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88% of Electronics Exports Reused, Not Dumped
retroworks writes "Greenercomputing.com staff covered a study which sheds more light on the controversial practice of exporting used computer equipment overseas. University of Arizona professors Ramzy Kahhat and Eric Williams newly published research, Product or Waste? Importation and End-of-Life Processing of Computers in Peru apparently confirms what WR3A.org says in the Video 'Fair Trade Recycling'. Namely, that most of the exports of used computers imported by buyers overseas (88%) are really for reuse and repair. Otherwise, people would not pay to import them. This bolsters pro-export arguments made in a scholarly article by Charles Schmidt of NIH in 2006. Perhaps what is needed to stem e-waste pollution is not a ban on exports, but for more people to export, so that buyers have more choice of (ethical) suppliers. Put another way: If used computer exports are outlawed, only outlaws will export used computers."
The problem is though, that the primary reason many of these countries are still economically and technologically backward, is because they are politically backward.
Most of them are still either Dictatorships, Military Juntas, Communist "people's state" povertyholes, or are in the midst of some kind of civil war.
All the used computers in the world won't help if the people don't have the freedom and capitalistic opportunity to leverage them.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
The logical answer, it's always seemed to me, is to focus efforts on getting the rest of the world up to speed economically, not to impose our morals and guidelines like lords and masters from on high.
What happens if you get "the rest of the word" up to speed economically to the level where they can compete with us - and note that economic competitiveness implies military capability - and it turns out that their morals are diametrically opposite to ours (e.g., "Behead all those who insult Islam!", as written on the sign of one Muslim protester)?
Disregard for the Theory of Relativity is what caused Nazi Germany to fail in the Battle of Britain and so to fail to mount Operation Sea Lion and then to fail operation Barbarossa, which allowed allied forces to clinch them both on eastern and western front?
Is that story from the the Red Alert universe? Before or after Albert Einstein goes back in time to remove Hitler?
As for Muslim fundamentalists...
They don't think that Jews or "Jewish science" are inferior. Who told you that?
They think the same thing that fundamentalist Jews think about Muslims.
That they are evil heathen child murderers who hate their (Jewish/Muslim) god and wouldn't like nothing better than to exterminate and/or enslave all the Jews/Muslims in the world, burn their synagogues/mosques and take their money, land and etc.
Religious hatred beats bogus racial theory hatred any day. Plus it works instantly in both directions.
And they all hated each other forever after.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens