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America has a tungsten problem

noleary.com

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Re: America has a tungsten problem

#121

Post by queenkjuul »

PKop wrote: post #79
h4kunamata wrote: post #42

Tungsten is the least of their problem. When a population cannot afford health care system, and have to walk with their passport so they are not sent to jail, you have a broken country. Not to mention the financial problems. Tungsten won't matter when there is no country.

> walk with their passport so they are not sent to jail No, it's broken because we've allowed millions of foreigners to come in and raise said healthcare and housing costs. Checking that people here actually belong here else they're deported is part of the "cost of living" solution, in addition to crime.

Get a load a this guy, he thinks immigrants invented private health insurance

Re: America has a tungsten problem

#122

Post by queenkjuul »

bell-cot wrote: post #10

Between the critical strategic/military need, the by-far largest producer being an unfriendly rival power, and commercial production looking like a very poor fit for the use case - the Old School solution would be for the gov't to own & probably operate the needed mines, refining facilities, and stockpiles. But between our low-functioning gov't and our lower-functioning Capitalist-Ideological Complex, I'd be surprise…

Don't worry, it wasn't

Re: America has a tungsten problem

#123

Post by refulgentis »

hunterpayne wrote: post #59
dotancohen wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how do you efficiently harness 1,000,000C heat? The traditional answer to that question is vacuum and magnetic confinement (usual toroidal). Whether that will turn out to be the practical answer is yet to be seen.

I said efficiently, you would be lucky to get 1% efficiency there. Vacuums don't conduct heat very well do they.

Okay, now I'm thinking you're trolling :) (if not: how warm is it where you are, i.e. how much above 0 kelvin? How?)

Re: America has a tungsten problem

#124

Post by Saline9515 »

queenkjuul wrote: post #112
Saline9515 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is plainly false. China bought the refining companies doing the extraction for rare earth in the US, extracted knowledge, then shipped the tooling to China and closed the US factories. Having no environmental regulation probably helped as well cost-wise, but that's not the fault of the USA. https://www.counterpunch.org/2006/04/07/the-saga-of-magneque...

That article doesn't say anything about selling a mine, it says the only mine was already in China. China bought an American magnet manufacturer which had been using Chinese neodymium to make magnets. It doesn't say anything at all about extraction. Also, nobody forced US companies to sell those assets.

The article explicitly says that the magnet manufacturer was bought by a shell company owned by chinese interests, which lied when they pledged to develop the activity.

Not that it's very surprising (US companies routinely do this as well, especially in Europe), but in this case it had clearly an ulterior motive.

Re: America has a tungsten problem

#125

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

a2tech wrote: post #15

This website has no author attribution and this is the only article on it. I would be very suspicious of its claims (not that I disagree with them, just that unattributed works on brand new websites are not ALWAYS the most trustworthy). The United States has exported the dirtiest businesses internationally for quite a few years (raw mineral extraction is a dirty, nasty business, with slim margins). Now that China has…

Probably just Big W trying to run the markets.

Same as it ever was.

Re: America has a tungsten problem

#126

Post by PKop »

skulk wrote: post #90
PKop wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> walk with their passport so they are not sent to jail No, it's broken because we've allowed millions of foreigners to come in and raise said healthcare and housing costs. Checking that people here actually belong here else they're deported is part of the "cost of living" solution, in addition to crime.

> No, it's broken because we've allowed millions of foreigners to come in and raise said healthcare and housing costs. The idea that deporting every undocumented person will reduce the bloat and profit extraction in our health care system is making me giggle. And do you really think checking every person is a strategy that scales? Why not just indiscriminately jail the people who hire them and thereby create a strong…

>Why not just indiscriminately jail the people who hire them and thereby create a strong incentive to come?

We definitely should do this, yes.

Re: America has a tungsten problem

#127

Post by djoldman »

noleary wrote: post #18
a2tech wrote: post #15

This website has no author attribution and this is the only article on it. I would be very suspicious of its claims (not that I disagree with them, just that unattributed works on brand new websites are not ALWAYS the most trustworthy). The United States has exported the dirtiest businesses internationally for quite a few years (raw mineral extraction is a dirty, nasty business, with slim margins). Now that China has…

Hey, I wrote the article. This is my personal website that I wrote mostly over the weekend. I went down a rabbit hole reading about metals and mining and just thought it was interesting. Not an expert or a nefarious actor, unfortunately.

I'm not sure about some of the numbers. PCD is pretty dominant in gas and oil drilling.

Re: America has a tungsten problem

#128

Post by wolvoleo »

JSR_FDED wrote: post #111
wolvoleo wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With respect to avoidance of “dirty” jobs. The EU is far , far worse in this respect than the United States is or was. Well yeah. Because we care about the environment and people like to enjoy their retirement instead of sitting in a wheelchair with COPD due to inhaling a lifetime of toxic dust. China is getting better at it too, but only a few years ago I remember a story of all the toxic lakes where all the bypro…

Sorry but while that was once true, the current administration has reversed that pretty dramatically. You personally might care about the environment, but when you use “we” in the context of US/China it no longer holds true.

No I mean "we" as in the EU, definitely not the US. The US is sliding back fast, being the only country to pull out of the paris accord (which itself was only the bare minimum needed to halt climate change)

Re: America has a tungsten problem

#129

Post by buckle8017 »

Saline9515 wrote: post #105
buckle8017 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you talking about its trivial to avoid purchasing product's produced in environmentally unfriendly ways. All products from China are manufactured with electricity that is largely coal. You just mean it's not economical.

Are you trying to say that it's trivial to avoid buying Chinese manufactured products? Where is the keyboard you are typing on made, by the way?

Sure it's trivial, but it's inconvenient and expensive.

I don't do it because I accept that my keyboard was made with coal.

But I would prefer my keyboard was made in America burning American coal.

Re: America has a tungsten problem

#130

Post by mschuster91 »

terminalshort wrote: post #58
Night_Thastus wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a frequent pattern of: 1: "We need to be more self-sufficient with minerals!" 2: "Let's try to kick-start more of our own industry digging it up!" 3: "Wow, that's expensive and can't compete with international prices." 4: "Better shut it down!" 5: Goto 1 Without ever getting that the point was never to be as profitable as overseas sources. Or getting the point and ignoring it.

The worst part is that most of number 3 is self imposed by the ridiculous amount of environmental review and litigation delays surrounding that process. Sure, cost of labor is some of it, but really it's not very much in comparison.

> The worst part is that most of number 3 is self imposed by the ridiculous amount of environmental review and litigation delays surrounding that process.

Because, surprise, we do not want more Superfund sites. Like, the Silicon Valley is the US' biggest cluster of Superfund sites by far.

At the same time, it is very convenient that there are lots of piss poor countries that have very difficult/dirty to mine resources... be it China, Congo or whatever. These countries didn't have the luxury to think decades into the future, and capitalism doesn't have built-in ethics, and this is how we ended up here.

The EU tried to introduce supply chain laws aiming at cutting back at this kind of exploitation, but the pressure from industry was immense.

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