I don't think this makes much sense. The mineral supply chain in that part of the world is ridiculously hard to track. Even when you stop buying directly from the DRC, the minerals flow over the borders (see how Rwandan coltan exports jumped when people stopped buying DRC 'conflict' coltan). That part of the DRC is basically beyond the reach of the Congolese government and the bordering countries have been waging proxy wars for at least a decade in the DRC, specifically for mineral control. The problem needs to be addressed at the local level, not at the international purchasing level - this may make the tech giants purchase minerals from a new provider, but that is a cosmetic change that won't actually impact people on the ground in the DRC.

It being hard to track is no excuse. We shouldn't be buying products from such abusive practices. We banned slavery, child labour and other abusive practices in our own countries, but by allowing the imports of such products from other countries, we're still indirectly making use of slavery and child labour.

Recently I heard that every person in a wealthy country effectively makes use of two slaves this way.

So these products being hard to track is no excuse. We should not allow the import of products where there's any uncertainty about their supply chain. Tech giants should have a responsibility to know where their minerals come from.

And this is not just about electronics or about the DRC. I think we shouldn't let our football teams play in Qatar stadiums built by slaves. We shouldn't be importing clothes made by child labour. We shouldn't be importing from countries that don't respect the rights of workers.

We're undermining our own freedom as well as our own economies by allowing this. We're indirectly abusing people in other countries, but we're also expecting out workers to compete with them. It's undermining everything we fought for over the past century.

I don't disagree, but if we want to actually help, we need to work with the world the way it is, not the way we wish it was. Moral grandstanding helps us feel good more than it helps the people who are actually suffering.

There will always be uncertainty about the supply chain. That's the nature of the mineral trade AFAIK.

> I don't disagree, but if we want to actually help, we need to work with the world the way it is

...said the people opposing abolitionism.

Reality: to achieve moral progress, sometimes you need to eat an economic recession. Suck it up, buttercup.

Good example. The person who actually ended slavery in the US, Abraham Lincoln, didn't support abolition until the military advantages of emancipation became obvious enough that he could sell it to the people. For a long time he supported some slavery improvements, but specifically did not support abolition - which very much helped his political career and put him in position to emancipate.

We might also note that what Lincoln did -- the Emancipation Proclamation -- abolished slavery only in areas that were not subject to the Union, making it questionable as an act of governance. Slaves in Union territory were emancipated by the 13th amendment three years later.

And slavery in prison continues to this day because of a neat little exemption in that 13th amendment.

> questionable as an act of governance

I disagree with this. You shouldn't fail to emancipate some slaves just because you can't emancipate them all.

When it’s your job, your family starving or out of work or homeless, then “suck it up buttercup” doesn’t sound so nice. The reality is the extreme poverty is lower than it has ever been, thanks to trade. Think it’s bad now? Try 50 years ago. The world is getting better despite the propaganda to the contrary. That we are even talking about this at all shows progress.

> There will always be uncertainty about the supply chain. That's the nature of the mineral trade AFAIK.

Not entirely true.

There are tools like SiliconExpert which track "conflict mineral issues" in the supply chain. This tool or others like it are used by the tech giants to screen their supply chain for this as well as other more mundane problems. It's a standard part of compliance engineering (https://www.siliconexpert.com/conflict-minerals-compliance-d...).

If a component/material gets flagged in a tool like that, it certainly is fair-game to go after a manufacturer & supplier for knowingly profiting at the expense of human rights. The penalties should be severe.

Yes, there's some uncertainty. But once exploitation becomes known, it's not THAT hard to trace it and stop at least the largest supply-chain users from using it without consequence.

I know Apple invested heavily into tracking their mineral supply chain, but I believe their final conclusion was that it is essentially impossible.

> "the lengthy nature of its supply chain – as well as the nature of the refining process – makes it “difficult to track and trace these materials”. Apple illustrates this challenge by noting that its supply chain runs through “family-run mines, brokers, smelters, refiners, and commodity exchanges – before reaching a component or subcomponent manufacturer”"[1]

From Apple's 2018 conflict minerals report - "Apple has not, to date, been able to determine whether the reported incidents were connected to specific 3TG included in Apple’s products. The challenges with tracking specific mineral quantities through the supply chain continue to prevent the traceability of any specific mineral shipment through the entire manufacturing process."[2]

[1] https://hrbdf.org/case_studies/conflict-minerals/conflict_mi...

[2] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/320193/0001193125190...

taking the stance that the exploitation of children is unacceptable and punishing anyone who does work with those who exploit children is not moral grandstanding.

Didn't the parents that are suing exploit their kids for economic gain? Why should they now be rewarded with profit from a lawsuit rather than imprisoned for doing so?

It's also an incredibly easy position to take when all you have to do is say it's wrong. I think that's what they are getting at.

What do you consider grandstanding?

"Grandstanding" is when someone talks about problems that don't affect me. For instance, if someone says that we should prevent child slavery, that's grandstanding because I'm not a slave. On the other hand, if someone says that whiteboard interviews for engineers are unfair, that's not grandstanding because I'm an engineer.

Also, if I agree with something, then it's free speech and therefore not grandstanding.

grandstanding is when you say or do something for no other purpose than how it looks to others.

Ok, so I guess you'll be going to prison too, then? Or do you not own a smart phone?

> we need to work with the world the way it is, not the way we wish it was

If you buy the logic behind the "resource curse", then reducing trade in such morally questionable resources could indirectly improve the state of the world.

> It being hard to track is no excuse.

Indeed. I have a good buddy who is inside council for a really visible guitar company. One of his main functions is tracking the provenance of any endangered hardwoods that go through the factory. From what I've been told there's a pretty big paper trail to document the date and place where "x" piece of Brazilian Rosewood or Ebony was harvested, but the penalty if they were to be caught building guitars from restricted or endangered wood is steep.

Maybe it wouldn't do much to dissuade the primary purchasers of cobalt, but a federal regulation popping them for a few million bucks for buying what essentially amounts to "blood diamonds" certainly wouldn't hurt the cause.

Hard ≠ impossible. If problem can be solved with money, then it's not a problem, it's expense.

> The mineral supply chain in that part of the world is ridiculously hard to track

Commodities, in general. They're fungible, so cobalt from one supplier looks like cobalt from another supplier.

Commodities are more trackable with detailed analysis then anyone might casually think. e.g. oil is a commodity but the signature of oil from certain regions is pretty visible by chemists, and one can force oil supply from trade restricted sources to at least try to mask the signature by mixing with other sources. Not perfect but you can raise the difficulty bar on commodity sourcing.

Not only that, oil companies share these lines. They know exactly what % of the oil flowing through that pipe is company A vs company B.

I know because I worked on some of the accounting software they use.

Cobalt has only one naturally occurring isotope, so I don't think you can use any tricks from chemistry or physics to track it back to the source after it has been separated from ore. Instead you need tamper-resistant supply chain documentation all the way back to the actual mine.

I'm not familiar w/ cobalt, but materials are rarely 100% pure. One might look at non-cobalt materials associated with the pure material and what ratios they're in? Again not perfect but something.

I think one of the problems is that the cobalt doesn't reach component manufacturers until it's been through a series of smelters/refiners.

Electronics manufacturers already have all sorts of tracking regulatory infrastructure and certifications for parts going into their BOM. Everything from other conflict materials, to limits on uses for component export/import limits because of trade sanctions, to conventional regulations on uses of materials like lead in solder, to some suppliers who won't supply to military or nuclear uses. The framework is there already, it's mostly a matter of bringing some focus to it for the particular matter of cobalt.

But efforts to prevent conflict materials from being sold have failed in the past. There's been a focus on coltan before cobalt and it sure seems like the minerals have moved from the DRC to Rwanda (see how Rwanda became the world's leading exporter of coltan after people stopped buying conflict coltan from DRC). Similarly, efforts to stop conflict diamonds and conflict gold have not found much success.

I'd agree the efforts have not cut off that kind of business 100% but they've been effective in reducing the amount of conflict business, as well as reducing their profitability making them do more work to put the items on the market.

Conflict diamonds and gold are a different market framework than electronics components though - those items in particular have much different and arguably more varied sales avenues that make them more difficult to stop. Electronics components have an inherent complex testing quality and fewer channels for markets to move through so should be easier to control on a regulatory basis.

> I don't think this makes much sense.

Let me see if I can put it into terms you can understand.

They prosecute people who look at child porn. Not because those people abused the children, but because those people create the demand that causes the producers to abuse children.

You decrease the demand, you decrease the abuse.

Or in another form.

If you really want to stop illegal immigration, you go after the people employing them, not the illegals themselves. We used to do this and it used to be effective.

There are an innumberable number of examples of going after the demand to affect the supply.

Banning cobalt alltogether?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt#Applications

You’d literally make usage of an element illegal due to that. For me it sounds bit of an overreaction.

Also it would be more than tad unfair for the cobalt mines not in DRC to have to close up.

this is a strawman and you should be ashamed of yourself. You cannot find any posts by me on this forum in which I've advocated banning Cobalt all together.

Find a better response.

I misunderstood then due to the examples. As child porn is recognizeable.

But cobalt is just cobalt. You have no way of telling where it came from. Humans have faces, fingerprints and genes that allow us to have documentation that yes this person is a citizen and not an illegal immigrant, so you cannot use documentation for one person to slip by another that easily.

There is no such thing for cobalt. A document that states this 20 tons of cobalt is not dug up by kids applies just as well to a 20 tons that actually was dug up by kids.

That issue was with blood diamonds. A semilegit mine sold it’s own diamonds and blood diamonds as it’s own.

you're getting lost in the example and losing the idea.

The idea is this: You forcibly change the demand to change the behavior of the producer. And there are plenty of examples of us doing this as a society (successfully).

In the successful cases it is easy for the demand to recognize what they are getting. Employer just has to demand passport and they can avoid hiring illegals. Just looking at the person is enough. Same with child porn. Same with anything else where we have curbed demand side.

How would you say Microsoft is able to recognize where the cobalt came from?

I can’t really see any way here that would not be a de facto ban for the whole material.

The same way we do it with other resources of this type. And yes, we do this with other resources. Oil & gas, medical marijuana, diamonds, et al.

This is a solved problem. What you and other people are arguing is that it's not solved perfectly.

I don't really give a shit if it's solved perfectly. If we go from say 66% of cobalt being bloody down to 33% of cobalt being bloody. That's a win. We can, over time, learn and adjust to bring it down even further.

Perfect is the enemy of good.

Plus in most cases they are not using it directly themselves. They are several hops away in the chain, using a part that may contain the wrong type of cobalt.

Just out of curiosity, do you know how regular people could know more about supply chains that are not hard to track?

> I don't think this makes much sense. The mineral supply chain in that part of the world is ridiculously hard to track.

It's been designed to be hard to track. Just because the infrastructure is a little hit and miss and the people are overall poorer doesn't mean it's impossible to reliably manage supply lines. The problem is corporations from the "West" don't want to know where the stuff is coming from because they know damn well it's sweatshop labor, minors, political prisoners, and who knows what else. That's why it's so fucking cheap.

Google knows my fucking shoe size at this point: if they, or Apple, or Samsung, or any other company wanted to know, they would know. The problem is they don't know because when people ask uncomfortable questions, they just shrug their shoulders and go "well we aren't responsible." Fuck that. They should be responsible.

> 'infrastructure is a little hit and miss'

Lol. The problem isn't a lack of roads, it's the fact that parts of eastern DRC are still effectively war zones. This isn't tech companies not caring, this is an ongoing war, a government incapable of controlling the country (and hardly the good guys even where they do have control), rebel groups (which have control over minerals and need income) running their own proto-states, long-standing tribal conflicts, militarily powerful neighbors with vested interests in keeping the conflict going and DRC's precious resources flowing over the borders, a widespread Ebola outbreak, and hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing their homes.

Google 'wanting to know' isn't going to solve the chaos in that part of the world that leads to the supply chain tracking problems.

They know enough to get the damn cobalt. They can know more if they want to, or, more likely, not do business with the sort of shady ass organizations who use child labor specifically because they can't get the documentation.

I really don't understand this "that's just the way it is" thinking when it comes to corporations doing shady shit overseas. If I went to my DMV and I said "I need to register this car" and had no proof of purchase, no previous registration, no paperwork from the former owner or dealer, I wouldn't be able to register this car. Yet, somehow, a multiBILLION dollar company can just buy material from warlords or whatever tribe in remote parts of China, and ship MILLIONS OF POUNDS of it out of that region, but nobody can get a fucking receipt? Are you kidding me?

>Yet, somehow, a multiBILLION dollar company can just buy material from warlords or whatever tribe in remote parts of China, and ship MILLIONS OF POUNDS of it out of that region, but nobody can get a fucking receipt?

What normally happens in this process is that the selling country's government official who is tasked with verifying the integrity of the receipt is bribed with a month or more salary to sign the exchange off as legitimate, e.g. the Kimberley Process. There has got to be a solution to this problem but paper trails are notoriously unreliable in scenarios like this one.

Wasn't bribery illegal?

So? Who is going to know or enforce it?

Most bribes are not obvious. More like give money to the charity my brother in law runs. The charity even does some good, but the real purpose is to pay the brother in law a nice salary and pay for family trips to various places the charity operates. (You should be suspicious anytime the family of a politician has any association with a charity - it might be a real charity but often it is a way to hide bribes)

"Speaking assignments" where you pay someone $8 Million to read a prepared speech for an hour is another common way to bribe people.

Not disagreeing with you, but I would be surprised if they're buying it directly from the mine and not from some sort of market/middleman/third party company. I wouldn't hold my breath for extensive receipts and documentation either. The miners pictured in the article don't even have shoes and the "hammers" they're given appear to be two pieces of rebar welded together. I'd be surprised to find much documentation at all.

FTA...

Q: But I'm asking you, is it possible that these companies can claim that you can't prove that they're actually linked to the cobalt?

A: Certainly the supply chain is opaque. It is complex. But the plaintiffs all were injured and killed at mines owned by companies that have been publicly disclosed as sellers of cobalt to our defendants.

So no real connection at all, then. Nice of them to admit it. Why are they suing these unrelated tech companies, then, and not the ones that actually sent the kids to work in the mines—i.e. themselves?

What good do you think a receipt is in that part of the world? Of course they get a certificate of conflict-free production. And if you have a couple bucks in the DRC/Rwanda, you can get one too! Look at diamonds, gold and coltan as useful precedents that show how buyer-side pressure will not improve things unless the buyers choose to stop using the minerals altogether.

> unless the buyers choose to stop using the minerals altogether.

BINGO. That's what you do. If the ass end of Mogadishu can't provide the minerals without using exploitative labor practices, THEN DON'T BUY FROM THE ASS END OF MOGADISHU.

And if that means an iPhone costs $200 more then that's what it fucking means, because no iPhone is worth it's weight in human suffering to have.

This is one of those feel-good solutions that lets us feel superior but doesn't actually help the people suffering. Demand is not going anywhere.

You're also insultingly wrong with your geography.

The 'someone will do it anyway' defense is not morally legitimate. Just because everyone else is doing it, does not make the action ok.

Luke 17:1 Jesus said to his disciples: "Things that cause people to stumble are bound to come, but woe to anyone through whom they come."

I'm not interested in sounding morally superior, I'm interested in actually helping people who need help. And if you want to do that, you need to accept that 'stop buying cobalt' is not currently a solution that has any chance of improving the state of things.

How does 'continue buying unethically sourced cobalt' improve the state of things?

Ideally, it is a dual solution of don't buy the unethical kind, and set up an alternate ethical supply chain to the same region so workers can switch to a better work place.

But, if the latter is not possible, one can at least help decrease the market for unethical cobalt by ceasing purchase.

Plus, it is not a matter of seeming morally superior. If one option is morally better than another, it should be chosen, regardless of the consequences.

So, for instance, if Jesus is correct, that it is immoral to be a path of scandal, then one should choose to not be a path of scandal, even if the state of the world otherwise remains unchanged (e.g. unethical cobalt mining continues).

In what situation? In the case of Cobalt it probably doesn't.

In the case of rubber the big companies do provide better jobs for the families they employ than anything else, ensure the family gets modern medical care (as opposed to "witch doctor" care anyone not working for them gets), and the children do go to school and so have the ability to get a better job latter. The companies looks the other way in harvest season then families are taking their kids with them to work, so long as the kids are in school. Child labor for sure, but you can honestly argue that the children are better off despite that.

You can decide if you accept that as better or not, but it is a reasonable argument that child labor isn't always the worst possible.

Sadly I don't think in the case of cobalt the above applies.

Yes, there is no inherent problem with child labor, especially if parents are involved and the companies are committed to ethical treatment of their workers. Many children today perform chores around the house, and in more agriculture societies help on the farm or in the family shop.

This is a discussion about child labor that is resulting in their deaths.

Mandating that companies stop buying cobalt from suppliers who don't document things well is absolutely a legitimate, non-pie-in-the-sky way to effect change.

The idea is that demand for documented cobalt will go up, prices for it will also go up, poorly-documented cobalt producers will have lower demand for their product and their profits will be harmed, the ones capable of fixing their shit so they can sell more-expensive documented cobalt will do so, relieving documented-cobalt supply, and when the dust settles cobalt will be a little more expensive but most of it will be documented.

This is basic policy-building how-to-make-the-world-less-shit using market forces for (old-school) conservatives stuff, and is the backbone of one of the most important & influential strains of political and economic thinking around. It's not remotely radical or unrealistic.

That is not a new idea, even in the DRC and it has been an abject failure. Conflict gold, diamonds and coltan still flow out of DRC despite efforts to not buy undocumented minerals. In highly corrupt and impoverished places, documentation doesn't mean anything. One bribe of a few hundred dollars and your Congolese conflict mineral is now clean, documented Rwandan mineral.

Efforts, but have companies been made to pay a cost for failing to source "ethically", even when they say "well gee we tried and it's just really hard"? Things tend to get more serious when money is on the line, rather than just PR. Doing it right would clearly take verification, not just documentation, which means requiring access for outside inspectors.

You can't prove that a certain mineral came from an unethical production location - that's the core problem I believe. How would you punish a company for using conflict minerals if no one can figure out if given minerals are conflict minerals?

Force them to figure it out or start impounding goods? Impound their goods if you can't, for any reason, gain access to inspect any part of their declared supply chain for occasional surprise inspections to verify it is as they say it is, until such time as they switch to recently-inspected suppliers or gain you access?

I don't really get how this is much harder or less practical for the state or states implementing the law than most laws governing corporate behavior, and particularly laws governing imports. Yes a law would have to be drafted, passed, and enforced. I don't think any part of that's particularly less reasonable or more unlikely than in the case of any similar law.

In short, you punish companies for either using conflict minerals or if you're unable to determine to a reasonable level of satisfaction that they are not using conflict minerals. Likely they'll want to make sure you can determine such, and will pressure their suppliers to make it happen, in the usual ways markets do things (suppliers that make it easy and do it right and develop a reputation for having few fine-inducing screw-ups can charge more, those that fail miserably at it may just go out of business and be replaced by others who aren't terrible at their job, pretty soon everything's a little more expensive but we have a decent idea of what comes from where)

You're asking the wrong question.

The question isn't "have we completely stopped blood diamonds", the question is "have we lowered the demand for blood diamonds".

If the answer is yes, then the strategy is legitimate and worked. We may have more work to do, but the argument that we must wait for perfect before attempting to make improvements is asinine.

I appreciate your measured and informative responses that are not pure opinion but everyone else in the thread is adding nothing but gut-impulse emotional opinions. Cut your losses.

> This is one of those feel-good solutions that lets us feel superior but doesn't actually help the people suffering.

So because we can't fix their situation for them, we're allowed to actively make it worse? This is such a nonsense point of view. Exploitative industry is not like regular industry. This is not a rising tide that lifts all boats, this is enriching one or two psychopathic monsters at the expense of their entire region, and possibly financing even more in other regions.

The West does not need to go in and "fix" every developing nation, but at the same time, saying "well if we didn't sell them scrapheap ships or buy the minerals their children mine, they'd starve" is a complete abdication of responsibility for the role the demand for those minerals plays in their situation. They mine them because they can sell them, that's the whole point. If you remove the entities buying them, then there's no reason to mine them.

It's just unrealistic. Here's a challenge - cut cobalt out of your life. I'll bet you can't.

Until you can do that, offering 'stop buying' as a solution is a waste of time.

I don't think people even realize where Cobalt is used. But they'd notice in a hurry if the supply was somehow interrupted.

> It's just unrealistic. Here's a challenge - cut cobalt out of your life. I'll bet you can't.

"Realistic" is determined entirely by the values of the overarching system. The fate of the people at the long tail of the supply lines isn't valued. That's the single, solitary reason that this shit is still happening. Change that, and the system will adapt. The mines will get better, or they will be replaced with other mines that do it properly.

Stop settling for what your corporate overlords tell you is doable. We can do anything as a species if we choose to, good or bad. Our history shows it. Industry has every reason to tell you it's impossible because they don't want to spend the money to insure supply lines are ethically handled.

If we can mine coal in the United States without children and with relative safety, they can mine Cobalt in the same damn way. Cobalt doesn't by virtue of being cobalt need to be pried from the Earth by children.

> If we can mine coal in the United States without children and with relative safety, they can mine Cobalt in the same damn way. Cobalt doesn't by virtue of being cobalt need to be pried from the Earth by children.

oh you didn't know? The blood of the children is what christens the cobalt such that it works in computers...

/sarcasm

How would you suggest we start? Real, concrete steps please.

You add regulation to businesses based in the US and that sell in the US specifying, explicitly, that they cannot use resources mined via exploitative practices. And then when businesses do anyway, because they will, you confiscate profits tied to products that were made that way. Repeat until they get the damn point.

seriously. How the fuck are people's moral compass so off? I understand reality is reality, but there are some things that should not be, and for slightly cheaper electronics of all things?

fuck that.

I mean, you typed that message using something that probably has cobalt inside of it or used cobalt in it's manufacturing.

So... why is your moral compass so off?

We're told that governments help us solve collective action problems. If it's hard for a single electronics manufacturer to wean itself from conflict cobalt, the government could help them by forcing all electronics manufacturers to cease purchase of conflict cobalt.

Of course, that isn't the real purpose of governments or any other illegitimate authorities, so I won't hold my breath.

oh please, I reject that argument outright.

This is about stopping the exploitation of children. While you're trying to squabble over whether or not some random internet person is using a keyboard with cobalt in it, children are being forced down into these mines and risking their lives.

Get your priorities straight.

>They can know more if they want to

Sure they could. They would basically need to set up a modern version of the East India Trading Company, build themselves a mercenary army, and go in there and set up a proxy government that adheres to whatever regulatory policies they want to define.

We called that "colonialism" the last time around though, and most of the countries it happened to were not fans.

The problem with colonialism is exploitation of the people, not the setting up of a just government. I'm in favor of Western countries coming in and setting up a just government, even if there is a profit motive involved. It at least is much better than a constant war torn and corrupt environment.

Where would the justice derive from in a government that was set up for the purposes of extracting resources in one area and transferring the resulting resources and wealth to a different area?

Justice as in peace is brought to the local population and they are kept from murdering and stealing from each other. Whether they get to keep their local resources or not I think is a secondary concern to whether they have a peaceful society.

Very Hobbesian. I think you'll find actual implementations of the systems you propose don't really discourage murder or theft; those don't concern the bottom line. I'll point to the Belgian Congo as a relevant example in this space

I've heard that some previous colonies have done quite well after the colonizers left, when the colonialism was combine with Christian missionary activity.

In more ancient history, while the Spaniards did many horrible things to natives, they also put a stop to even greater horrors, such as the mass human sacrifice at that time.

Even further back, Roman colonization was exploitative, but did also bring peace to the different regions they colonized.

So, colonization can bring about a better social structure. Given that people are often driven by selfish gain, getting something out of enacting a just social structure seems to be the best way forward.

False dichotomy. Or Strawman. Both apply.

I don't think that it is.

If you look at what the PRC is doing to establish footholds and reliable supply chains, it bears a strong resemblance to those old trading companies. The US does various "counter-terrorism" operations in different countries, essentially borrowing African military units.

The only reason "they know your shoe size" is because you carry around a $1000 phone that tracks your every move and spend all your disposable income through their platforms.

The same cannot be said for the poor Cobalt miners, so no they can't just will that info into existence simply because they "want to know"

This is not some arcane magic here. This is making companies responsible for the vetting of their suppliers. Do you know how hard it would be for Apple to check out a mining operation? A plane trip and a few days of a couple people's time. That's fucking it. That is NOTHING to a company like Apple, it would barely be a rounding error in their budget.

And if the mine is in the midst of a warzone and you can't be sure if they aren't using prisoners or children? Then find a different goddamn mine.

You should do a little more research. The problem that we've been trying to solve for over three decades is not easily solvable with your naive ideas - do you really think we haven't tried your ideas? The problem is that there are mines that pass all inspections that then sell minerals produced elsewhere. Given the chaos in that part of the world, it is not realistic to prevent this from happening because there is not a way, last I checked, to differentiate between the minerals produced using ethical methods and minerals produced using conflict methods. Finding a different mine does not mean you have impacted the original mine.

Unless you have a way to prevent demand for these minerals, there is not a known, effective solution to these problems.

There's a historical story that's relevant here. In the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, the contract for steel cable was let to someone whose reputation was such that the engineer insisted that all of the output tested for quality, and none of the bad cable was to be let installed on the bridge. Yet almost all of the bad cable made it onto the bridge, because the contractor did a good job of figuring out how to frustrate all of the compliance and inspection procedures for the cable.

That's the hard part of supply chain vetting: trying to ensure that your contractor isn't trying to pull the wool over your eyes. If you think "a plane trip and a few days of a couple people's time" is going to be sufficient to actually ensure that you're getting responsible cobalt, well, I have a bridge for you.

>Do you know how hard it would be for Apple to check out a mining operation? A plane trip and a few days of a couple people's time.

No. Not at all. It takes more than that to vet suppliers in a place as developed as China. If you think that's all it takes in an ACTIVE WAR ZONE you're delusional.

His point is that, if it's too hard to vet, then you shouldn't be buying at all. No proof of no exploitation should be treated as proof of exploitation.

I agree. Err on the side of caution. If it "can't be done", it'll be figured out soon enough when trade is completely cut off.

>I agree. Err on the side of caution. If it "can't be done", it'll be figured out soon enough when trade is completely cut off.

No. It took thousands of years of civilizational development to even create the state capacity to do this sort of regulation in the developed world. It doesn't just magically happen through some invisible hand nonsense. Governance requires concerted effort by a sovereign government. The only way it gets done is by forcing stability and creating a government, which is a responsibility I don't think you want to put in the hands of FAANG and Samsung.

I think it's a bit harder than that. But Apple is already doing it (or claims to be doing it). The latest Supplier Responsibility report claims that 100% of their Cobalt supplies is audited: https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple_SR_2... And Apple claims to regularly remove suppliers for violations.

Up until a few years ago, Cobalt was specifically called out as being a problematic resource, with incomplete audits and widespread violations. Now, Apple claims to have this under control. Either Apple is lying or misguided, or the initiators of the lawsuit are.

Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if the initiators of the lawsuit were wrong. It seems that Apple often gets lumped in with other tech companies' labor and supply practices, regardless of whether their specific policies are actually more strict than common industry practice (cf Mike Daisey's "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs")

Disclaimer: I work for Apple, but don't shop for their Cobalt, so I have no firsthand knowledge of the actual situation.

You seem to know the answer but are you currently in Africa doing anything? Do you sit there and post from a computer/phone/ use these companies services? Magic is all you’re speaking. Social media virtue signaling while you are not solving the problem. Arguing just to argue. If it was so simple as just hop on a plane and/or just don’t buy from there then the companies worth billions would have already done that.

Why do you need to be in Africa to start changing US law and regulations?

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?

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.

But why draw the line there? If we are making the whole chain liable then why not make the phone case manufacturers and app development shops liable too? They are only one hop down the chain and have the resources too.

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?

Vendors that don't get sued can compete better in the market and survive longer, and their prices won't go up (except maybe a little as rents if they have few competitors and those have been forced to raise their prices because they've lost a lot of lawsuits), right?

[EDIT] I'd don't really give a fuck about DVs but I'd love if some of the people DVing my comments on this thread would explain how I've misunderstood orthodox "right"-wing approaches to market-based regulation and commons management, since I don't think I'm claiming anything particularly radical here—quite small-c conservative, actually—and would like to know whether and how I'm missing the mark on it.

> 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.

All of the stock these corporations can buy may or may not contain this unethically-sourced cobalt. They don't know which, and their corporate buying choices don't affect anything.

Judging from these comments, the bar seems to be set at "if you can't prove the product doesn't contain unethically-sourced materials, don't buy it". That standard would apply equally well to end users. Of course you can't simply trust that your suppliers aren't lying to you, or that their suppliers aren't lying to them, so you have to be personally involved in auditing the entire process from mining to final production and delivery.

Or we could just be reasonable and agree that it's sufficient to avoid knowing or reckless involvement with unethical suppliers, and hold those who actually endanger their workers or lie about the sources of the materials they're selling responsible for their own crimes.

hey, great job. You've turned a discussion about child exploitation into a discussion about whether some random person on the internet will stop buying electronics.

It's great to see where your priorities are.

The tech companies are only one hop away from the end user, they are not close to being the direct buyer for these operations

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?

I agree. When a child is harmed to make a product, everyone involved in creating that incentive should be held responsible. Doing so will strongly change society to stop such harms of children.

This seems backwards. Why not tackle this at the source instead of all the leaves that can potentially trace to this? If we go after all the leaves this will pretty soon involve everyone. Eg what about the app developer that profits off the iphone? What about the property owner that gets rent from the app developer for his office space? This can go on forever.

And to drive home the challenge of how hard it is to trace the providence of a manufactured device, make the end consumer pay restitution directly to the affected parties.

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.

If one company is bad at vetting vendors and loses lots of lawsuits, so has to raise prices, that creates an opening for competitors (existing or new) to do a better job of that, not lose a bunch of lawsuits, and crush them in the market with lower prices. No?

[EDIT] to clarify, you're right if you're talking about flat costs across all players in an industry, but wrong about fines or liability exposure that targets specific behavior, as it's possible to avoid those and retain lower costs (yes, of course, compliance and that avoidance of liability has a cost that does tend to raise prices somewhat, but so does any action aimed at accomplishing some goal, and supposedly companies are more efficient at that sort of thing than government so this should be a relatively cheap way to achieve some end, if you think markets work fairly well in general)

You can agree or disagree with how effective this would be, but it's essentially the same argument for carbon taxes on consumers and the indirect tax applied via producers: you participate in production of the negative components, you help pay the cost.

Again, not arguing for or against but what's so different about taxing consumers on behalf of actual people in a different country vs. taxing them on behalf of the environment?

Or the producers of that cobalt will just find someone else in Shenzhen to sell to.

This problem should be tackled, but it is worth thinking about likely unintended consequences of whatever power structures you set up to tackle it. I hear the Belgians have some experience ending slavery in parts of Africa.

It was easier for Belgium to end slavery in the Congo, as they were the ones who started the slavery in the Congo. The US is in a bit of a different position. Rwandan warlords are not nice people, and are generally tolerated by a Rwandan government which is itself corrupt. They want to go over the border and kill, maim, steal minerals, and enslave, then what can you do if you don't want to risk direct confrontation with them?

This trade is difficult to break in the current environment. We'd need to get tough on people who we have generally not wanted to get tough with because we want to keep them friendly for a lot of reasons. Not least of which is growing Chinese (and European) influence in the nations of coastal Africa. We know very well that some of the people we need are less than savory. Some of the trade we engage in is less than honest. But it's not just the coltan trade that's influencing our behavior here. There are a lot of different and competing strategic considerations at stake.

My own opinion? This is probably going to blow up in our face in the future, and we'll spend the latter half of this century, (or maybe the first half of the next?), attempting to convince a rapidly developing sub-saharan Africa that we're deeply sorry for the past but you can trust us going forward.

Belgium didn't start slavery in the Congo, it introduced a much wider-scale and more horrifying[1] form of it. But Belgium was originally "given" to King Leopold with the justification that he pledged to end[2] the slave trade that already existed there.

Something that surprised me: Disney centered their 2016 film The Legend of Tarzan in this context.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocities_in_the_Congo_Free_S... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo%E2%80%93Arab_War

If you offer them a better margin to mine in a more ethically palettable way, and any up-front resources to do so, then it's reasonable to assume that they will.

I think this quickly gets into the details though. How much safety is required and what does it cost? Are there alternative materials that cost less than ethical cobalt? What age restrictions should be put on the labour involved and what will those children do instead (both with their time and to earn money)? Where will the adult workers come from to replace those kids and what training do they need?

Places where rule of the land (or lack thereof) already lets this happen is unlikely to change simply from increased margins. Most likely they’ll just pocket the increased profit with no improvement in conditions.

Responsible businesses do full inspections of their supply chains. All the way back to the farms which grow the food.

How about the factories where the fertilizer and pesticide/insecticide is made?

My point is it is unreasonable to expect a business to be able to do the kind of oversight that would require the reach of government agencies.

Taking on that responsibility would make defending against these types of lawsuits significantly harder...

Or, they'll launder the proceeds of the unethical mining by sending it through a few intermediaries so that it is now certified as ethically mined.

We've tried this before, and failed at it before (with respect to diamonds).

The same could be said about the Nike shoes you're wearing. By that logic, the company should be sued for buying the Cobalt to make phones. Shouldn't you, the consumer also be sued for buying the phone, containing the Cobalt?

There isn't really a government in the part of Congo where Cobalt is mined. There are many militia groups there and the government has very little ability to enforce the law. Changing the law in the US does very little to prevent this.

How many nations are interested in cutting the middleman? How many nations' officials would like to see corruption stop? How many people would prefer to work under dismal conditions as opposed to not having a job? If we are going to blame the the corporation purchasing the goods, we also need to blame ourselves for not doing our very best to source our purchase choices either.

Then make that argument and lobby the legislature. But you don't change law by bringing irrelevant lawsuits, that's not how it works.

I don't think they intend to change the law. I think these people are out to change the behavior, regardless of what the law is now or in the future.

Everyone is playing dirty. And I'm pretty sure they're going to play even dirtier in the future.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21824898.

Presumably you're willing to stand trial for your part in that supply chain? And ~2bn other smart phone owners will also need to be imprisoned?

I agree, the Swiss should crack down on their mining companies who are running child labor schemes.

This sort of flamebait is not ok here. No more of this please.

Going on about downvotes is also against the site guidelines, not only because it's boring (as they point out), but also because it's usually wrong. The GP comment has by now been heavily upvoted. Meanwhile off-topic complaints like this one linger on as uncollected garbage in a thread. Please don't.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I don't care about Teslas. I down voted because the proposal wouldn't be an effective solution.

Instead of trying to impose additional requirements on buyers, a better approach would be to work at the national governmental level through a combination of carrots (foreign aid and advice) and sticks (sanctions and tariffs for countries that don't meet labor standards).

When a radical action is proposed and someone disagrees with that action, it doesn't mean they are in support of the symptom.

In this case, it is universally agreed that child slave labor is bad. These lawsuits call for punishing a recipient many transactions away from the mining. It's not calling on the governments, nor the immediate companies involved. Nor is it calling for all parties who are recipients of cobalt, which would include end users. It is just piling onto the two minutes of hate surrounding a couple megacorps.

This is so clearly something that needs to be resolved through legislation and diplomacy. These companies have been purchasing cobalt legally (presumably). If they haven't, a civil lawsuit isn't the answer; criminal charges are.