"We want government officials to help us save our children, so they don't take part in these ruinous practices," said Oswaldo Honorato Mendes, a deep-voiced Mariaçu chief.
Trading in the earliest commodities of globalization — tobacco, silver, potatoes — helped societies to escape, at least temporarily, Malthus's theory of limited resources, contributing to an unprecedented population boom, yet it also facilitated the spread of disease and ruinous agricultural practices, leading to slavery and war.
Last week, the Interior Department's Office of Surface Mining proposed a revision, amounting to a repeal, of one of the last regulatory protections against an environmentally ruinous mining practice called mountaintop removal.
No longer does a publisher have to print long press runs, warehouse those books, and distribute them to bookstores that insist upon ruinous return practices (i.e. sending unsold books back to the publishers for refunds).
The administration is right to stop this mine as part of its broader campaign to halt a ruinous and unnecessary practice.
The effects of the police inquiry were proving ruinous to Ward, whose practice was collapsing rapidly.
They argued that small businesses, which they identified as the backbone of the American economy, need protection from the predatory pricing practices of ruinous competition.
On the surface this all made perfect sense, but in practice the plan was ruinous.
Still, he acknowledged the danger in the practice: "It could always become ruinous".
Without the caps on awards, the doctors claimed, physicians faced with ruinous insurance rates will simply give up their practices.
