How long do they have to be dead before we dig them up and take their stuff?
1 / expected value of loot to be found.
"So where are you fom, Utah Johnny Montana?"
"Idaho."
I recently read a hypothesis that the purported relic bones of St. Mark in the San Marco cathedral (Venice), which were smuggled out of Alexandria, are actually the bones of Alexander.
I don't suppose they'd be eager to allow a DNA test.
1. Guiyu is a used semiconductor / chip harvesting and reuse center. The acid baths stuff (for biproduct after chip reuse) stopped years ago, the material is now shipped to Dowa in Japan. There's an ongoing issue with incineration of the boards to concentrate the metals ash for Dowa - that is the focus of the improvements in the article.
2. Guiyu's main industry is textile dying. The river pollution blamed on "e-waste" is almost identical to Louhajang River in Bangladesh - a textile industry pollution site.
3. Abogbloshie in Ghana is mostly an automobile junkyard. Very little of the "e-waste" there is recently imported. African cities have had TV and recycling for a long time. World Bank statistics show Nigeria had 6.9M households with TV in 2006, for example. India has NO used imports, plenty of informal sector processes.
4. Three separate peer reviewed studies show 85%-91% reuse of used electronics imports in South America and Africa.
5. According to TFA, the material currently processed in Guiyu is mostly generated in China.
6. USA has never been a significant exporter to Africa.
Emerging markets pay $$ for all the shipping. They pay for stuff they want, which is usually reuse value. They also generate "e-waste" and have their own dumps. China and India and Africa generate more electronic junk than USA or Europe. For some decent academic study on the Hoax, here are links to research at Memorial University, MIT, ASU, and UN at this
There's an upside to all the earthquakes and poisoned water supplies!
I figured they would power it with hype on Slashdot.
#2, Silver Mining. It turns out mountains don't come labelled as "gold" and "silver-only". As world affluence increases, demand for gold and silver increases. Today, affluent trapped from filters at gold mines produces more mercury than mercury mines. But the only mines "trapping" any mercury are in regulated western economies... most gold mining is in unregulated forests.
Lamps, by the way, have jackshit mercury, less than a fraction of what they had when lamp recycling got started. Billions of dollars are being spent "recycling" lamps which have barely any mercury in them.
At least the recycled mercury saves the environment, right? Oh. Nope. Read the great journalist John Fialka on WSJ 2006. Most of the mercury recovered from the recycling went to alluvial gold mining in Amazon and Congo river basins. http://online.wsj.com/news/art...
I'm an environmentalist, but environmentalists 3.0 need to recognize past mistakes, and correct them, the same as engineers and software coders are expected to do.
I think this is a simple case of "you break it, you buy it".
Or is the same asteroid making two passes?
That's what we all said in 1982 when Reagan was blamed for cutting the Pell Grant Program (which was replaced by loans). It turns out Reagan may have been right after all. The cost of tuition increases, when all other cost factors (energy, interest rates, salaries, etc.) were controlled for?... Federal Pell grants. The more the feds slopped into students, the higher the college tuition draw. (cue sucking sound).
I suspect that in nations where tax aid for tuition is working, the universities are government owned, and there are too many private colleges in the USA. And to give USA credit, our colleges are admired overseas in part for the competition between private and public enterprise (even if some was for the athletic facilities arms race). I was out protesting Reagan's cuts as a freshman and sophomore, but by the time I was a junior, I realized why Eisenhower included universities in his "military industrial complex" speech. We were patsies. The more our "need" was met, the higher the tuition went. It correlated to aid.
Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (5) All right, who's the wiseguy who stuck this trigraph stuff in here?