Word: slash
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...which is burning $2 billion a month, requested $18 billion in loans and credit lines - $4 billion for December. For that money, it will slash the number of plants it runs, the number of brands it makes and the number of dealers who sell them. It proposed cutting its hourly manufacturing costs in half. CEO Rick Wagoner agreed to work for $1 a year. GM's business is going down fast because consumers are already shying away from a potentially bankrupt company - which is part of GM's argument for immediate funding...
...essence, is a last-chance opportunity. If Congress provides cover, the Detroit Three can try to rescale their manufacturing capacity to their respective market shares - or even below. GM, for instance, has lost 7 market-share points, falling to 22%, in the past 10 years. It plans to slash costs by an additional $7 billion by 2012. "It's all about survival," says Van Conway of Conway MacKenzie & Dunleavy, a crisis-management and turnaround firm in Birmingham, Mich...
...benefits only begin there. When added to thin and acidic soil of the kind found in much of South America and Africa, char produces higher agricultural yields and lets farmers cut down on costly, petroleum-heavy fertilizers. Subsistence farmers seeking better soil have traditionally relied on slash-and-burn agriculture, which generates greenhouse gases and decimates forests. If instead those farmers slow-smoldered their agricultural waste to produce charcoal - in effect, slash-and-char agriculture - they could fertilize existing plots instead of clearing more land. This in turn would reduce emissions in the atmosphere, and so on in a virtuous...
...many city managers, it's easier to justify tacking a few fresh dollars onto locals' real estate tax bills than to try and slash the padding on a fireman's health insurance plan. City workers may pay 10% to 20% of a health plan's cost, compared with 30% in the private sector, but you win few local fans when you boost the burden on a teacher or policeman to prettify the municipal bottom line...
...what's the band been doing? Breaking up mostly. The current lineup has just one original member, Axl Rose. The rest, including guitar savant Slash, departed years ago, presumably too intrigued by the Internet and other human advances to stay locked up in a recording studio with their famously controlling singer. Rose, once as blond and lithe as a stalk of wheat, has suffered the pudgification of middle age and burned through a reported $14 million in production costs, making Chinese Democracy the most expensive record in history. But given the cruelty with which pop culture devours its celebrity eccentrics...