The US Effort to Break China's Rare-Earth Monopoly (msn.com) 142
The New York Times checks in on U.S. university researchers and start-ups trying to create domestic rare-earth processing facility:
There is too little money to be made in rare earths for the elements to be of much interest to mining giants, so the challenge of reestablishing a domestic industry has fallen to small companies like Phoenix Tailings, a Boston-area startup that runs the metal-making plant in Exeter, New Hampshire. A handful of other companies in the United States are processing rare earths in small quantities, including MP Materials, which owns a mine in Mountain Pass, California, and recently began producing rare-earth metal in Fort Worth, Texas. Similar efforts are underway in Europe and Asia. "It's small volumes of low-value materials that are very expensive to process," said Elsa Olivetti, a materials science and engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Meaning it's hard to make money."
Phoenix Tailings' New Hampshire operation is about 2 months old, housed in a converted medical device plant. The company buys metric-ton bags of powder — a mixture of neodymium and praseodymium bound with oxygen — from mining and refining companies in the United States, South America and Australia. It funnels that flour-like material into a drying oven and eventually into furnaces that heat it to the temperature of volcanic lava. This circuit takes up less than 15,000 square feet and is designed to generate no emissions other than those associated with the electricity Phoenix Tailings uses. The closed-loop design distinguishes this process from the more energy-intensive techniques used in China, where workers scoop up molten metal with ladles. That approach releases perfluorocarbons, potent greenhouse gases that do not break down easily.
In late 2024 the company was three weeks from bankruptcy — but it's recently been valued at $189 million.
Phoenix Tailings' New Hampshire operation is about 2 months old, housed in a converted medical device plant. The company buys metric-ton bags of powder — a mixture of neodymium and praseodymium bound with oxygen — from mining and refining companies in the United States, South America and Australia. It funnels that flour-like material into a drying oven and eventually into furnaces that heat it to the temperature of volcanic lava. This circuit takes up less than 15,000 square feet and is designed to generate no emissions other than those associated with the electricity Phoenix Tailings uses. The closed-loop design distinguishes this process from the more energy-intensive techniques used in China, where workers scoop up molten metal with ladles. That approach releases perfluorocarbons, potent greenhouse gases that do not break down easily.
In late 2024 the company was three weeks from bankruptcy — but it's recently been valued at $189 million.
Tariffs Working? (Score:4, Interesting)
Are tariffs having the desired effect? Specifically onshoring?
Seems like a good thing to me. But, I'm sure that this thread will be filled with outraged individuals who are totally not Chinese agents.
Re:Tariffs Working? (Score:5, Informative)
Seems like a good thing to me. But, I'm sure that this thread will be filled with outraged individuals who are totally not Chinese agents.
Bringing rare earths production back to the US is a good thing. The right way to do it if you were going to do it with tariffs would have been to be consistent, with a well-established schedule phased in over several years so as not to fuck over your domestic industries which depended on the products. You would have to be a Chinese (or Russian) agent to think it was a good idea to do it all at once, and to be completely inconsistent about it and change the amounts repeatedly and chicken out on some of them and never actually institute some of them (I've been buying stuff from China all along and none of it has gotten any new tariffs) and generally waffle and whine, winding up looking stupid and weak.
Whether you're picking up your fifty cents at the door, or you're chained to a table in Moscow, either way you can fuck off for free.
Tariffs won't bring back rare Earth mining (Score:5, Interesting)
If you want rare Earth mining in America you are going to have to subsidize it with the government. That's it. That's how you get it. That's what we did with the chip industry. And that's what you have to do with rare earth mining.
I don't think any of this really matters because the modern ruling class is global and the major players have class solidarity and work together. They will squabble over small countries like Venezuela and Cuba and Afghanistan and whatnot but at the end of the day when it comes to the big boys they are all in the same big club and as usual you ain't in it.
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Written by an idiot who does not know how "rare earth mining" (or probably any kind of mining) works.
Hint: it is not done by little children with a pickaxe, or a hammer and a chisel under ground in bad air, with collapsing rocks behind you and the fumes of candles in your face.
USA outsourced rate earth mining/refining/trade to the world market, because they wanted to Dave a dollar on the ton of material.
As China happens to have mining options where "the stuff just lies around", they literally simply shovel
You still need miners you twat (Score:2)
Using human beings, especially disposable human beings is much much more profitable. Combine that with cancer villages and the profits skyrocket.
What that means you dumbass is that any fucking company that decides to do rare Earth m
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Well, the "negative stuff" you mention, "cancer village" (what is that?) and all the other BS: does not exist in China - since decades.
But you have a worldview you have to protect so that's not on the menu.
No, you got it all wrong.
You have a wold view from 30 years ago, or even 50.
China has slaves, yes. Real slaves. People that get or got kidnapped and are forced to be slaves. Just recently they freed a dozens.
And mind boggeling story of an ~80 year old man who finally found his 60 year old son who was kidn
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"Cancer village" refers to the shanty towns near the mining and refining sites... they use tons of nasty stuff (cadmium, acids... by-products: radioactive waste, lead, asbestos, arsenic). The people who live there are going to develop cancer.
Sure... China is far ahead of the US on worker and/or environmental protection... what kind of 'wages' do they pay the 'adults' working in the factories that make cheap knock-off stuff for Temu and everyplace?
"Mined in deserts and refined with water" implies that someo
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> "Cancer village" refers to the shanty towns near the mining and refining sites
"Cancer villages" are definitely a thing in China. In the USA too, where they're called "cancer clusters and sacrifice zones", and Canada definitely has some too.
Hard to tell who has it worse per capita but the issues don't seem related to rare earths
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Do they sell the raw rocks containing some kind of rare Earth element and leave it to someone else (y'know... ship it to America, where we refine it down using acids and toxic stuff) to refine (America refines it to neodymium and sells it back to China) so they can make the chips?
Of course, China doesn't use child labor (insert winky face here), and your jeans that cost $35 weren't made in a sweatshop in Pakistan, and your $800 iPhone wasn't made in Thailand for a handful of rice.
If you actually did all the
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The point is: rare earths are not rare. It is just a name they got in the 1800ds when "they knew" those elements need to be there, but had no clue how to find/detect them.
They are eerywhere.
They do not cause any particular environmental hazard. Unless you kind of deliberately make one. They do not involve slave labour or child labour unless you have earth moving equipment cheap enough to entrust it a slave or small enough to entrust it a child.
And so on ...
The US does not mine them because they do not want.
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No child or slave labor? https://www.newsecuritybeat.or... [newsecuritybeat.org]
Yes, I know "rare earth" metals aren't really rare (like Dodo feathers are rare).
"The US doesn't mine them": even though, there's plenty of them here. https://www.questmetals.com/bl... [questmetals.com]
Sure... mining them doesn't involve any environmental hazards... processing them certainly does... so, what're you gonna do... mine it here in the US, ship it to China to be refined in the dirty, toxic refinery, then have the actual mineral shipped back?
What's this ab
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Why would processing ores for rare earth produce environmental hazards?
Or more concrete: smelting bauxit to aluminium. WTF ....
Just because it is "technology" it is automatically an environmental hazard? Oh my god. Now I get why you hate China. They can do things you can not, without any environmental problems. Facepalm.
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A little Google, and this (for why processing rare earth metals use toxic stuff):
"What toxins are used for refining rare earth metals
The refining process of rare earth metals involves several methods, each with its own set of potential toxins and hazardous materials. Here are some of the toxins and chemicals used in the refining process:
Hydrofluoric Acid (HF): Used in the Ames Process to dissolve the ore and extract REEs. However, it is known to be toxic and can cause serious health issues if inhaled or ing
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You don't have to do it with the chip industry if you prosecute antitrust before it gets out of hand, and you don't have to do it with the rare earths industry because they existed here before. You only have to accept slightly less profit than if you export it to China.
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I didn't know the potato chip industry was so cutthroat!
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The problem is we don't treat people poorly enough and we don't let companies make cancer villages
Project 2025: Hold my beer [epa.gov].
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I find it amusing that at both extremes of the political spectrum, there is a belief that there is a global ruling cabal controlled by the other side's extreme wing. This leads me to suspect that both sides are wrong about it.
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The problem is we don't treat people poorly enough and we don't let companies make cancer villages so nobody is going to try to compete on that cost.
Really? [theguardian.com] Or you're living in a bubble?
In contrast, China has been moving toward more environment friendly mining practices [biologicaldiversity.org]:
Through this upcoming regulation, China intends to protect its national interests and industrial security as well as prevent activities, such as illegal mining, destructive mining, unplanned and over-planned production, illegal trading of rare earth products, and destroying the ecological environment, among others.
Of course, the western critics, like yourself, will only emphasize the national security aspect which China should also protect especially as a response to the western sanctions on semiconductor products.
It is also well known that the western world just shift their pollution to the developing world, including China [wikipedia.org].
Westerners have such a mentality that only paint itself as victim never
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The problem is that whatever production appears in the US is 1) tiny, and 2) exceedingly expensive. US aluminum producers noticed that there was a shortfall in production worldwide of aluminum, so vowed to reopen a couple of mothballed plants to produce an extra 80,000 tons/year. The problem with this "wonderful" outcome is that 1) the shortfall is 2 MILLION tons, and 2) creaking old US factories' production processes are so inefficient that the only place their aluminum can be sold is in the US to avoid
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I assume you're referring to the US? China's government can, and does, direct that energy where it believes the most long-term value lies. Unlike the US with it's quarterly bonuses for C-suite execs controlling corporate decisions as they play Executive Musical Chairs and shift from company to company Chinese corporations are required by banks to have long term plans and to stick with them.
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The Caracas operation is what they hoped the invasion of Ukraine would look like: no air defense, little will to fight, an internal coup, quick removal of the leader, followed by occupation. Instead, they got stuck in a four year war, taking heavy economic and population losses
Except there wasn't a coup, and there isn't an occupation. The same party is running the country, and the VP took over. It's like a hostage situation now.
I'm not sure how anybody believes economic cooperation can follow. If the same had happened in Ukraine they'd be fighting for sovereignty under a different leader because kidnapping the Ukrainian president isn't going to coerce the rest of the country into favorable trade terms with Russia or make it cease looking for a defense compact elsewhere, and it's
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That's my stalker troll, it follows up pretty much every post of mine with pro-US propaganda (frequently talking points which were disproved years ago), generally unrelated to the discussion at all. I think it's a particularly poorly programmed bot of some kind.
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Have the LLM-AI datacenters turned any kind of profit yet?
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For nVidia... sure.
It's their "flagship" cards powering more LLM-AI slop and the sheeple are happy.
How about OpenAI or any of them? What profits have they turned?
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Well, in all honesty I think my last statement could apply to pretty much every Administration since the early 80's, when the lawyers and bankers took over the government.
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Whether bankers are friends, enemies, or a necessary evil has been an open question throughout our history.
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Are tariffs having the desired effect? Specifically onshoring?
Seems like a good thing to me. But, I'm sure that this thread will be filled with outraged individuals who are totally not Chinese agents.
The issue is "compared to what?"
The resources (that is, the people, money, and equipment, not the rare earth elements themselves) being spent creating barely profitable rare earth metals could otherwise be used to mine lithium, fabricate magnets from the raw elements, build solar panels, make chips, build data centers, or a million other things. Generally we use the market and price signals to discover what activities are the most valuable.
That these companies are barely making money is a good indication th
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Are tariffs having the desired effect? Specifically onshoring?
Seems like a good thing to me. But, I'm sure that this thread will be filled with outraged individuals who are totally not Chinese agents.
You have some things really mixed up. China's export restrictions (in response to the earlier tariffs) did that. It was all over Fox News because Trump responded with 100% tariffs and then they both backed down. That's how big a deal access to them is. It's not so much that we want rare earth processing here, it's dirty and doesn't make much money, it's that we don't want it all from China. Rare earth processing investments are a big part of our trade deals with other countries.
They're raw materials used in
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Did Biden pass the tariffs? Because that's when the companies listed in TFS started doing what they are doing. 2024.
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Rare earths, despite their name, aren't really all that rare. The US has a lot. The only reason they're "rare" is because it's hard (read expensive) to extract the elements from the minerals, often using very nasty chemicals and very polluting methods.
China was usually the place to buy them because it was cheap and well, we can look the other way on environmental rules. Because surprise surprise, no one wants that pollution in their backyard, making it very expensive to refine in the US.
All tariffs have don
Economists agree (Score:2)
There is an inertia in economics. Seeking to keep things as they are so that it is easier to measure year over year data, write research papers, and get quoted on media saying the usual "economy doing X" statements.
If the economic data collection method changes (survey to government filing extracts), new economic data is collected by the BLS, or there are larger changes in tax, trade, and commerce laws; it makes it more difficult to produce news quotable research.
Factor into this, the percent of economists
Re: Tariffs Working? (Score:2)
Is that true?
I know they agree on a purely economic context, but there's definitely value to notnhqving an antagonist in control of key products.
Re:Tariffs Working? (Score:5, Informative)
Economists agree
Economists agreed COVID inflation was... wait for it... "Transient."
Looks like they got that right. Inflation spiked to a high of 9.06% year-over-year in June, 2022. By September 2024, it had dropped back down to 2.24%, which is where it is today.
Economists agreed Biden's $2E12 Build Back Better bill "won't be inflationary."
I don't recall economists having any consensus on that. I remember different economists having different opinions. But, remarkably, while there was the expected inflationary spike in 2022, it went away, and the economy restarted smoothly. The bill seems to have done its job.
How'd that all work out?
Unexpectedly well. Back in 2021 and 2022, economists were worried that it would be nearly impossible to thread the needle between crashing the economy and triggering inflation, but in fact the economy came in for a soft landing, avoiding both extremes.
data here: https://www.in2013dollars.com/... [in2013dollars.com]
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No, it did not work out well, it worked poorly; as expected.
Also, "transient" meant a much shorter time frame than what we got. We all lived through it. It was horrible.
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You say that like 9% wasn't devastating.
The Anonymous Coward (was that you?)'s statement was that "Economists agreed COVID inflation was... wait for it... 'Transient'." Data shows that the COVID inflation was, in fact, transient. Since Anonymous Coward's point was that economists don't get predictions right, the particular example he picked contradicts his point.
If you want a detail analysis of what went right and what went wrong with predictions by economists in 2022, I am afraid that slashdot is probably the wrong place to find it.
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pollution (Score:3, Interesting)
Perhaps this will lead to more sustainable processes for refining rare earth products. The reason that China is dominating the industry (other than a concerted effort by the government to buy up as many sources of raw materials as they can outside of China) is due to the absolute "dirtyness" of the refining process. It uses a lot of energy and produces noxious waste products that first world countries would rather not have to deal with. China is willing to take the environmental impact hit to corner the market. They know there is significant money to be made and a huge strategic advantage to controlling the supply of refined rare earth metals.
The raw materials are not particularly scarce around the world so a process breakthrough would deflate China's dominance rather quickly.
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The reason that China is dominating the industry (other than a concerted effort by the government to buy up as many sources of raw materials as they can outside of China) is due to the absolute "dirtyness" of the refining process.
That, of course, is nonsense. The reason is greed. American oligarchs who ran companies which use rare earths figured out that it was more profitable to let China produce them with a lot of pollution in China, and ship them here producing more pollution, than to produce them with lower levels of pollution here.
Re:pollution (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:pollution (Score:4, Insightful)
It is easy to put the blame on oligarchs, very soothing. But... we enthusiastically help by buying from the cheapest supplier.
1) We buy what we're offered
2) As they have exported the jobs we've made less money and have less choice about what we buy based on what we can afford
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Oh, gods, another Liber tard ian.
We can only buy what is available for sale, and if the mega-corps which own the country don't want to sell it we can't buy it. Is that simple enough for you to understand?
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that people care about how rare earth are produced, would result in a business case where someone would offer such electronics at a higher price point.
Don't make me tap the sign [wikipedia.org]
It's not about what any individual consumer will care it's the fact that the production of some things carries a diffuse cost that the producer does not pay so society has to pay that cost and thus the market is distorted.
There is a free-market solution to this and that is a tax on the cost borne to society. In this case rare earths should be taxed for their environmental damage thus putting cleaner options in a fair market.
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While the loss of Maduro is a tactical defeat for Russia long term it is a validation of his sphere-of-influence style of geopolitics.
Russia is free to do what it wants to Ukraine because it's in their sphere, same as Venezuela is in the US sphere. Pete Hegseth just today is posting memes about the "Donroe Doctrine" so they're not hiding their intentions.
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That's my stalker troll, it craps out completely unrelated propaganda after anything I post. I rather think it's a bot of some type.
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A lot of that going around these days
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Brother you got the wrong poster, if it were up to me I'd give Ukraine every weapon system and I tell it could handle.
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We buy what we're offered
Nonsense. This shows surprising level of economic illiteracy that should disqualify you from commenting on any economic and economic-adjacent stories. What is being offered and at what price point is determined by the demand outside of very rare cases of inelastic demand (e.g., healthcare, heating, etc.). If consumers on the whole cared about how electronics were produced over the price, then there would be manufacturers producing such 'clean' electronics. That is, market demand exposes BS, where people publicly complain about polluting electronic production but given privacy to shop would buy cheapest electronics from known slave-labor producers without any hesitation.
Start running sweatshop commercials like the drug pimps run TV ads in America, and then see how consumer sentiment changes.
If we can put a disease-riddled black lung on a pack of cigarettes to deter consumers from buying that product, I sure a shit should be able to find the 10-year old sweatshop workers face on a fucking $40 Nike T-shirt sales tag so I KNOW how much I'm overpaying when I don't choose the American made shirt.
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Exactly... the borderline 'slave labor' production in China and that area means cheaper, and that's all anyone cares about now.
If AMD started making CPUs here (in the US... from the photolithography to putting t he metal cap on the die and packaging it) for the same price as the Chinese version, we'd probably buy the American version.
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If AMD started making CPUs here (in the US... from the photolithography to putting t he metal cap on the die and packaging it) for the same price as the Chinese version, we'd probably buy the American version.
In order for them to do that they would have to pay workers here even less than they do now, and then they wouldn't be able to afford to buy the American version.
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Exactly.
Soon, _everything_ will have a poorly-written Chinglish manual, and a surveillance bug hidden in it (for free).
Meanwhile, the US demands higher minimum wage and gets it, so the employers don't wanna pay that many people the increased wage, so they get rid of a couple people and combine three jobs into one, because you can do three peoples worth of work.
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>"Go fuck yourself, Ivan. Fuck yourself today, tomorrow, and every other day, and when you have fucked off, fuck off some more."
How is this productive? Although the poster made a personal attack, which is not good (and I do not condone), this type of response is even worse. You go nuclear and don't even address the issues.
Sinij actually made a valid point- in a free market, consumers *do* decide what products they want and are willing to pay for and companies *do* respond to consumer demand. It isn't
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>"Go fuck yourself, Ivan. Fuck yourself today, tomorrow, and every other day, and when you have fucked off, fuck off some more."
How is this productive? Although the poster made a personal attack, which is not good (and I do not condone), this type of response is even worse. You go nuclear and don't even address the issues.
Sinij actually made a valid point- in a free market, consumers *do* decide what products they want and are willing to pay for and companies *do* respond to consumer demand. It isn't perfect, for sure. Especially when consumers and companies do not have full information. What is the alternative? To have the government decide what is sold and at what prices?
Knowledge is power. So I'll just reiterate what I posted elsewhere on this, as a valid response to Sinij.
Today we can put a nasty picture of a disease-riddled black lung on a pack of cigarettes to deter consumers from buying that product. In fact, those manufacturers are forced to do that.
If the supply chain reveals we should be putting a 10-year old sweatshop workers face on an brand-overpriced $40 T-shirt sales tag so consumers know exactly what they're overpaying for and how it was made, then ask your
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Because 10 year old sweat shop workers are difficult to find.
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No system is perfect, but the free market is the least bad.
Even if you accept that we have a 'free market' (which we really, really don't) the ongoing collapse of the environment which sustains our civilization and our species is evidence to the contrary. Externalities like pollution dumped into the Commons is the Achilles Heel that Libertardians like to pretend doesn't exist.
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Russians now fret that Moscowâ(TM)s weapons stockpiles in Venezuela might not only vanish with unpaid loans but suddenly âoereappearâ in Ukrainian hands.
That would be great, but it won't happen, because Cheeto Benito won't let it.
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Drinkypoo is extremely ignorant of economics and accounting. Personal attacks and profanity are the best responses we'll get.
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JLCPCB has an insanely well optimised process, this is why they are so fast with their manufacturing. And since they are the leader, they operate on such a large scale that they can easily squeeze the small stuff orders between their large orders so they don't waste anything.
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If she bought the necklace 99% complete and just added the clasp she could still slap the 'Made in America' label on it. The car companies ensured that was the case decades ago when they started building in maquilladoras in Mexico and then adding some trim pieces in Detroit or Alabama.
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Increasingly Chinese products are not only cheaper, but more reliable and better designed. I suppose that comes from having the best technical education system in the world and sufficient population to fill those schools.
Options Matter. (Score:2)
It is easy to put the blame on oligarchs, very soothing. But... we enthusiastically help by buying from the cheapest supplier. We are all in it together. It is human nature. Luckily we are the only creatures who can go against our nature. Not an easy process though. Very similar to the effort it takes to lose weight.
I can easily choose whether or not I wish to support a Chinese sweat shop making sweatshirts for seven cents an hour, because I’ve been armed with that choice as a consumer.
Now tell me exactly how I get to choose my rare earth metal supplier. Because last I checked you need a HELL of a lot more than consumer power to even power a delusion of choice here.
Yes. This IS one of those moments when we can blame oligarchs. We the People didn’t choose the cheapest supplier. Greed N. Corruption, CEO d
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So, if you don't buy the 'sweatshop sweatshirt', what sweater do you buy?
Are you buying rare Earth metals in bulk? Or do you mean who made the magnet for the fridge magnet?
And, what change are we going to institute with our elective power (do you mean popular vote or the electoral college?)?
Okay, so you don't buy anything -not- made on US soil (and, you get rid of anything not US-made)... what're you left with?
Even the few things that are built in the US are made of foreign components.
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Why do people continue to misuse the word "oligarch"? People who wield power due to their wealth are plutocrats. Members of a politburo are oligarchs.
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A plutocracy is a type of oligarchy.
Have you ever been right about anything? Because today is not that day.
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Since you've obviously never read Marx, here's his Communist Manifesto. It's not long, you should be able to skim through it fairly quickly.
https://www.gutenberg.org/eboo... [gutenberg.org]
'Das Capital' is considerably longer, but neither as long nor as dreadfully written as 'Wealth of Nations' (which Libertardians also never read).
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What you say is just re-labeling of long discredited Marxists views
What I say is fact which you could corroborate by reading the dictionary.
If you weren't a Russian troll then maybe you would do that.
Fuck off, Russian troll.
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The reason that China is dominating the industry (other than a concerted effort by the government to buy up as many sources of raw materials as they can outside of China) is due to the absolute "dirtyness" of the refining process.
That, of course, is nonsense. The reason is greed. American oligarchs who ran companies which use rare earths figured out that it was more profitable to let China produce them with a lot of pollution in China, and ship them here producing more pollution, than to produce them with lower levels of pollution here.
100% this.
And none of that Vote With Your Wallet shit applies either. At no point in the last 30 years was a Democratic voting booth offering even the illusion of choice when it came to this particular aspect of manufacturing. These actions are decided on by Greed behind closed doors, with citizens ironically paying more in save-the-planet taxes created by MBAs who fly private, all for “choosing” to let China pollute and fill our rare earth orders.
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The "process breakthroughs" have already been developed.
In China.
And in our wonderful 'free trade' system we're not allowed to buy them.
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we're not allowed to buy them.
Buy them? We should have as much respect for China's IP as they do for ours. That is to say: zero.
But of course, it's a game of quid pro quo. We copy their rare earths procesing technology and they threaten to cut off the production of fidget spinners. And then the US faces a future of unpacified autists.
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We should have as much respect for China's IP as they do for their own. That is to say: zero.
FTFY
The Chinese manufacturing sector is essentially an open source project.
https://kdwalmsley.substack.co... [substack.com]
Knowledge spillovers create benefits for firms, besides the companies that make the first discoveries or innovations. That results in market failure, because it is a disincentive for firms to do research and development, since they cannot enjoy all the revenue streams that result. But the deliberate building o
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And the cost of the energy involved (cleaner processes are very energy intensive).
US electricity cost - $0.18/kwh
China electricity cost - >$0.08/kwh
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It does not really make sense to compare "local costs" that way.
Especially if you do not even know if that is home consumer end price or an industrial price.
If you want to compare prices, you have to figure how much one for example can buy from a monthly wage.
Silly example, a good bottle of beer in Germany costs about 1EUR. Minimum wage per hour is ca. 1OEUR. After taxes let's say it is 5.
So for one hour working a simple job, you can buy 5 beers. Or a bit more than one gallon (3l) gasoline. Or 15kWh if elec
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It's a retail consumer cost for both countries. However unlike in the US, Chinese corporate customers don't get the deep discounts over consumers so that's pretty close to their price. Even if Enron gives Alcoa a 50% discount over retail customers (exaggerating, of course) Chinese energy is still considerably cheaper.
https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
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Well, prices in Germany are like:
- 30cents for households (including grid costs)
- 4cents per kWh for the industry, plus grid cost, which can be "whatever" but is usually similar to the pure energy cost, so it is 8cents in total.
- mid range business is in the 8cents range + grid cost of 4cents, in total 12cents
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Cleaner process needs new machinery, maybe buildings or a field to drop the processor, people trained on the new, shiny equipment, additional power run to the new 'factory'.
The "old" machinery may be forty years old, but it's cheap, and can employ local villagers for a bag of rice versus bringing on 20 engineers for $80k a year each.
We invaded Venezuela (Score:2)
Mexico and large parts of South America have those too. Cuba comes to mind. Which is why Trump is talking about invading them next.
Eventually we're going to have our hands in too many pots and with birth rates going down Trump is going to have to institute a draft.
If you're a hardcore Trumper guessing you probably don't care if your kids get drafted to die in wars for oil and lithium.
For everybody else
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and we'll invade Greenland so we can take their rare earth minerals.
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and we'll invade Greenland so we can take their rare earth minerals.
Wait, I thought we wanted Greenland for the Strategic Ice Cube Reserve.
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The Invisibke hand of the market (Score:2)
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Recycling might help (Score:3)
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Are dumps are full of neodymium from old hard drives, and lithium from batteries. You can take the magnets out of an old hard drive by boiling it in water, and using a pair of pliers with a jaw pushing on edge of the magnet, and the other on the edge of steel plate. Industrially, lithium could probably be extracted from old batteries by grinding them and soaking them in water to react the lithium
No doubt. The devil is in the details. I'm sure some bright sparks thought the same thing, ran the numbers, and concluded it's far cheaper to mine new neodymium than to try to recover it from e-waste. I'm pretty sure people are looking at recycling batteries. I'm guessing mining new lithium is actually quite cheap if it's easier to dig up new ore rather than melt down ad purify an existing battery.
That's been the dirty little secret of recycling for 40 years: many things you'd think would be economical to r
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That's been the secret to China's success, sure they have companies which pursue the high-profit industry segments, but they have a plethora of companies which are content with a much lower return like REE and a government which supports their effort. With their galloping advances in robotics and AI it would be surprising if they don't become the world leader in consumer waste recycling very soon.
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That's been the secret to China's success, sure they have companies which pursue the high-profit industry segments, but they have a plethora of companies which are content with a much lower return like REE and a government which supports their effort.
Right. But follow the money: to subsidize low profit industries, they have to be getting money from somewhere, ultimately by taxing their citizens. That's...a model a suppose.
With their galloping advances in robotics and AI it would be surprising if they don't become the world leader in consumer waste recycling very soon.
I'm not sure how B follows A but let's set that aside for now.
China already was the world's recycling destination. We kept sending them bales of unusable trash which found its way into rivers where it eventually wound up in the Pacific garbage patch. I seem to recall they stopped accepting recyclables a few years ago because it really
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I'm not sure how B follows A
Ever seen a consumer recycling operation? It's a miserable, dangerous, low paying job mostly staffed by illegals because rather than pay worker's comp the company can get them deported (much like the meat industry), the sooner it's automated the better. Plastics are particularly problematic for them, because while almost all of them have the "recyclable" symbol on them it's difficult to tell the various types apart so most of them get incinerated.
Robots and AI can sort and separate different types of mate
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What the heck do you mean by "boiling old harddrives in water"?
I just use screwdrivers... they make awesome fridge magnets.
(Tip: if it's a laptop harddrive, be careful with the platter... they're spun glass, and they don't do much break as explode)
Of course, the government SHOULD be running this (Score:2)
If something is of strategic importance but is not economically profitable, that's *exactly* when the federal government should be financially supporting it. But good luck explaining that to the Imbecile-In-Chief.