India wasn't dragged into intrigue by Japan. India was blockaded by China BECAUSE Japan (and South Korea) are working on building an ExChina supply chain for REE processing within India, and becuase Taiwan has begun moving it's dual use ESM chain to India [0][1]. A lot of India-Taiwan military collaboration is occuring at IIT Ropar [2], which has become a de facto hub for Indian defense tech [3] (most of their "AI" research is tracking and C-UAS applications). Essentially, India is viewed by China as a potential competitor that needs to be nipped in the bud [5].

The Japanese government, Toyota, and the Indian government began a REE joint venture back in 2009 called Toyotsu Rare Earths India Ltd [4] that dramatically expanded after China started a trade war with Japan over the Senkaku Diaoyu islands in 2012.

> That’s pretty big news if true

It has been in Japan and India for months now. This is why the Indian government began a massive processing campaign over the past 1-2 years with Japanese and Korean involvement, along with a push for EESM mass production.

[0] - https://english.cw.com.tw/article/article.action?id=4196

[1] - https://cuashub.com/en/content/a-geopolitical-game-of-drones...

[2] - https://www.iitrpr.ac.in/indo-taiwan/

[3] - https://www.iitrpr.ac.in/coe-sards

[4] - https://trei.co.in/

[5] - https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/cfer-202...

User name does not check out. :-)

> I think it would take me two days to clear out the house

my experience helping clear out a hoarding family member's house tells me this is highly unlikely.

>it would take me two days to clear out the house

"I'm not addicted, I can quit anytime I want"

> And I disagree, I think it would take me two days to clear out the house, but mostly lack the energy and motivation to do it

Likely you’re psychologically unable to ever do it, but it’s comforting to have this convenient lie.

There’s only one way to know.

Maybe just one room?

In starting from scratch, you also run the risk of recreating, from first principles, the thing your are trying to replace.

You can do it with structures maintained by taxing other people's labour, though.

How do you think policy that affects whole groups of people, or even a whole country, is made? Not talking about just Trump/DOGE, or even just US or just 2025. In general and globally.

Goverments and lawmakers do get to "do that with people's lives". And they do that, affecting them, all the time. Including affecting them negatively a lot of the time.

And it gets worse: ineffective bureucracies (or incompetend ones) also "get to do that with people's lives"

["that" being: affecting them negatively, destroying their livehood, even causing deaths, e.g. consider some country's organization similar to FEMA being incompetent when there's a crisis].

it's a shame government itself has never been bound by that rule in the past.

What does this mean, practically?

We can never reduce the size of the federal workforce because it means people will lose jobs?

We can never cut any federal benefit or subsidy regardless of the cost, importance, or overall value to society because someone, somewhere is benefiting from it?

Clearly you’ve never dealt with a government before.

Who said anything about rebuilding? The party in power wants the government (of the people) to have less of everything except authority for their own role.

Yeah, because shutting down an ineffective bureucracy and replacing it with a new organization necessarily leads to chaos and mayhem /s

And obviously sustaining an ineffective bureaucracy can never itself lead to the deaths of children and the elderly /s

better analogy: the majority of fouix-gras birds would prefer not to be force-fed and caged.

The people working in the bureaucracy do not have the authority to overhaul it.

Here we have the "stupid" bit of my reference. No, the budget should not track population growth, because improved technology means that occasionally the cost to provide the same service to an individual decreases, whereupon the budget should also decrease. Or, for instance, a military threat or other transient event (eg COVID) that necessitated temporarily elevated funding levels expires, and the budget should decrease accordingly.

The converse being, of course, that sometimes transient events or large shifts (eg increase in costs of materials used to make some important good that the government procures) make things cost more, and so the budget should increase in proportion to those beyond population growth.

Some companies manage to maintain war chests, others have some insane "we had EOY leftover budget so we spent it on another redesign" craziness going on. Ditto with the "we must spend it, otherwise we'll get less next year". Where do such terrible incentives come from?

When did I ever try to justify those budget increases or cuts? You need to improve your reading comprehension.

That seems like a difficult position to make coherent. The comment seems to start by arguing that government spending should increase as much as is reasonably possible because it draws resources away from billionaires.

Then the second half seems to be a complaint that increasing government spending has created a resource for billionaires to draw from to enrich themselves.

It seems that if you believe the first, the second is hard to complain about. There is a social contract that the billionaires must fund [yea much] government. They are. If they then pay a little extra tax and it goes in a circular loop back to them, which is weird but I'm not sure how you are arguing it to be a problem - clearly under this frame they are going to be worse off than when they started, so they have been taxed some amount. The question is whether that amount is reasonable or not, I suppose. But that has nothing to do with whether they have a custom of a ceremonial handing of some billionaire money to the government to be handed back to the billionaire on top of their taxes.

And here we have a double demonstration of both stupid and malicious.

> If economy grows by roughly even percentage each year same should be true about government budgets

Stupid. For the purposes of this discussion, the government exists to provide services. The cost of those services, in general, decreases with economic productivity.

> Otherwise you just leave money on the table for billionaires to scoop up and sit on.

Both stupid and malicious. Mind-bogglingly stupid, because that profit isn't just captured by the wealthy, but by all economic classes. Malicious, because you'd rather sabotage the economy than let some people take excess profits based on their wealth alone.

Increase in GDP is created by inflation and increases in productivity.

Government budgets should increase with inflation but there is zero reason for them to partake in the increase in productivity. Increases in productivity should, generally, also be applicable to government programs and, as such, they should get relatively cheaper over time, not more expensive.

If we want to _add_ programs, government budgets should increase in kind but the efficiency of government should rise over time as the things required to run government become cheaper. This rarely happens though because government programs don't have the same incentives that lead to increases in efficiency.

It's funny you're so against billionaires scooping up that money but want the government to scoop it up instead. Government is just big business with guns.

Or just actually deliver what people need faster and better?

Well if our choice is a hypothetical fire all the political operators or fire randomly then random will leave more political operators.

I don't know anything much about the history of Sanders's rhetoric specifically, but: Inflation and economic growth mean that "millionaire" very much doesn't mean what it used to N years ago, and more so the larger N is. (And Sanders has been around for a while, so N can be pretty big if you're comparing early-Sanders with late-Sanders.)

If you believe something along the lines of "the richest 1% of society, the ones who have > 10x more wealth each than a typical upper-middle-class person, have too much money and too much power and we should change that" -- which I think is the kind of thing Sanders believes -- then talking about "millionaires" was a reasonable way to express that 50 years ago; these days what we need is a word whose meaning is more like "person with $20M or more"; give it another 50 years and "billionaires" might express roughly the same meaning that "millionaires" did in 1975. (Or, of course, there might be a huge economic crash, or a currency devaluation, or a technological singularity, or something.)

So someone could switch from complaining about "millionaires" to complaining about "billionaires" just because the way the meanings of those words have shifted means that the best word for pointing at a particular social issue used to be "millionaires" and is now "billionaires".

Because we really only have "millionaire" and "billionaire" and, more generally, numbers spaced by powers of 1000, the sets of people you can talk about pithily change over time. So, at the moment, you can talk about "millionaires" and be referencing something like the top 15% of US households (so if you're wanting to engage in some hostile rhetoric, pointing it at "millionaires" is probably broader than you want for several reasons); or you can talk about "billionaires" and be referencing something more like the top 0.0003% (so if you're wanting to raise money by redistribution, "billionaires" is probably much narrower than you want).

I suspect there are a few good PhD theses to be written investigating questions like "do populist-leftist movements have more success in places/times where some handy term like 'millionaire' picks out roughly the top 0.3%-3% of the population than in places where there's no word that does that?".

(Note: numbers above are in the right ballpark but I make no claim that careful calculation wouldn't change them somewhat.)

You probably meant to write "millionaire himself", and I don't know if it's true, but yes, same principle

> DOGE toppled existing incentive structures

DOGE attacked organizations investigating companies owned by Musk. Nothing else.

> DOGE toppled existing incentive structures, yes

> emphasising cost reduction

no.

[dead]

Doesn't work. China's export controls on rare earths are product-based, not country based. You can buy motors, but not magnets.

China has started in recent years to increase production of liquid fuels from coal (essentially what Germans did in WWII but much improved). That competes with oil when prices are above 80. With that it makes no sense for them to even try shale as those will be more expensive.

A mandate for government orgs including the military to exclusively use "all domestic" suppliers is laudable but also subject to graft and corruption - companies need to compete to get into the "in" club and admittance will be "gated" by favouritism, political alliance, and whatever grease needed to get you into that club. And once in, you're always tempted to collude ... partition the pie amongst the "competition" while petitioning the government to grow the pie ...

Yes, you _can_ try to regulate your way out of that. It'll result in a giant thicket of rulebooks, laws, procedures and processes. Exactly what a "slim" state would not want to see ...

(I am not sure there is a perfect way out; "extremely strong" gating criteria though tend to always favour the incumbents, and a prescription of "100% domestic all the way through" is a strong gating criterion if I've ever seen one)

If you exhaust your local supply first you put yourself at a strategic disadvantage.

> On the one a hand I'd rather export our environmental disaster,

That's what Europe has done when it comes to most of its industry, and that is a big reason why now we (I'm from Europe myself) have to buy stuff like weapons from the Americans.

America's over-production of corn/maize is a direct result of Nixon. His administration knew how to deal with protesting hippies, but when farmers & housewives started protesting, the response was to heavily subsidize corn/maize production. With vast quantities of the stuff, companies looked to find uses for the stuff. Two books that describe the situation are Omnivore's Dilemma and Altered Harvest. The subsidies for growing maize/corn make it cheap, add in the tariffs on sugar imports and that explains why HFCS is ubiquitous.

0 - https://www.amazon.com/Omnivores-Dilemma-Natural-History-Mea...

1 - https://www.amazon.com/Altered-Harvest-Jack-Doyle/dp/0670115... This book also explains why tea is the British beverage (and not coffee), or how the Irish potato famine happened. And it explains the source of the corn blight that caused rioting farmers & housewives - texas male-sterile cytoplasm was used by all the hybrid seed companies, so a blight that affected one plant affected 80% of the US corn/maize crop.

These two topics are not remotely the same or even in the same league.

In fact you could very easily argue that the reliance on HFCS which is native grown and keeps a huge amount of tillable land in production is a national security asset. It keeps farmers (and thus the institutional knowledge that can easily be switched to other crops in dire emergency) in business vs. importing a product from overseas to replace it.

If the argument was removing sugar from most products - sure! But it's not like "banning" HFCS is going to change anything when you simply switch it out for beet or cane sugar instead. It's the sugar, not the slight difference in molecules, that cause the health problems. The only real health argument against HFCS is that it's so cheap it ends up in everything. But that likely has more to do with the war on fats from past eras than much else.

I don't want to go too far down the rabbit hole on this topic, but in the context of national security HFCS vs. Cane Sugar is a clear win.

Most likely because America has been in a political dead lock for the last 2 decades. Everything supported by one party is rejected by the other, everything that would benefit one state is a detriment to another, everything that would benefit the masses are extremely rejected by very load minorities. There is a strong man in charge pushing every button to see what happens, in the course of things it will turn out that at least one or two of them were far overdue to be pushed.

From 2004...

https://inthesetimes.com/article/magnet-consolidation-threat...

> obviously popular that I don't understand why it was never an issue before.

Maybe previous administrations have been economically incentivized to not fix those problems. Perhaps those previous administrations didn't have our best interests in mind.

I think its reasonable to assume the US demand is so large that any laundering of resources can not be disguised easily simply due to the quantity. Countries with sudden spikes in demand with no way to explain the need for the demand will be suspect.

IDK, China are requiring a license to export magnets, and I hear it is not easy to get

Up until the US went into debt to fund the arms race, things were great. Now that there's so much debt and unfettered financial engineering by Wall Street, the idea we can get get back to "the American Dream is a home with a white picket fence" is impossible.

  U.S. Corporate Tax Revenue as a Percentage of GDP (1900–2020s)
  Decade Corporate Tax Revenue as % of GDP
  1900s ~0.1%
  1910s ~0.5%
  1920s ~0.8%
  1930s ~1.0%
  1940s ~4.0%
  1950s ~4.3%
  1960s ~3.5%
  1970s ~3.0%
  1980s ~2.5%
  1990s ~2.5%
  2000s ~1.3%
  2010s ~1.0%
  2020s (est.) ~1.0% (varies slightly)

  U.S. Individual Income Tax Revenue as a Percentage of GDP (1900-2020s)
  Decade Income Tax Revenue as % of GDP
  1900s ~0.0%
  1910s ~0.5%
  1920s ~1.5%
  1930s ~3.5%
  1940s ~7.5%
  1950s ~8.0%
  1960s ~8.0%
  1970s ~8.5%
  1980s ~8.0%
  1990s ~8.0%
  2000s ~8.5%
  2010s ~8.0%
  2020s (est.) ~8.0% (varies slightly)

To me it was WW2 and the lingering "intelligence apparatus" it spawned. We went from using our resources for national security and started using it to steal banana plantation land and contracts in South America. It went from a necessary evil to a clandestine service available to the highest bidder.

Lots of comments below. I think Reagan “Government doesn’t help” campaign + (obviously) big tax cuts were the beginning of the end. Early 1980s was the beginning of deficit spending and tax cuts based on the Laffer Curve big lie. Bush followed suit, and Obama/Biden realized that the American people would gladly elect presidents who spent borrowed money.

Unclear how we recover as a country given the reach of the Fox News propaganda. Maybe a huge recession?

WtfHappenedIn1971.com

A-12 Oxcart

I think that was the SR-71, but yeah.

They got the titanium from the Soviet Union, so not exactly an ally. The US just lied about using it for pizza ovens instead of jets.

> Japan and South Korea are not western nations and hence not part of the west

Japan and South Korea are commonly treated as being part of the West for the same reason Australia is - they are geographically in Asia but aligned with the United States and EU.

If you don't like Japan or South Korea being called "Western" we can call them NATO+ then.

> Think it had more to do with the US forcing Japan to join its trade war against china. Don't you?

Japan began moving REE processing to India all the way back to 2010-12 when the Senkaku Diaoyu standoff happenened and China blockaded Japanese access to REEs. That's when both Toyota and Hitachi began working with IREL on REE extraction and processing.

And China initiated the trade war with Japan all the way back to the Senkaku Diaoyu standoff, just like China initiated the trade war with South Korea due to South Korea allowing THAAD deployments. The interest in developing an ExChina supply in Japan and South Korea has existed ever since China was the aggressor to both countries.

And Japan (as well as South Korea) has been an economic partner of India since all the way back during the socialist 1980s era. Japanese JVs like Maruti Suzuki, Tata Hitachi, Tata Docomo, Sumimoto Chemicals India, and others have been around for decades. Heck, it was Softbank that helped spark India's startup boom in the 2000s and 2010s which became the IPO boom today.

Fair enough .. I hope for the US's sake it doesn't merge with the DoHS to wage war on the 'wrong type' of US citizen ... (now designated terrorists).

'Active clubs' are on the rise - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/19/active-clubs...

If you change requirements all the time and never deliver, then no, you're not trying hard enough. Plan, Build, Evaluate, Learn.

The general sense in DC was that DOGE was never going to make it to DoD because

a) many of the individual people leading DOGE benefit personally from DoD spending (which is not true of IRS, HHS, USAID, etc), and

b) most civilian policy leaders in this administration have built their political brand around boosting the military, and dramatic cuts don’t align with that.

> >DOGE never seriously tried, or even discussed, tackling that problem. > > They got shut down and the Trump-Musk thing flared up more or less the nanosecond they looked at the DOD. Sad, but they never had the political capital to win that fight. They probably could've done some good slashing around in there.

What "good slashing" did they actually do anywhere to assume they would have done good there?

It is even deeper than that. The problem is that voters do not have faith in the organizations created to oversee and regulate government waste. Perhaps there isn't enough visibility. Or maybe the typical shenanigans that commenters love to harp on hides the actual good work that public servants sometimes do in managing the public purse.

So as with most political challenges, it all comes down to trust, and a failure to garner it.

The lack of trust then creates the vaccuum into which silly notions of thinking a coffee cup is worth a grand, or an ashtray is tens of thousands of dollars, or the magic hammer that is the same as a normal hammer but costs 100x, or whatever.

What are you talking about? Reducing government revenue does not increase government spending.

That would help a tiny amount. The bigger problem, which GP alluded to and which is very, very frustrating to entangle, is the incentives around accountability. Pahlka’s writing puts it better than I could:

https://www.eatingpolicy.com/p/the-water-is-a-mirror

https://www.niskanencenter.org/culture-eats-policy/

We get the project management we pay for. You can outsource implementation but you can't outsource accountability; ultimately, the only way to get effective government is to build up project management expertise in-house, and to do that you need to be willing to match the pay and conditions (including but not limited to reliable long-term employment) that skilled project managers could obtain in private industry.

old people in china don't have computers, they use smart phones

The Chinese pirate Windows extensively, and the code has been leaked before. If IP law goes out the window, they will do whatever the hell they want.

How would you effectively stop windows updates to china? Bypassing the Windows activation measures isn't stopping single pirates (or people still wanting Windows 7 updates intended for big business with legacy devices), the only way to stop windows updates is preventing access to it. It's impossible to do so while still having Windows as an Operating System that people outside high security environments use.

I disagree with that "argument" for the reasons I stated. China has a billion people, including tons of programmers. They will rapidly build whatever software they need if push comes to shove, potentially starting with Windows source code or Linux. There may be a team working for the Chinese government in secret doing this as we speak, ready to push an update to millions of PCs over China's heavily censored and manipulated Internet. They have mandatory software installed on practically every PC that could be used to facilitate this "upgrade" automatically. I promise, installing Linux or a hacked version of Windows can happen way faster than any mining operations to provide the minerals you're talking about.

As for proprietary software that runs on Windows, these would need to be handled individually. The simplest solution for them is to use old versions that need no connection to the outside world to function. There might be some risks involved but I think they will rapidly adjust.

In my opinion, China and probably other countries currently have stolen code for every major proprietary software product. They just won't use it openly or officially because of IP laws. In a war, all that will go out the window. They may not have quite as many competent people to throw at fixing issues with that software, but they will do what they can.

What about scenarios short of a war? Well, a lot of what China does for us involves IP. If they stop respecting a bunch of our IP and stop exporting things that only they currently make, they can cause tremendous damage. Go look in a store and see what is made in China. American cars currently rely on Chinese parts and materials. The Chinese can stop exporting steel if they want. They will certainly take damage but you seem to not understand the extent of the damage they can inflict on the West. Windows Updates won't mean a damn thing in the long run, or even the short run.

1. What exactly do you think are delivered in Windows Updates?

2. Why do you think the pirated versions of Windows largely used in China are getting updates?

3. What do you think happens when patches aren't applied to Windows?

Ahh, crafty. Thanks for that!

Stockpile it beforehand and don’t create pointless conflicts.

We're reasoning about the current state of things. We're /not/ suggesting this is good or should continue.

The unwritten implication is, we can do it ourselves, but the price will skyrocket as a result. I personally think that would be fine. Wait a minute and someone else will come by to yell about this the other way.

Does that mean to say "the Chinese government regularly subsidizes BYD"? Because the US regularly subsidize Ford, and I don't think you'll find any one that disagrees with that.

The vans are probably a wash, carbon-wise, because they are taking cars off the road.

I hardly ever drive anywhere these days. Pretty much everything we buy in the household comes through Amazon or another online seller, and gets delivered by vehicles that would have been on the road anyway, delivering other things to other people. The "larger picture" may be larger than you think it is.

That's not what a subsurface well is.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B97801...