Intel Challenges Manufacturers To Avoid "Conflict Metals" 123
retroworks writes "Several news outlets report on Intel's announcement that it will avoid purchases of rare earth minerals and metals, such as tantalum, sourced from high conflict areas such as the Congo basin. Could this lead to manufacturers stating the percentage of their boards which are made from recycled boards, like recycled paper greeting cards?"
Just the processors (Score:2)
Call me when they get rid of the tantalum capacitors on their motherboards. Are there that many "conflict" elements used in integrated circuits?
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Intel recently stopped making motherboards
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These are the "conflict minerals" as described by Wikipedia:
Columbite-tantalite (coltan) - this is where tantalum comes from, which is used in compact and reliable capacitors across many industries, as well as a carbide in jet turbines, drills and other tools
Cassiterite - used to make tin, which is obviously used for tin cans and solder, as well as making fungicides, paints and PVC
Wolframite - used to make tungsten, used as a weight in a variety of applications, and as a carbide is used in similar applicati
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PC motherboards you normally buy don't have tantalum caps as they are too expensive. The solid state caps that are getting popular are aluminium with conductive polymers. They have better electrical characteristic than tantalum.
Tantalum caps are used for high reliability applications e.g. telcom, mil etc where you want something that last long (if you treat them right) and operate over a very wide range of temperature. Traditional electrolytic are wet, so they don't work well when the electrolyic freezes
Re:The real headline... (Score:5, Insightful)
Hooray, activism works.
Seriously, simply by trying to avoid conflict minerals, they are already helping to stop fueling those regional wars. Does that make them "good guys"? It makes them "better than they were before." Which is a good thing.
Nobody's always perfect, so we should at least celebrate a little when someone improves.
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I suspect that it won't stop these regional wars, humans will ALWAYS find something to fight over.
Even if it's because Group A worships God A, and Group B worhios God B. . . .
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humans will ALWAYS find something to fight over
Since they'll never be peace on earth, it doesn't matter how much war on earth there is?
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I just read up the Wiki article on the war in question [wikipedia.org]. It was not so much a religious war as much as a war for control of those 'conflict materials'. But before going after US companies, here is the rub: the trade in this is not done so much by warlords, but by leaders of other African countries that got involved in this because they had personal stakes in the trade. Leaders like Mugabe or Sam Nujoma of Namibia. There were a total of 9 African countries involved in this war due to that reason.
So if
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If it's anything like "conflict-free diamonds", it will find a pretty big niche among people who care more about feeling like they're helping and less about actually helping. For the most part, the only reliably conflict-free diamonds are lab created ones. Even Canadian diamonds have been traced as going back to pay African warlords.
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Even Canadian diamonds have been traced as going back to pay African warlords.
If you trace it enough couldn't this be said for darn near ANY purchase, much like how we can detect cocaine on any given bill that's not fresh from the mint?
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Exactly.
There has been a long campaign to convince people that you shouldn't sell them on. [theatlantic.com]
Why? Because they are virtually indestructible. There must be enough diamond jewellery out there for everyone by now....
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It'd be fine if that were the idea, but here's a question: what if those conflicts suddenly stopped? Would there be any reason to prefer the new materials over Tantalum?
If yeah, just state it and go ahead w/ its R&D. If no, avoid using the justification of avoiding 'conflict materials' and just internally go ahead and do it, if they really believe in it and it makes them feel better.
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Let me be the first to post a selfie on this topic (Score:1)
Perhaps this will simplify their reporting? (Score:5, Informative)
It appears the SEC [wikipedia.org]. Has a rule requiring companies to audit their entire supply chain, for "Conflict Metals".
These supply line traceability audits would surely present a very high burden of compliance, and high costs, for this extra bureaucracy, even for a company like Intel.
Still...... Even if the company doesn't otherwise care where their metals come from, The SEC mandates independent third party supply chain traceability audits and reporting of audit information to the public and SEC and an annual conflict minerals report to the public, for manufacturers, and companies contracting an item to be manufactured.
Then there are..... companies who supply materials to the “issuers” (but are not themselves SEC-regulated) but who will almost certainly be required to conduct conflict minerals audits [wikipedia.org] to meet the demands of those customers. Other estimates indicate that the total number of US companies likely impacted may exceed 12,000
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These supply line traceability audits would surely present a very high burden of compliance, and high costs, for this extra bureaucracy, even for a company like Intel.
Really? You have reliable estimates of the costs, or is it just your ideology that tells you it must be true? Similarly, if we require all diesel fuel sold in this country to be ULSD, it will raise costs enormously. Oh, that's right, even the oil companies say it only costs $0.07/gallon.
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Depends on the level of traceability desired. You want to know why a bolt for an aircraft is $5 each, versus probably the exact same bolt you can buy at Home Depot for $2/lb (or probably under 10 cents each)?
It's traceabilit
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You seriously think the only difference between aircraft bolts and hardware store bolts is traceability?
Please don't act on your belief and put hardware store bolts into your aircraft (or even car). Also do a little research.
Tantalum is not a rare earth metal (Score:4, Informative)
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In a world where companies rarely go all-in on something new, isn't partially better than the only other practical alternative of not at all? Besides, it's almost impossible to be 100% ethical in every single thing you do, as you'll quickly find your bottom line nickled and dimed away.
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Busy work (Score:5, Informative)
This is all being driven by a 2010 US Law requiring companies to track and disclose where they acquire gold, tantalum, tin and tungsten. These are primarily mined in the Congo region, and are believed to be run by warlords using the public as basically slave labor.
While a good in principle law, it doesn't currently list "bad" suppliers, and really doesn't do anything but make companies track their suppliers. No penalty for buying from the worst of the worst, you just have to report it. And the "worst of the worst"? They're not stupid - they're reverting to well thought out money laundering techniques to hide their product behind "clean" companies.
So this ends up being another needless law that requires companies to to extensive work reporting something that the bad guys have already found a way around.
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So this ends up being another needless law that requires companies to to extensive work reporting something that the bad guys have already found a way around.
It didn't start out that way. There were punishment clauses and a mandate to create an independent body to review the companies being reported to ensure they weren't just laundering fronts. But then Republican happened and it was defanged and defunded.
Your tax dollars at work.
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Sounds like the law was financed by the chinese government. Now we pretty much HAVE to buy from china. They're one of the few rare earth suppliers and also their companies have no problems forging documents where their minerals came from.
Tantalum is not a rare earth, and Australia is the world's largest tantalum supplier.
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So... since bad guys find loopholes, we shouldn't even try? If we extend that mindset we shouldn't have labor laws, environmental regs, building codes, etc etc etc. I don't want to live in your world.
OR, we could see it as a continual fight. Something that's never won, but worth fighting for. I personally would like my clothing to not be made my little kids in some foreign country. I'd like the materials that go into my electronics to not be mined by slave labor. I'd like the products I use to be built b
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Of course you do. Children and slaves are highly productive workers. Slaves are many times more profitable than employees who are only interested a paycheck to support an easy lifestyle while slaves only require low quality food. As for child labor a healthy woman can easily pump out another one every year and they aren't intelligent enough to survive on their own and have loyalty to their parents. They also make great soldiers. Give them an AK47 and turn them lose. Their mothers are busy pumping out repla
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Because all regulation is bad, right? Who cares about saving lives if it increases costs?
Obviously the bad guys would prefer not to have to launder money. It's an extra cost to their business brought on by regulation.
Jobs (Score:1)
But if the SEC is going to make a stink about it the easy solution is to not be listed on an American Stock Exchange. It's funny really. We sent every job overseas so we could become the "Financial Center". Now we are going to drive finance offshore too. People, especially the US Government fails to realize that there are other countries on this planet, and not all of them like being
damage control (Score:2)
Expect large corporations to start looking for ways to make themselves look less evil while they cut their workers incomes in half.
Note to CEOs: If you really want to seize some moral high ground, treat your workers like human beings and pay them enough to live well. You'll still make a shit-ton of profit and everyone will be better off.
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I'll second this. CEOs, please treat your workers better.
/gets on his horse. Ahem. I buy all of my clothing second hand because I don't want my dollar supporting a company that uses little kids to sew garments, or any other horrible practice. Shoes are hard though. I only buy New Balance, and only particular NB shoes, because they're made in America, (although any country with decent enough labor practices would do). NB has me as a customer because everyone else is an asshole.
I try to extend this practi
Such as? (Score:2)
... it will avoid purchases of rare earth minerals and metals, such as tantalum, sourced from high conflict areas such as...
...China? Because, you know, they're fighting over those exact resources. It's just an economic battle rather than involving slave labor. Although I'm not sure you can say that the Chinese factory workers are all that much better off.
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Actually, given China's human rights violations and their occupation of Tibet, until people are willing to oppose them w/ the determination that they had in boycotting South Africa in the 80s, nobody should really say a word about the African warlords. Only difference b/w the African warlords and the PLA is that the former is not sitting on trillions of $$$, which is why the West is happy to want to boycott them
In Europe we have a full GSM phone doing that (Score:4, Informative)
Fairphone, http://www.fairphone.com/ [fairphone.com]
And, the specs go much beyond just avoiding 'conflict metals'. For instance, the battery is replaceable, and there are two SIM slots that make the phone much more interesting to reuse in developing countries when you'll be tired of it.
And, they considered a lot of 20000, then sold them all, then extended to 25000, then sold them all again.
So, things are going well for them.
(I'm patiently waiting for them to become compatible with the open-source Sailfish OS, and then will be ready to pay twice the current cost.)
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This looks like a great product; been following it for a while now. I would pay a premium to have a US version of Fairphone, though I guess that would hurt its re-usability quotient.
Why not get them here (Score:1)
We have plenty of rare earth metals as well as tantalum. They are not mined because of regulations, esp. from the EPA. As I understand it, rare earths are never mined in this country because thorium always occurs with them. Thorium is slightly radioactive. It's sad. Thorium is more common than uranium and burns cleaner. The DOE, however, has regulations from the 60's or 70's that only allow uranium to be used in this country. This appears to be because Uranium 235 can be used to make plutonium for we
Commodity Differentiation (Score:2)
This feels like the result of Moore's Law winding down. Intel used to differentiate based on transistors, computations, energy use, but now the best they seem to do in world where rates aren't skyrocketing is to say they make their chips / boards without using "blood minerals". Could also just be them responding to the pricing pressure that conflict and the dominance of certain countries like China has caused in the rare earth metals market. Don't buy those because they're bad (and they jack our costs)
They should also avoid (Score:2)
BTW, Intel's intentions are pretty evil (Score:2)
They have stated to trade groups that they intend to drive increased consumption even if consumers don't need or want their products. IIRC, in one of their commercials they even accost a disinterested PC user and get her to buy a new laptop based on a bunch of new buzzwords that sound cool. The subtext was: You're in idiot living in a bubble if you're satisfied with the stuff we made for you just a few years ago.
Intel and Apple today represent a nexus of the aggressive consumption mindset. Its not working o
Can't wait to see this (Score:2)
New Intel CPU box with "Made from 90% recycled AMD CPUs".
Here we go again (Score:2)
Given the expected regulatory hassles, companies are looking for mineral supplies in more stable countries. Legal exports (as opposed to black market transactions) of the minerals from the Congo, which supplies 13 percent of the worldâ(TM)s supply of tantalum, dropped more than 90 percent in April from a month earlier, according to the latest data. âoeAlmost everything came to a standstill,â says Paul Yenga Mabolia, head of Promines, a World Bank program assisting the mining industry in Congo.
Note that a huge increase [agmetalminer.com] in the price of tantalum happened after supply was deliberately restricted.
Often, and this is no exception, fads come with a hefty priceâ¦literally. The price per kilogram of tantalum imports to the U.S. increased by 170% in just one year. The rise in price was mostly seen in imports by air, as shown in the graph below. The average import price of tantalum went from $110 in 2011 to nearly $300 in 2012. The craze is continuing into 2013 as well, with January numbers showing the average price at $360.
China also happens to be the primary source of imported tantalum for the US. Given that China is also alleged in my previous link to be the main destination f
Walmart (Score:2)
This is what happens (Score:2)
documentary about this (Score:1)
I am one of the people who feels uneasy watching this kind of stuff as it makes you feel guilty for living your life.
However, watching this will probably make you feel a bit more strongly about the issue.
Re:no (Score:4, Insightful)
The only real problem with using raw materials from areas dominated by various tribal warlords comes from the risk of supply disruption. Anything else amounts to denying domesticated primates their reality-given right to treat each other like shit.
Re:no (Score:5, Insightful)
Tactlessly phrased or not, this AC has pretty much expressed what most of us feel - Who gives the least damn about "conflict metals" vs the price of their new tablet?
I'm not saying you're wrong -- perhaps most of us do gladly suffer other people's misery if it knocks a few bucks off our retail price.
But I wonder if this would still be true if more of us were educated about the facts on the ground. It's easy to not care about distant people whom you've never met, or just absentmindedly heard about in the news.
To some extent this strategy of simply labeling, as in differentiating regular from "conflict" or "blood" sources, sort of worked out ok for diamonds. Not completely, of course, but it absolutely helps.
Majority or not, the complacent are a huge part of the problem.
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I guess I might have meant "indifferent" rather than "complacent". Oh well, who gives a fsck.
Re:no (Score:5, Informative)
To some extent this strategy of simply labeling, as in differentiating regular from "conflict" or "blood" sources, sort of worked out ok for diamonds. Not completely, of course, but it absolutely helps.
There's a bit of a difference between blood diamonds and blood capacitors. You don't actually need diamonds for anything. Industrial diamonds (which you actually use for useful purposes) are cheap and easy to get, since they're incredibly small (basically diamond dust). The larger ones have no practical uses; they're only used for jewelry. So if you want to avoid fueling tribal warlords, it's easy: you don't buy diamonds, and instead buy something else like cubic zirconia, Swarovski crystals, or other gemstones like sapphires, rubies, emeralds, etc. (many of which are now artificially-created anyway).
Tantalum isn't used for jewelry, it's used for capacitors. Not only that, it's used for extremely high-performance capacitors. So you could stop using it, and switch to other types of capacitors, but you're probably going to suffer for it somehow, because AFAIK nothing else can match the volumetric efficiency of tantalum at this time. You could switch to standard electrolytics, but those don't really fit into smartphones and iPads. You could switch to multilayer ceramics, but those probably won't give you the required capacitance, so you'll have to use lots of them, so your smartphone will need to be 50% larger.
It's the same problem we have with oil; we can't easily switch to something else, or do without, without severely affecting our technology and quality-of-life, so we fuel conflicts in certain parts of the world which happen to be rich in that natural resource.
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True, but I don't see how that is an argument against being informed about it. The quality of life we stand to lose for having suboptimal capacitors is trivial, even embarassing, compared to the potential gain in quality of life for some of the people at the other end. And my main point was, I think this labelling is a good idea because then at least we can't claim ignorance.
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Also, if you're uncertain that tantalum is so essential for your electronic lifestyle that suffering in war torn areas is irrelevant, it's good to know there are no wars in Australia. They're the world's major supplier of tantalum. Avoiding "blood tantalum" really is a matter of "sanitizing" your supply chain.
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Cool! Now, maybe you can suggest to those of us who support Tibet and human rights in China on how we can avoid any 'Made in China' items in our daily lives
Not the same. In Africa, the money from the minerals actually causes (or at least aggravates) the conflict. In China, the opposite is true: Rising wealth and engagement with the world is improving the human rights situation.
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True, but I don't see how that is an argument against being informed about it. The quality of life we stand to lose for having suboptimal capacitors is trivial, even embarassing, compared to the potential gain in quality of life for some of the people at the other end. And my main point was, I think this labelling is a good idea because then at least we can't claim ignorance.
To me, this entire argument misses the point. It makes the rather untenable assumption that if most people stopped buying tantalum or whatever from a specific source, that all the conflicts there would be resolved and the people would somehow decide that they're going to just hug it out and be friends. It's easier to make that assertion with diamonds - there's a lot of money chasing them and you can point to specific thugs killing people over them. Not so for most of these rare minerals and metals. In f
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In fact I would think if the market dried up, the warlords would just move their slaves to performing other tasks, and working them even harder since there's now less money overall to fight over. In other words it makes everyone worse off.
So your premise is that if slavery is less profitable, there will be more of it? I am not sure how your theory works. If we remove all the profit, will there be an infinite amount? I have never seen the Lump of Labor Fallacy [wikipedia.org] applied to slavery before, but it seems just as nonsensical.
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You miss his point. Once the warlords find that they can't sell the conflict materials, they'll not give their slaves freedom: they'll take them and put them to other uses. Make them work harder to make the same sort of money they were making when they were trading in the materials. They're not gonna reform just b'cos the money is gone.
The only way to really fix things is by force. But the last time we had UN peacekeepers in the Congo, they raped local girls, bringing the UN force into disrepute.
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You miss his point.
No. I understand perfectly. I just think it is nonsense.
Once the warlords find that they can't sell the conflict materials, they'll not give their slaves freedom: they'll take them and put them to other uses.
Hogwash. If those "other uses" were profitable, they would already be doing it. Slave owners, just like any other businessmen, don't decide in advance to accept a certain level of income, and then constrain their activities to not exceed it. They try to maximize income. There are costs to acquiring, feeding, housing, and supervising slave labor. If you take away some of the profit, then fewer activities will meet the threshold, and there will be
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Hogwash. If those "other uses" were profitable, they would already be doing it. Slave owners, just like any other businessmen, don't decide in advance to accept a certain level of income, and then constrain their activities to not exceed it. They try to maximize income. There are costs to acquiring, feeding, housing, and supervising slave labor. If you take away some of the profit, then fewer activities will meet the threshold, and there will be less slavery.
Those "other uses" are profitable, but not as much as the current use. They will be got around to when the current use isn't all that profitable.
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Yes they will. If a business is less profitable, fewer people will engage in it. To believe otherwise is just plain stupid.
That assumes that there's other businesses which they could take up instead. I imagine the number of business opportunities in Africa are limited. You really think that the warlords are just going to give up using people as slaves and go work regular 9-5 jobs if extremely lucrative businesses dry up?
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So your premise is that if slavery is less profitable, there will be more of it?
Not at all, the opposite, in fact. My premise is that when there is more profit available, more people will prosper. Freedom requires access to resources. When resources are constrained, only the strongest prosper. This has been proven throughout history. It's how the dark ages ended and a middle class emerged: more open trade brought more prosperity, and serfs were able to escape serfdom.
Did sanctions on Iran make the Iranian people more free? Did it work in Iraq? Cuba? North Korea? I can think of
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True, but I don't see how that is an argument against being informed about it. The quality of life we stand to lose for having suboptimal capacitors is trivial, even embarassing, compared to the potential gain in quality of life for some of the people at the other end. And my main point was, I think this labelling is a good idea because then at least we can't claim ignorance.
It's also (in the medium term) hopefully the case that the supply situation isn't static: It's not as though anyone has a problem with DRC-sourced minerals per se, they just have a problem with the endless, brutal, war and extremely crude (often heavily reliant on coerced labor) mineral extraction that finances it.
In the ideal case, buyers put enough pressure on bad-actor sellers that the economically rational thing to do becomes "stop paying an enormous price in blood and forgone human development for a
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So (large) diamonds aren't a necessity, but it is a necessity to make smartphones and iPads smaller?
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...it is a necessity to make smartphones and iPads smaller?
Yes, because it's profitable. And companies that are less profitable than their competitors are pushed out of the market and thus into extinction. Smaller equates to being more marketable to a portion of consumers large enough to detmine company life or death.
If we all agreed that there's no reason my phone has to be 50% slimmer, then no it would not be necessary. But most people just think, "his is thinner and therefore better - I want one too."
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Clearly yes. If you make phones and tablets smaller, then medium sized diamonds will look larger in comparison.
Do I have to do all the thinking round here?
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So...it's OK for people to suffer because: "My phone might be 2mm thicker if they don't"
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You could switch to multilayer ceramics, but those probably won't give you the required capacitance, so you'll have to use lots of them, so your smartphone will need to be 50% larger.
First, nothing in a cell phone requires high capacitance. Generally big caps are needed for power supply applications, but the amount of capacitance needed is proportional to current consumption and inversely proportional to switching frequency. Obviously cell phones don't draw much current, or the batteries wouldn't last. Also, low voltage switching (DC:DC) converters often run at several MHz these days, which makes the required capacitance (and the size of inductors) much less. At those frequencies ESR an
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Mod parent up!
Not only is it easy to boycott jewelry (like people did to South Africa during the Apartheid regime) - there are several countries that are major sources of natural diamonds and gold. Particularly Russia - unless one wants to make statements against the Kremlin by boycotting it. Which reduces diamond conflict to a minimum.
With conflict metals, like Tantalum, avoiding it could result in inferior capacitors, thereby either impacting the performance of the overall product, or making it more
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I am not an expert on tantalum, but others seem to be saying that there are other, morally less offensive, sources for the stuff. But even if that weren't the case, I personally don't feel that a marginal loss of luxury and convenience on the demand side of this market is too high a price to pay for fundamental improvements to people's lives on the supply side.
Everyone is free to make their own balance for such issues, of course. But for many people the balance changes when they learn of the misery that oth
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Are you saying that the ONLY supply of these materials is in the conflict areas? I don't think that is true.
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No, of course not. Someone else here pointed out that Australia is a big provider of tantalum.
All I'm doing is making the point that it's much easier to boycott some items than others. Diamonds are easy: no one actually needs them for anything, unless you buy that bullshit that DeBeers tries to convince everyone about diamond engagement rings. But materials used for technological purposes are a little different, and harder to work around.. Now, someone else here has pointed out that tantalum capacitors
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Yeah, all the idealists here outraged over the African warlords seem to have overlooked the elephant in the room - China. How do I boycott Chinese, can anyone tell?
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There's a bit of a difference between blood diamonds and blood capacitors. You don't actually need diamonds for anything. Industrial diamonds (which you actually use for useful purposes) are cheap and easy to get, since they're incredibly small (basically diamond dust). The larger ones have no practical uses; they're only used for jewelry. So if you want to avoid fueling tribal warlords, it's easy: you don't buy diamonds, and instead buy something else like cubic zirconia, Swarovski crystals, or other gemstones like sapphires, rubies, emeralds, etc. (many of which are now artificially-created anyway).
It's still fairly fucked up environmentally (as mining tends to be); but you can buy gem-grade diamonds from Canada (because the 'Kimberly Process' is sort of a farce, they have their own certification program) and Russia, Australia, and a few others have some deposits as well. If you are some kind of monster who isn't willing to tell your future wife "Your love is worth paying some poor kid to die for", you can buy those.
I don't know what the situation looks like for tantalum-from-non-totally-fucked-cou
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"sort of worked out ok for diamonds"
If by worked out okay you mean the cartel got to slow down growth of a new supplier until they could get control of it.
During the height of a conflict no once cares about the conflict-whatevers because the volume is too low. Once the conflict starts to die down production can ramp up. This is the point where the advertising starts against conflict-whatevers. This has the additional effect of keeping economic development down during the recovery form the conflict so that f
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What is the definition of a sociopath again?
Re:no (Score:5, Insightful)
Why did this get modded down? Tactlessly phrased or not, this AC has pretty much expressed what most of us feel - Who gives the least damn about "conflict metals" vs the price of their new tablet?
As much as I'm deeply-not-outraged by AC, there is a distinction to be made: Everyone operates under what might be called 'moral myopia': things closer to them(either literally geographically closer, or socially/in-their-living-room-by-TV/etc.) affect them more, more distant things affect them less. This is just how humans are specced. Plus, if it didn't work that way, the utterly incomprehensible scale of continual human tragedy worldwide would probably reduce us to nonfuctional, catatonic shells.
Given that a mostly-landlocked war in the relatively hostile environment of central Africa is about as far from most of us as anything can be (some locations are more distant as-the-crow-flies; but handy services like 'roads' and 'airports' and 'enough bars and hotels to attract foreign journalists' don't really exist, so the area barely even gets written about or filmed), it's entirely to be expected that what goes on there would have vanishingly low moral salience for us.
However, people who tediously go on about just how much they don't care, and how these supply chain policies are total regulatory bullshit, and so on, aren't psychologically distant from the situation. (They are in fact more engaged with it than those who know little and say less, or even some slactivist petition-signers). They actually don't give a fuck, and overtly support corporate supply chain convenience and incrementally cheaper gizmos made possible by a brutal slow-burn conflict [wikipedia.org] substantially driven and financed by access to mineral resources in the area. That point of view is pretty fucked up.
(Now, one accusation that is probably valid is that Intel is being slightly sneaky here: Intel makes a comparatively small quantity (particularly by mass) of mostly-very-high-margin products. Their products do require a number of esoteric materials, and they probably could be making some greater amount of money if they just held their nose and went with the lowest bidder in all cases; but in terms of 'dollars in profit per gram of Tantalum used' Intel probably crushes almost everybody else, certainly the board-stuffers at Foxconn buying capacitors by the containerload to assemble boards, or the guys at Vishay making-it-up-in-volume actually manufacturing tantalum and tantalum-doped ceramic capacitors. Intel can probably afford to be pickier than many other players.)
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Not entirely a fair assessment of the situation. I don't support corporate profits over human lives - Quite the opposite, actually; I fall to pretty much the opposite extreme of thinking we should ban the entire concept of "i
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As much as I'm deeply-not-outraged by AC, there is a distinction to be made: Everyone operates under what might be called 'moral myopia': things closer to them(either literally geographically closer, or socially/in-their-living-room-by-TV/etc.) affect them more, more distant things affect them less. This is just how humans are specced. Plus, if it didn't work that way, the utterly incomprehensible scale of continual human tragedy worldwide would probably reduce us to nonfuctional, catatonic shells.
Before humanity rose in power by the massive energy content of fossil fuels the world past the boundaries of your nation was practically unknown. You couldn't care about the people half way around the world because there was zero accessible information on them.
NO (Score:1)
Oh, slashdot. Never change. No, wait -- change, please. Change immediately. Let's look at some of the ideas in this comment:
Any intervention in a troubled area is a violation of human freedoms. This is why it is more moral not to interfere with things like genocide. Also, when someone punches someone else, it would be interfering with their rights to stop them continuing to punch the person into unconsciousness and death.Because THAT IS THEIR RIGHT, right?
All problems in troubled areas were created by p