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This ought to tell you something. Why does everyone assume more money equates to more security? Gargantuan defense budgets did not win American wars in Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan, where we struggled against luddites fighting in flip-flops, with AK-47s and pickup trucks.

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TyKC 7 Apr 24
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There are vast rare Earth deposits in America, China, and India. Rare Earths matter. Smartphones require rare Earths. Virtue can't produce rare Earths. Only rare Earth ore can produce rare Earths.

China owns rare Earth production, and they use it to squeeze America's balls. That should never happen. America's balls should never be squeezed. If American balls are being squeezed, then an American politician screwed up. Squeeze the balls of that politician.

America once dominated rare Earth production, with the California Mountain Pass Mine. Leftists closed down the mine with green bullying. Leftists won. The California rare Earth mine was shut down. The consequence was that China took over world production of rare Earths, and used it to squeeze America's balls. Nice job dumbasses.

California screwed up, and as a consequence, all of America's balls are getting squeezed.

Leftism is like aggressive cancer. It doesn't just destroy the place where it started. It goes out and destroys the rest of the organism.

California shut down the Mountain Pass Mine because they felt it was too polluting. Today, China mines rare Earths at the Bayan Obo Mine, and they don't give a damn about pollution. Bayan Obo is the new Chernobyl. It cranks out massive pollution. Leftists are dumbasses.

Remember India? The Indian rare Earth ore is not good enough to compete with America or China, but they have vast amounts of it. Uranium, thorium, and rare Earths are chemically similar, and they tend to be found together. As it happens, uranium and thorium are the two magic fissile elements. Thorium can be used for fission power, and India is the Saudi Arabia of thorium. Who knew?

The Shadow knows. India knows. Behold the yuge blue thorium dot on India.

China is building 20 new fission reactors, and India is builiding 10. No one else is building more than 4.

India knows.

The Indian rare Earth ore is not good enough for rare Earths, but it's good enough for thorium extraction.

India has gone all-in on thorium fission reactor technology. I'm confident they'll succeed. India has 23 Institutes of Technology. The world of American physics is loaded with badass Indian physicists.

@Hanno, what are your thoughts about thorium power?

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The British and Spanish Empire ....
Small wet island ---- Apparently infinite amounts of New World gold and silver.

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I have an entirely different perspective on this. I worked for DoD for 23 years. I was never left with the impression that the Generals and Admirals I worked for were in any way proficient in the art of war. Most were money people whose mantra was always "more is better." The way you win wars, they would say, is to have more guns, more boats, more planes, more bombs, just more of everything ala "armament capable of destroying the Earth's population tens times over was just not enough." This has been the U.S. war planning strategy for the last 70+ years. The way officers moved up the ranks was not to become connoisseurs of Sun Tzu, but do everything possible to protect their Service's "Mark." These people showed little interest in military strategy. Even in classified briefings, war strategy was rarely discussed. It was all about how to keep the other Services from finding out about your Service's budget proposals. Besides, Wall Street learned long ago that winning wars quickly and efficiently isn't good for business, but prolonging them is. What the military needs are war fighting Generals who don't owe an allegiance to a particular Service and who actually know how to fight a war and win.

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@TyKC @Hanno @rway @Derf @Krunoslav @Garsco

There is a fuss about energy storage, over designing methods.

Kenobi: Don't try it.

Don't try to store energy. Instead, cash it in. Use surplus energy to produce potassium and magnesium from seawater. Pure electrolysis. The cost is purely a function of the price of electricity. Seawater is abundantly available.

If you don't have seawater, you can fall back on air. Use energy to produce noble gases from air. Air is universally available. Using energy to produce xenon from air is the most concrete possible example of converting energy to money. Xenon is worth 1800 $/kg.

In addition to economic value, Xenon has virtue signaling value. Xenon is a miracle anaesthetic, and if it was cheap, all surgeries would use it.

Democrats want to provide free health care to everyone, but they forget that there are aspects of health care that hinge on energy. At present, energy is too expensive to provide xenon for all surgeries. Too bad. Virtue can't make xenon. Energy can.

If we had infinite cheap energy, we would have an arsenal of flying ambulances. Wouldn't that be great? Leftists would love to have this, but you need energy. Leftists hate gasoline, but what if gasoline could deliver a doctor to you fast, in a moment of emergency?

Leftists consider virtue to be more valuable than energy. It may turn out that virtue factories are more profitable than energy factories.

Nuclear reactors produce bigly xenon. Ho ho ho! Nuclear reactors are virtue factories.

Leftists virtue signal about fusion. Fusion reactors require tritium, which can only be produced in a fission reactor. Ho ho ho!

Ukraine produces bigly neon because they have surplus electricity from nuclear power, and they're cashing it in. There is a fuss that Ukrainian neon supply was disrupted, but this is false fuss. Neon is produced from air, and can be produced anywhere.

Energy storage is a red herrring. Cash in the energy, and make sure to have bigly capacity for peak loads. Have a spare coal plant with a bigass pile of coal, for peak power. Don't fuss about the coal. It's only a small fraction of overall power.

The only energy storage method that is both cheap and has yuge capacity is pumped hydro, and it's only possible if you have a yuge water reservoir, which takes up yuge land. If you have the reservoir, then rejoice, and use it. If you don't, then you shouldn't try to store the energy. Cash it in.

If you tell Democrats that free speech can be transmitted by air, Democrats will try to ban air.

This page maps the flow of energy and carbon through the industrial economy. Science for politicians. jaymaron.com/naturalresource.html [jaymaron.com]

The plot shows the primary raw materials. The cost of most of them is dominated by the cost of energy. The "embodied energy" of a material is the energy/kg required to produce it.


Seawater, percent by mass:

Sodium 1.08
Magnesium .129
Potassium .04

Air, percent by mass:
Argon .98 (.93 $/kg)
Neon .0018 (240 $/kg)
Krypton .00011 (290 $/kg)
Xenon .0000087 (1800 $/kg)

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LOL... it ought to tell you something, true; but "reduce the military budget" ain't it. 🤦

Greater capability only equates to greater security if you have the collective will to use it.
We walked away from all three of those conflicts because of our own domestic Politics.

$773 Billion is less than 20% of the Budget... and that's not even counting a couple-Trillion in "stimulus" payments here and there... But at least National Defense is a legitimate role of the Government.
The other 80% or so... goes to social and cultural bullshit that was never under the legitimate purview of the Federal Government in the first place. How 'bout we reduce some (or ALL) of that?

To win any conflict, against any enemy, you only have to do one of two things: neutralize either their ability, or their will, to continue fighting. The permanent infestation of anti-American traitors within our "gates" can be counted on to help the enemy (any enemy, it seems), by undermining our collective will to defend American values and interests.
Because they simply don't share the values of the society that feeds and coddles them with that other 80% of the budget in the first place.
They fully expect, and even claim imaginary "rights", to pillage and consume the fruits of those values like a swarm of locusts; without a thought in the world about where that prosperity came from in the first place... or what they're going to do when it's gone.

@rway

Colonel Kurtz drew attention to the concept of "will to fight".

@jaymaron This author's not entirely wrong, but starving the military budget as a ham-handed way to "force them to adapt" isn't the way to do it.
The reason Asymmetric Warfare has become the norm, is because nobody on the planet has a conventional capability that can stand toe-to-toe with the U.S. military. And they know it.
They have no choice but to find other means... and often, their only viable options are guerilla tactics and propaganda.

We used guerilla tactics with great success against the superior British forces over 200 years ago, after we learned them from the Native Americans who were using them against us for the same reasons.
None of this is new stuff. There's no "post-Conventional" era going on... it's just more of the same.

And propaganda is just a given. It's as old as warfare itself. We've lost much of our 20th-century dominance in that sphere as well, but that's our own Frankenstein monster (the Internet) that we released into the wild.
Besides, the West had already lost that information-dominance internally by the 1960's anyway, lost it to the anti-American Left.

If we foolishly abandon our conventional dominance of the Land, Sea, and Air... then what?
We just go back to hiding in the bushes waiting for bad-guys to wander by? That's dumb.
Especially if you're flying in from 6,000 miles away to drop a couple-thousand troops in the desert (quick, everybody... hide!) 😅
Conventional Warfare was dramatically successful in Iraq. We took Baghdad in about 3 weeks.
3 WEEKS! (19 March to 09 April 2003.)

You know what isn't dramatically successful?: Nation-building.
That's not what the military is for. And the State Department sucks at it, so does the U.N.

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Energy -> raw materials -> manufactured goods -> exports -> money

Maximize energy.

Money is fake. Energy is real. You can always convert energy to money, but you can't always convert money to energy. For example, California blackouts.

A currency can collapse. Energy holds its value.

Does anyone doubt that gasoline will always have value?

In the Mad Max world, the currency was gasoline.

Who controls Bartertown? The oligarch with the methane.

You miss the factor of human effort, both intellectual and then physical.
I prefer to use the concept of “value”, which are both goods and services.
Value = human labour x natural resource.x k.
K is a factor that describes how efficient the human labour is, Technology, productivity etc.

Energy is only the first step of the value chain.
However it needs human effort and a natural resource.

It is a very important concept to understand the “no free lunch” principle.

Money is just a artificial medium to facilitate the easy transfer of value.

@Hanno

Yes, K is a prime concept.

There exist sectors where K can vary widely.

There exist sectors where K is fixed, such as for the production of many raw materials, such as metals, chemicals, and plastics. For these sectors, all that matters is the price of energy. Even if you have no technology, you can win.

Many sectors of manufacturing are dominated by energy.

If a foreign student pays tuition at an American university, it counts as an American export, and it has a high value of K. Or it used to, back before American universities went woke. America threw away its K advantage.

@jaymaron

Their was a significant difference between the K of
10 000 Chinese coal miners digging with their hands vs a German lignite mine operating an automated excavator by one operator.

The rise of China is due to their rise in K.

And yes, we in the West is somehow ashamed of creating high K and is throwing it away.

Energy is the first “value” we create in almost any value chain.
However it is still a value, the most important one.

What we need is to secure the resource (oil, coal, gas and uranium/thorium) and make sure we apply the highest as possible K to it to make the most energy at the slowest rate of resource consumption.

Then appreciate that “value” and use it optimally to create and use the things we all want.

That is the simple solution to a “sustainable” future and not having wars.

For that we need the big brain kids go and work to develop that k… which fit in with our previous discussion on physicists being so important.

@Hanno

It feels like senseless regulations obstruct K.

The strip mining of coal is a well-optimized process. Nuclear reactors are a mature technology. Fermi built a nuclear reactor in 1942, damnit! What are your thoughts about the regulations situation for nuclear reactors?

Though most aspects of nuclear reactors are mature, there are also new technologies. What are your thoughts about future technology for nuclear reactors?

@jaymaron
I am obviously extremely biased towards nuclear energy.

I can tell you how senseless application of regulations killed the high temperature reactor development in Germany until Chernobyl and politics killed it.

And how it slowed down development in South Africa until politics killed it.

There are some good projects still going on in the world. The Myrrha project in Belgium I have a soft spot for and in the European contexts very important. I wish France would participate more in that.

Then there are the various projects in the US, the X-Energy is doing well and other fast reactor designs although I am not much involved there anymore.

The future? I think the only way out for Germany from energy dependence that is driving the Russian expansion is going back to nuclear.
Nuclear will always be strong in France and Korea. They have no choice.

@Hanno

"Nuclear will always be strong in France and Korea. They have no choice".

Hilarious!

Nuclear energy is the new virtue. Nuclear bias is virtue. Signal the virtue.


Analysis?

    Operational  Constructing  Shut  Aborted  Melted
                               down            down

  USA       94       2         41      2
  France    56       1         12
  China     51      20
  Russia    38       4          9     19
  Japan     33       4         23                3     Fukushima
  S Korea   24       4          2
  India     20      10          1
  Canada    19                  6
  Ukraine   15       2          3     13         1     Chernobyl
  UK        13       2         31      7
  Belgium    7                  1
  Czech Rep  6
  Germany    6                 30      4
  Pakistan   6       1
  Finland    4       1
  Hungar     4
  Slovakia   4       2          3
  Argentina  3       1
  Brazil     2       1
  UAE        1       3
  Iran       1       1
  Turkey             3
  Italy                         4     2
  N Korea            3          1     3
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They equate to more money for the MIC and logistics for corporations (and therefore US hegemony) rather than advancing the public objectives of wars.

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