Word: assignments
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...actually assign a lot of blame for our recent troubles on a lack of interest-rate caps - that is, on the absence of strict usury laws. Why? Almost every state had usury laws in the 1920s, and they were circumvented one by one. Prohibitions against excessive interest started to disappear [South Dakota, for instance, loosened its laws in 1980], and once they did, the credit-card companies recognized a wonderful opportunity. They could charge as much as the market would bear, claiming that they had to charge more for bad credit risks. You can argue that's the democratization...
Wherever she is in Uganda, Maureen’s surname identifies her as a clan member of the kingdom of Buganda, one of thousands of people who assign social authority to the same group. Wherever I am in America, in contrast, my name identifies me as an individual, with allegiance principally to myself...
...sometimes, life can be a microcosm of sports, too. When a kid loses both parents, lives an adolescence defined by constant change, and uses his naivety to break down the barriers of segregation, we assign to him the most fundamental tenets of sport: winner, champion, victor...
...teams that do exist have problems of their own. The Chinese Super League, now the top-tier professional league in China, has been plagued by scandal in recent years. Despite government intervention to assign the best players to represent China at international tournaments, match-fixing, pitch violence, controversial referees and the outrageous behavior of star players have not helped professional football's fan base in China. "If you keep a record of the champion teams every year, you'll see that the players remain the same every year, only in different jerseys and representing different cities," Wang says. "That...
...easy to chalk that up to simple human carelessness. Certain economists, though, have another way of looking at that and similar findings. They see a systematic psychological breakdown - as a species we're just really bad at understanding costs that come later on. Instead, we assign a disproportionate amount of importance to what's immediate and tangible. We lock eyes with that initial low rate and can't look away. (And, yes, credit-card companies get that...