The COVID-19 Bottom Line: Some Societies Can Afford To Insure The Elderly. Some Can't.

This will be brief, and I don't want to "bury the story" yesterday about concrete things recyclers in wealthy societies can do to preserve their businesses.

Bloomberg columnist Adam Minter just published a big truth. In some of the 7 billion people world, there is enough stimulus to finance "flattening the curve". In other places, there is not.

Game Theory 5: Yankee Ingenuity changes to Soukous Ingenuity

Time to tweek the English Vocabulary.


This post is about "aid" or "nurture" versus strategy for growth and self-sustaining economies.  It's not the proverb "teach a man to fish".  It's "Dudes!  Don't even you see this guy is fishing successfully?  Give him back his dang fishing pole.  Like, primum non nocere already!"

for some reason this depicts strategy by wiki

"Yankee Ingenuity" was a term recognized virtually worldwide after World War II, though it harkened back the a period much earlier, when New England's industrialization began making "good enough" product  in competition with English and European manufacturing.   Paper mills, weavers, cotton gins, and printing presses (like the used one purchased by teenaged Ben Franklin from London prior to the Revolutionary War) were often erected with "tinkered" parts.   Reuse, repair, and upgrade were recognized as a talent associated with poverty and a "can do" attitude.

My generation of schoolchildren in the 1960s saw "yankee ingenuity" in our history textbooks, it was so promoted that Wikipedia's editor is within h/h rights to label it a "stereotype".  

But what we really need is a term that African and Asian and South American Tinkerers can be proud of.  The "tinkerer's blessing", as I've dubbed it refers to can-do/make-do in contrast to the "Resource Curse".   But 'blessing' is a description of an effect, whereas "Yankee Ingenuity" gave respect to the people performing the repairs and upgrades.   Tinkerer's Blessing refers to the effects the Geeks of Color have on their own emerging city or country.   What do we label the drive within the African, the Joe Benson, the Hamdy Moussa?  How do we regionalize Acer's Simon Lin or Terry Gou's adaptation of "semi-knockdown" and "elective upgrade" in a way that signifies a "tip of the hat?"

Injury Box Blog: Pics Parasites Poverty

Last week I "kinda severely" injured my left hamstring in two winter-home-weatherization related incidents.  What has been frustrating has been to be home-bound but unable to sit still, upright in a chair for long.  Makes for halting, sporadic blogging.

Last weekend's post "Missing Poverty: Poverty Comedy" was messy, but I'm kind of excited by something that turned up from inside it.   The parallels between 1960s Ozarks and 2010s West Africa is not exactly uncanny, we've even been there before.  But the Hans Rosling videos I've been engrossed by this winter helped me generalize my subjective insights.



In 2009, South Korea became the first former recipient of OECD economic assistance to join the assistance giving committee.   South Korea was admitted to the OECD in 1996, 25 years after OECD was defined.  The 1961 original OECD membership list was whites - only (not even Japan was considered "developed").  Kids in college today are getting a message about "developing world" from people who considered South Korea a charity case, and they are getting the message on Samsung handheld devices (which they use to shop for Hyundais and Subarus in another tab).

You can track affluence and progress through lifecycle of appliances.  Koreans bought used products from affluent 1970s Japan.  Selling a first used car to a teenager is not necessarily "exploiting" the teenager.  Selling a starter home to a young family is not making them poor.  The guilt-by-association with poverty dogs the used goods market, and photographic snapshots of poverty should not become a modern soul snatching juju.

It's a fallacy that invokes instincts of nurture and instincts of aversion, and it sways crowds of people who self identify as "Agents of Conscience".   The key is to understand spiritual materialism (the desire to be a good soul) and history of development.  Rosling has shown how the majority of humans, like my Ozark cousins, have emerged from poverty within generational memory.  We need to explain to the Royals that fixing and recycling stuff isn't suffering.

Many places have been wealthy for so many generations that they do not have any institutional recollection of the end of poverty.  But for those of us who can remember, boycotting the poor is not how affluence went down.

Term "Third World" is Anti-Second-Hand Propaganda

How "e-Waste Tragedy" propaganda is imprisoning African Geeks, Nerds, and Technicians.

1. 

1. The term Third World arose during the Cold War to define countries that remained non-aligned with either NATO (with the United States, Western European nations and their allies representing the First World), or the Communist Bloc (with the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and their allies representing the Second World).

2. Third World - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

   en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World
   

   Wikipedia
3. 
   

Ok.  So, the number of people who are not aligned with either the Soviets or NATO is... irrelevant.







Now, we all have friends who are overly anxious to impart their trust quickly on the statistic which affirms their bias.   The "bias confirmation" here could be something Eric and I suffer from.

We see that people are being arrested for importing stuff which mostly works.  To us, banning the trade between rich and poor makes as much sense as outlawing the used car market.

Cultural Gulfs In Developing Markets #1: BlueGrass, Soukous, & 9 Mile

The Urban v. Rural path of development is a common theme in this blog.   "Emerging markets" in Brazil, China, South Africa, India, Egypt and Indonesia have their own "story of stuff".    For 3B3K (three billion people earning $3000 dollars per year) internet = entertainment.   It's a whole mass media market creating a demand for "good enough" devices.  These markets now produce/consume more "stuff" than rich nations do, but they also reuse and repair devices, like rich nations did 25 years ago.

Afrikan Marilyn Manson Die Antwoods Volandi Visser

Huge factories devoted to refurbishment of good enough display devices served these markets for the past 20 years.  They deserved more credit than they got in the "E-Waste Toxic Dump" press.  Unfortunately, I'm the only person writing about it, and I've been labelled.  This "well is poisoned".

But what about the demand, the noise, the hunger for music and videos coming from inside those cities?
How are the new hyper-cities like Hong Kong-Shenzhen-Guangzhou (a metropolis with a population as large a Japan) incorporating music and culture from the rural areas migrants came from, and how are those sounds changing when infused with world pop?  When we call six billion people "the third world", we put megacities into the same category as Somalian refugee camps.

We talking about a very cosmopolitan three billion people, my friends.

Ducking the Dunning–Kruger Effect (Part 1)

Dunning-Kruger Effect describes a lot of activists on the right and left. The only cures are hindsight, skepticism, humility, and listening. Duck.

We slowly learn that "e-waste dynasty" is really not that special.   It has been a good ride. It brought something new for career recyclers like myself to get excited about, after the goals of universal curbside recycling, recycled content, household hazardous waste collections, and landfill capping and closure became yawn-ho-hum.

And it is indeed important not to squander the carbon embedded in the manufacture of gadgets.  Vital to respect the enormous burden of mining on Earth's habitats. Our demand for copper, silver, gold, zinc, palladium, rhodium, tantalum, and other minerals and metals to make our chips, capacitors and circuits is crushingly important.  

But the "impact" of discarded electronics on landfills and foreign beaches has been overplayed.   The associated toxics are far less newsworthy than "a-waste" (automobiles), original mining of the metals, original manufacture, or even the use and disuse of the electronics during its life.

What "the great e-waste crisis" offered was illusory superiority.  In a vacuum of data and definition, we became our own titles.  We announced ourselves as "non-exporters", or "professionals", or "stewards", or "certified".   We became "Good guys".  Our companies were "Creative", and "Synergistic" and "International" and "Solutions", all competing (for attention and investment) in "solving the e-waste problem".

A new cause is an opportunity to claim expertise as the journalists come looking.  But what were we "experts" in, really, except the "topic" of a new category of scrap?

What do you know, really, about the oldest Texas Instruments calculator in your house?   You've owned it 30 years.  Are you an expert about its end-of-life?  Does the fact that you own it, and the prospective buyer (in China) does not (yet), make you the expert on e-waste?

"The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than is accurate. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude.^[1] Actual competence may weaken self-confidence, as competent individuals may falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding."

"Where Unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority..."  How well does the Dunning-Kruger effect describe rallies to the cause of electronics recycling?

Everyone in the developed world, and billions of people in the emerging world, have something electronic which was worth a lot of money once and now isn't.  It's the "wealth" of "e-waste" haves.  You are a "have",  I'm a "have".  Six billion out of seven billion - the "non-OECD" - have been defined as the "have-nots".   Yet 80% of them are actually "haves" as well.  But if you are looking for a 30 year old "waste" item, like a TI calculator, you better look first among the "haves" of Christmas Past.

We have evolved to save things which we procured at cost.  Our ancestors survived on the reuse of spear-heads, and scavenging biproduct bones.  We are programmed to get value back out of things we have invested in.   But if there's nothing economic to do with it, it just manifests itself as guilt.

More Insider Dope on Electronics Export Transactions: Giovana Vitola

Leyla Acaroglu tweeted us about a documentary, aired in Australia, as proof that electronics exports are bad.  The reporter is a Brazilian woman, who is now in Singapore.   I have an address for her to visit.

Giovana Vitola's documentary "E-Waste Hell"  (shown on Australia's DateLine) follows the Basel Action Network recipe.

1.  Fly to a big city in an exotic location.

2.  Find bored kids burning TV devices (and refrigerators) at a city dump.  Take film.

3.  Interview an African (Mike Anane) who reads and believes BAN's fake 80-90% export statistics.

4.  Go to the sea container yard and take pictures of televisions being unloaded (from Australia)

5.  Interview the importer with a hidden camera.

Before you assume this is "same old same old", watch the documentary all the way through.  I noticed a few things worth talking about.

First, the standard freeze frame screen shots show, once again, that the devices filmed in the landfill shot look nothing like the flat CRT (2003ish TV year, which would have been made a the Samsung Corning flat CRT furnace in Klang, Malaysia, which made the compact CRTs until 2011).  She films one with broken plastic, but it's clearly shipping damage, and it's cosmetic, it doesn't mean it won't work.

No, I don't think so.  Talk to StEP much?

Second, the undercover film shows what Interpol recognized in its 2009 "organized crime" report.  The sea container is being received by the family business... the importer says his brother lives in Australia, and bought the televisions.  Another "Hurricane Benson" being associated with the dump, kilometers away.

Interpol:  Brothers + buying = organization = mafia

Memo from Rich: Mine it, Don't Reuse It.

M E M O

3 / 6 / 2013

To:      Third World
From:  Management


Subj:   Reusing "waste" materials from OECD Bosses



Dear Third World:

Your relationship is very important to us.  Please take note of the following memo to reduce need for escalation of conflict resolution in reuse, repair and recycling chains.

It has come to our attention that you are recycling raw materials sourced, as "waste", from our rich nations.  This was acceptable in the past, but we have new management directives for you, based on recent status updates.

Evidently, some nations importing raw materials are salvaging manufactured goods and repairing them for direct reuse and resale.  This began with Japan Victrola Corporation (JVC) ninety years ago, and led to JVC's reuse of victrola systems from RCA, which eventually led to full scale development of the nation of Japan, and eventually, an increased sense of Japanese self-autonomy, descending into World War II.

While we greatly value the mining and refined content of the new products we sell, and accept recycled content as a "green" innovation, we must draw the line at reuse and refurbishment of our product.

Based on past precedents, reuse and repair of products made in first world countries has sometimes led to reduced purchases of our goods in "good enough" markets.  Self sufficiency, through repair and reuse, will break the chain of our relationships with mining and resource rich nations in the third world.

In order to preserve the important relationships rich countries have engendered with consumer nations, we have taken unilateral steps to seize used goods purchased by Africans and other emerging markets, shipped from ports in the European Union and other OECD nations.

Please, respect the relationships we have developed.   The role of the developed nations is to brand and resell to your nations at an added value which allows us to source raw materials from your mines.  Self sufficiency, through reuse and repair, sets a dangerous example which will threaten the growth of our super rich original equipment manufacturing (who outsource assembly to you as well) corporations.

Sincerely,


First World Management