Word: problem
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...problem is twofold. Illiteracy is a major reason poor people often choose not to seek the protection of local courts, since in many countries, laws established under colonial rule have never been translated into local languages. When would-be entrepreneurs do set out to legally register a business, they are easily discouraged by the mass of bureaucratic red tape and costly fees. In Egypt, for example, starting a bakery takes 500 days, compliance with 315 laws, visits to 29 agencies and the financial equivalent of 27 times the monthly minimum wage. A recent study by the Inter-American Development Bank...
That can go for nonchemical addictions as well. Behaviors, from gambling to shopping to sex, may start out as habits but slide into addictions. Sometimes there might be a behavior-specific root of the problem. Volkow's research group, for example, has shown that pathologically obese people who are compulsive eaters exhibit hyperactivity in the areas of the brain that process food stimuli--including the mouth, lips and tongue. For them, activating these regions is like opening the floodgates to the pleasure center. Almost anything deeply enjoyable can turn into an addiction, though...
...Associate Professor Greg Newbold, a New Zealand criminologist, believes the situation is now beyond control: "They might manage to suppress it in one area temporarily, and it will just crop up again somewhere else. The problem is generated by the cultural milieu and the economic conditions in that area." Newbold speaks with the authority of a man who has done jail time himself for drug dealing and written a book on crime in New Zealand. "This is their excitement. This is their entertainment. This is what they live for. They live for their patch, for their gang and for their...
...loved my country, not in a tacky way, but profoundly and permanently as a paladin of Freedom in a world of Tyranny. Which is the problem with abstractions, even those we think we hold dear. They are cheap and fleeting, “words words words” as Hamlet says. Or Nietzsche: “That for which we find words is already dead in our hearts.” Today, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” sounds ugly to me in comparison to the eternal battlecry of the French Republic...
Michael Broder, a Philadelphia psychotherapist and author of The Art of Living Single, decries what he calls the "perfect-person problem," in which women refuse to engage unless they're immediately taken with a man, failing to give a relationship a chance to develop. "Few women can't tell you about someone they turned down, and I'm not talking about some grotesque monster," he says. "But there's the idea that there has to be this great degree of passion to get involved, which isn't always functional. So you have people saying things like...