[ExI] it won't work, but i have a better idea

[Adrian Tymes]

On Sun, Oct 12, 2025 at 10:15 AM spike jones via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> OK.  Now I REALLY sense a market here.  Time and money, put em together and they produce MORE money.  It is what capitalism is all about.

Yes, and China sensed this market decades ago.  That's why they went
on to establish the near-monopoly they have today.  Without starting
with a lot of money, any solution you produce, they can simply
undersell you, leaving your solution with not enough income to sustain
operations.

You seem to be approaching this from a clean-sheet angle - what some
call "blue ocean".  But that's not the reality that's out there today.

> Complicated factories, those are words that cause engineers to get turned on.  It’s why we never could get girls to pay attention to us: the ladies went for all the usual stuff: beauty, personality, athleticism and so on, they never did figure out that if they talked sexy to us about complicated factories and such, we would soooo give them anything they wanted, regardless of the other stuff.

Finding ladies who like e.g. Minecraft is a bit of a challenge, yes.

My wife is playing Minecraft in the other room as I type this email.
I love her.

> John I just have a theory that if there is money in it, America will somehow figure out how to make a factory which extracts any element we want from the ore in which traces of it exists.

Again, this is "blue ocean" thinking: "...if there is" (any) "money in
it...".  There would be some money in it, but not enough to make it
profitable given that China can undersell most of the solutions.  It's
not enough to get any money whatsoever; the operation has to,
specifically, generate enough money to make a profit given current or
likely-near-future market conditions.

> Whoever has the best chip fab outside of China and Taiwan will really clean up if China takes Taiwan.

For all the talk and hype, notice that investment money is still going
into TSMC.  Those with the money are betting that China won't take
Taiwan any time soon.  Prediction markets aren't always the best
oracle of the future, but in many cases they're the best we've got,
and this would seem to be one of those cases.
https://polymarket.com/event/will-china-invade-taiwan-before-2027
currently puts the odds of such an invasion (not even necessarily a
successful one, just enough of a serious attempt to be called an
invasion) at 15% before the end of 2026.