chaosCruiser

America will be great again? Well probably more like, poor, distrusted, hated, ignored and alone, but maybe Russians and Chinese think that’s great.

Well what if you need to keep on producing more common metals in the meantime, and REEs are a byproduct. You would need to keep the REE factories running too.

If you end up with 100 tons of terbium and yttrium oxide sitting in bags out in the rain, it’s going to lead to some serious quality issues further down the line. Well, just shove them in a warehouse then?

You’ll need a big warehouse, and you need to keep building more of them every year as the stockpiles grow. Needless to say, there are some serious logistical problems with a total export ban. A partial restriction is more viable, because it gives China some time to figure out how to adapt.

In any case, the rest of the world needs these metals, and they are willing to bend to knee long before China runs out of mitigation strategies. It’s going to be a problem in China as well, but at least they’re not totally screwed.

As opposed to what the headline could make you think, it’s not a complete ban on all REE exports. A total ban wouldn’t make much sense.

The REE business is big, and China can’t keep stockpiling these metals for long. Also, REE production is integrated to the rest of the industry, so you can’t just switch those factories off and expect everything else to keep on chugging along as usual.

If the fan is buried under a mountain of fecal matter, there’s no way you can hit it with more turds.

Previously it was thought that non-coding sequences were junk, and enormous numbers like 99% were thrown around at the time. Later, we found out that more and more of the non-coding regions actually do various other things, and the scope of junk DNA got narrower as years went by. Nowadays, you don’t really hear that term much, because future scientists have a tendency of discovering new functions for sequences that were previously thought of as non-functional. There’s also debate as to where do we draw the line.

As usual, biochemistry is a fast moving target, and people have gotten cautious about these things. As more and more is discovered, older notions are updated or even thrown away.

I mean, the torture camps already exist, and they don’t appear to be problematic in any way whatsoever. It’s going to be smooth sailing from here on out. Nothing could possibly hit the fan at this point. It’s just physically impossible.

Junk DNA.

Oh, and the investors just love this sort of uncertainty… Well as long as they sold all of their stocks a few months ago, so that now they have plenty of cash to buy everything back at half the price.

The value of USD is already falling. If China dumps a bunch of cheap dollars into the market, it could deliver the final death blow. I think China might want to wait for the right time to do that. It’s going to be expensive, and you want that sort economic attack to have the best chance of permanently ruining USA.

My evil twin from the mirror dimension. We meet at last! Or maybe I’m the evil one?

Well, not really superpowers since they are common in humans. However, they are pretty interesting abilities nonetheless.

• Advanced speech recognition. I can filter out speech of one person while ignoring other background noise and even other speech.

• Advanced face recognition. I can see faces in clouds, floors, and other inanimate objects. Also helps when looking at real faces of people in a crowd. See also: pareidolia

• Auditory hallucinations during hypnagogia. Look it up. It’s weird and trippy.

• Desensitization and habituation to capsaicin. I can eat spicy foods.

Try that with cheap mobile phone charges. They have an annoying coil whine.