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The Effects of Exporting Used PCs To Africa
retroworks writes "According to this UK MailOnline story, computers donated to Africa are causing quite a few problems. The BBC does a similar story on the junk computers from rich countries found on the ground in Africa. But all of the footage is of the junk PCs; there is no film of any repaired or good computers. There have been a dozen stories now about the bad apples. It seems like there have to be good ones, too, to cover the costs of shipping. Some of the ones in the Mail story actually look decent. Is there more balanced coverage of used computer exports, many of which provide affordable technology to poor people? Organizations like Greenpeace and Basel Action Network are promoting electronics recyclers with zero-export policies. One organization, the World Reuse Repair and Recycling Association, is promoting a 'Fair Trade Coffee' approach to moderate the number of bad computers exported, and has a video showing both sides of the story. A ban on exports leaves Africa with a choice of spending a year's income on a new PC, buying mixed loads of computers from undercapitalized recyclers, or remaining without this level of technology. And our choice seems to be to donate a decent computer mixed with other people's junk, or to grind it up in a perverse tribute to Vance Packard, as 'obsolescence in hindsight.'"
The problem is, all the good charity work doesn't cancel out the toxic fallout from the scrapped hardware. Besides, the junk the richer countries send there is hardly a charitable donation, it's a dumping ground.
We used "development aid" for ages to get rid of our surplus and other crap we'd have had to dispose of for a lot of money, now we do the same with electronics. Where's this news?
I remember someone doing humanitary work there, giving a speech and essentially saying "Please help us. By not helping us". When we dump free food on a third world country, we ruin their farmers because they can't compete with free food. When we dump free clothing on them, we ruin the few textile mills they have. Essentially, what we do with development aid is to push them more and more into dependency because we ruin whatever industry for the local market might start to grow. Instead we force them to build industries for export, so they can somehow pay back the "development help" we "grant" them.
Want to help? Then don't. Don't send your crap down there. Start trading with them. But not with some international corporation that squeezes the country and the people dry. Trade with companies from there.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's really sick how the "rich" countries think they're helping when they use their own country's way of life as a template to "improve" a third-world country. If you live in a country like the US (or Canada, where I am), take a serious look around and try to realize that your country's ways are totally FUCKED UP AND SHOULD NEVER BE DUPLICATED ELSEWHERE!!!
I know, let's fatten up the world's entire population on McDonald's, chips, chocolate, and all the other junk food we live off. Let's advertise Coke and Pepsi to the masses and rot everybody's bodies all to hell. Let's send them magazines that promote beauty as the most important facet of any human being. Let's teach them that the only thing that really matters is money and power, and that one should do anything possible to surround themselves with such things.
So please, leave the rest of the world alone. Starvation and disease may be one hell of a way to live, but think of what you're introducing them to by pushing your way of life onto these people. Truly sickening, if you ask me.
I'm actually serious. I don't believe in any kind of aid that is made of physical material. If you want to help people, you send books, you send teachers. You don't send rice and garbage.
A few reasons for this:
1) When you grow food and eat it, you poop those nutrients right back into your own ground. You send that to another country, and you are impoverishing your own.
2) Sending broken computers to vicious, fell people results in exactly this kind of thing. We want to believe that everyone has a kind of collective mentality, but most people on this earth are free-market all the way. And a totally free market is a murderous hellhole with a few fabulously wealthy people and the masses in abject poverty. That's a free market. Democratic capitalism is great because it utilizes that "free market" drive (aka greed) to effect positive social change. But it requires constraints to make it move in that direction. Once people see how well a social mindset plus greed works to improve the lives of all (and create a massive middle class, which is key to a functioning society), then they nurture that. They feel a part of something. They neither need nor want to smash people's heads in for a computer monitor full of poison. Most African countries haven't figured this out, and that's their problem--both as in "the problem they have" and "not our problem." We can't fix it, but it also seems we don't recognize that.
Why are the countries that are at the top of the heap at the top of the heap? Simple. We are better. I am absolutely serious. The cultures of Europe and Asia understand the power of a group mentality. They are on different points on that continuum, and that's fine. But we all have it.
Africa is what you get when you don't have that. Everyone is working randomly because they don't care about each other because they don't see that they are the same and that cooperation is the only way to success.
They think that other countries have become rich and comfortable because of luck. But we built this from the ground up--especially for those of us whose ancestors came from the dump known as the British Isles. Our ancestors were just like this until the Romans brought literacy and we saw the awesome power of working together outside of small collectives (Roman Empire).
The Brits got it. The African countries haven't.
This isn't to say they all don't get it, but the problem is that you need a substantial majority of people buying in before it works.
3) Last, handouts are not good for the human psyche. They keep you believing that you are not capable of doing something yourself. I firmly believe that every human being is as capable as any other (at something!), and it's simply a matter of finding that and having that be nurtured by one's surroundings. This is the problem with welfare as well. You walk a very narrow line between making sure you don't have people dying on the streets and cultivating a lawless and irresponsible culture that is not tied to personal achievement and responsibility. Give a man a computer monitor, and he'll smash it open on his neighbors head to get at the copper inside. Teach him to build one, and... Okay it doesn't work, but you see where I'm going.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but Africa is a fucking mess. But no matter what the hippie-type liberals say, it's not because we like coffee and chocolate. It's 100% the fault of the local societies (or lack thereof). It's the fault of governments not working for the people, which is really just a function of the people not working for the people. And we can't help that.
I don't buy into any of this Fair Trade / don't buy diamonds / hippie bullshit. If other people can't run their countries right; if they can't even get organized enough to overthrow their dictators and/or plantation owners (or, rather, when they do, they then just devolve into infighting and become the same thing), then I can't do anything about
I'm going to guess you have no clue what the person is talking about, and simply spouting off with something that sounds like rhetorical racist-flagging when in actuality the problem being referred to is the social mentality of taking what's needed with violence.
The last time I checked, there really aren't many times in America, China, Russia, European nations, or even Canada where a large group of militia held back food from large numbers of individuals and systematically assassinated droves of people in a given path. At least not for the last 200 or so years.
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Care to tell me how you'd deal with the epidemic of obesity in the west?
First, by West, you must mean US. There is no epidemic of obesity in Europe.
My solution is simple - the new "Can't catch it, can't eat it" policy. Worked for millions of years. Put it in place in stages.
Stage one is a ban on food delivery services. The morbidly obese will starve down to a weight where they can at least get into their cars and get to the drive thru.
Stage two is a ban on drive thrus, so people will starve down to a weight when they can actually get out of their cars and into the counter or grocery store to get their food.
Stage three is a weight limit on disabled parking passes. If you're so fat that you need a special parking permit to get to your food, you'll starve down to a weight where you can at least hobble in to get your food.
Stage four is a ban on any personal scooters or electric wheelchairs that can support more than 250 lbs. If you're too fat to propel yourself, you'll starve down to a weight where you can at least stand up on your own.
Stage five is the big one - the doors of any food retailer will no longer be allowed to be any wider than 20". Then people will at least starve down to a size where they can fit through the door.
See? Piece of cake. Er....
paintball