China bans export of rare earth processing kit China has added a host of technologies related to rare earth production to its list of restricted exports. An updated list published on Thursday by China's Ministry of Commerce mentions rare earths 17 times. Chinese state media reports the update includes items Beijing feels should not be freely exported in order to safeguard …
Clearly Biden and co did not think this through very well.
To the likes of us it was bleeding obvious what China would do and the consequences that the West would suffer.
And all of this to protect us against unproven spying from Huawei equipment.
I guess this is China 1, the rest of the world 0.
What, you think the US doesn't have this technology? The rare earths industry was originally mostly US based, the mines closed because China mined more cheaply due to cheaper labor and far more lax environmental rules (rare earths mining is notoriously polluting)
Some of those mines are reopening in the US to avoid China having strategic control over them. There are reserves all over the place, the problem with rare earths is not they are rare. They are not. The problem is that they aren't concentrated - they don't precipitate together like heavy metals such as gold, silver, uranium, etc. do so you have to move a lot of cubic yards of earth to find a very small amount of rare earths. The successful mining areas are those with a slightly higher concentration than everywhere else in the world.
Few years back, China got miffed at a certain nation occupying a continent south of it due to its government vocally drawing attention to certain human rights abuses. China therefore stopped importing coal, wine, lobsters, barley and certain other commodities from that country, in breach of a FTA and WTO rules, in an attempt to blackmail it into toeing the party line.
Sovereignty being what it was, the appropriate response was "get stuffed". New markets were found for the exports, leaving low quality high priced replacements (if at all) for Chinese consumers and industries.
Seeing that their blackmail was ineffectual, and wanting nice beer, wine and lobsters on the table and high quality steel from their factories, the Chinese now want cheap imports to resume. Only problem is, the new markets that were opened up in response to their illegal political protectionism mean that the global market price for said commodities is now higher than it used to be.
They might be just as vulnerable to digging themselves a big hole on the export side of their economy too. Time will tell.
What, you think the US doesn't have this technology? The rare earths industry was originally mostly US based, the mines closed because China mined more cheaply due to cheaper labor and far more lax environmental rules (rare earths mining is notoriously polluting)
Yep. Although it might be debateable if China's rules are too lax, or US rules are too stringent. Well, China's often being too lax isn't really debateable. But it's suited us because out of site, out of mind. But this place is a good example-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Pass_mine
Built to mine europium for making colour TVs, technology and environmental regs moved on, mine shut down. But still has tons of 'rare' earths sitting in it's waste piles because at the time, there wasn't much of a market for those elements. Now there is, but the problem of paperwork still remains. And that's just one site, and there's a lot of spoil heaps around abandoned mines in the US that could be processed for 'rare' earths. And there may also be another problem brewing if Russia bans nuclear fuel exports to the US, especially as there's a growing recognition that nuclear is needed to meet energy needs, clean or otherwise. US also has uranium, but would need to re-open those mines and processing & enrichment facilities.
And there may also be another problem brewing if Russia bans nuclear fuel exports to the US, especially as there's a growing recognition that nuclear is needed to meet energy needs, clean or otherwise. US also has uranium, but would need to re-open those mines and processing & enrichment facilities.
That's not a problem for several reasons.
Firstly, Russia supplies 5% of the worlds [unenriched] Uranium. Kazakhstan supplies something like 43% of [unenriched] uranium and their diplomatic slaps in the face to Putin suggest that they aren't really onboard with him.
Secondly, for the pittance that we actually require the supplies from Australia and Canada are sufficient. Unless we ramp up nuclear plans significantly, but given the building time there would be plenty of time to get on with producing the enrichment. Urenco (headquarted in the UK with facilities in Europe and the US) already supplies just shy of a third of the nuclear fuel used in the world. Britain maintains strategic stockpiles of Uranium, Plutonium and any other waste product from a reactor that might conceivably have future value as fuel, or for the UK's nuclear weapons programme on the basis that storing it is cheap, but mining it takes ages and is expensive.
Ergo if Russia did shut themselves out of the market then it's not going to do any more than cause them more economic problems with industries losing customers.
Firstly, Russia supplies 5% of the worlds [unenriched] Uranium. Kazakhstan supplies something like 43% of [unenriched] uranium and their diplomatic slaps in the face to Putin suggest that they aren't really onboard with him.
Sure, but that may be part of the reason we're busy doing the regime change thing in Kazakhstan. But Rosatom/Tenex did snap up a lot of uranium mining and production assets, including the dubious deal that Cliinton approved after getting a big cash bung from Canada's Uranium-1. Sure, Kazakhstan mines a lot of uranium, but relies on Russia to process it, eg the sale of it's enrichment facilities to Russia.
So I think it's less about who can supply uranium than who can supply LEU. Tenex supplies a bunch of US nuclear plants already, and I guess long-term, it's who will be able to supply all the reactors that are in the pipeline.. But most of those are Russian and for countries that aren't exactly fully on board with the sanctions regime anyway.
their diplomatic slaps in the face to Putin suggest that they aren't really onboard with him
You mean like Ukraine? Another good reason the west should keep funding Ukraine's defense against Putin's invasion. Kazakhstan might be where he turns his attention to next if we decide "oh this is taking too long and costing too much" and he's able to turn Ukraine into a vassal state like Belarus. Then he'd grab every able bodied man left in Ukraine and his POW camps to pour into Kazakhstan and force them to fight for him or die to start the whole process over again.
Or more likely, on the basis that disposing of it properly is darn nigh impossible.
Nope. Disposing if it could be relatively straightforward, albeit depending on disposal method. The hardest part is dealing with all the inevitable objections as a consquence of decades of neo-Luddite anti-nuclear FUD. See for example-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhHHbgIy9jU
Kyle Hill's got a bunch of great videos trying to bust many of the nuclear myths, but he's fighting an uphill battle to go against the propaganda that comes from the likes of Greenpeas, Fiends of the Earth etc etc.
Kyle Hills makes money from a pro-nuke channel. That's his business model: getting some "views", some "subscribe" and "monetizing" his channel. He's market are members of the nuke-cult attempting to justify their religion rationally. In 2023, Nuclear energy is nothing but a waste of time and resources.
Talking about it rationally is definitely a good thing.
But operating processes and long-term storage are two different things. In the video, Kyle and the plant representative both only talked about the safe storage of the waste for the period of the operator's licence - presumably a few decades. There was no mention that it's going to have to be stored for millenia after that, long after the current operator is gone. Those are some very large cans to kick down the road.
In particular, it would be good to be transparent about how much those containers hold of long-lived fission products, and how the long term storage is going to be handled and paid for.
"In particular, it would be good to be transparent about how much those containers hold of long-lived fission products, and how the long term storage is going to be handled and paid for."
The longest lived fission products are typically the least concern. It can be argued that everything is radioactive since protons decay, but the decay is so slow that it makes no odds. Some radioactive products are dangerous due to their chemistry. The human body sees Strontium the same way it sees Calcium so radioactive Strontium is a big health risk. Humans have no tolerance for Plutonium since it doesn't occur naturally. The metal is toxic so you'll die from the chemistry more readily than the radioactivity.
at 450 years the used nuclear fuel is slightly more radioactive than background and slightly LESS radioactive than the original fuel
Plutonium is an alpha emitter and could be safely stored in a paper bag. The hairy-scary *dangerous* radionucleides break down to safe products very quickly
Do you know that TMI was dismantled and the reactor + hot bits trucked off to a safe location less than a decade after its meltdown don't you?
There was no mention that it's going to have to be stored for millenia after that, long after the current operator is gone. Those are some very large cans to kick down the road.
Not really, but the anti-nuclear brigade makes mountains out of molehills. Long term storage has been a solved problem for a long time. With some exceptions, mostly involving whataboutery. So one of the more bizarre is signposting. So study groups look at far future scenarios where in an millenia, our descendents stumble across an ancient structure. They may decide it's an ancient site of worship to cthonic deities because we've buried valuable treasures as offerings to our $deities. Or it may be a future pharoh's curse. But they come up with elaborate schemes to place warnings that may be understandable to a future us. A simpler solution would be to just replace the signs whenever our language drifts enough to make our current language obsolete.
I think a picture of a skull and crossbones will mean the same thing in 100000 years as it does now, if any of our kind are left to be curious about it.
If they're another species, they're from far enough away in time and/or space for it not to matter - either the danger will have decayed, or they're clever enough to work it out for themselves.
"There was no mention that it's going to have to be stored for millenia after that, long after the current operator is gone. Those are some very large cans to kick down the road."
In the US, the government takes responsibility for the waste, not the operator. It was set up that way for the sort of problems that could crop up if the operator goes out of business.
The raw nuclear waste from a 1GW nuclear power station accumulated over its 60 year working lifespan is "about an olympic pool in volume"
It's possible to produce far LESS waste than that. Alvin Weinberg's uranium "tea kettle" boiler design that's the basis of all water-moderated designs(*) was proof of concept made from weaponsmaking waste(**) products and with no optimisation to reduce waste production
Weinberg went on to make a less wasteful (and much safer) design that was more suitable for industrial/power use but the project was shut down by US military (signed off by Nixon in 1972) because their abliity to use thorium in addition to uranium(***) posed an existential threat to the "dual use" treaty exemptions of uranium processing plants
(*) Nautilus and Shippingport were themselves derived from the ww2 X10 plutonium breeder reactor that was part of the Manhattan Project
(**) Enriched uranium was an UNWANTED waste product of making plutonium bombs. The militarily valuable stuff is the depleted uranium (U235) as this is the feedstock for making Pu239 and having U235 present makes unstable isotopes that degrade the effectiveness of nuclear weapons (counterintuitively, nuclear weapons are BARELY radioactive, which is why truckloads of bananas regularly trip radiation detectors intended to spot smuggled ones in ports - extra radioactivity makes them more likely to not go off, or go off prematurely)
(***) Solid fuelled reactors can use thorium but it ends up costing more and producing more waste than using uranium despite the $150/kg vs $50,000/kg fuel cost difference. Irradiated thorium is not something you want to stand near and the extra handling precautions drive up costs substantially
"Weinberg went on to make a less wasteful (and much safer) design that was more suitable for industrial/power use but the project was shut down by US military (signed off by Nixon in 1972) because their abliity to use thorium in addition to uranium(***) posed an existential threat to the "dual use" treaty exemptions of uranium processing plants"
And... The Chinese have that research and are working to extend the project to the point where it's commercially viable. There's no supply issue for bomb making materials so MSR's such as LFTR not producing more than trace amounts isn't an issue. Nixon wasn't clever enough to spot that and realize that the country having access to abundant cheap energy was only going to be a good thing.
It’s simple market price. Gold, which has relatively little practical use (jewellery [~50%], bullion, dentistry, plating, etc.,) can be mined and refined at sub-ppm levels (<g/tonne). Gold is ~$66/g - The cost of getting it is typically less than half of this price. I was told that one of the drivers of its price is the confidence of men in the Middle East and Asia who "put it on their wives to show how wealthy they are". In times of uncertainty it is a useful currency, so prices can go up in both good and bad times.
In contrast neodymium is quite abundant (~$0.12/g), and is mined in China, United States, Brazil, India, Sri Lanka, and Australia - As noted, its extraction can be relatively polluting. Current demand is roughly 10 times the production of gold. China is expected to become a net importer shortly, with countries like Australia being major exporters. It is unlikely that the world will "run out", as it is relatively easy to recycle.
It depends what we want.
To produce a high-performance EV and drive like a total dickhead, you need Neodymium permanent magnets.
To produce a more moderate EV which drives like an old volvo, an iron-cored reluctance motor is enough. But it is slightly less efficient, and an obsession with efficiency like the one we see in so-called white goods can also drive up the use of rare earth magnets.
It's actually the Chinese export ban on Graphite that worries me more
> Neodymium permanent magnets
... are just based on a certain crystalline structure. Which can also be achieved with nitrogen.
I think you'll find various places in Africa where rare earths are even cheaper than China, you don't even need money in some of these places, just guns and the will to keep a local civil war going until you've extracted everything...humans are incredibly cheap in Africa and there is the added bonus that they haven't got a clue what to do with it once it's dug up...mind you, China has been slowly buying up various African countries...as has Russia...over the past decade or so...what do you think Wagner is doing out in Africa? Freeing oppressed people? Fighting for freedom and democracy? Looking out for the little guy? Fuck no, they're protecting mines.
They probably do, but they don't have the means to manufacture it at any kind of reasonable scale...also tech made in the US is usually crap these days...there just isn't the scale to make it cheap enough to iterate and improve on it in a reasonable time scale.
I personally can't remember the last time I owned a piece of tech made in the US or even a piece of tech made in the USA that I wanted.
Even stuff like soldering irons (which you can get that are made in the US) are shit.
I had a US made soldering iron for years, that I thought was pretty good...then I bought a cheap Yihua soldering iron, the kind that China not only sells, but uses in many, many of their factories for producing stuff at massive scale and the difference is night and day. My Yihua is built like a tank and the power it outputs feels like it's enough to weld two battleships together...and it cost nearly 10x less than an equivalent spec US made soldering iron...which can barely join two wires together without shitting the bed.
It is trendy to knock China, and they do produce a huge amount of garbage...but in amongst all of that crap you can find some seriously good stuff....you can't say the same for the US...it just produces overpriced crap. Even if labour is cheaper in the US, their products don't need to be priced anywhere near as high as they are...it's still mostly made by machines in automated factories.
There is no way you can convince me that buying this:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Weller-Professional-1010-T0053298399-Temperature/dp/B07CHZ132F
Is somehow better than this:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/YIHUA-939D-III-EVO-Desoldering/dp/B0BTY3NHZS/
The Weller is twice the price and half the spec...so I'd put that at 4x worse value than the Yihua...it gets better though, check out the price of the Weller with an extra tip a spool of solder and some snips. Extra £75!
There is no way on earth, even if Joe Biden himself fabricated the parts, using materials sourced from an asteroid from the kuiper belt, that a tip, some solder and a pair of snips is worth £75.
I've looked at teardowns for both of those irons. Internally, there is very little difference. If anything the Chinese iron I own is easier to repair because they don't waste money on coating the boards in resin or using exotic parts, sealing the units shut with a plastic weld etc etc..
I've also watched videos of soldering irons being manufactured (mostly to try and repair other soldering irons) and once the parts come off the automated factory floor, the assembly and QA takes minutes. It's not a labour intensive product...it's not like there are lines and lines of people slaving away for hours to make a few irons a day each.
Is China a dumpster fire of human rights? Yes.
Do they take advantage of cheap labour? Yes.
Is it worth paying 4x as much for an inferior product from the US in light of this? No. Unfortunately...it seems someone, somewhere has to get fucked for a product to exist.
There is a four way decision that has to be made most of the time.
1) Buy from China, get a reasonable product at a reasonable price, someone else gets fucked.
2) Buy from the US, get a shit product at a crap price, you get fucked.
3) Please let there be a German version that is awesome...I'll buy that if it exists. (this is usually my preferred choice, Germans, we Brits don't always see eye to eye with you guys, and every couple of centuries you do get a bit out of hand...but you're alright).
4) Don't buy it.
If US companies and the US government just stopped trying to fuck people for a minute, China might not even be a problem.
I would gladly pay a little more for a superior product as part of a deal where nobody gets fucked. I get what I pay for and the people that made it get paid fairly. That would be ideal...but the anti-consumer practices of the West coupled with the rampant human rights violations of the East creates no situation where this can happen.
The old US mantra of "stack it high, sell it cheap" has been usurped by China and has been replaced with "Seal it up, fuck em hard".
I'm not sure there ever was a generation that genuinely and generally hated the Germans. My grandad, a man that waded through Nazis like B J Blazkowicz during the war (mostly melee, he was responsible for taking messages behind enemy lines, unarmed, didn't speak any German or French, on his motorbike and occasionally had to punch his way out of situations, yeah he was a bit of loon, he had several bullet holes in him), quite liked the Germans and was always quick to point out that he had no problem with them...he just hated Nazis, especially the ones that knocked him off his bike and slowed him down.
The OG Nazi's were prescient in one aspect of their plan, that the "final solution" would be permanent, like every other genocide, but any significant reprecusions for the future generations of the rest of the nation would be temporary (also the usual results of genocides). Many saw it as a personal sacrifice for their descendants.
What, you think the US doesn't have this technology?
Why yes, I think exactly that. Why would the Chinese bother to ban export of the technology otherwise?
BTW, if you read the Wikipedia article on the Mountain Pass mine, you'll find that the rare earth oxide concentration there is around 7% which is actually quite a bit higher than the typical commercial ore concentrations of minerals like Copper, Silver, or Gold. I suspect, but don't know for sure that the technology in question might have to do not with extraction, but with separating the various rare earth elements from each other. My hazy recollection is that the chemistry o the 17 elements is virtually identical -- which makes separating them from each other and purifying them quite difficult. I should think that someone else around here would know a lot more about this than I do.
"(rare earths mining is notoriously polluting)"
The mining is exactly the same as for any other raw material. The processing is another matter. With RareEarths, the classification of Thorium in the US as a radioactive hazardous waste makes it uneconomic to mine any of the RareEarths. In China, the government is accepting surplus Thorium and storing it in anticipation of the using it in Molten Salt Reactors as they are working very hard on completing the LFTR design started in the US many years ago.
The Rare Earths are not rare as the name suggests. They are everywhere and if the only country that is interested in mining them economically is China, they're going to have a lock. China is also well known in the manufacturing world for going up the chain. They'll sell raw material for a while, they'll then sell refined material, they'll then sell components and finally finished goods while at the same time taking the previous step off of the market. Solar panels is a good example. In the case of magnets, they used the age old tradition of buying up foreign competitors, shutting them down and shipping the capital equipment to China so it couldn't be resurrected by a new company. The barrier to entry for a new firm can be far too high in some of these cases as large presses are very expensive. Another tactic is to file patents while at the same time not respecting other's patents. China is such a large market, that if domestic companies can infringe patents of foreign companies with impunity, they get a big boost. When the patent expires, they have a mature industry ready for export.
It's less about environmental rules and more about thorium. China's been stockpiling it for the last two decades in anticipation of the SINAP TMSR projects being viable
Without thoirium's disposal costs, rare earth mines are economically viable. IN a market for thorium, rare earths become side gigs and thorium the primary product - without even changing the current price of $140/ton
Source: When a Huawei Bid turned into a Hunt for a Corporate Mole
>>> "The US indictment accuses Huawei of explicitly incentivizing theft. “Employees were directed to post confidential information obtained from other companies on an internal Huawei website, or, in the case of especially sensitive information, to send an encrypted email to a special huawei.com email mailbox,” the indictment states. “A ‘competition management group’ was tasked with reviewing the submissions and awarding monthly bonuses to the employees who provided the most valuable stolen information. Biannual awards were made available to the top ‘Huawei Regional Divisions’ that provided the most valuable information.”
>>> "Huawei has also consistently faced accusations that its equipment is used for spying. The company vehemently denies this, but there’s countervailing evidence. In 2012, as Bloomberg News reported, Australian officials informed their American counterparts of a sophisticated intrusion involving Huawei’s gear. Hackers from China’s spy services were copying large volumes of data from Australia’s telecommunications systems and sending it to China, according to the Australians. The incident was considered especially damning because the code used in the hack was delivered through Huawei software updates, suggesting that either the company had approved the operation or its technical staff had been infiltrated by intelligence operatives. "
If there was any actual evidence that Huawei had done any of the things they are accused of, it would be splashed across every front page on the planet. A decade ago, Snowden proved that US TLA's subverted US companies to do exactly the things Huawei is accused of, and by all appearances, it is still ongoing.
Documents link Huawei to China’s surveillance programs
Excerpt:
> "A review by The Washington Post of more than 100 Huawei PowerPoint presentations, many marked “confidential,” suggests that the company has had a broader role in tracking China’s populace than it has acknowledged. These marketing presentations, posted to a public-facing Huawei website before the company removed them late last year, show Huawei pitching how its technologies can help government authorities identify individuals by voice, monitor political individuals of interest, manage ideological reeducation and labor schedules for prisoners, and help retailers track shoppers using facial recognition."
Whataboutins = admission of guilt. LOL. I thought we were dealing with Huawei. You seem to implicitly agree it's a rogue company, Wumao?
Also, Google and others do it to increase revenue. Huawei does it on behalf of the CCP. To control the people, and track down dissidents. All in name of communism and brotherly equality!!! LMAO.
"And reading to sell them to any data broker for a few bucks?
So that the US authorities can get hold of it without any warrant?"
It's not just "a few bucks". Companies such as Google and Facebook make most of their revenue selling PII with advertising in second place.
A warrant is required to compel evidence usually through sending in a large armed group of fumblers. Any information that is sold on the open market doesn't require a warrant and companies that are perfectly happy to hand over data just for the asking obviates the need for a warrant.
But all of that is someone buying Huawei technology and using it in ways that you (quite reasonably) don't like. All technology companies compete for big government contracts, especially in their native country. Cisco is keen to sell to the US government. Huawei is keen to sell to the Chinese government. Again, it's quite reasonable to object to what the Chinese government does with the purchased kit, the same way that lots of US technology companies faced protests about their sales to US CBP a few years ago, when Border Patrol was treating migrants badly.
But that's different from the reason Huawei were banned from western infrastructure. Which was that Huawei has some kind of back door allowing Chinese spies access to your data, even if (as the owner of the Huawei kit) you don't want that.
I am aware of evidence (from Snowdon) that the US was intercepting Cisco kit before delivery and adding malware to enable spying. I'm not aware of evidence that Cisco were complicit in that.
I am aware of a UK law that requires UK suppliers to co-operate with the UK spies to do that sort of thing.
I am not aware of evidence that Huawei has been complicit in inserting back doors, vulnerabilities or malware to enable Chinese spying.
But they're probably all as bad as each other. Every country spies. China, America/5Eyes, Russia.
It's not always about what has happened, sometimes it's about what *could* happen.
Thanks to the US and it's various businesses having a certain model when it comes to things like firmware updates, operating system restrictions and so forth...it became the norm to accept that software updates had to come from a server somewhere, automatically, that are controlled by the manufacturer...this gives businesses the power to push whatever they like to the hardware you own, transparently...therefore, knowing the damage that could be done, they operate under the assumption that it will be done...
There is already plenty of evidence out there that a lot of Chinese devices ship with malware on them...pretty much every Android based TV box for example...it would be less of a problem if it was possible to flash a clean build of Android to a device yourself...but because of the way patents, chip licensing etc etc work...that has become quite a complicated task.
There is absolutely no technical reason why Android can't work like Windows or Linux and be installable by anyone...it's the licensing and proprietary nature of some of the tech that prevents it happening...this only exists to ensure that the big players can always launch "superior" products when compared to small upstarts...because the smaller guys can't access the components.
The push towards making devices modular is great and all...but I'd rather the focus was on allowing me to flash my own devices first without having to fuck around with bootloaders, fuse mods, rooting etc etc.
Ahhh yes, let's blame Biden, when it actually was the orange Trumpet and his cohorts in Congress that started this slide down the slippery slope. And given the current administration is given no choice but to horsetrade with the MAGA brigade in the House of Representatives and the horde of lobbyists that rule Congress by proxy, there's not much left to be said.
And yes, absolutely, this *is* China giving the rest of the world the big middle finger. I don't see why they shouldn't.
Thing is, whenever sane politicians do to think that one (and many many other bleedin obvious things) through, the "FREE MARKET! SMALL GOVERNMENT! NO REGULATIONS!!!!" crying starts, and the political enablers of those crying block the necessary steps.
And when it turns out several years later, to exactly noones surprise that it was, once again, a bad idea to listen to The Market, becauce the free market is mostly driven by greed, emotions and short term self serving gains instead of long term planning and working for society, then it is suddenly the sane politicians fault...
rare earth extraction amd processing is very dirty business. lots of nasty chemicals and by products. that is the main reason other countries dont do it. There are plenty of viable reserves bit not the will to play with the stuff.
As for uranium, Australia has a lot of the stuff. More than anyone else in fact so the US wont have any issues procuring it.
Russian problems will come years down the line when the chinese come knocking for their loan repayments.
China doesn't want the money, they want that block of land to the East of China that is currently Russian, but was originally Chinese and is populated mostly by Chinese speaking people. I suspect China is egging Russia on because they intend to do to Russia what Russia is doing to Ukraine...China plays an extremely long game though, so we may not see this in our lifetime.
"Remember that time 100 years ago when we helped you with your campaign to 'liberate' Russian speakers from Ukraine? Well about that...there's this plot of land that was once China and has mostly Chinese speaking people...we kinda want it back...you understand, right?"
If you're talking about the Turkmens, Uzbeks, etc., the idea of something being formerly Chinese could extend as far as Hungary, given the conquests that happened under the Mongols, who also conquered China.
Under the philosophy of the Middle Kingdom, which for all of the cultural revolutions in the twentieth century probably hasn't changed that fundamentally, countries that the Imperial Court had heard of were considered as owing fealty to the Emperor. Refusal was grounds for war, invasion and subjugation. The Emperor is a Party now, but one man is actively trying to reassume the sort of dominance within it that Mao Zedong exerted in his day.
If people think the Americanised West or Russified East was imperialist, China has been for thousands of years a far more seriously imperialist Empire. A big chunk of its assertiveness now comes from a sense of offended entitlement which its economic strength is now preparing to set straight.
Don't blame Biden. Trump was no smarter about it, and nor is any other American lawmaker.
They just can't grasp the concept that the American public suffers FAR more from embargoes and trade tariffs than do the targeted nations. In the case of China, they're still the ones holding onto a whopping, massive debt that the Americans owe them for products already purchased and consumed. They can afford to live on the interest from that money for far longer than the American public can afford to suffer losses so that the honchos in Congress and the Oval Office can enjoy some sense of "victory" over what they've decided is their "enemy."
There is one planet; we're all in it together. I do wish the nations of the world would wake up to that essential fact before we continue our path to destruction unabated.
LIDAR was invented during WW2. Indeed R. V. Jones had some input into it (see 'Most Secret War', ISBN 0-241-89746-7). So how it can be 'licensed' now by anyone to anyone is very questionable, as the technology is well in the public domain. Unless of course they're meaning a specific implementation, whereupon we just have to implement it differently.
Are you sure about RV Jones, radar yes very much so.
Lasing was not practically demonstrated until 1947, actual working laboratory devices of the 'pumped' variety are mid 60's iirc.
I seem to remember that the theoretical concept of lasing and masing for that matter was the subject of papers through out the inter war years.
Can anyone define what Net Zero actually means and what this will do to the global climate in a couple of decades time? Is there a cost/benefit analysis that does not simple make bold predictions about future costs if we do not adopt the policy? To be clear, I am not denying climate change or even that humans are responsible for it, just questioning the political decisions that are supposed to fix the problem.
.. if only to balance the debate a bit; see this article in the China Daily.
It does make a couple of very valid points.
That said, are the US and friends really complaining that their own tactics should not be used by anyone else? I saw this as inevitable. IMHO, in a tit-for-tat war there are never any actual winners because both sides have given up collaboration. Stupid, but hey, that's politics for you.
This "tit-for-tat" war started because Chinese farmers stopped buying soybeans.
It wasn't that they stopped buying AMERICAN soybeans but that the entire Chinese market for the product contracted about 80-90% thanks to mass pig culls related to trying to curb the spread of African Swine Fever
Farmers tend not to buy feed for animals which don't exist - doubly so when those farmers have gone bankrupt and been forced off their plots
American pork producers saw a market more than twice the size of the USA domestic one opening up for the taking (which would have consumed the entire USA soybean surplus and then some), only to get the door slammed in their faces thanks to Mango Mussolini's deranged rantings
>> "Think of the shareholders! How else do you increase profits?"
In a world where buyers don't care about prices, you don't need to cut costs to defend your market share. But that world does not exist. Or maybe elsergiovolador is the only guy in this forum who doesn't own a single object made in China.
"They are made in China using cheap labour and we pay premium for these."
They labor in China isn't especially cheap anymore and hasn't been for some time. If somebody like Apple can make the printed circuit boards in the US due to regulations surrounding the chemicals used and disposal of same, it's better for them to have them made in China. The bulk of an iPhone is made robotically with very little labor input anyway. The same goes for many products these days. I had a manufacturing company in the US and it always felt like government was trying everything to close me down or apply fines.
It is massively cheaper and you get more value for money year on year, for the simple reason nobody is manufacturing anything in the West so the Western expertise is diminishing.
There are no manufacturing and engineering jobs, so people have no reason to pursue those careers...
and it always felt like government was trying everything to close me down or apply fines.
Yes, corruption in the West is massive. It's easy for competition with connections to pay off some jobsworth to launch an investigation or issue a fine. They always go after small business anyway, just so they can been seen doing something.
In China is different, because all companies are de-facto belonging to the state, so every Chinese company play in the same team.
"How about we don't ship off all our manufacturing jobs in future, especially 'hi' tech ones?"
That would require politicians to stop banning things and regulating the rest out of existence locally. What's really mind-blowing is the anti-food crowd that are demanding that farms reduce their output and kill off the bulk of their livestock. I live without TV, but I haven't figured out how to live without food. I'd also rather have fresh food grown nearby than highly processed food from China that's been bulked up with production excesses of Melamine.
Another problem politicians seem to have is they only think one layer deep. They don't see the bang on effects when they kill off an industry. What they often do is form a blank spot(s) in the supply chain which makes it easier for companies to locate elsewhere so they have a contiguous supply chain. If metal plating is banned (it's pretty ugly), there's little point in the raw metal market nor machining/shaping. Once manufacturers are having their metal parts made off-shore, it's a no-brainer to add assembly for sub-components or just finishing the entire product in the same place rather that carefully packing and shipping the parts to be assembled elsewhere and put up with damage and delays.
"I'd also rather have fresh food grown nearby"
Go and speak to your local gardeners association, usually in a building next door to your local allotments...you can get loads of free locally grown fruit and veg there...they aren't allowed to sell it for some reason (well not officially, quite a few high end restaurants in the area do some under the table dealing, how else do you think these places manage to "source ingredients locally") but grow tons of it...there is so much excess that most of it goes into making compost for next year...and that's after giving away tons of it to local pensioners etc...seriously, it's fucking loads.
My old man has a few allotments and for about 9 months of the year, I don't pay for fruit and veg (well not with money, usually he makes me pay with digging and insults).
So yeah, if you don't mind throwing in some labour every now and then and being told how gay you are for complaining about the cold and wet, you can get plenty of locally grown free veg.
On a serious note though, we'd have a lot more locally produced, low cost produce if selling the stuff grown in allotments wasn't banned...whats weird about the ban is that the stuff grown in allotments has to be grown to similar standards as farmed stuff...certain pesticides and practices are also banned on allotments...it's pretty much all organic.
This season, the old man managed to grow around 50kg of tomatoes, 10kg of jalapeno chillis...untold amounts of bell peppers, about 50 cabbages, huge amounts of spuds, carrots, courgettes, gem squash, beans, peas, herbs, onions, garlic and various other stuff.
It really wouldn't be difficult for Britain to be self sufficient to a degree...I suspect the reason for bans can probably be linked to lobbying by supermarkets etc...because the way I understand it, it's not a local authority thing.
Anyway, your local allotments have tons of excess produce, will likely let you have it for free...or maybe you can offer something (some supplies for the allotment from your local garden centre for example, allotment folks are always after bags of compost, top soil, scraps of wood, railway sleepers, gravel boards, wire, cable ties, string, rope etc etc)...they are also mostly retirees as well...a good synergy to be had is trading your engineering skills...which is something I do with the pensioners...I get free veg, they get free tech support, tool repairs, machinery repairs etc etc.
"Go and speak to your local gardeners association, usually in a building next door to your local allotments...you can get loads of free locally grown fruit and veg there...they aren't allowed to sell it for some reason (well not officially, quite a few high end restaurants in the area do some under the table dealing, how else do you think these places manage to "source ingredients locally") but grow tons of it...there is so much excess that most of it goes into making compost for next year...and that's after giving away tons of it to local pensioners etc...seriously, it's fucking loads."
I have a garden that gets bigger every year as the vacant property next door is so tied up with liens and such I doubt anything will ever be done with it and I hope to buy the land on the other side of me. I think this next season I'll have enough excess to do some trading. My hope is the estate sales will continue to produce canning jars for cheap. I just did pickles for the first time and they're awesome. I have no doubt I'll much through them long before I'll have more of my own cucumbers grown and ready.
You seem to have misunderstood...rare represents the length of time they cooked it for...I've seen it. In Waitrose it's more expensive for a packet of rare roast beef than it is for the standard roast beef which appears to have been well done.
Personally, I prefer my earths grass fed and dry aged (at least 48 days)...that has much more an impact on flavour than the cooking method.
"this is why he decided to remove the LiDAR from the latest iteration of Teslas..."
Tesla vehicles have never had LiDAR. Elon doesn't believe in it. Tesla will even remove RADAR from their vehicles that had it originally if you bring your car in for any service. It's not used anymore.
《to safeguard China's "economic and technological rights and interests."》
Given the middle kingdom's long record of ignoring intellectual property rights and overt industrial and other espionage the quoted gem is adamantine chutzpah.
How the speaker could maintain a straight face without a lethal dose of botox is an inscrutable mystery.
In any case I am pretty sure that like everywhere else it just means a bigger brown paper bag or larger denominations.
My guess is some of this nonsense are first steps of a longer term return of chinese isolationism. Historically periods of chinese expansionism have been short interruptions to chronic isolation.
Hilariously China also blocked exports of its "super uber processor" thats slower than an AMD bulldozer and has worse memory management than a Pentium II.
When a $30 raspberry pi is 4-5x the speed of your "era defining" CPU, perhaps you need to go back to the drawing board. And throw away that ancient 50n chip equipment.
"And throw away that ancient 50n chip equipment."
The electronics world isn't just cutting edge tech and nothing else. There's nothing in the guitar effects pedal on my repair bench that needs even 50nm process. The majority of the black boxes in my car use clunky old tech since there's no need for super fast memory to keep track of where my seat position is or the pauses for the intermittent wipers. A bleedin' Arduino is overkill for most controllers in 'white' goods. When the unobtainable function switch failed in my counter-top convection oven, I built a controller based on an Arduino and it's hugely overkill, but I have them and know how to write code for them so that's what I used. That's even with all of the new functions I added so I could do fancy recipes that change temperature settings during a bake.
Net Zero policies are doing a great job of destroying industries in the West whilst giving China a free pass to build coal powered generating capacity to replace them. A simple quick solution would be to drop Net Zero and focus on preparing for climate change rather than a futile attempt to stop it.
China's newer coal stations are vastly more efficient than the old ones and are pulling coal burning out of cities (a lot of apartment buildings still use old-style coal burning boilers and the Chinese are trying to ban them in the same way that London did in the 1950s)
In addition, stations build in the last 20 years have conspicuous empty spaces adjacent to the turbine halls
It should be noted that a molten salt nuclear reactor provides high-grade heat sufficient to replace burners and that one of the size necessary to drive a coal thermal power station - including its containment building - would approx 1/4 the size of the equivalent burner infrastructure
I'd say the Chinese government has been engaging in some forward planning - and FWIW despite the station buildouts, China's still managed to reduce its overall carbon footprint (or at least prevent it growing)
Yes, this anticipates MSRs being viable at scale but there's no indication of any large "gotchas" so far
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