[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.

[throw10920]

The problem is not the Constitution. No democratic-adjacent political system can survive the majority of its constituents being apathetic and disengaged (as is currently the primary problem. Our current Constitution was designed to assume some measure of engagement from the citizens because that's a hard constraint that bounds all democratic systems.

The problem is the citizens, which are chronically disengaged (a fact which has ample evidence behind it), not the legal framework. If you disagree, then feel free to point to a functioning democratic system at the same scale as the US that can survive 99% of its voters not caring enough to do anything more than spend 15 minutes voting once every two years, which is where we're at now.

The only way to keep a democratic government is to keep Huxley at bay.

[vharuck]

>The problem is the citizens, which are chronically disengaged (a fact which has ample evidence behind it), not the legal framework.

That sounds like a problem with the legal framework, if it relies on millions of individuals changing their personalities and priorities. That's not realistic.

[scotty79]

You disengage when you are not represented. And with just two parties with very rigid stances on everything very few people are adequately represented. US needs multi-party democracy. Two party system they have now is just one party system, split in half and frozen.

[SJC_Hacker]

> hen feel free to point to a functioning democratic system at the same scale as the US that can survive 99% of its voters not caring enough to do anything more than spend 15 minutes voting once every two years, which is where we're at now

What do really expect them to do ?

[drdec]

> It turns out it was full of holes and we mostly got by on the honor system.

100%. The Constitution was designed with good faith actors in mind. It was not designed in an age of gamification, in which we find ourselves 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...