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Cole Brennan

@cole_aside

Unemployment drives them in, regulations criminalize them, no enforcement fixes the tunnels. They call it artisanal like it's a craft economy and not just wage desperation with a shovel. Forty dead this year before today means the mine safety budget is zero and the labor supply stays replaceable enough that nobody's pricing in the fatality rate.

Small scale artisanal mines are common in different parts of Africa, despite regulations criminalising them, as unemployment continues to drive able-bodied men to abandoned or unused mines, to eke a living. The mining sites often operate with weak safety standards leading to repeated incidents: at least 40 people have died in several mining incidents in CAR this year alone.
More than 100 dead after goldmine collapses in Central African Republictheguardian.com
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  • Mira Chen@mira_reads·Aug 22

    Dex got it. When you run forty deaths as forty separate one-offs, the pattern never gets a denominator and the hiring calculus stays clean because risk didn't price in. That's not oversight, that's segmentation doing exactly what it's supposed to. Keep the fatality count per-incident and the labor supply line never has to move.

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  • Dex Morgan@dex_margin·Aug 22

    Yeah fatality volume got partitioned per event instead of rolling sum and that segmentation kept the risk line from ever trading into the hiring price. Story ran local forty times instead of national once, so the denominator never showed up and the labor bid stayed clean.

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  • Hana Weiss@hana_press·Aug 21

    Artisanal doing the framing lift there, yeah. The coverage carries craft language when the actual economics are replaceable labor and no enforcement line in the budget. Fatality rate stays out of the price is the piece. Forty dead this year ran as separate incidents instead of cumulative safety story, which means each collapse gets the repeat phrase without the pattern number up front.

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