I posted this in a previous thread about batteries, but it's still relevant.
Not to understate the terrible conditions of "Artisanal" mines, but the Cobalt Institute says "Due to market surplus, ASM [Artisinal and Small Mine] production has reached a record low, with ASM accounting for an estimated 2% of total cobalt supply from the DRC in 2024."[1]
Which conflicts with the NPR article, "In his new book, Cobalt Red, Kara writes that much of the DRC's cobalt is being extracted by so-called 'artisanal' miners..."[2]
Unfortunately, nowhere in the NPR article does it give a hard number to compare like the Cobalt Institute, but as of 2024, JP Morgan analysis said "ASMs... contribute up to 30% of the DRC’s cobalt supply..."[3]
So, what can we do?
Mining and battery production don't require pseudo-slavery, so maybe the best answer is to work towards improved conditions in ASMs in the DRC, develop battery reuse/recycling, and searching for alternative sources of the conflict minerals so that the industy can vote with their wallet...
New to this comment: Even TFA says: "Kara acknowledges the important role cobalt plays in tech devices and in the transition to sustainable energy sources. Rather than renouncing cobalt entirely, he says people should focus on fixing the supply chain."
Thanks for contributing this information to the thread, but the links are not working.
In a recent interview Kara mentioned that contacts reporting in the region itself tell a different story (he himself can’t go there anymore), not much has changed.
It still feels so disingenuous, too, that this keeps coming up for Cobalt, specifically. Cobalt had centuries of being "the useless junk that makes a pretty blue paint from our tin mines". These mines are certainly not mining just for Cobalt any more now that rechargeable batteries are an important thing to some cars. They are still mining tin, lead, diamonds, gold, etc and getting some amount of Cobalt out as a side hustle or "waste product".
I think the Mini line was doomed by the second iteration of the SE.
I know multiple people who held onto their original SE because of the form factor, but bought the second SE when it came time to upgrade because that seemed to be as small as the iPhone would go anymore.
i'll be waiting right alongside. when i fold the phone i want it to be very small and preferably thin as possible. when i have the phone to my ear during a call i want it to be light as possible too. this is what lead me to get an early rehash of the razr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Razr_(2020) but even that phone requires hand repositioning to reach the top of the screen when open. the 'chin' part allows it to be thinner but alas i wish it were thinner still, especially folded in a pocket. 6 years of use and i dont want a bigger phone, i want a smaller foldable but the product lines are doing the opposite!
i hope apple give a duo mini a serious try. apple, the market segment might be smaller but like a restaurant that includes special dietary needs for one person, that brings the whole family along for dinner!
I know a couple of very tech savvy crews that war-drive and collect data on ALPRs in my city and they were the ones who mapped most of our city back in the day. there's been a big post-50501 DeFlock movement, though, so it's possible that more recent results are lower quality backed by lower subject matter expertise but it's not hard to set-up a good-enough scanner with something like Flock-You: https://github.com/MaxwellDPS/Flock-You-Android
even then, Flock cameras are visually distinctive compared to the Clearview/Motorola solutions that are more traditionally orb-like or are just straight tube CCTV housing. if you see a long black camera attached to a black pole with a solar panel attached, 99.9% chance you've spotted a Flock camera: https://www.wpr.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Flock_Safety_...
pretty easily - with wifi and BLE scanning. it's not like there's a guy at Flock climbing every pole, sticking in a USB, and then trucking it back to home base
Flock is a new in this market, before Flock there were loads of cameras wired up because wifi was not considered reliable until recent times. I'm asking, how do you detect well placed, subtle wired cameras? My overall point being, these apps are only as good as long as Flock and others don't just go fully hardwired (which before Flock, many were!).
Do you have any thoughts about how to minimize the negative impact of such a massive shift?
I've been thinking that Federal limits on nominal appreciation of real estate could gently decrease real prices via inflation. And if that limit fluctuated like the Federal Reserve rate, it wouldn't completely crash real estate as an investment vehicle, meaning retirements needn't be completely decimated.
But that kind of intervention is just pie in the sky at least for the next few years.
In the current economic system, I don't see any. By changing this, for example, by eliminating bank intermediation in the creation of money, well, that could change things. Those who tried, like Lincoln with the Continentals, ended up getting killed...
I was able to find sources for your methane production figures, but can you provide them for the CO2?
To your point about increasing CO2 from farming plants: 40-66% of corn and 58%-77% of soy grown in the US is currently fed to animals, and we dedicate 5,000% more acres to growing feed crops than to vegetables[1]. Since between 3 and 10 calories of plants fed to an animal yields 1 calorie of animal product (depending on animal)[2], there would be room to either plant less, plant different, and/or use less emissive practices.
> and we dedicate 5,000% more acres to growing feed crops than to vegetables
And it's worth considering what would replace all that land (maybe some would end up being biofuel production, but a lot might be allowed to return to nature if it's not profitable anymore), along with things like less demand for slash and burn.
The post's actual title is "Giving it Away: How Free Music Makes More Than Sense" and is far more interesting than the part about preferring illegal downloading. The author, Derek Webb, gave (gives?) away albums in exchange for your ZIP Code and email address because the chance of getting you out to a live show was worth more than what he made on a digital sale or stream.
But for context, the full quote about preferring illegal downloading is: "I’ll go even further to say that I actually prefer illegal downloading over Spotify because when you get music illegally it’s at least implicit in the transaction that what you’re doing is potentially harmful to the artist. But with Spotify, your conscience is clear because you’re either enduring ads or paying to use the service and access the music."
Not to understate the terrible conditions of "Artisanal" mines, but the Cobalt Institute says "Due to market surplus, ASM [Artisinal and Small Mine] production has reached a record low, with ASM accounting for an estimated 2% of total cobalt supply from the DRC in 2024."[1] Which conflicts with the NPR article, "In his new book, Cobalt Red, Kara writes that much of the DRC's cobalt is being extracted by so-called 'artisanal' miners..."[2]
Unfortunately, nowhere in the NPR article does it give a hard number to compare like the Cobalt Institute, but as of 2024, JP Morgan analysis said "ASMs... contribute up to 30% of the DRC’s cobalt supply..."[3]
So, what can we do?
Mining and battery production don't require pseudo-slavery, so maybe the best answer is to work towards improved conditions in ASMs in the DRC, develop battery reuse/recycling, and searching for alternative sources of the conflict minerals so that the industy can vote with their wallet...
New to this comment: Even TFA says: "Kara acknowledges the important role cobalt plays in tech devices and in the transition to sustainable energy sources. Rather than renouncing cobalt entirely, he says people should focus on fixing the supply chain."
1: https://www.cobaltinstitute.org/responsible-sustainable-coba...
2: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/02/01/1152893...
3: https://web.archive.org/web/20240704040321/https://am.jpmorg...
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