smothering

The smothering of the fire is even worse.

Try smothering a closed fireplace and watch the glass of the doors turn black in a few hours.

There's something smothering about living in a rental when you've previously been free to do what you want.

Influencing government decisions is typically done by lobbying, handing more power to the state by way of smothering them in funds.

Hence the gadgetry smothering a simple idea of just laying down, turning off the phone, and covering up with some comfortable blankets.

The content companies are intent on smothering any startup with great ideas, because it's a huge threat to their current business model.

Would you lock down all of New York City if some mother killed her four children by smothering them with a pillow?

The hardest thing I still struggle with is not smothering my coworkers when they are stuck.

You people are smothering me with your cheeriness and positive thinking.

One thing thing that is inflated is Forbes-blogger pagerank, due to Forbes smothering a bunch of crappy blogs in pools of their magazine operation's pagerank.

A reasonable person could argue that it's better not to do formal evaluations at all, rather than smothering the whole school system with meaningless standardized tests.

The bankers explain that the spun-off company will flourish because its management will be more entrepreneurial, having been freed from the smothering bureaucracy of the parent company.

Strong cause and effect relationships for reward / punishment, time degrading incentives for participating in "normal" behaviors, firm willed discipline when they regressed to earlier outbursts or triggers, and a steady diet of signals for what is "ok" or not without smothering or coddling.

I say Ballmer is a bad CEO because of the stack ranking employee evaluations and the rampant smothering of prototype technologies that later turned out to be valuable in favor of "core" technologies - you know, the two behaviors that are absolutely toxic for a tech company.

Smothering all that innovation with codec licences incompatible with open source would be crazy.