mircea_popescu: yet somehow in their minds the idea doesn't form that... hello ? anyone home ? ☟︎

mircea_popescu: meanwhile, during THAT EXACT INTERVAL, this set of 10-20 metals did EXACTLY what they had hoped their dead horse would do.

mircea_popescu: my concern was more cultural, so to speak. here are these dudes, maybe 100k of them, all heads counted. they're mostly over 50 white men, who have for 30 years been buying and hoping.

mircea_popescu: but in all fairness this thing, while in principle promising, is mroe than a few tweaks away.

mircea_popescu: anyway. i always thought all the work in fine graphite fibers is really intended to do this, eventually.

mircea_popescu: this "from the clouds down" approach... who cares about "the entire world", srsly ?

mircea_popescu: but yes, perhaps getting there.

mircea_popescu: the x per day bla bla figure is spurious. obviously there's a shitton of energy there. the problem is we don't yet have the filters.

mircea_popescu: i thought you wanted it made the only way we know how to create elements atm.

mircea_popescu: that's all i was saying really. making your own rare metals may work, but it won't be this century. ☟︎

mircea_popescu: that's what i was answering to.

mircea_popescu: decimation the idea was that somehow you create the hafnium you use in your laptop through a fission process that happened during your lifetime.

mircea_popescu: 4kb times better off, to be specific.

mircea_popescu: but it boils down to the simple fact that if you're a mile away your share of the sphere surface is tiny, whereas if you're surrounding the item, your share's 100%. distance is a much better insulator than mass, because distance goes into the formula ^3. and consequently you're better off a mile away from a ton's worth of criticality than with a gram of the stuff in your colon.

mircea_popescu: (i have the math done on the difference between being exposed to a meltdown outside and being exposed to ingested material, if the obvious difference's aren't obvious i can dig it up)

mircea_popescu: fission may well be the safest method of electricity production. that's not in discussion. a large part of WHY it is the safest involves not sticking bits of a reactor core inside you.

mircea_popescu: but i will note for jurov's benefit exactly what the differences are between his great friend to the east and his great friend to the west.

mircea_popescu: at least a dozen people died the first week.

mircea_popescu: is this a rehash of the entire russian song and dance about how "nobody died at chernobyl" ?

mircea_popescu: well in this case the reasons seem to be more like, "because it will kill you painfully."

mircea_popescu: i doubt you'll ever be able to put up your gf's butt something that was inside a reactor core during your lifetime.

mircea_popescu: the trawlers that pretty much took all the fish, 1965-2015 can be refurbished to suck out the rare earths too, 2015-2065.

mircea_popescu: yes. the fact that they can't currently be extracted efficiently from electronics scrap speaks volumes.

mircea_popescu: it is actually not unreasonable to overspend on sustainability when building a mine.

mircea_popescu: decimation soon to come to a strip mine/mall near you!

mircea_popescu: i guess alf's observation re kalash bullets, copper and izhevsk is so difficult to grok and utterly advanced people just can't wrap their heads around the fact that copper's not really the only superiority metal. ☟︎

mircea_popescu: nobody yet wanted to be africa and failed to get its wish.

mircea_popescu: but his much more important failures when trying to preserve soime sort of future for that country get ignored throughout.

mircea_popescu: iirc obama even whined at the wtc about china rare earth policy

mircea_popescu: and you simply can't beat a value proposition like "either have europium or not be able to display the color red - it's that simple".

mircea_popescu: meanwhile every time china cuts quotas, the futures go into 10x explosions.

mircea_popescu: it's just not a bottleneck atm. sure, maybe it will become. who knew, in the 60s, that mountain pass thing in pasadena would be the most strategically important place in all the us.

mircea_popescu: those are the two main things.

mircea_popescu: except electric contacts are not really where the cut lies atm. optic interactions (hence hafnium - ever seen an ingot with the microflim effect btw ?) ☟︎

mircea_popescu: europium phosphates for instance are still to this day the only way to get a decent red.

mircea_popescu: (brazil and australia pretty much own the known hf supply atm). in any case, pretty fucking weird that goldbugs and silverheads still insist with their "precious" metals. they're useless. pm freaks of 2015 really should collect hf. cerium. lanthanum. europium. etc.

mircea_popescu: this century will be the rare earths century. ☟︎

mircea_popescu: prolly hafnium oxide, which should make the world situation ever more interesting.

mircea_popescu: oh this is resistive memory. ☟︎

mircea_popescu: only real clue being the "non volatile" part

mircea_popescu: good for 'em... i wonder if this is the glass thing being discussed for the past year

mircea_popescu: i thought it was built from the clouds down, honestly.

mircea_popescu: i mean what the shit is this even.

mircea_popescu: "Following more than a decade of research and development, 3D XPoint technology was built from the ground up to address the need for non-volatile, high-performance, high-endurance and high-capacity storage and memory at an affordable cost."

mircea_popescu: kakobrekla interesting. tho i don't get enough from that article to figure out how the fuck it'd work

mircea_popescu: bwaha jurov that kicks ass

mircea_popescu: but bdb has come to expect!