Word: problem
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...faster markets, says Greenspan, mean more opportunities to make money. They also mean more chances to lose your shirt, something he calls "the increased productivity of mistakes." Computers make it possible to push a button and destroy a billion dollars of wealth. The chairman was warning about the problem long before Long-Term Capital Management vaporized $4 billion, but that debacle silenced any skeptics of the new risks...
...these three men need a carrot at all? If markets work so well, why were they burning their vacations on the phone trying to convince central bankers 10,000 miles away that the world depended on a little self-restraint? The problem, the men say, is that the markets are encumbered by all kinds of imperfections. Even tiny flaws create problems. A Thai banker who breaks the rules by passing $100,000 to his brother-in-law puts the whole system at risk...
...online flirting and decide it's time to make the call. No problem. Click on an icon, and your cyberhoney's phone rings in an instant--a few blocks or a few thousand miles away. And it's not just any ring. Everyone in the house has a separate phone line, each with a distinct sound. So when they're all huddled together watching a movie on cable, they know who needs to get up to answer. Of course, no one really has to get up, because they all have a cell phone handy, and it doesn't cost anything...
...thorniest problem is those 383,000 miles of timber roads that crisscross the national forests. "They are the heart of a lot of controversy," says Marty Hayden, director of policy for the Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund. Environmentalists complain that the roads, cut for the timber companies and maintained by the Forest Service, are degrading watersheds, filling streams with silt and subdividing wildlife habitats. "It is simply time to stop logging our national forests," says Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope...
...second problem: in a French study of the same drugs, two infants died from a rare neurological disease. It is by no means clear that the drugs--AZT and 3TC--are the cause, but the possibility has researchers poring over their data. Even if it proves to be true, though, the benefit in AIDS prevention probably outweighs the harm. On balance, the fact that a treatment the poor can afford may save their babies' lives seems like something to celebrate...