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

[Keith Henson]

I have not dug deeply into RE processing, but I do know that the US
had the Mountain Pass mine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Pass_Rare_Earth_Mine
.
One major problem is pollution, I guess, from the large amount of acid
used to put the RE elements into solution and the fact the tailings
are radioactive.  It is hard to say if the stock is a good investment.
The company goes bankrupt from time to time.

Keith


On Sun, Oct 12, 2025 at 7:15 AM spike jones via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
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> From: John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [ExI] it won't work, but i have a better idea
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> On Sat, Oct 11, 2025 at 3:03 PM <spike at rainier66.com> wrote:
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>  >>… If China really does have a chokehold on materials other countries need for weapons, chips, motors and such,
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> >…It does…
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> I sense a market here.
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> > then other countries need to develop that technology themselves.  I refuse to believe we cannot develop the chemistry technology to extract these materials,
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> >…It's not a question of discovering a technological secret. It takes time and a lot of money…
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> 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.
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> >… to build the complicated factories required…
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> >…which are expensive…
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> Venture capital to the rescue!
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> >…and extremely polluting, or at least the Chinese ones are…
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> Hey cool, a marketing angle!  We have clean coal, now we can have clean dysprosium.  Do the right thing, buy clean AMERICAN praseodymium.
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> >…And it takes thousands of experienced and highly skilled people to operate those factories…
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> That part makes me wonder a bit.  Thousands?  Hell Mr. Musk is building electric cars with fewer proles than that.  We can’t extract a coupla chemicals from ore with fewer?
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> >…currently the US has zero such people…
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> We have Chinese expatriate engineers all over this valley.  I hafta think somewhere there are fellers who know from dysprosium.  The Chinese engineers who do know how to do this will likely understand their worth, and sneak out, come here, be free, plenty of good Chinese restaurants around here, they will love it.
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> >…And we can't import them from outside the country because He Who Must Not Be Named has just imposed a $100,000 fee on new H-1B visa petitions that highly skilled workers need for them to enter the country…
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> Do let me assure you, if an immigrant has the skills we need, the officials will find a way.
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> >…By the way, both the American companies Google and Nvidia (which is the most valuable company in the world) were founded by foreign immigrants, and so were many of the founders of the American company OpenAI…
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> Ain’t that cool?  Make America the place to go if you plan to start up the most valuable company in the world.
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> >…And Elon Musk was born in South Africa…
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> Whooda guessed, the richest feller on the planet would be African American?  I heard as a group, African Americans had fewer assets.  That one guy brings up the average by… how much?  Half a trillion dollars really helps the team.
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>  > if we get there first...
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> >…When it comes to rare earths it's much too late for that, a distant second is the best we can hope for…
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> Distant second is first, if the Chinese aren’t selling their product.
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> > We all have eyes and ears.  We hear and see China is casting a lustful eye toward Taiwan.
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> >…Yeah, that's a big worry because Taiwan is where 92% of the world's most advanced AI chips are manufactured, almost all of them from just one company, TSMC… John K Clark
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> Whoever has the best chip fab outside of China and Taiwan will really clean up if China takes Taiwan.
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> spike
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