This is a bad excuse to not feel bad supporting industries that make heavy use of child labour. I'll break some things down: > "Please do not bring kids. It is

This is a bad excuse to not feel bad supporting industries that make heavy use of child labour. I'll break some things down: > "Please do not bring kids. It is irrelevant here and can be even factually wrong." We should absolutely bring up the kids, since this article talks about the scaling of an industry where the kids play a role in its cheapness. It's very much relevant to the conversation of the price of cobalt. > "If not for cobalt they can be sent to fields and be subject for all chemicals used in modern agriculture. Or work in a sweatshop or in a factory with zero regulations about safety." Mining cobalt is much more dangerous than agriculture; even "modern agriculture". Sweatshops come in all forms, some incredibly dangerous, very physically demanding and potentially toxic, like cobalt mining. I wouldn't say they're worse though. Saying so is not being too familiar with how terrible cobalt mining can be [1][2]. It's worth noting though; one can't defend a terrible children's right abuse by claiming that "if they weren't being abused this way they'd be abused another". We don't know that, and it very much doesn't make it ok. > "I.e. the problem is that the country is poor. Fix that and kids will spent time in schools, not in mines." Yes, The DRC needs capital to develop and support its population. It's worth understanding the problem with a little more depth, since it's complex. The DRC has about half of the reserves of one of an incredibly important resource [3]. That's a very significant amount of latent capital. It also has a chokehold on the market, accounting for about 70% of the world's cobalt production [4]. That's power. One can't just say that The DRC "is poor"; it is being "kept poor" by internal conflict largely enabled and stirred by outsiders (I quickly found some examples from a few years back but there's way more: [5][6]). It's also victim to an international community that says and does nothing about this, because the international community benefits a lot from the poverty in The DRC. That's why we should talk about the children. For years African analysts have noted that the USA cares about "liberating" countries human rights abuses in some parts of the world, yet is very confortable with tyrannical dictators in others [7]. I don't know how much the West would hurt its own economic interests based on public outcry, but we should absolutely acknowledge the fact this is not ok, and Western (in the very least) indifference plays a role in it. [1]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/a394gp/smartphones-child-labor-cobalt-mines-africa-congo-amnesty-international https://www.vice.com/en/article/a394gp/smartphones-child-lab... [2]: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/commentisfree/2019/dec/16/i-saw-the-unbearable-grief-inflicted-on-families-by-cobalt-mining-i-pray-for-change https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/commentisfree... [3]: https://www.kitco.com/news/2022-02-17/The-world-s-largest-cobalt-reserves-by-country-in-2021.html https://www.kitco.com/news/2022-02-17/The-world-s-largest-co... [4]: https://investingnews.com/where-is-cobalt-mined/ https://investingnews.com/where-is-cobalt-mined/ [5]: https://youtu.be/tEOmI5bc3HU?t=68 https://youtu.be/tEOmI5bc3HU?t=68 [6]: https://youtu.be/ptdVHo481eI?t=148 https://youtu.be/ptdVHo481eI?t=148 [7]: https://youtu.be/ptdVHo481eI?t=609 https://youtu.be/ptdVHo481eI?t=609