Word: leveller
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...what, exactly, does it mean? On the most obvious level, it means what everyone knows: that money is losing value. But it also means that we are in the grip of a wave similar to what, in 17th century Holland, was known as the Tulip Mania. The tulip was then a comparatively new import from the Near East, and mutant specimens, with irregular stripes, were prized as rarities-so prized that men would mortgage their villas and their fields. The tulips had little intrinsic value. Their worth as commodities was a function of pure, irrational desire, and their economic fate...
Ceiling fans. There is little point to heating a house if most of the warmth wafts overhead: in a well-insulated room the air near the ceiling can be anywhere from 10° to 25° warmer than at ankle level. Ceiling fans can reduce heating costs sharply, from 25% to 35%, simply by swishing the over-head reservoir of warm air down to where the people are. Designs range from units with plain wooden blades to brass and even iron-scrollwork extravaganzas that recall the decor of turn-of-the-century ice cream parlors. Top-of-the-line ceiling...
...Alice-in-Wonderland world of the oil game, some observers argued that the rises were welcome, on the theory that they might somehow manage to forestall even bigger OPEC money grabs in the days ahead. By bringing its charges up to the $24 level, where much of the rest of OPEC has been for months, Saudi Arabia is attempting to return order and stability to the cartel's chaotic price structure as well as head off demands in Caracas for much steeper hikes by such cartel radicals as Iran, Libya and Nigeria. Said Saudi Oil Minister Ahmed Zaki Yamani...
...John Anderson, a dark horse Republican presidential candidate, submitted a bill calling for a tax of 50? per gal., with the revenues to be used to chop Social Security taxes approximately in half. That measure would help cut consumption by moving the price of the fuel closer to the level that most of the rest of the world already pays. If Americans are unwilling to pay the price of necessary conservation, why should the cartel members, or any other nation, listen to anything the U.S. has to say about the burning issue of the 1980s: energy...
...started gymnastics before the Gang of Four. The rest are very young, and they started after the troubles in China. But we have no one in the middle. So now we must do two years' training in a single year if we are to reach the top level...