Word: clocking
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...weeks ago in midtown Manhattan, time stood still - literally. After the country's debt surpassed $10 trillion, the marquee-sized debt clock in Times Square, which has kept a running tally of the U.S. national debt for nearly 20 years, ran out of digits. For a nation already struggling with a bleak economic reality, it was a less-than-reassuring display. Several news organizations quipped about such a literal "sign of the times," while the satiricial newspaper The Onion offered its own brand of gallows humor: "If everyone just donated one dollar, we would have enough money...
Luckily, citizens won't have to pitch in. New York real estate firm The Durst Organization, which owns and operates the clock, plans to install an updated model sometime next year that can display a quadrillion dollars. In the meantime, the company has hacked the current display to provide a temporary solution - replacing the dollar sign at the front of the number with an extra digit...
...late real-estate mogul Seymour Durst first erected the clock on Feb. 20, 1989 to call attention to the consequences of Reaganomics. At the time, the country had a national debt of $2.7 trillion. The original 25-foot-wide, 1,500-pound, 306-bulb sign cost more than $120,000 to create and install. (It now costs more than $500 a month to operate and maintain the light bulbs). Durst told reporters he had no plans to ever remove the clock. "It'll be up as long as the debt or the city lasts," he said, adding, "If it bothers...
...York Times to run what he liked to call "bottom lines" - rants that ran along the bottom of the page like stock tickers. His haiku-esque May 26, 1991 message: "Federal debt soaring, national economy shrinking, soon the twain shall meet." In 1980, before technology could support a debt clock, he mailed handwritten holiday cards to dozens of congressmen that read: "Happy New Year. Your share of the national debt is $35,000." When technology finally caught up with his vision of a fiscal odometer, Durst's clock included a smaller counter that tracked each American family's share, which...
...asked them to do. And we think, with that, we might be able to put this behind us. Now, will it lengthen the foreclosure process for the banks? Yeah, it could. But my goal here is not to ensure all the banks are taken care of around-the-clock no matter who's expense. The goal here is to ensure that justice is being done. We need to get this right, and until we do, we can't just keep throwing people out on the street and hide behind a court order - "I know I just destroyed your life...