Its market value is clearly not high enough or they wouldn't use it in disposable vapes.

We need to lighten up on smoking. Professionals should be able to smoke and drink in the office and every else can stop being a baby about it. Yes it stinks, but so do your coworkers. Haters need to step aside.

Because China has stated they will take Taiwan, they have been threatening Philippines sovereignty too. Japan and others are on edge too. China currently has been behaving very adversarial and has a huge fraction of the minerals under their control that this article is posting about. I think sovereignty is a good thing. Plan for the worst, hope for the best.

A war with large geographic scope has been independently modeled as having a high probability of occurring circa 2030 by major governments for a decade or more. As time has passed, reality has not diverged from those models, so confidence in the conclusions have grown. It is worth noting that this pre-dates current political dramas, Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, etc. The underlying strategic geopolitics driving it is much deeper than those issues.

It has been accompanied by a large spike in military spending globally. The backlog of foreign military sales of US weapons just waiting for approval is ~$1T.

This level of preparation does not strike me as "so hard". Seems to me that if we in America and Europe were really preparing for a war there are a lot of things we would want to do that we are not doing.

because the empire sees no other way but war to maintain dominance, scratch that, avoid dissolution. so folks all over the world prepare, and rightly so if u ask me.

spoiler alert: the cozy days of the colonial west are over. it will all be over soon, and one can hope but i don't guarantee surviving will be necessarily a lucky draw.

btw, this would explain fermi's paradox pretty well.

War with China has been on the roadmap for 10+ years.

The military build-up in China is world war scale.

Because some idiot leaders threw diplomacy & international law out the window?

So.. back to how things were done in the old days.

I hope its less because of war and more because its better to not be so dependent on other countries, similar to how Europe is trying to rely less on the US for digital infrastructure.

I also feel like the boomers offshoring everything to China in the 70's is one of the reasons things are worse off nowadays, but I digress.

The Juche is on the loose.

A lot of the answe are reddit-esque throwaway answers and political shill bots, but for a more nuanced answer. For a long timeant people were brought up on the "End of History" idea. That after the Cold war mankind would all get together and sign kimbaya, that war as we knew it was over, sure there would be atrocities and "policing actions" that would be needed to stop some bad guys but everything was good wars of the past were over and it was all good.

This started to unravel as things got more tense with the increasing militarization of China and centealzatuon of power in Xi as well as well as Putins more aggressive moves.

The Ukraine war kicked the whole structure over and dillusioned a lot of people. The problem is that if suddenly history isn't over and war is a possibility again you need to start preparing for it. If you choose not to play the great game you don't avoid it, you just get crushed, and so as a matter of national survival and security you need to start preparing to meet near peer adversaries, but they see you preparing and they up their defensive preperations and military spending because you did and if they don't they might be crushed, and you see this and have to up your spending, and suddenly a massive amount of wealth is going to preparing for conflict.

The whole situation is almost identical to how things were on the eve of the 20th century, with radical advances in technology overturning decades of military theory and strategy, everyone is tense with alliances constantly shifting and real politick dominating everything because the alternative is the fate of the Belgians who had their country shorn from them and their people massacred by Imperial German forces. At the same time we see growing social unrest within nations (stoked by foreign actors trying to disrupt social cohesion of their potential enemies) and everyone posturing with more and more bluster because to be precieved as weak is to invite death as no one wants to make friends with a weak link.

The one important lesson to be taken however is that WW1 didn't have to happen the Great War could've been prevented, a major part of the conflict was the certainty that there was going to be a war. If we can choose to instead try and be peacemakers and bring the overall temprature of discourse down we can avoid another human catastrophe.

> Why is everyone preparing for war so hard

Unfortunately I think the actual reason is because they know (despite what they say in public) that climate change is a real and present danger, and the resource and migration wars are coming.

If you look at everything that seems strange through this lens (see for example: Trump talking about how the US needs to take Canada and Greenland) it looks a lot less strange. There's at least some sort of rational throughline, even if its awful and militaristic (and likely only revealed at all to the public at this point because Trump is an age-addled old fool that has a broken public-speaking filter).

Cuz they don’t believe in anything else anymore except violence

great distraction for the masses from the files

War is profitable and the people who profit run the US and Europe

Micron had to delay their New York memory fab by a year because there were some bats in trees. This stuff is DOA in most states.