China is trolling rare-earth miners online and the Pentagon isn't happy The US Department of Defense said it's investigating Chinese disinformation campaigns against rare earth mining and processing companies — including one targeting Lynas Rare Earths, which has a $30 million contract with the Pentagon to build a plant in Texas. Earlier today, Mandiant published research that analyzed a Beijing- …
" This campaign spread content claiming Lynas' planned processing facility in Texas would harm the environment and expose neighbors to radioactive contamination, cancer risks, gene mutation, and deformities in newborns."
Ahh! Just like the Covid vaccine then!
God help us if I need to add /s.
Hmm. I suggest you go and look up some real figures. e.g. in this article: https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2022/06/24/big_tech_post_roe_wade/, I made a comment that received 13 down votes. It also received 70 up votes.
I guess if you cannot attack the comment you have to resort to ad hominem. What is to say that quite a few of the down votes are not from down vote farms? I'm aware that some people are upset by my comments. Sometimes the truth hurts. If you only want to hear or read comments that please you, let me suggest a web site to you: http://localhost.
The recent story about 7Zip includes several posts by you where you were DownVoted 30, 80, or over 130 times. I normally don't see vote counts like that on anything not in a BOFH, Something For The Weekend, or Who Me? comment thread.
I try not to feed the trolls or argue with the pigs, it just keeps the trolls going & amuses the pigs. Please keep posting as is your priveledge, I'm just pointing out that I thought your choice of pseudonym was better served with a slight tweaking to be more, you know, truthful. =-J
Ok, so you actually managed to come up with something where the ups outweighed the downs. Yay! Good for you.
Now, about everything else you've posted.
HINT: "Real figures" means using all of them, not cherry picking the ones you like. Are you a White House analyst in disguise?
"We never interfere in the internal affairs of sovereign countries (unless they have some resources we want and their government won't cave in to our demands), we are a peaceful nation and will never attack anyone (unless we are asked to in the name of democracy/WMDs)".
Ok, I admit you got me there at Spratly Islands
No one is getting super rich by mining rare earths, since they aren't really particularly rare. Sure, the more the mining is concentrated in China the more (temporary) influence they'd be able to exert on supplies, but there would be a lot of better ways to gain leverage over western economies. Plus the more mining that happens in China the more of the pollution resulting from it that happens in China.
You'd think it would be a much better bang for the "economic warfare" buck to try to sabotage efforts to build new fabs in the US, or infrastructure in general...
Or it might be real environmental activists ? Or a CIA campaign to smear China's reputation ? Wouldn't be unheard-of. Thinking of it ... yes, this very much stinks of a CIA campaign, it ticks all of their check-boxes : remember Cambridge Analytics, Julian Assange ... only Snowden got away, funny that, isn't it
Come on, this is far more like a case where the simplest answer is most likely correct: China wants to keep western, if not the whole world's, manufacturers hooked on their product. The simple possibility of restricting access to vital elements gives China leverage over other nations and companies. Don't even need to make actual threats.
Can't have another pusher o China's patch. China would lose its leverage, and Pooh Bear is all about global leverage.
Physical sabotage would be far worse "bang for the buck". One, it'd be a lot more bucks - a simple cyber-trolling operation is dirt cheap, especially when compared with an alternative that requires someone to commit actual crimes and risk jail time. And two, it would be a momentary setback, which at most would increase costs a bit or maybe delay operations for a few months.
By doing it this way, it's not only cheap, it also has a decent chance to create a permanent grassroots opposition movement that will obstruct development for years to come.
I expect with some deep digging a real reporter would find money from China, Russia, and even the Saudi's going into the coffers of American environment groups and supporting some politicians.
Those groups and politicians make it a lot more expensive and difficult to accomplish a lot of things or to even kill them off entirely (See the Keystone XL pipeline)
Quite possibly, but it wouldn't make a bit of difference. Lots of people would say some version of "that's all very interesting, but you haven't actually answered the points raised, have you?"
After all, it worked for Trump. He took both money and support from the Russians, plenty of people pointed it out, and he just shrugged and said "so what?"
The labor cost and environmental cost of rare earth mining in western countries are much higher than those in developing countries. The mining products cannot be competitive in the market at all, and can only be paid by the government, which will further increase the burden on the high fiscal deficit of the United States.
There is currently only one rare earth mine in operation in the United States, and several others are a decade away from production, and the mined rare earths are sent to China for processing. Even with dramatic changes to the rare earth supply chain, the U.S. is at least a decade away from becoming self-sufficient.
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