Word: ploy
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Still, in the green arena, Bush has always been a President you have to grade on a generous curve, and in that respect, tonight's speech earns him a solid B. Perhaps his apparent green conversion is just a calculated ploy to win some much-needed good press. But it's also true that the last two years of a badly cratering Presidency can be a time of unexpected clarity; the less you have to lose, the less you have to fear. And the first step in tackling anything as scary as global warming is admitting you have a problem...
Globalization, it turns out, means what the word implies. It is not just a ploy by domestic companies in the rich world to boost profits by outsourcing work to call centers and low-cost factories overseas. It involves a transformation of economic relations, not only because processes can be shifted from one nation to another, but because ownership and control of crucial economic assets is becoming ever more widely distributed. Though the Industrial Revolution's crucible 200 years ago was the Atlantic world, there has always been economic activity and wealth elsewhere. Now, investors and entrepreneurs from anywhere can hazard...
...political process, not the military operation, that's the problem in Iraq." Would Rumsfeld be so spiteful as to embarrass the President like that? We'll probably never know. It may be that the President's agenda for the al-Maliki meeting was a relatively simple public relations ploy: to show support for a weak Iraqi partner and-with the Baker-Hamilton report looming-to reassert that Bush will be the "decider" on Iraq strategy. But even that simple mission failed...
...racing, crews typically use the opportunity to bring their cars in for a pit stop. But when yellow came out in the 25th lap of last year's Monaco Grand Prix, Team McLaren Mercedes made the counterintuitive decision to keep driver Kimi Raikkonen on the track. The ploy worked; Raikkonen won. But the decision wasn't made at trackside. It came from team leaders based at the McLaren Technology Center in leafy Woking, south of London, who were using prediction software they had developed to help them make split-second tactical decisions in a sport in which speed is king...
...record show that it was a clever marketing ploy for Criterion to number its releases, with the number printed on the spine of the packaging. That lets you know, when you look at your collection lined up on a shelf, where the gaps are. The dedicated collector will feel these gaps like they were missing bicuspids. This plays to his or her worst pathologies and has probably boosted Criterion's profit margins by a healthy amount every year...