Billmon on Bill Gates’ China vision
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January 29, 2005
Billmon: A “New” Form of Capitalism
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Gates’ other component of new capitalism is “friction free” disintermediation: digital markets are supposed to cut out the middleman. Right.
Another crank philosophy from a billionaire. Has any ubercapitalist, in the modern era, ever contributed anything enduring to western philosophy and art? I can only think of Wallace Stevens. Maybe there are others.
Posted by: slothrop | Jan 29 2005 16:44 utc | 2
Bill Gates has already used prison labor in the US – a dandy deal.
“Many corporations, whose products we consume on a daily basis, have learned that prison labor can be as profitable as using sweatshop labor in developing nations. You might have had a first-hand experience with a prison laborer if you have ever booked a flight on Trans World Airlines, since many of the workers making the phone reservations are prisoners. Other companies that use prison labor are Chevron, IBM, Motorola, Compaq, Texas Instruments, Honeywell, Microsoft , Victoria’s Secret and Boeing. Federal prisons operate under the trade name Unicor and use their prisoners to make everything from lawn furniture to congressional desks.”
Link
UNICOR: Federal Prison Industries, Inc. Good for a browse – “The best kept secret in outsourcing”, for example.
Unicor
Soon Gates won’t be able to find graduates in the US to write his code and come up with new ideas:
“States around the country spent more building prisons than colleges in 1995 for the first time. (…) Over the last twenty years California built twenty-one new prisons but only one new college. Since 1990, California laid-off over 10,000 professors and other university employees and hired a similar number of prison guards.
During the past 20 years, more than 30 states have legalized the use of prison labor by private companies. Three privately owned corrections management firms are trading on the stock exchange: Corrections Corp. of America, Wackenhut Corrections Corp., and ESMOR Corrections Services and 17 other private prison companies have built 100 incarceration facilities on factory design plans so the prison labor can serve corporate America.”
Earthlink
Posted by: Blackie | Jan 29 2005 17:52 utc | 3
Charles Ives, John Alden Carpenter, Henry Church, John Jay Chapman, Marcel Proust….
Posted by: alabama | Jan 29 2005 18:00 utc | 4
@Blackie
Your post reminded me of this:
The Great Judeo-Christian Sin, Outlaw, Guilt, Crime & Punishment T.V. Show .
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Jan 29 2005 19:47 utc | 5
alabama
haha. but were any of them as great as ornette coleman?
there seems to be a sliver of truth in what rgiap says: ‘we’ have the poets and ‘they’ have American Idol. And if an Ives comes along (nationalist homophobe though he was) we call those guys ‘vanguard intellectuals.’
Posted by: slothrop | Jan 29 2005 20:05 utc | 6
smile 🙂 Scam, I did like the “mammalian politics” mentioned. In turn it reminded me of:
Monkeys Pay to View Porn Link
Longer:
Monkey “Pay-Per-View” Study Could Aid Understanding of Autism.
Duke U
driftin’ OT here…
Posted by: Blackie | Jan 29 2005 20:57 utc | 7
Yikes. Just when you know for a lead-pipe cinch that it’s gone to hell, it’s worse. Ah, the Happy Planet. Nothing finer.
Posted by: Kate_Storm | Jan 29 2005 21:39 utc | 8
on china’s “brand new form of capitalism”, via pr watch
China’s Communist Youth League has a new partner: the New York advertising firm Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide. In an “unlikely marketing joint venture” called Red Force, “programs organized by the 70 million-member league are coaching young people in today’s paramount ideology: capitalism. … At a Beijing session last month, Ogilvy staff taught the entire two-day seminar, beginning with a lecture on communication and personality style, as well as an overview of mantras of Ogilvy corporate culture: ‘Deliver your brand to the last mile,’ repeated Ogilvy executive Jeffrey Wu.” Hong Kong Disneyland hired Red Force “to hold six storytelling sessions with children in southern China,” in preparation for China’s first theme park.
Source: Wall Street Journal, January 25, 2005 (login req.)
Posted by: b real | Jan 30 2005 4:29 utc | 9