Disappointment, frustration and confusion are universal and multi-gendered – though, to my immense relief, what this myriad of anonymous voices reveals is one huge contemporary certainty.
What sane people should be emphasizing is that in addition to the risk of financial disruption, there's the certainty of huge pain from spending cuts and a crippling hit to economic growth.
As she knocks back and forth between the Paris of Possibility and the London of Dull Certainty, devoting huge and pointless thought to suitors who never quite declare themselves (most probably because they aren't suitors in the first place), she becomes the ghost of her own tale and a symptom of her author's malaise.
Even if a trade to the Far East was made legal, di Minin said there was no certainty the huge spike in poaching in the past seven years and eye-watering prices on the black market (estimated at around $60,000 per kilo), would necessarily translate to high demand.
Despite the supposed sophistication of the investors involved, no one took account of how shoddy the loans were or -- more fundamentally -- the certainty that huge numbers would go bad if and when the housing bubble popped.
We live in a civilization which no longer lives by huge philosophical or religious certainties.
Given the huge upfront costs and the certainty of resistance from environmentalists, firms will have to know the government is serious about curbing CO2 before they commit themselves to building nuclear plants.Oil and natural-gas firms are in no immediate danger.
We are facing the certainty of a huge increase in the national debt and the possibility of a future inflation rate so high that, as in the early 1980s, the Federal Reserve will have to engineer a severe recession (by affecting a sudden sharp increase in interest rates) in order to restore price stability.
The city has chopped more than a billion dollars from the school budget just since last summer, and further huge cuts are as much a certainty as rising enrollments.
