Yet another Hacker News

America Didn't Lose Its Rare Earth Industry. It Sold It

47 points speckx 1 hour ago 10 comments

OgsyedIE 1 hour ago | parent

The price signals drove the move away, it's quite simple. Energy, labor, pollution tolerance, legal costs and economies of scale said to go elsewhere.

Some said that these price signals only make sense if globalisation lasts forever, but their remarks were dismissed as depressing.

FuckButtons 50 minutes ago | parent

short term profit over long term thinking - because no one in the system is incentivized towards long term thinking. The counter balance should in theory sit within the remit of politics, but even senators can be bought and few are far sighted enough to realize the consequences of incremental deindustrialization.

bluGill 41 minutes ago | parent

Problem is nobody knows the future. XI didn't come into power until 2012 - until then China was moving slowly in the right direction (that is more open and free), so moves of those things there there seemed to encourage that. However XI has consolidated power and put a break on moving in the right direction and now we need to react.

I have no idea who will move what way in the future so I can only guess what we will regret in 10 years. However I must act on the world as I know it lest things get worse. (what makes things worse is open for debate)

geodel 35 minutes ago | parent

I don't think its Xi's doing vs Globalist looking only for signals which confirmed their views and ignored or outrightly rejected everything contrary.

Sha1rholder 8 minutes ago | parent

>...put a break on moving in the right direction and now we need to react

- What do you mean "the right direction"? Do you mean the "open and free direction" that "Hey you can't have our Nvidia chips but must keep selling us cheap rare earth"? - And who are "we"? I suggest "we"'d better take care of "ourselves" instead of "react".

bubbluppugus 59 minutes ago | parent

America didn't lose manufacturing jobs it sold them

The whole economy for 40-ish years now been built on finance engineering away labors grip on anything in the US

tehjoker 34 minutes ago | parent

It's pretty funny the lengths these guys will go to avoid nationalization, though to be honest, China is basically in the right here. USA is being aggressive, China is responding. The authors are resentful that America can't do anything it wants without pushback.

throw0101c 31 minutes ago | parent

See also National Helium Reserve, which was also sold:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve

It became a bit of a news item a few months ago:

> Ripple effects from the war in Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz continue to widen. There's yet another brewing shortage, this time in helium. While most people associate helium with balloons and funny voices, the element is used in a surprisingly wide variety of industrial settings, including semiconductor production, where its role in advanced lithography has been growing rapidly. But helium mining and exploration in North America has been practically non-existent for a variety of reasons. And while the US used to have a strategic helium reserve, the government started selling that down in the late 1990s. On this episode, we speak with Nicholas Snyder, the founder and CEO of North American Helium, which does helium mining in Canada. We discuss the properties of helium that make it so useful, as well as the difficulties of expanding global production and distribution.

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjc6MgUY0BE

* https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/now-theres-a-helium-shortage-...

* https://podcasts.apple.com/pe/podcast/now-theres-a-helium-sh...