In Colorado, such service refusals are illegal. The civil rights agency prosecutes them and their legal rationale is that historically every "we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone" has only been used to discriminate against non-white customers.
> Rule 20.4 – Discriminatory Signage in Places of Public Accommodation.
> No person shall post or permit to be posted in any place of public accommodation any sign that states or implies the following:
> “WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE SERVICE TO ANYONE.”
> Such signage implies that management may rely upon unlawful discriminatory factors in determining access to a place of public accommodation and thus is prohibited.
> I am never sure if the people that wrote that law
No. Much of the legislation that gets introduced is provided as "model legislation" by political action groups (such as ALEC). This is why so many states seem to introduce the same legislation all at once.
The party whip tells them what to vote for. Sometimes, sensible people stop deranged legislation from getting out of committee (such as banning all mRNA vaccines (ID in 2024 & 2025, KY in 2025) or requiring blood banks to provide "pureblood" (from people who never had covid vaccines) at no additional cost to anyone requesting same (ID & KY in 2025). Or the one from ID in 2024 that would have made providing blood from a person who had a covid vaccine a felony.
For example, HR 22 passed the House of Representatives along party lines. The Senate has not scheduled the bill for hearing/vote yet. This bill is only 2 pages long, but I would like you to read it and take a guess at who they are trying to ban from voting in Federal elections. It has never been legal for non-citizens to vote in federal elections.
> A form of identification issued consistent with the requirements of the REAL ID Act of 2005 that indicates the applicant is a citizen of the United States.
This is called an Enhanced Driving License and only 5 states (MI, MN, NY, VT, and WA) issue these. From the front, they look just like the REAL ID compliant ID/DL from that state but with a cute little American flag on the front. The back has the funny OCR text like the page in your passport that has on the page with your picture.
They are trying to ban the following from voting in Federal elections:
1. Transgender people.
2. Non-citizens.
3. Women who took their husband's name upon marriage.
4. People who changed their name.
5. People who can't afford the $200 for a US Passport (if you never had one before, or lost yours like I did, this is about what you have to pay, otherwise it runs $110).
> why is it so assumed that only China can produce rare earths?
Pollution. The smokestack emissions are very toxic. The residue/slag is toxic and radioactive. One should remember that "rare earth metals" are not rare, they're the bottom 2 rows of the periodic table. They are rather hard to separate chemically and many people like to exclude the bottom row of the periodic table (the actinides) because that's where uranium and plutonium are located and those 2 elements terrify people enough to derail discussions about the materials.
We absolutely could mine and refine the stuff. It is everywhere. The "problem" is that the refining process is horribly toxic and the residue/slag is toxic and radioactive. The last refinery that had been located in the US is now a SuperFund site. Every country would prefer that the refining takes place in China because that way the pollution & hazardous waste remains in China.
The anger is that China is being "uppity" by wanting to make the things (like motors) out of the "rare earth" elements instead of being the colony that supplies raw materials to the Empire/colonizer. This was one of the complaints leading to the Revolution in 1776 - only raw materials could be shipped to England and all finished goods could only be shipped from England. The colonies were forced to remain at the bottom of the economy.
China wants "a seat at the table". Western countries are unwilling to let that happen.
Additionally, the goal of DOGE was to dismantle every agency investigating Musk's businesses. Future James Bond type movies won't have SPECTRE or Blofeld as villains, they'll all be thinly disguised Musks.
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.
America's over-production of corn/maize is a direct result of Nixon. His administration knew how to deal with protesting hippies, but when farmers & housewives started protesting, the response was to heavily subsidize corn/maize production. With vast quantities of the stuff, companies looked to find uses for the stuff. Two books that describe the situation are Omnivore's Dilemma and Altered Harvest. The subsidies for growing maize/corn make it cheap, add in the tariffs on sugar imports and that explains why HFCS is ubiquitous.
1 - https://www.amazon.com/Altered-Harvest-Jack-Doyle/dp/0670115...
This book also explains why tea is the British beverage (and not coffee), or how the Irish potato famine happened. And it explains the source of the corn blight that caused rioting farmers & housewives - texas male-sterile cytoplasm was used by all the hybrid seed companies, so a blight that affected one plant affected 80% of the US corn/maize crop.
China wants to move up the value chain. They don't want to continue to be the colony supplying raw materials (or even slightly refined materials) to the "first world". China wants to be building those electric motors - which is where the value & profits are located.
In Colorado, such service refusals are illegal. The civil rights agency prosecutes them and their legal rationale is that historically every "we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone" has only been used to discriminate against non-white customers.
> Rule 20.4 – Discriminatory Signage in Places of Public Accommodation.
> No person shall post or permit to be posted in any place of public accommodation any sign that states or implies the following:
> “WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE SERVICE TO ANYONE.”
> Such signage implies that management may rely upon unlawful discriminatory factors in determining access to a place of public accommodation and thus is prohibited.
https://www.sos.state.co.us/CCR/GenerateRulePdf.do?ruleVersi...
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