Word: rip-off
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Other pieces of Expo have altogether different ambitions; they are neither good nor bad, exactly, but something else -- Disneyish. The Saudi pavilion, a fake Arab ruin into which a fake nomadic hovel has been inserted, is like a second-rate SITE rip-off -- except that SITE actually designed it. The South Pacific pavilion is a compound of grass huts (or was -- it burned down last week, but is to be rebuilt promptly). New Zealand's conventional steel-and- glass facade gives way at one end to a rugged Pacific promontory, complete with recorded ocean noises, artificial stones and plastic seabirds...
...honor system, but some of them cheat. Fraud may account for as much as $75 billion of annual U.S. health-care expenditures, according to the National Health Care Anti-Fraud Association. Last June California officials uncovered the biggest single medical fraud to date, a $1 billion rip-off carried out by thieves operating clinics on wheels. Investigators say the clinics offered patients free tests and exams, then used their insurance information to generate a huge number of fake bills. In a similar scam in New York City, a doctor billed Medicaid for $50,000 worth of lab tests...
After more stories and another novel, Sayles went to work in Hollywood for B-movie king Roger Corman, churning out such scripts as Piranha, a low-budget rip-off of Jaws. His idols, however, were independent filmmakers like John Cassavetes. In 1978, having saved $40,000 from script fees and book royalties, Sayles struck out on his own; he recruited a cast of actor friends and made the film that would become The Return of the Secaucus Seven...
B.C.C.I.'s downfall was inevitable because it was essentially a planetary Ponzi scheme, a rip-off technique pioneered by American flimflam man Charles Ponzi in 1920. B.C.C.I. gathered deposits, looted most of them, but kept enough new deposits flowing in so that there was always sufficient cash on hand to pay anyone who asked for his money. During the years of its most explosive growth in the late 1970s and mid-1980s, B.C.C.I. became a magnet for drug money, capital-flight money, tax-evading money and money from corrupt government officials. B.C.C.I. quickly gained a reputation as a bank that...
...price and a cutoff of supply. True, our interest is in paying as little as possible for oil in the long run, not just today. Too low a price could be sucker bait, discouraging alternative energy sources and conservation, and setting the stage for a bigger rip-off tomorrow. It is impossible to say what price today minimizes the long-run cost of oil for consumers. What you can say for sure is that oil producers have exactly the opposite objective: maximum revenue in the long run. Letting a producer cartel fix the price cannot be good for consumers...