For Thankgiving 2018: Yes, You Are Probably Better Off Than Your Parents*

On social media, I sometimes try to "referee the internet".  That's what I call engaging in political debate or argument. I like dialectic. Constructive argument is better than smile-and-wave, or sweep-under-the-rug, etc. If you have the right touch, the friendship survives.

One of the arguments that is ongoing is over the pessimism vs. optimism for globalisation.

Other species, and the environment, I'm tragically not optimistic about.  My optimism about human lives is actually, in part, to get us to focus on worrying about things that really matter.  Also, I think that unnecessary panic and pessimism, whether to Trump or Bernie, distracts us from making investments that might really matter.

So here goes. When we look at an optimistic video, like GapMinder (Hans Rosling), about more girls going to school, fewer diseases, less poverty, the statistics and facts are clear.  Here is an interesting graphic - The World Poverty Clock.

57,913 people escaped poverty today (income levels increased)
11,508 people fell into poverty (especially in places like Venezuela, Nigeria, Syria and Yemen)

World Poverty Clock Screenshot

The graphic shows red (newly poor) and black (newly rich) stick figures, and shows countries in red or black according to how their own population is faring.  I have some funnier videos at bottom.

Here's the argument people most often push back. Many people believe that the current generation of AMERICANS or EUROPEANS is less likely to be better off than their parents generation.

But there are two ways to pose the question. Are we living better than a previous generation? And if so, how did we afford it?

Q-Methodology And Fair Trade Recycling Negotiation - The News

Many readers already know about the E-waste research project, funded by a $469k grant secured by Dr. Josh Lepawsky at Memorial University, Newfoundland.  The project involves research in five countries - Mexico, Peru, Bangladesh, and China. I'm kind of doing Ghana on my own, as is Grace Akese of Memorial U, so I include it even though it's not part of the research funding.

We introduced Lepawsky to Josh Goldstein, a Ph.D. in Chinese History at USC, and Dr. Ramzy Kahhat of Pontifica Universidad Catholica Peru (PUCP).  Lepawsky and some grad students recently completed their first "assessment", based on indept interviews of workers at Retroworks de Mexico in Sonora.

Value Added By Recycling Industries in Massachusetts (1992, Robin Ingenthron) - What John Tierney Failed to Learn about Garbage

Value Added By Recycling Industries in Massachusetts (1992, Robin Ingenthron)

This is kind of a hoot.  Dr. Josh Lepawsky found a paper I wrote my first months in the job at MA DEP, 30 years old, 25 years ago. It got Boston Globe front page coverage because of ricochet.   A loud PIRG vs. Plastic Packaging Industry referendum fight had thrust "recycling" into a spotlight, and the value of "recycling" rather than the packaging policy itself, was occupying the center stage.  Critics of the referendum were attacking state recycling policy, and proponents of the packaging laws were wrapping themselves in recycling like it was mom, apple pie, and the American flag.

To defend recycling as a policy, I tried to explain that there aren't "good markets" and "bad markets".  There are "buyers markets" and "sellers markets", and from an economic perspective, the paper mills, glass furnaces, metal refiners, etc. were adding more value than "waste diversion" from landfills.  So I got some secondary data on the recycled paper mills etc. that I'd supplied as a recycling collector, added up their employees, and explained the multiipliers.

The paper doesn't do so explicitly, but buried in it was my first realization that paper mills might be worse "neighbors", environmentally (odor, water effluent) than an incinerator or landfill, but they created so many jobs that the neighborhoods surrounding those mills were advocates.  Environmental enforcement was linked, geographically, to real estate value.  Likewise, those same jobs, which would disappear in Massachusetts if the tissue paper had to be made from trees, were far more important economically than the value of a ton of paper at a recycling center.

I was initially accused of writing the paper to influence the referendum (and threatened, professionally). I responded that the paper mill employees and those like me who'd been driving paper recycling trucks were kind of bemused... I might next leak the number of laundromats in MA and see if that got in the Globe.  And four years later, this paper was called upon to rebut John Tierney's "Recycling is Garbage" rant, which in part arose out of the very anti-recycling statements being made during the Packaging Referendum Wars (which employed many Bottle Bill Battle generals... history for another blog).

Anyway I long ago lost track of the paper, Josh found it at the MA State House library.

Ewaste Witch Hunt #6: Portrait of African Scrapper, Dying for Attention

If you've been following the last 8 blogs about Agbogbloshie in Ghana, you see the tricky place we are approaching.  If the slum dwellers in Accra are burning wire for less than $3 per day, does chasing away the photojournalists do more harm than good?

There's this sense that photos have value, and a sense that some kind of exploitation is going on.  But it travels like a rumor, and the Africans are conflicted in whether to participate or boycott the photojournalists.  It's part of the #charitableindustrialcomplex that they know is "happening" but don't really understand how to monetize.

If the hyperbole about the  "largest e-waste dump on earth" goes away, if the source of the scrap in Agbogbloshie is not "hundreds of containers from sham recyclers" but just pushcarts collecting junk from a city that had 20 TV stations 20 years ago, where does that leave Razak, Awal, and Rachid, the scrappers we did Q-method interview with on film last spring?

Are they still "important"? 

It's a tricky thing.  They have no problem at all "outing" Mike Anane.  The scrappers clearly can't stand the guy. Every time Anane's name or picture came up, Awal's crew would begin talking over each other, standing and yelling.  That didn't come from me.  "HE DEY LIE!" [he lies] It was cried with emotion because they knew what Anane charges for his "photojournalism tours", they know his bogus relationship with the idealist young journalists like Kevin McElvaney, or "BitRot" Bellini, and with Jim Puckett and Lord Chris Smith etc... and they suspected it was part of the "Sodom and Gomorrah" propaganda campaign to evict them from their homes for the Accra Metropolitan Association could take the land over and develop it with hotels, malls, and office complexes.

Evolution of RERA #eWaste Legislation: Spinning H.R. 2791 Obsolescence

Lobbying for the RERA Bill, to bring EU style enforcement to bear on secondary market electronics, keeps shifting parameters.   Here's a blow by blow on why exports of used electronics should (or shouldn't) be banned.   The justifications for both RERA and Interpol enforcement seem to go "obsolete" every 18-24 months... Moore's Law for accusations?  

Summary: H.R.2791 — 113th Congress (2013-2014)

(Note, the dialogue is equally effective in summarizing INTERPOL's Project Eden enforcement)

"The legislation is necessary because 80% of USA e-scrap is exported and dumped.  It was necessary to arrest Joe Benson and more like him.".

- No, actually USITC and MIT show conclusively that most is not exported (otherwise why would we have all those CRT glass piles?)

"We meant, The legislation is necessary because of what IS exported, 75% is simply dumped and recycled in primitive conditions.   It was necessary to arrest Joe Benson and more like him."

- No, actually 85%-93% is reused, not dumped, according to multiple peer reviewed UN studies.

"Ahem.  Thanks to the attention we brought, and arrest of Joe Benson, the situation is greatly improved.  Legislation is needed to continue this improvement."

- No, the studies were on the containers seized during his arrest.  It was literally the accused containers that were found to be 85%-93% reused.  He didn't do what you said.

"While the 80% dumping was exaggerated, 9-15% dumping is still completely unacceptable.  Legislation is needed so Africa will leapfrog into new product..."

- No.  Actually, brand new product imported to Africa was found to fail more often than the used equipment, either due to lightweighting (less durable, cheaper components susceptible to Africa's electric grid fluctuations), or shipment of "new" ESD damaged warranty returns to Africa.

Labor Saving Devices Advertise Jobs In USA

There are older versions of this song on youtube, and versions I like better.



This is a song about jobs, it romaniticizes hand labor.

Shredding machines have been given a much lighter job than rail setting machines.  They don't repair, they don't even set aside repairable items.

And in fact they don't finish the job.

The specifications you see advertised on electronics shredders are real.  They really do produce the copper, aluminum, and plastics streams they show.  But the trick is this.  They produce 80% of the sort in the first 20% of the time and energy they run.

In 20% of the time, the machine owner gets 80% of the benefit.  The owner of the machine has to continue to grind, grind, grind, running the shredder 5 times longer, to get the cleanest stream advertised in the shredding magazine.

It's called "diminishing returns".

Adam Minter's book (Junkyard Planet) shows the lines at the back end of the shredders, the people who hand-sort material that has been shredded not-quite-to-spec.  As he documents, it's appropriate at some point, when the labor has run into it's own Paretto Principle, when there are diminishing returns for the labor.  My company sends a percentage of cleaned e-scrap off to shredders, we are not hand-disassembly "purists".

But even the material we send for shredding doesn't "end of life" there.  Most profitable USA shredding companies turn the machines off before 50%, sending the remaining pieces overseas to be hand-sorted.  They never run the machines 100%, due to "diminishing returns".  It takes as much energy to clean the last 20% of material as it took to clean the first 80%.  Sorters do a better job, by hand, in China, and just as much labor is exported as was displaced in the USA.

The irony is that shredding companies advertise themselves as creators of jobs in the USA.  That's really not true.   The shredders who advertise "USA jobs" are using mechanical means to eliminate labor in the USA, and to eliminate repair and remanufacturing jobs which simultaneously create more employment in both the exporting and importing country.

Bullboys 11: "My Generation Did WHAT??" to CRT Glass Markets

So I used to sell to Egypt, now I don't.

I used to sell to Indonesia, but it's illegal now, so I stopped.

And for years I exported to Malaysia for refurbishing, and that factory - which recycled 100% of accidental breakage at the CRT glass furnace in KL - no longer speaks English.  We gave them a price cut in return for their obtaining ISO14001 certification.  They began a takeback program, creating a domestic Malaysia CRT recycling infrastructure...

It's all dead.  Supply and demand.

The E-Waste Industry, at the EScrap Conference in Orlando, will be talking about there being no demand for CRT glass, cathode ray tube cullet.   But that's not exactly what there's no demand for.

There's no demand for self-righteous bigotry and b******t.

Back to the drawing board.  I can cross off lots of places that are expensive to visit, expensive to audit, and give R2 Auditors the heeby-jeebies.  Turns out, the heeby-jeeby feeling is mutual.  In Vermont, we have practically eliminated CRT export for reuse.  I could become an E-Steward right now, if I was willing to pay the dues.  I'm not doing anything they don't want me to do.

So gee... I should look back at the invitation to join E-Stewards, the gracious invitation extended to me last
winter.   Sure, I'm qualified now to be a "steward".  But, it's wasted on me.  See, I'm really not into calling innocent people guilty, and the whole making myself look like a better recycler by making other people look worse.   If an all white country club chased off my colored fiance, and said now I could be a member, I wouldn't be too keen with all that.  

I'm E-Steward qualified, E-Steward eligible, E-Steward compliant. I'm a good ole e-waste steward boy. Just got to show them my downstreams and write them a check.

Crayons on Maps: Your list of Acceptable Jobs

The theme of social choice, being able to choose a job, is key to mobility.  But mobility is also key to being able to select a job.

In the blogs here about slums, choices of jobs, and exports of materials, we are really talking about free trade.  If you ask people their opinions on free trade and sustainability, you can predict what their estimate is of bad trade.

The Bayesian analysis used by Reed Miller's group at MIT did some interesting things, using surveys of experts, seeding "known" information, and then weighting opinions of statistics according to their ability to answer known things correctly.  The expert who knows the most about your car is most likely to tell you correctly what is wrong with your car.

What is seriously lacking are surveys of Africans, Chinese, Latinos, living across the colored crayon lines that we have drawn on our maps.

Interpol's Sending Africa "Back to Eden"

INTERPOL targets foreign trade Between Europe, Africa (Lyons, France)

"Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice" - Senator Barry Goldwater

Back-wards To Eden.  

I am well aware that white people using the word "racist" are vulnerable to being ignored.  We just don't get it, my African friends and me.  40 businesses arrested, goods seized.  USA laws proposed to outlaw trade between us.   Study after study shows that the African entrepreneurs have no financial incentive to pay for the import of junk.   Studies show that the "e-waste dumps" filmed by do-gooders from IFIXIT to Pieter Hugo depict mainly African electronics, used by Africans for years, sometimes "traded in" for newer used models, sometimes collected from the streets by scrap dealers (the same as rag pickers and newspaper drives collected recyclables from the alleys of New York, Philadephia, or Boston).

Anyone who has lived in Africa knows that a family without formal education dreams of a handful of jobs for their kids.  Agriculture (e.g., Fair Trade Coffee picked "by hand"), the army, and working for a multinational like Exxon or Nike, those are considered the "good" jobs.

Poaching elephant tusks, gorilla hands, bushmeat hunting, sex tourism, drug smuggling, and using toxic mercury to delve the rivers for gold... those are the jobs I'd want my kids to avoid.

Of all these jobs, of all the resource-curse jobs, the globalist sweat shop jobs, the finite material mining, the pollution, of all these ways for Africans to earn income, David Higgins of Interpol in Lyons, France, has elevated one of them to criminality.

Reuse and repair of used electronics.   That's the bad one.

There's a new idea circulating in Europe for Africa's future.   "Back to Eden".

Here's the thing.

used outfit:  confiscate

I need TWO HANDS to count the number of my friends who have lost 30-60% of their life savings, who have been arrested, or whose goods have been labelled as "toxic", despite the fact that these people cherry pick like all hell, and all of them refuse 90% of the material that comes through our door.

Yet I have never, ever, been questioned on the 90% of junk, toxic, crap, obsolete material that I ship to white people.

So please someone, explain this "Eden" solution to me.  I'm listening.

Recycling Export Ban Won't Create Jobs

Grind it even smaller and create even more jobs?

The report has good people behind it - My buddies Ted and Natalie at DSM Environmental.

And it's pitched by my favorite E-Steward, Neil P-M of Cascades.

The headline of the report, funded by Export Boycott group CAER, the Coalition for American Electronic Recycling, is based on two analyses:

1. If material is recycled rather than discarded in landfills, more jobs will result.
2. If the material is processed in the USA rather than exported, more USA jobs will result.

The first is true.  And I will take some credit, I did the first "Value Added by Recycling Industries" report at Massachusetts DEP in 1992, which was re-contracted to DSM to verify that decade.  Recycling does create more jobs than burning or disposal.  That is because of the Value Added - the value in the material, such as the refined plastic, the refined metals, etc., is preserved, rather than just lost at the dump.

The second is completely false.  I can prove that in a couple of ways.

First, take a look at the photo on the cover of the report.   Shredded materials from a big machine.  The largest and most prominent companies on the web page above use big shredders.  Then they export the shredded material... partly sorted by magnets into cleaner streams.  But generally it is not clean enough to avoid another manual sort.


(from ShanghaiScrap, photo by Adam Minter)
http://shanghaiscrap.com/2011/03/reprise-wasted-from-the-motor-breakers-to-the-sample-room/

Now I have nothing against the Chinese person in the photo above.  I just prefer to deal with people in repair markets, using the system I describe below.  Repair markets also preserve value - more value, in fact, than recycling does.  And lo and behold, just as the shredder creates jobs in the USA by exporting shredded metals diverted from landfill, based on the preserved value... by golly.   The more value we preserve in reuse, the more people we export intact products to, the more people we hire in the USA.

Just as diverting metal from a landfill into an export stream of metals creates more jobs in the US, diverting reuse material from the shredder, preserving MORE value, creates even more jobs in the USA.

The shredding machines replace workers at plants like mine, which use hand disassembly.  How can my company possibly out-perform these big companies, outbid them, using manual hand disassembly?  The only way is by doing what humans can do better - recognizing reuse value, and separating intact parts with retained or added value (like rare earth hard drive magnets which are lost in the shredder).

Follow the photo trail below to see how all these categories of preserved value exported from the USA create jobs in the USA.   My company also sends raw materials, like the shredded metals above, overseas.  We don't do it as quickly or efficiently by hand as the shredder does.  But our manual laborers keep aside the parts that have even more value intact than they have shredded.    Our company creates more jobs by doing more things with the export market than just selling "raw material".  We underbid the shredders... and we create more jobs per ton - by exporting appropriately and fairly.

Look at the DSM study cynically for a moment.  Shredders cannot compete fairly against reuse, so they want to pass a law against it.  But "jobs" is not the reason.  If I can't export the 20% of good stuff my manual disassemblers catch, I may as well replace them with a big metal shredder.

Below is the data on material collected by my company, in 2012.  I will show in photos why we employ MORE people by exporting that top quartile of material than if we recycled it in the big blue "raw material" 74%.



Let's also address the myth of "stack and pack".  I used to think my company was special by doing most of the work in the USA.  What I have learned during the past 10 years is that no export market EVER purchased and exported the "whole enchilada".  TVs are most of the e-waste, and the only ones the export market ever purchases are nice shiny black ones and small 17" ones that will work on weak current.

Freeze frame of Greenpeace film of Ghana.  Who's caught red-handed?  The exporter or the racial profiler who says this is raw e-waste for disposal? Clue:  talk to the buyer.

This isn't saying that all companies who export do an equally good job of sorting out "toxics along for the ride" junk, or ship equally high quality material.  Fair Trade Recycling, which we support, seeks to raise the standard on all used electronics exports.  But realistically, you cannot raise the standards in a supply-and-demand economy if you are shredding the supply.  Given the choice between buying a 2003 computer monitors, and a 1996 monitor, Africans will buy the newer one.   But if the newer one is shredded, expect the African to buy the 1996 model rather than go with no computer display at all.

My Vermont Company can beat CAER "zero export" companies in a fair competitive bid.  This is NOT because we employ fewer workers... quite the contrary.  It's because our sale of 15% of the material overseas generates 60% more income than we'd make shredding it for metal to export overseas.   

We hire more people per ton than the CAER's shredding system, and they want to pass a law to eliminate the staff we have sorting and reusing and exporting, because we make more money... something you HAVE to do when you employ more people.

Hobsons Choice For the "E-Waste" Market

Take it or leave it.

When an E-Steward company, or a state or enterprise influenced by its negative campaign, is approached by an Egyptian, Indonesian, or Nigerian who wants to set up the fastest growing cities in on the planet with affordable internet, they have one choice.

They can either replace the bad capacitors themselves, replace the hard drives themselves, buy new laptop batteries themselves... etc. etc.   Or they can destroy them.

The fastest growing, highest use, internet market in the world, is in the cities of emerging markets.  Cairo, Jakarta, Lagos... and dozens of others with billions of people clamoring to learn, to be entertained, informed, and connected to their family, friends, and associates.  They are starving for things like affordable display devices.

When a Nigerian, Egyptian, or Indonesian electronics repairperson (a terrific job choice in emerging markets) wants to buy a Dell, HP, or Samsung computer from the USA, they have once choice:  buy from someone willing to sell to them, or go without.

The Watchdog, the Gatekeeper, the certifier wants to change that choice.  The E-Steward Program charges YOU money to not attack you for selling junk.  This changes the choice for suppliers / sellers in the USA.  I used to decide based on the demand - what people wanted to buy.  Now that's changed by the requirement that I pre-repair it, and the risk that if I do sell it, I may be attacked.    The effect has been to constrain the supply - the buyers choice of goods.

The Watchdogs say this is to protect the buyers from getting "junk".   The test of whether something is junk?  In the marketplace, it's called "the marketplace"... what people are interested in buying.  The buyers, the Geeks of Color, the Technicians, the "Good Enough Market".   The Watchdog, having convinced everyone that 80% of these decisions are bad ones, intervenes, and places themselves between the buyer and the seller.   A referee can be good - if the ref understands scoring and other rules of the game.

Under E-Stewards, the ref has raised the stakes on any missed calls, and so they design a rule to be something much easier to measure than willingness to buy (repeatedly).  They can't be bothered by the background checks on buyers and fair contract language that Fair Trade Recycling pursues.   Keep it simple e-Stupid.  "Fully Functional", "Tested Working", "Plug and Play"...  E-Stewards and PACE gave up when we sent them 20 page purchase orders with quantities, tests, sizes, buyer qualification rules and other parameters.   Too long to read.   To difficult.  So they created "tested working" as a standard.  Sounds good.  The effect was to remove sellers unable to test and buyers who preferred buying newer goods for repair (rather than old ones "working").

1:  Take the highest demand in the world
2:   Restrict what they can buy
3.  Profit!!

They get applause from the Anti-Gray Market Alliance members who make brand new product, who restrict the right to repair and use patent trolls and copyright extension to squeeze the largest demand in the world into the tiny space of brand new product.  Profit.

My Life In Footnotes: Value Added Recycling Jobs '92

"Value Added by Recycling Industries in Massachusetts" was an article I published in July 1992, in my first few months of my appointment as "Recycling Director" at Massachusetts DEP.  Footnotes to the report live on, and I feel sure I must have a hard copy somewhere, but I cannot find it online any longer.

Drive around the parking lots of your competitors.

Count the cars.

Use the cars to estimate the number of employees.

Some staff may be absent, some may have carpooled, some processors may be more efficient than others. But generally, if you circle 100 paper recyclers parking lots, the ones with just a few cars are less likely to be baling the same amount of material.  The larger ones will actually bale more per employee or more per car perhaps (due to larger, higher efficiency balers), and the smaller ones may employ more people per ton.  But you have a point of reference.

Just When I was Starting to Hate Apple

 'Photographer Credit: Nichollas Harrison' - thanks

I am not a Troll

Steve Wozinak Speaks to Bloomberg about Smart Phone Patent Wars.

“I hate it,” Wozniak said when asked about the patent fights between Apple and Samsung. “I don’t think the decision of California will hold. And I don’t agree with it -- very small things I don’t really call that innovative.

“I wish everybody would just agree to exchange all the patents and everybody can build the best forms they want to use everybody’s technologies.”

Steve Wozniak, the engineer-geek who co-created Apple Computer with Steve Jobs, was ever the good cop.   Yes, Jobs was a visionary, yes he was an orphan, yes he climbed up from the bottom, and yes he got blindsided by IBM when richie rich kid Bill Gates' Parents (who were on IBM's Board of Directors) got Gates a personal meeting to pitch Windows... Perhaps those tender moments influenced Jobs, perhaps he grew up tough.

But Steve Jobs also sued 14 year old bloggers, parked in handicapped spots, and (my beef) took credit infamously and greedily for other peoples ideas.  See Wired News articles... (but beware of flame-baiting your blog)...

My position in this industry was built by reading Digitimes, a Taipei-based tech journal which I started subscribing to about 10 years ago.  It was mainly about displays, displays, displays then.  I was able to predict and ride the sales of CRTs when the demand curve was outpacing the LCD supply curve, due to increasing demand projected in emerging markets, I was able to find Taiwanese-owned contract manufacturers, and I became who I am by riding Taiwanese coat-tails.  And here's the truth - Windows and IBM released their hardware, the PC clones, rather than open-source their software (as Google has now done) and the deal worked.  The Asian Tigers engineered and tinkered and produced PC Clones into a massive industry.  And the biggest thing you wanted to clone, 50% of the cost of a computer, was the CRT monitor.

Apple had to outsource their displays, they had nowhere near the market share to produce their own, not even close, in the 1990s.  And they outsourced them to Japan (Sony Trinitron), and did not develop the ties with Proview, BenQ, Wistron and Foxconn which others in the industry developed.  Apple tried to keep control, when Windows and IBM were PC-cloning, and tries to keep control as Google is Androiding.  But eventually, they had to come work to discover the IPhone prototype.

The Taiwanese became to display devices what Japan had become to automobiles.  In fact, it drove Beijing nuts that Taiwan was becoming outsource-in-chief to Japanese manufacturing, drove the Communist Party so nuts that they tried to corner the entire CRT manufacturing market, buying out all the furnaces and dumping subsidies into the manufacture... in 1999.   (Newbies).

AWESOME Exploitation: Crowdsourcing the Developing World

Having documented ad nauseum that 85% of the computers sold to Africa are reused and repaired, and documenting that the 3B3K market (3 billion people earning $3k per year) has added internet access at 10 times the rate of growth of the "developed world", how do we create employment without outsourcing a job?

We outsource work done by an overheated machine.... IBM's Big Blue, perhaps.  It's "immaculate exploitation", no jobs exported, no toxics, creating jobs out of code.

This AWESOME article from MIT Press (found on /.), Human Workers Managed by an Algorithm, explains how human interaction is more efficient for certain mega-computing processes.

Supercomputing is actually more efficient if some of the algorithms are done "by hand".  The programs have to check off boxes which are obvious... humans can do it instinctively, and crowd-sourcing limits or eliminates subjective bias.   The problem is you just cannot afford to do it in Silicon Valley, your maximum return is $4 per hour.

By assigning such tasks to people in emerging economies, MobileWorks hopes to get good work for low prices. It uses software to closely control the process, increasing accuracy by having multiple workers perform every task. According to company cofounder Anand Kulkarni, the aim is to get the crowd of workers to "behave much more like an automatic resource than like individual and unreliable human beings." 

Four bucks per hour is great for MOST people in the world.  Awesome, in fact.   And they are not taking jobs away from  Big Blue, they just give the megacomputers more "leisure time" (if you are stuck in the thinking of Marx, Hegel and John Stuart Mill).

The bad news? Oh gee, people in "Developing Nations" earning less than minimum wage, there's gotta be a downside. Quick, let's send a reporter to photograph the dirty clothes their children wear, the mud huts, trash being burned at the Accra or Lagos landfill.  Because these jobs are available to people who can only afford a $20 used CRT monitor.   Yes... there's a photo of a burning computer monitor that needs to go into the article somewhere, or a "witches brew" of bad capacitors associated with the good enough market.

"Exploitation".

What I do at the Beach: Masters in Capitalism

This doesn't really fit in a blog.   And like many of my college papers, it was written at one sitting (I used a typewriter with white out and being able to re-write a paragraph was rare). Sometimes I do this and park it for months, and eventually publish a "robin masterpiece" like Monkeys Running the Environmental Zoo.  Sometimes I do it in one sitting at a place like Motherboard.TV and an editor there helps me to produce "Why We Should Export Our Electronic 'Waste' To China and Africa.", which becomes subject of a documentary on European cable news.

I haven't reread this at all, so buyer beware.  Here's my attempt at relational relativity applied to Marxism and development economics.   It was too windy at the beach. (pun intended).

Cleaning Up in Capitalism:  Relative Aspirational Pyramids
by Robin Ingenthron, July 21 2012.  Written in Le Barcares, France.


In journalism, they say you need to know your audience.  I'm obviously not a journalist, and don't think I'm competing in "free content" for the news writing community.  But I think there are a lot of works I admire where the author (e.g. de Tocqueville) probably didn't exactly "know his (future) audience".


I'm also re-reading Herman Hesse's Siddhartha.  In chapter one, he's an arrogantly admirable son of a brahmin (SOB).

The word Siddhartha is made up of two words in the Sanskrit language, siddha (achieved) + artha (meaning or wealth), which together means "he who has found meaning (of existence)" or "he who has attained his goals".^[3] 

BAN Farewell: It's About Giving them Cash

The NGO Basel Action Network just announced they want to cash out on their "Stewardship" program.  This is what I predicted.  When they started, I said they are going to have to come face to face with real recyclers making real decisions, real uncertainty, and they would be FORCED to confront their pollyana unicorn-promise responses.  They just announced a retirement plan.  Submit your proposals to see them off.

What Romney and Obama Need to Legalize

America's Denial:  Demand for Immigration and Marijuana vs. Modern Prohibition

Zarakia and Bloomberg are correct about immigration.  Immigrants create jobs.  They have taxes withheld which they never recover.  Stopping immigration puts the USA on the path that stifled Europe a century ago, drawing lines and language barriers which defy our past success.  Legalize Immigration.

At the same time, Arizona is also right.  My friends in Vermont attribute the anti-immigration, anti-Mexico laws there to racial fear  Certainly the racists would support those laws.  But there is a very scary, very violent bunch of drug gangs who have invaded Phoenix.  I'm very pro-immigration, but I have also heard gunshots in the background when talking to my employees in Arizona, and understand that people turn to Sheriffs in Maricopa for a reason.  Protect our children.

Why are the drug gangs coming into Arizona?  Arizona, once again, is subject to the winds of California law.   California is practically de-criminalizing marijuana.   De-criminalization has been called "the worst of both worlds" in that it allows (encourages) consumption but does not allow the development of clean and legal channels to produce the marijuana consumed.

California, of course, is also right.  The cost of imprisoning people who smoke pot is ridiculous, and people are going to keep smoking it.  Creating a "medical exception" to cheat through is better than cheating in other ways.   Criminalizing marijuana is not a solution.  Marijuana, which I have smoked but do not smoke now, is nowhere nearly as dangerous as alcohol, which I do consume, and which has taken the lives of people close to me.   Marijuana is not a "gateway" drug, any more or less than underage drinking is a "gateway".... the gate is law violation, moving the gate to eliminate the gateway has been tried in both directions, permissive Amsterdam 1990s and prohibition Chicago 1920s... moving the gate does not stop the supply and demand.

The cost of arresting, detaining and deporting immigrants from Latin America is estimated by ICE at $122,000 per defendant, approximately the same as the cost of imprisoning a pot smoker in California.  Just as California created an escape hatch for smokers to avoid prison costs, ICE has come up with a way to reduce the cost of deportation (or to create "self deportation).

Today ICE focuses on employers, to reduce the supply of paychecks.   It will not increase the number of Vermonters (at 4.8% unemployment) who will milk cows or perform cleaning services (or recycling work).   But it will make it less attractive for Latinos to come work here.  It's less expensive to frighten 10 employers into terminating 5 employees each than it is to arrest, detain, and deport a tenth as many.  And ICE doesn't get its hands dirty.

Outcome?  In Arizona, the outcome is that fewer people cross the border to pick fruit, clean metals, repair cars, or do any of the other "list of jobs beneath white people".   Those jobs aren't worth it.   However, the California illegal marijuana market remains, and remains very lucrative.   Statistical Outcome? The Latinos who do come up are more likely to be drug gangsters and less likely to be milkers and apple pickers.   The net migration from Mexico is down, but the type of Mexicans taking residence in Arizona is more scary than it was 30 years ago.

This plays well to our innate "think of the children" and "separate the colors" fears and phobias, and playing to fear and phobia takes up 18 months every 4 years - during the election campaign.  So families in Arizona who are legitimately afraid of gunshots in their school districts vote for tougher immigration, even as immigration declines as a percentage.  Cost of car repair, fruit picking, milking, goes up, which puts more pressure on the jobless.   This makes creating jobs for the jobless a political issue, even though they are only 4.8% of Vermonters... including some of them who may be (illegal) pot smokers and (legal) drunks and have trouble keeping jobs for other reasons than competition with Mexicans and Central Americans.

There is one solution.  Legalize Marijuana.

Legalize marijuana at the federal level.  Not because I want to use it or intend to use it, nor will I advise my kids to use it (except as a social alternative to binge drinking).  But we need the tax revenues from marijuana, and we need to spend less money enforcing and imprisoning Californians, and when the drug cartels lose the business, we will have fewer gangs, and Arizona residents will stop being obsessed with immigration.

Everyone will get a unicorn.  (Or at least the opportunity to imagine they see one.)

This is the truth darn it and the republicans and democrats all know it, they are just emphasizing disagreement at all possibly junctures because they do not care as much about the deaths and lost lives in prisons and deportations of cow milkers and apple pickers, or the jobs (as Fareed will talk about) which are created by the immigrants who want to do great things in America.

Productivity and invention and intelligence creates jobs, and this is a very nasty political funk America has gotten itself into and I'm shocked by the cowardice of both the politicians and the electorate.  Immigration needs to be legalized, and for that to be politically acceptable, we have to end the "drug war" if we have decriminalized the demand side.   Marijuana needs to be completely legalized and grown domestically, and taxed, and free our law enforcement officers from chasing down hard working immigrants and Californian smokers, empty our jails, and get our budgets balanced.

Maybe if it becomes a health care law or social security tax revenue issue...   Shoot the meth dealers and let the marijuana dealers buy licenses and be regulated like liquor stores.  Pat Robertson has my vote on this issue.

[Postscript:  More graphic detail on cannabis at TheEconomist 2012/06 "BongoLand"  USA, Canada, Spain, Italy, Nigeria, Australia, New Zealand represent X% of consumption... They need to form a "Fair Trade Marijuana" consortium.  Time to get motivated tomorrow.]

Press Sinks Ship Recycling

There are two ways to get metal.


Bangladeshi Workers Risk Lives Recycling Ships... thanks to Adam Minter for the nod.

One is to get it out of the ground.  Here is an example:  The OK Tedi Copper Mine on the island of Borneo.  Metal is found in many places, but it's impossible to gouge and dump cyanide tailings anywhere close to a populated area.  The USA has vast federal lands, remote from cities, so we can still mine red and hard rock metals (gold, copper, silver, etc.).  They generate 45% of all toxics generated by all USA industry... but it's not close to property values.   It's the same economic logic discussed in "environmental justice" blogs last weekend.

Australia has a lot of remote places, and is in the metal mining business, as is Canada and Mexico.  But when you try to do it in a place like Europe, there are risks of toxic spill disasters, like this one in Eastern Europe in 2010, or recently, in Liuzhou, China.  A city of 3.2 million, its drinking water system nuked by a cadmium spill into the Longjiang River, released by the Guangxi metal mining industry.

The press does occasionally cover these polluting practices, but only when an "abnormal" disaster strikes.  Bloomberg reports in 2010, China's Shenzhen Zhongjin Shuts Zinc, Lead Smelter After Toxic Leak Found.  Or here is another zinc smelting spill, of cadmium from metal mining, of the Yangtze River.

 In January 2012, Jonathan Watts wrote in The Guardian: Chinese emergency personnel are erecting barrages and pouring hundreds of tonnes of chloride into a river in southern China in a desperate effort to prevent a toxic spill from contaminating the supplies of a major city. The flow of cadmium - discharged into the Liu River earlier this month - has continued despite three previous containment operations, and now threatens the 3.2 million residents of Liuzhou city in Guangxi province. [Source: Jonathan Watts, The Guardian, January 30, 2012]

I've previously reported stories from the Danube, and from Guangzhou's massive zinc-lead smelter spill in 2006.  And don't forget about the conflict metal mining... today, this blog is sadly the top of the google ranking if you are looking for news about it.  I find that tragic.  I'm a nobody.  But the Guardian writes about stopping ship recycling, without asking, anywhere in the article, where the metal will be replaced from as the shipping industry increasingly sinks the ships rather than risk the wrath of environmentalists.

There are two ways to get metal.

Memorial Day: Fear and Greed, Part 3

There is a cynical expression in Africa, used in response to "fears of the rich".   Why worry about toxics which may kill me seven years from now, when there are so many things that may kill me today?

Just as there are Useless Lists of Jobs Beneath Wealthy People, there are fears and phobias that the emerging markets don't have on their list of priorities.  That can be an opportunity for exploitation.  Yesterday's post described how EPA's Environmental Justice team came on board to make sure that "a clean local environment" was a right for every American citizen.

I learned today about careers in actuarial science (CNN).  It's about the statistics of risk and benefit, which (those who know me, know) I attribute to most of my life success.  (Taking credit for good luck, others call it).  Wikipedia 2012.05.28

An actuary is a business professional who deals with the financial impact of risk and uncertainty. Actuaries provide expert assessments of financial security systems, with a focus on their complexity, their mathematics, and their mechanisms (Trowbridge 1989, p. 7).

Actuaries mathematically evaluate the likelihood of events and quantify the contingent outcomes in order to minimize losses, both emotional and financial, associated with uncertain undesirable events. Since many events, such as death, cannot be avoided, it is helpful to take measures to minimize their financial impact when they occur.

According to the article, actuaries are one of the most sought-after degree holders, with virtually 0% unemployment.   What I'm curious about is what a professional actuary would say about "recycling" and "reuse" endeavors, with their associated benefits and risks, in a developing nation?  

One of the saddest stories I remember from Peace Corps in Africa was a young woman who spent a year teaching farmers to cultivate fish ponds.  Her favorite and most apt farmer/student lost his 1 year old son, who drowned in the fish pond she helped to dig, and she quit the service and returned to California.  Perhaps an actuary would say that the protein in the diet is worth the risk, if you learn from the lost life and make the fish ponds a little safer.  (Yes, this is similar to the story of the boy I helped bury who drowned in his father's well.  Not digging wells is not an option.  I taught by twins to swim by the time they were two years old).

Unlike the Peace Corps volunteers, the villagers really don't have much of an option to move to San Francisco.  If they try illegal emigration, that has its own risks.  My best friend from Africa married my Peace Corps replacement and they moved to the USA.  He was a muslim who fell into drinking in the USA, lost his family, and has been in and out of prison.

Finding a scapegoat for the things that killed us today is rarely useful.  The amount of fear that we can realistically project onto something that may kill us seven years from now is also practically useless, unless we find a scapegoat to leverage... the answer to that "unless" depends on the wealth of the scapegoat.  The environmental justice and Stewardship philosophies may not be built upon this attraction to leveraged wealth... but they cannot help but be influenced by it.

We can blame ourselves, or government, for the fish ponds.   We can blame corporations for the stewardship of the toxics.  But like actuaries on a battlefield, the entrepreneurs I've met in slums and emerging markets don't wait around for someone to blame.  They find the most value they can, the smartest way that they can.  It's not waiting for a big multinational corporation to pay for a modern shredder.   It's not taking back an exhausted 1980s TV from Lagos for repair.  The best thing they can do is get a laptop which needs the fan cleaned, or a computer with a dead capacitor, and repair it, earning a months wages in forty five minutes.  It may be safer for the white volunteer's shiny conscience to escape that, or say they shouldn't have had to make that choice.   I didn't leave, and don't intend to.

When a risk is a consequence of trade, and the trade is a good or service between someone wealthy and someone poor, it might be about exploitation and it might be about race.   But sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.  The actuarial science of life for the developing world says that Foxconn and contract management and low wages are a better path out of the poorest ditch than the promises of Mao or Al Qaeda.  Having a boss sucks.  But having a fair boss, or a good trading partner, doesn't suck nearly as much.

BREAKING NEWS: Mexican Immigration Solved

From the Wall Street Journal:

"Net migration from Mexico has plummeted to zero thanks to changing demographic and economic conditions on both sides of the border, a new study shows, even as political battles over illegal immigration heat up and the issue heads to the U.S. Supreme Court.".. 

"The net migration flow from Mexico to the United States has stopped and may have reversed," says the report, which is based on analysis of U.S. and Mexican government data by the nonpartisan Pew Hispanic Center.

The standstill, according to the report, results from declining immigration from Mexico paired with a rising number of people returning south from the U.S. Those trends recently converged, and between 2005 and 2010 about as many Mexicans left the U.S. as flocked here. 

People aren't dying to cross our borders anymore.

People aren't trying to take our jobs away.

They don't really need our e-scrap, either.  They have enough "e-waste" of their own.

 It's ridiculous, people flying around, dodging Mercedes Benz's, trying to get a rare shot of the endangered, exotic, scrap merchant.

Going to a landfill and photographing junk TVs, and we ASSUME they must have been just imported.  AFRICANS don't have TVs!  They MUST have been imported!!

Guess what?  They are selling milk in plastic bottles now!!  And the Berlin Wall is down!