7 ms·

I'm shocked DoD doesn't have straw buyers in friendly (or neutral) 3rd party countries to deal with that possibility.

by mothballed 1y ago

dgfitz 1y ago
I’m shocked you thought the government was ever functional enough to do something like that.
- j-bos 1y ago
  They used to, iirc that's how they sourced the titanium used in the b2 bombers, which was mined in the ussr.
  - selectodude 1y ago
    A-12 Oxcart
  - Enginerrrd 1y ago
    I think that was the SR-71, but yeah.
  - MegaButts 1y ago
    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.
- estimator7292 1y ago
  The US government was pretty decent up until ~50-100 years ago. Pretty standard, functional democracy. Lots of money and effort spent on improving the physical and social environment for the betterment of the people. You know, normal, expected stuff from a functioning government.
  - themafia 1y ago
    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.
    - rurban 1y ago
      Yes, it was Franklin Roosevelts declining health and death the fascists took over. They already brought Hitler to power, and from then on took over their state. They planned, but didn't need their Business Plot.
  - reenorap 1y ago
    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.
    - cogman10 1y ago
      "The American Dream" was made possible by government spending to subsidize home purchases. The 1950s housing act. America was great when the pocket books of the government were open to public spending and funded primarily by high taxes on the rich. In the 1950s the top marginal tax rate was 90%. What made america great was taxing the hell out of the rich and big business to the point where they'd rather invest in their employees and companies. That's what drove the innovation and quality of life improvements throughout the 50s and 60s. We abandoned that in the late 70s onwards because of an economic downturn that hit everyone. Rather than just powering through it we went with "Let's just tear down everything" and now we are dealing with what the government was like in the gilded age of the 1920s. Stories of corruption, corporate capture, and scandal are nearly identical to what we see today. We need a new deal.
      - reenorap 1y ago
        When the US has a surplus with no debt, as it was pre-Nuclear Arms race, they can afford to do things like be generous with housing, etc. We can't do that now because we have too much debt, and most of the money is being funneled to the elites.
        ckemere 1y ago
        We had a surplus under Clinton (well after Nuclear Arms race) which was parlayed into deficit by Bush tax cuts.
        reenorap 1y ago
        I misused the word "surplus". Surplus is talking about a net positive in terms of government income less spending. What I meant was total government debt. Yes we had surpluses under Clinton but the US was still deeply in debt. We went from the largest creditor nation to the largest debtor nation in the world under Ronald Reagan.
  - ckemere 1y ago
    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?
    - phil21 1y ago
      > recession This, but an actual depression that will likely make the Great Depression look like a good time - largely due to folks being a lot more self-sustaining back then due to common skillsets and lived experiences.
  - greenavocado 1y ago
    WtfHappenedIn1971.com
daedrdev 1y ago
nope, china has 90% of the market, and some of the rest are probably just secretly from china
- mothballed 1y ago
  Sure but I presume China will still want to sell stuff, even if not to the US. After it leaves their borders it's not super likely they can have an effective control on the chain of custody. What I'm referring to is diversion from foreign commerce.
  - jimnotgym 1y ago
    IDK, China are requiring a license to export magnets, and I hear it is not easy to get
  - MisterTea 1y ago
    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.
reenorap 1y ago
There is nothing rare about rare earth minerals. The only thing is that it's expensive to extract them by American workers vs Chinese workers which is why all the business went to China. The prices will have to go up in order for it to be "worth it" but now that it's a national security issue, maybe more effort will be put into this.
- dingnuts 1y ago
  it's always been a national security issue and I don't understand why it took the election of this chucklefuck to change things it's the same shit with high fructose corn syrup! everyone hates that shit, why did it take the Great Orange Menace (not to be confused with this website, the other Great Orange Menace) to get companies to realize that? I know that bringing up HFCS here is a big digression; there are probably better examples. It's just another "broken clock is right twice a day" issue from the current admin that is so obviously popular that I don't understand why it was never an issue before.
  - isk517 1y ago
    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.
    - reenorap 1y ago
      It wasn't that they were fighting each other, they were working in concert with each other, like a dance. If the Dems say one thing, the Republicans say the opposite and vice versa, because they knew it would keep both of them in power. Now we have a true Agent of Chaos in charge that doesn't heed any of the previous rules and us peons will have to deal with the fallout from that. The biggest negative repercussions is that both the Republicans and the Democrats will be completely emboldened to do whatever they want now and we are going to suffer because neither party gives a fuck about us, they only care about maintaining their own power.
alephnerd 1y ago
Ever wonder why there was a sudden spike in antimony, gallium, and germanium shipments from Thailand - a country that does not produce either of the 3 at scale - this summer? That said, much like smuggled GPUs - it is difficult to transship an export controlled material at scale.
iancmceachern 1y ago
There is historical precedent for this. As I understand it the US was only able to make the SR71s by sourcing Soviet titanium for the airframe in this manner.
- Tangurena2 1y ago
  Titanium is a fascinating metal. You can't refine it in anything close to the manner you refine every other metal. It oxidizes hundreds of degrees lower than the melting point (and Titanium Oxide is a brilliant white powder that makes paint so much brighter). Likewise, you can't try to melt it in a nitrogen-only environment because that too turns it all into TiN (a hard gold-colored ceramic material used to coat metal). It is one of those very complicated refining processes that give this electrical engineer headaches trying to follow the chemical reactions. So if you every have one of those thought experiments about traveling back in time and "inventing" steel (or gunpowder or penicillin or overthrowing the Roman Empire) hundreds of years earlier, forget about titanium because commercial scaled production couldn't happen until the 20th Century. 0 - https://www.titaniumprocessingcenter.com/titanium-history-developments-and-applications/ https://www.titaniumprocessingcenter.com/titanium-history-de...
  - iancmceachern 1y ago
    Totally, aluminum is similar
jm4 1y ago
Of course they do. The SR-71 was built with Russian titanium that the Russians believed was going to be used in pizza ovens. There’s no reason to think schemes like that ever stopped. Or that that was the first time. My guess is most countries have been doing it for as long as they have been trading.
- zdragnar 1y ago
  China has vastly stricter controls in place now than SU did back then. Not impossible, but much harder.
Animats 1y ago
They do. DoD made a deal with MP Minerals (Mountain Pass, CA) in 2024. DoD will buy rare earths at a guaranteed price which is well above the world price.[1] This followed a 2021 deal with General Motors to insure GM's magnet supply.[2] That resulted in building a modest magnet plant in an industrial park in Texas, using MP Minerals ore. This deal expanded in 2025, with DoD taking a majority stake in MP Minerals.[3] The history here is that the price goes up and down so much that the Mountain Pass mine has been shut down twice since the 1990s. There were two bankruptcies. The most recent glut and price crash was in 2015.[4] The process has four steps: 1) mining, 2) beneficiation, where mixed rare earth ores are separated out, 3) chemical separation, where the individual rare earths are separated, and 4) magnet metal making. For years, 3) wasn't done in the US, and MP Minerals was shipping ore to China for processing. [1] https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/09/20/fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-takes-further-action-to-strengthen-and-secure-critical-mineral-supply-chains/ https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/statement... [2] https://investor.gm.com/news-releases/news-release-details/general-motors-and-mp-materials-enter-long-term-supply-agreement https://investor.gm.com/news-releases/news-release-details/g... [3] https://mpmaterials.com/news/mp-materials-announces-transformational-public-private-partnership-with-the-department-of-defense-to-accelerate-u-s-rare-earth-magnet-independence https://mpmaterials.com/news/mp-materials-announces-transfor... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP_Materials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP_Materials
- NewJazz 1y ago
  Commenter meant straw buyers as in buyers of Chinese rare earths that do so at the behest of the US DoD while under the guise of buying the metals for their own use internal to whatever country they are based in.
  - Animats 1y ago
    Doesn't work. China's export controls on rare earths are product-based, not country based. You can buy motors, but not magnets.
    - 1y ago
marcosdumay 1y ago
> friendly (or neutral) 3rd party countries Well... In 2024 there were things like that.

I'm shocked DoD doesn't have straw buyers in friendly (or neutral) 3rd party countries to deal with that possibility.

dgfitz 1y ago

I’m shocked you thought the government was ever functional enough to do something like that.

j-bos 1y ago
They used to, iirc that's how they sourced the titanium used in the b2 bombers, which was mined in the ussr.
- selectodude 1y ago
  A-12 Oxcart
- Enginerrrd 1y ago
  I think that was the SR-71, but yeah.
- MegaButts 1y ago
  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.
estimator7292 1y ago
The US government was pretty decent up until ~50-100 years ago. Pretty standard, functional democracy. Lots of money and effort spent on improving the physical and social environment for the betterment of the people. You know, normal, expected stuff from a functioning government.
- themafia 1y ago
  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.
  - rurban 1y ago
    Yes, it was Franklin Roosevelts declining health and death the fascists took over. They already brought Hitler to power, and from then on took over their state. They planned, but didn't need their Business Plot.
- reenorap 1y ago
  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.
  - cogman10 1y ago
    "The American Dream" was made possible by government spending to subsidize home purchases. The 1950s housing act. America was great when the pocket books of the government were open to public spending and funded primarily by high taxes on the rich. In the 1950s the top marginal tax rate was 90%. What made america great was taxing the hell out of the rich and big business to the point where they'd rather invest in their employees and companies. That's what drove the innovation and quality of life improvements throughout the 50s and 60s. We abandoned that in the late 70s onwards because of an economic downturn that hit everyone. Rather than just powering through it we went with "Let's just tear down everything" and now we are dealing with what the government was like in the gilded age of the 1920s. Stories of corruption, corporate capture, and scandal are nearly identical to what we see today. We need a new deal.
    - reenorap 1y ago
      When the US has a surplus with no debt, as it was pre-Nuclear Arms race, they can afford to do things like be generous with housing, etc. We can't do that now because we have too much debt, and most of the money is being funneled to the elites.
      - ckemere 1y ago
        We had a surplus under Clinton (well after Nuclear Arms race) which was parlayed into deficit by Bush tax cuts.
        reenorap 1y ago
        I misused the word "surplus". Surplus is talking about a net positive in terms of government income less spending. What I meant was total government debt. Yes we had surpluses under Clinton but the US was still deeply in debt. We went from the largest creditor nation to the largest debtor nation in the world under Ronald Reagan.
- ckemere 1y ago
  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?
  - phil21 1y ago
    > recession This, but an actual depression that will likely make the Great Depression look like a good time - largely due to folks being a lot more self-sustaining back then due to common skillsets and lived experiences.
- greenavocado 1y ago
  WtfHappenedIn1971.com

daedrdev 1y ago

nope, china has 90% of the market, and some of the rest are probably just secretly from china

mothballed 1y ago
Sure but I presume China will still want to sell stuff, even if not to the US. After it leaves their borders it's not super likely they can have an effective control on the chain of custody. What I'm referring to is diversion from foreign commerce.
- jimnotgym 1y ago
  IDK, China are requiring a license to export magnets, and I hear it is not easy to get
- MisterTea 1y ago
  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.

reenorap 1y ago

There is nothing rare about rare earth minerals. The only thing is that it's expensive to extract them by American workers vs Chinese workers which is why all the business went to China. The prices will have to go up in order for it to be "worth it" but now that it's a national security issue, maybe more effort will be put into this.

dingnuts 1y ago
it's always been a national security issue and I don't understand why it took the election of this chucklefuck to change things it's the same shit with high fructose corn syrup! everyone hates that shit, why did it take the Great Orange Menace (not to be confused with this website, the other Great Orange Menace) to get companies to realize that? I know that bringing up HFCS here is a big digression; there are probably better examples. It's just another "broken clock is right twice a day" issue from the current admin that is so obviously popular that I don't understand why it was never an issue before.
- isk517 1y ago
  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.
  - reenorap 1y ago
    It wasn't that they were fighting each other, they were working in concert with each other, like a dance. If the Dems say one thing, the Republicans say the opposite and vice versa, because they knew it would keep both of them in power. Now we have a true Agent of Chaos in charge that doesn't heed any of the previous rules and us peons will have to deal with the fallout from that. The biggest negative repercussions is that both the Republicans and the Democrats will be completely emboldened to do whatever they want now and we are going to suffer because neither party gives a fuck about us, they only care about maintaining their own power.

alephnerd 1y ago

Ever wonder why there was a sudden spike in antimony, gallium, and germanium shipments from Thailand - a country that does not produce either of the 3 at scale - this summer? That said, much like smuggled GPUs - it is difficult to transship an export controlled material at scale.

iancmceachern 1y ago

There is historical precedent for this. As I understand it the US was only able to make the SR71s by sourcing Soviet titanium for the airframe in this manner.

Tangurena2 1y ago
Titanium is a fascinating metal. You can't refine it in anything close to the manner you refine every other metal. It oxidizes hundreds of degrees lower than the melting point (and Titanium Oxide is a brilliant white powder that makes paint so much brighter). Likewise, you can't try to melt it in a nitrogen-only environment because that too turns it all into TiN (a hard gold-colored ceramic material used to coat metal). It is one of those very complicated refining processes that give this electrical engineer headaches trying to follow the chemical reactions. So if you every have one of those thought experiments about traveling back in time and "inventing" steel (or gunpowder or penicillin or overthrowing the Roman Empire) hundreds of years earlier, forget about titanium because commercial scaled production couldn't happen until the 20th Century. 0 - https://www.titaniumprocessingcenter.com/titanium-history-developments-and-applications/ https://www.titaniumprocessingcenter.com/titanium-history-de...
- iancmceachern 1y ago
  Totally, aluminum is similar

jm4 1y ago

Of course they do. The SR-71 was built with Russian titanium that the Russians believed was going to be used in pizza ovens. There’s no reason to think schemes like that ever stopped. Or that that was the first time. My guess is most countries have been doing it for as long as they have been trading.

zdragnar 1y ago
China has vastly stricter controls in place now than SU did back then. Not impossible, but much harder.

Animats 1y ago

They do. DoD made a deal with MP Minerals (Mountain Pass, CA) in 2024. DoD will buy rare earths at a guaranteed price which is well above the world price.[1] This followed a 2021 deal with General Motors to insure GM's magnet supply.[2] That resulted in building a modest magnet plant in an industrial park in Texas, using MP Minerals ore. This deal expanded in 2025, with DoD taking a majority stake in MP Minerals.[3] The history here is that the price goes up and down so much that the Mountain Pass mine has been shut down twice since the 1990s. There were two bankruptcies. The most recent glut and price crash was in 2015.[4] The process has four steps: 1) mining, 2) beneficiation, where mixed rare earth ores are separated out, 3) chemical separation, where the individual rare earths are separated, and 4) magnet metal making. For years, 3) wasn't done in the US, and MP Minerals was shipping ore to China for processing. [1] https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/09/20/fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-takes-further-action-to-strengthen-and-secure-critical-mineral-supply-chains/ https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/statement... [2] https://investor.gm.com/news-releases/news-release-details/general-motors-and-mp-materials-enter-long-term-supply-agreement https://investor.gm.com/news-releases/news-release-details/g... [3] https://mpmaterials.com/news/mp-materials-announces-transformational-public-private-partnership-with-the-department-of-defense-to-accelerate-u-s-rare-earth-magnet-independence https://mpmaterials.com/news/mp-materials-announces-transfor... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP_Materials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP_Materials

NewJazz 1y ago
Commenter meant straw buyers as in buyers of Chinese rare earths that do so at the behest of the US DoD while under the guise of buying the metals for their own use internal to whatever country they are based in.
- Animats 1y ago
  Doesn't work. China's export controls on rare earths are product-based, not country based. You can buy motors, but not magnets.
  - 1y ago

marcosdumay 1y ago

> friendly (or neutral) 3rd party countries Well... In 2024 there were things like that.