Word: fraction
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...second incentive is to make college loans contingent on a year of service, or some such formula. That would snare all but the richest young folks. The hope would be that some fraction of those so ensnared will be inspired to dedicate their lives - or at least a part of their lives - to public service. And it's possible. But a larger fraction may regard the whole exercise somewhat cynically, and the very concept of "volunteerism" under this kind of pressure may turn the word into a joke. The exclusion of kids whose parents are wealthy enough to buy their...
...Even conceding the case for a military draft, there is a problem. The problem is that the military has no use for more than a small fraction of draft-age men and women. So if you are going to piggyback some vast national service plan on the military's need for relatively few recruits, what do you do with the rest of them? There are, it seems to me, just three possibilities: give them useful jobs that someone else is already doing; give them useful jobs that currently are not being done; or give them make-work jobs...
...artificial color, says Weitz. "More women today are more financially independent, and that leads them to a place where they have the resources to do what they want to do." Weitz suggests that because baby boomers represent such a large segment of the population, even though the fraction of gray-haired women who don't dye is relatively small, the absolute numbers will lead to a perception of far more women going gray. "Miranda Priestly, Streep's Prada character, would not have had chic white hair," according to Weitz, "if so many boomer women were not already doing it." Leading...
...Several people I consulted told me I would be taxed on this. But that was a fraction of the decision to sell the ball. I originally wanted to keep it. But you have to have a nice house with a big living room and a trophy case to put the ball in. You need a very large and expensive security system, because it'll be gone the next...
...these rising house values added trillions to our sense of national wealth, but it is an illusion. If everybody, or even a fraction of everybody, tried to cash in on this rising value, prices would collapse, and the value would disappear. (By contrast, there aren't millions of onion owners counting on the value of their onions to keep going up year after year.) Economists predicted for years that something like this would happen as the boomer generation aged. Nobody believed them...