[ExI] Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

[Keith Henson]

On Fri, Oct 24, 2025 at 5:50 PM <spike at rainier66.com> wrote:
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com>
> >
> >>... Ja that one I kinda get.  Everyone can see we are preparing for a war with China.  They have been making aggressive moves toward Taiwan.  Sooner or later they are going to take it.
>
> >...It is not that clear.  There is no question that, at a vast cost, China could take Taiwan.  But it is not clear whether China would gain enough to make it worthwhile.  The semiconductor factories would be destroyed, and more importantly, the workers would decamp to the US...
>
> Keith I do hope you are right on that one.  Worst case scenario: China somehow arranges to capture the fabs intact, along with preventing the top-level workers from fleeing.

What might be a good deal less expensive would be to just buy off the
Taiwanese.  It might be less expensive than a war.  If I were asked,
my suggestion would be to offer them a Chinese passport and freedom to
travel anywhere in China.
> > >...  This means the advantages of mass production runs are decreased relative to smaller production runs.  The US used to be the nice country, but no longer, leaving that slot open.
>
> >...With nanotech you should be able to build anything one-off...
>
> Of course, but I am imagining the non-nanotech scenario and the non-singularity scenario for the near term.

Read Drexler's most recent book.

> >>... The trade wars are pressuring the USA and other nations to have their own production capability and resource refinement capacity.  Some consumer items go up in price, but we get stability and security in return.  So in that sense, trade wars can be a good thing. spike
>
> >...I doubt it.  Opening a new RE mine is a 5-10 year project, and as far as I know, nobody is working on it.  Can't blame them, there is a copper mine in AZ that has been held up for 20 years   A few months from now I expect defense projects like the F35 to shut down for lack of parts that contain rare earth elements.
>
> If anything super important is being held up, we can mine the permanent magnets in wind turbines.

I could not say.  I don't have a bill of materials for either an F35
or a windmill.  However, magnets are not the only use of REs in
high-tech defense hardware.  The engineers should never have been
permitted to design in materials that did not have a secure source.

> A lot of those were planted in places where they don't really pay.  Anyone who takes a flight across the USA on a clear day will see wind farms where two or three turbines are spinning wildly (demonstrating there is wind that day) while hundreds sit still and quiet.  This tells me there is insufficient demand for the power that day and insufficient (or completely utilized) energy storage.  Given that observation, one can speculate that the rare earth elements (if they really are necessary) can be mined from retired wind turbines.

I have a proposal to use all the surplus energy available.  LA trash
plus 30 GW of intermittent will make enough syngas that when converted
to jet fuel is enough to supply the fuel needs of LAX.  The problem is
that buillding the trash vaporizers will likely take longer then the
singularity.

> However... I don't think we are incapable of designing around a shortage of that stuff.

No doubt, but at what cost and what degradation of performance?

Keith

  I think we can design around it, or find it in existing
infrastructure, without too much difficulty.  If the market is there,
the Invisible Hand will find a way.  Invisible Hands are really good
at finding ways.  It may cost a lot.  But Invisible Hands like to be
paid, so they can stuff visible money into their invisible pockets.
>
> spike
>