rent v. lease

Rentals and leases are types of agreements to use or occupy property in exchange for payment.

A lease is a long-term contract, usually lasting a year or more, with fixed pricing and conditions.

A rental is a short-term arrangement with a typical period of a month. A rental may be terminated by either party, or its terms altered, so long as sufficient notice is given. Unlike leases, rentals are automatically renewed at the end of the rental period.

Image courtesy of xkcd

Diffen on rent v. lease

recession v. depression

A recession is a general slowdown in economic activity, and can be visualized as the period from a peak to a trough in a business cycle. A period of increasing economic activity is called expansion.

There aren’t widely accepted rigorous definitions of recession and depression. A nation’s Gross Domestic Product is the total value of all the goods and services it produces in a year. It’s sometimes maintained that a recession is marked by a decline in GDP for two or more consecutive quarters. The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) determines when recessions begin and end by tracking rates of industrial production, wholesale and retail sales, employment, and real income. 

A depression is a long-lasting, severe recession. One view holds that a country is in a depression when its GDP declines by more than 10% or it experiences a recession lasting at least 2 years. By this measure, the last official depression in the United States was the second wave of the Great Depression, from 1937 to 1938.

About.com on recession v. depression

How Stuff Works on recession v. depression

socialism v. communism

Lego Karl Marx. Image courtesy of Flickr. Socialism is an economic system that promotes equality through public ownership and centralized administration of the means of production. It can be contrasted with capitalism, in which private ownership unfairly concentrates wealth.

Communism is a branch of socialism aimed at creating a society without distinct social classes. It has the similar goals of communal ownership of property and the organization of labor for the common advantage of everyone.

Socialism advocates ownership of capital by the workers who use the capital, and Communism advocates ownership of capital by the entire community. Socialists recognize 2 types of private property: consumer goods used for personal enjoyment, such as books, clothing, and furniture; and assets, like factories, used to manufacture consumer goods. This second category is what’s meant by ‘means of production’, and it is this type of property that socialists would place under public control. In communism, by contrast, the entire community collectively owns all industries and their products.

In Marxist theory, socialism is considered an intermediate stage between capitalism and communism. Thus, socialism can be summed up by the credo, ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his deeds’. Communism, being considered a ‘higher stage’ of socialism, is represented by the slogan, ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’.

WikiAnswers on socialism v. communism

DiscoverTheNetworks.org on socialism v. communism