Word: chop
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Plan to the Arab world - not in the form of money to rebuild war-torn cities but in the form of ideas to rebuild violence-torn minds. We have no alternative. In my yard there are stubborn patches of crabgrass. It's tempting to take a weed whacker and chop them down, but the crabgrass comes back twice as strong unless you get at its roots...
...learned in Vietnam that Ho Chi Minh's "hearts and minds" approach could withstand burning showers of napalm and carpet-bombing from B-52s. The poison of Islamic fundamentalism will survive any aggression we mount against it. Roots don't submit to violence. (Chop up a crabgrass root, and it breeds a dozen new offspring.) You have to patiently dig and dig, and never give up until the job's done. (See pictures of Saudi Arabia's Jihad Rehab Camp...
Every December throughout my childhood, my father would rise from the couch on a Sunday afternoon and tell us that it was time to chop down the Christmas tree. But the Walsh men are not outdoorsmen; firmly suburban, we're at most screened-in-porch men. So by cutting down the yule tree, my dad meant climbing into the attic and bringing down the tinsel-covered bits of plastic and tubing, then assembling them into something resembling Tannenbaum form. Yes, though it shames me to say it now, we were a faux-fir family...
...Shutting down plants and cutting labor are costly - it's one of the ironies of the auto business. Deutsche Bank estimates that GM would have to spend $12 billion to chop labor costs and compensate dealers who lose their franchises. That would lower GM's North American operating costs from the current $31 billion to $25 billion annually, says Deutsche Bank. (See pictures of the global financial crisis...
...Through all those explanations runs the thread of risk--and how it was mismanaged. Financiers, as well as the investors who bought their wares and the ratings agencies that evaluated them, agreed that by applying the proper equations it was possible to, say, bundle a bunch of subprime mortgages, chop them up and sell the pieces as fairly safe securities, even as they were leveraged to the hilt. Why? The mathematical models--backward-looking and based on just a few years' data from an asset bubble--said so. "As an industry, we let financial tools be a substitute for human...