Now that I’ve installed Wi-Fi a worry is setting in. I’ve stopped using entirely the desktop computer in favor of the laptop at home, which means that I’m consuming less coal and more tantalum. I’d rather it were the other way around, since I’m far more bothered by the exploitation of men than of minerals.
It occurs to me that society at large is always making decisions of this kind: shutter a polluting mill and drive families out of work, boycott a product from an unsavory foreign regime and put its peasants to ruin, ban a chemical pesticide to save a handful of cancer cases and watch a million contract malaria. I wonder if there’s a circle in hell labeled “Incorrect Moral Calculus”?
Update: Bloggingheads has long explanation.
Aside: I don’t like the term “coltan.” I wish the media would use scientific terminology instead of picking up and spreading local jargon.
