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

[spike at rainier66.com]

-----Original Message-----
From: Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> 
Sent: Saturday, 25 October, 2025 10:02 AM
To: spike at rainier66.com
Cc: John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com>; ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Subject: Re: [ExI] Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

On Sat, Oct 25, 2025 at 8:06 AM <spike at rainier66.com> wrote:

snip

>>... Sure but for tax advantages, wind turbines have been placed in locations which are sub-optimal and don’t really generate enough power to break even.

>...Can you cite any published study on this?

No.  I flew across country a lot between about 1995 and 2011 on business.  I saw a lot of wind farms where nothing was moving, or (something I haven't been able to understand) a few of the turbines spinning, which indicates there was wind that day.  But clearly there was a lot of capital sitting there doing nothing.  Businesses cannot survive when capital sit idle.

>...I don't know if the demand for RE elements matches the RE elements in wind turbines.  Do you?  Keith

Neodymium appears to be the one that comes up on both lists.  We have long used gallium and germanium, but we can mine and refine that stuff here.  Those have been used in chips since at least the 1980s.  We don't really need the REEs for fighter planes, hell we don't even really need the planes.  (Why should we need the planes?  Fighter pilots can't take the G loads.)

Conclusion: the notion about China having this big monopoly on REEs must be exaggerated.  If those elements are needed badly enough, we can mine the defunct turbines.  But good chance we will find enough neodymium without taking those turbines apart.  

If the wind farm investors want to recycle them for materials, that might help defray the cost of taking them back down.  Aside on that: during the wild buildup phase of wind farms, we have heard for twenty years this was coming.  We were told those were being overbuilt and were going in places where they wouldn't pay.  Well, those warning apparently turned out to be true.

spike