No, it does not, it's just a confusion of the term reserves. That's not on you, though, because everyone constantly gets it wrong.

Reserves are not estimates of the amount of a mineral underground. To be counted as proven reserve, you need to show that the mineral is economically extractable at market prices. Specifically, by starting to extract them. They are "working inventory" of mines that have been developed, they are not our understanding of how the minerals are distributed. They are also a function of commodity prices, not something that remains constant unless you dig them.

China has so much of the worldwide production and reserves because mining is an extremely capital-intensive industry, that is also sensitive to labor costs and environmental legislation. For a long time, China had the trifecta of lax legislation, cheap labor, and sufficient political stability to attract investment. US or Europe can't compete because mining there is more expensive, the third world can't compete because people are wary of investing billions into projects that might go to zero for political stability reasons.

Should the market prices of key minerals rise to the point where it makes sense to mine them outside of China, reserves will be developed and production will shift. This will probably require political will to either tariff Chinese production or subsidize production outside China, because so far China has wielded mineral exports as a weapon only for brief periods, being careful to release exports to crater prices often enough to kill competing projects.

You don't need to be actually mining the stuff for it to be considered a reserve, at least in the Canadian (CIM) definitions. You do need at least a pre-feasibility study, and details on market prices & contracts.

The general point is right though, "mineral resources" means there's metal in the ground, "mineral reserves" means there's metal in the ground that can be economically mined, with consideration of the mining methods, infrastructure, legal title, environmental impact, metallurgy, market contracts, etc.

If the fundamentals of international resource extraction changes (which because of the increase in wages and living standards and expectations in China is happening) then we might see wide spread and rapid mining happening in the US. My questions in that scenario are 1) who will work these mines? The US is running at very high employment right now, and mining is very hard work 2) where would our ore refinement equipment and skills come from? China has 50 years of ore refinement development behind them. They have infrastructure to BUILD the infrastructure for ore extraction and refinement. My understanding is that they're uninterested in selling that currently 3) then all the other local issues like where will they be able to sell locals on building giant mines, dealing with the heavy traffic, potential environmental concerns, etc.

> China has 50 years of ore refinement development behind them.

No it doesn't (at best its about 35 years) and it often (mostly) uses equipment made in the west. In fact, if you want to extract something from the earth, its very likely you need a US firm to help you do it (depends on how hard the material is to extract).

> and ecological collapse

You can do mining responsibly, it just costs more. US firms about 20 years ago tried to get the US government to subsidize their industries to compensate for the extra costs. The politicians said no and voiced environmental concerns. So those materials started coming from China and the 3rd world where they were extracted using even dirtier methods than the US was using at the time. It turns out that pollution doesn't obey international borders though.

Finally, most of the material China exports is raw and its refined somewhere else. The only things China refines for themselves are either a) is easy and they need them domestically or b) the refining process is very dirty. Additionally, mining almost always takes place far from population centers. The basic reason for this is that all the material near population centers was extracted far in the past. Your entire take has little to no resemblance with reality.

>almost always takes place far from population centers

No in PRC case, they literally build population centers to service mining, part of third front strategy in 60s to move mining into rugged interior to protect against US/USSR. If you want to mine/process at PRC scale, you need to plop a few million people in large urban complexes i.e. boutou has 3 million people, they're not 5000 people mining towns.

It's amazing how many people think China bootstrapped its industry from first principals when all it did was lure western companies to move their production over and "learned" by copying.

Yeah, and they fell for it. Handed over all their intellectual "property" to the chinese on a silver platter. Moved all their production to China, thereby deindustrializing their own countries and impoverishing their fellow citizens to the point of nearly wiping out the middle class.

I wonder if it's even possible for the west to save itself at this point.

He bought IP from people who didn't see value in it. He obtained state subsidies and convinced politicians to see his sector as a national priority. When he couldn't buy the know how, he had it reverse engineered from samples.

West just needs to go back to what used to work, and what still works. If China could industrialize itself from practically nothing, why couldn't western countries do something similar? Some of them already did after WWII.

It's just a matter of will. And accepting that there will have to be compromises and certain level of sacrifice.

"Fell for it" looks a lot like "basically compelled by the economic impacts of public policy and political winds" so far as I can tell.

Some man in a C-suite in 2002 who was wrestling with a decision to refresh domestic factories with capital investments that would pay off over the next 15yr and be competitive for 30 or build new in China could only make that decision one way without being ousted by his own board. Even if the economics barely penciled out positively after compliance costs the political winds made it too risky.

I mean, yeah, someone fell for it. The public, the politicians, etc. etc. But it's not like anyone who didn't have to grapple with the numbers didn't know what they were doing was suspect at best, though many of course deluded themselves into believing in it.

How many decades and dollars did we spend shipping trash plastic overseas because they provided us with receipts saying they were recycling it when they were landfilling, burning or dumping it? Everyone who knew the chemistry and energy prices knew it didn't really work but still, it happened.

The fact is at some point the USA shifted from nation to an amalgamate of corporations. The US government serves the interests of corporations that have gone multinational, corporations that are barely american at this point, corporations that now kowtow before China lest they lose access to the chinese market and its growing middle class. Meanwhile China consistently demonstrates the ability to plan and execute long term strategies that advance the interests of the chinese civilization. I don't like it but I have to respect it. They're making democracies and their leaders look like complete idiots who care about nothing but muh reelection.

There's a reason western M/HREE (i.e. the strategic good stuff) strategy hedges on similar iconic clays finds like PRC, because that's the only working industrial chain that extracts M/HREEs at scale. It's why AU/Lynas focus on ionic clays and not US hardrock... which btw doesn't even pretend it will do anything meaningful for mineral security other than light REE.

US+co is trying to replicate PRC M/HREE industry, without the techstack that took PRC decades to build out, because US+co never developed these geologies in the first place. The relevant upstream extraction/mmidstream refining tech for kind of deposits was never pursued in the west.

Now west can move fast due to second mover advantage, but it's going to be slow going like PRC EUV. Until then it's going to require all sorts of parallel efforts like recycling, or materials engineering to reduce M/HREEs to mitigate gap.

Not even close. EUV lithography is as close to magic as it gets. By any reasonable assessment it shouldn't work but a few wizards somehow manage to pull it off.

The execution difference is PRC is generating enough semi talent to replicate EUV and entire semi stack sooner than later. They already have the most complete localized semi supply chain in single nation, i.e. they're doing ASML+5000 niche suppliers at once. Hence consensus estimate is they'll get there somewhere 2030-2035. Reminder EUV is basically a "tiny" ass effort from a handful of countries, for reference airbus/boeing each has 150k employees for commercial aviation, EUV was developed by 3k from Zeiss, 1k from Cymer, 13k from ASML... over 20 years of casual development. It's ultimately a hard but narrow specialization problem, hence PRC EUV prototype beating estimates/expectations. It's not magic, it's just people + cash + industrial vertical integration that PRC is uniquely well equipped to deal with.

VS west has "easier" M/HREE tree to rebuild on paper but lack both talent #s, and state capacity to execute. M/HREE is ~20 minerals each has it's own midstream extraction process that require dozens of plants and 100s of stages for 5/6/7+ sigma high end strategic use. It's a different monumental/gargantuan task, on top of the sheer fucking scale of infra involved. I noted Batou has 3 million residents for a reason, that's the scale of M/HREE industry west has to replicate. It takes 8-10 years to get a refinery up in the west, the chance of west getting 100s of highly polluting industrial chains up for M/HREE before PRC sorts out semi is close to zero. It's a mass scale industrial mobilization problem that west is uniquely not well equipped to deal with. I'd wager M/HREE more bureaucratic magic than even EUV technical magic for west.

Meanwhile, there isn't a single M/HREE plant in western pipeline that will do anything at scale until maybe 2030, only thing in pipeline is validating unproven lab extraction/refining methods by ~2028, if it works, will take years to scale extraction, and even more years to scale refining.

You illustrate a fundamental lack of understanding. 9 women can't produce a single baby in one month. That's just not how it works.

I think you really don't appreciate how utterly ridiculous the implementation details of the smaller lithography processes are. It wasn't merely limited to the west, it was limited to a single company.

> VS west has "easier" M/HREE tree to rebuild on paper but lack both talent #s, and state capacity to execute.

Wrong. The west currently lacks investors willing to shift focus to that extent and the state lacks the willingness to divert resources and step in themselves.

> It's a mass scale industrial mobilization problem that west is uniquely not well equipped to deal with.

It's not that the west is unable. We don't currently have sufficient motivation to overcome the political barriers that prevent speed.

I agree that retooling for that would take many years due to the scale of the physical infrastructure involved, and in practice will likely take multiple decades due to lack of urgency. Where I disagree is the comparison with EUV.

Lack of willingness/urgency is just loser talk for last of system capacity, i.e. overcome political barriers, especially when it's been highlighted how strategic important it is to hammer out separate REE chain. Important to distinguish between unwillingness and simple inability. Easy to strong arm TW to TSMC Arizona for leading edge goals, but can't strong arm PRC to transfer M/HREE tech.

Note I didn't say M/HREE was "easier" than EUV in technical sense. I said in terms of execution, i.e. overcoming barriers, PRC is simply going to have easier working with EUV engineering problem than west with M/HREE engineering, massive infra, domestic politics problem. So it's going to be slow going, in terms of execution time.

An economic superpower identified cutting edge lithography in general as a national priority, allocated the resources, and after something like two decades of intensive research is _still_ trailing by many years. I can't immediately think of any other commercialized technology with a similar difficulty level.

As for REE, political willingness is entirely orthogonal from physical capability. A bunch of hot air on the evening news is irrelevant. If the politicians don't allocate the funds then they clearly don't see it as a top priority. If there were a pressing need then it would get done.

Where we really see the political dysfunction is the lack of planning for the future. By the time it's an urgent need there won't be enough time left for the buildout. But that's unrelated to the topic at hand.

PRC barely focused on EUV until trade war. Entire PRC semi push was unserious until like 2018 when they elevated semi to first class discipline, and already there's got prototype out, again years head of estimates.

For difficulty - M/HREE. World also settled on PRC as functionally sole supplier for 5/6 signma purity minerals that PRC process has functionally 100% dominance in. Competitors at PRC EUV lab tech scale. That's just how market forces equalized sometimes before geopolitical disruption creates opening for new entrants.

Ultimately west see priority on REE, they're are allocating funds, they are also finding out one can't buy capability, and wanting something bad doesn't translate to getting it done. Political dysfunction is precisely relevant to the topic at hand, because political will determine what's possible at what speeds even when nation has the expertise and money.

Would you fucking stop crying already. What did you expect them to do? Commit to being a slave and leave all the value to western corps? And who asked western companies to outsource everything? It seems that for an extra buck they would sell everything. So you basically reap what you sow

Every time there is a discussion about how China is wiping the floor with the west, someone wants to chime in that they stole IP. It is an unhealthy fixation and betrays the fact that they are genuinely more efficient in many cases, even when labor costs and subsidies are removed.

Not to mention, complaining about China stealing IP is a pacifier. Even where true, it does not change the competitive dynamics at this point because any damage has already been done.

If we, as the west, want to be great, we will have to move beyond the victim stage.

    edition =

Persia as a word for the whole region is an exonym, derived of the name of a single province and the people who lived in it. Iran is the endonym that the people living in the area have understood to refer to the entire area for millennia.

It's like calling the Netherlands Holland. Everyone understands what you are talking about, but it is definitely not very precise, and some people from the region might take an exception to it. Fine for conversational use, not so much in academic literature. You might talk about the Persian Empire when referring to the Achaeminids or the Sassanids, but that comes with the understanding that while the ruling class is Persian, they rule over an empire of people, many of which are Iranian but not Persian.

When talking about ancient people and countries, it is hard to avoid using exonyms, as they are usually much better known than whatever names may have been used by natives. In many cases such names have been discovered only relatively recently, during the last century, so they are known mostly by professionals and they are rarely found in popular literature. Moreover, frequently for the native names there is a much greater uncertainty about their original pronunciation than for exonyms.

Names have familiar uses, besides the technical.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvr7rFzarYs

not exactly. Persians are also majority of people in what's now called Iran (just like Russians are majority in Russia, this is the same naming pattern as for many countries) and renaming is a result of an invasion. Talking about "ancient Iran" before it Muslims arrived is talking about Persia

If SpaceX pays too much for it, other SpaceX shareholders have a case against SpaceX leadership. If xAI accepts an offer that is too low, other xAI shareholders have a case against xAI leadership. Given that the leadership is basically the same people, they are very well incentivized to come up with a valuation that is as fair as possible.

And this is not just theoretical, Musk has already been sued successfully once on a similar case, when his companies gave out too much free support to the boring company.

They don't, so why shouldn't he think that way?

This is indeed best practice because it allows you to alert based on key: if you receive a login on a machine with your backup key, but you haven't lost your devices, then you know your backup was compromised. If you take backups of your regular key then it would be much more difficult to notice a problem.

Note that you would never need to go get the smart-card just to perform incremental registration between it and a new remote host/service. You just need its pubkey, which can live in your password manager or wherever.

And yet, if your house burns down, you can go get that smart-card, and use it to get back into all your services.

And yet also, unlike a backup of another of your keys, if you find out that someone broke into your house and stole your safe, or robbed your bank, etc, then you can separately revoke the access of the pubkey associated with the smart-card, without affecting / requiring the rolling of the keys associated with your other devices. (And the ideal additional layer of passphrase protection for the card, gives you a time window to realize your card has been taken, and perform this revocation step, before the card can be cracked and used.)

Indeed, as the sibling comment mentions, this is vaguely similar to a (symmetrically passphrase-encrypted) backup of a unique extra KPI keypair onto a USB stick or somesuch.

The major difference, though, is that because a backup of a key is truly "just data", an attacker can copy off the encrypted file (or image the raw bytes of the encrypted USB disk), and then spawn 10000 compute instances to attempt to crack that encrypted file / disk image.

Whereas, even when in possession of the smart-card, the attacker can't make 10000 copies of the data held in the smart-card. All they can do is attack the single smart-card they have — where doing so may in turn cause the smart-card to delete said data, or to apply exponential-backoff to failed attempts to activate/use the key material. The workflow becomes less like traditional password cracking, and more like interrogating a human (who has been explicitly trained in Resistance-to-Interrogation techniques.)

The reality is that TSMC has no competition capable of shipping an equivalent product. If AI fizzles out completely, the only way Apple can choose to not use TSMC is if they decide to ship an inferior product.

A world where TSMC drains all the venture capital out of all the AI startups, using NVidia as an intermediary, and then all the bubble pops and they all go under is a perfectly happy place for TSMC. In these market conditions they are asking cash upfront. The worst that can happen is that they overbuild capacity using other people's money that they don't have to pay back, leaving them in an even more dominant position in the crash that follows.