African firm is selling pepper-spray bullet firing drones

Though I think you may underestimate how easy it is to dodge relatively slow moving things in the sky. I could see that sort of thing being defeated by the operator flicking the drone up sharply when people start throwing stuff.

It also does not matter that the work miners do is difficult and dangerous, because wages are determined by supply and demand, not sheer effort. In a developed country with near full employment you do tend to see dangerous jobs providing much higher wages, in part because of the immense difficulty in hiring people willing to do them, but in SA with its enormous unemployment there are thousands of unskilled and desperate people willing to perform any job. It's not uncommon to see tens of thousands of people turn up for a job opportunity with only one or two hundred places.

South African mines are labour-intensive as a result of the cheap black labour made available by Apartheid, creating a migrant labour system in which black males left their families in rural areas to live at the mines for a few years, remitting money back. Over time, as the rest of the world embraced mechanisation and other productivity improvements, reducing the manpower needed to run a mine, local miners persisted with their labour intensive process because it was, frankly, cheap. It did not improve once the ANC took power, as they explicitly pressured mining firms to avoid doing anything that might reduce total employment in the mining sector.

It's in the context of that many people employed on each mine that the union's wage demands are unsustainable. While one can argue that the mining firms ought to have done more to improve the living conditions of their workers while the platinum and gold price were high, the fact is that both have been stagnant for years now and most South African mines, being deeper than most and expensive to operate, have become marginal with profit only just outpacing costs. This is why all major mining firms are looking elsewhere for their big investments and profit opportunities.

I've seen the figures: The only way the mines can sustain that high a wage is to close all of the marginal mines (noting that a closed shaft cannot be re-opened because of the immense depth) and to heavily mechanise the rest, retrenching most of their employees in the process. This isn't fair for those employees, it's not their fault the South African economy is in decline and precious metal prices aren't high enough, but that's economic reality. We can't wish it away, no matter how much we would like to.

As I said in the parent post, those who suffer the most will be the miners. Neither their unions nor the government gave any thought to investing in retraining programmes to help them find alternative employment, and none made any attempt to reverse the destructive migrant labour system. Inflation has driven up living costs to the point where most are now indebted to loan sharks far past their ability to ever pay. And most of the workers come from the poorest and most rural parts of the Kwazulu-Natal and Eastern Cape provinces, where, even in this modern age, the government has granted all land ownership to local tribal chiefs who can kick anyone off at any time, so the workers and their families don't even have permanent assets like property that they can fall back on.

With few to no transferable skills, no assets, and indebted to the hilt these people are in a terrible situation with, as I said, no good outcome. It's a human catastrophe that experts saw coming but nobody in a position of power did anything to prevent.

Small warfare drones. And semi-autonomous warfare vehicles of which several can be controlled by one operator. And... it looks like all those hours of video games may pay off (for certain countries) after all.

Sure, there is still a flight modifying force. Calculate and correct it as much as possible with an equal and opposite force from the motors or a blank countershot.

I do think smaller weaponry of this type is coming.

>What monetary value they produce doesn't come into play. It's not like the mine owners share their huge profits with the miners.

Of course productivity matters, as that's what determines how much profit is created and thus how much money is available for higher wages.

Since 2007, the wages of South African mine workers have increased by about 12% per annum on average, well above inflation, while productivity per worker has declined by 35% and total output has shrunk. For instance, during the commodities boom of 2001-2008, South Africa's mining sector shrank by 1% per year as opposed to a global average increase of 5%, largely caused by the cost increases of labour and electricity. As it is, labour costs are about 60% of the total costs of an average South African mine, compared to a global average of around 25%. And while Australian mine workers earn on average three times more than their South African counterparts, they produce 10 times more value per person.

So your assumption that mining firms in South Africa are making 'huge profits' off of their South African operations is incorrect. They used to, but that's no longer the case. South African gold and platinum mines are nearly all marginal in terms of profit and face a future of decreasing output and increasing input costs. That's why there's zero meaningful investment in new mining operations in the country, as all the mining multinationals have gone elsewhere in the world to find high-margin and high-profit opportunities. It's a dying sector.

The only way South African mines can remain sustainable is for costs to be dramatically cut, which is going to mean mechanising operations the same way as has been done in countries like Australia, allowing for the work force to be reduced massively and for higher-skilled workers to produce more. Those who remain will earn far more than even the highest union demand at the moment, those who are let go face certain poverty and suffering.

>Well, I lived in an era without "modern computers" and it wasn't that bad at all. In fact in several respects it was better than today.

>What does "perfectly OK" mean? I like my gadgets, shopping online, instant communications and everything. In fact, I'm one of those "programmers" (though with a better than 3-year degree).

>But none of those things are indispensable. We managed without those, not in antiquity, but merely 40-50 years ago. And even 25 years ago mostly geeks had computers. The eighties, seventies are not some medieval dark ages of humanity. Much less so the sixties.

We coped with that situation decades ago, the world has changed with the advent of better technology and thus the idea of us turning back the clock and suffering few consequences is what I find odd.

In any case, it's irrelevant. The software developer's salary was just an example of what a highly-skilled worker in South Africa earns, so it applies far more broadly than just to software. A country can certainly not do without a highly-skilled work force, its engineers, mechanics, scientists, etc.

What it comes down to is a simple calculus: The South African mining industry cannot afford to pay its 500 000 mostly-unskilled employees higher wages than the market is able to bear for even highly-skilled workers. Something has to give.