To reiterate the below-the-fold conclusion of Part 2:
Today, in most of the world, the highest risks to our health are affluence-related.
Over-eating. Driving cars too fast. Ingesting newly developed drugs. New inventions like handguns. But as compared to the highest risk of death a mere fractional 200 years ago, the biggest risk today is having lived twice as long as the average human 1% of evolution ago. The entire list of these affluence-related risks and outside risks today is a lower risk than faced by 30 year olds, centuries (seconds in evolution relativity) ago.
Einstein's theory of relativity places the fully formed amygdala in a perspective setting, similar to the relative speeds of sounds from trains, speed of light, all the great Einstein thought experiments explaining relativity.
The press and social media constantly portray business and trade as if it takes place between predatory cats and baby rabbits. And it is natural for humans to give equal weight to every new fear.
Predatory cat vs. bunny depictions cut across global perspectives, often in contradiction.
Big corporations vs. consumers.
Big government vs. small business owners.
Globalists vs. child laborers.
Pollsters and politicians are adept at changing the direction of the camera lens, and putting their own interest in the position of the underdog. Denying jobs vs. Exploiting workers. Who's the cat, and is the cat even evil if it's catching rats rather than baby bunnies? The underdog portrayal basically sees voters as too occupied and uninformed to spend time studying an issue, and rightly so, so they figure they can make us react with emotion by triggering some childlike senses of injustice which can realistically and simply be stopped with a new rule, or scrapping of an old one.
There were missing questions in blogs 1 and 2 - is there an overpopulation or underpopulation of rabbits, and is housecat rabbit predation significant in it either way, and is it realistic or worth the cost of trying to intervene in the cat practices and rabbit reproductive cycles? But the children are not reacting as planners, they are seeking answers to calm their amygdala fear centers, their instincts to fear and desire and nurture. The rules children imagine are necessary might not be, and life is too short to spend creating cat containment bureaucracies or rabbit social services.
These are not completely false narratives. But in many cases, society suffers a childlike reaction to a natural business practice or relationship, often when a reporter makes visible an obscure or forgotten practice - like picking cotton balls by hand, or removing copper and aluminum from a junk auto chassis, or changing the oil on a farm tractor - and brings it to our awareness. If it's made to sound bad, it becomes bad then and there. And with bunny-rescuing-childlike aplomb, there's a call to increase regulation, make certification rules tighter, raise the barrier to entry to the business.
Often this happens without any awareness of the evolution of the business. Is the free market practice getting worse than it was decades earlier? Or is there steady progress? Is a bad practice holding everyone else back? Or is a practice being defined as bad, as worse than it is, in order to scapegoat competitors?
Pay to prove there's no shred of client data in this bale
If I get to part 4 or 5, I will look at how SERI R2 standards, ISO, and E-Stewards certification requirements have evolved over the decade, and raise the question, are these new rules actually based on planning and analysis of what's going on? Are Geeks of Color who buy used electronics for sale to African consumers "baby rabbits" who need protection from bad cats like me? Or are they, as importers, "preying upon" consumers in poor countries who could not otherwise afford new devices?
Jim Puckett told me ten years ago that his vision was that Africa would "leapfrog" electronics used in the West, and get better, brand new electronics to connect their societies. A happy, innocent, childlike solution.
The slums in Africa are not created by e-waste, of course. They are rather emptied, as skilled Africans conserve their limited finances and climb out of poverty of their own intelligence and tenacity. The fact is that the trade in goods, the networking of mass communication in emerging markets, is not a story of predation or cuteness.
People in Africa today are more threatened by their own growing affluence, and diseases like high blood pressure spurred by consumption, by getting hit by faster cars, and by alcohol, fast food, and drugs. Even the risks of environmental contamination at sites like Agbogbloshie are a story of an increasing standard of living, as Africa generates more waste whenever the standard of living supports more elective upgrades.
There are a lot of improvements necessary to improve the environment and protect nature in emerging markets like Ghana and Cameroon. I would nominate oil-changing stations... I saw a lot of what looked like freon and motor oil running in the gutters of Accra, and I remember that was a big problem when I was a kid in Arkansas. DIY or do-it-yourself oil changes were one of the biggest pollution sources of the Ozark rivers. And regulators came to see Jiffy Lube and other corporations as a solution.
Imagine if, during the 1970s, commercial oil changing businesses in Arkansas were attacked as preying upon "right to refill", and we demanded a doubling of the rules and certifications necessary to operate those businesses?
Rule by triggered amygdala is very inefficient. It leads to waste, inefficiency, bureaucracy, and rising costs. Sometimes you just have to watch what's happening and take notes and make recommendations over a longer period of time, instead of reacting to every emotional trigger.
Primum non nocere.
Let's look at the data security rules created for old hard drives and "information containing devices" for a start. That's the fastest growing set of regulations and costs. The fear of identity theft is real. But is there any evidence at all that 5 year old hard drives are, after reformatting, being dissected with information recovery software to steal identities? Has anyone, anywhere, ever purchased a stack of obsolete desktops for 18 cents per pound to pay people to go afer the data? If in a world with phishing bait, theft of in use devices, and insider employee, anyone is trying to reboot a reformatted 2010 PC to retrieve information, it's someone in the business of increasing the certification standards. The only example I actually know of is the infamous Frontline episode by BAN and University of Vancouver, where they paid an African to look for "recoverable data" on a used hard drive. They never said how the data would profit that African geek. Hopefully they paid him for his time.
Here people raise the Morgan Stanley Server case of 2019-22 (settled for $60M this month). But in that case, someone found a server that had data and informed Morgan Stanley. There was NO THEFT of money. Instead, Morgan Stanley paid a settlement based on the threat of being sued for the possibility the data might have led to a breach and actual loss. Had Morgan Stanley not sent out the notice to clients that the breach had occurred, it's doubtful anyone would have known or cared. Morgan Stanley is a "wealth management" company which caters to the most astronomically wealthy patrons on the planet, and so settling the case for $60M, despite no demonstration of harm (theft) having occurred, simply raises the stakes for competitors.
Now, I'm not saying that as a recycling company owner that we don't follow the rules of our certification. We just note the expense, and if our clients live in a desert and are being forced to pay for flood insurance, it's ethical to tell the clients that the risk they face may be far less than the money they must pay us to reduce that risk. Most recyclers, once we become certified and follow these rules, see our costs rise. Naturally, many of us take a position that being honest about the risk will risk a loss of clients to non-certified companies avoiding the cost of nonsense ... we become financially motivated to "maintain the scare". The clients hear us bad-mouth the buyer from the emerging markets who cannot afford the certification and avoids the cost of walking in circles adding no value. We brand "the others" as "informal sector", as we pay the costs to enter billions of hard drive serial numbers into excel spreadsheets, for no detectible benefit other than milking clients amygdalas for cash.
Our industry is increasingly less about the environment, in terms of the environmental value of dollars spent, and more and more about kicking our clients' amygdalas across the floor like injured baby bunnies.
In Part 4, if I get around to it, I'll talk about the actual case of Sean, a worker we hired from the counseling service who has some intellectual disabilities. He enjoys taking apart old hard drives with a a screwdriver, recovering the neodymium magnets for resale/reuse, and separating the steel from the precious metal bearing circuit board. A platinum-plated disc, bearing the original 1's and 0s once read by the hard drive needle to recover information, are tossed into a 1000 lb box. For years, the R2 auditors have cited us for not proving the data on those discs will not be read, we've argued a) that's absurd, and b) that's not in the R2 standard. Well, looks like the next version of the R2 standard will force us to replace Sean with a mechanical shredder, which will lose the value of the magnets and circuit boards, yield lower quality steel and aluminum, and all to preserve the fear recyclers rely on to suck money out of scared clients.
For $60m, someone might actually try to get data off the bare disk, but it would be an expensive lottery ticket hoping there's actual useful information to be found. But Morgan Stanley's settlement raises a question - that data merely existing on the bare disk could be defined as a "breach" without any actual harm accruing to the client.
All in time for solid state hard drives which are replacing all the HDs with magnets and spinning discs...but which will be just as susceptible to phishing, theft, and purloining insiders. Worry more about a waiter on drugs stealing your credit card number than you've been made to about data in scrap.
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