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CES: Bringing Electronics Assembly and Distribution to Central Africa (Video)
"When you think about electronics manufacturing, you probably don’t automatically think about Africa. You are about to meet somebody who would like to change your mind about that. His name is Tony Smith, and he is the CEO and Founder of Limitless Electronics." That's how Slashdot Editor Timothy Lord introduces this video. And that's what it's about: Former Microsoft employee Tony Smith at CES 2013 talking about his efforts to bring electronics assembly and distribution to his native country, Cameroon, through his company, Limitless Electronics.
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If this guy worked on Windows 8 by chance. That would make a lot of sense.
The poor people in east and south Asia aren't as desperate as they once were and are starting to demand better treatment and higher wages and the right to organize unions and such. The poor people in central Africa, on the other hand, are quite desperate for work, and the governments have things enough under control that it's relatively safe to set up a factory.
That's one of the effects of globalization: Manufacturing jobs move towards desperation, because that's the cheapest place to hire people and bribe the government into doing the company's bidding.
I am officially gone from
Asian countries are getting uppity. Demanding living wages, work conditions that don't kill them, hours that let them have a life outside of work, and pollution controls that don't poison the land. How dare they!
Time to move on to the next dirt poor country with a labor force to exploit.
(To be fair, industrialization from foreign investment does tend to lead to the eventual rise of a middle class. The transition is always nasty though. Nasty and bloody.)
Shoving technology down Africa's throat isn't going to make them act any less like barbaric savages. They're stuck in the stone age for a very specific reason; missing neanderthal DNA, plain and simple.
Africa needs to have a significant boast to their standard of living to reduce war, poverty, unwanted births, death, and disease.
China, still has bad working conditions yes, but as a whole being a chinesse citizen today is insanely better than being a citizen 30 years ago. Where before an average farmer never had a dirt floor and no more than $10 in his whole life in addition to an average food stable of just one serving a meat a week shared with rice for the whole family to tiles on their floors, meat 5 times a week, $100 if you saved for a good month, with huge metropolitan changes like cars, highways, and modern 21st century living.
Yes, working 14 hours a day in a factory really does suck. But that is the first process to move up economic wise and everyone benefits.
Africans are pirating ships in Somalia not because they want to be thugs, but because there is no money to buy food. Africa has more natural resources than China and could be even more powerful than China or India if they get their shit together with infrastructure and education.
If it were not for wars, lack of infrastructure like electricity/roads, lack of education, Africa would be rich and China still poor. China has the benefits of educated citizens and infrastructure with a large population of potential consumers. It is not just because they are willing to work for cheaper.
Africa has the resources. China has some rare earth metals and some fisheries and that is about it.
http://saveie6.com/
look at Europe in the 1800's
USA in the pre 1970's
china now
you get your jobs but you also get to poison you body through the pollution it creates. everyone wants these jobs in the USA, but no one wants them close to where they live.
Africa needs to have a significant boast to their standard of living to reduce war, poverty, unwanted births, death, and disease.
In order to get rid of the last three items, they also need to get rid of all the Catholic missionaries.
Ezekiel 23:20
If you would actually listen to what the man says, he highlight that ther flagship tablet is one of the few in the industry that gives the user a choice in what OS they want loaded on their device. Of which one is Ubuntu (!).
Moreover, their products aim is to be high quality and affordable as apposed to just being as cheap as possible.
And please, this is exactly the kind of thing that needs to happen to bring "the last" continent out of it's poverty. It should be applauded. And what the hell is up with all the racism and calling names (trolling, but nevertheless, wtf).
"the majority" being you and three or four others, while thousands of people seem to enjoy the videos.
if you don't want to watch them, don't. i don't click on every /. article because not all of them interest me.
All I see is a black rectangle with "You need to have the Adobe Flash Player to view this content" in it.
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How can people in africa be expected to produce electronics? I mean all they do now is kill each other with guns, produce nigerian scams galore, and the african women spread their legs so much its no wonder hiv/aids is rampant in africa and killing them all off. And the majority of threm live in poverty above all else with the real only accomplishment being the city of Johannesburg.
It will be interesting to see what the price will be for the tablet. I am quite interested having Linux on my devices instead of Android or Windows, which both have privacy issues and lack of total user control of the device.
Devices like this. is something that other continents need as well. It hope this starts new trend which helps to grow market share of (pure) Linux devices.
The sheer amount of racism in the 38 comments (when I posted this) is disheartening.
Africa needs jobs, there is no question about that. And the rare earth metals needed to build electronics exist on the continent in abundance, so it makes sense to move the manufacturing center next closer to the source.
But Africa already has a problem with slave labor at precious metal mines, and it will get worse with the rise of these factories.
http://www.laborrights.org/stop-child-labor/news/11648
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/15/south-africa-mine-strikes_n_1886507.html
won't this happen on its own anyway?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
... you know - those "We're all the same" Africans bringing science and technology to those braindead and 'evil' whites.
As for the cretins bleating about 'racism' - I take it you mean 'telling the truth'.
Care to debate anybody here with FACTS, instead of trying to censor opposing points of view? You arrogant cretins.
Move to Detroit or Haiti and tell us how evil 'racism' is - you morons.
Chinese labour costs are rising. It's time to move to a new country.
The only problem is the lack of existing infrastructure. You need mines, factories, transport and power.
Don't get me wrong: I view this tendency more as a sad fact of life, not a moral evil.
Now, what is in my view a moral evil is that while Africa has all sorts of valuable natural resources, very few of those resources are owned by Africans. The effect of that is significant: In, say, a South African gold mine, for $1000 worth of gold ore, the miners might get $1, his bosses gets $3, the government of South Africa gets $1, and investors in New York and London get $995. Now, getting that $5 into the South African economy improves the economy of South Africa, but it also sucks out $995 worth of natural resources that can't be replaced. It's one of the remnants of European colonialism that is not likely to go away anytime soon.
I am officially gone from
Africans are pirating ships in Somalia not because they want to be thugs, but because there is no money to buy food.
I think you'll find that the Somalian pirates used to be fishermen - there was lots of food untill industrial fishing fleets came from the west and asia and sucked all the fish up.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
In order to get rid of the last three items, they also need to get rid of all the Catholic missionaries.
Yes, because surely Africa would be much better without the 964 hospitals, 5,000 medical clinics, 260 leprosariums, 650 rest homes, 800 orphanage and 2,000 kindergartens the evil, evil Catholic Church keeps there.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
One hundred years ago it was newsworthy if an African wanted to open a factory to produce beer bottles, or forty years ago light bulbs (or at ScreenVision in South Africa, CRTs). It's nothing new, and the reason is simple. It's hard to open a company in a country where there is 8% unemployment and 15% of people are benchwarmers (or alcoholics, drug abusers, thieves, or don't get along with people). It is easier to avoid those 15% of less-productive people in a nation with 50% unemployment than it is in a country with 8% unemployment. If that's "exploitation" then I guess it's exploitation in the good way. 85% of Americans or Europeans may better educated than the top 50% of Cameroonians, but it doesn't matter if you need employees and can't outpay existing companies (like textile mills which have all left).
Gently reply
Globalisation covers a lot of things, not just corporations. It's just as responsible for getting aspirin and antibiotics to the middle of Africa as McDonalds. Probably most important is the globalisation of culture.
Africa has a pretty terrible culture in many ways, and is resistant to change because worship of tradition is part of that culture. Not knocking Africa, tradition was a vital part of most societies up to a point. Prior to the industrial revolution in Europe, there was little progress because most progress wasn't scientific - if someone made pottery slightly differently, it probably cracked or failed. If they forged metal differently it was useless. Changing how you made bread or raised cattle or whatnot almost always resulted in problems. That's because nobody actually understood why doing things the traditional way worked, they just knew it did, so any change became ingrained as something to be avoided.
There was still progress on occasion, but that was still the exception, and often rejected by most people as long as possible. This notion changed first in the New World, as there was no "tradition" (or what there was wiped out by the settlers and their plagues), and came back to the colonizing European countries. Eventually it spread through political conquest, economic forces, and sometimes voluntarily (Japan was an early adopter of some Western attitudes), but the idea of constant improvement through change is not global yet. In particular, it's still rejected by the general population in Africa and the Middle East, even as they develop economically.
This is why those in power, or seeking power, are only interested in the power itself (or prestige), only benefitting those closest to them first, and their country and society last - and brutallly suppressing all opposition. And people don't really mind because they just expect this to be the normal thing - it's their culture, how it's traditionally been done.
This is where globalisation of culture helps - by showing that there are alternatives, and what the benefits are. Even if it doesn't convince the adults, the next generation grows up knowing there are alternatives, and they're willing to change. Little known fact, Iranian people in general are among the most pro-American in the Middle East, because they've experienced an entire generation of an anti-American government oppressing them, yet have been able to learn that it doesn't have to be that way (that's simplified, but essentially correct - the Iranian government is terrified of their own people being fed up, and a war with America is probably the best thing that could happen to them to keep them in power).
A big difference between Africa and the Americas is that natives in the Americas were wiped out by plagues shortly before European settlers moved in - huge pandemics that made Europe's Black Death look like allergies. If this hadn't happened, settling the Americas would have been like colonising Africa, at least in the populated coastal areas. Cultural traditions were lost. In Africa, this didn't happen, and male-dominated, tribe-oriented, and superstitious traditions remain the norm to this day.
Globalisation will inevitably change this, and for the better. That's what will eventually allow Africa to develop, organize, and improve the lives of its people.