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Comment by akomtu | Hacker News Reader

Did they count only office workers? I bet way more people die in cobalt mines in Africa to make our electric car revolution affordable.

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Interesting that this outrage has only started appearing now when there are moves to electrify transport, and was somehow never a problem for all previous generations of electronic processes - which have relied at least as heavily on cobalt.

What irks me about outrage culture is many of these pro workers types of people think that we can somehow have an ethical society but still maintain. So the push for anything moral and affordable means someone is gonna get exploited. If those people can't be exploited costs will go up. If costs go up the product can only be bought by rich people. Then the cycle begins again. I wish people would just get a reality check that life is filled with people who are exploited. That's been our history for millennium. Some new idea is not going to change it. The faster people accept this the quicker they can work to get to a point where they can try to end the cycle...until they realize they're themselves are just another cog in the impossible to control machine.

The overlap between environmentally concerned and electric car users is lot more than electronics users. It is serious conflict with their story of why they and you should switch to electric.

Isn't part of it the difference in size? How many phone batteries does it take to equal one car battery?

We can do two things at once - in fact society is so large that everyone trying to do a single thing is likely to lead to a lot of inefficiencies.

If there's a good source on cobalt mine deaths that shines a light on the issue why not consider submitting it to HN?

you must be exaggerating? it's really that bad that literal millions die in mines in Africa?

I don't know about in the mines, but there is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_diamond

I imagine a similar phenomenon exists for other mineral resources.

"Paid less than $1 a day children are primarily coerced into cobalt mining work due to injury or death suffered by parents in cobalt mining, the inability to pay school fees, ..."

Did you mean to enclose an actual source with that comment? Without that, it's difficult to verify the scale and validity of the issue you're raising (not that I necessarily doubt it; I just like to have more coherent sources than a pull quote from an anonymous commenter on an internet forum).

https://www.forbes.com/sites/tobyshapshak/2019/12/18/cobalt-...

[1] doesn't directly answer your question, but there are some interesting stats there -- over 300k children, 5 and up, work in Bolivian mines. Bolivian Miners die on average 25 years earlier than the average Bolivian. Overall, that appears to point to a significant amount of premature death caused by mining.

On the other hand, the answer to GP's question is that this study isn't predominantly about officework. It's a global study[2], and miners are likely accounted for. Americans account for less than 5% of the statistic.

[1] https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/planet-earth/minin...

[2] https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S01604120210022...

No they didn't count only office workers.

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