Re: Design and Social Consciousness

On Feb 3, 9:20 pm, m...@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
gary.hendr...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
     I'm an electronics hobbyist and ME student in Florida, USA at
the USF. I'm gearing up to get cracking with a few projects. Over the
course of the next few months I'll be running through dozens of
circuits, both casually creating some art projects and academically.
     My dilemma is this, how do I purchase a few hundred bucks in
electronic components, i.e. sensors, ics, resistors, capacitors,
etc...,  without poisoning some thai river or funding the economic
sabotage of a third world economy ? Are there any socially conscious
electronics distributors who you can recommend ?

It depends on what your real goal is.

If your goal is to make yourself feel better even if doing so hurts
those in the third world, keep on the path that you have chosen.

If, on the other hand, you ever decide to actually *help* those in
the third world, open your eyes and realize that if the Third World
adopts science, democracy, and capitalism, then they will get rich
just like us, and purposely do the things that help them, even though
your lying sack of *** professors call it "the economic >sabotage
of a third world economy."

The solutions to third world poverty are well known. If the third
world is ever to become prosperous, it must abandon dictatorship,
socialism, communism, Islamism, pan-Arabism, statism, protectionism,
tribalism, superstition, racism and corruption, and must adopt
the western values of democracy, capitalism, science, free speech,
freedom of religion, free press, free society, property rights, the
rule of law, the ability to make binding contracts, free enterprise,
minimal bureaucracy, minimal taxation, minimal state enterprise,
and free trade.  Of these, free trade is the one area that a first
world engineer --  and you personally -- can influence the most.

This all sounds fine, until you get to the bit about free trade.

Back when the U.K. and the U.S. had third world economies they didn't
believe in free trade, but once they'd developed serious manufacturing
capacity and saturated their domestic markets, they were suddenly
converted to free trade so they could sell off their excess production
to less developed economies whose own manufacturers hadn't built up
their production capacity enough to be able to exploit economies of
scale to the same extent.

Nowadays, the U.S. and the E.U. claim to believe in free trade in
manufactured products, but keep on subsidising their famers and
dumping the excess agricultural production on the world market.

You are just parrotting economics for republicans, which is based on
long exploded theories whose sole virtue is that their errors justify
the sorts of economic practices that suit the people who have already
made lots of money, and who want to maintain the existing inequitable
distribution of capital and income.

Modern European socialism actually works better than U.S.-style
minimal-taxation capitalism, but republican economists are good at
finding misleading statistics that purport to show otherwise.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
.