Can You Lose 50 Pounds In 12 Months? The Hot New #Clickbait #EWaste Diet!

 Can You Lose 50 Pounds In 12 Months?

Shameless promotion of "e-waist"

Technically, I'm not sure I make it. I've only lost 46 pounds, to be honest (that's strictly going by my physical medical exam, not home scales).

The Editor of Resource Recycling Magazine, Dan Lief*, told me that the staff (Cara Bergeson, Bobby Elliot, Colin Staub, Rick Downing,  Jared Paben, Jef Drawbaugh...) had assigned me a nickname of "Clickbait Robin".  That was a gentle chiding, suggesting that some of my stories - like Retroworks de Mexico, perhaps - were more fluff than substance. Low-calorie fare.

Coming from a journalism family (Dad was Mass Communications Professor at U of Arkansas, his parent and grandparents worked at / owned a County newspaper), I don't take it as an insult that I get my point of view out there any way that I can. Chaz Miller, Jim O'Keefe, Brian Taylor, DeAnne Toto, Rachel H. Pollack, Dan Sandoval, and even Cole Rosengren know that I can be tongue-in-cheek, and deadly serious, at the same time. If you are going to use a weight-loss, or journo name-drop, as your clickbait, you better have really lost the weight, and be truthful if it's 46 (this AM, seems 47 lbs) and not 50 pounds you've lost.

(Mark Hickey at Waste360... have not met anyone there yet, and the trade paper's silence on the controversy over racial profiling of used electronics traders really should be addressed)

Poison Apples 4: BAN Report on Canadian Export - 9% Export Despite Rigged Sampling!

Nine Percent!?!?

Nine Percent is a nine-member Chinese boy group formed by the survival show Idol Producer by iQiyi in 2018.

Nine percent is also the result of BAN's E-Stewards new report  on a rigged process to show illegal ewaste export is still a thing to pay them money about.

Rigged as in 14% of all the devices BAN tracked were sent to one company (which BAN has engaged in a lawsuit against). And BAN didn't track things they knew would not likely be exported.

Basel Action Network, the owner of the "E-Stewards" authority program, is still using GPS trackers to try to ramp up business.  In a new report distributed by email, BAN has given a subject headline that "Canada still Exporting e-Waste to Developing Countries"... Using a clever but well trod journalism trick, "still" is meant to imply something significant is contained in the report.

Let's boil the information down from page 1.

1) Zero CRT televisions tracked, despite being 60% of Canada's e-waste stream.  That's a major sampling bias if your claim is about "Canadian e-Waste".

2) The devices "chosen" for export tracking - LCD monitors, CRT desktop monitors, and printers - were identified in BAN's 2016 report as the most likely items purchased by export markets.

3) BAN "Poisons the Apples" again, claiming to have secretly "rendered the devices economically unrepairable".  Like the 2016 report, the sabotage is not visible, it's hidden (and not competently done - in 2016 several devices were found repaired and in use anyway). Why do that, other than defeat screening and quality control procedures by the accused Canadian exporter?

4) BAN again conflates the Basel Convention - which explicitly allows reuse and repair and even recycling exports to developing countries - with their proposed AMENDMENT, which they admit has not been passed or ratified by either the Convention or Canada. So their claims of "illegal" activity by Canadians are clearly false and defamatory.

Despite all this spin, the result of the GPS study is   9 %

And if CRT TVs had been tracked, it would have been less than 3 percent!!!  This report shows an NGO flailing its fingers on the keyboard!!!

Apple of California or Taipei iPod Contractors? "Birth of iPhone" is "Game of Thrones" Saga

In the Game of Thrones (which am watching for the first time, binging Seasons 1, 2, and 3 during an Xfinity free-access trial).  It's about the rightful sons and daughters, or "bastard" sons of Kings, and their rights and claims to Kingdoms and Thrones.

In our world, the Patent or Copyright or Claim of invention is the coveted throne of the modern "Rightful Heir".  And the stakes - for Titans like Apple, Samsung, Sony, or Foxconn - represent a far more wealth than the "Iron Throne" at King's Landing.

Game of Thrones keeps our interest, in part, by slowly revealing more dimension in characters introduced in a previous season (before killing them off and replacing them, perhaps with a new actor less willing to negotiate better salary.. another contract manufacturing angle).  For those of us who study planned obsolescence and contract manufacturing, the history of Android (especially Samsung) vs. Apple smartphones is just as fascinating.  (There's even a 'bit player' I know personally, a kind of Hong Kong Tyrion, that I know pesonally.  Proview's Rowell Yang of the four fingers received a check from Apple for $60M five years ago. He had trademarked the name "iPhone" while I was a consulting with Proview).

In last weekend's WSJ.com, there's a fascinating chapter to the claims that Steve Jobs is the rightful King. father of the smartphone.

Open Minded Electronics Importer Gets R2 Shaft: CEFAD

There are way too many trolls on the internet.  People who are either super sure of themselves, or who get off somehow by acting that way, appear to go out of their way to shock and provoke insult.

trolling e-waste downstream markets

There are also too many wishy-washy agreeable people, people who 'like' whatever is being said today by the people they are near, most comfortable with repeating second hand impressions as fact.

And then there are really principled people, who really think they are good and fair, who really mean to do well, but they are caught in a tide of group-think.

Some of us cannot even see how our perceptions of reality have been caught in a kind of cultural gravity that general impressions cannot escape.   Many of these people are even agents of conscience, trying to make the earth a better place, as best as they know how.

It was someone like the latter to whom I sent the email (bottom, in yellow) for someone's first R2 (Responsible Recycler) end market report two years ago.  I have changed names, hotlinks, and email addresses, otherwise this is exactly what we sent.  This is a real case of "collateral damage"... no one meant to do anything but good...

Someone I wrote about in September 2012 is now out of business.

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.

JTouch: Long Live the Hardware Kings

Americans (and everyone else) loves the touchpad screens on HTC Evo, IPhone, Samsung Galaxy, etc. i-Everyone is aware of i-something and e-waste.  What does J Stand For?

No, Steve Jobs didn't e-invent the i-touchscreen.  Apple saw the beauty of the nice, tight little Asian displays, and quickly worked to design an operating system to implement them.  But now Google Android and Microsoft have caught up, and I don't know how long it will take for someone in Asia to start making software.

JTOUCH... Only 2,400 employees.  CEO Yeh Yu Chou, his phone number is still listed on the web.

J Touch Corporation is principally engaged in the manufacture and distribution of touch panels. The Company's major products include resistive touch panels, capacitive touch panels and traditional touch panels. The Company's products are applied in the manufacture of smart phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), portable navigation devices (PNDs), commercial point of sale (POS) tools and business applications, among others. During the year ended December 31, 2011, the Company obtained approximately 99.68% of its total revenue from touch panels. The Company distributes its products primarily in Asian markets. - Reuters

Find the Taiwanese Executive.  I see Japan, I see South Korea, I see China... Working together to produce films and cultural cooperatation.  Because these guys don't want a stupid war in Asia, not over Sino/Japanese islands or the Taiwan straight or Korean "unification".  They even avoid patent wars, at least better than Americans do.

They are not "outsourced".  They ARE the Source.   Let's hope they make enough money to buy beef and cars made in America, because the genie ain't going back in the 1955 Display Device catalogue.

Now you can find $40 pads in Shenzhen (see "Death of Hardware").   I researched this, because the "death of hardware" headline looked to me like another case where we think that because "Polaroid Died" and "Eastman Kodak Died", that the headline is that "Cameras Died".

Hardware isn't dead.   JTouch is a company you never heard of, and they are making a billion dollars a quarter.  And they can produce the hardware cheaply enough now to sell it to people earning $6,000 per year.  That's a lot of people, a big market, a market bigger than a USA patent lawsuit can leverage.

In fact, the entire story of screen display technology "outsourcing", by Apple, or by whomever, as told by Romney and Obama, is a completely hysterical fiction.  IBM stopped making CRT monitors in NY in the early 1990s.  And that, my friends, was because Asia already owned the CRT business by then.

"Hardware is Dead"?   The king is dead, long live the king.  Incredibly good, profoundly useful, and shockingly cheap gadgets are going to change our industry.  They won't stop.  The question is whether the idea to make them non-repairable is ingrained in the industry now, and whether they will become like light bulbs, produced too cheaply to fix first, then re-designed to fail faster... or whether, mercifully, buyers in the $6000 income bracket won't put up with that.  In the USA, display panels are already becoming the new ink cartridge, and we barely finished breakfast.  But in Guangzhou, you can buy printed reverse-engineering books which tell you how to repair (or remanufacture, or counterfeit) every electronic device on the market, and if one gets a reputation for being "all glue and no screw," they may find USA and Europe to be their only market.

JTouch to increase revenues in 4Q12 from tablet product orders

Siu Han, Taipei; Alex Wolfgram, DIGITIMES [Thursday 4 October 2012]

Taiwan-based touch panel maker JTouch is expected to see fourth-quarter 2012 revenues hit the highest quarterly level of the year due to increased orders for touch screen panels used in tablets, according to industry sources.

The company is seeing increased orders mainly from international companies such as Samsung Electronics for its 10.1-inch tablets and is increasing its overall proportion of production of touch screen products used in small- to medium-size devices, added the sources.

JTouch has also been improving its production capacity throughout 2012 and is increasing the number of customers from China, added the sources.

JTouch's revenues for the third quarter are estimated at NT$1.4 billion (US$47.7 million), up 40%...

See Digitimes for more

China (over) Produces $45 Tablets - Commodity Deflation!!

Looks like a job for Light Bulb Repair-Man

Last weekend I wrote about Apple founder Steve Wozniak's take on the "Samsung vs. Apple" patent battle.  Yesterday we looked at the billionaire Asian Titans, Lees, Lins, Lis and Gous, who took reuse and spun good enough gray market and refurb items into the dominant modern industry of our times.

Are display devices becoming like light bulbs?

Today, I ran across an article by Jay Goldberg in VentureBeat about his latest trip to Shenzshen, China.



Android tablets are selling in Shenzhen at $45 each, brand new.

"Hardware is dead".

This was a 7-inch tablet, Wi-Fi only with all the attributes of a good tablet. Capacitive touchscreen. Snappy processor. Front facing camera. 4GB of internal memory and an expandable memory slot.

I later found out that these devices are now all over the supply chain in Shenzhen. At volume, say 20,000 units, you can get them for $35 apiece. My device ran full Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and had access to the full Google API, including Gmail, Maps, YouTube and Google Play (not quite sure how that works either).

Once my heart started beating again, the first thing I thought was, “I thought the screen alone would cost more than $45.” My next thought was, “This is really bad news for anyone who makes computing hardware.”

The title is misleading. The hardware isn't dead.  In the industry, it's called "commoditization", where yesterday's unique must-have hardware becomes mass produced, and competition renders it the price of an ear of corn.  Apples may truly become apples.   Even as Apple and Samsung fight over the patent on the tablet and touch phone, the fact that the critical component - the small touch screen - was not owned / invented by either, has taken over reality.

This is not a small deflation.

Yes, it is still aggravating that OEMs seem to manufacture devices NOT to be upgradeable or repairable.  But if they are producing them at 10 percent the cost of a year ago, that may undermine the tinkerer blessing.