Empathy and Compassion 101 are not part of the STEM curriculum.
“A mindset in which individuals are ultimately discarded will never achieve peace or justice,” he writes. “Responsibility for the poor and the marginalized must therefore be an essential element of any political decision, whether on the national or the international level.”
Americans are technology mad: Ipads, Smartphones, multi-purpose pens, blackberries, all the slick little gizmos that everyone is wild to own.
But what about the tekky innards of these amazing gizmos:
.... the coltan mud mines of the eastern Congo and the informal tanzanite gemstone mines near Arusha, below the snows of Mount Kilimanjaro inTanzania.
Coltan is fuelling Congo's civil war, the UN recently warned that this black eastern Congolese mud -- ($80 per kilo, refined into tantalum for cellphones and laptops) -- had already created a new African slave trade. However the UN did not mention the thousands of child slaves lowered into impromptu mineshafts to claw out the exquisite tanzanite gemstone of Tanzania.
Let us briefly consider the excesses of consumerism:
Are you feeling a bit bloated? As though all your senses have been fully sated and then some? Do you feel in need of a purge – certainly intestinally, and perhaps even mentally as you look back on a series of days of excess and abandon. You do? I have the perfect thing. Do you want to try calculating your slave footprint? It's like your carbon footprint, but much, much worse.
Slaveryfootprint.org is a US website that allows you to calculate the likely total of people – men, women and children – working in terrible conditions in poorer and developing countries to manufacture all the stuff – food, clothing, electronics and so on – you have. You put in your details (your age, gender, how many children, bedrooms, bathrooms, gadgets you own) and out comes an appalling number. In my case, it was 65.
Then, one must also consider the working conditions of those who assemble these wondrous gizmos of technology:
Inside Apple's Chinese 'sweatshop' factory where workers are paid just £1.12 per hour to produce iPhones and iPads for the West
Factories covered in suicide nets to stop workers leaping to their deaths
18 people have killed themselves at the facility
iPhone, iPad and MacBook assembled in factory in Shenzhen
Microsoft, Dell and Hewlett Packard products also built on site
Explosively unsafe working conditions for tech assemblers:
The explosion ripped through Building A5 on a Friday evening last May, an eruption of fire and noise that twisted metal pipes as if they were discarded straws.
When workers in the cafeteria ran outside, they saw black smoke pouring from shattered windows. It came from the area where employees polished thousands of iPad cases a day.
Sorry to rain on the crap under your future Christmas tree but I must fulfill my mission as a committed Luddite.