Nice, instead of supporting the PCB business 5 miles away, send it to China. The copper not on your PCB is probably floating down some Chinese river, hence "Dirty PCB".
They are already making huge sacrifices working in terrible conditions because they weren't lucky enough to be born in the US or western europe et al. Chinese workers are very smart and hard working, so their position in life is not based on their ability but simply bad luck (relative to people born in the US etc.) The least I could do is buy their labour so that they may improve their lives. If I bought from a US companies most of the money would go to a rich 1% new yacht and new iphones for his daughters. I would rather feed a poor chinese worker family and send a youngster to school.
If only.
that's great. but chinese schools are way cheaper than US schools so if somebody asked me to give up $100 to educate 100 chinese kids or half a US kids for x amount of time I would have to say the chinese on utilitarian principle since I can hardly justify that a US person is worth 100x a chinese person.
>paying state and federal taxes
a lot of which is going to welfare i.e. hands out for people not doing anything productive, which again is a very bad way to spend money.
>SS, healthcare for employees,
same arguments ditto
>and probably allot for hazardous waste service.
This is great. However, china is kinda too poor to have good hazardous waste removal. Thus money spent on china makes it richer and more likely to have hazardous waste, thus more likely that less people will be exposed to hazardous waste.
>What makes you think the Chinese PCB manufacturer is not in the 1%; just assumption the US manufacturer is.
because US is a wealthier country therefore all else being equal the probability of the US manufacturer being rich is higher than the same prob. for the chinese
Nothing personal to the americans of course. It's not their fault either than a bowl of noodles in US is 10x the price of the same thing in china so an american has to make way more money than a chinese to survive but i like to spend the least amount of money possible.
What makes you think the workers have any other choice? They're not "willing" if it's wage slavery.
What makes you think the people injured by pollution are willing? When exactly did they give their consent in this transaction?
(the knee-jerk response to both is "government regulations", but those are so thoroughly captured/corrupted that no real consent is transmitted)
>If I bought from a US companies most of the money would go to a rich 1% new yacht and new iphones
This seems equally likely in China.
that's like saying we are all physics slaves because the universe imposes the laws of physics on us...
slavery means a specific thing. when a person is owned as property and has no right and must obey his master on pain of death.
don't stretch the word
>What makes you think the people injured by pollution are willing? When exactly did they give their consent in this transaction?
Im still waiting on the my nuclear reparation money from the USA for all the extra exposure from all those atmospheric nuclear tests
nobody in the world has a legitimate pollution compensation scheme
>This seems equally likely in China.
well since im paying less for stuff from china im definitely paying less for a 1% yacht
My answer is: I can't afford US goods costs. I can afford Chinese costs.
I'm not a company whose decisions are to move away from the US for an extra $1 billion profit. My choices are : Get it from China, or Don't get it.
dirtypcbs is $14 for qty 10 of 25 sq cm boards or 250 sq cm total. So 1500 sq cm of boards from dirtypcbs would cost about $14 times 6 or $84.
Note that ethically, outsourcing to China is the modern version of handing syphillis blankets to indians. "Well, they're warm blankets, and they did ask for it, and anything is morally acceptable if the victim is tricked into accepting it, if you're really screwed up ethically". It only costs $50 more not to participate in something as ethically distasteful as Chinese manufacturing and you get the product in a day not a week without trashing the environment and while treating human beings like humans, even if they are not white.
Also, if you live on the west coast, you and your kids are breathing the airborne pollution from those Chinese plants for the rest of us.
So, you don't own any recent electronic devices either, I presume, like smartphones, computers, home appliances? And who do you think manufactures the components for your not-Chinese-made electronics?
In many places there's only one reason a small company (let alone an individual) would buy a short run of PCBs locally - you desperately require it in two to four days and are willing to pay six times the price to get it.
It's not that people aren't willing to support local PCB manufacturers, it's just that the manufacturers know there's very money in cheap, small volume work outside China and focus on the profitable niches (like really fast turnaround), which usually makes them unaffordable for hobbyists.
"Dirty PCBs" are so named because they're not great quality. The solder mask and silkscreen aren't perfectly aligned and the minimum trace width is eight mil.
Except that motivation will only results in removing just as much copper as it's economical to extract. They'd still discharge the remaining copper once it reaches concentrations too low to bother extracting (but plenty high enough to cause damage to biological systems).
This also ignores all the other stuff in the etching and rinse baths, which isn't exactly benign.
I don't see why he should support somebody who charges 5x the competitor.
Im not gonna pay $20 for a jar of peanut butter because the factory owner lives 5 miles from me.
Locality matters. Love thy neighbor, because they may reciprocate and their neighbor, surprise, is you.
Edit: My point is that I go to farmer's market for the experience, not to support the local farmers. It just so happens that the locals are the best are providing that experience. I do have to admit though that wanting to support the local farmers may have bootstrapped the farmer's market - or it may have survived through the rise of grocery stores.
And even with all that, going to farmer's market is splurging for me.
It's simple biology and physics: if you want freshly-picked fruit, you have to get it nearby, unless you're going to pay $$$$ to have someone ship it to you by overnight shipping (and it's not economical to ship food that way).
How is some local farmer going to "help me out with whatever glitch"? He's busy running his farm. He doesn't live next door to me, he lives 20 minutes away. He might as well live across the country. But his food is probably going to be fresher and better quality than food at the supermarket that was shipped in from Central America.