From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

LAGOS, Nigeria — Behind an outdoor market selling used computers, young men scavenge metal and plastic from a smoldering digital dump.

[...]

Three-fourths of the thousands of discarded American computers arriving in Nigeria each month are in bad shape or beyond repair, African business leaders say.

All this outmoded equipment — containing lead, cadmium, mercury and other contaminants — is creating dangerous messes that pollute land and air of one of the world’s poorest countries. Even computer dealers are outraged.

“People in the United States need to understand that we in this part of the world are human beings just like you,” said John Oboro, deputy head of the Computer and Allied Products Dealers Association of Nigeria.

The U.S. government not only permits the exports, but it also contributes to them.

In a Lagos warehouse, asset tags on dilapidated computers viewed by a Post-Dispatch reporter showed that some once belonged to the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Postal Service.

[...]

Seated in his office overlooking a bustling Nigerian computer market, Oboro argued that the responsibility lies not just with the U.S. government but with American people looking for cheap and easy ways to get rid of outmoded equipment.

“Americans should not leave their e-waste only for the black man to manage,” he said.

I’m tempted to just leave this idiocy to stand on its own, but I cannot resist making a few comments.

1. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which is a terrible newspaper, sent someone to Nigeria for some reason, possibly explicitly for the purposes of reporting on ‘e-waste’. If you live in St. Louis and want to know what caused all the commotion and fire trucks screaming past your door last night, you’re out of luck: but you are fully up-to-date on ‘e-waste’ because they’re running this expensive, Pulitzer-bait series.

2. There is, of course, a racial angle to it. The Post-Dispatch, aside from being a terrible newspaper, is also terribly liberal, far more so than the city it allegedly serves. So dead and obsolete computers are not being sent to Nigeria because Nigeria is a hellhole that exports oil and still manages to be an economic and social basket case where things like stripping monitors of components looks like reasonable employment to people. Oh, no: it’s because the United States collectively has it in for ‘the black man’.

3. In the Post’s view, the cause of the whole problem is that the United States government ‘permits the exports’. The article ignores the fact that the U.S. is not just running up to the beach and dropping off containers of computers, and then sprinting back out to sea before the Nigerians can protest. It ignores the fact that someone in Nigeria is importing the things and could simply stop doing so. It ignores entirely the fact that while the U.S. government could ban the export of dead computers, the sovereign Nigerian government could also ban the import of dead computers, or regulate the recycling and dumping of them. The Post-Dispatch, as I said, is a liberal paper, so this doesn’t occur to them: the U.S. must protect the Nigerians from themselves. The unwritten pinko racist assumption seems to be that the Nigerians are black Africans and are therefore far too stupid to look after their own interests. Banning exports from the U.S. is part of the White Man’s Burden.

4. If the U.S. restricted the export of dead computers to more ‘developed’ countries that dealt with the stuff in a way that the Post-Dispatch considered acceptable, the Post would probably then howl about the denial of opportunity to Nigerians. They would then suggest that this was somehow racist, and call for foreign aid from the U.S. to Nigeria to be increased.

I don’t like to use the word ‘empowerment’, because it’s a buzzword. It’s a handy one, though, because the normal English phrase ‘allowing subordinates to make their own decisions and to solve problems themselves’ is cumbersome.

I watch a show called The Tube, an ITV show about the workings of the London Underground. I think that the thing must be underwritten somehow by the London transport workers’ union, because most of the show seems to be about how unbelievably hard everyone works, and how earnest they are. Or maybe they just do this to maintain access. In any case, the recurring theme is that the Underground people do their best, but that they would be able to do their jobs a whole lot better if it weren’t for all these passengers, who are a total nuisance and who just get in the way of the smooth operation of the system. It would be so much easier to keep the stations safe and clean, and to run the trains on time, if it weren’t for all these pesky people who insist on using them.

As such, the whole thing is a wonderful illustration of a libertarian’s feelings about public transport. The LU people are wonderful people, I’m sure: but they have no effective competition, and they’re working in a highly bureaucratic, highly unionized field. All of these factors tend to produce an environment where individual decision-making is strongly discouraged.

With no competition, there’s no special reason to deliver services more efficiently than anyone else. The whole purpose of bureaucracy is to establish Procedures, and to centralize decision-making power. And unions tend to favor limiting their members’ authority to make decisions; if there’s a clearly-defined Procedure, and if the employee is trained in and follows that Procedure, then the employer can’t find his actions at fault.

Add to this the general bureaucratization of modern British society and the general emphases on safety, security, and Not Giving Offence that now take precedence over everything else, and you have something like a perfect storm of customer disservice.

Consider this short clip from the show (MPEG4):

At the King’s Cross station, they’re doing construction and so don’t have room inside the station for the normal number of passengers. LU’s solution for this is to close gates at the entrance to keep the platforms from getting overcrowded. Eminently sensible.

However, after watching the video, consider:

1. The LU employee’s contempt for passengers when talking to the camera: “…they think the platforms are empty. Now, how do they know that? Because I can’t see from here, so how can they see? I think it’s the fact that they’re all in a rush, they all want to get to work.”

Not only does he seem to consider wanting to get to work on time some particularly inconvenient eccentricity, but he considers that the passengers’ frustration at being made to wait on the sidewalk as being due to their belief that the station is empty. There’s no particular evidence to back this up.

2. When a passenger complains, the immediate and sole reaction of the employee is to tell him to put his complaint in writing and to send it to LU at an address he can find on a poster in the station.

Now, ask yourself: is this going to help? No: it’s just going to piss off the customer even more. When a union employee of a monopoly tells you to send a written complaint to the head office, he means: I have adhered to the official procedure and therefore cannot be held at fault; send a letter and maybe get a response in eight weeks, and fuck you very much, sir.

It’s probably not even our intrepid employee’s fault: he’s probably forbidden to do anything other than close and open the gates, and to tell anyone with a complaint to write a letter to HQ. If he had any discretion in his actions, he might do the wrong thing, and neither the union nor London Underground want that.

In the process of relieving them of the burden of — and the ability to — make decisions based on the circumstances of the moment, LU dehumanizes its employees. Is it any wonder that the passengers then tend not to treat them with proper human respect?

Humans must mind the gap or be DELETED!!!

What if the employee had said, “I’m sorry for the delay, but with the construction in the station we don’t have enough room in there, and so have to hold people at the entrance until the previous crowd thins out”, and then told the guy to write a letter if he argued about it?

What if they increased the fare for people getting on at King’s Cross £1 while the construction was underway? If you absolutely had to get on there, you’d pay the surcharge; everyone else would walk down to Euston.

But LU doesn’t do these things: why should they? Are they going to lose customers to a competing system of subterranean trains? Are all these people going to buy cars, find somewhere to park them in central London, and then deal with the traffic? No. They’re totally powerless to do anything, so they assault the employees. And the response to this is measures that make the passengers feel even more powerless. Give ‘em any lip, and they immediately start reaching for the Button that will bring in the Hired Goons. (At LU, they first suggest that you write a letter: so that’s a progressive policy, then.)

Children throw tantrums because they have no control over their lives. Adults don’t throw tantrums often because, to a large degree, they do control their own lives. What’s more, they’re used to controlling their own lives. Deny them any of that control (as on an airplane) and they throw tantrums, just like children. More force, more authority, more procedures, and more hair-trigger hired-goonery can only make things worse.

Seth Godin writes about Under New Management signs.

Why would anyone put a sign like this up on her store?

If I liked your store before, now I’m on notice to be careful–it might not be as good.

If I didn’t like your store before, why on earth am I paying attention to your little sign and why should I go out of my way to take another chance?

But I think he misses the point completely. When I see an Under New Management sign, I assume that the previous management was so foul that it drove away all the customers, and wound up going broke.

The New Management bought the lease and the stock at a discount, and put up the sign hoping to get rid of some of the ill will generated by the previous management. Certainly most of the establishments I see these signs on are placed that I have learned to avoid. If they’re selling something I want, I might be prompted to give them another try if I know that the idiots who used to run the place are no longer there.

In a situation where competent management has been replaced, it might make less sense, except when you think about transparency. If the old management generated a lot of goodwill, customers might think that they were being hoodwinked when they came in and found different people running the place. Hanging an Under New Management sign on the door of a successful business can be seen as an attempt to be honest and open with your customers, and to avoid being seen as someone who’s trying to merely buy a reputation.

A Taiwanese company called BenQ is running a website for one of its products that features a guy standing in front of the rubble of the World Trade Center:

According to Gizmodo, The Chinese text allegedly says something along the lines of:

Even if the world is destroy to dust, I still believe in music

Now, this is pretty tasteless. Or, as the Chinese aren’t really known for being particularly cosmopolitan or particularly aware of other cultural values, it’s pretty tone-deaf.

I’m not offended by the use of the image, because I don’t think that BenQ is aiming for offense. China isn’t a particularly cosmopolitan place, and so I don’t think it ever occurred to them that the use of that image might be in bad taste in some places.

More interesting than the use of the WTC rubble as an advertising backdrop is the reaction in the discussions attached to the Gizmodo posts, particularly in relation to other discussions recently about Wal-Mart selling a T-shirt with the SS Totenkopf on it.

The skulls on the Wal-Mart shirts say ‘Since 1978′ under them, so it doesn’t seem too likely that they’re trying to make an actual Nazi reference, and the consensus seems to be that whoever designed the shirt was just clueless.

But that doesn’t get Wal-Mart off completely, of course. 1978 could be a code for letters, meaning ‘A.I.G.H.’ — Adolf Is Great Hitler! Or The Turner Diaries! That was written in 1978! There must be some connection, a lot of people write, and even if there isn’t, the people involved should lose their jobs for their insufficient knowledge of history.

The reaction to the WTC image, on the other hand, is a lot more muted. While the Wal-Mart buyers and designers ’should have known’ about the Totenkopf, a good number of people maintain that the image being used by BenQ isn’t the World Trade Center at all.

Most of the Totenkopf comments are of the ‘this is unfortunate but not deliberate’ variety, which is probably the most rational position with the WTC image. Unfortunately, it’s not a common one. Most of the WTC commenters seem to be of the opinion that the use of the image was the result of a clueless designer, but that this is perfectly okay and that Americans need to suck it up.

A couple of comments pretty much sum up what bothers me about this. On person says:

http://www.benq.com.cn/musiq/ points to a Chinese site for a Chinese audience who strangely enough might not be quite as offended as you are at the depiction of tragic events that happened in a largely alien nation 10,000 miles away whose social mores they largely do not share. Kinda like anti-porn protestors buying access to cable and complaining about the amount of flesh they now have access to. It’s a Chinese site for Chinese people so looking at this in order to be offended is foolish at best. Move along, there is nothing to be seen here (unless you actuallly WANT to be offended).

Another says:

This reminds me of the Mohammad cartoons that sparked so much controversy last year. To most Americans it just seemed like a bunch of people getting too worked up over something that seems pretty benign to our senses, and we can’t figure out why anyone would be so uptight about some image.

(Though of course nobody in the U.S. has called for anyone at BenQ to be murdered.)

The underdogist position in a nutshell: Americans must be sensitive to the cultural requirements of everyone on the planet; but if Americans think that using the image of the World Trade Center in an ad for an MP3 player is tasteless, well, they’re just being imperialistic.

Consumerist has been running regular updates about the shirts still being available in stores despite Wal-Mart’s promise to pull them. Somehow I doubt that Consumerist’s sister site Gizmodo will continue to track the BenQ website.

We’re running the AIR CONDITIONING here. The AIR CONDITIONING, because with the WINDOWS OPEN it got too warm (Tino Manor really traps the heat). I wore a T-shirt today: according to the car, it was 77 degrees Fahrenheit out there. December, ladies and gentlemen.

We haven’t run the heat yet since last March, except to take the chill off one or two mornings.