Chinese Ad Resellers On Anti-Google Hunger Strike 151
itwbennett writes "About 200 employees from 7 Chinese ad reselling companies are protesting outside Google's offices in Shanghai in response to Google terminating their contracts, said Fan Meiyong, a representative for the group. 40 of those have gone on a hunger strike that will last until the group's grievances are resolved, Fan added. The ad resellers have said they have held talks with Google about the matter but they still don't know why the contracts were terminated. The group has even written an open letter to Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, asking them for their intervention."
Hunger Strike? (Score:4, Insightful)
Man those chinese are desperate. This isn't a prison, Google isn't responsible for your personal well-being under any international treaty, convention, or agreement
Re:Hunger Strike? (Score:5, Interesting)
In china you can hire professional mourners for funerals, so I wonder if you can hire professional hunger strikers.
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In China you can hire just about anything you want, as long as you grease the palms of bureaucrats first.
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Haha. That is so funny.
Is that the same as when a big company "supports" politicians and the politicians in turn "support" that company?
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Don't be ridiculous, that's a totally legitimate business practice. You're probably just upset because you don't have enough money to put yourself on an even playing field with the big boys... maybe you should try working harder and having some personal accountability. Commie.
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So true. I can't wait for the day I have kids and tell them I make all the money, so I get to tell them what to do (the dished for starters). I have to start somewhere.
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Re:Hunger Strike? (Score:4, Funny)
Cool. I'd like to hire one of them for my next design review at work.
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Not an original thought of course...
http://www.economistsdoitwithmodels.com/2010/05/13/dilbert-and-wally-on-outsourcing-and-leverage/ [economists...models.com]
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now that more are wanting an actual livable wage you'll see some place like Indonesia or some other have starved third world country suddenly become the "capitalist paradise" and China will end up with tons of empty factories just like we in the USA have.
I've noticed lots of the cheapest products (plastic buckets, plastic cutlery, very cheap clothes, plastic £2 toys etc) are now made in Vietnam. This is the stuff that used to be made in China in the 1980s when the electronics were made in Japan.
There's much of Africa waiting to be exploited too.
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At my wife's uncle's funeral in Malaysia his family paid for two (2) days of professional crying. Seriously, nobody is going to sit out in the tropical sun crying if you can pay somebody else to do it for you.
Re:Hunger Strike? (Score:5, Funny)
In china you can hire professional mourners for funerals, so I wonder if you can hire professional hunger strikers.
Sure you can, but try to avoid the ones with the "Will Hunger Strike For Food" signs...
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Yes you can. But tell them you'll pay after the job. If they are good at their job, they'll die!!!!
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Really, they should just hire the Falun Gong people. Experts at protesting and garnering sympathy. This hunger strike just looks kind of stupid.
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Really, they should just hire the Falun Gong people. Experts at protesting and garnering sympathy. This hunger strike just looks kind of stupid.
Of course as soon as the Chinese government noticed that Falun Gong was involved, in even the most tangential way, they'd freak out and nuke the entire town... Hmm, I guess that'd show Google though!
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In china you can hire professional mourners for funerals
Similar used to apply in Ireland and Scotland. It's where the surname "Keener" comes from, from the irish/scottish gaelic "caoineadh". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keening [wikipedia.org]
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Re:Hunger Strike? (Score:5, Interesting)
Man those chinese are desperate. This isn't a prison, Google isn't responsible for your personal well-being under any international treaty, convention, or agreement.
I dunno, but it sure appears weird from thousands of miles away. I know it's an off the wall theory, but could it actually be motivated by the government as a way to marginalize the idea of a hunger strike as a meaningful protest so that actual political dissidents who go on hunger strikes might be more easily brushed off?
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Hunger strikes don't need marginalizing; they're the grown-up version of holding one's breath.
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Actually, Gandhi made several hunger-strikes, but they all occurred only after he was a hugely popular leader- which meant that the possibility of his death, brought massive pressure over the ruling British Government who would have to deal with anarchic rage riots that could break out in the population.
To protest the Salt tax, he simply marched to the sea and made his own , with about a few hundred other people.
.
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Technically, that wasn't a hunger strike; you refer to the Dandi march, which was more of civil disobediance. The point was to make salt, which was a forbidden commodity.
The hunger strike was a different tactic, which he used more often to highlight differences between his own people (Hindu-Muslim unity and so on). And yes, that was reasonably successful too.
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Yes, but it is their shit hole now. Everybody has the right to their own shit hole.
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This is probably the most insightful comment I've read this week.
Re:Hunger Strike? - seriously? (Score:2)
The elitist attitude over India is unfortunate, particularly since apparently roughly half that number of Americans have issues with local water having unsafe elements in it (and we have only 1/3 the population of India!). See this [nytimes.com] NY Times article on the US problem. While
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hunger strikes can work, it just helps to have a legitimate cause. In this scenario, there isn't one.
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A hunger strike cannot be effective if the fact that it is being undertaken is not publicized so as to be known by the people who are to be impressed, concerned or embarrassed by it.
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LoB
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Apparent to whom?
(yuk yuk!)
Re:Hunger Strike? (Score:4, Interesting)
Agree - absurd theory. Just some nutty self-serving individuals. The only reason to even bring this up is an attempt to blindly play on the "big, bad, scary communist government" theme.
The truth is, the PRC is completely clueless about PR (public relations) and will continue to be roundly slaughtered in the court of public opinion because of this.
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The truth is, the PRC is completely clueless about PR (public relations) and will continue to be roundly slaughtered in the court of public opinion because of this.
Far from it; they are very competent, as you will understand if you look at eg the Olympics and their efforts in space. PR is not always about saying "Please love me, I am sooo nice" - when the Chinese government seem to be oblivious to how we in the West see them, it is to send a message about strength and independence.
Look at the way they handle the criticism of their human rights record. Objectively, they are doing more or less as much as a nation can sensibly do; a responsible government will not just i
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Not so much clueless as uncaring. The opinion they care is that of higher ups in certain countries. That's pretty much it.
And that's not that much different from US, or any modern Western nation really. We still rape and pillage many 3rd world countries without caring about their public opinions.
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Man those chinese are desperate.
Yes, they probably are. If you were sacked and not given a reason, you would probably be asking questions. These folks didn't start the hunger strike the moment they got shitcanned. They tried to find out what happened, how to resolve it and the like. This is the only thing they can think of doing - for better or worse.
I don't know the background of this at all, they could have been doing shonky business practice and got caught out once too many by Google or perhaps Google thought they could make more mo
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This is the only thing they can think of doing - for better or worse.
Except for, you know, like taking Google to court? Yes, I'm sure the court system in China isn't as good as the court system in freer, western, nations but at least do that.
Or, better yet, run your own ad company. When you are a useless middleman as it seems these people were, don't be surprised when companies streamline things to leave you out.
I'm really having a hard time finding sympathy for a company who totally relied on only one company to be a middleman. Thats just a piss-poor business stra
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If you were sacked and not given a reason, you would probably be asking questions.
If you are a permanent employee in the USA you still can be sacked and not given a reason. If you are a contractor in the USA nobody will even think about giving you a reason. Contractors are specifically employed for temporary, special jobs that are not expected to be needed all the time. This is becoming even more popular in the USA because labor laws put more and more burden on employers for the privilege of employing pe
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Hunger strikes have worked when the person(s) you are trying to convince are not responsible for you.
Google's China strategy has always been a mess (Score:3, Insightful)
and I don't think Larry and Sergey will give to damn to those Chinese resellers.
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Protests? In CHINA?! (Score:3, Funny)
Get out the Google Tanks! Oops, wrong regime. Get out the Google StreetView data collection vehicles! If they're not jumping from the building yet, then things are pretty good in Shanghai. Damn, I love me some Shanghai tiles...
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Protests are SO overrated. If banks fuck up your savings, it's TOTALLY acceptable to all bend over and take it like a man.
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If my bank fucked up my savings, I certainly wouldn't waste my time "protesting". Protests are useless. We have a court system now, which replaces the older practice of stringing up cheating bankers from the nearest lamppost. I prefer the older practice, but one tries to keep with the times.
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torches and pitchforks works better. you can even upgrade to a truck full of rednecks with shotguns. however, court room is not the answer to your problem, because real winner in the court rooms are them lawyers.
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I like how you chose taxpayer over citizen. $44,107 is nowhere near as inflammatory as $124,000 now is it?
Either one is pretty damn inflamatory! But only taxpayers are even in the game as far as paying the debt down. And it's insane: We could cease paying Social Security and Defense entirely, and that would merely break even - now think about paying down the debt. The austerity coming for us may be worse than Greece or France.
Could it possibly maybe be that wee need to dramatically cut back on the role of government not because of some political argument, but simply because we're flat broke, and can't borrow
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Pointless (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Pointless (Score:5, Insightful)
If Google violated a contract, take them to court. If not, then there is no room for complaint.
Oh sure there is, the court of public opinion doesn't follow the same rules as a court of law.
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and if there's no public opinion, there's always grandstanding.
initial thought (Score:4, Interesting)
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Live to work (Score:2)
I'd say I was impressed that they're going on a hunger strike, except that in doing so they place their health on the line for their employer.
Perhaps it's the western perspective that work isn't something worth our health?
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I'd say I was impressed that they're going on a hunger strike
Would you be equally impressed if 20 young men are walking around your house and chanting "Microlith, hire us or else our death will be your fault!" (Note that you don't need anything that those guys are selling.) Will you hire them? Will you hire them if your name is not Microlith but Google?
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Two things:
1. Atheism is the lack of a belief. You don't really "believe in it", in the sense that there's no dogma, holy book, prophet or anything of the sort. Atheists can argue on things like what is the highest calling and where morality comes from precisely because none of that is defined anywhere.
2. It is not necessary at all to think the highest purpose is reproduction. IMO there really isn't any. There's no godless version of the mandate "be fruitful and multiply", it's just that reproducing is how
huh? (Score:2)
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Or their google jobs were the only thing putting food on their table. If they are going to starve anyway, might as well get attention and possibly redress for it.
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Think about it... they can afford to NOT WORK AT ALL, in order to protest and hunger strike. I'd say leave 'em to it. There are folks that can't afford to hunger strike, at least these strikers are leaving the jobs for those that need them.
On second thought: Can get all the other middle-men in the world to go on hunger strike too?
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There are folks that can't afford to hunger strike, at least these strikers are leaving the jobs for those that need them.
WTF? Who can't afford to not buy groceries?
Google "reselling" is over (Score:5, Insightful)
The "search engine optimization" community is waking up to the fact that Google "reselling" is over. The October 27th merger of "Google Places" into Google web search wasn't about "places". It was about "businesses". Google is pulling third-party revenue in-house. Google is squeezing out "made for AdWords" sites, "directories", and other intermediaries that are just forwarding clicks. Search for "London hotels" or "DVD player", and notice how far down you have to go to see an organic search result. If you want to advertise a product that's found by search, you now talk to Google directly.
This will put a big dent in the "search engine optimization" industry. We'll see many junk sites going under, too.
Bing, having copied Google in this within days, is doing roughly the same thing.
The guys in China are getting hit by this, but they're just collateral damage of a major policy change.
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The guys in China are getting hit by this, but they're just collateral damage of a major policy change.
Or perhaps they are just experiencing the backlash of being worthless human beings who fail to offer anything of value to society. Is there any way we can get the rest of the link-farmers, fake bloggers and forum spammers to starve themselves to death? Failing that, can we just shoot them?
yeah they didnt offer anything (Score:2)
now, ALL that revenue wi
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That would be awkward if there was a starving chinese dude by the front door
It's not so awkward when it's self-inflicted. At that point it's just stupid.
what about morons (Score:2)
it is ironic for someone to talk about this, that, spam, internet and whatnot without knowing shit about it. read some i.t. history first and then blabber about.
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I think you're missing the point. They are ad resellers. The nationality of the scum is irrelevant.
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This will put a big dent in the "search engine optimization" industry. We'll see many junk sites going under, too.
I believe that is called "cutting the middle man", which is always a good thing.
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Indeed. I can't wait for these wastes of resources to die.
They didn't protest to the China government (Score:2)
... because they would risk being imprisoned and suddenly disappear, I guess.
Smear Campaign? (Score:1, Insightful)
Anyone willing to bet they're being paid by Baidu, or even better Beijing? Those on the hunger strike probably get a nice bump. Or maybe they're just using the only chance they'll get to protest in public. If this was a Chinese company they were protesting against, there would be 200 freshly dug graves.
To quote George Carlin (Score:2)
Seriously, if you have a contract dispute, take them to court.
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"Don't eat, see if I give a shit"
Seriously, if you have a contract dispute, take them to court.
In China, take them to court in China. Seriously?
American companies do this shit all the time... (Score:1)
...Work with a local partner, get them to do the hard work, then decide to keep the benefits for themselves, drop the local guy..
Then act surprised when its not considered acceptable (or even legal) in other parts of the world.
The American legal system is so completely skewed in favour of the big guys that even people who decry this in other areas accept it as 'just the way things are'.
The google guys obviously totally believe their own bullshit about what good people they are, and probably don't realise ho
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They worked for google, they got money from google.
Google got somebody else to do the work (themselves), google stopped paying a workforce no longer needed.
Omfgod google is evul for not paying workforce to do nothing! Workforce doing nothing really hard! Google entitled to pay workforce doing nothing!
No seriously, you're trying to make it sound like they are entitled to something beyond their contracts. While it really suck to lose your job and I can imagine it sucking even more in China, the reality of a n
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Addendum:
That said it does seem like China has some gotchas regarding terminating employees. If the local law prohibits google from doing it the way they did, then of course there is a case. If not, there isn't. In the first case they should be taking it to court, not protesting, in the latter case they should be looking for new jobs instead of protesting. In both cases, they should stop protesting.
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If a partner company isn't needed, then even in the most liberal first world countries the company would be closed down without question - only there the laws would ensure that the employees get decent termination compensation and the owners take the most of the loss for the failing business model.
If your business model is 'reselling adwords', then it's your bet with your capital that reselling adwords is something useful that people want to pay for. Well, it isn't - the link-sites border on spam and aren't
Newsflash (Score:4, Informative)
Chinese labor laws are not the same as those in the US or Europe.
http://www.chinalawblog.com/2010/01/terminating_your_china_employe.html [chinalawblog.com]
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The article says that google didn't terminate a contract with the employees, but with the resellers that were employing them. It effectively put them out of work, but the protesters were never actually employed by google.
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Re:Newsflash (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure. Great point and quite interesting. The problem is that it doesn't apply here.
Google did not employ these people. These were companies that Google stopped doing business with. As long as Google didn't have some long term binding contract that ceasing business violates they are not 'legally' responsible for the employees that these companies can no longer afford to pay because they don't have Google's business.
This article doesn't go into detail but I believe, even in China, it is OK to cease employment if your company goes under which is exactly what is going to happen to these companies since their business model was so flawed as to depend on a sole customer anyway. Whether the "in China" factor means that there are more severe ramifications for the terrible CEOs that run these organizations is another matter.
Re:Newsflash (Score:4, Informative)
Please note though that Chinese courts have a history of showing "fairness", where the definition of fair is probably different from yours.
E.g. if my truck driver drives off a cliff while delivering the goods you ordered to you, you usually can't sue me for the loss of the goods. Instead you're likely to be asked to share in the total costs of the truck, the goods and damages to the drivers family. The fact that you did not directly employ the driver nor owned the truck does not matter. To the court, that's just meaningless paperwork. The driver and the truck were doing a job for you.
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Re:Newsflash (Score:4, Informative)
Your link discussed China's* sobering anti-layoff laws that make USA's at-will employment look like the joke it really is.
So looking beyond "ad resellers" and Google to the whole outsourcing deal, it's hard to see how laws against US companies layoffs are a problem today. It's here in the US that they can and have been aggressively shrinking forces, and over in Asia where they are growing, so it will be several years before they even think of shrinking, if US outsourcing doubiously ever reverses its growth.
Further, though there are tons of plants manufacturing and assembling stuff there, I thought they were Chinese-owned, so we won't be the ones doing the firing and the point is moot. For the giants who DO see a danger in Chinese land, they'll just do the sensible thing and open India centers like the rest of the world has been doing recently. I reckon India only seems to be used for coding and English-language phone support, so I've no idea about their manufacturing power.
But that's not our problem. The outsourcing will continue wherever it is linguistically and politically easier. Under recent signs of US prosperity, forced accretion has been obversed in US branches while headcounts rise in Asian branches. More power is going to India, Australia and the Philippines because it makes perfect sense to beancounters to avoid promoting American labor again, in spite of what that means to us here.
*Europe too, without additional detail.
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Heh, I'm not even a lawyer and already realized US firms on Chinese ground will copy a US trick to avoid China's ad-hoc layoff prevention:
Stop growing and start sub-contracting new work/manufacturing to Chinese-owned firms. That eliminates the local contract bindings and allows thousands of ties to be cut by just severing one business relationship --without lowering your internal headcount.
As a bonus, report back to president Obama that 0 jobs were added outside the US and 100% (of 3 or 4 per month, but hey
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Why do you believe you have the right to be overpaid for a job? Or that it's more moral to hire an American than someone in China? Simple racism?
Meanwhile, China has been losing jobs steadily, because they've much of it's growth has come from low-skilled manufacturing jobs, and those workers are being replaced by robots. Long term, even that's a great thing - no human should spend his days in mindless repetitive labor.
Want a job that will stay in the US? Do something that can only be done locally, or do
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Why do you believe you have the right to be overpaid for a job? Or that it's more moral to hire an American than someone in China? Simple racism?
It seems that my post just flew by and got tl;dr by some, so read my post to find what I really said.
Compare jobs with software: OpenOffice was in good hands, and the Oracle's ownership apparently killed it. Most people will take something produced by the original crew than the "new" our outsourced ones. Tech support quality loss is a prime example of that.
With the lost jobs that up and left the coutry, people can't just "
Do something that can only be done locally, or do something better than those who can work cheaper.
" is not how a country gets out of 10% unemployment, especially with expert economist
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Please be more sensitive.
Have you seen an Indian shanty-town? The "poor" in America live better than most everyone who has ever lived. When a software development job moves to India, 1 American is looking for work, but 5-10 Indian jobs are created (the software developer and the service people he will in turn employ), often lifting families out of abject poverty. There's no moral injustice in a job moving to India, and only by racism could we pretend there was.
I've worked in several professions and re-invented my job skills more
did it even dawn on them Google is having leaving? (Score:2)
It does seem strange to go on a hunger strike because you lost your job. It does solve the problem of finding ways to feed yourself though but even then, it can only be a short term solution.
LoB
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Google never left China. I live right next to their Beijing office and they've never stopped recruiting or growing. All they did is moved Google Search to their Hong Kong servers and moved some people back and forth between their Shanghai and Beijing offices.
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Or are you saying you know for sure those employees are Ad Sales related or just that Google has employees in China?
LoB
Hunger strike? (Score:2)
Or I might just eat the pizza in front of them to get them hungry enough to go eat something. Depends on how much or how little I t
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Well, in this case, it gets them in the news and attempts to sway the court of public opinion.
If you were a prisoner of an oppressive state, it is often the only form of resistance you have.
WTF.....? (Score:2)
Re:And that'll work out so well for them. (Score:4, Funny)
It's a simple answer. We'll just alter Google Maps to show Shanghai in the middle of the China Sea, and then *blub*, that will be the end of that.
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Whatever they are, I bet they get first class seating on the B-Ark.
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purchase ad space in bulk and sell small parcels at markup? allows a manufacturer to outsource their sales/marketing department.