim Jong Il a rational leader with whom the west can do business, or a loose missile (perhaps, after Pyongyang's nuclear test, an unguided bomb), to be neutralised before he destroys himself and possibly the world?
Duncan Exley, director of The Equality Trust: The Government can tinker endlessly with fuel duty, but if it doesn't reverse the huge diversion of wealth from the bottom and middle to a very small super-rich cabal at the top, then the economy will remain at risk.
It's a huge diversion for the business, but one that's turning out to be fruitful.
Writing in the Birmingham Post, Mr Simon said he understood the logic behind a possible ban: "By-elections can cost hundreds of thousands of pounds and are a huge diversion of party activist and staff time and energy.
In 256 B.C. an engineer named Li Bing, concerned about the catastrophic annual flooding of the Min River, completed a huge water diversion and irrigation scheme.
