Word: middlemen
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Zhang Weifang used to study the three Rs: reading, 'riting and rigging gunpowder canisters with flash fuses. Sitting at their desks in the Fanglin village school, she and her classmates each made 20 firecrackers per day that her teachers sold to middlemen who sold them to factories. "Sometimes the teachers beat us with a wooden plank," Zhang says. "Making fireworks is hard." It's also hazardous, especially when the workers are children who shouldn't be playing with fireworks, much less manufacturing them. Last week an explosion ripped apart Zhang's school in Jiangxi province, killing more than 40 students...
...speed is processed it is handed over to local crime gangs, who ship it to Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia and Australia or take it overland into Burma to the Wa state, where the drugs are further refined into the tablets that are eventually smuggled into Thailand and sold, via numerous middlemen, to Jacky and her fellow addicts at the Do It Yourself Happy Homes. The pink pills that Jacky smokes are all stamped WY, the symbol of the United Wa State Army...
...access to the Internet spreads, it may soon be possible to download copyrighted music directly from the artists, paying in advance for the service, and to bypass the middlemen of the recording industry. The recording industry, which would lose much of its revenue in such a system, should not be able to block entrepreneurs from entering the market and attempting to create these alternate distribution channels. Unfortunately, it seems that the Napster ruling--by placing impossible demands on online distributors--may help prevent these new channels from emerging...
Even leaving aside the important moral legitimacy of intellectual property, a simply utilitarian look at the Internet as a potential market for music condemns these attempts at "de-marketifying." In a truly competitive Internet market, overhead for recording music is near zero and those hated music executive middlemen would be eliminated because artists could market their own work, and keep their entire profit margin. Of course, this is assuming that the Internet could provide a legitimate and secure market for music, something that in this age of rampant piracy seems difficult to imagine...
...large syndicates based in Thailand and Malaysia control the arms-smuggling trade but it is administered by a dizzyingly complex system of middlemen like Joe. When the police do crack down, those at the top, the brains running the muscle, are never touched. Take a man like Samnang. A 45-year-old arms trader, his daytime job is as a border guard on the Thai side of the border with Cambodia. "I am an ex-Khmer Rouge soldier," he says, smiling easily. We are talking outside his office at the bustling gateway, and Samnang is dressed for work - blue shirt...