Word: cheap
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...honest about this: China's long overdue development, whilst in many ways impressive, has primarily been underwritten by profit-driven Western corporations. Corporations have moved to manufacture in China en masse because of very cheap labour, minimal regulation and the ability to externalize other costs, namely the environmental impact. This has then indirectly improved China's lot. How has China otherwise added value or changed the world for the better in modern times? Innovations? Improvements to the human condition? Global benevolence? Becoming the world's temporary sweatshop and biggest copycat does not place one in the league of great nations...
Back in 2000, Steve Martin was talking about the hack writer's trick of getting sympathy for one character by making another one a total rotter. "I think that's the cheap and ugly way out," he said. "What I hate in movies - I mean action movies - is, 'We need the audience to really hate the bad guy. So let's have him kill two 6-year-olds...
...Pelevin takes an even bleaker outlook. The drunken narrator comes to realize that “the entire immense country in which [he] lived was made up of lots and lots of these lousy little closets where there was a smell of garbage and people had just been drinking cheap port,” an acknowledgment of the tedium and squalidness of quotidian life in the Soviet Union. Other stories critique the endless, labyrinthine bureaucracy and the culture of mistrust, where civilians spy on their fellow citizens...
...simple health concerns. Michael Pollan, renowned author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto,” notes in the Washington Post that the substance “may be cheap in the supermarket, but in the environment it could not be more expensive.” The American corn industry, which produces grain en masse, relies on monoculture: growing one crop on the same land year after year, which depletes soil and requires large quantities of fertilizers. As Pollan writes...
...film's solid three-act structure, Act 1 gets good mileage from the bitter-truth premise. In this world, a retirement home is called "A Sad Place for Hopeless Old People"; a motel is "A Cheap Place to Have Intercourse with a Near Stranger." There's even truth in advertising, as indicated by the slogans for Coke ("It's very famous") and Pepsi ("When they don't have Coke...