Critical Minerals: Reducing U.S. import reliance with substitution and recycling
gao.gov
gao.gov
https://www.neowin.net/news/meta-is-reusing-old-ddr4-ram-in-...
And maybe introduce some technological improvements, too. Like portable millsites and leach pads so you don't fuck up the landscape with dead buildings and environmental waste. And maybe look into some chemical process improvements, like using DMSO instead of cyanide for leaching gold.
Oh, and look into using Z-pinching for mining so we don't need explosives, we just need capacitors and metal tubes and drills to make precision tunnels to grab ore and leave more of the land intact.
I would love to see how this process works. Banning them seems to be the most economic and safest solution.
If you took the lithium from every disposable vape imported into the US yearly and instead used the lithium for industrial scale batteries, you’d get like 100. That’s it. Or maybe 5k batteries for EVs. That’s about 0.005% of yearly EV sales.
I can say with a reasonable amount of confidence that going "but china" isn't going to help the US much going forward.
The upcoming Alberta separatist referendum that is funded and boosted by foreign agitators isn't intended to succeed. It's intended to cause a festering wound in Canada to prevent it from growing in strength and independence from America.
As far as I'm concerned America has already lost the next impending major war. They've spent the past 25 years blowing trillions on purposefully unwinnable wars that serve to enrich American oligarchs. This has left the American military structurally weakened and mis-optimized to fight small groups of terrorists instead of fighting an enemy with comparable and perhaps superior ability.
We've also seen the decimation of the manufacturing base in America and with it the economic security that it provided the middle class and with it the power and skill set that comes from being able to design and build thing. Finally, the United States' recent choice to blow half their stockpile of numerous kinds of missiles all all at once while at the same time lacking the supply chain or even the manufacturing base to adequately restock their munitions as the nail in the coffin for the American empire.[2]
So what's going to happen in a world where America can't win a global conflict but is still protected from invasion by thousands of nuclear weapons? America is going to decline into a regional power that attacks its neighbours with impunity. You're already starting to see it and it won't be long until you see articles like this[1] about Alberta.
I don't want it to be this way, but it is.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43487443
[1] https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-hit-with-demand-for-answ...
[2] https://www.csis.org/analysis/last-rounds-status-key-munitio...
Are they cheaper? They are open-weight, so in theory, they are cheaper to run and do with them as you wish.
The problem is that they come from a place with a long and storied history of attacking digital assets in the US and the West in general.
I also feel like the boomers offshoring everything to China in the 70's is one of the reasons things are worse off nowadays, but I digress.
They probably won't move until they have a very decent chance of pulling it off but they are running out of runway to build that force.
Unfortunately I think the actual reason is because they know (despite what they say in public) that climate change is a real and present danger, and the resource and migration wars are coming.
If you look at everything that seems strange through this lens (see for example: Trump talking about how the US needs to take Canada and Greenland) it looks a lot less strange. There's at least some sort of rational throughline, even if its awful and militaristic (and likely only revealed at all to the public at this point because Trump is an age-addled old fool that has a broken public-speaking filter).
Sure, but now all the major powers have society ending devices to deploy when they go to war.
And when you combine that with the fact that the US is currently actively proving it can't impose its will on even Iran despite having a much stronger conventional military, when the next war breaks out between major nuclear powers it is likely to accelerate to the worst possible outcome very quickly.
There is a lot of dramatic stories in the climate change space but when you see the military's and actuaries around the world talking about the conditions of the coming decades in very matter of fact terms, that is why I worry. They are the level heads that are signaling to those in power, now is the time to harden defenses. Both external and internal.
There have been many Climate Risk Assessments by many countries that we only have little pieces of, but due to freedom of information requests and what bits we have are fairly grim.
Here in Australia there was a report that is still not public on this. But the more open politicians that have seen it said they had to change all their future plans and promises based on what the findings were. That we are moving towards a much more unstable and resource limited world.
As it has been termed by many militaries, Climate change is a threat multiplier.
I have said it for a long while now, in future we will welcome immigrants with open arms. Those arms being machine guns, rockets and drones. I really hope I am wrong but I can see many hermit kingdoms rising and they will loot others before they go hungry.
This started to unravel as things got more tense with the increasing militarization of China and centealzatuon of power in Xi as well as well as Putins more aggressive moves.
The Ukraine war kicked the whole structure over and dillusioned a lot of people. The problem is that if suddenly history isn't over and war is a possibility again you need to start preparing for it. If you choose not to play the great game you don't avoid it, you just get crushed, and so as a matter of national survival and security you need to start preparing to meet near peer adversaries, but they see you preparing and they up their defensive preperations and military spending because you did and if they don't they might be crushed, and you see this and have to up your spending, and suddenly a massive amount of wealth is going to preparing for conflict.
The whole situation is almost identical to how things were on the eve of the 20th century, with radical advances in technology overturning decades of military theory and strategy, everyone is tense with alliances constantly shifting and real politick dominating everything because the alternative is the fate of the Belgians who had their country shorn from them and their people massacred by Imperial German forces. At the same time we see growing social unrest within nations (stoked by foreign actors trying to disrupt social cohesion of their potential enemies) and everyone posturing with more and more bluster because to be precieved as weak is to invite death as no one wants to make friends with a weak link.
The one important lesson to be taken however is that WW1 didn't have to happen the Great War could've been prevented, a major part of the conflict was the certainty that there was going to be a war. If we can choose to instead try and be peacemakers and bring the overall temprature of discourse down we can avoid another human catastrophe.
Also, technological changes in our times are slow compared to the end of 19th century. Nukes are 60 year old tech and cheap drones are not particularly sci-fi tech machines.
As a wise man once said, we didn't start the fire. It was always burning since the world's been turning.
It has been accompanied by a large spike in military spending globally. The backlog of foreign military sales of US weapons just waiting for approval is ~$1T.
Do you have more information about this, or a source?
> Germany's defence minister is frank and plain-spoken, but also deliberate with his words and intention. When he talks about Russia, the future of the West and the possibility of another European war, the message however becomes stark: "Our experts say it can happen in 2029."
> In remarks published Wednesday, Generalleutnant Christian Freuding, the inspector of the German Army, said the 2029 date was not a figure pulled out of thin air by his government's national security establishment, but an actual consensus view among Western allies.
https://www.politico.eu/article/nato-mark-rutte-says-europe-...
> NATO Chief Mark Rutte urged member countries to do more to prepare for the possibility of large-scale war, warning that Russia may be ready to attack the alliance within five years.
Russia can't even take the country next door. How exactly are they going to attack NATO? With a bunch of rusty nukes that almost certainly no longer work, and that would get their (relatively few) major population centers vaporized by nukes that almost certainly work just fine?
If you're a Russian officer in charge of nuclear stockpile maintenance, why in the world wouldn't you pencil-whip the paperwork and steal the funding? If you're ever caught, it will be under circumstances where nobody will be in a position to do anything about it.
Also corruption is somewhat accepted in some countries as it allows those at the top to have legitimate means of disposing of traitors when needed without that hassle of drumming up fake charges.
Neither could the Weimar Republic.
> With a bunch of rusty nukes that almost certainly no longer work, and that would get their (relatively few) major population centers vaporized by nukes that almost certainly work just fine?
Even 1% of Russia's arsenal being functional would be a problem, and I can imagine someone taking a gamble on "will Germany/France/England want to take a nuke to the face over the Baltics?"
With what, sharpened sticks? Russia will soon only be left with rattling its nuclear saber as its once mighty military is left in ruins.
Deniable, asymmetrical attacks?
Look what Ukraine did to Russia's air bases with a couple truckloads of drones.
https://www.rand.org/topics/taiwan.html
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/content-series/atlantic-coun...
The major alignment is almost always assumed to be something like Russia/China vs Europe/US/Japan.
You can find circumstantial evidence for this in the change in military posture of many countries and rapid scaling of production capacity. Some random examples:
French General states that they are preparing for open war in "3-4 years" in 2025:
https://www.politico.eu/article/french-top-general-expects-s...
Sweden increases defense spending by 40% starting in 2021:
https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2020/12/15/sweden-...
Nowadays it is seen as having the world largest moat.
When things like global conflict starts, it does impact us but it is more the flow on effects rather than direct impacts.
The last few minutes of this 2025 recap by 'Ordinary Things' did the best job or summarizing how the world is getting ready for war.
https://youtu.be/ZEobLPh82-w?si=hrUaw-vTx4mWU6T6&t=6627
I hope we avoid this but I fear we will not.
If things go down in the Pacific no one will be safe.
Every USA president since the fall of the Berlin Wall has implored NATO members take control of their own defense. The US has long since abandoned the two theater war doctrine. The US is not going to fight Russia. Doing so would just be taking the bait to split their forces when China simultaneously decides to mobilize in the South China Sea. All of USA military planning has been in preparation for that theater.
Trump's belligerence has accomplished the US foreign policy goals of every administration for the last 40 years.
If you're saying that it seems to you that the tactical goal was accomplished at the expense of the broader historical strategy, I would respond that yes, it does seem that way.
Whether the admin would have done anything to Iran without being asked by Israel is a big open question for me here.
Testosterone injections won't help there.
I am not supportive of war with Iran by a long shot but to see the US military and be like “oh it’s strained” is just not talking from a place of knowing. The politics is straining the military and rightly so, but capability wise it’s as good as ever
Then the Gulf oil infrastructure would be gone in retaliation and the impacts to the global economy would be severe. Trump's popularity and legacy would be utterly destroyed.
There's no point talking about USA's theoretical capabilities to end a war quickly if they can't use those capabilities to end a war quickly. Yes, the USA is holding back on invasion, carpet bombing, total war and nukes. It doesn't matter to the Chinese assessment for the capability of sustained high intensity US military operations.
They’re different leagues, and in a gloves off war being on the receiving end of the US military would be devastating.
I think if China makes a move it’s because they perceive US political will to defend Taiwan to be weak enough that there won’t be a real protracted fight or escalation.
Which I half wonder if that is why they aren’t more defensive about Iran. Bleed out the political will of the US populace on a war and it’s unlikely we’ll want to support another one anytime soon.
spoiler alert: the cozy days of the colonial west are over. it will all be over soon, and one can hope but i don't guarantee surviving will be necessarily a lucky draw.
btw, this would explain fermi's paradox pretty well.
So.. back to how things were done in the old days.