Tantalum

[spruce_moose]

I don't mean to make this issue contentious or anything. I'm just curious to see what other people's perspective is on this.

This stuff is extracted under some pretty poor conditions, but is super handy in electronics for heaps of applications. You could have the view that it doesn't matter because the only ones creating demand are corporations, and pedal building is a drop in the ocean.

I haven't really had a reason to use it, and am not really sure what to think if I end up needing to for noise suppression. Perhaps it's possible to always design around these things.

For me this parallels with a situation where the knobs running NZ at the moment try and argue we shouldn't have to drop our emissions because we're so small that the USA, China etc should do it all and we should be allowed to let our cows multiply. It's kind of a dick move.

If you go from being a consumer to a manufacturer AND consumer, you could argue you're fast becoming a bigger part of the problem. Lots of people like us DO combine, and easily equate to the demand created by much larger businesses right?

Thoughts?

[ChannelingHemingway]

I think it's part of the wider conversation on the ethics of how we get all our rare earths.

Another way to look at it is that multiple sectors of employment raises wages: if the only work in town is farming then you're stuck with whatever the landowner pays you, but if a factory opens down the street now the landowner and factory have to compete for the same labor pool. The result is that everyone, both farmers and the factory workers, make more money than when there were only farmers.

It's shitty that the places where this stuff is closest to the ground are less industrialized and don't have the luxury of automation/safety oversight that richer countries can bring to mining, but at some point someone will say this sucks/is too inefficient/too expensive and figure out a way to mechanize a lot of it. Eventually, somebody will probably figure out how to get to the harder-to-reach deposits in Europe and the Americas and once the costs of extracting through that method are comparable to the slow, dangerous, manual ways those will start running.

Interesting statistic: in countries with no existing landline system (which describers where a lot of this mining is current being done), for every 10% of the population that gets a mobile phone, that country's GDP rises by .5%.

Regarding volume. How many guitar pedals are built in a year compared to the number of mobes churned out by Samsung, Huawei, LG, Apple, et al? It's an issue, but it's also not going away. Do what you need to do to sleep at night.

[spruce_moose]

Yeah I hear ya. In regards to cellphone ownership correlating with GDP growth, is there any way to tell that's lowering slave labour in the mining communities?

If there was more demand for fair trade tantalum caps, they might become more accessible for DIYers?

Improvement of working conditions (albeit small) could more directly be associated with something like the DIY community indicating a general preference for fairer components. That kind of sway could influence companies like Rasberry Pi, and there's heaps of those being made.

[ChannelingHemingway]

I haven't read anything regarding the rates of slave labor in mining. I have read that since Apple and a few other companies started looking more closely at their supply chains militias that had previously just been sitting on these mines and taking the profits have become more mobile (raiding, pillaging, etc) in order to compensate for the reduced cashflow.

If there was more demand for fair trade tantalum caps, they might become more accessible for DIYers?

Yes. Demand would probably have to come from outside the DIY community though. I don't know exactly what goes into making a tantalum, but it seems way more complicated than something like a guy rolling his own paper and oils. Economies of scale, etc etc.

That kind of sway could influence companies like Rasberry Pi, and there's heaps of those being made.

It could, and that would be great.

Tim Worstall is a regular contributor to theregister.co.uk; he writes about the intersection of technology and economics and also has a stake in a scandium mine, and he hits on this and related topics pretty often. It's interesting reading, but he's a pretty ardent free marketer and depending on your politics that could be particularly odious. Today's article is about how child labor bans in underdeveloped economies simultaneously increase the number of children working and decrease their wages. The point basically being that child labor is bad, but children dying from starvation is worse. It seems like these things often come down to picking the lesser of two evils.

[spruce_moose]

Wow. Thanks for taking the time to teach me a few things.. mainly that there is no tidy solution to something that seems like a straightforward ethical supply/demand issue. Also that it's all a complete mess while somehow being a fine balance yikes

[ChannelingHemingway]

No problem, dood. All appropriate disclaimers that I'm not an economist and yadda yadda, of course.