Word: stated
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...smart card was invented by a former French journalist and technological autodidact, Roland Moreno, in the 1970s. Initial applications centered on ID cards, but by the 1980s--in another example of state-led adoption of new technology--France Telecom introduced prepaid telecartes that rendered coins in phone booths obsolete. Applications quickly blossomed as the association of Carte Bleue debit cards ordered their banks to fight fraud by issuing only chip-embedded cards, and as France Telecom issued the Minitel with smart-card readers to enable online purchase of everything from opera tickets to train reservations--well before anyone had heard...
...spend last December stockpiling Champagne? Sucker. Instead of getting ready for a bubbly crisis that never came, you should have been stashing away the harder stuff, tequila. Since last year, farmers in and around the tequila-producing Mexican state of Jalisco have been facing shortages of agave, the spiky-leafed member of the lily family from which the spirit is distilled. Agave's price has leaped from about $40 a ton a year ago to a high of $560 a ton last December. If the shortage continues--and the agave plant's grandfatherly maturation time of eight to 12 years...
Another push for tequila consumption came in 1997 from the World Trade Organization and the European Union. Since 1974, the Mexican government had kept tight control over the production and labeling of the liquor: only tequila made from at least 51% Weber blue agave grown in Jalisco state or five designated neighboring areas could bear the generic tequila name. The WTO and the E.U. concurred, making tequila--like Champagne, Cognac and sherry--one of the world's few geographically defined liquors. Suddenly dozens of brands produced in other Mexican states, the U.S. and Spain had to be relabeled, focusing...
...scarcity of Weber blue agave in Jalisco has meant that some distilleries have quietly augmented their supply with cheaper agave from the southern state of Oaxaca--outside the officially designated zone. Sales of Oaxacan agave to Jalisco have roughly doubled in the past year. Mexican regulators are trying to crack down on the rogue suppliers and buyers and have closed at least one distillery. The smuggling also threatens production of tequila's less tony cousin, mescal, made with unauthorized agave species or Weber blue grown outside the designated zone, by driving up Oaxacan agave prices...
...measure of how Europe is changing that Funky Business authors Kjell Nordstrom and Jonas Ridderstrale, professors at the Stockholm School of Economics, are considered radical prophets of consumerism. Their message is hardly new in the heartland of capitalism, the U.S., but it is a revelation in Sweden, where the state-led economy has long held sway. Nordstrom and Ridderstrale claim that in the new wired world, employees and consumers, not capitalists, hold the real power. The only unique asset companies have, they say, is the brainpower of their employees. The corporation is us, the means of production ours. Demand seldom...