[tim333]

>With their feet chained, and dressed in rags, Apuleius describes the workers as having “eyes so bleary from the scorching heat of that smoke-filled darkness they could barely see, and like wrestlers sprinkled with dust before a fight, they were coarsely whitened with floury ash.

Any examples of regions of the world where things are as bad as that? I've travelled a bit and seen nothing like that.

[resolutebat]

Brick kiln slavery in India comes pretty close.

https://www.antislavery.org/latest/report-slavery-india-bric...

[grotted]

How do you think we're getting all those rare earth minerals?

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/05/31/the-dark-side-...

[defrost]

"Artisanal" cobalt mining isn't the source of most of the worlds cobalt, it's an unregulated cowboy side trade that's hard to stamp out.

https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/features/top-cobalt-produci...

That said, horrific working conditions abound in today's modern world, another example being "call centre coolies", eg:

Inside the call centre scam that lured vulnerable workers to Cambodia and trapped them in the murky world of human trafficking

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-12-29/inside-call-centre-sc...

these places pop up all over the globe.

[peterfirefly]

Cobalt is not a rare earth mineral + only a low single-digit fraction of our cobalt comes from Congo.

... and living conditions for most Congolese are still better than they used to be, even for the lowest 10%.

[grotted]

Well they're certainly better than we were mass harvesting their hands, but that's a low bar.

[ffgjgf1]

Or ever.

Not that it’s a fair comparison modern medicine and some (even on a minimal level) access to healthcare means that the majority of people who are alive now would’ve been dead.

Of course that’s certainly not the only thing.

[wkat4242]

North Korea perhaps?

[ffgjgf1]

Possibly. But only for a small minority.