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Marrakech: The Style | Mustapha Blaoui’s Showroom
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Lemurs, Madagascar
Photo: Stephen AlvarezDecken’s sifakas appear right at home in their karst home in western Madagascar. These lemurs live...
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![theatlantic:
Why a Chinese Company Wants to Own Your Local Movie Theater
There’s good chance that your local movie theater will soon be owned by a large, Chinese conglomerate. This weekend, Dalian Wanda Group announced that it would pay $2.6 billion to purchase AMC Entertainment, America’s second largest cinema chain. It would be the most expensive foreign takeover yet by a private Chinese company, a summer blockbuster for the mergers and acquisitions world.
For those prone to anti-China hysteria, this all might sound vaguely menacing (First they came for our factories, then they came for our Kevin James vehicles…). To others, it might simply sound a bit backwards. After all, China’s domestic box office earnings are on the upswing, growing faster than Hollywood’s catalog of comic book sequels. In the United States, theater revenues have essentially been stagnant for a decade as attendance has steadily dropped. From a strictly financial point of view, there isn’t much reason for a Chinese company to start snapping up American multiplexes.
But Dalian Wanda isn’t buying itself higher profits, at least in the short run. Rather, it’s buying an education. China plans to massively expand its own film industry in the coming years. But even more importantly, it would like to expand its cultural influence by becoming as good at producing and exporting entertainment as it is computers and phones. Much as the country’s manufacturers evolved by co-opting technology and techniques from abroad, its movie business is apparently looking to leap forward with some aid from America.
Read more. [Image: Reuters]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4fss7VwmS1qcokc4o1_500.jpg)
Why a Chinese Company Wants to Own Your Local Movie Theater
There’s good chance that your local movie theater will soon be owned by a large, Chinese conglomerate. This weekend, Dalian Wanda Group announced that it would pay $2.6 billion to purchase AMC Entertainment, America’s second largest cinema chain. It would be the most expensive foreign takeover yet by a private Chinese company, a summer blockbuster for the mergers and acquisitions world.
For those prone to anti-China hysteria, this all might sound vaguely menacing (First they came for our factories, then they came for our Kevin James vehicles…). To others, it might simply sound a bit backwards. After all, China’s domestic box office earnings are on the upswing, growing faster than Hollywood’s catalog of comic book sequels. In the United States, theater revenues have essentially been stagnant for a decade as attendance has steadily dropped. From a strictly financial point of view, there isn’t much reason for a Chinese company to start snapping up American multiplexes.
But Dalian Wanda isn’t buying itself higher profits, at least in the short run. Rather, it’s buying an education. China plans to massively expand its own film industry in the coming years. But even more importantly, it would like to expand its cultural influence by becoming as good at producing and exporting entertainment as it is computers and phones. Much as the country’s manufacturers evolved by co-opting technology and techniques from abroad, its movie business is apparently looking to leap forward with some aid from America.
Read more. [Image: Reuters]
Buford, Wyoming, now belongs to Pham Dinh Nguyen, a Vietnamese businessman in Ho Chi Minh City. (Photo by frankenstoen, Flickr)
Nguyen paid $900,000 for the right to own Buford — all 10 acres of it.
The one resident of the town, Don Sammons — who also happens to be the mayor — is planning to pack up and leave, so he put the town up for auction. Sammons had worked as a radio operator in Ho Chi Minh City during the Vietnam War.
More.
A closer look at TOMS Shoes raises questions: Does it hurt the communities it tries to help? How closely does it work with religious organizations? (Photo: Blake Mycoskie, the founder of TOMS Shoes. From toms.com.)
The company promotes a “buy-one-give-one” business model and says it has provided millions of needy children with footwear.
Reporter Amy Costello investigated TOMS Shoes for a podcast called Tiny Spark – Igniting Debate About the Business of Doing Good. Costello talked to Laura Freschi at New York University’s Development Research Institute, who had this to say about how the company could be hurting some communities:
“I’m concerned that TOMS creates the impression that there are no shoes to be purchased inside of these communities, when in fact there are vibrant local economies. In many of these places where they’re giving shoes, it’s important to acknowledge that in some cases the buy-one-give-one model practiced this way could be harmful to those local producers and sellers.”
Apple Inc CEO Tim Cook was in China this week, visiting an iPhone production plant run by the Foxconn Technology Group. Foxconn has been embroiled in controversy recently for a string of worker suicides.
Leslie Chang, a long time China correspondent and a contributor to the New Yorker, spent two years getting to know assembly-line workers in south China. In her book “Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China,” Chang chronicles the lives of these workers.
“They are not victims,” Chang said in an interview with PRI’s The World. “The workers choose to leave the countryside to go to the city. They choose to work in a certain factory. It’s true they can’t organize a union. They can’t sue their boss. Certainly the system is stacked against them. But their choice is to leave to a better factory. And over time the really bad factories don’t have workers and they have to improve conditions or they go out of business.” More.
(Image: cover of Leslie Chang’s “Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China”)
We’re introducing new video series on our sister site Co.Exist! The Unreasonables follows 25 entrepreneurs from around the globe as they tackle world-changing projects and the biggest challenges of their lives. Enjoy the trailer. More on the series here.
![thedailywhat:
Restored Faith In Humanity of the Day: A new trend aimed at helping locally owned mom-and-pop businesses is reportedly gaining traction across the country. Unlike their flashier counterpart, however, “Cash Mobs” don’t involve a song and dance routine — just a bunch of people eager to invest in their community.
The blogger who started it all, Buffalo-based engineer Chris Smith, explains that cash mobs are “sort of a reverse Groupon” in that people support local retailers, but instead of getting a discount, they pay full price.
Smith says he hopes cash mobs lead to a “longer-term relationship with customers” who gain new-found respect for locally owned stores.
So far cash mobs have been organized in 32 states. There have also been international efforts in Canada and the UK.
A website called Cash Mobs aims to help people organize local events. They’ve even set March 24th as National Cash Mob day.
“It’s not just about the money that comes in that day, it’s about a real small business that doesn’t have a lot of money and a marketing budget,” says Smith. “They get a little earned media coverage they wouldn’t normally get that allows them to establish themselves a little bit more.”
[pri / photo: wbur.]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lzux68CDAz1qzpwi0o1_500.jpg)
Restored Faith In Humanity of the Day: A new trend aimed at helping locally owned mom-and-pop businesses is reportedly gaining traction across the country. Unlike their flashier counterpart, however, “Cash Mobs” don’t involve a song and dance routine — just a bunch of people eager to invest in their community.
The blogger who started it all, Buffalo-based engineer Chris Smith, explains that cash mobs are “sort of a reverse Groupon” in that people support local retailers, but instead of getting a discount, they pay full price.
Smith says he hopes cash mobs lead to a “longer-term relationship with customers” who gain new-found respect for locally owned stores.
So far cash mobs have been organized in 32 states. There have also been international efforts in Canada and the UK.
A website called Cash Mobs aims to help people organize local events. They’ve even set March 24th as National Cash Mob day.
“It’s not just about the money that comes in that day, it’s about a real small business that doesn’t have a lot of money and a marketing budget,” says Smith. “They get a little earned media coverage they wouldn’t normally get that allows them to establish themselves a little bit more.”
Last week, Apple released for the first time the list of companies that supply components and manufacturing services to the company. It also announced that it would allow the Fair Labor Association to oversee independent audits of assembly plants employed by Apple.
A week before this news, This American Life aired “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory,” which followed lifelong Apple superfan, Mike Daisey, to an Apple assembly plant in China called Foxconn, where employees recently staged a protest and threatened to commit suicide.
On the show, Daisey reported on the conditions at the plant, and host Ira Glass talked with with Ian Spaulding, founder and managing director of INFACT Global Partners, which goes into Chinese factories and helps them meet social responsibility standards set by Western companies; and with Nicholas Kristof, columnist for The New York Times who has reported on Asian factories.
In the podcast and streaming versions of the program Glass also speaks with Debby Chan Sze Wan, a project manager at the advocacy group SACOM, Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior, based in Hong Kong. They’ve put out three reports investigating conditions at Foxconn (October 2010, May 2011, Sept 2011). Each report surveyed over 100 Foxconn workers, and they even had a researcher go undercover and take a job at the Shenzhen plant.
This American Life producer Brian Reed wrote this response to Apple’s news.
