The Effects of Exporting Used PCs To Africa 355
retroworks writes "According to this UK MailOnline story, computers donated to Africa are causing quite a few problems. The BBC does a similar story on the junk computers from rich countries found on the ground in Africa. But all of the footage is of the junk PCs; there is no film of any repaired or good computers. There have been a dozen stories now about the bad apples. It seems like there have to be good ones, too, to cover the costs of shipping. Some of the ones in the Mail story actually look decent. Is there more balanced coverage of used computer exports, many of which provide affordable technology to poor people? Organizations like Greenpeace and Basel Action Network are promoting electronics recyclers with zero-export policies. One organization, the World Reuse Repair and Recycling Association, is promoting a 'Fair Trade Coffee' approach to moderate the number of bad computers exported, and has a video showing both sides of the story. A ban on exports leaves Africa with a choice of spending a year's income on a new PC, buying mixed loads of computers from undercapitalized recyclers, or remaining without this level of technology. And our choice seems to be to donate a decent computer mixed with other people's junk, or to grind it up in a perverse tribute to Vance Packard, as 'obsolescence in hindsight.'"
Good ones don't count (Score:5, Insightful)
News? (Score:5, Insightful)
We used "development aid" for ages to get rid of our surplus and other crap we'd have had to dispose of for a lot of money, now we do the same with electronics. Where's this news?
I remember someone doing humanitary work there, giving a speech and essentially saying "Please help us. By not helping us". When we dump free food on a third world country, we ruin their farmers because they can't compete with free food. When we dump free clothing on them, we ruin the few textile mills they have. Essentially, what we do with development aid is to push them more and more into dependency because we ruin whatever industry for the local market might start to grow. Instead we force them to build industries for export, so they can somehow pay back the "development help" we "grant" them.
Want to help? Then don't. Don't send your crap down there. Start trading with them. But not with some international corporation that squeezes the country and the people dry. Trade with companies from there.
Re:News? (Score:5, Insightful)
When we dump free food on a third world country, we ruin their farmers because they can't compete with free food.
Nice sentiment, but, you know, the 'third world' is a big place, and surprise surprise, if you don't live near one of these food producers, and there's a famine, you're dead unless someone gives you food.
None of the Charities are saying that providing food is a long term solution, its just that its hard to talk long term to people whose kids will be dead by the end of the week if you don't hand over some rice now.
How Sick (Score:0, Insightful)
It's really sick how the "rich" countries think they're helping when they use their own country's way of life as a template to "improve" a third-world country. If you live in a country like the US (or Canada, where I am), take a serious look around and try to realize that your country's ways are totally FUCKED UP AND SHOULD NEVER BE DUPLICATED ELSEWHERE!!!
I know, let's fatten up the world's entire population on McDonald's, chips, chocolate, and all the other junk food we live off. Let's advertise Coke and Pepsi to the masses and rot everybody's bodies all to hell. Let's send them magazines that promote beauty as the most important facet of any human being. Let's teach them that the only thing that really matters is money and power, and that one should do anything possible to surround themselves with such things.
So please, leave the rest of the world alone. Starvation and disease may be one hell of a way to live, but think of what you're introducing them to by pushing your way of life onto these people. Truly sickening, if you ask me.
Re:News? (Score:4, Insightful)
Being a parent I find myself sympathising with the parents who know nothing of the wider reasons for the current famine, and who are solely concerned with feeding their child.
Fewer images from news coverage of famines have effected me more then those of parents burying kids who died of starvation.
Believe me, if your kids life is on the line, you give not a fuck about the morrow, just so long as that child is alive to see it.
Re:News? (Score:3, Insightful)
Well yes, it should be limited to goods they don't already have sufficient supply of...
The trouble is, the local producers can't fulfill all the demand, and many people cannot afford to buy from the local producers. So foreign handouts come along... Suddenly those people who could afford to buy from the local producers, now take the freebies, and many of those who couldn't afford the local producers still have nothing.
On the other hand, there are very few (if any?) producers of computer hardware in the third world. I think we should send obsolete but still fully functional computers there, while educating locals how to provide service and support for those who don't want to learn in depth about the computers. As it stands, there is no way people in the third world will be able to produce computer hardware, even to a level that would be considered horrendously obsolete by today's standards... But they are perfectly capable of learning how to support these machines and writing software for them. An otherwise outdated computer that goes to be used in the third world saves landfill.
But we should do something about those who send junk, that is completely defective machines that aren't of any use whatsoever.
Re:Good ones don't count (Score:2, Insightful)
It's like any other recycling. The ones that actually work (cans, paper sometimes) do because there is an economic incentive behind them (i.e: someone makes money out of it)
Re:News? (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't believe your comparison is valid. Africa (apart from South Africa and probably Egypt) do not produce semi-conductors, so there is no industry to kill.
Besides, how old can these computers be? Maybe 8 years? That will mean early P4 / Athlon right? That sounds pretty decent.
Re:News? (Score:4, Insightful)
If they are starving, it's because they don't have sufficient resources to sustain their current population. If you let them starve, the population will contract to a sustainable level. If you give them food, the population will increase to even more unsustainable levels meaning you have to keep giving them food or face an even bigger level of starvation.
They really need to stop having so many kids, smaller families will put far less of a strain on the available resources.
And these third world countries were doing just fine before the europeans went and interfered with them... We really should just leave them alone to make their own way without interference.
Re:News? (Score:3, Insightful)
-1, Malthusian
Re:News? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, someone who actually gets it. Every other species on the planet naturally lives and dies by such logic. Human beings though (especially those who live in first-world countries) seem to think that large numbers of people living within small radii is somehow normal. If there isn't enough natural-born prey to hunt (ie: without resorting to breeding) and/or fauna to pick, then a larger population is _not supposed to exist_! Only mankind could think there's a way to cheat the inevitable.
The fact is that humanity isn't dying off fast enough. In fact, our planetary population continues to increase. Someday the phony sustainability we've been living under is going to crash, and billions are going to die (as they should).
Think about it. If we were talking about an overpopulation of polar bears, birds, or deer that threatened the balance of the planet's combined ecosystem, mankind would have no problem murdering these animals in the billions to fix the problem. Isn't it funny how we overlook such ideas when it's our own "masters of the universe" species that is the problem?
Re:News? (Score:0, Insightful)
And yet they stop working when their bellies are full.
Re:News? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:News? (Score:5, Insightful)
The soulless anonymous coward dies a thousand deaths, the starving die but once.
Re:News? (Score:1, Insightful)
Except the choice isn't school or a sweat shop. It's a sweat shop, starving to death or a job much much worse than a sweat shop (likely involving literal slavery). Likewise education isn't exactly useful when the most you're likely to do in life could be done by a well trained monkey. Shoving western values that evolved from millennium of slow progress, including conditions much worse, onto areas that haven't had that progress doesn't work well.
Unless you can pull a magical solution that instantly fixes all their problem out of your ass there is no quick fix. If there is no quick fix then some people and some generations will be screwed over so that future generations can do better. In other words these kids won't get an education but the goal isn't that but rather that their kids (or grandkids) can get an education.
Re:News? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a tad nazi-ish.
Actually no, that's exactly nazi-ish.
Care to tell me how you'd deal with the epidemic of obesity in the west?
Render down 1 in 10? Start apportioning food based on a persons worth?
Do tell.
Re:News? (Score:3, Insightful)
The fact that western corporations can go there and open sweat shops is "the problem." I don't agree that we should enforce western values on anyone, even the west. The only thing we should be doing in these countries is helping them learn to solve the problems they have. Not providing a solution for them.
Re:News? (Score:3, Insightful)
"People don't recognize that Third World nations need something more sustainable than a band-aid. By giving these people food and clothing, all that is accomplished is a temporary fix and a few feel good points for those who donated. Really Third World nations need to be taught how to fish so-to-speak."
Organizations such as the Peace Corps and many others have spent the past 50+ years trying to educate Africans and "teach them how to fish". 50 years later they are still poor, starving and illiterate. It's time to face the reality that nobody wants to admit.
See what happens if you try to help someone? (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm actually serious. I don't believe in any kind of aid that is made of physical material. If you want to help people, you send books, you send teachers. You don't send rice and garbage.
A few reasons for this:
1) When you grow food and eat it, you poop those nutrients right back into your own ground. You send that to another country, and you are impoverishing your own.
2) Sending broken computers to vicious, fell people results in exactly this kind of thing. We want to believe that everyone has a kind of collective mentality, but most people on this earth are free-market all the way. And a totally free market is a murderous hellhole with a few fabulously wealthy people and the masses in abject poverty. That's a free market. Democratic capitalism is great because it utilizes that "free market" drive (aka greed) to effect positive social change. But it requires constraints to make it move in that direction. Once people see how well a social mindset plus greed works to improve the lives of all (and create a massive middle class, which is key to a functioning society), then they nurture that. They feel a part of something. They neither need nor want to smash people's heads in for a computer monitor full of poison. Most African countries haven't figured this out, and that's their problem--both as in "the problem they have" and "not our problem." We can't fix it, but it also seems we don't recognize that.
Why are the countries that are at the top of the heap at the top of the heap? Simple. We are better. I am absolutely serious. The cultures of Europe and Asia understand the power of a group mentality. They are on different points on that continuum, and that's fine. But we all have it.
Africa is what you get when you don't have that. Everyone is working randomly because they don't care about each other because they don't see that they are the same and that cooperation is the only way to success.
They think that other countries have become rich and comfortable because of luck. But we built this from the ground up--especially for those of us whose ancestors came from the dump known as the British Isles. Our ancestors were just like this until the Romans brought literacy and we saw the awesome power of working together outside of small collectives (Roman Empire).
The Brits got it. The African countries haven't.
This isn't to say they all don't get it, but the problem is that you need a substantial majority of people buying in before it works.
3) Last, handouts are not good for the human psyche. They keep you believing that you are not capable of doing something yourself. I firmly believe that every human being is as capable as any other (at something!), and it's simply a matter of finding that and having that be nurtured by one's surroundings. This is the problem with welfare as well. You walk a very narrow line between making sure you don't have people dying on the streets and cultivating a lawless and irresponsible culture that is not tied to personal achievement and responsibility. Give a man a computer monitor, and he'll smash it open on his neighbors head to get at the copper inside. Teach him to build one, and... Okay it doesn't work, but you see where I'm going.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but Africa is a fucking mess. But no matter what the hippie-type liberals say, it's not because we like coffee and chocolate. It's 100% the fault of the local societies (or lack thereof). It's the fault of governments not working for the people, which is really just a function of the people not working for the people. And we can't help that.
I don't buy into any of this Fair Trade / don't buy diamonds / hippie bullshit. If other people can't run their countries right; if they can't even get organized enough to overthrow their dictators and/or plantation owners (or, rather, when they do, they then just devolve into infighting and become the same thing), then I can't do anything about
Re:News? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you truly feel drastic measures should be taken to reduce the human population, I invite you to start with yourself. Pick a building 6 storeys or more high and jump off the top. Or are you saying it's the OTHER humans that need thinning down, not you? Isn't it funny how we overlook some obvious solutions when it's our very selves that are the problem?
Re:News? (Score:2, Insightful)
It's not nazi-ish at all.
It's educating. It's doing population control, something that the human race constantly battles against with "religion".
F*cking=>Overpulation=>Starving
The problem won't be resolved until the ROOT of the problem is addressed.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:News? (Score:3, Insightful)
What reality? That it doesn't help jack when you teach people when they're rounded up to fight in a civil war that's perpetuated by the same nations that teach them?
You can't solve a problem when at the same time you perpetuate it. A company that sells fire extinguishers pumps fuel into a burning house isn't doing any good. That's not the tenant's fault, though.
Stop selling them guns and you'll see how it works out.
Re:News? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:News? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not bad that you send goods into struggling countries. It's what goods are being sent there. Sending there machines they can't produce themselves to make creation of goods easier is a good thing. But that's certainly not what happens in most cases.
Our thinking of charity works without taking the implications into account. We see someone threatened by famine, so we send food. This is a good idea when the famine is already killing people, it is a very bad idea, though, when there are farms that can't produce enough. Those farms are killed by free food. Basic supply and demand, when there's free food, you can't sell yours. It would make more sense to send farming machinery and fertilizers to increase harvest. Instead, if we think past immediate "send food", we send engineered "power crops" that have the, for this area, very negative impact that they're infertile for the next season, so we have to send more seeds. And they eventually have to buy them since we killed their own.
Basically, what we deem "development aid" these days is more and more nothing but an attempt to make the lesser developed countries more and more dependent on us. Either directly by making them dependent on our consumer goods (food, clothing, etc, by killing their own industry by sending free stuff), or by using a quite fiendish vendor lock in due to terminator crops or machines that require highly sophisticated spare parts.
A prime example was a high tech water pump. Sure, it did provide the people with water. But at the same time, this pump required trained personnell to erect and maintain it, it required high tech spare parts and was quite expensive to maintain. A more sensible solution would have been a hand pump or another device that we'd consider "low tec", that could be easily maintained by the local people with local parts. I've seen very creative designs, they ain't dumb or lazy, and they're the best people I've ever seen when it comes to jury-rigging stuff, but you can't expect someone to come up with a way to jury-rig a machine that requires microelectronics when the welding transformer you built out of a few yards of copper cable and some old magnets is about as high-tech as you get.
KISS has never been a more important thing to keep in mind than when it comes to sensible development aid.
Re:Good ones don't count (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Good ones don't count (Score:2, Insightful)
By taxing 'luxury' goods like cell phones and computers they're taxing the 'rich' and not taxing the starving masses.
Don't you mean something along the lines of "By taxing the 'luxury' items like cell phones and computers, they're keeping them 'luxuries' instead of allowing everyone to have convenient communication"?
Re:The real problem... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm going to guess you have no clue what the person is talking about, and simply spouting off with something that sounds like rhetorical racist-flagging when in actuality the problem being referred to is the social mentality of taking what's needed with violence.
The last time I checked, there really aren't many times in America, China, Russia, European nations, or even Canada where a large group of militia held back food from large numbers of individuals and systematically assassinated droves of people in a given path. At least not for the last 200 or so years.
Easy! (Score:5, Insightful)
Care to tell me how you'd deal with the epidemic of obesity in the west?
First, by West, you must mean US. There is no epidemic of obesity in Europe.
My solution is simple - the new "Can't catch it, can't eat it" policy. Worked for millions of years. Put it in place in stages.
Stage one is a ban on food delivery services. The morbidly obese will starve down to a weight where they can at least get into their cars and get to the drive thru.
Stage two is a ban on drive thrus, so people will starve down to a weight when they can actually get out of their cars and into the counter or grocery store to get their food.
Stage three is a weight limit on disabled parking passes. If you're so fat that you need a special parking permit to get to your food, you'll starve down to a weight where you can at least hobble in to get your food.
Stage four is a ban on any personal scooters or electric wheelchairs that can support more than 250 lbs. If you're too fat to propel yourself, you'll starve down to a weight where you can at least stand up on your own.
Stage five is the big one - the doors of any food retailer will no longer be allowed to be any wider than 20". Then people will at least starve down to a size where they can fit through the door.
See? Piece of cake. Er....
Re:News? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:News? (Score:5, Insightful)
If there isn't enough natural-born prey to hunt (ie: without resorting to breeding) and/or fauna to pick, then a larger population is _not supposed to exist_!
Supposed by whom? God? You? Who is this supposer that requires human populations to not exist except by hunter/gatherer subsistence, and why should we follow his dictates? We don't live by natural means. Artificial means made by human skill or produced by humans. By definition pretty much everything we do is not natural. Get used to it.
Re:News? (Score:2, Insightful)
Can I make just one point here about the supply of food in Africa?
I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in The Gambia, West Africa, for the last two years. Many Gambians there have had good crops in the past. True, some years are better than others, some worse than others. That's how it goes. But the Sahara is near, in the grand scheme of things, and it's getting nearer. The land is getting more and more arid. The rainy seasons are slowly getting shorter. It is predicted that within the next 20 years, The Gambia (and with it Senegal and parts of Guinea-Bissau and Guinea Conakry) will be basically Saharan countries. The ability to grow food in these countries will be drastically reduced as a result.
Do you want to take a wild guess as to why the Sahara is creeping south? Let me give you a hint: global warming has a lot to do with it. Want to improve the lives of people in sub-Saharan Africa? Go carbon neutral [wikipedia.org]! You can start by getting rid of that smog-belching SUV and trading up to a PZEV [wikipedia.org] or, better yet, ride your bike to work. Basically, what I'm saying, is that a lot of the "natural" food shortages in the third world are caused indirectly by our extravagant habits in the first world.
Re:News? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah. Get it. You have kids; you have the whole "parental mind warp" thing that comes with it going (anyone who thinks Steve Jobs's reality distortion field is bad hasn't observed some parents...), and it makes me personally very happy that you love your children so much you'd probably be willing to cause a global thermonuclear holocaust and kill off the entire rest of the planet just so your oh so wonderful spawn could live.
But that doesn't really help solve the problem. Obviously children dying is bad, and we obviously want to stop that, but we also don't want them to sink into further dependence. And, a MAJOR part of the problem, actually ... is those children. Overpopulation is one of the worst aggravating factors of Africa's crisis.
Since we can't really kill the children, and we don't really want to let them die, we feed them. Then those children reach breeding age and soon afterwards create more children, which also need food. And the circle continues.
So what do we do? Well, a number of approaches have been proposed, including teaching the children how to not make more children the instant they become fertile. But it's really painfully obvious that we need to look further ahead than "stop them from starving", because we're just making the hole deeper. If you're sympathetic to their plight because you also reproduced, try to look for ways to stop the plight in the future, not just mitigate it in the present.
Re:News? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think you very eloquently hit the nail on the head regarding the third world's problems. Problem is that one should think about the morrow even before having kids (including planning for cyclical periods of a relative lack of prosperity).
On the other hand, decades of socialist welfare conditions seems to have robbed westerners of the will to do their own forward planning too.
Re:Good ones don't count (Score:3, Insightful)
Since you can get a factory sealed new computer for less than $200 these days, for this to work, the total cost of shipping all that quasi-junk out there + the cost in time (yes even third world man hours have a price, especially skilled ones, people who are struggling to feed their families can't devote large amounts of time to tasks that don't have immediate material benefit) + the cost of disposing of what can't be recycled has to be less than that figure or there just won't be incentive to use such a program, especially if it isn't implemented at scale.
I don't mean to be a naysayer. I'm all about reuse and recycling. But charities should listen to the people they're trying to help, not make assumptions about other peoples' problems.