Word: gusher
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Angola, the government collected $10 billion in oil revenues in 2005 alone, and that number is expected to soar until production peaks in 2011. This is the first gusher of wealth in a country that has never known it. But the gains are not evenly spread. In downtown Luanda today, it's clear Angola's new rich are doing well. In April, the $35 million Belas Shopping Center - the country's first mall - opened in a new suburb called Nova Vida. There, in a store called Tapazio, they can shop for such baubles as silver-plated ashtrays...
Consider what happened the first time the nations of the Persian Gulf found themselves in a dollar gusher, during the oil crises of the 1970s. They handed back much of that money to Western banks, which loaned it out to developing countries that couldn't repay it. Then, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Japanese firms recycled their dollars by investing in trophy U.S. properties, including Rockefeller Center and the Pebble Beach resort. Both those deals ended in bankruptcy for the acquirers...
...does consciousness exist at all, at least in the Easy Problem sense in which some kinds of information are accessible and others hidden? One reason is information overload. Just as a person can be overwhelmed today by the gusher of data coming in from electronic media, decision circuits inside the brain would be swamped if every curlicue and muscle twitch that was registered somewhere in the brain were constantly being delivered to them. Instead, our working memory and spotlight of attention receive executive summaries of the events and states that are most relevant to updating an understanding of the world...
...Gusher or not, the region is booming. On the border with Turkey, about a half-hour drive from the DNO rig, Kurdistan has clearly become Europe's gateway to Iraq. Trucks from Turkey, Austria, Bulgaria, Germany and the Netherlands are backed up for miles and carry goods from across the continent. Sea cargo from Dubai is diverted through Jordan, Syria and Turkey before reaching Kurdistan, where it is transferred to Iraqi trucks before proceeding to Baghdad. That route is the only choice: driving north through Iraq from the Persian Gulf is too dangerous...
...generating such positive buzz with its green initiative while Exxon generally looks like sludge? Look to the top. Lee Raymond, Exxon's chairman and CEO, is a verbal gusher of anti-global-warming rhetoric who opposes mandatory caps on greenhouse-gas emissions. Environmentalists accuse Exxon of being the "No. 1 climate criminal," responsible for the Bush Administration's refusal to sign on to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which sets targets for reducing pollution that causes global warming. "We do think there is a risk of climate change, but there are much better approaches to making progress than mandatory caps," says...