blood diamonds

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Science...For Her! by Megan Amram

Albert Einstein, blood diamonds, butterfly effect, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, double helix, Google Glasses, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, pez dispenser, Schrödinger's Cat, Steve Jobs, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Wall-E, wikimedia commons

You may have heard about conflict diamonds, also known as blood diamonds. These refer to diamonds mined in war zones and sold to finance insurgencies, in places like Sierra Leone and Liberia and other African countries. Sorry to be TMI, but: I love them!!! Not African countries, silly—blood diamonds! Honestly, I find that blood diamonds often have a much prettier sheen than non-blood diamonds. Something about the guns that are going off murdering people around them seems to make the diamonds sparklier. Maybe I’m imagining it, but I don’t think so! Like I’ve always said, BLOOD diamonds are a girl’s BLOODST FRIEND! Good Name for Tiffany’s Vag I Just Thought of “Blood Diamond” Why Diamonds Are BETTER BEST FRIENDS Than My Friend Tiffany (no offense) * * * Many people have said, “Diamonds are a girl’s best friend!”

I TOOK YOU TO A CHAPTER ON BIOLOGY AND THEN A REAL CHEMISTRY CHAPTER THERE’S NOTHING LEFT TO TALK ABOUT UNLESS IT’S PHYSICS OR ALL THE OTHER CHAPTERS LET’S GET PHYSICS, Y’ALL PHYSICS, Y’ALL I WANNA GET PHYSICS, Y’ALL LET’S LEARN ABOUT INCLINED PLANES, INCLINED PLANES LET’S LEARN ABOUT INCLINED PLANES Introduction I think we all agree, that song that I wrote was amazing, gals! So, physics is kind of difficult to teach because it’s not just a soft science like bio and chem, it’s a super hard science. Usually I like when things are hard (Can I get a “dick as hard as a diamond and as red as blood, aka a blood diamond”?!), but when it comes to sciences, I like them soft and flaccid, like my boyfriend when I showed him my “twin.” Physics comes from the Greek φυσική (έπιστήµη), which, loosely translated, means “illegible.” Physics looks at matter through space and time. So, while chemistry studies the mixing of matter, physics studies how matter moves and exists.

Like I’ve always said, BLOOD diamonds are a girl’s BLOODST FRIEND! Good Name for Tiffany’s Vag I Just Thought of “Blood Diamond” Why Diamonds Are BETTER BEST FRIENDS Than My Friend Tiffany (no offense) * * * Many people have said, “Diamonds are a girl’s best friend!” Here are just a few reasons that diamonds are so much better best friends than my slutty ex–best friend Tiffany! * * * Diamonds are less ugly than Tiffany Diamonds won’t ever f your ex Xander Diamonds go with everything; Tiffany only “goes with” (sleeps with) pieces of trash Tiffany, you smell like a barfed-up bagel if it had a million stretch marks Also your vag is always beet red no matter the day.


pages: 378 words: 111,369

Gateway by Frederik Pohl

blood diamonds, gravity well, Magellanic Cloud, oil shale / tar sands, time dilation

A NOTE ON PIEZOELECTRICITY Professor Hegramet. The one thing we found out about blood diamonds is that they’re fantastically piezoelectric. Does anybody know what that means? Question. They expand and contract when an electric current is imposed? Professor Hegramet. Yes. And the other way around. Squeeze them and they generate a current. Very rapidly if you like. That’s the basis for the piezophone and piezovision. About a fifty-billion-dollar industry. Question. Who gets the royalties on all that loot? Professor Hegramet. You know, I thought one of you would ask that. Nobody does. Blood diamonds were found years and years ago, in the Heechee warrens back on Venus.

There was the original anisokinetic punch, that had earned a lucky prospector something like twenty million dollars in royalties already. A thing you could put in your pocket. Furs. Plants in formalin. The original piezophone, that had earned three crews enough to make every one of them awfully rich. The most easily swiped things, like the prayer fans and the blood diamonds and the fire pearls, were kept behind tough, breakproof glass. I think they were even wired to burglar alarms. That was surprising, on Gateway. There isn’t any law there, except what the Corporation imposes. There are the Corporation’s equivalent of police, and there are rules—you’re not supposed to steal or commit murder—but there aren’t any courts.

Well, I know what they look like. Sort of like a rolled-up ice-cream cone made out of crystal. All different colors of crystal. If you hold one right and press on it with your thumb it opens up like a fan. Professor Hegramet. That’s what I know, too. They’ve been analyzed, same as fire pearls and the blood diamonds. But don’t ask me what they’re for. I don’t think the Heechee fanned themselves with them, and I don’t think they prayed, either; that’s just what the novelty dealers called them. The Heechee left them all over the place, even when they tidied everything else up. I suppose they had a reason. I don’t have a clue what that reason was, but if I ever find out I’ll tell you.


pages: 413 words: 119,379

The Looting Machine: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa's Wealth by Tom Burgis

Airbus A320, Berlin Wall, blood diamonds, BRICs, British Empire, central bank independence, clean water, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, F. W. de Klerk, financial engineering, flag carrier, Gini coefficient, Livingstone, I presume, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, purchasing power parity, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, trade route, transfer pricing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

The porters’ haste was a matter of economics: they were paid 1,000 Congolese francs per trip (about $1) and had to wash and sift their cargo in the stream at the bottom before it began the long trip toward the border or the buying houses of Goma. Most of the incipient certification schemes for Congolese minerals work by tagging sacks of ore as they emerge from the mine to certify their provenance, imitating the Kimberley Process, which was designed to stem the flow of ‘blood diamonds’. The idea is to prevent belligerents getting around embargoes by passing off their minerals as originating from another mine or smuggling them across borders to allow Congolese coltan to be branded as Rwandan or Angolan diamonds as Zambian. But on this hillside there was not a tag in sight. One local, a peace campaigner who had come along for the climb and who kept his distance from the mining bosses leading the ascent, told me that some of the coltan extracted here was crossing the nearby border into Uganda clandestinely.

From there they would flow to Antwerp or other centres of the rough diamond trade and were again sold on, chiefly to De Beers, then still a cartel that controlled 80 per cent of the world trade in rough diamonds.12 Cut, polished and mounted, the diamonds would end their journey on the earlobes and ring fingers of the wealthy and the amorous. The notion of a ‘blood diamond’ strengthened as consumers came to realize that beautifying their hands came at the cost of African limbs. In Sierra Leone rebels under the tutelage of Charles Taylor, a warlord in neighbouring Liberia, severed hands and feet as they waged a campaign devoid of any cause beyond amassing power and wealth.

The same year, the public tarnishing of the resource industry’s most illustrious commodity gave rise to the first international mechanism designed to break the link between natural wealth and bloodshed. Campaigners from Global Witness generated such outrage with their investigations of the links between diamonds and war that De Beers’s claims that it had ceased to buy blood diamonds were insufficient to prevent more concerted action. The Kimberley Process, named after the South African mining town that was the scene of the first mining rush in the 1870s, was designed to stop rebel movements like Unita and the RUF from selling diamonds into the world market, either directly or via neighbouring states, by ensuring that every rough stone carried a certificate of origin.


Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence, and the Poverty of Nations by Raymond Fisman, Edward Miguel

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, blood diamonds, clean water, colonial rule, congestion charging, crossover SUV, Donald Davies, European colonialism, failed state, feminist movement, George Akerlof, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, mass immigration, megacity, oil rush, prediction markets, random walk, Scramble for Africa, selection bias, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, unemployed young men

Millions of civilians have died over the past two decades. The seemingly endless list of wars—in Angola, Liberia, Mozambique, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Burundi, Chad, both Congos (Democratic Republic of Congo and Republic of Congo), Ethiopia, Eritrea, Cote d’Ivoire, Niger, Uganda—evokes nightmarish images of massacres, blood diamonds, gang rapes, and heavily armed and drugged-up child soldiers tormenting motorists at checkpoints. It’s a gruesome but essential exercise to go through the 114 N O WATER, N O PEA CE numbers to grasp the urgency of putting an end to Africa’s wars. Over 50,000 people died in Sierra Leone’s civil war between 1991 and 2002, and millions were displaced from their homes by the ruthless Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels.

The cost of protecting one mine alone could run as high as $500,000 a month, as the Angola Peace Monitor reported in 2001.19 And to keep mines safe from government meddling, paying bribes was the norm. Not every CEO or shareholder is willing to set up a private army, or partner with a real-life Danny Archer, the mercenary played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the film Blood Diamond about Sierra Leone. But some know how to turn wartime adversity to their advantage. Firms like Mano River Resources, DiamondWorks, and Rex Diamond have operated mines in multiple African war zones over the years, despite the costs and hurdles that drive out everyone else. That is, war acted as a “barrier to entry” that kept other companies out and insiders’ profits high.

See specific countries and issues Agnelli, Giovanni, 49 Amassalik Inuit, 138 Amazon (company), 25 Angola, 96, 120b, 175; diamond mining and, 181b–85b; economic revival of, 184b antiparasitic drugs, school attendance and, 193–95 armed conflict, 148–55; Africa and, 114–16, 174–78; civil versus foreign, 173–74; disarmament and, 175–76; economic factors and, 116–17, 120–22; GDP and, 124; government stability and, 176–78; infrastructure investment and, 162–63, 170–71; OECD and, 120–21; political transformation and, 163–64; rainfall and, 122–27, 149; reconciliation and, 179–81; selection bias and, 174; technological inno- vation and, 164; tribal hatreds and, 116–17 Bakrie, Aburizal, 34, 38 behavioral economics, 96–97, 222n8 Bellow, Adam: In Praise of Nepotism, 30 Bimantara Citra, 33–40 Blood Diamond, 183b Bloomberg, Michael, 104 Bono, 9 Borsuk, Rick, 37–38 Botswana, 20–21; Drought Relief Program, 152–53, 199–200 bribery, commerce and, 66–67 Bush, George W., 32, 73–74, 174, 217n4 Busia (Kenya), 193–95, 232n9 Canada: corruption in, 95; United States and, 94–95 Capone, Al, 5–7 Chad, 17–18; corruption and, 156; economic decline of, 111–12; I N DEX Chad (continued) global warming and, 131; Lake Chad, 111–12; paperwork delays in, 66–67; petroleum deposits in, 155–58; political turmoil in, 112–13; rainfall and, 114; violence in, 175; World Bank and, 156–58 cheap talk, 18–20; violence and, 118b–19b Cheney, Dick, 29, 51–52 China: 1998 anticorruption campaign and, 70–73; global warming and, 127–29; smuggling and, 55–57; tariffs and, 60–64, 221n4, 221n6 China National Petroleum Company (CNPC), 185b Clodfelter, Michael, 160–61 coffee, 117–18, 149–50 Collier, Paul, 215n9, 228n20, 230n13 Colombia, 76–78, 102–3, 142 commodity prices, 117–18, 149–50, 227n15 conflict traps, Chad and, 113–14 containerization, 56–57 corruption: bottom line on, 102–3; cheap talk and, 18–20; culture and, 80–81, 87, 102–3; definition of, 18, 83, 216n12; economic growth and, 41–46; income level and, 91–92; mea sur ing, stock markets and, 24–29; national pride and, 100–102; outsiders and, 41–43; poverty and, 15–17; “Scramble for Africa” and, 101–2; stock markets and, 24–27; wages and, 189, 230n3.


pages: 234 words: 63,149

Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World by Ian Bremmer

airport security, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamonds, Bretton Woods, BRICs, capital controls, clean water, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, global rebalancing, global supply chain, income inequality, informal economy, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, nuclear winter, Parag Khanna, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, smart grid, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, trade route, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

For many years, in states like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone, Côte d’Ivoire, and Zimbabwe, insurgents and local governments have sold diamonds to finance wars or government repression, earning the gems the epithet “blood diamonds.” In 1998, the South African government hosted a meeting in the town of Kimberley that brought together officials from diamond-trading and -producing states, several rights groups, and representatives of the diamond industry to find a solution to the blood diamond problem. Three years of tough negotiations produced the Kimberley Process (KP), an international diamond certification system endorsed in January 2003 by the United Nations, which requires governments of countries that produce or trade diamonds to certify where they come from.

Three years of tough negotiations produced the Kimberley Process (KP), an international diamond certification system endorsed in January 2003 by the United Nations, which requires governments of countries that produce or trade diamonds to certify where they come from. Member states have to create local laws and regulations that keep blood diamonds off the market and can only trade uncut diamonds with other KP members, giving governments a powerful incentive to join the club. So far, seventy-five governments have signed on.21 But this is one of the many international agreements unlikely to generate even modest success in a G-Zero world. In June 2011, for instance, President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe announced that his cash-starved government would ignore international agreements to sell diamonds from its controversial Marange mine, which Zimbabwe claims could one day produce up to 20 percent of the world’s diamond supply.


pages: 459 words: 109,490

Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possible by Stephen Braun, Douglas Farah

air freight, airport security, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, blood diamonds, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, out of africa, plutocrats, private military company

Fortified with enough drink to last the night, the revelers sprawled across a secured hilltop as lights twinkled from the fishing boats on the lake below.1 Bemba could afford Bout’s services because Bemba controlled access to something Bout very much wanted: a rich diamond field that netted the rebel leader $1 million to $3 million a month in sales. These “blood diamonds”—illicit gems that were mined in rebel-held territory and shipped abroad despite international embargoes against their sales—were mostly moved illegally through the neighboring Central African Republic, where both Bemba and Bout had friends and protectors in high places.2 When Bout finally bedded down, he slept, as he often did, with some of his crew near one of the helicopters.

Like Milo Minderbinder, the cheerily infernal war profiteer in Joseph Heller’s World War II novel Catch-22, who filled returning bomber planes with shipments of fresh eggs and Egyptian cotton, Bout often scheduled lucrative cargo pickups wherever his planes dropped off weapons shipments. The practice ensured that his Russian freighters always carried a moneymaking load when they were airborne. If an Ilyushin Il-76 was bringing helicopter gunship parts into Goma, it might leave with a consignment of coltan, mining equipment, or blood diamonds. On a run of Kalashnikovs and MiG fighter jet tires into Kandahar, a load of lumber or carpets might be waiting for a flight out. RPGs or gladiolas, diamonds or frozen chickens, it made little difference as long as there was a profit to be made from one destination to the next. In that manner, Bout’s air fleet flew the world in endless circuits.

From there, the planes would rumble back toward Sharjah or other friendly airports. Sometimes their cargo holds brimmed with ordinary shipments of refrigerators and appliances bound for Afghan merchants. But more often the cargoes were spoils that warlords and dictators preferred to turn over to Bout’s crews as payments for their weapons deliveries—blood diamonds, coltan, gold, any natural resource that Bout’s network would then convert to cash. Eventually the planes would return to Sharjah or Ostend, poised for their next circuit. Bout has said that his business took off exponentially in 1993 when he began flying his aircraft out of the UAE, overrun at the time by nouveau riche Russian vacationers and business hustlers.


Poisoned Wells: The Dirty Politics of African Oil by Nicholas Shaxson

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, blood diamonds, business climate, clean water, colonial rule, energy security, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Hernando de Soto, income per capita, inflation targeting, Kickstarter, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil-for-food scandal, old-boy network, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Tragedy of the Commons, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Why did nobody pose the question, How was UNITA’s illegal army supplied on a large scale, and who financed it? Why? Strange!” he said, before hinting darkly that it was, once again, French interests. I reminded him that UNITA’s diamondfueled arms trade was also excoriated and was even tackled with a western campaign against “blood diamonds,” but he waved this away. “The legal government of Angola, through the Angolan ministry of defense, bought arms from the very legal Russian government, respecting all international legislation. . . . I was an oil trader,” he went on. “Then I convinced international banks to advance the money—around $500 or $600 million—mortgaged against Angolan oil, and this money was paid to the Russian government to supply the arms.

“These big ships and vessels, where do they come from? The Nigerian navy did not see them. The Nigerian air force did not see them. They are so tiny!”43 The deep involvement of Nigerian political parties and prominent politicians may be why the bunkerers—whose tankers are rather easier to spot and catch than, say, Angolan rebels’ blood diamonds, which have been cracked down on—are almost never caught, and perhaps why oil companies have not seriously impeded the problem. Western policy makers may feel that they need not care much about bunkering; they are just thankful that the stolen oil still flows into world markets, albeit via different routes.

Diamond industry officials I spoke to were furious. Global Witness was crazy; they were naive; they were left-wing sandal-wearing idiots; they had no right. “Global Witness,” said one, “is just a bunch of wellintentioned hooligans.” A Rough Trade was one of the founding documents for the now-famous international campaign against “blood diamonds,” which upended the global diamond industry, and brought governments together in search of solutions. I have chosen to write about Global Witness partly because I don’t want to give anyone an impression that I have been alone in delving into 210 Global Witness this queer world, and partly because their story presents a chance to appraise current western approaches to tackling problems associated with Africa’s oil.


pages: 538 words: 138,544

The Story of Stuff: The Impact of Overconsumption on the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health-And How We Can Make It Better by Annie Leonard

air freight, banking crisis, big-box store, blood diamonds, Bretton Woods, California gold rush, carbon footprint, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, cotton gin, dematerialisation, employer provided health coverage, energy security, European colonialism, Firefox, Food sovereignty, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, global supply chain, income inequality, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, intermodal, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, liberation theology, McMansion, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, Ralph Nader, renewable energy credits, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, supply-chain management, the built environment, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, union organizing, Wall-E, Whole Earth Review, Zipcar

-based organization leading the campaign on conflict diamonds, these rocks “have funded brutal conflicts in Africa that have resulted in the death and displacement of millions of people. Diamonds have also been used by terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda to finance their activities and for money-laundering purposes.”91 The role of “conflict diamonds” or “blood diamonds” in Sierra Leone’s civil war has received global attention, in large part thanks to Global Witness’ Combating Conflict Diamonds campaign, launched in 1998. The situation was also brought to light through the 2006 film Blood Diamond. The film does a pretty good job of illustrating the brutality of both the rebel forces that run the mines (kidnapping villagers to make them into miners and young boys to serve as child soldiers) as well as the government forces, which indiscriminately kill civilians and villagers alongside the rebels.

Congolese human rights activist Bertrand Bisimwa summarized the way far too many people perceive his country: “Since the 19th century, when the world looks at Congo it sees a pile of riches with some black people inconveniently sitting on top of them. They eradicate the Congolese people so they can possess the mines and resources. They destroy us because we are an inconvenience.”104 Some electronics manufacturers have publicly declared their ban on African-mined tantalum altogether, although, as depicted in the film Blood Diamond, tracing the source through so many dealers and handlers means this is far easier said than done. A solution with more promise is a database of “coltan fingerprints” that scientists are creating, which is feasible because each mining site has a distinct geological history and produces metal with a specific composition.105 This database would allow an international certification system like the Kimberley Process to be established for coltan, so that electronics manufacturers could source their coltan from legitimate mines with decent working conditions and environmental standards.

INDEX Abacha, Sani, 31 Abu Dhabi, 66 Acetone, 60 Advertising, 160, 163–168, 251, 256 Advisory committees, 99–100 Afghanistan, 243, 244 Agent Orange, 54, 213 Air freight, 115, 119 al-Qaeda, 26 Alameda County Waste Management Authority, 211 Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA), 258 Allan, John, 17 Alloys, 44 Aluminum, 21, 59 Aluminum cans, 64–68, 196 Amazon, 116, 118–121 Amazon River, 66 American Chemistry Council, 93, 99 American Cyanamid, 222 Ammonia, 60, 61 Amnesty International, 28, 32 Anderson, Ray, 19, 185, 187–189 Anderson, Warren, 92 Anheuser-Busch, 196 Antibacterial products, 79 Antimony, 59 Appalachia, 35, 36 Apple Computer, 57, 59, 108, 109, 203, 206 Aral Sea, 46 Arsenic, 13, 15, 35, 59, 73, 203 Autoclaving, 201 Automobile industry, 159–160, 164 Bangladesh, 12–14, 49, 184, 193, 219–221 Barber, Benjamin, 169, 172 Basel Action Network (BAN), 205, 227, 228 Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal, 227, 258 Batker, Dave, 246 Batteries, 203, 204 Bauxite, 21, 64–65 Beavan, Colin, 147, 239, 245 Bechtel, 140 Bee, Rashida, 91 Benin, 45 Benyus, Janine, 105 Benzene, 30, 48 Beryllium, 203 Beta-hexachlorocyclohexane, 79 Beverage containers, 64–68, 194–195 Bezos, Jeff, 118 Bhopal disaster, India, 90–93, 98 Big-Box Swindle (Mitchell), 121, 125 Big Coal (Goodell), 36 Bingham Canyon copper mine, Utah, 21 Biological oxygen demand (BOD), 10–11 Biomimicry, 104–105 Bioplastics, 230–231 BioRegional, 40 Birol, Fatih, 29–30 Birth defects, 60, 74, 76, 91 Bisignani, Giovanni, 115 Bisimwa, Bertrand, 28 Bisphenol A (BPA), 78, 99–100 Bleach, 15, 48, 56 Blood Diamond (movie), 26, 28 Body burden testing, 78–80 Bolivia, 140 Books, 51–56, 118–120 Borden Chemical, 222 Borneo, 3 Boron, 59 Boston Tea Party, 127 Bottle Recycling Climate Protection Act of 2, 195 Bottled water, 16 Bowling Alone (Putnam), 149, 238–239 Bräutigam, Deborah, 37 Brazil, 8, 66, 67 Breast milk, 81, 82–83, 91, 171 Bridge at the End of the World, The (Speth), 167 Brockovich, Erin, 30 Bromines, 48 Bruno, Kenny, 225 Burkina Faso, 45 Burundi, 27 Bush, George H.


pages: 487 words: 147,891

McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld by Misha Glenny

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, blood diamonds, BRICs, colonial rule, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Firefox, forensic accounting, friendly fire, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, joint-stock company, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, Pearl River Delta, place-making, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, trade liberalization, trade route, Transnistria, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile

Nonetheless, the Iraqi interlude is instructive as it demonstrates how major criminal figures such as Bout can continue to function by existing in that peculiarly opaque netherworld where money, criminals, crises, and security services mix so thoroughly that only the most trained analyst can separate the individual parts. Viktor Bout is one of the few contemporary criminals who enjoy the distinction of having inspired not one but two Hollywood movies (with a third under consideration), the most recent being the underrated Blood Diamond, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as an especially convincing South African mercenary. Andrew Niccol, the New Zealand–born director and writer of the movie Lord of War, has said that the lead character, Yuri Orlov, played with real style by Nicolas Cage, was based on about five people, but he admits that one of them was Viktor Bout.

By 1999, conservative estimates put UNITA’s revenue from its diamond operations at $4 billion in less than a decade. The value of the stones when they reach the market is roughly ten times that figure. And during that same period, there was nobody in the diamond industry through whose hands conflict or “blood” diamonds (so called because of the deaths that their passage to market caused) did not pass: from de Beers, the immensely powerful South African conglomerate, through to the workshops of India, where 80 percent of the world’s diamonds are polished, and on to the many dealers in Antwerp, Tel Aviv, London, and New York.

Until the turn of the century, there was little evidence that the voluminous trade in African blood minerals would be noticed, still less interrupted, notwithstanding the public concern in the Western world about organized crime. But then something rather unlikely happened. A merrily shabby office in a respectable West London suburb seems an unlikely venue for the throbbing hub of resistance to the trade in blood diamonds. Charmian Gooch was not yet thirty when, in 1995, she and two friends formed an NGO called Global Witness. “We were monitoring the work of a lot of organizations dealing with the environment, and another lot dealing with human rights. And we just kept seeing the bits in between which connected the two areas but which nobody was investigating.


pages: 215 words: 59,188

Seriously Curious: The Facts and Figures That Turn Our World Upside Down by Tom Standage

agricultural Revolution, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, blood diamonds, corporate governance, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, failed state, financial independence, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, invisible hand, job-hopping, Julian Assange, life extension, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mega-rich, megacity, Minecraft, mobile money, natural language processing, Nelson Mandela, plutocrats, price mechanism, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, purchasing power parity, ransomware, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, South China Sea, speech recognition, stem cell, supply-chain management, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, undersea cable, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks

Brides continue to want diamond engagement rings: in America, De Beers reports, a quarter of young brides dreamed of their rings years before beginning a relationship. But there are signs that demand might falter. Those in the millennial generation earn less than their parents did at their age and are less interested in material luxury. They grew up as awareness of “blood diamonds”, which are mined to fund conflict and are illegal, entered popular culture. Brides who want a diamond now have alternatives in the form of synthetic diamonds, which have improved in quality and become less costly to produce. De Beers and other miners are working to boost demand, with new advertising campaigns and slogans.

In business-school jargon, commoditisation, of everything from silicon chips to Christmas cards, is associated with dull, repetitive products, however useful, that generate low margins. The extraction of physical commodities such as oil or iron ore, meanwhile, has an unseemly air to it. People talk of the “resource curse” (the impact of cyclical ups and downs in prices on poor countries), “Dutch disease” (the impact of high prices on exchange rates), and “blood oil” and “blood diamonds” (the use of proceeds from extractive industries to fund conflict). Some worry that even love has been commoditised by dating apps and websites. In economic terms, commodities are vital components of commerce that are standardised and hence easy to exchange for goods of the same type, have a fairly uniform price around the world (excluding transport costs and taxes) and are used to make other products.


pages: 372 words: 109,536

The Panama Papers: Breaking the Story of How the Rich and Powerful Hide Their Money by Frederik Obermaier

banking crisis, blood diamonds, credit crunch, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Snowden, family office, high net worth, income inequality, Kickstarter, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, mega-rich, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, optical character recognition, out of africa, race to the bottom, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks

In plain English: while many of its clients are doing nothing illegal, some of the world’s biggest scumbags have used Mossack Fonseca’s anonymous offshore companies to disguise their business dealings. During the Offshore Secrets and HSBC Files investigations we came across convicted drug kingpins and suspected traders of blood diamonds who had used companies established by Mossack Fonseca for camouflage purposes. Search the Internet for Mossack Fonseca’s clients and you will also find accomplices of Gaddafi, Assad and Mugabe allegedly working hand in glove with the Panamanian law firm. Please note that I say allegedly, as Mossack Fonseca denies any association with these people and its client list is confidential.

It will also mark the beginning of the largest international investigative journalism project of all time. Ultimately, around 400 journalists from over eighty countries will be investigating stories originating from this data. Stories that report on the secret offshore companies of dozens of heads of state and dictators; stories explaining how billions are earned from arms, drug and blood-diamond trafficking and other illegal business; and stories that bring home to readers the scale of tax evasion by the wealthy and super-rich of this world. And all those stories begin with Mossack Fonseca on that first night. 1 Start The Russian president’s best friend. Businessmen close to the Argentinian president and her late husband and predecessor as head of state.

According to the UN, around thirty-two so-called low-intensity conflicts are currently raging around the world; these are conflicts that claim fewer than 10,000 lives each year. These are taking place in the Philippines, as well as Darfur, the Central African Republic, etc. etc. Each year, hundreds of thousands of people all over the world lose their lives in these conflicts. By enabling the purchase of weapons or the sale of blood diamonds, for example, offshore centres play an instrumental role in these conflicts. Politicians in the Virgin Islands, the Cook Islands and the Caymans would probably say that they aren’t doing anything apart from allowing shell companies to set up there. That isn’t true. So-called tax havens and their service providers like Mossack Fonseca are nothing short of enemies of humanity.


pages: 220 words: 64,234

Fewer, Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Objects by Glenn Adamson

big-box store, Biosphere 2, blood diamonds, blue-collar work, Buckminster Fuller, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, dumpster diving, haute couture, informal economy, Jacquard loom, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Mason jar, race to the bottom, tacit knowledge, trade route, white flight

When consumers claim that they are immune to the sentiments peddled by marketing departments, one’s alarm bells should certainly go off; and certainly, there is much to dislike about the contemporary diamond industry. Though fitful attempts have been made to address the problems of sourcing, for decades precious stones have been mined in Africa in terrible circumstances, including slavery enforced by violence. Awareness of these so-called blood diamonds is obscured not only by the lack of transparency that one finds in almost all commodity chains, but also by the dazzling sight of the stones themselves. Here, we arrive at the special quality of diamonds, which sets their paradoxes in train. Each stone is rated according to a rigorous grading system, codified by the Gemological Institute of America.

., here, here, here, here, here, here Adamson, Peter, here, here, here Adamson parents, here Admirable Discourses (Palissy), here aesthetics, here, here agency vs. materiality, here AIDS, here airbrush, here alchemy, here Aldersey-Williams, Hugh, here altruism, here aluminum, here, here, here, here, here Analytical Engine, here animals, stuffed, here, here, here antimaterialism, here antiques market, here Apple, here architecture, here, here, here archives and archivists, here Aristotle, here, here art, interaction with, here Art and Craft (documentary film), here artifacts, here, here Art Institute of Chicago, here artisanal knowledge, here Arts and Crafts movement, here atomic theory, here attention hammer example, here of longing, here, here paying, here, here, here, here, here automotive industry design, here awareness, here, here awnings, here Babbage, Charles, here backstrap loom, here Bacon, Roger, here Baekeland, Leo, here balance, here, here Barnes, Dorothy Gill, here Barthes, Roland, here Basilica of St. Josaphat, here basketry, here Beach, Alfred, here Beckerdite, Luke, here Beckmann, Max, here, here Bennett, Tony, here bespoke, here the blind, here, here blood diamonds, here Bodenner, Scott, here, here The Body of the Artisan (Smith), here book of secrets, here books collecting, here digitizing, here, here Boulle (Buhl) saw, here Boulle, André Charles, here Bowling, Mimi, here, here Breward, Christopher, here Brooklyn, here Bryant, Janie, here Buchwald, Art, here carving coconut, here, here stone, here Casdagli, Alexis, here cast iron, here cast objects, here Center for Wood Anatomy Research, here ceramics Chinese, here fingerprints on, here pottery, Japanese, here, here, here, here, here terra-cotta, here touching, here Chair Question, here chanoyu (tea ceremony), here chess, here children stuffed animals of, here, here, here technology and, here, here Chinese ceramics, here chisel, here Clark, Kenneth, here Clarke, David, here class condescension, here class distinction, here claw, here clay foot of teabowls, here clay models, here, here cleverness, here climate change, here Clunas, Craig, here coconut carving, here, here Coffeyville (KS) children, abilities of, here, here pig anecdote, here Pumpkin Creek Farm, life on, here shared enterprise, feeling of, here collection, the, here communities of respect, here community awareness of, here creating, here history of the Warsaw Jewish, here the homeless and, here identity, here Jerry Walsh and the, here completeness, attaining, here computers, here, here Confessions of a Professional Makeup Artist (Mailfert), here confinement, here connections, objects in creating, here, here, here, here contact zone, here, here, here, here control, here, here, here Cooke, Ned, here Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, here copies, here, here The Count of Monte Cristo (Dumas), here craft.


pages: 347 words: 115,173

Chasing the Devil: On Foot Through Africa's Killing Fields by Tim Butcher

barriers to entry, blood diamonds, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, Etonian, Google Earth, Kickstarter, Nelson Mandela, pre–internet, Scramble for Africa, trade route, upwardly mobile

Money earned from the sales would be spent on more weapons used by the rebels to secure yet more territory and enslave yet more people to search for yet more stones. It was a self-sustaining cycle of violence. The term ‘blood diamonds’ feels an entirely appropriate name for gems mined, smuggled and traded to sustain the conflict. Hollywood took on the subject convincingly with the 2006 film Blood Diamond starring Leonardo DiCaprio. It is a wartime story of a white diamond smuggler joining forces with a desperate black Sierra Leonean villager to snaffle a priceless stone from under the noses of rebels and mercenaries out in the country’s chaotic hinterland.

Nervousness started to take hold of me, weak to begin with but welling so forcefully it overwhelmed all sense of physical discomfort. I was walking across Liberia, one of the most lawless and unstable countries in Africa, a nation left in ruins by a cycle of coup and counter-coup, rebellion and invasion, that had festered for decades. Its conflict helped spawn many of modern Africa’s most troubling icons – child soldiers, blood diamonds, fetishistic killers – and although the war had officially ended, its jungle hinterland was still regarded by many as off limits. The crisis came four days into the trek when my local guide and trusted friend, Johnson Boie, could walk no further. Hobbled by blisters, he reluctantly agreed to take a lift on a motorbike to the village of Duogomai where I was determined to spend the night.


pages: 407 words: 121,458

Confessions of an Eco-Sinner: Tracking Down the Sources of My Stuff by Fred Pearce

additive manufacturing, air freight, Berlin Wall, blood diamonds, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, congestion charging, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, demographic transition, Fall of the Berlin Wall, food miles, ghettoisation, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Kibera, Kickstarter, mass immigration, megacity, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, profit motive, race to the bottom, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, the built environment, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

On the back of the film Blood Diamond, the ethical-jewellery business is set to take off. His model is the Body Shop ethical franchise chain established by the late Anita Roddick just down the road in Littlehampton. And he is as ambitious. ‘We want three hundred outlets by 2009,’ he said. ‘But all this depends on being able to get sufficient certified supplies.’ He is lining up more gold miners’ groups from Bolivia, Peru and several African countries, along with silver miners from the Philippines and diamond prospectors from Tanzania – and who knows, one day from the cauldron of blood diamonds, Sierra Leone, too.

China has 60 per cent of our antimony, which is widely used in the ubiquitous electrical conducting devices known as semiconductors, and in flame retardants. There may be only thirty years’ supply of antimony left. China also has 30 per cent of our tin and 20 per cent of our zinc. All this makes resource politics interesting. We know all about oil politics. And the world of blood diamonds has become notorious. But what about phosphate politics? Phosphates are an essential nutrient in soils. Plants need phosphate to grow as much as they need water. It takes a tonne of phosphate to produce every 130 tonnes of grain. There are no substitutes. If natural phosphate is in short supply in their soils, as it often is, farmers must add phosphate rock.


pages: 251 words: 76,868

How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance by Parag Khanna

Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, bank run, blood diamonds, Bob Geldof, borderless world, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, charter city, clean water, cleantech, cloud computing, commoditize, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, double entry bookkeeping, energy security, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, friendly fire, global village, Google Earth, high net worth, high-speed rail, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, laissez-faire capitalism, Live Aid, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, microcredit, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, out of africa, Parag Khanna, private military company, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, sustainable-tourism, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, X Prize

If Western donors and multilaterals can coach on environmental standards, while China continues investing in raw materials but hires more local labor under pressure from African governments, then the renewed great power interest in Africa can finally mean a race to the top, rather than to the bottom. Reversing the Resource Curse Were it not for De Beers, Botswana could very well have wound up like Sierra Leone. Like other postcolonial African states, Botswana is landlocked and suffered turbulent governance during its early independence years. But rather than engaging in a “blood diamond”–fueled civil war, Botswana’s government auctioned off resource rights to get the best price for them, taxes corporate revenues rather than accepting personal bribes, and invests some of its profits in worthwhile national development projects. De Beers has been essential to Botswana’s strategy of controlling diamond-export volumes to maintain a high price (which they split fifty-fifty with the government) and has also supported a domestic distribution plan for diamond wealth.

Alien Tort Claims Act, the International Labor Rights Fund sued Unocal in the 1990s on behalf of impoverished Burmese villagers for abuses committed by the ruling junta during the construction of the $1.2 billion Yadana pipeline, where villagers were paid little or nothing, and shot if they moved too slowly. While legal tactics have evoked reflex benevolence from companies, NGOs also actively lobby the same corporations to reshape their policies on the ground prior to getting sued. Rather than continuously publishing damning reports on blood diamonds, Global Witness decided to sit down with De Beers to forge what became known as the Kimberly Process for monitoring and certifying the origin of diamonds being sold worldwide. Now more than one hundred diamond companies, monitoring groups, and regional organizations are involved. The worldwide governance of natural-resource wealth is now emerging through such public-private networks.


pages: 651 words: 186,130

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth

4chan, active measures, activist lawyer, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blood diamonds, Boeing 737 MAX, Brexit referendum, Brian Krebs, cloud computing, commoditize, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, defense in depth, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, failed state, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, index card, information security, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, offshore financial centre, open borders, operational security, pirate software, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

For decades, as Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and others introduced more encryption to their data centers and customers’ communications, the only way to intercept unencrypted data was to break into someone’s device before its contents had been scrambled. In the process, “zero-day exploits” became the blood diamonds of the security trade, pursued by nation-states, defense contractors, and cybercriminals on one side, and security defenders on the other. Depending where the vulnerability is discovered, a zero-day exploit can grant the ability to invisibly spy on iPhone users the world over, dismantle the safety controls at a chemical plant, or send a spacecraft hurtling into earth.

If they described their zero-day or handed it over for evaluation, a buyer might simply feign disinterest and use it anyway. The time lag between a hacker’s zero-day demo and when he got paid was brutally long. Zero-days took weeks, if not months, to vet—all the more time for the vulnerability to be found and patched. Six-figure zero-days could turn to dust in seconds, leaving sellers up a creek. And just as with blood diamonds, there was the fairly significant issue of one’s conscience. As more buyers made their way into the market—foreign governments, front companies, shady middlemen, cybercriminals—it was becoming impossible for hackers to know how zero-days would be used. Would their code be used for traditional state-to-state espionage, or to track down dissidents and activists and make their lives a living hell?

They were here to recruit, perhaps, or broker the latest and greatest in Argentine spy code. I had timed my visit for Latin America’s largest hacking conference. Ekoparty was a mecca for hackers all over South America, and more recently zero-day brokers who came from all over the world in search of digital blood diamonds. This was my best chance of glimpsing the world’s new exploit labor market. The agenda listed hacks of encrypted medical devices to e-voting systems, cars, app stores, Androids, PCs, and the Cisco and SAP business apps that could enable attackers to take remote control of computers at the world’s biggest multinationals and government agencies.


pages: 460 words: 131,579

Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse by Adrian Wooldridge

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, Black Swan, blood diamonds, borderless world, business climate, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Exxon Valdez, financial deregulation, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, George Gilder, global supply chain, Golden arches theory, hobby farmer, industrial cluster, intangible asset, It's morning again in America, job satisfaction, job-hopping, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Naomi Klein, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Norman Macrae, patent troll, Ponzi scheme, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, wealth creators, women in the workforce, young professional, Zipcar

A survey by McKinsey in 2007 discovered that 95 percent of companies felt that “society” had higher expectations than it did five years ago.9 Academics, whistle-blowers, journalists, NGOs, professional malcontents—all delight in exposing the malefactors of great wealth. Hollywood has produced a stream of corporate-bashing films: The Constant Gardener (pharmaceuticals), Sicko (healthcare), Blood Diamond (precious stones), Supersize Me (fast food), Syriana (big oil), Michael Clayton (corporate law), and Capitalism, a Love Story (business in general, courtesy of the man who made the best business-bashing film of all, Roger and Me, Michael Moore). CSR is a way of fighting back, a way of managing your reputation in a reputation-shredding age.

Companies have been forming some surprising alliances in the name of CSR—and blurring the line between for-profit and nonprofit organizations in the process. Companies have taken to striking deals with governments to slay various monsters such as corruption (a particularly common practice in the mining industry) or blood diamonds (the Kimberley process). Limited Brands, a clothing company, has even lobbied the government of Alberta, Canada, over threatened caribou habitats. But the bread and butter in CSR deal-making is provided by NGOs. Coca-Cola has formed an alliance with the World Wild Life Fund to conserve freshwater river basins and with Greenpeace to eliminate carbon emissions from its coolers and vending machines.


Life of the Party: Stories of a Perpetual Man-Child by Bert Kreischer

airport security, blood diamonds, pre–internet, Saturday Night Live

I felt like telling him he should write that down and work it out, because there was definitely something there that people could relate to, but I got the feeling he wasn’t about to slow down and pull out a pen and a notebook. He was on a roll. Everything he said that night was a diamond, but a blood diamond, because as the night continued, a small fortune of alcohol accrued on that table. At the end of the night, when the only energy left in the club was Tracy’s, the white waitress appeared through the crowd of brothers with a smile and a bill. She quickly scanned the crowd—landing her sights on me, the lone white guy.


pages: 238 words: 73,121

Does Capitalism Have a Future? by Immanuel Wallerstein, Randall Collins, Michael Mann, Georgi Derluguian, Craig Calhoun, Stephen Hoye, Audible Studios

affirmative action, blood diamonds, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, butterfly effect, creative destruction, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, distributed generation, Dr. Strangelove, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, full employment, Gini coefficient, global village, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, Isaac Newton, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, land tenure, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, loose coupling, low skilled workers, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Ponzi scheme, postindustrial economy, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, too big to fail, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks

It also has a large-scale dimension of transnational capitalist structures that operate at least partially outside state institutions and laws. The latter include money-laundering, banking, and investments backed up by force as well as contracts. They include tax-evasion, trafficking, and a range of illicit flows—from minerals (blood diamonds or coltan), to weapons (small arms mostly, but also tanks, aircraft, and missiles), to drugs, to people. This often illicit capitalism is often more formally organized than the name “informal sector” suggests, and it has revenues and investments running into many trillions of dollars (though not surprisingly hard to calculate precisely).


pages: 243 words: 77,516

Straight to Hell: True Tales of Deviance, Debauchery, and Billion-Dollar Deals by John Lefevre

airport security, Bear Stearns, blood diamonds, buy and hold, colonial rule, credit crunch, fixed income, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, high net worth, income inequality, jitney, junk bonds, lateral thinking, market clearing, Occupy movement, Sloane Ranger, the market place

Might as well—they’re already paid for, and altruistically speaking, they’ll be safer with us. By the exit, we see Varun, having not bothered to search for a dark corner, with a wide grin on his face. He’s got a drink in each hand, a girl under each arm, and another on his lap. “T.I.A., baby. T.I.A.” The acronym from the movie Blood Diamond—“This Is Africa”—had long since been appropriated as “This Is Asia.” As I knew it would be, the casino is disgusting. “Sorry, chaps. It’s not Monte Carlo, but tonight, it’ll have to do.” I can tell that they don’t really want to be there, but I just want to gamble. We start off together at the baccarat table and then gradually jump around in search of blackjack, more drinks, and better luck.


Yes Please by Amy Poehler

airport security, Albert Einstein, blood diamonds, carbon footprint, do what you love, Donald Trump, East Village, Google Hangouts, Pepto Bismol, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Skype, the medium is the message

I think The Wire is the best-written show in recent memory. I have watched each episode of all five seasons twice. For Mother’s Day one year, Aziz Ansari got me a signed and framed picture of Omar Little with the inscription “Amy, You come at the King You Best Not Miss. Omar.” Next to my children and my blood diamonds this is the only thing I would grab in a fire. A nice young person stood up at the panel and asked David and me how we found the “courage” to do what we do. We both bristled a bit at the idea of our work being “courageous.” We both admitted that we often think about how if everything went away tomorrow we would still have a trade and a skill to depend on.


pages: 322 words: 84,752

Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up by Philip N. Howard

Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blood diamonds, Bretton Woods, Brian Krebs, British Empire, butter production in bangladesh, call centre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital map, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Google Earth, Hacker News, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information security, Internet of things, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, obamacare, Occupy movement, packet switching, pension reform, prediction markets, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, spectrum auction, statistical model, Stuxnet, Tactical Technology Collective, trade route, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day

Tax evaders, terrorists, drug cartels, and corrupt politicians don’t want to keep their dirty money under their own names. So one of the most important anticorruption campaigns is against anonymous companies that are able to hide their owner ship structure in layers of easily created shell companies.29 The cruel industry behind blood diamonds, in particular, has been able to bury the identity of company owners and beneficiaries. Unfortunately, only the most experienced data sleuths can track down their personal data and see who is using it. Given the large volumes of compromised personal records—on average each U.S. adult has had nine such records compromised—it would be impossible to fully understand who has access to data about us.30 National-security organizations may have better digital archives of our communications than we have on our own devices.


pages: 330 words: 83,319

The New Rules of War: Victory in the Age of Durable Disorder by Sean McFate

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamonds, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer vision, corporate governance, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, drone strike, escalation ladder, European colonialism, failed state, hive mind, index fund, invisible hand, John Markoff, joint-stock company, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, private military company, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technoutopianism, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, yellow journalism, Yom Kippur War, zero day, zero-sum game

But it was all perversion. Taylor, like the warlords before him, saw the country as a prize to be pillaged. And pillage he did. He looted $100 million from the treasury and lived lavishly as Liberians starved. He had a small army of child soldiers who revered him as a father-god, and he traded so many “blood diamonds” (gems harvested in the gore of war), that the phrase became a household term around the world. Taylor also liked war bling, and he had a chromed AK-47, which I held years later. If he saw a woman he wanted, he would send men to take her. After he was done, she may or may not have lived. His son Chucky was worse.


pages: 314 words: 86,795

The Comedy Film Nerds Guide to Movies by Graham Elwood, Chris Mancini

blood diamonds, Bob Geldof, Dr. Strangelove, financial engineering, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, nuclear winter, Wall-E

Is it a bunch of dumb whores in a stupid town yelling about why they are the best wife in the lot? Or maybe a cooking competition with fancy suit wearing shitheads judging a bunch of nonsense that would never influence anyone’s decision on if a restaurant is good or not? Perhaps it is some family of rich, vapid dummies whose only talent is how to correctly wear blood diamonds. Oh wait, I’m talking about the reason I canceled my cable. Reality TV has nothing to do with documentaries. A good doc (the hipster shorthand in film-land) is when the audience is taken into a world that most of us know little about, and we learn by going along on the experience with the subjects.


pages: 244 words: 82,548

Here I Am: The Story of Tim Hetherington, War Photographer by Alan Huffman

blood diamonds, British Empire, friendly fire, illegal immigration, Skype

An oft-repeated mantra during Taylor’s campaign was “You killed my ma, you killed my pa, I will vote for you.” To make up for funds deprived him by the sanctions, Taylor tapped Liberia’s ship registry program, the largest in the world, as well as the Sierra Leonean diamond industry, which extracted so-called blood diamonds using child and slave labor. LURD, which formed in 1999, was one of several Liberian rebel groups bent on overthrowing Taylor. By the summer of 2003, when Hetherington and Brabazon arrived, LURD was the preeminent rebel group, directly supported by Guinea. Hetherington had done his homework on this complicated dynamic before traveling to Liberia during his previous trip in 1999.


pages: 261 words: 86,905

How to Speak Money: What the Money People Say--And What It Really Means by John Lanchester

asset allocation, Basel III, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Swan, blood diamonds, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, commoditize, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, forward guidance, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, high net worth, High speed trading, hindsight bias, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kodak vs Instagram, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, loss aversion, margin call, McJob, means of production, microcredit, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, Nikolai Kondratiev, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, survivorship bias, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, Tyler Cowen, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, working poor, yield curve

The main cause of the boom has been the growth of China, whose industrial output increased by 22 percent every year on average in the first decade of this century. Making more stuff means you need more stuff to make it with—hence, a commodity boom.27 The quest to find and extract commodities from troubled places is one of the darkest aspects of the contemporary economic system: “blood diamonds” are the best known of these products, but there are many more and many whose stories go untold. Much of the world’s computer equipment functions by means of tantalum capacitors, which are made with an ore called coltan, much of which comes from the Congo, where it’s extracted from mines run by warlords using slave labor.


pages: 311 words: 89,785

Crossing the Heart of Africa: An Odyssey of Love and Adventure by Julian Smith

blood diamonds, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, James Watt: steam engine, Livingstone, I presume, Pepto Bismol, Scramble for Africa, trade route

I’d always teased her about how bourgeois diamond engagement rings were: the “tradition” invented in the 1930s by the De Beers cartel—Cecil Rhodes again—after a glut of South African diamonds threatened to send prices crashing; the ad exec who picked the two months’ salary figure out of thin air; the profits from “blood diamonds” mined in war zones that fueled vicious conflicts across Africa, including the DRC. She didn’t deny any of it. But she still wanted one. I owed her that much. I told her I was going to give her a diamond ring that had belonged to my grandmother. I’d just underestimated how long it would take to have it cleaned and resized and FedExed here.


pages: 342 words: 94,762

Wait: The Art and Science of Delay by Frank Partnoy

algorithmic trading, Atul Gawande, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, blood diamonds, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, corporate governance, cotton gin, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Flash crash, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Google Earth, Hernando de Soto, High speed trading, impulse control, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Long Term Capital Management, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nick Leeson, paper trading, Paul Graham, payday loans, Pershing Square Capital Management, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, six sigma, social discount rate, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, Steve Jobs, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, upwardly mobile, Walter Mischel

But Kroft persuaded Obama to give him a few more minutes on camera later, after a ceremony for firefighters who lost their lives on 9/11, and that gave 60 Minutes just enough material to fill all three of the show’s segments. Francesco Guerrera was born in Milan and has a first-class degree from City University in London. He has won numerous awards, including a Foreign Press Association Award for his investigation of “blood diamonds,” an Overseas Press Award for his scoop on CNOOC’s takeover bid for Unocal, and a SABEW Award for a video series on the collapse of Lehman Brothers.23 He is widely considered one of the world’s leading business reporters and is editor of the Wall Street Journal’s respected “Money and Investing” section.


pages: 345 words: 92,063

Power, for All: How It Really Works and Why It's Everyone's Business by Julie Battilana, Tiziana Casciaro

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Asperger Syndrome, Big Tech, BIPOC, blood diamonds, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, different worldview, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, feminist movement, fundamental attribution error, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mega-rich, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech worker, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, zero-sum game

This is the challenge that De Beers and other diamond sellers started to face at the turn of the twenty-first century, as some consumers turned their backs on diamonds. The number of marriages has been shrinking, with evolving gender norms challenging traditional marriage rituals. In the past decades, competition for luxury goods, from travel to handbags and electronics, has also been exploding.18 Blood diamonds—gems mined in war zones and sold to finance military insurgencies—have further tarnished diamonds’ once-pristine reputation as the symbol of eternal love. These social trends have lessened De Beers’s and, more generally, the diamond industry’s power, with some analysts calculating a drop in sales growth by as much as 60 percent between 2000 and 2019.19 But De Beers had been losing power in the industry even before these trends began to play out, so much so that by 2019, its share of the global rough diamond market had fallen to roughly 30 percent.20 De Beers’s change of fortune resulted partly from strategic moves by its suppliers and competitors: The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 weakened De Beers’s partnership with Russian diamond producers, while new mines opened in Canada, and start-ups began to use new technology to grow synthetic diamonds in their labs.


pages: 348 words: 97,277

The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamonds, Blythe Masters, business process, buy and hold, carbon footprint, cashless society, circular economy, cloud computing, computer age, computerized trading, conceptual framework, content marketing, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, global supply chain, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, informal economy, information security, intangible asset, Internet of things, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, linked data, litecoin, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, market clearing, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, off grid, pets.com, prediction markets, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, Project Xanadu, ransomware, rent-seeking, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, social web, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, the market place, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Turing complete, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, universal basic income, web of trust, zero-sum game

Mining giant BHP Billiton is using the technology to track minerals analysis done by outside vendors. The startup Everledger has uploaded unique identifying data on a million individual diamonds to a blockchain ledger system to build quality assurances and help jewelers comply with regulations barring “blood diamond” products. These solutions are also IoT blockchain plays because they are intrinsically linked to the sensors, barcodes, and RFID chips that are increasingly used in manufacturing and shipping to trace goods, trigger actions, and prompt payment. Once again, there will be a need for “know-your-machine” systems that can “identify” these devices and assure they are operating in a trustworthy way.


pages: 279 words: 96,180

Anything to Declare?: The Searching Tales of an HM Customs Officer by Jon Frost

airport security, blood diamonds, British Empire, friendly fire, haute cuisine, IFF: identification friend or foe, Louis Blériot

In my time as a uniformed officer I seized many weird and wonderful things: passengers, aircraft, presidential aircraft, a working tank, cars, lorries, boats and coffins; and I uncovered wild animals, killer snakes, bush meat, animal porn, poisonous vodka, dodgy medicine, bootleg prescriptions, pirated pills, toxic alcohol, firearms, sidearms, swords, explosives, stolen gold, dirty money, blood diamonds, child pornography, dead parrots and every drug known to man (and a few as yet unknown). And that was all just from searching the living. The dead? Well, we searched them, too. We had to. It’s amazing what you can hide in a coffin. There were many aspects of the job that made you think twice about ever again putting your fingers anywhere near your mouth.


pages: 335 words: 96,002

WEconomy: You Can Find Meaning, Make a Living, and Change the World by Craig Kielburger, Holly Branson, Marc Kielburger, Sir Richard Branson, Sheryl Sandberg

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, blood diamonds, Boeing 747, business intelligence, business process, carbon footprint, clean water, cleantech, Colonization of Mars, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, energy transition, family office, future of work, global village, impact investing, inventory management, James Dyson, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, market design, meta-analysis, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, pre–internet, Salesforce, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Virgin Galactic, working poor, Y Combinator

Enterprising for Good At law school across the pond in Oxford, it was easier for me to travel to the expanding WE Charity projects in Africa, which I visited frequently. No place struck me more than Sierra Leone, which is the most damaged country we've ever worked in. An 11-year civil war fueled by blood diamonds brought terror to every corner of the tiny West African nation. Thousands of boys, some as young as seven and eight, were forcibly recruited to the rebel ranks. Those who refused had a hand chopped off to stop them from fighting for the enemy. Young girls were taken as war brides. As the civil war approached its end, our organization began to build and repair schools, but reading and writing took a back seat to more remedial lessons.


pages: 341 words: 111,525

Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart by Tim Butcher

airport security, blood diamonds, clean water, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, discovery of the americas, European colonialism, failed state, Live Aid, Livingstone, I presume, Scramble for Africa, transatlantic slave trade

They were galvanised by the issue, launching unprecedented campaigns, both in Europe and America, to highlight the cruelty committed in the Congo Free State in the name of Leopold, focusing on the rubber industry and the violence unleashed by colonial agents to harvest it in the Congo. Just as campaigners today use the term Blood Diamonds to discredit gems produced in Africa's war zones, so their predecessors from a hundred years ago spoke of Red Rubber, publishing dramatic accounts of villagers being murdered or having their hands cut off to terrify their neighbours into harvesting more rubber. Leopold's representatives tried to suppress the flow of information emerging from the Congo and produced their own propaganda about the benign nature of the colony, but slowly and steadily, as information leaked out of the Congo over the years, smuggled out mainly by missionaries, they lost the public-relations battle.


Reset by Ronald J. Deibert

23andMe, active measures, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, availability heuristic, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamonds, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Cal Newport, call centre, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, high-speed rail, income inequality, information retrieval, information security, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, liberal capitalism, license plate recognition, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megastructure, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, New Journalism, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, QAnon, ransomware, Robert Mercer, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, sorting algorithm, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, the medium is the message, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

In Chile’s Atacama and Argentina’s Salar de Hombre Muerto regions, where lithium mining operations are located, local communities complain about water-related shortages and conflicts related to them, as well as contaminated water supplies.317 By far the most concerning mining operations are those in and around zones of conflict. Thanks to films like Blood Diamond and campaigns to regulate and eradicate trade in so-called “conflict minerals,” most people have a general appreciation that mining operations in places like Central Africa are bound up with warfare, organized crime, poor labour practices, smuggling, and kidnapping. But what may be overlooked is how the elements that are mined in these regions, such as cobalt, copper, tantalum, tin, and gold, are integral to the components that make up our electronic devices.


pages: 364 words: 112,681

Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How to Take It Back by Oliver Bullough

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, blood diamonds, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, capital controls, central bank independence, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, diversification, Donald Trump, energy security, failed state, financial engineering, Flash crash, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, high net worth, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, income inequality, joint-stock company, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, mass immigration, medical malpractice, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Sloane Ranger, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, WikiLeaks

In 2002, the governor of the central bank tried to transfer $50 million of the government’s money to his own account in the United States. When the request was blocked by Western bankers, he tried again. Angola is, in short, an almost perfect case study of modern transnational kleptocracy. Some of Global Witness’ earliest reports detailed the link between corruption and conflict in Angola, with UNITA profiting from ‘blood diamonds’, and MPLA dominating the oil industry. The NGO’s 1999 investigation – entitled A Crude Awakening – described how international energy companies were paying off the government, thereby colluding in the despoliation of the country and the immiseration of its people. ‘Corruption starts with the head of state, surrounded by a clique of politicians and business cronies,’ the report stated.


pages: 379 words: 114,807

The Land Grabbers: The New Fight Over Who Owns the Earth by Fred Pearce

activist lawyer, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blood diamonds, British Empire, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, Cape to Cairo, carbon footprint, clean water, corporate raider, credit crunch, Deng Xiaoping, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, Garrett Hardin, index fund, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, megacity, megaproject, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, Nikolai Kondratiev, offshore financial centre, out of africa, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, smart cities, structural adjustment programs, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, undersea cable, urban planning, urban sprawl, WikiLeaks

Sun Biofuels has joined a growing list of companies that tried and failed to make it big from the world’s sudden enthusiasm for biofuels in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Some might have succeeded. Others always looked like buccaneering bad boys. Energem was a Canadian company owned by a South African, Tony Teixeira. Previously known as DiamondWorks, it had a well-documented involvement with people who were trading “blood diamonds” from Angola and Sierra Leone. It had links to London mercenaries, and at one point employed Simon Mann, a former SAS officer who was later convicted in Equatorial Guinea for trying to organize a coup there. Allegations that Teixeira was aiding gun runners supplying South Africa–backed UNITA fighters in Angola led to his being dubbed a “merchant of death” by British foreign minister Peter Hain in 2000.


pages: 501 words: 114,888

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamonds, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, call centre, cashless society, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Dean Kamen, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital twin, disruptive innovation, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, food miles, fulfillment center, game design, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hive mind, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, loss aversion, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Lou Jepsen, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, mobile money, multiplanetary species, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Oculus Rift, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

Lastly, if your identity can be established, then a reputation score can easily be attached. This score allows for things like peer-to-peer ridesharing, which today require trusted third parties named “Uber” and “Lyft.” In the same way that blockchain can validate identity, it can also validate any asset—for example, ensuring that your engagement ring isn’t a blood diamond. Land titles are another opportunity, especially since a considerable portion of the planet lives on land they don’t own, or not officially. Consider Haiti. The combination of earthquakes, dictatorships, and forced evacuations makes determining who actually owns which bits of property a giant quagmire.


Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism by Harsha Walia

anti-communist, antiwork, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, blood diamonds, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, California gold rush, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, dark matter, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Food sovereignty, G4S, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, land reform, late capitalism, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, pension reform, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

The Democratic Republic of the Congo is home to one of the world’s largest displacement crises, with over four million internally displaced people. Major drivers of Congolese displacement are mining-related invasions and conflicts over diamonds, cobalt, copper, coltan, and gold, placing the country at the epicenter of violence and forced child labor related to “blood diamonds” and “blood batteries,” which implicates corporate criminals like Apple, De Beers, Google, Microsoft, and Tesla. To top it off, EU arms giants like Finmecannica and Airbus sell billions of euros worth of weapons fueling conflicts, while raking in billions of euros worth of contracts in the business of militarizing Fortress Europe.112 Europe is also pushing free trade agreements across the continent, promoting policies of capitalist investment and neoliberal liberalization at the expense of local producers.


pages: 494 words: 116,739

Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology by Kentaro Toyama

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blood diamonds, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, delayed gratification, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gamification, germ theory of disease, global village, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Khan Academy, Kibera, knowledge worker, liberation theology, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, North Sea oil, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, Y2K

Paying families to send their children to school through conditional cash transfers and imposing sin taxes on unhealthy goods are types of manipulation.15 Charity, in the form of handouts without attempts to nurture people’s capacity, can be helpful in emergency situations, but, when provided without reflection, it can become a crutch that stunts growth. And trade is often considered an unqualified good, but it easily devolves to exploitation when exchanges happen between parties of unequal power or wealth. Think blood diamonds and Nigerian oil. Mentorship is most studied in the business world, where it is sometimes contrasted with coaching and managing, both of which share mentorship’s acceptance of status disparity but differ from mentorship in important ways.16 In certain definitions of coaching, coaches are content-free sounding walls and program managers: They introduce no technical knowledge to the relationship.17 Unlike a coach, a mentor often brings relevant expertise and resources.


pages: 587 words: 117,894

Cybersecurity: What Everyone Needs to Know by P. W. Singer, Allan Friedman

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blood diamonds, borderless world, Brian Krebs, business continuity plan, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, do-ocracy, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fault tolerance, global supply chain, Google Earth, information security, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, M-Pesa, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, packet switching, Peace of Westphalia, pre–internet, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, RFC: Request For Comment, risk tolerance, rolodex, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, uranium enrichment, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day, zero-sum game

Companies like PayPal, Bank of America, MasterCard, and Visa were targeted because they stopped processing payments to the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, following its controversial publication of US diplomatic cables. The Zimbabwe government’s websites were targeted after its president’s wife sued a newspaper for US$15 million for publishing a WikiLeaks cable that linked her to the blood diamond trade. The Tunisian government was targeted for censoring the WikiLeaks documents as well as news about uprisings in the country (in a poignant twist, a noted local blogger, Slim Amamou, who had supported Anonymous in the effort, was arrested by the old regime and then became a minister in the new regime that the effort helped put into power).


pages: 1,117 words: 305,620

Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield by Jeremy Scahill

active measures, air freight, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, blood diamonds, business climate, citizen journalism, colonial rule, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, failed state, friendly fire, Google Hangouts, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, information security, Islamic Golden Age, Kickstarter, land reform, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, operational security, private military company, Project for a New American Century, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Strategic Defense Initiative, WikiLeaks

After the Nairobi bombings, the United States aggressively tried to freeze the assets of bin Laden and al Qaeda. In response, bin Laden sought new revenue streams and put Fazul in charge of an ambitious operation to penetrate the blood diamond market. From 1999 to 2001, Fazul would largely operate out of Liberia under the protection of its dictator, Charles Taylor. In all, al Qaeda took in an estimated $20 million in untraceable blood diamond money, much of it from the killing fields of Sierra Leone. By that point, Fazul was a wanted man, actively hunted by the US authorities, and al Qaeda spent huge sums of money to keep him safe.


pages: 462 words: 142,240

Iron Sunrise by Stross, Charles

blood diamonds, disinformation, dumpster diving, Future Shock, gravity well, hiring and firing, industrial robot, life extension, loose coupling, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, phenotype, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, RFID, side project, speech recognition, technological singularity, trade route, urban sprawl, zero-sum game

A name for something to hate. The loop path branched, and her lightbug darted off to one side. Wednesday followed it tiredly. It was past midnight by her local time, and she badly needed something to keep her going. Here, the concourse took a turn for the more conventional. The vegetation thinned out, replaced by tiled blood diamond panes the size of her feet. Large structures bumped up from the floor and walls, freight lifts and baggage handlers and stairwells leading down into the docking tunnels that led out to the berthed starships. Some ships maintained their own gravity, didn’t they? Wednesday wasn’t sure what to expect of this one — wasn’t it from Old Earth?


pages: 482 words: 161,169

Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry by Peter Warren Singer

barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamonds, borderless world, British Empire, colonial rule, conceptual framework, disinformation, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, full employment, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, market friction, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, Peace of Westphalia, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, private military company, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, risk/return, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, supply-chain management, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

Kammerer award, among the finalists in international affairs books of the year by the Gelber Prize, and a "top ten summer read" by Businessioeek The work was featured in the History Channel documentary postscript: the lfssons of iraq Soldiers for Hire and provided background for plotlines in the TV drama The West Wing and the movie Blood Diamonds. Even more exciting for an academic like me was the positive response from the folks working in the field, from being invited to lecture on the topic at military bases to being emailed by a contractor I had originally interviewed for the book that he had just picked up a copv at Bagdad International Airport (BIAP, one of the early hubs for the industry in Iraq).


pages: 641 words: 147,719

The Rough Guide to Cape Town, Winelands & Garden Route by Rough Guides, James Bembridge, Barbara McCrea

affirmative action, Airbnb, blood diamonds, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, carbon footprint, colonial rule, F. W. de Klerk, ghettoisation, haute cuisine, Maui Hawaii, Murano, Venice glass, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Skype, sustainable-tourism, trade route, transfer pricing, young professional

Cape Town was subsequently able to stand in for 35 diverse locations for the 2005 Nicolas Cage movie Lord of War, including Bolivia, Beirut, Berlin, the Caribbean, Sierra Leone, Indonesia, Odessa and New York City. Nowadays, Capetonians are increasingly spotting major Hollywood names in bars along the Atlantic seaboard beaches, as 24, starring Kiefer Sutherland, Blood Diamond with Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Connelly, and Clint Eastwood-directed Invictus, starring Matt Damon and Morgan Freeman, have been shot in the city. Following the arrival of the world-class R350m Cape Town Film Studios in 2010, the city has hosted the filming of major Hollywood productions, including Dredd and Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, while scenes from the fourth season of TV drama Homeland were shot in the Mother City in 2014.


pages: 547 words: 172,226

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson

"Robert Solow", Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, blood diamonds, BRICs, British Empire, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of the americas, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, household responsibility system, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, invention of movable type, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, land reform, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, Paul Samuelson, price stability, profit motive, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, Simon Kuznets, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, working poor

It also gave further impetus to the process of state centralization as diamond revenues could now be used for building a state bureaucracy and infrastructure and for investing in education. In Sierra Leone and many other sub-Saharan African nations, diamonds fueled conflict between different groups and helped to sustain civil wars, earning the label Blood Diamonds for the carnage brought about by the wars fought over their control. In Botswana, diamond revenues were managed for the good of the nation. The change in subsoil mineral rights was not the only policy of state building that Seretse Khama’s government implemented. Ultimately, the Chieftaincy Act of 1965 passed by the legislative assembly prior to independence, and the Chieftaincy Amendment Act of 1970 would continue the process of political centralization, enshrining the power of the state and the elected president by removing from chiefs the right to allocate land and enabling the president to remove a chief from office if necessary.


pages: 603 words: 182,781

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamonds, Boeing 747, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cleantech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, food miles, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, gentleman farmer, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Dubai also trafficks in sex and death. An estimated ten thousand kid-napped girls move through here, while the weapons dealer Viktor Bout reputedly armed both Hezbollah and the Iraqi insurgency from the emirates. His fleet of fifty aircraft is the black market FedEx, exchanging assault rifles and ammunition for oil money and blood diamonds. Defying all sanctions, his planes supplied more or less every warlord in Africa, including both sides of Angola’s civil war. Al Qaeda and the U.S. military were also his customers, as was the United Nations, which unwittingly relied on him to deliver aid to Darfur. (Bout was extradited to the United States in the fall of 2010.)


pages: 772 words: 203,182

What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . And What Other Countries Got Right by George R. Tyler

8-hour work day, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Black Swan, blood diamonds, blue-collar work, Bolshevik threat, bonus culture, British Empire, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lake wobegon effect, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Money creation, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, pension reform, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, pirate software, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

And most are multinationals exploiting tax havens abroad, small rogue nations, such as Switzerland or the Cayman Islands, which parasitically pirate their neighbors’ taxes. Tax havens are state-sponsored thieves that have created an enormous industry serving drug and arms dealers, despots, American multinationals, blood diamond warlords, and African elephant killers (tusk smugglers)—along with your ordinary wealthy tax dodger. Experts such as the economist Martin Sullivan, formerly with the US Treasury Department and now at Washington-based Tax Analysts, have found that havens enable many profitable American multinationals to pay little or no tax.


pages: 740 words: 217,139

The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution by Francis Fukuyama

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamonds, California gold rush, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Day of the Dead, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, double entry bookkeeping, endogenous growth, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Garrett Hardin, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, John Perry Barlow, Khyber Pass, land reform, land tenure, means of production, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, principal–agent problem, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, Scramble for Africa, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), spice trade, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Whereupon the prince hastened to order that silver spoons be provided “remarking that with silver and gold he could not secure a retinue, but that with a retinue he was in a position to secure silver and gold.”37 During the 1990s, Sierra Leone and Liberia collapsed into warlordism as a result of Foday Sankoh and Charles Taylor building retinues of retainers, which they then used to acquire not silver spoons but blood diamonds. But war is not motivated by the acquisitive impulse alone. Although warriors may be greedy for silver and gold, they also display courage in battle not so much for the sake of resources, but for honor.38 Honor has to do with the willingness to risk one’s life for a cause, and for the recognition of other warriors.


pages: 828 words: 232,188

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy by Francis Fukuyama

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamonds, British Empire, centre right, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, conceptual framework, cotton gin, crony capitalism, Day of the Dead, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, household responsibility system, income inequality, information asymmetry, invention of the printing press, iterative process, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labour management system, land reform, land tenure, life extension, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, means of production, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, open economy, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, Port of Oakland, post-industrial society, post-materialism, price discrimination, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, stem cell, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

In 1999, the RUF launched an assault on Sierra Leone’s capital, Freetown, known as “Operation No Living Thing,” in which entire neighborhoods were looted and their inhabitants indiscriminately raped and killed.1 How does one explain this level of human degradation? One answer, usually not articulated too openly but often tacitly assumed, is that things were somehow always like this in Africa. The Sierra Leone conflict, portrayed in the popular film Blood Diamond, as well as others like the insurgency of the Lord’s Resistance Army in northern Uganda, or the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda, have reinforced Western notions that Africa is a place of brutality and barbarism. Robert D. Kaplan and others have suggested that in West Africa the veneer of civilization had broken down, and these societies were returning to an older, primordial form of tribalism, only fought with modern weapons.2 This answer reflects a great deal of ignorance about historical Africa, and about tribalism more broadly.


pages: 1,261 words: 294,715

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky

autonomous vehicles, Bernie Madoff, biofilm, blood diamonds, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Brownian motion, car-free, clean water, cognitive dissonance, corporate personhood, corporate social responsibility, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, desegregation, different worldview, domesticated silver fox, double helix, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Flynn Effect, framing effect, fudge factor, George Santayana, global pandemic, Golden arches theory, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, John von Neumann, Loma Prieta earthquake, long peace, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, microaggression, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mouse model, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, placebo effect, publication bias, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Rosa Parks, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, twin studies, ultimatum game, Walter Mischel, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game

Illiteracy, death in infancy, death in childbirth, death from preventable disease. Capital punishment. Here are things invented in the last century: Bans on the use of certain types of weapons. The World Court and the concept of crimes against humanity. The UN and the dispatching of multinational peacekeeping forces. International agreements to hinder trafficking of blood diamonds, elephant tusks, rhino horns, leopard skins, and humans. Agencies that collect money to aid disaster victims anywhere on the planet, that facilitate intercontinental adoption of orphans, that battle global pandemics and send medical personnel to any place of conflict. Yes, I know, I’m an utter naïf if I think laws are universally enforced.