Big Button Research Articles

A Really Big Button That Doesn’t Do Anything? The Anti-NME Clause in US Trade Agreements Between Law and Geoeconomics

Abstract The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) features a clause, dubbed ‘anti-China’, which sets out legal consequences in case one of the parties negotiates or enters into a free trade agreement (FTA) with a nonmarket economy (NME). A similarly worded objective appears among the negotiating objectives of the US for FTAs with the European Union, Japan, and the United Kingdom. This article examines the anti-NME clause, arguing that its concrete legal consequences are less relevant than its symbolic effects. The USMCA clause itself is difficult to replicate in bilateral agreements, since it depends on cooperation between the two nonsigning parties. Its operation is nonetheless similar to that of two unilateral remedies available under the law of treaties, permitting a reasonable assessment that the clause, if it follows its original design, will aim to permit termination of bilateral US FTAs in response to the other party entering into an NME FTA. While such a clause would offer little in terms of concrete effects if added to agreements that already permit unilateral withdrawal, its greatest value may not be in its legal effects but in its legitimating and signaling properties, which push USMCA parties to establish a common front in the ‘geoeconomic’ dispute between the United States and China.

A Really Big Button that Doesn’t Do Anything? The ‘Anti-China Clause’ in US Trade Agreements

The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) features a clause dubbed ‘anti-China’, which sets out legal consequences in case one of the parties negotiates or enters into a free trade agreement (FTA) with a ‘non-market country’ (NME). A similarly-worded objective appears among the negotiating objectives of the US for FTAs with the European Union, Japan, and the United Kingdom. This paper examines the anti-NME clause, arguing that its legal effects are less relevant than its symbolic value. The USMCA clause is difficult to replicate in bilateral agreements, since it depends on cooperation between the two non-signing parties. However, the similarity between its effects and those of two unilateral remedies available under the law of treaties leads to the reasonable expectation that the clause, if it follows its original design, will aim to permit termination of the FTA in response to the other party entering into an NME FTA. While the clause would offer little in terms of concrete legal effects if added to agreements that have a withdrawal clause, its greatest value may not be in its concrete effects but in its legitimating and signaling properties.

Alarm fatigue

It is easy to be bamboozled by the amazing technology we have at our fingertips – portable monitors, ultrasound machines, tricorders – but you only really need to know one button. It’s that one we all instinctively reach for before have even assessed the patient. It’s the big button marked “Silence“. Emergency departments, operating theatres and… Read More »Alarm fatigue

THU0491-HPR Patient survey driven designing of clothes for rheumatoid arthritis patients with deformities (indian senario)

BackgroundRheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic, systemic inflammatory disorder that affect multiple small and large joints.1It can be a disabling and painful condition and leads to substantial loss of functioning...

Recruiting? Hiring Veterans Makes Economic Sense

Recruiting? Hiring Veterans Makes Economic Sense

Then, We Knew Everything

44 THEN, WE KNEW EVERYTHING EMILY SINCLAIR O ne of us saw her in a magazine. It was on a weekend in the luxurious mountain town of Crystal that one of us idly opened the copy of Crystal Life! the hotel had generously supplied. There, among the society photos of standard-issue-blonde, weather-worn women in expensive dresses, was Lydia Collins. She was holding a glass of champagne and standing between an older, silver-haired man and the artistic director for the Crystal Ballet. Her name was given as Sybille Moreau, and she was listed as a dancer. Our cell phones began buzzing. What Lydia C. said is True! She’s French, too. Text me back! When we knew her some years ago, Lydia Collins was wife to Walt, mother to Elsa, Henry, and Bronson. She was delicate and olive-skinned, with slender arms and legs and round, full breasts. Lydia had pushed the children to preschool in an oldstyle British pram. The children wore coats with big buttons and shoes that closed with real buckles, instead of Velcro. She spoke in a breathy Continental accent, like Audrey Hepburn. She lived her life alongside ours, but more gracefully than we did, and now, as we slid into the middle of our lives, trenchantly ourselves, Lydia had become, at forty, Sybille, the French dancer . What, we wondered, did it mean for us—the other mothers, who’d thickened in the middle and learned disappointment, the lumpenmutter, we called ourselves—that the goddess among us had gone away and begun again? The story of Lydia’s defection is the story of those of us who stayed. The children are two. Neurally speaking, they stand at a developmental precipice: Little dendritic connections are forming all over their brains, and all the pathways that don’t get used will die off very soon. It is our job, as mothers, to ensure the frantic and wide-ranging development of their brains so that connec- 45 Sinclair 45 tions are retained. We hug them, we sing to them, and we are in a church, waiting for a music class developed by child experts. On the worn carpet of the church meeting room, Lydia sits, her wavy hair flung over a shoulder, her legs, encased in tall black boots, stretched out in front of her. We eye her. Lydia absentmindedly rocks a baby in a car seat, and a small, still girl sits next to her. When we go around the circle, introducing ourselves , Lydia says, “This is my daughter, Elsa, and my son, who will either be called Hunter or Bramble.” We nod. “Welcome, Lydia! Welcome, Elsa!” we say. Hunter and Bramble are stupid names and how could you not have named your baby already?—but we try not to judge. We tap our finger cymbals and try to find the beat while keeping the egg shakers out of our toddlers’ mouths. The toddlers rock from side to side on sturdy legs as we hold our infants, with their wide, wet eyes, in our arms. Lydia is a beautiful woman with beautiful, chocolate-eyed children. We will absorb her into us. We sing happy songs and watch through the window as autumn leaves release themselves from the trees. Our bodies have run marathons , given birth, fed our young. Our lives are rich and tender and the intensity of feeling nearly unbearable. At the end of class, we ask Lydia if she liked it. “I miss New York,” she says, shrugging. “Oh, well,” we say, somewhat at a loss for words. “Denver’s not New York. But Denver’s a really nice place to raise children .” We gather at the white wooden fence of the little Montessori school on Snyder Street, waiting for our children to come out of their morning toddler class. We wear jeans and ponytails, and we carry paper cups of expensive coffees. We have parked our minivans and station wagons and suvs at the curb, some with sleeping younger siblings in car seats. We have groceries in the backs of our cars. Some of us have on clothes from the gym or yoga studio. We were lawyers, doctors, teachers, and editors before...

Spirits, Devils, and Fugitive Soldiers

RUSSIAN KARELIA (the former Olonets and Arkhangel provinces) with its immense forests has been admirably suited for the sojourn of the fairies and good and evil spirits. And, as a matter of fact, they did live there undisturbed, giving only now and then signs of their presence to the inhabitants of the neighborhood. They had more intimate relations only with herdsmen, hunters, and fishermen, with whom they shared the common area of interest-the forest and its immediate surroundings. The activity directed against the religious and superstitious beliefs during the decades of the Soviet domination has scared the supernatural beings into the depth of the forests, where they show themselves to just a few old people. The outer appearance of the fairies and spirits in Russian Karelia and adjacent areas in Finnish Karelia has a feature that merits special attention: they have big buttons on their clothing. These buttons gleam in the sun and moon and make the spirits look like soldiers. Extensive data about the buttons is to be found in the memorates in the Finnish Folklore Archives (Helsinki), recorded from persons who themselves came into contact with the spirits or received their information from trustworthy sources. As the following excerpts from the memorates indicate, the gleaming buttons belong especially often to the costume of the forest spirits: