Word: bigs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...like one of those boosteristic burgs that Sinclair Lewis used to deride. There was a day when New York City was so smug, haughty and complacent about its firstness that Author Irvin Cobb thought the place possessed "absolutely not a trace of local pride." Yet in the 1970s, the Big Apple, as the city now cutely calls itself, has been larding the air waves so much with a treacly, self-addressed valentine of a song ("I love New Yorrrrrrrrrrk!") that even a tone-deaf statistician might wonder how all the fleeing industries and corporate headquarters failed to get the message...
...rock." In this year's second quarter, unit sales were down 28% at Chrysler, compared with 27% at Ford and 15% at General Motors. GM and Ford, being bigger, are better able to withstand downturn. Also, they normally manufacture cars only after dealers order them; alone among the Big Three, Chrysler until recently produced autos essentially on speculation and then tried to market them to dealers. Because its dealers' lots are overflowing with slow-selling cars, Chrysler has been forced to add to its own sprawling stockpiles. Inflation raises the cost of financing this inventory and adds...
...impractical the attempts to recover left-behind oil in old wells. Natural gas, in their view, also has a dim future because proven reserves have been steadily shrinking. Even before Three Mile Island, notes the book, nuclear power was declining. Finally, mining, transportation and pollution problems rule out big increases in coal production...
Precise details of the process are state secrets, but the general outlines are known. To extract the oil, the Sasol plant burns coal with oxygen and steam in a big cylindrical vessel until a gas forms above the ashes. Once the gas is cleaned of impurities-yielding valuable chemical byproducts in the process-it is mixed with a catalyst made of iron and other substances. This catalyst transforms the gas into liquid oil. Production costs amount to $17 per bbl. That is well below the OPEC price of around $20 per bbl. and much less than...
Parts of the underground economy are highly visible. Most big cities are aswarm with street hawkers, who sell from boxes and truck tailgates an astonishing variety of jewelry, clothes, toiletries, fruits vegetables and assorted schlock. Some of the stuff is "hot"; last year about $2 billion in merchandise and food was hijacked from trucks or stolen from warehouses. The rest is distress merchandise that has not moved on the store shelves and is dumped at large discounts to middlemen, who field it out to street hawkers. City governments are trying to collect sales taxes from the vendors, but the vast...