A reminder of the consequences of approaching systemic risks, based on flimsy or groundless assumptions that things will turn out okay, is seen in the bland reassurances that came back in response to repeated warnings about the massive risks facing the banking system far in advance of the 2007-2008 crisis.
Or maybe it is a hallucination that is even flimsier than the assumptions that drove Wall Street to sink trillions into financial instruments that no one actually understood but all the right people agreed were worth tons of money.
In other places the assumptions are flimsy: data for how businessmen travel are vital, but were found to be based on numbers from between 1999 and 2001.
The governor and the mayor announced budget plans that are based on revenue assumptions that may be as flimsy as a striking screenwriter's bank account.
The UN Provides the flimsiest base for its figures, building extravagant assumptions on the high end of American estimates.
We now know that that assumption was based on evidence that was, at best, flimsy and, at worst, fabricated.
With the Aka on my mind, my assumption that childrearing was an essentially female occupation was now looking embarrassingly flimsy.
Forgettable, virtually interchangeable movies like "She's All That," "Whatever It Takes" and the nondance parts of "Center Stage" operate on the disastrous assumption that since young love is trivial, stories about it can be flimsy and secondhand.
Today, however, the basic assumptions of cold war liberalism lie in ruins – after decades of intellectual exertion to construct flimsy oppositions between the rational west and the irrational east.
That is where the government would like them to stay.It is awkwardly apparent, however, that the two assumptions on which the case for the British nuclear deterrent has always rested look flimsier in the aftermath of September 11th and the Iraq war.
