Re: China resumes export of Nexperia chips, with some restrictions

That wouldn't have been all that logical back when I was doing detailed design. They did have some unique parts.

The Chinese always sold the their rare earths for less than the cost of production whenever anybody tried to get into the market. They had to keep it up until the competition had gone bust or chosen to sell out to a chinese buyer.

Whether Trump has the attention span to keep subsidising non-Chinese sources for long enough to let them become reliable sources is an interesting question. It takes while to get the processing plants built and running smoothly, and even longer to get them big enough to swamp the economies of scale in the Chinese operation.

With rare earths it will be while before you can do that

The message may be obvious to you. There's nothing Mao-specific in the Chinese scheme to corner the market in rare earths. De Beers did the same with diamonds for ages, without having China's population and industries to pay the cost of under-cutting the competition.

They mostly have cheap discretes that can be got elsewhere.

What specific parts do you refer to?

OK, it may take a while.

Will the Chinese stop all exports of rare earths, to the whole world? They'd have to to keep US companies from getting them.

De Beers had access to African diamonds, and diamonds are rare elsewhere. Rare earths are "rare" because of their low concentrations, not their geographic distribution.

Processing them is a nasty, dirty, dangerous business that needs lots of cheap expendable labor and lots of land to pollute. Think Mao.

De Beers killed a lot of cheap labor in the mines. Mao killed more.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Pretty sure he's focused on regime change in Venezuela right now. Two of America's biggest failures, the War on Drugs and the Iraq War, but in one package! What could go wrong?! Where's Maduro hiding those drugs and/or aluminum tubes..

Illegal drugs kill more Americans than car accidents.

Intercepting incoming drugs will drive up the street price and reduce consumption and save lives.

And it would be great if the Chinese can be persuaded from killing our kids.

As the US applies pressure, the drug sales are shifting to europe.

That's all Econ 101.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

It was twenty years ago, and it was a fast TTL buffer - I was delivering bytes in parallel to be serialised in a fast ECL timing system, and nothing else was fast enough. I'd been able to use ECL ram for a previous version, but by 1995 Iran was trying to get hold of them for their radar systems, and European universities couldn't buy them.

And that is a problem when you have a "mercurial" president.

That's exactly what they threatened to do.

In the same way the US stopped Russia from getting advanced integrated circuits in the 1980s. They didn't do a perfect job, but they came close enough.

But the techniques used to keep the price up are pretty standard.

Processing rare earth ores to get the rare earths is just chemistry. If you spend enough on automating the process, you don't need cheap expendable labour - machines are faster and more careful (if you design them right), and you can extract the dangerous pollutants and dispose of them safely. Cheap and dirty is a option, but not one that people take when working in their own backyards.

It's a choice management can make if the cheap labour isn't unionised. Democratic governments listen to trade unions. The US claim to be a democracy looks a bit unrealistic when you look at their anti-union legislation. It's a plutocracy, despite all the propaganda.

Prohibition doesn't work. America tried it against ethanol and gave up. The war on drugs was the same prescription applied to heroin and cocaine and it hasn't worked either.

Harm reduction is a more effective route to reducing drug related deaths.

Who use harm reduction to limit the damage they do.

Simple-minded economics ignores all the other choices society can make.

One of the things that makes drugs of addiction particularly lethal in the US is the high level of income inequality. If you haven't got enough money, you spend some of what you have on getting your kicks cheaply, even if it is likely to kill you.

Reducing US income inequality would probably be a much more effective tactic, but rich Americans wouldn't like it, and they don't much care about the fate of the kids of less-rich Americans.

Where they don't do anything like as much damage.

That's all about Venezuela shipping cocaine to the US, not Europe.

It's impressive how many kids of the rich are killed by ODs. And how many movie stars and popular musicians. The 27 Club.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

But there aren't all that many of them. And if it killed an appreciable proportion of that group, the US would do something about it.

Newspapers and the media do highlight the deaths of the rich and famous, when they happen. The deaths of the less well-off don't sell newspapers.

The US druglords will just be synthesizing more of it. That's Econ 101 too.

Jeroen Belleman

The precursor chemicals come mostly from China and south america and Afghanistan. It would be hard to hide a wide-scale domestic drug manufacturing industry.

The people who make, import, or sell fentanyl and meth and heroin are mass murderers, and we should treat them as such.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

It's a useful and powerful analgesic too.

Jeroen Belleman

Fentanyl is a decent anesthetic. I don't personally use it because it makes me nauseous.

I think the only legal use of cocaine is in eye surgery.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

I wouldn't know, I've never had it.

Many "illegal" substances have useful medical applications. It would be criminal to deprive patients from substances that can be of genuine help just because some part of the population abuses them to drug themselves to death.

You need control, not prohibition.

I'm tempted to add 'think of it as evolution in action', but I recognize that that is no solution.

Jeroen Belleman

They stole US idea: they would refuse to sell rare earths to anybody who would resell them to prohibited entites (read USA).

The people who won't sell medical grade fentanyl, meth and heroin to the people who use them, and force them to get them from unreliable suppliers of low quality products are the actual mass murderers and should be treated as such.

The harm reduction approach is to supply addicts with medical quality products, and insist that they be consumed at the point of supply so that they can't be sold on to other addicts, and any adverse reactions can get treated on the spot.

The US is set up to allow people who make a lot of money out of behaving badly to keep on making lots of money and paying out some of it in bribes of various sorts. The new East Wing of the White House is being paid for by some of those bribes.

What a warped way of looking at the problem, The people who promoted the drugs in the first place and got vulnerable people hooked on them are murderers. If they had been got rid of promptly, the problem wouldn't exist.

Rare earths don't have part numbers and top marks like ICs.

The USA and Australia can ramp up RE production. The chinese can posture but probably aren't dumb enough to destroy their own business.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics