Google Warning - retroworks.blogspot.com losing 592+ Posts

Well, it was a depressing email in my gmail box this morning.  Google will stop indexing a huge number of posts from this blogspot.

I've always been aware of my mortality, and of the mortality of my ethical recycling messages. I have books on my shelf which are long, long out of print, which are both central to my morality and my thesis, and which I know are unlikely to ever be read again, much less appreciated by mentorees.

But the first one I looked at in the Google Indexing purge kind of stung.

It was from autumn 2009, when I had been a background check source for CBS Sixty Minutes producer Solly Granatstein, about Scott Pelley's notorious "wasted" minutes flying around with BAN.org's Jim Puckett, who was describing huge imports of CRT desktop monitors (purchased for $10 apiece, bearing only $2 of scrap copper) as being "primitively" mismanaged in Guiyu.

http://retroworks.blogspot.com/2009/08/cbs-60-minutes-wasteland-unseen-footage.html

Solly and Michelle Rey had stopped responding to my emails asking them to run a follow up or correction to the story, which had shown no evidence of CRTs processed in Guiyu, despite the claim "we followed the trail".

So I checked that one, and because the film evidence of the factories that had actually purchased the monitors circled by helicopter were posted in picasaweb, a google product offered to bloggers like myself for photo uploads, and Google has since stopped supporting picasaweb, that the blog will no longer show up in searches.  So if you are a journalism student looking for CBS Wasteland's Polk Award on CRT disposal allegedly occuring in China in 2008, you won't find me.

A lot of people I met - "Swordfish" - in my career met me through the circulation of that specific blog. Author Adam Minter for example asked what to look for when he visited Guiyu (the three-story integrated IC chip market - Guiyu was a reuse-of-CPU and chips market, not a CRT monitor refurbisher. And what is upstream of the river where BAN's "samples" showed poisons more associated with textile manufacturing than e-waste). Adam later visited CRT remanufacturing factories. He's a journalist with actual knowledge of recycling. But the blog that connected us is now gone unless Google accepts my correction (now linked to photos.google not picasaweb).

But am I going to take the time to re-edit 520+ blogs? I had to find the one on CBS Wasted Leads via the Wayback Machine site to locate it and find the dated address to correct it on blogspot.

Bullyboy 7: The Great Cabbage Farm vs. TV Repair Controversy

If you do an image search for "cabbage worker" on Bing or Google, you can find a lot of very interesting, very different photos, spanning a great deal of time.  Cabbage is eaten in almost every part of the world.

Well, it's interesting to me.  Let me explain why it's related to "E-Waste" exports in general, and Joseph Benson in particular.

You can search "African cabbage farm", or "Guatemala Cabbage", or "Chinese cabbage harvest", or "Russian cabbage".

Want to guess where the cabbage photo to the left was taken?  Florida.

There are some Australian aborigines cabbage worker photos from a century ago, and there is an ocean of cabbage photos on alibaba.com.  Dried cabbage, chopped cabbage.  

There are workers clinging to the sides of a moving cabbage truck in Guatemala.  There are workers dressed in white smocks and moon suits in the Czech Republic.

I was searching "cabbage" on alibaba, and searching images for cabbage, because I wanted to find something as boring and non-controversial as... television repairman.

Africans, Chinese, and Latino workers who head to the Bright Lights, Big City places like Lima, Cairo, and Joseph Benson's Lagos, are usually making a choice not to do something.  They don't necessarily know what jobs they'll find in Accra, Kinshasa, or Dakar.  But they don't expect to grow cabbage, or tubers, or sugarcane, or cotton.

"Ag Flight".   It's basically exactly the same reason the USA cabbage farms import migrant labor from other countries.  

I've got rural, subsistence farming roots.   Three out of four of my grandparents lived on subsistence Ozark farms, and remained in farming until the 1960s (fourth grew up in journalism, and as a child of someone in the Indian Service).  Agriculture's an honorable profession.

I was told the easiest thing to grow, if I chose to be a farmer, was probably cabbage. Cabbage is pretty virulent, cabbage crops can survive temperature disruptions.  You won't make a lot of money on cabbage, but barring an Oklahoma dustbowl storm, you are unlikely to utterly fail.  As I looked down at my grandpa Fisher's cabbage row, I thought it was the dullest, most boring thing in the universe.

Had Joseph Benson been a cabbage farmer, he would not have been the center of a sting by Greenpeace, Basel Action Network, Cahal Milmo (Independent), or BBC Panorama.  Unfortunately for Benson, he invested in a different job abandoned by white people - one exoticized to titillate environmentalists.

Television repair.

CRT Recycling Primer: Update

E-Waste Made Simple!

Taking a break on the "Term Paper" project which explains the "good enough" markets among the world's urban poor, I found some broken links on this 2010 post "CRT Recycling Primer".

I updated a broken link and added a few lines, and it occurred to me that this was kind of a gem in the light of recent buzz about CRT glass recycling stockpiles and glutted markets.

The ugly, the bad, and the Good Enough Market connect between bans on the West Coast, sellers markets on the East Coast, piles of CRT glass, and a surge in internet by young people in emerging markets, as profiled by EMarketer (covering research by Google and Booz)

O! What a tangled web we weive when first we practice to deceive!  It all started with a bogus, raunchy, cynical, made up statistic by Basel Action Network which said that 80-90% of CRTs exported were burned in primitive and polluting conditions.   Not only has BAN stopped distributing the stat, they have refused to ever say where it came up with it in the first place.  Combined with pictures of poster children, this stat sucked in CBS Scott Pelley, Terry Gross, Frontline, and entire "E-Steward" enterprises.

The outcome?  Shortages of monitors, dictator crackdowns on internet hardware, worse supply chains, high taxes, and a big stockpile of CRT glass cullet (and higher prices to recycle it).   Now California companies are asking for permission to landfill it, which means not only were California taxpayers asked to take the monitors taken from Egyptians, the CRT glass was not even recycled.

1.  California subsidizes companies to break CRT monitors.  This created a sellers market for working CRT exports on the East Coast, and created a simple "big shred" system of companies in California who live off the breaking subsidy (planned obsolescence in hindsight).

Blog Maintenance - Searching for the Poison Pill

UPDATE:  After a couple of hours I found the "Search Engine Genie" XSS (cross site scripting) in the PAGERANK button at bottom (er.. formerly at the bottom, it's erased now).   I have a headache from reading HTML now but hopefully this puts us back in business without (ironically) punishing our pagerank.  The lesson learned in this case is not to borrow Gadget Script from third parties.  What is interesting is that the pagerank button was there for a long, long time before I got this warning.  

Dear readers, please be patient while we try to find the source of a report that an unsafe link has been found in one of the blogs.  There are a lot of comments and a lot of postings to screen through and it may take time.   This site may be taken down for several hours or days if we find the "search engine genie" hijacker is actually found here.

The good old days of letting any person comment with any link, or using links to other sites which may change ownership and become "link poison" years later, may be over.  Or this may be a false flag.  If I link to a site that I disagree with, I think of it as being transparent, but it also means that if the owner of the site I link to wants to get back at me, they can insert something at the link which poisons my blog on google.

It's Gone

My Blog has Disappeared from Google.


At least, I'm at page 25 of google search for "e-waste", and no sign of the blog.  It was page 1 six months ago.  Who killed it?  I noticed a massive fall-off of pageviews back in May or June.  I attributed it to a strong April, but it never resurfaced.


I've done nothing ornery.  If anything, I vastly reduced use of video and photos from online sources.


Has my writing suffered?   Or is there a third party interference?  (See the blog on "comments").   I  am sure Google is working on this and is finding who torpedoed the blog.  Here you go:  I'm typing in "John Shegarian" simply to increase google search hits, not because he has anything to do with it, he just searches his name a lot, I've been told.  If the rank doesn't go up, it's gotta be conspiracy, baby.


First:   A Blog Self-Audit.   I've been reviewing my posts from the last few months, by readership and content.  Do not blame conspiracies without first checking the most obvious source:  bad content.

The destruction of the Indonesian and Malaysian display device refurbishing market was possibly the most important E-Scrap story of the past decade, and I've tried to give voice to it.  The people who lost their jobs, the environmentalists engaging in "friendly fire", the environmental consequences...  Mainstream press (Motherboard, Scrap, Recycling International, 3Sat.de) picked it up, but it has been nowhere as successful as the story in CBS 60 Minutes, which conjoined the same refurbishing factories with unrelated wire burning operations in Guiyu, China.  But did I write about it too often, and cause pagerank to decline?

Rat on a train ditch.  Caught on a limb.  YOU know better - but I know HIM.