[thisisnotauser]

I used to work on a DoD special project that required rare earths that we could only get from China and we had to write a monthly memo about the risk to our $10B program that China would just stop selling it to us.

The problem boiled down to the Chinese government buying out and shutting down any competitors anywhere in the world, plus Congress requiring the DoD to go with the lowest cost, which was always China. We knew what the problem was, we made the problem clear, no one did anything about it.

Maybe this administration blowing up the government is good, actually.

[btreecat]

> Maybe this administration blowing up the government is good, actually.

My house was so difficult to walk through with the years of stuff piled up. Much easier now that it's all been burned to the ground!

[lmm]

> My house was so difficult to walk through with the years of stuff piled up. Much easier now that it's all been burned to the ground!

For anyone who's dealt with a hoarder house that's not the reducto ad absurdum you think it is, just the tragic reality.

[throwaway3b03]

I'm that hoarder, and granted, not in terminal stage, but enough to severely impact my quality of life. And I disagree, I think it would take me two days to clear out the house, but mostly lack the energy and motivation to do it. So no, burning down the house would be way way worse.

[lotrjohn]

User name does not check out. :-)

[ansho]

> I think it would take me two days to clear out the house

my experience helping clear out a hoarding family member's house tells me this is highly unlikely.

[hjadal]

If you don't care about the possessions you could remove it quickly. The problem is that when you try to clean it, they want to evaluate every single item for if it should stay or not. Throwing it all in garbage bags and then in the bin takes much shorter amount of time.

[technothrasher]

I just recently helped a buddy clean out his dead relatives hoarder house. The only real decisions were "consignment, charity, or dump?" It took us weeks. I'm sure if we threw a ton of money, people, and vehicles at it we could have done it quickly, but that's not your typical scenario.

[igleria]

When time came for my incapacitated-by-stroke father to move after we sold the family house to his new apartment, he did exactly this:

> they want to evaluate every single item

I almost gave up on him and only resumed when he was literally crying for me to come back. Did not regret coming back.

When he died 5 years later, my poor mother needed WEEKS to throw away all the useless shit he had accumulated in his apartment. Then I did regret not being harsher on him, but he was mentally and physically ill.

To anyone reading this: You are not the only one being hurt when you are a hoarder. Let people help you.

[Tangurena2]

The hoarder houses I've been part of cleaning also require ripping up and discarding the carpeting. Some walls could merely be repainted, some required that special paint for trapping decades of cigarette smoke, and some required replacing the sheetrock that had been damaged by unspayed pets "marking" the walls.

[jamesnorden]

"I could have an use for that dirty diaper some day, you never know."

[parineum]

> I think it would take _me_...

Even more unlikely when said hoarder says _they_ can do it in a few days.

[coldtea]

>it would take me two days to clear out the house

"I'm not addicted, I can quit anytime I want"

[Forgeties79]

This is unproductive and quite rude.

[jdross]

It could actually be very productive. Addicts do not do well with coddling

[nlitened]

> And I disagree, I think it would take me two days to clear out the house, but mostly lack the energy and motivation to do it

Likely you’re psychologically unable to ever do it, but it’s comforting to have this convenient lie.

There’s only one way to know.

[lazide]

Burn his house down? (/s)

[flir]

Maybe just one room?

[ninalanyon]

Doesn't work. Did that with my sister. I managed to clear out the dining room so that it wa possible to sit the family around the table to eat. Went back six months later and not only was that room uninhabitable but the amount of junk in other rooms had increased and the family was eating off trays in front of the television.

It's not the junk that is the problem, it's the way of thinking that leads someone to refuse to discard it. Or more likely there is some even deeper rooted cause that makes them think that way.

It can also be the case that the people they live with don't help either.

[AdamN]

Yeah - I read that and was like 'yeah' and didn't even realize at first that they were trying reductio ad absurdum. At some point demolition is the best step.

Don't agree in demolition of the USG though - it's actually quite effective when you think about it.

[foxyv]

Been there! It's hard, but not nearly as bad as building a new house I would say. Although the temptation exists!

[barrenko]

You can finally see the moon?

[ur-whale]

> For anyone who's dealt with a hoarder house that's not the reducto ad absurdum you think it is, just the tragic reality.

As a matter of fact, hoarder house is quite an accurate description of the US government.

[baby]

It's funny that you chose to use this analogy because most people improve old buildings by blowing them up and rebuilding everything

[dymk]

People move out of the building first

[iwontberude]

Israel doesn’t always give advanced warning before they improve buildings

[btreecat]

> It's funny that you chose to use this analogy because most people improve old buildings by blowing them up and rebuilding everything

It's not funny, it's practical.

Even if we were to demolish and rebuild first there's cleanup. Then there is a survey. And then planning, input design and then after all that, construction.

If you were going to do all those tasks inside that building you already destroyed, it's now much harder to rebuild.

Order of operations matter.

[coldtea]

Well, sometimes the only realistic solution is to burn the whole mess to the ground and build a new one...

[eptcyka]

You don't get to do that with people's lives.

[avidphantasm]

In starting from scratch, you also run the risk of recreating, from first principles, the thing your are trying to replace.

[coldtea]

And in trying to merely restructure you're also running the risk to carry over all pathologies, bad actors, "code debt", and general baggage, of the thing you're trying to restructure.

Choices...

[avidphantasm]

Yeah, I think this is why starting with a smaller part(s) of a big system that is more-or-less working and building on that is maybe the best we can do.

[CaptainOfCoit]

If only someone thought of this 240 years ago when some peeps got frustrated enough with their government to fight their way through a separation from that government.

[paulryanrogers]

Or 165 years ago when people tried to fight through separation, and arguably got most of what they wanted even after losing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4kI2h3iotA

[philipallstar]

You can do it with structures maintained by taxing other people's labour, though.

[bpt3]

What does this mean, practically?

We can never reduce the size of the federal workforce because it means people will lose jobs?

We can never cut any federal benefit or subsidy regardless of the cost, importance, or overall value to society because someone, somewhere is benefiting from it?

[mhalle]

Here is a reference to the "Reinventing Government" effort that was implemented during the Clinton administration and considered highly successful (and legal):

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Partnership_for_Rei...

[bpt3]

Yes, I am questioning whether the parent poster would have supported those cuts or uttered the same cry, as some individuals and communities were absolutely worse off after those cuts.

[paulryanrogers]

Democrats significantly cut the government and Al Gore led the effort. It had some issues though is widely considered a success in hindsight. That was a scapel, DOGE appears to be a drunken flamethrower.

[cjbgkagh]

Democrats cut the government because they were unable to resist Republican cuts, so if we’re drawing a causal link I think it would be fairer to say Republicans made the cuts during a time when a Democrat was president. Also the public blamed the Republicans for the shutdowns which reelected Clinton and is probably the reason the Republicans stoped caring so much about the deficit.

[bpt3]

Yes, I understand that Democrats have cut government in the past.

I was young, but I remember cries of "you can't do this to people!" then as well, just like we hear from a select group of people every time any cut is contemplated, which is why I asked the parent poster what exactly they mean by their comment.

[coldtea]

How do you think policy that affects whole groups of people, or even a whole country, is made? Not talking about just Trump/DOGE, or even just US or just 2025. In general and globally.

Goverments and lawmakers do get to "do that with people's lives". And they do that, affecting them, all the time. Including affecting them negatively a lot of the time.

And it gets worse: ineffective bureucracies (or incompetend ones) also "get to do that with people's lives"

["that" being: affecting them negatively, destroying their livehood, even causing deaths, e.g. consider some country's organization similar to FEMA being incompetent when there's a crisis].

[eptcyka]

But you just don't get to start over with someone's life. You can't unfuck a life.

[serf]

it's a shame government itself has never been bound by that rule in the past.

[lazide]

Clearly you’ve never dealt with a government before.

[idiotsecant]

Said every first year developer ever.

Almost always the real solution is the unsexy and emotionally unsatisfying task of just fixing the machine you've already got

[pferde]

Depends on who is doing the rebuilding.

[paulryanrogers]

Who said anything about rebuilding? The party in power wants the government (of the people) to have less of everything except authority for their own role.

[pferde]

The parent post did.

[bamboozled]

Generally you don't do that with the occupants still inside, good luck to you.

[XorNot]

I'm sure years to decades of anarchy would kill very few children and the elderly. /s

[coldtea]

Yeah, because shutting down an ineffective bureucracy and replacing it with a new organization necessarily leads to chaos and mayhem /s

And obviously sustaining an ineffective bureaucracy can never itself lead to the deaths of children and the elderly /s

[paulryanrogers]

Is the government becoming less opaque and more effective?

I guess if the goal is to harass innocent Hispanics and deport fewer criminals then effectiveness is on the rise!

[scotty79]

I often have this sentiment. Ultimately I compromised and moved to a new one leaving the old to be a storage space for old stuff.

[turkishdelight]

Actually...that sort of works.

[btreecat]

> Actually...that sort of works.

Not if you need a house

[beebmam]

Please say sike

[e40]

And some number of years ago, the government restarted a rare earth ore processing plant (somewhere in the west, like CO... I forget). Of course, after a year or two, the will to maintain it (because it was operating at a loss) evaporated and it went under.

Japan broke their habit of buying rare earths from China because of an extortion incident between the two... they process the ore in far off places (Australia and other places), before importing the final products.

The issue is that the US is (and has been for some time) mired in short-term thinking. The short term being how to win the next election, not how to solve problems. Of course, now, the problems being solved aren't really ones that people want, unless you are rich already.

[Tangurena2]

Part of the trouble with refining "rare earths" [1] is that the undesired residue (commonly called "slag") is radioactive and toxic. Smokestack emissions are also toxic enough that countries with pollution controls don't want them inside their borders. In the US, that means that every rare earth refinery becomes a SuperFund site [2].

China doesn't want to keep refining the metals - they want to move up the value chain by making things out of these metals. Instead of selling the refined neodymium & dysprosium for $50, they want to sell the electric motors that sell for $1,000.

Notes:

1 - They aren't rare at all, they're the bottom 2 strips/rows of the periodic table (of how it is most commonly displayed). Chemically, they're rather similar so the separation process is more complicated and annoying than, say, refining iron ore. Many people like to specifically exclude the actinides (the bottom row which includes uranium & plutonium) from the category "rare earth" because scary! radioactive! nuke! stuff! tends to divert discussion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_element

2 - A major problem with SuperFund sites is that every person/corporation who owned that land at any time is responsible for cleaning up the toxic waste. Just like asbestos waste. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfund

[e40]

Exactly! The problem with the way countries move up is to move the dirty industries to the up-and-coming countries. We need to properly pay for clean industry, but that conversation really never gets very far.

[CGMthrowaway]

The US mine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Pass_Rare_Earth_Mine

It went bankrupt in 2015, but came out of it and is still operating today. $MP, up 300% YTD

The Japan incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Senkaku_boat_collision_in...

tldr: Japan arrested a Chinese fishing boat captain in disputed territory. China responded by restricting exports of rare earth elements to Japan. Japan responded by forming a new partnership with Lynas Rare Earths which mines in Australia and processes in Malaysia. $LYS, up 150% YTD

[alephnerd]

> Japan broke their habit of buying rare earths from China

Nope. They are still dependent on transshipment via Thailand or processing in 3rd countries like India or Vietnam.

Heck, Toyota's India JV has been halted [0] from exporting processed rare earths to Japan from India right now because China has blockaded Indian access [1] to rare earths which China promised to remove recently but still hasn't [2], which lead to India blocking it's export of REEs.

And people wonder why countries have continued to engage with the US despite Trump.

[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-moves-conserve-its...

[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/india-taking-steps-mitig...

[2] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20250916VL202/tata-group-rar...

[MichaelZuo]

Toyota intentionally tried to use India as a shield and drag it into intrigues with China over rare earths?

That’s pretty big news if true.

[alephnerd]

India wasn't dragged into intrigue by Japan. India was blockaded by China BECAUSE Japan (and South Korea) are working on building an ExChina supply chain for REE processing within India, and becuase Taiwan has begun moving it's dual use ESM chain to India [0][1]. A lot of India-Taiwan military collaboration is occuring at IIT Ropar [2], which has become a de facto hub for Indian defense tech [3] (most of their "AI" research is tracking and C-UAS applications). Essentially, India is viewed by China as a potential competitor that needs to be nipped in the bud [5].

The Japanese government, Toyota, and the Indian government began a REE joint venture back in 2009 called Toyotsu Rare Earths India Ltd [4] that dramatically expanded after China started a trade war with Japan over the Senkaku Diaoyu islands in 2012.

> That’s pretty big news if true

It has been in Japan and India for months now. This is why the Indian government began a massive processing campaign over the past 1-2 years with Japanese and Korean involvement, along with a push for EESM mass production.

[0] - https://english.cw.com.tw/article/article.action?id=4196

[1] - https://cuashub.com/en/content/a-geopolitical-game-of-drones...

[2] - https://www.iitrpr.ac.in/indo-taiwan/

[3] - https://www.iitrpr.ac.in/coe-sards

[4] - https://trei.co.in/

[5] - https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/cfer-202...

[MichaelZuo]

If China was fine with rare earths ultimately making its way to Japan, why would Toyota HQ need to use an Indian JV as a proxy?

There has to be some reason to use such a roundabout method and get the Indian board members signatures on the record on whatever they sent to Beijing to get it approved in the first place.

[alephnerd]

> Toyota HQ need to use an Indian JV as a proxy

Japan began moving extraction and processing to India. Japan conducts transshipment via Thailand and Vietnam (though Vietnam is now graduating into processing as well).

TREI is completely ExChina.

> China was fine with rare earths ultimately making its way to Japan

The worry has been if China and Japan are ever in a diplomatic tussle again like in 2010-12, then the entire flow of REEs from China could be shut down, but the Chinese government still wants to let some amount of flow to happen in order to ensure that the incentive to build an entirely ExChina supply chain does not take hold.

[h2zizzle]

If the US were to engage in long-term thinking, we might come to dangerous conclusions like, "Having a permanent racial underclass of perpetually-exploited and dissatisfied residents is a bad thing, and maybe we should train/pay the ones that are already here, inculcating them the righteousness of the American project, rather than constantly importing workers because their lack of direct experience with our country's institutions as they currently exist makes them easier marks." It would devastate the poverty-retail-financial-service complex.

The funniest part is our current admin's inadvertent exposure of this situation. Tinfoil hats on, but I hear tell of difficulties in the subprime auto-lending space because so many of immigrants who were targeted for those loans either stopped making payments because they're too afraid to go to work, or else self-deported with their cars. Lender bankruptcies are in-process, which is probably not good for all of the derivatives that are about to go to zero in sympathy. So much for consumer strength, and completely avoidable if not for our insistence on squeezing our least for every last cent.

[lazyeye]

I thought we were talking about rare earths?

[h2zizzle]

>The issue is that the US is (and has been for some time) mired in short-term thinking. The short term being how to win the next election, not how to solve problems. Of course, now, the problems being solved aren't really ones that people want, unless you are rich already.

If you're going to get smart, at least pay attention.

[lazyeye]

(Shrugs)...people who make every. single. thing. about Trump are just not interesting.

[h2zizzle]

If you think that that comment is about Trump, rather than simply mentioning him as part of a larger point about American society, you might cure your boredom by focusing on enhancing your reading comprehension.

[evanjrowley]

It's amazing how the general public seems to think people involved with the bureaucracy would never support cuts and downsizing. They should get a moral compass and try working there for a while.

[throw10920]

Yes, and here's some nuance: based on my experience, the majority of the people in the bureaucracy want it to be more efficient.

To effect cuts, you can either cut the budget without improving efficiency, leading to a loss of scope (which is what the current administration is doing, and is not great), or you can keep your scope while improving your efficiency such that you don't need as much money, which is vastly preferable.

Those in the general public who thinks that government budgets should increase monotonically are a linear combination between total idiots and outright politically malicious.

[bratbag]

The majority of obese people want to be thin, but will die obese anyway.

Just wanting something that requires a significant overhaul of how you do things, is not enough.

[paddleon]

better analogy: the majority of fouix-gras birds would prefer not to be force-fed and caged.

The people working in the bureaucracy do not have the authority to overhaul it.

[parineum]

The people working in the bureaucracy chose to be there. Bureaucracies self select for people that are okay with it. I'm sure there's a few who are there to change it from the inside but they are the exception.

You're not going to find a lot of vegans working in a meat packing plant.

[wizzwizz4]

But you are going to find vegans working in a slaughterhouse. Some people prioritise pragmatism over ideological purity. (See https://our-compass.org/2020/06/15/i-worked-undercover-insid... and parts of https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-50986683.)

[runako]

> To effect cuts, you can either cut the budget without improving efficiency, leading to a loss of scope (which is what the current administration is doing, and is not great), or you can keep your scope while improving your efficiency such that you don't need as much money, which is vastly preferable.

The US federal government has taken a third route: increasing scale faster than resources. Before this administration, the # of federal employees sat roughly where it was in 1969 (there have been some fluctuations since then). In addition to the added tasks/departments/etc., there are 70% more Americans for which to administer government.

Scope has gone up quite a bit faster than headcount. I haven't done the analysis, but would be curious to see how this compares to given companies over similar timelines.

[callmeal]

>government budgets should increase monotonically

Well, they should track population growth. You cannot effectively serve a larger population with the same resources, otherwise we would continue to have two lane freeways everywhere.

[throw10920]

Here we have the "stupid" bit of my reference. No, the budget should not track population growth, because improved technology means that occasionally the cost to provide the same service to an individual decreases, whereupon the budget should also decrease. Or, for instance, a military threat or other transient event (eg COVID) that necessitated temporarily elevated funding levels expires, and the budget should decrease accordingly.

The converse being, of course, that sometimes transient events or large shifts (eg increase in costs of materials used to make some important good that the government procures) make things cost more, and so the budget should increase in proportion to those beyond population growth.

[callmeal]

Improving technology has not increased housing stock or transportation options. Everyone still needs a place to stay and ways to get to/from work. Another issue is that using technology to reduce humans in the loop is what gets us "your call is important to us..." levels of customer support.

If the number of people who need to apply for id/license/passports keeps increasing, then the number of people servicing those requests also needs to increase (or we need to stop complaining about the dmv). No amount of technology is going to replace that need.

[throw10920]

[flagged]

[_heimdall]

The challenge for the second approach is that budgets are going to be spent once they have been allocated. If you improve efficiency and reduce costs that savings will just get spent somewhere else or on some new initiative.

Government work and corporate work are very much the same in that way, budgets are use it or lose it and everyone will use it this year so their budget isn't reduces next year.

[the8472]

Some companies manage to maintain war chests, others have some insane "we had EOY leftover budget so we spent it on another redesign" craziness going on. Ditto with the "we must spend it, otherwise we'll get less next year". Where do such terrible incentives come from?

[throw10920]

> Ditto with the "we must spend it, otherwise we'll get less next year". Where do such terrible incentives come from?

That specific one is an unfortunate side-effect of needing to allocate budgets in advance. Large organizations working with a lot of money need to statically schedule their budgets in advance - and because they don't have crystal balls, they can't actually know in advance how much they'll need, and have to make educated guesses. If a department didn't use all of its allocated budget last year, sure that's a very weak signal that it was given too large of a budget - but it is a signal, and there aren't very many other good ones.

[_heimdall]

In my opinion this has always been a sign that an organization grew too large.

Its the way of the world now to aim for growing into a huge org, hiring as much as you can on the way up. Once those in charge know little more about a part of their company than the budget surplus at the end of the fiscal year the model just doesn't make sense.

[the8472]

It's not a signal, no. If you're good at forecasting but don't have a crystal ball then you'll overestimate on some years and underestimates on others, averaging out.

And the budget-burning shows that this encourages making over-estimates and then spending the excess to make the actual numbers match the prediction. It's no different than research based on falsified data at that point.

[scotty79]

> government budgets should increase monotonically

It should and not even just linearily. If economy grows by roughly even percentage each year same should be true about government budgets. Otherwise you just leave money on the table for billionaires to scoop up and sit on. Of course it should be funded with taxes not debt and that's where the worst part of government spending is. That it's done by indebting itself to billionaires and letting them suck more and more government money each year through debt servicing.

[roenxi]

That seems like a difficult position to make coherent. The comment seems to start by arguing that government spending should increase as much as is reasonably possible because it draws resources away from billionaires.

Then the second half seems to be a complaint that increasing government spending has created a resource for billionaires to draw from to enrich themselves.

It seems that if you believe the first, the second is hard to complain about. There is a social contract that the billionaires must fund [yea much] government. They are. If they then pay a little extra tax and it goes in a circular loop back to them, which is weird but I'm not sure how you are arguing it to be a problem - clearly under this frame they are going to be worse off than when they started, so they have been taxed some amount. The question is whether that amount is reasonable or not, I suppose. But that has nothing to do with whether they have a custom of a ceremonial handing of some billionaire money to the government to be handed back to the billionaire on top of their taxes.

[scotty79]

> There is a social contract that the billionaires must fund [yea much] government.

I don't think that's the contract. Government must be funded by citizens which all are consumers. What billionaires extract from consumers can't go towards funding the government. Unless it's borrowed directly from billionaires which is what got most governments in financial problems they are currently in.

> The question is whether that amount is reasonable or not

To asses that you only need to compare rate of growth of billionaires wealth to the rate of growth of the entire economy. Then you can see how much they suck out of non-billionaires.

[roenxi]

> I don't think that's the contract. Government must be funded by citizens which all are consumers. What billionaires extract from consumers can't go towards funding the government.

I don't think you're articulating your point clearly here - what billionaires extract from consumers has to go towards funding the government in part, that is what they use to pay their taxes. Otherwise where does the wealth used to pay the taxes come from? Capital only generates a return in a context where there is someone to consume what it produces.

Just to put my view - I'm with you 100% that billionaires are sucking money out of the government. Look at any billionaire and a good chunk of their wealth seems to come from some combination of regulatory capture and government contracts. I'm just not seeing how you square that with "and therefore the government should grow at the same rate of the economy". It seems like a counter-intuitive position to take if you've identified that billionaire wealth is a key justification and the billionaires are very good at extracting money from the government. It seems likely to me that billionaire wealth would scale with the size of government.

The wealth of government is ultimately funded by the middle class. There aren't enough billionaires to carry the load. Eg, Elon Musk's net worth is estimated at $500 billion which isn't enough to cover 1 year of spending of the US military, for example. So he taps out after 1 year and then someone has to find funding for the 2nd year somewhere else. And you'd consume a few more billionaires (none of whom have Musk-level wealth) to cover the parts of the US government that aren't war-related. It wouldn't last long if billionaires have to fund it.

[parineum]

Increase in GDP is created by inflation and increases in productivity.

Government budgets should increase with inflation but there is zero reason for them to partake in the increase in productivity. Increases in productivity should, generally, also be applicable to government programs and, as such, they should get relatively cheaper over time, not more expensive.

If we want to _add_ programs, government budgets should increase in kind but the efficiency of government should rise over time as the things required to run government become cheaper. This rarely happens though because government programs don't have the same incentives that lead to increases in efficiency.

It's funny you're so against billionaires scooping up that money but want the government to scoop it up instead. Government is just big business with guns.

[scotty79]

> It's funny you're so against billionaires scooping up that money but want the government to scoop it up instead.

The reason is that government is ruled democratically which makes it less likely to successfully execute terrible decisions persistently. There's also some influence of the public on those decisions. In case of billionaires there's nothing to stop them to pursue idiotic, societally and economically harmful goals on a whim. There's also difference of transparency and availability of warning signs. Not to mention that I can change which government rules me by boarding a plane but Zuckerberg is influencing my life in every place on Earth.

Leaving the money with the populace is not an option. Citizens are weak, money will get scooped. The question is by whom. I'll pick democratic government over billionaires every day of the week.

[throw10920]

And here we have a double demonstration of both stupid and malicious.

> If economy grows by roughly even percentage each year same should be true about government budgets

Stupid. For the purposes of this discussion, the government exists to provide services. The cost of those services, in general, decreases with economic productivity.

> Otherwise you just leave money on the table for billionaires to scoop up and sit on.

Both stupid and malicious. Mind-bogglingly stupid, because that profit isn't just captured by the wealthy, but by all economic classes. Malicious, because you'd rather sabotage the economy than let some people take excess profits based on their wealth alone.

[scotty79]

Government doesn't provide services. Government owns the land and the population simply by the fact of having army that can exert control. It provides monetary system you measure worth of everything in. You provide the service of producing economic value.

You can't with straight face claim that profit is not captured by billionaires but by everybody if economy grows 3% but billionaires wealth doubles in the same period. They not only capture the entire new profit of economy growth but also extract wealth from all other parties including government.

[throw10920]

> Government doesn't provide services.

Yet again, factually incorrect. The government provides many services - social security, food stamps, military protection, utilities, research funding, pharmaceutical oversight, and many, many, many other things. You're just wrong.

> You provide the service of producing economic value.

Also wrong. That is not a "service" provided to the government - it's just something that people do, and they have the right to keep those rewards.

> You can't with straight face claim that profit is not captured by billionaires but by everybody if economy grows 3% but billionaires wealth doubles in the same period

Those things are unrelated.

Yet again - a mixture between stupidity and malice, driven by base greed, envy, and resentment of what others have that you don't.

[callmeal]

>To effect cuts, you can either cut the budget without improving efficiency, leading to a loss of scope (which is what the current administration is doing, and is not great)

Um, $11,000,000,000 for ICE is not a cut. $850 Billion for the department of war (an increase of $25 billion over last year) is not a cut.

But yes, CFPB's funding for 2025 which gets reduced from about $823 million to about $446 million is a cut. Which will be great for consumers because we can now start paying extra fees that will boost corporate profits.

[throw10920]

When did I ever try to justify those budget increases or cuts? You need to improve your reading comprehension.

[egorfine]

> the majority of the people in the bureaucracy want it to be more efficient

and thus be fired?

[rkomorn]

Or just actually deliver what people need faster and better?

[egorfine]

There are no incentives for that. Bureaucrat will get paid at the end of the month no matter what.

But if said bureaucrat makes its own process more efficient, they might get fired because they are not needed anymore.

[etiam]

Most bureaucrats are also humans, and not solely or even mainly motivated for their every action by having it rewarded with maximum salary profit.

Plenty of dysfunctional bureaucratic organizations have high rates of occupational burnout and high employee churn due to the stress of repeatedly enforcing policies the employee knows full well are morally reprehensible.

So in real psychology, I claim there's plenty of incentive, even for the majority of people in the organizations.

[potato3732842]

Worse, their boss's (maybe not direct boss, but somewhere up there) prestige, power and career potential directly tracks headcount.

So even if the DMV clerks want it to not suck, management want it to suck.

[guappa]

The problem with random cuts is that the same people whose only skill is to play office politics are the only ones who will be left after.

[ACCount37]

That wouldn't be a problem if the cuts were truly random. In practice, they aren't.

[mulmen]

Well if our choice is a hypothetical fire all the political operators or fire randomly then random will leave more political operators.

[ACCount37]

If only such a hypothetical could be implemented.

I don't think it's easy to design a firing process that would outperform random chance there. In any non-random process, office politicians would always be first in line with an excuse for why they specifically should not be fired. No matter what the criteria for not getting fired are - they'll do their damn best to make sure they meet them.

[mulmen]

Agreed. But while I agree political operators corrupt all objective processes I refuse to conclude that we should cause random destruction instead.

[rowanG077]

Every individual can support efficiency and downsizing and yet it will not happen. With such an extremely large organization it's not enough people just want something. You need concrete drivers for change.

[Propelloni]

Agreed, and to add: take a look at the incentive structures. Virtually everybody anywhere is acting rationally within the dominant incentive structure they are confronted with.

I know this seems so abstract it sounds like a truism and not actionable. Considering that incentive structures come in many guises (laws, morals, money etc.) the first thing we need to figure out which incentive structure is dominant in a given situation. An employee of a bureaucracy, for example, might share the presented moral disapproval about inefficiency but is it the dominant incentive structure? Probably not.

For example, DOGE toppled existing incentive structures, emphasising cost reduction vs. effectivity and privacy. People were (maybe are, nobody is reporting anything on this anymore) up in arms because they had to abandon incentive structures they knew to navigate. DOGE was a colossal failure because emphasising efficiency over effectivity is always like polishing a turd and many people said as much "back then" but look at the incentive structure of those who didn't and don't. Many of them have not prospered in the previous structures, so they support the new ones, even if they are insane to you and me. They act rationally.

[Tangurena2]

> DOGE toppled existing incentive structures

DOGE attacked organizations investigating companies owned by Musk. Nothing else.

[paddleon]

> DOGE toppled existing incentive structures, yes

> emphasising cost reduction

no.

[coldtea]

The public is totally right, those people would never support cuts and downsizing, unless it affects a rival department.

[cavisne]

Right, just like how Bernie switched from targeting millionaires to billionaires once he became a billionaire himself.

[gjm11]

I don't know anything much about the history of Sanders's rhetoric specifically, but: Inflation and economic growth mean that "millionaire" very much doesn't mean what it used to N years ago, and more so the larger N is. (And Sanders has been around for a while, so N can be pretty big if you're comparing early-Sanders with late-Sanders.)

If you believe something along the lines of "the richest 1% of society, the ones who have > 10x more wealth each than a typical upper-middle-class person, have too much money and too much power and we should change that" -- which I think is the kind of thing Sanders believes -- then talking about "millionaires" was a reasonable way to express that 50 years ago; these days what we need is a word whose meaning is more like "person with $20M or more"; give it another 50 years and "billionaires" might express roughly the same meaning that "millionaires" did in 1975. (Or, of course, there might be a huge economic crash, or a currency devaluation, or a technological singularity, or something.)

So someone could switch from complaining about "millionaires" to complaining about "billionaires" just because the way the meanings of those words have shifted means that the best word for pointing at a particular social issue used to be "millionaires" and is now "billionaires".

Because we really only have "millionaire" and "billionaire" and, more generally, numbers spaced by powers of 1000, the sets of people you can talk about pithily change over time. So, at the moment, you can talk about "millionaires" and be referencing something like the top 15% of US households (so if you're wanting to engage in some hostile rhetoric, pointing it at "millionaires" is probably broader than you want for several reasons); or you can talk about "billionaires" and be referencing something more like the top 0.0003% (so if you're wanting to raise money by redistribution, "billionaires" is probably much narrower than you want).

I suspect there are a few good PhD theses to be written investigating questions like "do populist-leftist movements have more success in places/times where some handy term like 'millionaire' picks out roughly the top 0.3%-3% of the population than in places where there's no word that does that?".

(Note: numbers above are in the right ballpark but I make no claim that careful calculation wouldn't change them somewhat.)

[coldtea]

You probably meant to write "millionaire himself", and I don't know if it's true, but yes, same principle

[mothballed]

I'm shocked DoD doesn't have straw buyers in friendly (or neutral) 3rd party countries to deal with that possibility.

[Animats]

They do. DoD made a deal with MP Minerals (Mountain Pass, CA) in 2024. DoD will buy rare earths at a guaranteed price which is well above the world price.[1]

This followed a 2021 deal with General Motors to insure GM's magnet supply.[2] That resulted in building a modest magnet plant in an industrial park in Texas, using MP Minerals ore.

This deal expanded in 2025, with DoD taking a majority stake in MP Minerals.[3]

The history here is that the price goes up and down so much that the Mountain Pass mine has been shut down twice since the 1990s. There were two bankruptcies. The most recent glut and price crash was in 2015.[4]

The process has four steps: 1) mining, 2) beneficiation, where mixed rare earth ores are separated out, 3) chemical separation, where the individual rare earths are separated, and 4) magnet metal making. For years, 3) wasn't done in the US, and MP Minerals was shipping ore to China for processing.

[1] https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/statement...

[2] https://investor.gm.com/news-releases/news-release-details/g...

[3] https://mpmaterials.com/news/mp-materials-announces-transfor...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP_Materials

[NewJazz]

Commenter meant straw buyers as in buyers of Chinese rare earths that do so at the behest of the US DoD while under the guise of buying the metals for their own use internal to whatever country they are based in.

[Animats]

Doesn't work. China's export controls on rare earths are product-based, not country based. You can buy motors, but not magnets.

[Tangurena2]

China wants to move up the value chain. They don't want to continue to be the colony supplying raw materials (or even slightly refined materials) to the "first world". China wants to be building those electric motors - which is where the value & profits are located.

[SJC_Hacker]

Buy the motors and take out the magnets then

[NewJazz]

I didn't say it would work, just clarifying the comment you were replying to.

[reenorap]

There is nothing rare about rare earth minerals. The only thing is that it's expensive to extract them by American workers vs Chinese workers which is why all the business went to China. The prices will have to go up in order for it to be "worth it" but now that it's a national security issue, maybe more effort will be put into this.

[maxglute]

>There is nothing rare about rare earth minerals

Many heavy rare earth, i.e. the strategic stuff, is actually rare in terms of economic extractable sources we know of, mostly ionic clays found in China and parts of south east Asia I think also Brazil. It's the same reason PRC is the largest oil importer even though on paper PRC has the largest shale reserve in the world (more than the US), their deposits are just very deep in the desert, technically extractable but not remotely economically to the point where it doesn't even make strategically (not for lack of trying). This without even mentioning behind behind in extraction tech.

[fpoling]

China has started in recent years to increase production of liquid fuels from coal (essentially what Germans did in WWII but much improved). That competes with oil when prices are above 80. With that it makes no sense for them to even try shale as those will be more expensive.

[wakawaka28]

Just about everything is a national security issue if you think about it. The military should be forced to buy things from domestic suppliers, at least some percentage of the time, to make sure that there are people and resources available to deal with a war. As a compromise, set a maximum rate of profit allowable to these companies after they recover their investments, to discourage monopolies and price gouging.

[fch42]

A mandate for government orgs including the military to exclusively use "all domestic" suppliers is laudable but also subject to graft and corruption - companies need to compete to get into the "in" club and admittance will be "gated" by favouritism, political alliance, and whatever grease needed to get you into that club. And once in, you're always tempted to collude ... partition the pie amongst the "competition" while petitioning the government to grow the pie ...

Yes, you _can_ try to regulate your way out of that. It'll result in a giant thicket of rulebooks, laws, procedures and processes. Exactly what a "slim" state would not want to see ...

(I am not sure there is a perfect way out; "extremely strong" gating criteria though tend to always favour the incumbents, and a prescription of "100% domestic all the way through" is a strong gating criterion if I've ever seen one)

[wakawaka28]

>Yes, you _can_ try to regulate your way out of that. It'll result in a giant thicket of rulebooks, laws, procedures and processes. Exactly what a "slim" state would not want to see ...

They already operate in a thicket of laws, rules, and procedures. These all need to adapt to the behavior of domestic and foreign businesses to achieve national security. I think my proposal acknowledged and presented an initial set of propositions to deal with graft. It's better to try than to let national security fall by the wayside due to idealism about free markets. I am very idealistic about them myself, but we see our foreign counterparts use this idealism against us strategically. They are not constrained by idealism.

[necovek]

I sense a bit of contradiction in there.

If it's universally true that free markets reign supreme for economic development, then how come "foreign counterparts" can strategically leverage that without having a free market themselves? How did they even get to the comparable economic level without them?

So I would counter that this is the wrong conclusion. Due to USA supporting and driving the globalization of trade and production, it has remained the "world leader" for as long as it has. Let's remember that USA has 1/4-1/3 of the population of China or India — I would say that the tactic has worked for a long while. Unless you want to claim how USA has inherently more capable and more intelligent people (which I would dispute)?

Without this, I believe USA would have likely lost the lead even sooner — let's see how high end tech export restrictions will end up? Will it make China actually catch up sooner since they can't leverage top end tech anymore, and now they have to invest a lot more in developing it themselves?

Now, maybe we are at a tipping point where USA does need a change of tactic to remain a "leader" (but why?), but it really seems like squeezing the last ounces of the tech leadership by USA to remain "top dog" for a little longer. At the same time, it's completely normal that countries 3x or 4x the size of it, with improved economic and scientific development, are about to overtake the USA. Do you think there'd be any incentive to go into a war if all the people in the world were as rich as middle class people in USA? I think it'd be very hard to get anyone to sign up for an army, even if there are any profiteers looking to start it.

A good world, IMO, is one where everybody has at-least comparable means as the US middle class. That would naturally mean that bigger countries than US are richer than them, and that is OK. I know US people have been growing up with this superiority complex, but really, a lot of historical things have come together for US to be as successful as it was.

I believe that all of you HN participants from US are closer in mindset to HN participants all over the world than to some of your fellow Americans. Don't let the nationalism get to you either: you've got good examples of what comes out of people in other countries who fall prey to it (they get abused by their politicians and war criminals, get the shitty end of the stick while the former get rich and avoid any life-threatening drama).

[necovek]

With all the mention of war, people of the USA seem to forget that it's not a given all of USA would "stand" for the same side — it is so big and so polarised (with the latest political climate), that I wouldn't be so certain of it.

If we even imagine a war between nuclear powers like Russia and China vs US, I would hope that most of the smart, liberal population of USA would realise that this is not about "winning", but rather about having fewer casualties (iow, fewer dead people). And that is best done by less war (ideally none), and if war is in progress, figuring out a way to stop it as soon as possible, even if it means making some concessions.

While war does lead to engagement of industries which might have been long forgotten, in the big scheme of things, it is always an economic loss for anyone directly being hit. US does have the benefit of not having been directly hit for centuries (if we exclude a terrorist-style attacks like Sep 11th, or single instances like Pearl Harbour), but that would be hard to avoid in a conflict between Russia/China and USA.

And that's when polarisation in a society comes out, and with such a long, lingering list of "unresolved" issues, I wouldn't allow myself to predict an outcome.

While I am not a fan of Chinese or Russian leadership, I definitely hope that there are enough smart people in there to not allow such craziness to unfold either.

[tosapple]

If you exhaust your local supply first you put yourself at a strategic disadvantage.

[malux85]

That’s why they said “At least some percentage of the time” so they can tune this to balance dependence and readiness

[tosapple]

Thank you

[Tangurena2]

The slag left over from the refining process is toxic and radioactive. In the US, we call those places "Superfund sites".

[turkishdelight]

Plus the shit is dirty to extract. On the one a hand I'd rather export our environmental disaster, on the other hand I think we really need to eat our dog food -- but I'm not confident that any amount of dog folding will lead to much change.

[paganel]

> On the one a hand I'd rather export our environmental disaster,

That's what Europe has done when it comes to most of its industry, and that is a big reason why now we (I'm from Europe myself) have to buy stuff like weapons from the Americans.

[scotty79]

It still better to push out all industry then bring some back as needed than let it run rampant and deal with health issues in whole generations of people.

[paganel]

> some back as needed

This doesn't seem to happen, at least not at scale.

[dingnuts]

it's always been a national security issue and I don't understand why it took the election of this chucklefuck to change things

it's the same shit with high fructose corn syrup! everyone hates that shit, why did it take the Great Orange Menace (not to be confused with this website, the other Great Orange Menace) to get companies to realize that?

I know that bringing up HFCS here is a big digression; there are probably better examples. It's just another "broken clock is right twice a day" issue from the current admin that is so obviously popular that I don't understand why it was never an issue before.

[isk517]

Most likely because America has been in a political dead lock for the last 2 decades. Everything supported by one party is rejected by the other, everything that would benefit one state is a detriment to another, everything that would benefit the masses are extremely rejected by very load minorities. There is a strong man in charge pushing every button to see what happens, in the course of things it will turn out that at least one or two of them were far overdue to be pushed.

[reenorap]

It wasn't that they were fighting each other, they were working in concert with each other, like a dance. If the Dems say one thing, the Republicans say the opposite and vice versa, because they knew it would keep both of them in power. Now we have a true Agent of Chaos in charge that doesn't heed any of the previous rules and us peons will have to deal with the fallout from that. The biggest negative repercussions is that both the Republicans and the Democrats will be completely emboldened to do whatever they want now and we are going to suffer because neither party gives a fuck about us, they only care about maintaining their own power.

[jm4]

100%. The damage that has been done in just the past several months is unthinkable. It’s not going back to the old ways any time soon, if ever. The democratic republic experiment might even be over at this point.

I’m beginning to believe the best path forward is a new constitution, which is absolutely crazy because I used to believe we had an extraordinary system designed with incredible foresight. It turns out it was full of holes and we mostly got by on the honor system. Sure, there have been lousy and corrupt politicians, but we never had a truly bad actor determined to sidestep every rule until now.

[scotty79]

Alternative would be one party system like China. Where you could do more but at the cost of controlling social hatred towards government. US goes easier route and controls hatred by splitting it in half directing the halves to hate each other.

[scotty79]

Deadlock wouldn't be so bad to have is US wasn't in terrible shape before. Now this bad state is frozen.

[phil21]

These two topics are not remotely the same or even in the same league.

In fact you could very easily argue that the reliance on HFCS which is native grown and keeps a huge amount of tillable land in production is a national security asset. It keeps farmers (and thus the institutional knowledge that can easily be switched to other crops in dire emergency) in business vs. importing a product from overseas to replace it.

If the argument was removing sugar from most products - sure! But it's not like "banning" HFCS is going to change anything when you simply switch it out for beet or cane sugar instead. It's the sugar, not the slight difference in molecules, that cause the health problems. The only real health argument against HFCS is that it's so cheap it ends up in everything. But that likely has more to do with the war on fats from past eras than much else.

I don't want to go too far down the rabbit hole on this topic, but in the context of national security HFCS vs. Cane Sugar is a clear win.

[kingkawn]

No, fructose bypasses the insulin control pathways and is converted almost immediately to ldl fats that deposit and cause arterial occlusion leading to an enormous amount of health problems across the country.

[jandrewrogers]

With one exception, HFCS is lower in fructose than common natural alternatives. Cane sugar is 50% fructose. HFCS used in food is typically 42% fructose. Fruit juice is extremely high in fructose, whence “fructose” got its name. The HFCS used in sweetened beverages is 55% fructose, which is only marginally higher than cane sugar.

The only way to avoid fructose is to avoid natural sugars. HFCS is created by taking a low-fructose sugar and modifying it to have fructose levels more similar to natural sugars.

[parineum]

Compared to what and by how much is HFCS higher in fructose?

[Tangurena2]

America's over-production of corn/maize is a direct result of Nixon. His administration knew how to deal with protesting hippies, but when farmers & housewives started protesting, the response was to heavily subsidize corn/maize production. With vast quantities of the stuff, companies looked to find uses for the stuff. Two books that describe the situation are Omnivore's Dilemma and Altered Harvest. The subsidies for growing maize/corn make it cheap, add in the tariffs on sugar imports and that explains why HFCS is ubiquitous.

0 - https://www.amazon.com/Omnivores-Dilemma-Natural-History-Mea...

1 - https://www.amazon.com/Altered-Harvest-Jack-Doyle/dp/0670115... This book also explains why tea is the British beverage (and not coffee), or how the Irish potato famine happened. And it explains the source of the corn blight that caused rioting farmers & housewives - texas male-sterile cytoplasm was used by all the hybrid seed companies, so a blight that affected one plant affected 80% of the US corn/maize crop.

[kQq9oHeAz6wLLS]

> obviously popular that I don't understand why it was never an issue before.

Maybe previous administrations have been economically incentivized to not fix those problems. Perhaps those previous administrations didn't have our best interests in mind.

[dwd]

From 2004...

https://inthesetimes.com/article/magnet-consolidation-threat...

[jm4]

Of course they do. The SR-71 was built with Russian titanium that the Russians believed was going to be used in pizza ovens. There’s no reason to think schemes like that ever stopped. Or that that was the first time. My guess is most countries have been doing it for as long as they have been trading.

[zdragnar]

China has vastly stricter controls in place now than SU did back then. Not impossible, but much harder.

[alephnerd]

Ever wonder why there was a sudden spike in antimony, gallium, and germanium shipments from Thailand - a country that does not produce either of the 3 at scale - this summer?

That said, much like smuggled GPUs - it is difficult to transship an export controlled material at scale.

[iancmceachern]

There is historical precedent for this. As I understand it the US was only able to make the SR71s by sourcing Soviet titanium for the airframe in this manner.

[Tangurena2]

Titanium is a fascinating metal. You can't refine it in anything close to the manner you refine every other metal. It oxidizes hundreds of degrees lower than the melting point (and Titanium Oxide is a brilliant white powder that makes paint so much brighter). Likewise, you can't try to melt it in a nitrogen-only environment because that too turns it all into TiN (a hard gold-colored ceramic material used to coat metal). It is one of those very complicated refining processes that give this electrical engineer headaches trying to follow the chemical reactions.

So if you every have one of those thought experiments about traveling back in time and "inventing" steel (or gunpowder or penicillin or overthrowing the Roman Empire) hundreds of years earlier, forget about titanium because commercial scaled production couldn't happen until the 20th Century.

0 - https://www.titaniumprocessingcenter.com/titanium-history-de...

[iancmceachern]

Totally, aluminum is similar

[daedrdev]

nope, china has 90% of the market, and some of the rest are probably just secretly from china

[mothballed]

Sure but I presume China will still want to sell stuff, even if not to the US. After it leaves their borders it's not super likely they can have an effective control on the chain of custody. What I'm referring to is diversion from foreign commerce.

[MisterTea]

I think its reasonable to assume the US demand is so large that any laundering of resources can not be disguised easily simply due to the quantity. Countries with sudden spikes in demand with no way to explain the need for the demand will be suspect.

[jimnotgym]

IDK, China are requiring a license to export magnets, and I hear it is not easy to get

[marcosdumay]

> friendly (or neutral) 3rd party countries

Well... In 2024 there were things like that.

[dgfitz]

I’m shocked you thought the government was ever functional enough to do something like that.

[estimator7292]

The US government was pretty decent up until ~50-100 years ago. Pretty standard, functional democracy. Lots of money and effort spent on improving the physical and social environment for the betterment of the people. You know, normal, expected stuff from a functioning government.

[reenorap]

Up until the US went into debt to fund the arms race, things were great. Now that there's so much debt and unfettered financial engineering by Wall Street, the idea we can get get back to "the American Dream is a home with a white picket fence" is impossible.

[cogman10]

"The American Dream" was made possible by government spending to subsidize home purchases. The 1950s housing act.

America was great when the pocket books of the government were open to public spending and funded primarily by high taxes on the rich. In the 1950s the top marginal tax rate was 90%.

What made america great was taxing the hell out of the rich and big business to the point where they'd rather invest in their employees and companies. That's what drove the innovation and quality of life improvements throughout the 50s and 60s. We abandoned that in the late 70s onwards because of an economic downturn that hit everyone. Rather than just powering through it we went with "Let's just tear down everything" and now we are dealing with what the government was like in the gilded age of the 1920s. Stories of corruption, corporate capture, and scandal are nearly identical to what we see today.

We need a new deal.

[potato3732842]

>"The American Dream" was made possible by government spending to subsidize home purchases. The 1950s housing act.

No, it wasn't. The american dream was the reality of huge swaths of the middle class. Who do you think all those pre-1950 single family homes were built for? And of those that didn't live in a single family dwelling, the other inhabitants of a multi-family was often related to them.

The subsidy just made it a little more accessible down-market.

>What made america great was taxing the hell out of the rich

Um, what? Look at tax receipts relative to GDP. We've never taxed harder than we do now. Even if you assume we took it all from the rich back then it was still less.

The only way this comment only holds if you look at fed income tax only and you look at the nominal rate, which is farcical.

[reenorap]

When the US has a surplus with no debt, as it was pre-Nuclear Arms race, they can afford to do things like be generous with housing, etc. We can't do that now because we have too much debt, and most of the money is being funneled to the elites.

[themafia]

To me it was WW2 and the lingering "intelligence apparatus" it spawned. We went from using our resources for national security and started using it to steal banana plantation land and contracts in South America. It went from a necessary evil to a clandestine service available to the highest bidder.

[rurban]

Yes, it was Franklin Roosevelts declining health and death the fascists took over. They already brought Hitler to power, and from then on took over their state. They planned, but didn't need their Business Plot.

[ckemere]

Lots of comments below. I think Reagan “Government doesn’t help” campaign + (obviously) big tax cuts were the beginning of the end. Early 1980s was the beginning of deficit spending and tax cuts based on the Laffer Curve big lie. Bush followed suit, and Obama/Biden realized that the American people would gladly elect presidents who spent borrowed money.

Unclear how we recover as a country given the reach of the Fox News propaganda. Maybe a huge recession?

[phil21]

> recession

This, but an actual depression that will likely make the Great Depression look like a good time - largely due to folks being a lot more self-sustaining back then due to common skillsets and lived experiences.

[greenavocado]

WtfHappenedIn1971.com

[j-bos]

They used to, iirc that's how they sourced the titanium used in the b2 bombers, which was mined in the ussr.

[MegaButts]

They got the titanium from the Soviet Union, so not exactly an ally. The US just lied about using it for pizza ovens instead of jets.

[Enginerrrd]

I think that was the SR-71, but yeah.

[selectodude]

A-12 Oxcart

[necovek]

I hear about something that does not seem to really be a problem portrayed as a problem.

China did not stop selling to USA before USA decided to introduce tariffs and stopped selling to China advanced tech like GPUs and NPUs.

In a sense, mutual economic dependency has worked in the past, would work in the present, but "blowing up the government" is leading to one strong-arm play after another — and really, it only leads to everybody being unhappier, and prices being higher for everything, yet the trade will continue very similar to how it did before.

And really, this trade inter-dependency is really the only guarantee (if there is such a thing) of no big military conflict coming out between the two countries. And I am pretty sure that's worse.

[nostrademons]

> plus Congress requiring the DoD to go with the lowest cost, which was always China

Are second-sources no longer a thing? Going with the lowest cost is fine, but it used to be that every critical project lined up a second domestic source for its supply chain. A lot of prominent semiconductor companies (eg. AMD) got started this way.

[somanyphotons]

I'm sure Australia would be happy to supply for a slight premium

[alephnerd]

That's the plan as part of the Minerals Security Partnership - US, Japanese, Korean, Emirati, EU, and other members capital would go into Australian, Canadian, and other countries with large enough deposits to build an ex-China supply chain.

The current admin has made it rocky, but the rest of the countries are still participating in it.

[yard2010]

No free country can compete

[perihelions]

I don't see it. I don't see what this Administration has done to erode China's rare earth monopoly; or actions that could erode it in the future. They've spent a lot of brain cells[0] on the opposite: on trying to convince China to continue exporting rare earths to the US (in clownishly inept ways).

Trump's signature accomplishment is to unintentionally convince China to enact a total ban[1,2] on the exports of several rare-earths (and some other minerals)—something he didn't predict, and is now trying to undo.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/26/trump-tariffs-china-rare-ear... ("Trump threatened 200% tariffs on China if Beijing does not export rare-earth magnets to the U.S.")

[1] https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/china-bans-expor... ("China bans export of critical minerals to US as trade tensions escalate")

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/09/business/china-rare-earth... ("China’s Grip on [Samarium] Threatens the West’s Militaries")

[alephnerd]

It's not just the US. China has blockaded the entire West (EU, UK, Japan, South Korea, Australia) and non-China aligned countries (India) access to rare earths.

The EU, UK, and India are working on scaling out EESM production and Japan, South Korea, Australia, and India are working on building an ExChina processing and supply chain for a number of materials. This played a role in the recent Japanese pledge to invest $60B in India and transfer processing tech IP to Indian firms.

[hearsathought]

> the entire West (EU, UK, Japan, South Korea, Australia)

Japan and South Korea are not western nations and hence not part of the west.

> This played a role in the recent Japanese pledge to invest $60B in India and transfer processing tech IP to Indian firms.

Think it had more to do with the US forcing Japan to join its trade war against china. Don't you?

[alephnerd]

> Japan and South Korea are not western nations and hence not part of the west

Japan and South Korea are commonly treated as being part of the West for the same reason Australia is - they are geographically in Asia but aligned with the United States and EU.

If you don't like Japan or South Korea being called "Western" we can call them NATO+ then.

> Think it had more to do with the US forcing Japan to join its trade war against china. Don't you?

Japan began moving REE processing to India all the way back to 2010-12 when the Senkaku Diaoyu standoff happenened and China blockaded Japanese access to REEs. That's when both Toyota and Hitachi began working with IREL on REE extraction and processing.

And China initiated the trade war with Japan all the way back to the Senkaku Diaoyu standoff, just like China initiated the trade war with South Korea due to South Korea allowing THAAD deployments. The interest in developing an ExChina supply in Japan and South Korea has existed ever since China was the aggressor to both countries.

And Japan (as well as South Korea) has been an economic partner of India since all the way back during the socialist 1980s era. Japanese JVs like Maruti Suzuki, Tata Hitachi, Tata Docomo, Sumimoto Chemicals India, and others have been around for decades. Heck, it was Softbank that helped spark India's startup boom in the 2000s and 2010s which became the IPO boom today.

[hearsathought]

> Japan and South Korea are commonly treated as being part of the West for the same reason Australia is

Australia isn't "treated" as being part of the West. It is a western nation. It's people, institutions, culture, language, etc are all of western origin. Japan and South Korea are not western nations. All you would have to do is go ask the japanese or south koreans themselves. I don't know of anyone who "treats" Japan and South Korea as western nations except those with a bizarre agenda.

> they are geographically in Asia but aligned with the United States and EU.

Australia would still be a western nation even if australia was aligned with china. Also, western nations existed before the EU and even before the US were created. If the US and Australia went to war against each other, they would still be western nations.

> And China initiated the trade war with Japan all the way back to the Senkaku Diaoyu standoff.

Then you might as well argue Japan initiated the trade war by imperial expansion to those islands.

[rat87]

> Maybe this administration blowing up the government is good, actually.

Of course it's not. Imagine how difficult it will be to rebuild things to function half as well after all the corruption and disruption with less money

[cogman10]

Right, especially since we've made anyone that knows anything in the government unemployed. It'll be almost impossible to hire back even a small portion of the experts in 3 years.

It's going to be a rough couple of decades.

[raincole]

> We knew what the problem was, we made the problem clear, no one did anything about it.

(Insert here a logical gap wider than the ocean between the US and where the rare earth is produced)

> Maybe this administration blowing up the government is good, actually.

[gjsman-1000]

The idea behind DOGE made a mountain of sense, even if the execution was all over the place.

Americans get sympathetic when they hear about the Air Force $1280 coffee mug. They don't forget that, even half a decade later, when they hear the word "waste." Apple's monitor stand has better build quality than what it's known for.

https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2018/10/23...

[Jtsummers]

That's not even the real waste in DOD. The real waste is mostly in failed projects. Projects that either never deliver, or deliver years late and millions or billions over budget, typically with reduced features. They'd have to buy a million of those hot cups to come close to the waste that occurs due to these failed projects.

DOGE never seriously tried, or even discussed, tackling that problem.

[ACCount37]

If you don't have failed projects, are you really trying hard enough?

[datadrivenangel]

If you change requirements all the time and never deliver, then no, you're not trying hard enough. Plan, Build, Evaluate, Learn.

[potato3732842]

>DOGE never seriously tried, or even discussed, tackling that problem.

They got shut down and the Trump-Musk thing flared up more or less the nanosecond they looked at the DOD. Sad, but they never had the political capital to win that fight. They probably could've done some good slashing around in there.

[snowwrestler]

The general sense in DC was that DOGE was never going to make it to DoD because

a) many of the individual people leading DOGE benefit personally from DoD spending (which is not true of IRS, HHS, USAID, etc), and

b) most civilian policy leaders in this administration have built their political brand around boosting the military, and dramatic cuts don’t align with that.

[btreecat]

> >DOGE never seriously tried, or even discussed, tackling that problem. > > They got shut down and the Trump-Musk thing flared up more or less the nanosecond they looked at the DOD. Sad, but they never had the political capital to win that fight. They probably could've done some good slashing around in there.

What "good slashing" did they actually do anywhere to assume they would have done good there?

[potato3732842]

All I said was they probably could've done some good slashing around in the DOD. Nothing more, nothing lesee. Take your strawman and get lost.

[scott_w]

There’s no straw man in the question. You’re being asked to substantiate your belief by showing where the people who would be responsible for “good slashing” demonstrated their ability to do some “good slashing” elsewhere.

[gjsman-1000]

I'm not disputing it; but the downvoters missed my point.

My point is that voters know that if a mere coffee mug costs that much, who knows what else stupid is going on. It's a smoke signal saying there's waste of unprecedented amounts everywhere.

[bdamm]

It is even deeper than that. The problem is that voters do not have faith in the organizations created to oversee and regulate government waste. Perhaps there isn't enough visibility. Or maybe the typical shenanigans that commenters love to harp on hides the actual good work that public servants sometimes do in managing the public purse.

So as with most political challenges, it all comes down to trust, and a failure to garner it.

The lack of trust then creates the vaccuum into which silly notions of thinking a coffee cup is worth a grand, or an ashtray is tens of thousands of dollars, or the magic hammer that is the same as a normal hammer but costs 100x, or whatever.

[potato3732842]

Of they just don't fundamentally trust the institutions.

I bet there isn't a single person in this country that can't pick a subject they care a lot about on which the government actively gaslit them in the last ~5yr.

That kind of tarnishes what the .gov has to say on every other subject.

[bdamm]

I'm not saying people should implicitly trust the government.

I'm saying that lack of trust, and lack of the ability of people and government to meet in a way that develops trust, is the issue that underlies people holding up a "$1280 coffee mug" as an example of government waste.

The ideal is that representatives you do trust would be evaluating the government for you, and so you would be building trust by experiencing trust with one or more of your representatives. But the scale of the federal government has resulted in few people actually trusting their representatives, and the experience of having a trust test with a representative doesn't scale. This is the fundamental issue.

To be totally clear, I am implying that a change to the system needs to proceed towards improvements in accountability and visibility, so that people can experience more legitimate trust in their government.

[dangus]

The idea never made sense, the government isn't particularly wasteful, and the entire premise is based on bad math that misunderstands how much money the federal government actually spends on things, especially salaries.

On top of that, the premise was based on defying congressional appropriations. Congress decides how money is spent. When the Clinton administration undertook this, they went through Congress to enact legitimate and lasting reform. [1]

The federal government has a much lower employee to citizen ratio than it used to have, it's quite efficient.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/03/12/1237991516/planet-money-doge-...

[parineum]

The issue now is that, at the time, the Clinton admin was looking at a political reality of cuts happening in a Republican congress and chose to work with them to make those cuts align more with his party's agenda than it would have before.

That reality isn't something either party seems to be willing to deal with today. The only time changes happen in the federal government are when one party controls the whole thing. Which is why there's such a fight for these mid-terms. If Republicans lose either house of congress, the last 2 years of the Trump admin will be stalemate.

[dangus]

I don’t think it’s party willingness to deal with government efficiency, I think it is more accurate to say that neither party thinks that government efficiency is a significant problem.

In other words, it’s just something Trump wanted to do. The GOP is very firmly under his control.

The other policy that’s like that is tariffs. Nobody in the GOP wants tariffs except for Trump. You could see the lack of cheers at the SOTU.

The other truth of the matter is that the Republican Party has become addicted to cutting taxes without replacing revenue. It seems to me that there’s a desire to create a debt crisis to justify cuts to social programs. In reality, social programs would be highly sustainable if taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals weren’t continually being reduced.

[parineum]

> I don’t think it’s party willingness to deal with government efficiency, I think it is more accurate to say that neither party thinks that government efficiency is a significant problem.

That wasn't the point I was making. The point I was making was that Bill Clinton was able to balance the budget _and_ keep the programs he wanted to not because it was something he originally wanted to do.

He did it because the Democrats lost power in the midterms to Republicans who ran on balancing the budget.

He was looking at either not being able to do anything he wanted and possibly vetoing a Republican agenda that the American people just voted for or changing his own agenda to more closely align with that and work with the Republicans to make sure programs that Democrats really wanted weren't cut but still balancing the budget. He did the latter and it's largely used as a point of pride for the democratic party but they ignore the fact that it was only achieved through compromise.

A more modern opportunity/example for this would have been if Biden, after the midterms, chose to work with yhe Republican congress on immigration reform and get something done that everyone could live with.

Instead he doubled down and made the situation worse, supercharging the issue in the next election leading to the election of Trump on largely that platform.

I'm not blaming just the Democrats for this, neither party would do it, it's just the example that came to mind.

> In reality, social programs would be highly sustainable if taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals weren’t continually being reduced.

There's not really a good example of this in practice. Healthy social programs in other countries are typically funded largely through pretty substantial middle class taxes.

There simply aren't enough rich people and corporations to yax to fund the rest of the country.

The desire to tax the other to fund my benefits is the problem. Instead of looking at poverty and wanted to do something about it, we look to other people and tell them they should do something about it.

[dangus]

I totally understand what you were saying with the Clinton era, I’m mainly saying that the Trump administration is making cuts that Congress didn’t ask for while Clinton was working with Congress to make cuts that hi Republican Congress already wanted and made it align with his own priorities as well.

Nobody in the GOP was asking Trump to make cuts at (e.g.) the FAA, that was just the incompetence of the administration at work.

As far as whether taxes can pay for social programs, I’m just going to go ahead and disagree with you on that. We know this because we have math to tell us that the tax cut and jobs act and the big beautiful bill added to the deficit while still making cuts to social programs and increasing tax burden for the poor/middle class.

In addition, Social security is not a wealth transfer program at all and has always been self-funded. Its funding issues could be resolved overnight with modest reforms.

Medicare is funded by the same people who use the program, it’s not a wealth transfer program either.

Social programs like Medicaid, food stamps, and welfare are at their most cynical evaluation society’s pitchfork insurance. If you let people go hungry you will get societal and political instability, it is in any regime’s best interest to keep the poorest people in society fed.

[rat87]

The idea behind DOGE was to

1. fire people who don't automatically support Trump regardless of the law/constitution/good of the nation 2. Fire people who Trump or maga dislike for some reason (LGBTQ, minorities, people who have ever criticized Trump) 3. Destroy government in general (from people on the ideological right who are willing to set aside any principles to work for Trump)

Reducing waste or making government efficient was never one of the goals. Otherwise they wouldn't have gotten rid of people doing actual oversight work for the government. They also wouldn't have fired so many people on whims (that they had to take back in many cases)

[theossuary]

Anyone who thinks DOGE was anything other than an ideological purge is incapable of critical thinking. Though, in all honestly, most who say it wasn't know it was, and are just lying to buy time till the project is complete.

[Tangurena2]

Additionally, the goal of DOGE was to dismantle every agency investigating Musk's businesses. Future James Bond type movies won't have SPECTRE or Blofeld as villains, they'll all be thinly disguised Musks.

[ants_everywhere]

It was also to justify increased government spending, namely the extension of the tax cuts

[MisterMower]

What are you talking about? Reducing government revenue does not increase government spending.

[ants_everywhere]

That's really a matter of accounting.

Under some accounting systems if you have a financial obligation and that obligation is forgiven, then it's an expense (e.g. bad debt expense) for the forgiving party and income for the party that is forgiven.

A big tax cut like this is forgiving the dues everyone owes for living in a society. It's only really a pure loss of revenue if you believe that taxes aren't an inherent part of the social contract.

At least empirically I agree with Hobbes that life in the state of nature is nasty brutish and short and that there are no, for example, big tech companies in anarchies. So in both theory and practice taxes are conceptually subscription fees that arise with the social contract in exchange for protection, public services, and the protection of rights. In this sense they are debt and cancelling the debt is an expense.

Of course I recognize that in practice the government does not treat future tax revenue as receivables in terms of accounting. But there are sufficiently many games and white lies in the bill to make it appear budget neutral that I don't think anybody really believes the actual budget accounting is what's driving the bill. It's a political bill and politically I think it's reasonable to consider it an expense.

[Jensson]

> That's really a matter of accounting.

So increasing taxes can be said to reduce government spending? Do you think anyone really buys that argument?

[jiggawatts]

I've been the one selling the "$1,280 mug", not in America, and not to the military, but to state and federal governments all over the place.

It's always the same problem: They write "requirements" that end up being total nonsense, they have an unlimited budget, and they're terrified that they'll get "in trouble" for some slight oversight. This is a recipe for overspending, and is the bane of all such organisations everywhere.

The reason that DOGE had a snowball's chance in hell of fixing government overspend is that this can't possibly be achieved by merely cancelling a few hundred contracts out of millions!

The dynamic has to change, by realigning incentives and changing the rules, but DOGE did not have that power.

Not to mention that nobody knows how to do this at the scale of the US government! Nobody. I don't have the answers, Elon doesn't, neither does anyone else like Peter Thiel.

They keep talking about how the government is bad, but they don't have an alternative that wouldn't be subject to the exact same forces and produce an equally bad (or even identical) outcome.

[Jtsummers]

One thing that would help, but only help, not solve, is to train the people writing requirements. I've seen so much overfitting. "We developed on a Dell 1234ABC, so that's what we need 200 of when we deliver this to the field." That's not how computers work, but that's how they end up writing requirements. That can even make it into the TO for systems so now they have a drawing of the back of a Dell 1234ABC and the front, showing how it's installed at a desk and cabled up.

Once that happens, if the system lasts more than a year, they have to start sourcing Dell 1234ABCs with the same specs. However, that's an item that's no longer sold. So then they switch to maintaining the ones they have, which means a support contractor is hired to staff locations to handle these repairs (because the local IT staff is already responsible for a lot of things, and maintaining obsolete hardware is not their priority). When what's needed is any computer with X GB of RAM, X GB (or TB these days) of storage, and so on. Set the minimum specs, go acquire it from whatever vendor, and move on. It'd cost a fraction of the amount of that multi-million support contract whose entire job is to maintain obsolete computers.

[zbentley]

That would help a tiny amount. The bigger problem, which GP alluded to and which is very, very frustrating to entangle, is the incentives around accountability. Pahlka’s writing puts it better than I could:

https://www.eatingpolicy.com/p/the-water-is-a-mirror

https://www.niskanencenter.org/culture-eats-policy/

[jiggawatts]

Precisely right.

Adherence to internal procedure becomes ever more important as organisations grow larger, eventually becoming by far the most critical requirement for all work, internal or external. Cost, efficacy, customer happiness, etc... become distant secondary requirements, dwarfed by the mountains of procedure, policy, and paperwork.

[lmm]

We get the project management we pay for. You can outsource implementation but you can't outsource accountability; ultimately, the only way to get effective government is to build up project management expertise in-house, and to do that you need to be willing to match the pay and conditions (including but not limited to reliable long-term employment) that skilled project managers could obtain in private industry.

[malcolmgreaves]

Their goal wasn’t to make the government better. It was to destroy it and steal data so that Trump and Musk could get richer.

[stirfish]

Thanks for this link. I always assumed that things like $1280 coffee cups were like dad's "business trips", where we all know that's not really what's going on but we're all politely not talking about it.

Like a coffee cup might've been in the shipping manifest, but that wasn't all of it and we still needed to pay to ship it to [redacted]

[stirfish]

Ten billion sounds like a lot, but it's not really for an organization like the DoD that has so many projects and so much money. I bet someone above you assessed the risks and decided your project was good to run for as long as it could, but wouldn't be a crippling loss if it had to shut down. It would be like Google having to decide to keep selling Chromecasts until they can't and just stopping, or buying up the entire supply chain to secure their ability to produce Chromecasts indefinitely.

[mulmen]

I don’t see the problem. You explained the risks, leadership said they accept those risks. What was supposed to be done differently?

[micromacrofoot]

accelerationism often looks appealing

as long as if you're willing to ignore the people it will kill

[thrance]

DoD? You mean the DoW?

[defrost]

Still the DoD ...

  A September 2025 executive order authorized the usage of "Department of War" as a secondary name. Department of Defense remains the legal name.

Even had the primary name legally changed the Department of Defense would still be the correct name of the organization at the time that @thisisnotauser worked for it.

[thrance]

Ya, it was kind of a tongue-in-cheek remark on my part. I don't agree with much of what this administration does, but I still think "Department of War" is more honest of a name for this institution.

[defrost]

Fair enough .. I hope for the US's sake it doesn't merge with the DoHS to wage war on the 'wrong type' of US citizen ... (now designated terrorists).

'Active clubs' are on the rise - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/19/active-clubs...

[bjourne]

It is not realistic to expect a modern supply chain to be completely uninterruptible. The US has large stockpiles of (not very) rare earth metals and there are multiple ways of acquiring them in case China stops exporting. If China ever embargoes rare earth metals, the US can embargo Windows updates. Who do you think will last the longest?

[Bender]

the US can embargo Windows updates

That's actually a funny and real example. For a long time there was a heat map that showed where the concentration of MSIE 6 was. It was China because every copy of Windows was pirated and may have also had government keys hard coded in the pirated copies. They were locked at the patch level the pirated version was made from and it was impossible to patch it otherwise.

Either way the US has nearly unlimited amounts of rare earth material in raw form. Its just much more expensive and time consuming to process it in the US and US regulations make it even more expensive. China does not follow our environmental laws and we breath the output of that. That's why they are processed in China. Processing it in the US would reduce global pollution for a hefty price.

[lmm]

> China does not follow our environmental laws and we breath the output of that.

Some of it perhaps. A lot of it is more localised, going into their dust clouds and water supplies. We should face the fact that moving rare earth processing to the US would mean either expensive mitigation measures or a lot more Americans experiencing health conditions - and probably both.

[Anarch157a]

It's much easier to smuggle a USB drive with Windows updates than it is a few tonnes of metal.

Then China will switch a billion desktops to Linux and the US will still need rare earths.

[rat87]

I run desktop Linux. It's pretty hard to switch a billion desktops to Linux even if you do it one at a time. Not to mention a ton of problems with compatibility and corporate and government IT

[wakawaka28]

The Chinese pirate Windows extensively, and the code has been leaked before. If IP law goes out the window, they will do whatever the hell they want.

[stickfigure]

> Then China will switch a billion desktops to Linux

Easier than smuggling a few tonnes of metal? Let me introduce you to my elderly parents...

[deadfoxygrandpa]

old people in china don't have computers, they use smart phones

[mothballed]

If all the US needs is a few tonnes the cartels can get it done no problem.

[wakawaka28]

Is this a serious question? China probably has the full source code of Windows, which has leaked before and could be obtained easily by spies abroad who are employed at Microsoft. They also don't need Windows. They make practically all the computer gear, or enough of it that they can get by in a war. We need to make real essential goods to sustain ourselves, not a bunch of spyware products and "service industry" gigs.

[bjourne]

I hear you are not actually addressing my argument? Stopping Windows Updates would do more short and long-term damage to the Chinese economy than embargoing rare earth metal exports ever will.

[wakawaka28]

I disagree with that "argument" for the reasons I stated. China has a billion people, including tons of programmers. They will rapidly build whatever software they need if push comes to shove, potentially starting with Windows source code or Linux. There may be a team working for the Chinese government in secret doing this as we speak, ready to push an update to millions of PCs over China's heavily censored and manipulated Internet. They have mandatory software installed on practically every PC that could be used to facilitate this "upgrade" automatically. I promise, installing Linux or a hacked version of Windows can happen way faster than any mining operations to provide the minerals you're talking about.

As for proprietary software that runs on Windows, these would need to be handled individually. The simplest solution for them is to use old versions that need no connection to the outside world to function. There might be some risks involved but I think they will rapidly adjust.

In my opinion, China and probably other countries currently have stolen code for every major proprietary software product. They just won't use it openly or officially because of IP laws. In a war, all that will go out the window. They may not have quite as many competent people to throw at fixing issues with that software, but they will do what they can.

What about scenarios short of a war? Well, a lot of what China does for us involves IP. If they stop respecting a bunch of our IP and stop exporting things that only they currently make, they can cause tremendous damage. Go look in a store and see what is made in China. American cars currently rely on Chinese parts and materials. The Chinese can stop exporting steel if they want. They will certainly take damage but you seem to not understand the extent of the damage they can inflict on the West. Windows Updates won't mean a damn thing in the long run, or even the short run.

[danhor]

How would you effectively stop windows updates to china? Bypassing the Windows activation measures isn't stopping single pirates (or people still wanting Windows 7 updates intended for big business with legacy devices), the only way to stop windows updates is preventing access to it. It's impossible to do so while still having Windows as an Operating System that people outside high security environments use.

[wakawaka28]

To be fair, Microsoft could be persuaded to add actual exploits to Windows contingent on the install being in China. In that case, they would want the Windows updates to be installed. There is thus no realistic scenario where exports of Windows updates would be possible or even desired by the US government.

[bpt3]

1. What exactly do you think are delivered in Windows Updates?

2. Why do you think the pirated versions of Windows largely used in China are getting updates?

3. What do you think happens when patches aren't applied to Windows?