It's on "Breaking the link between resources and repression".
There's a good number of wars going on right now that are more about exploiting resources than trying to become a government. In some places the various factions actually end up selling weapons to each other, while grabbing the local population and forcing the boys to commit atrocities against their own relatives, and raping the girls.
Some of the top resources paying for these conflicts include oil, diamonds, gold, copper, coltan (an ore rich in tantalite, an material crucial for current state-of-the art capacitors), timber, and ivory.
So I knew that as far as I can tell pretty much every oil company in existence has been linked to human right abuses by supporting local military forces' repression of anyone protesting the companies behavior. Unfortunately I wasn't aware of the high-tech connection to these practices (other than exploiting women labor to assemble the circuit boards).
I wonder how much progress the team trying to print micro-circuitry with nanotube ink and an ink-jet printer have been making.
It'd be nice to have an sustainable alternatives for the bits of high-tech society I like, so I can get back to picking on U.S. oil dependence.
