Hey, abundance!
I actually like the general thrust of the push by Ezra et al to boost growth and simplify life in the blue states (and enable carbon transition investment), but it is a genuinely difficult problem to decide which regs are essential to maintain planet and natural abundance.
As a proud Pennsylvanian, Moby is bound to envy mining disasters elsewhere.
Isn't "leach" an industrial process with metals?
But they're leaching the whole of Zambia!
And, more importantly, homophones.
I wonder if African English speakers use "leech" as slang for "doctor" like in Foyle's War.
Red Moshannon Creek is the most visible mining-destroyed river. Much smaller scale than this.
We have a Zambian student assistant in the library who I've been a mentor to, she's absolutely brilliant and got into Cambridge and a bunch of other universities and we were talking about this last week.
She expressed despair over the government being too corrupt and dysfunctional to do anything about it. She was pretty upset but things have been busy so we didn't get a chance to discuss it as much as I would have liked to, I'll ask her more about it tomorrow, especially what news she's had from home. She's from Livingston.
A couple years ago I almost took a USAID-sponsored gig to go to Zambia and advise on an e-commerce platform. Although it was less obvious they needed my help and in seemed more like a local agency justifying its need for US development dollars. And no shade on them for that - its how soft power works - but I feel bad that even that tiny little gravy train has ended.
17: "agency" as in part of the state?
Oh gosh that's really sad. My Dad was a mining engineer in Zambia when the companies were all still British. Copper is by far their biggest export and source of currency. I hope he doesn't see this. :(
¡Sí! No Metals (because they're all in the river now)
17: No, it was a private agency and their gig was recruiting and supporting westerners to do development-related stuff in Zambia. Which is both a worthy thing and a bit of a hustle.
Oh, that's very sad. It's a difficult balance for poor countries like that that are hugely dependent on natural resource extraction.
There was a time when I thought that public protests of environmental disasters within China would feed into pro-democracy protests, but that was 15-20 years ago when I was younger and more naive.
Speaking of poisoning rivers, here's one that's our fault: https://apnews.com/article/usaid-cuts-trump-agent-orange-vietnam-bien-hoa-2d55174970ef36c3247f6981150913de
Better Orange than Red!
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"As a government, our priority is to adhere to peaceful resolution, using the basis of law and negotiation and our diplomacy, international law," he said in a speech to the Cambodian Tycoon Association.Speaking of on the nose.|>
There was me thinking that NVIDIA putting metal detector security checkpoints all round....Cesar Chavez Park in San Jose was the heavy-handed symbolism of the week.
("Si, se puede!" "Excuse me sir do you have a K3 pass for the keynote?")
Just yesterday I was talking to a person at a local university who is involved in acquiring GPUs from Nvidia on what sounded like basically extortionate terms.
Update to 16 I just spoke with her and she said shockingly that there is nothing about this on the news in Zambia at all. People who know about it are hearing about it from outside media. Even her family really didn't know much about it other than what she told them. This isn't the first time, she mentioned another copper mine and also horribly an area with a lot of lead pollution where the government offers poor families free housing. Local journalists who tried to cover environmental issues have been killed.
31: Interesting. When I searched I saw plenty from local media, including government and broadcast. Does anyone have a VPN with a Zambia server?
Vaguely on topic.
https://chinaglobalsouth.com/analysis/ecuador-set-to-take-over-chinese-built-dam-amid-arbitration-over-defects/
Includes possibly the ugliest shirt-jacket combination in recorded history.
OK, she pointed out that those are almost all government sites, and online and with little after February when the spill happened and that there is next to nothing on TV or radio which is where most people would get their news.
35 fair. I saw a couple of state TV pieces, but they were on Youtube, so IDK how much airing they got.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5qOSTqdqJQ
She just popped into my office to show me this TikTok video and especially the comments which are filled with Zambians saying that this is the first they've heard about it
https://www.tiktok.com/@okayafrica/video/7482931280615574826?_t=ZM-8uyj5qwPHAz&_r=1
(On Youtube, he clarifies, as if anyone thought he had been tuning his shortwave to pick up the crackling voice of Zambia.)
Further to 38, she said because of unreliable electricity most people get only about 4 hours a day (about ten hours when she grew up and the dams were run by Germans), so there's not much opportunity to watch TV news.
In an incredible coincidence, I saw a Zambian movie for the first time ever last night. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl -- a very interesting and troubling movie, that I don't feel at all qualified to judge.