I will be avoiding buying new Lion battery products for foreseeable future
Only used ones? I'm serious here. How? How are you going to live in today's world and keep that promise?
Tech giants sued over deaths of children who mine cobalt
71–80 of 300 posts
Re: Tech giants sued over deaths of children who mine cobalt
#72Regarding the legal merits of the case, I notice that don't see any coverage of a proposed theory of liability in the article. The lawsuit text is more informative, pointing at a bunch of sections of US Code about forced labor, trafficking, and sale into voluntary servitude — for instance, 18 U.S. Code § 1589 which notes, "(b) Whoever knowingly benefits, financially or by receiving anything of value, from participati…
A quick search shows that past lawsuits against Nestle and other companies for child labor in their supply chain listed consumers as the plaintiffs claiming damage from false advertising and non -disclosure [1]. These cases have ended up being dismissed. The difference is that in this case the children and their families are the actual plaintiffs which presumably changes the legal merits. I still suspect that this ca…
> I think the point is that these lawsuits are intended to raise public awareness of the issue which will ideally put pressure the companies being sued to institute voluntary policing of their supply chain.
Beyond the legal merits, tech companies have been talking about "conflict minerals" for a while. You could certainly doubt how seriously committed they are to resolving the minerals-sourcing issues, or even what their motivations are: my unconfirmed assumptions are that "conflict minerals" https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/policy/policy-confli... was conceived by Intel as an adaptation of the "conflict diamonds" campaign, and that the "conflict diamonds" campaign was in turn something contrived by De Beers as a marketing effort. But what's remarkable is how little consumers seem to have cared or responded even when manufacturers made the running on the issue. It seems it's much easier to get consumers on an ethical-sourcing bandwagon when the product is a luxury good bought for social-signaling purposes (like fur coats or diamonds) than when it's something they look on as a quotidian expense or something to get the most bang for the buck in. Which is unfortunate, I think: consumers probably should get off their arses and on the likely-somewhat-sleazy "conflict minerals" bandwagon, because it's likely the best chance to meet our responsibilities and effect real change in the sourcing of minerals for electronic devices.
Re: Tech giants sued over deaths of children who mine cobalt
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why stop at the direct buyer then? Why not make the end consumer liable too? Make them care, you make the buyers of that cobalt start caring even more right? Heck why don’t we just extend liability down to the end of the chain for everything?
I'm not convinced that punishing the end consumer would be all that bad. Maybe it would generate actual participation in the market and send a message that they're the ones that fuel it.
Related: what does "punishing" a company mean anyway, fines? Those are paid for by the consumer. So what's the difference? Same as corporate taxation. Taxing and "punishing" companies but pretending that the consumer is not affected is just a political game.
Re: Tech giants sued over deaths of children who mine cobalt
#74I highly doubt these companies are directly hiring or managing Cobalt miners. You might as well also sue anybody who uses a computer. This is purely a publicity stunt; it will get thrown out immediately.
You're telling me with 100 billion dollars in the bank you don't fully understand your supply chain and make an informed decision?
Re: Tech giants sued over deaths of children who mine cobalt
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
> third world mining companies Glencore headquarters is in Switzerland
And they have third world mining operations.
The hyphen to the rescue!
"third-world mining operation": a mining operation that is also a third-world operation.
VS
"third-world-mining operation": an operation for mining of the third world
VS
"third-world third-world-mining operation": a third-world operation for mining of the third world
VS
"first-world third-world-mining operation": a company headquartered in CH that mines in the deep backcountry of the DRC.
Re: Tech giants sued over deaths of children who mine cobalt
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because the direct buyer is the one who has the most information and the most control. In contrast the end user has almost no information, so punishing them is both unfair and ineffective.
So now that you have the information, I trust you have stopped purchasing these products beginning today?
Information, and control.
All of the products I can buy may or may not contain this unthetical cobalt. I don't know which, and my personal buying choice doesn't effect anything.
What are you proposing, that everyone with a smartphone or a computer be sued? How will that work?
Re: Tech giants sued over deaths of children who mine cobalt
#77Then the law needs to change. It's unconscionable for this to be happening. You make the buyers of that cobalt start caring, you'll make the producers of that cobalt start caring.
Why stop at the direct buyer then? Why not make the end consumer liable too? Make them care, you make the buyers of that cobalt start caring even more right? Heck why don’t we just extend liability down to the end of the chain for everything?
Corporations have far more resources than individuals, and a much smaller set of things to worry about, if this is limited to inputs or products the company themselves are responsible for creating or having created (not, say, office chairs and pens). Individuals can't just "put a person on it" (they are the person—perhaps there are a few in a household, but they still can't afford to make it any one person's job) and they consume a much wider variety of things from many more sources than your average business does (again, constrained to things core to its business).
"Well why can't they restrict themselves to a smaller set of products the supply chains of which they can verify?" well yes, they could, but this is plainly still vastly more burdensome than asking a company to simply make sure the much-smaller set of folks involved in its supply chain aren't killing kids, given the vast resource disparities between the two.
So, while pushing liability "to the end of the chain" may satisfactory complete some kind of line of ethical reasoning, practically speaking it's just a way of saying "I'd rather we do nothing". Pushing the liability to companies might actually accomplish something, without undue burden (as pushing the liability to consumers would, I think it's clear, surely have).
At any rate, isn't the market supposed to be great at sorting these things out? If we could let market-based solutions take over the role of things like food safety certification without massive increases in risk and decreases in convenience and wild inefficiency, as I've seen proposed, then surely these companies can figure out some way to organize a market for supplier validation and inspection that solve the problem more efficiently than government directly inspecting and certifying every part of every supply chain. Right?
Re: Tech giants sued over deaths of children who mine cobalt
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because the direct buyer is the one who has the most information and the most control. In contrast the end user has almost no information, so punishing them is both unfair and ineffective.
These tech companies aren't direct buyers any more than you or me. Ore is sold to smelting companies, who sell ingots to sheet metal companies, who sell it to electronics component manufacturers, who sell it to contract manufacturers, who sell it to the giants. And that's the legal supply chain - add in some shell companies, forged documents, and resellers and it gets more complicated.
> These tech companies aren't direct buyers any more than you or me
Well, they're (a) further up the supply chain that we are, and (b) have the resources to understand and influence their supply chain. You can be pedantic about the word "direct" if you like but I don't think that's useful.
Re: Tech giants sued over deaths of children who mine cobalt
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
So now that you have the information, I trust you have stopped purchasing these products beginning today?
Information, and control . All of the products I can buy may or may not contain this unthetical cobalt. I don't know which, and my personal buying choice doesn't effect anything. What are you proposing, that everyone with a smartphone or a computer be sued? How will that work?
What are you proposing, that if your vendor is sued you don't pay for it?
Re: Tech giants sued over deaths of children who mine cobalt
#80It's about time tech giants take responsibility for the blood minerals they use. You can save people's lives by using the Fairphone already. It's free of those.
No, I can't. Just like sorting my trash won't save any fish/birds/whatever and riding my bike won't slow down the melting of the ice caps. The carbon footprint of my entire country is almost exactly 1/100th of the last company on the "top 100 polluters" list[1]. 10 million people are just as powerless as one, if all they do is buy a different phone or whatever. But 10 million people voting for the politicians that wi…
Hopefully that didn't come across as aggressive against Fairphone or your comment. I like Fairphone and might actually buy their phone next cycle.
This is just a topic that really matters to me, as I've witnessed what happens when someone goes down the environmental responsibility rabbit hole to the point of not being able to properly function because of feeling guilty about basically every part of modern society.
Making sacrifices to make up for other people's wrongdoing is never a good mentality. You shouldn't give away your money to people who got robbed. But you should definitely stop voting for the party that made robbery legal.