191–200 of 611 posts
"China is estimated to hold an about 84% share of the global market in neodymium magnets and an over 90% interest in samarium cobalt magnets. Japan, meanwhile, has about 15% of the neodymium magnet market and a less-than-10% share of that for samarium cobalt. If China bans the export of such technologies, it would be difficult for the United States and Europe, which do not traditionally manufacture rare earth magnets…
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the difference between having engineers as government leaders versus lawyers. The West is ran by smooth talking lawyers rather than a general sample of the population or subject matter experts here's a visualization of the change over time, career government employees and lawyers took over and things went downhill in the US at least https://i.imgur.com/xdWVes2.gif
The us tried having an engineer leader, Herbert Hoover. It did not end well.
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> Where are we exactly? Your prediction has not been proven correct. Even as much as things are escalating, war does not appear imminent nor certain. We’re much closer than we were 20 years ago. Nobody believed Russia would actually invade Ukraine; nor that Xi would be foolish enough to scare away Taiwan by muscling in on Hong Kong. Unless the CCP forces Xi out, their hardliners and the middle-kingdom mindset have al…
You are making a bunch of statements that virtually nobody who has paid attention to either scenario would agree with.
Because a quick google search will easily disprove that notion.
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They are rare in the sense that they tend to be extremely diffuse, rather than having nice, massive veins of concentrated ore or elemental metal like you might find for copper or bauxite. Since they tend to be diffuse, mining them requires disrupting significant volumes of earth and rock, plus the chemicals needed to separate them out of the less interesting material that gets dug up. The cheapest way to do that is t…
It's called "liquid-liquid extraction" [1] and requires crushing the rock and mixing it with an extractant (see D2EHPA [2] which is also used in uranium extraction) into a nasty acidic slurry. It is then separated into a aqueous layer containing the waste and a nonpolar solvent that strips the rare earth elements bound up with the extractant. All the different rare earth elements then have to be separated out of the…
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> It's coming sooner or later and the longer you leave your investments in China the more you risk the door slamming shut on your hand. Half the US population is asleep. During my undergrad years, I told my professor—then racing to get a foothold in China—that I thought war with China was inevitable. 15 to 25 years was my projection. He probably thought I was batshit crazy, but here we are. China’s now using shows of…
This has been a popular opinion for a very long time. It even supports a plot point in the movie The Departed (2006): Oliver Queenan : Microprocessors. Billy Costigan : Micro what? Oliver Queenan : Microprocessors. We'll probably be at war with the Chinese in 20-odd years and Costello is selling them military technology. Microprocessors, chips, computer parts. Anybody says anything about anything like that you let us…
I remember the original Black Ops 2 video game campaign literally built on microprocessors all coming from China.
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This is not normal decoupling, we're in a full on economic war. In the short term that's terrible. In the long term, pain now will help minimize pain later when China invade Taiwan and US-China trade drops to zero overnight. It's coming sooner or later and the longer you leave your investments in China the more you risk the door slamming shut on your hand.
What does China actually stand to gain by invading Taiwan? Any kind of real analysis based in anything other than nationalistic fervor or fear mongering seems to indicate that they're better served by the status quo.
Begin with the simple observations that reuinfication is popular with mainland Chinese people and party members and that the official position of the PRC since its inception has been that the PRC and ROC are one country. Taiwan's independence is an affront to the perceived authority of the mainland government. Reunifying China after its fracturing under imperialism is a deep cultural ethos. Material concerns are secondary to this.
I read "Rare Earths" are nor really rare. But the article did say extracting these elements cheaply causes a lot of environmental damage, which as we know, China is perfectly fine with. I also read the US is close to opening a "mining" site for Rear Earths, but not sure where or for what elements.
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I disagree about the Russia Ukraine prediction statements in this discussion. Nobody wanted to admit a "full blown invasion would happen" is better wording. Russia invaded and was meddling with Ukraine back in 2014. It invaded Georgia in an actual war back then over the same act. EU vetoed related action and was preaching that everything is going to be fine because Germany was using all their power to not ruin their…
> Nobody wanted to admit a "full blown invasion would happen" is better wording. That’s still a spectacular failure in its own right. It means we’re not willing to admit the obvious until it becomes a far bigger problem. A weakness of a democratic process without the right leaders.
Because as far as I know, the right people expected something to happen — there is just the issue of “well, what do you do about it?”
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Do you want a real answer to this, or one that self-congratulates us, by playing to our biases and cultural myths, and generally poor understanding of how societies work? The same options that any people have. Soft power. Every government, be it formally representative or not, multi-party or dual-party, or single-party is ultimately only able to govern with the consent of the governed. There are always levers for peo…
There is a lot of bias and emotion to unpack from your comment. It's not like one side is more manipulative than the other in the US, both are equally guilty of this, it's part of politics in a democracy, especially given the hyper-media. The "wokeness" movement went to far and we as a country are now self correcting, not the first time it happened, last time it was called PC for short. And it's not just a "right" si…
Mindshare of the majority is the real battleground, and mindshare is just as relevant in China as it is here, and it's why mindshare is fought over so bitterly across the world.
You ask how politically weak minorities in China can get what they want, I point an answer that, for contrast, provides a litany of ways for how politically weak minorities in the US can't get what they want, and you accuse me of being biased and political. I can only assume that the problems of how minority rights can be asserted in practice in the two systems wasn't actually what we were interested in discussing?
'We have elections' isn't a conversation-terminator. It's a conversation-opener, because it isn't actually the trump card that you think it is.
[1] And in other countries, but usually for other reasons.
[2] And I'm not talking about normal parliamentary checks and balances that allow a minority to hold legislature in stasis. That's to be expected from any political system that requires a more-than-50% consensus in order to deviate from the status quo. [3] I'm talking about a minority actually managing to impose its will, through new legislature, against a majority.
[3] Which is often a desirable requirement.
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Yeah China purposefully undermined the competition through state funding in order to control the market.
I doubt it was that, I think China's lack of environmental rule enforcement led to a condition that allowed for lower cost producers, the state didn't intend on controlling this market (or maybe some combination of that, but refusing to export in the future means they won't control the market anymore).