Huh. Interesting. I barely read Ayn Rand... 28 years ago, in college. Her work did seem to capture how the Nazis and Stalin lost key scientists, like this Iranian programmer, by having zealots in charge. Didn't realize Rand references were troll food. Tough crowd.
"Well, prosecutions and seizures are a good thing if the people really were cut-rate recyclers using damaging, illegal reclamation processes, unapproved dumps, and/or child labor. This is an actual, documented problem.'
Yes. IF. Here is a slashdot article http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/02/12/1431208/its-not-all-waste-the-complicated-life-of-surplus-electronics-in-africa showing the actual documentation of the actual trade in Africa during the time the African in the Guardian article was accused of shipping to the unapproved dump with the child labor. Your "actual, documented problem" was not committed by the person arrested, and does not appear to be very actual, if you actually look at the documentation. Talk about high tech lynchings...
Brilliant. Excites young people in the Green Revolution, and provides massive disincentive to programmers and engineers. Atlas won't just shrug, Atlas will give Iran the middle finger on the way out. This is much more powerful than any international protest or letter writing campaign. But if the campaign spares the individual programmer's life in the meantime, it's still time well spent.
Yep. Many have been prosecuted, many goods seized. Usually, it's someone like Mubarak, declaring working items "toxic waste". But it just takes a few seizures to put the chill on would be resellers and donors. In the UK, they take nice looking electronics, sabotage them, sell them to the Nigerians as "working", then bust the Nigerians for exporting waste. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/man-held-after-tonnes-of-illegal-ewaste-are-exported-to-africa-1816570.html This week a study showed 85% of the ones imported into Ghana and Nigeria were working, and the material at the dump in Nigeria (described in the Guardian) was generated by Africans after years of use. A lot of innocent people are getting screwed. I realize it's a niche issue for many here. But go ahead and read the Guardian article, then read the/. report on the Basel study last weekend.
And they drive around our neighborhoods, and they look at license plates. My grandfather warned us about this, but did anyone listen? Now they can see things from the sky, too.
No. The lesson is, if you break in in April, and don't actually do anything voluntarily to disclose the vulnerability and let Facebook know about it and fix it, and actually go back in to erase your fingerprints, and the FBI comes and knocks on the door of your home two months later, that you are too late with the Good Samaritan defense. Having read the article, I'm not particularly as sympathetic to the kid as I was based on the/. summary. He got caught and he hadn't done anything to redeem himself. He doesn't get fined, by the way, he does 7 months prison sentence which he still has a chance for parole on.
Have been there. This factory is way beyond garment factories in terms of attractiveness. The Shenzhen campus, which has about 600k employees, makes not just Apple but HTC, Sony, Panasonic, you-name-it. They are owned by Taiwan, employ management from Hong Kong, employ Cantonese labor , and are governed by Mandarin communist party staff. They are ISO certified. There are so many reasons to run this factory right, it's kind of surprising that activists who are really concerned would pick on a factory like this in the first place, as opposed to say the garment industry in Guangdong. http://www.greenpeace.org/eastasia/press/releases/toxics/2010/textile-industrial-pollution/ My theory is that White People have their own "ju ju" words. Like Cameroonians who are scared to death of owls, environmentalists have an exaggerated sense of risk when something is technological and involves anything with toxics. A lot of cognitive risk dissonance over high tech and brown people. Personally, I think it's kind of cool that the Taiwanese, Hong Kong, Japanese, Communists, etc. get along here and run a factory that produces the coolest gadgets ever produced by humans. At the rate they have grown, I'm sure the auditor will find lots of violations. But the headline is accurate... the auditor knows within a few hours that they are NOT in the textile hell-hole up the river, or the smelter, or the copper mine.
China, including (Taiwanese) Foxconn, is barreling down the same industrial revolution path as Europe, Japan and USA. There are no doubt some who will see the Apple certification effort cynically, but this is how change starts. The fact that China and Taiwan are working together making money via peaceful trade is worth more than anything. I'm an optimist about the future, not an apologist for the present, but recoiling from poverty is not the same as compassion. All the OEMs manufacturing in China are getting their hands dirty and risking their reputations, but the world is going to be better off than when China was cut off from world trade.
It will work for awhile. But once everyone starts doing it everywhere, a new strain of harpsichord-loving crack dealer will emerge and be more difficult to eradicate. They'll try changing the music to polka, which will work for awhile. The city needs to decide who the people are and talk to them. Otherwise these effects are like a bright kitchen light on cockroaches, it doesn't get to the root of the city's problems. Who knows, maybe these kids are like the hippies whom city elders wanted off the lawns and parks in 1966. Maybe there's a Steve Jobs or Wozniak milling around under the streetlights. I know a lot of really nice high school kids who'd probably leave if you played classical music at them... which was always the problem with that soap, it killed the good bacteria and let staph grow in its place.
@arcite, I did live in Africa, two and a half years. RTFA, the kids you are describing are working on AFRICAN GENERATED equipment, which was in use for a decade. The resale shops accept it as a trade in. Banning the export from rich nations, when demand is still there, causes lower quality imports which fail faster and give the boys more to burn. Per the article, Ghana alone has 30,000 repair/reuse/tinkerers repairing electronics, and per the article, these make 10 times more per hour than the underprivileged kids you describe. The "poster child recycling children" is, according to the study, a very small portion of the imported "e-waste" economy. The articles says that in each study, a relatively small investment would clean those jobs up considerably. The article does not apologize for the scrap boy infrastructure, but has concrete suggestions which are superior to the export ban.
In Democracy in America (1840), Alexis de Tocqueville noted the rise of planned obsolescence in the United States:
"I accost an American sailor, and I inquire why the ships of his country are built so as to last but for a short time; he answers without hesitation that the art of navigation is every day making such rapid progress, that the finest vessel would become almost useless if it lasted beyond a certain number of years."
Now I deal in used VGA and SVGA displays (exported about 30,000 to Egypt between 2002 and 2008) and I know there is a much longer reuse value for things than Best Buy or WalMart may have us believe. But there is a finite time between when the Model T is upgraded as a primary vehicle, and when it is upgraded for a Sunday antique show. The latter market tends not to want new upgraded parts (the 'original condition' has more collector value). So this invention will either A) be used by a very small market which wants to keep upgrading their gear for typical current use (e.g. Hollywood period film which doesn't care for historical accuracy but needs high display), , or B) used by Original Manufacturers to design upgradeability for changes in market demand. I think (A) is much more likely than (B), see "Planned Obsolescence". All that said, applause and hurrahs to Matthew H. at Atari, we are better off rewarding those who strive against planned obsolescence, despite de Tocqueville's sailor's advice.
They had a lot of mustard gases and viral agents developed in WWI, which were never used. But I do feel nervous. Maybe it's not that the weapons are getting more dangerous... maybe the people on the earth are getting worse.
Just say you like 20% of the things you don't care about, and don't click on 20% of the things you do secretly like, and you are statistically invisible, because 40% of people are even bigger phonies than you are. Occasionally, you will still get a car ad when you really were interested in a car. Big big whoop.
The credit card industry has been doing this for decades. Every purchase we make at stores, travel, online purchases, creates a crude profile of who we are as purchasers. The credit card industry sells this info every day. And there are other examples you could also label "Faustian Bargains".. if I accept the premise that personal information about me is my "soul". Still, at least we could cheat this devil. We just need a program that runs silently in the background, in a back tab of our browser, which randomly looks up anything we might or might not be interested in, to "pollute the cache" or camouflage it. That's something I can do with google but cannot do to my credit card company.
Damn, I was just writing that I'm less worried about Al Qaeda reading scientific journals on bird flu than I am about Al Qaeda reading about censorship over security concerns, titled "Streisand Effect" . I was going to give thanks to Slashdot for killing us all by flagging this for weaponization or Streisand-Andromeda-Flu. Then I got worried that I could be contributing to our doom by making the connection, and trying to word this in pig latin so that it wouldn't give any ideas. Then... you scooped me by posting first. More for the list of FirstWorldProblems
I had read the article and posted it on Facebook as a caution. Now I've read your insightful commentary, removed the post, and decided to let the kids play on the lawn again...
Slashdot Mirror
Huh. Interesting. I barely read Ayn Rand... 28 years ago, in college. Her work did seem to capture how the Nazis and Stalin lost key scientists, like this Iranian programmer, by having zealots in charge. Didn't realize Rand references were troll food. Tough crowd.
"Well, prosecutions and seizures are a good thing if the people really were cut-rate recyclers using damaging, illegal reclamation processes, unapproved dumps, and/or child labor. This is an actual, documented problem.'
Yes. IF. Here is a slashdot article http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/02/12/1431208/its-not-all-waste-the-complicated-life-of-surplus-electronics-in-africa showing the actual documentation of the actual trade in Africa during the time the African in the Guardian article was accused of shipping to the unapproved dump with the child labor. Your "actual, documented problem" was not committed by the person arrested, and does not appear to be very actual, if you actually look at the documentation. Talk about high tech lynchings...
Brilliant. Excites young people in the Green Revolution, and provides massive disincentive to programmers and engineers. Atlas won't just shrug, Atlas will give Iran the middle finger on the way out. This is much more powerful than any international protest or letter writing campaign. But if the campaign spares the individual programmer's life in the meantime, it's still time well spent.
Yep. Many have been prosecuted, many goods seized. Usually, it's someone like Mubarak, declaring working items "toxic waste". But it just takes a few seizures to put the chill on would be resellers and donors. In the UK, they take nice looking electronics, sabotage them, sell them to the Nigerians as "working", then bust the Nigerians for exporting waste. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/man-held-after-tonnes-of-illegal-ewaste-are-exported-to-africa-1816570.html This week a study showed 85% of the ones imported into Ghana and Nigeria were working, and the material at the dump in Nigeria (described in the Guardian) was generated by Africans after years of use. A lot of innocent people are getting screwed. I realize it's a niche issue for many here. But go ahead and read the Guardian article, then read the /. report on the Basel study last weekend.
And they drive around our neighborhoods, and they look at license plates. My grandfather warned us about this, but did anyone listen? Now they can see things from the sky, too.
No. The lesson is, if you break in in April, and don't actually do anything voluntarily to disclose the vulnerability and let Facebook know about it and fix it, and actually go back in to erase your fingerprints, and the FBI comes and knocks on the door of your home two months later, that you are too late with the Good Samaritan defense. Having read the article, I'm not particularly as sympathetic to the kid as I was based on the /. summary. He got caught and he hadn't done anything to redeem himself. He doesn't get fined, by the way, he does 7 months prison sentence which he still has a chance for parole on.
I'd say the judge is innocent.
Africa has more cell phones than toilets. http://blogs.worldbank.org/africacan/more-cell-phones-than-toilets The entire infrastructure was built on "e-waste", used cell phones were imported and hacked/jailbroken, which created enough subscribers for private sector companies to erect the towers. The free market bypassed the entire government-infrastructure track. Of course, there is evidence of a second crime here.... http://archive.basel.int/industry/mppi/gdfd30Jun2010.pdf Cell phones are labelled "e-waste" in Europe http://retroworks.blogspot.com/2011/09/new-world-order-interpol-calls.html and Africans who buy them have been declared "criminals" by Interpol.
But why then is Foxconn converting to robots? REUTERS "Foxconn to rely more on robots; could use 1 million in 3 years" http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/01/us-foxconn-robots-idUSTRE77016B20110801
Have been there. This factory is way beyond garment factories in terms of attractiveness. The Shenzhen campus, which has about 600k employees, makes not just Apple but HTC, Sony, Panasonic, you-name-it. They are owned by Taiwan, employ management from Hong Kong, employ Cantonese labor , and are governed by Mandarin communist party staff. They are ISO certified. There are so many reasons to run this factory right, it's kind of surprising that activists who are really concerned would pick on a factory like this in the first place, as opposed to say the garment industry in Guangdong. http://www.greenpeace.org/eastasia/press/releases/toxics/2010/textile-industrial-pollution/ My theory is that White People have their own "ju ju" words. Like Cameroonians who are scared to death of owls, environmentalists have an exaggerated sense of risk when something is technological and involves anything with toxics. A lot of cognitive risk dissonance over high tech and brown people. Personally, I think it's kind of cool that the Taiwanese, Hong Kong, Japanese, Communists, etc. get along here and run a factory that produces the coolest gadgets ever produced by humans. At the rate they have grown, I'm sure the auditor will find lots of violations. But the headline is accurate... the auditor knows within a few hours that they are NOT in the textile hell-hole up the river, or the smelter, or the copper mine.
As a silver lining, will we know where exactly our tech support call is going now?
China, including (Taiwanese) Foxconn, is barreling down the same industrial revolution path as Europe, Japan and USA. There are no doubt some who will see the Apple certification effort cynically, but this is how change starts. The fact that China and Taiwan are working together making money via peaceful trade is worth more than anything. I'm an optimist about the future, not an apologist for the present, but recoiling from poverty is not the same as compassion. All the OEMs manufacturing in China are getting their hands dirty and risking their reputations, but the world is going to be better off than when China was cut off from world trade.
It will work for awhile. But once everyone starts doing it everywhere, a new strain of harpsichord-loving crack dealer will emerge and be more difficult to eradicate. They'll try changing the music to polka, which will work for awhile. The city needs to decide who the people are and talk to them. Otherwise these effects are like a bright kitchen light on cockroaches, it doesn't get to the root of the city's problems. Who knows, maybe these kids are like the hippies whom city elders wanted off the lawns and parks in 1966. Maybe there's a Steve Jobs or Wozniak milling around under the streetlights. I know a lot of really nice high school kids who'd probably leave if you played classical music at them... which was always the problem with that soap, it killed the good bacteria and let staph grow in its place.
Exactly. Nature never makes anything invisible. Creatures evolve camouflage.
@arcite, I did live in Africa, two and a half years. RTFA, the kids you are describing are working on AFRICAN GENERATED equipment, which was in use for a decade. The resale shops accept it as a trade in. Banning the export from rich nations, when demand is still there, causes lower quality imports which fail faster and give the boys more to burn. Per the article, Ghana alone has 30,000 repair/reuse/tinkerers repairing electronics, and per the article, these make 10 times more per hour than the underprivileged kids you describe. The "poster child recycling children" is, according to the study, a very small portion of the imported "e-waste" economy. The articles says that in each study, a relatively small investment would clean those jobs up considerably. The article does not apologize for the scrap boy infrastructure, but has concrete suggestions which are superior to the export ban.
from wikipedia 2012.02.12 'Planned Obsolescence'
In Democracy in America (1840), Alexis de Tocqueville noted the rise of planned obsolescence in the United States: "I accost an American sailor, and I inquire why the ships of his country are built so as to last but for a short time; he answers without hesitation that the art of navigation is every day making such rapid progress, that the finest vessel would become almost useless if it lasted beyond a certain number of years."
Now I deal in used VGA and SVGA displays (exported about 30,000 to Egypt between 2002 and 2008) and I know there is a much longer reuse value for things than Best Buy or WalMart may have us believe. But there is a finite time between when the Model T is upgraded as a primary vehicle, and when it is upgraded for a Sunday antique show. The latter market tends not to want new upgraded parts (the 'original condition' has more collector value). So this invention will either A) be used by a very small market which wants to keep upgrading their gear for typical current use (e.g. Hollywood period film which doesn't care for historical accuracy but needs high display), , or B) used by Original Manufacturers to design upgradeability for changes in market demand. I think (A) is much more likely than (B), see "Planned Obsolescence". All that said, applause and hurrahs to Matthew H. at Atari, we are better off rewarding those who strive against planned obsolescence, despite de Tocqueville's sailor's advice.
Meanwhile, back in real time, Intel has stopped producing VGA outputs, and the display device market will stop making VGA devices, keeping chop shops like mine in business in the interim. http://www.pcauthority.com.au/News/241144,intel-announces-the-end-of-vga.aspx
They had a lot of mustard gases and viral agents developed in WWI, which were never used. But I do feel nervous. Maybe it's not that the weapons are getting more dangerous... maybe the people on the earth are getting worse.
Just say you like 20% of the things you don't care about, and don't click on 20% of the things you do secretly like, and you are statistically invisible, because 40% of people are even bigger phonies than you are. Occasionally, you will still get a car ad when you really were interested in a car. Big big whoop.
The credit card industry has been doing this for decades. Every purchase we make at stores, travel, online purchases, creates a crude profile of who we are as purchasers. The credit card industry sells this info every day. And there are other examples you could also label "Faustian Bargains".. if I accept the premise that personal information about me is my "soul". Still, at least we could cheat this devil. We just need a program that runs silently in the background, in a back tab of our browser, which randomly looks up anything we might or might not be interested in, to "pollute the cache" or camouflage it. That's something I can do with google but cannot do to my credit card company.
Now what is going to happen to all of my "Wheel" stock? First they obsolete the internal combustion engine, then came the paperless office, now this.
He may as well "let it ride" and sue everyone for everything.
I told my wife we might need it someday!
Damn, I was just writing that I'm less worried about Al Qaeda reading scientific journals on bird flu than I am about Al Qaeda reading about censorship over security concerns, titled "Streisand Effect" . I was going to give thanks to Slashdot for killing us all by flagging this for weaponization or Streisand-Andromeda-Flu. Then I got worried that I could be contributing to our doom by making the connection, and trying to word this in pig latin so that it wouldn't give any ideas. Then... you scooped me by posting first. More for the list of FirstWorldProblems
I had read the article and posted it on Facebook as a caution. Now I've read your insightful commentary, removed the post, and decided to let the kids play on the lawn again...
" I survived the sunspot blob of plasma 2012 "
I'm in. Go for it.