Some countries don't recognize the concept of Public Domain works. In the US, many government works are Public Domain as a matter of law. This creates complications internationally in those countries that don't recognize the legitimacy of Public Domain as a legal concept. Nonetheless, the US still wants to make it available internationally.
To satisfy these conflicting requirements, the US government places it in the Public Domain in the US to satisfy US law. Additionally, they make it available internationally under a license that approximates the intent of Public Domain while still being recognized as a legally valid thing.
An important point is that this wealth is purely notional. It doesn't exist as cash you can distribute unless there is a liquid market, and confiscating it would annihilate any liquid markets. Furthermore, ~70% of that wealth in the US is non-liquid generally.
That wealth doesn't become cash unless there is a giant pile of cash owned by someone that can be used to buy the assets at the notional value. Where is that cash going to come from? It can't come from the government printing money since that is just inflation with more steps.
If maximum performance is a top objective, it is probably because C++ produces faster binaries with less code. Modern C++ specifically also has a lot of nice compile-time safety features, especially for database-like code.
I've worked on a couple different projects that did substantial parallel development in C++20 and Rust, which created interesting opportunities for concrete comparison. It was performance-engineered code and we needed to validate their equivalence by testing them against each other.
The practical differences are larger than the theoretical differences, so I would expect the gap to diminish over time.
Rust reminded me of when I used to write database engines in Java. It required a lot more code, which has its own costs, but never really delivered on claims of comparable performance. The "more code" part largely comes down to the more limited ability to build good abstractions compared to C++20 and more limited composability. The "slower binaries" part comes down to worse codegen, which you can't blame on Rust per se, and a lot of extra overhead introduced in the code to satisfy the Rust safety model that would simply not be required in other systems languages.
Safety is a mixed bag. Rust can check several things at compile-time that C++20 cannot. C++20 can check several things at compile-time that Rust cannot.
For high-performance database-y code, memory is allocated at startup and is accessed via managed index handles. Rust does the same thing. In these types of memory models, i.e. no dynamic allocation and no raw pointers, both Rust and C++20 offer similar memory safety guarantees. Most high-performance software is thread-per-core that is almost purely single-threaded, so thread-safety concerns are limited.
That said, stripping away all of the above, the only real advantage that C++20 has its much more powerful toolset for building abstractions. Its performance and unique safety elements are based almost entirely on the ability to build concise, contextual, and highly composable abstractions as needed. This is not a feature that should be downplayed, I immediately miss it when I use most other languages.
As someone coming back to C++ after more than a decade away, do you have any recommended resources on C++20 or open source projects you've seen that utilize the language this way?
Few people in the US are living "paycheck to paycheck" out of economic necessity. We have extensive data on this separately from BLS and the Federal Reserve. The percentage of US households that are living paycheck to paycheck out of economic necessity is 10-15% last I checked. That isn't nothing but it is a small fraction of the population. Retirees comprise a significant portion of that for obvious reasons.
There is an additional ~30% that is notionally living paycheck to paycheck as a lifestyle choice rather than an economic necessity.
The median US household has a substantial income surplus after all ordinary expenses. There may be people suffering economically but it is a small minority by any reasonable definition of the term.
In fairness, the winds and droughts have been a documented feature of that area for thousands of years and for as long as Europeans have been there. While it may be extreme, it is also normal for that region.
The US still one of the leading countries in the world for mining and refining by any measure. It has extensive expertise and its mineral wealth is unusually diverse.
All of this is despite the fact the US effectively banned new mining several decades ago. The US is a mineral juggernaut and has the technical knowledge but growth has been severely restricted as a matter of policy for a long time.
By analogy, US oil production was in terminal decline since the 1970s and presumed dead at the end of the 20th century. Now the US is the world’s leading oil producer with no sign of slowing down.
There is every reason to believe the same thing would happen if the US decided to re-open the mountain west to mineral exploration.
An issue that might not be obvious is that most of the metals in question are mined exclusively as secondary and tertiary ores. It is rarely profitable to mine them as primary ores and in some cases, like gallium, they don’t exist as primary ores. Consequently, there is a long list of metals that are mined almost entirely from the waste streams of primary metal ores with chemical processes that coincidentally have these other metals or which coincidentally partially refine other metals in the waste stream. This allows you to get a lot of work for free as a side-effect of processing the primary ore.
A canonical example of this is gallium, which famously doesn’t concentrate or form ores. However, the process of refining aluminum coincidentally partially refines gallium as a byproduct. So almost all gallium is produced by continued processing of the aluminum refinery waste stream even though aluminum ore contains no more gallium than a random rock.
China produces almost all of their REE from secondary and tertiary ores. The prerequisite to having these secondary and tertiary ore process is having a primary ore. If you are not processing primary ores, none of the secondary and tertiary ores will be available to you as an option. If you want to have a supply chain for diverse metals, you need to be processing diverse primary ores with an eye toward reprocessing the waste stream when it is chemically efficient.
The US has outsourced much of the primary ore processing that can produce a lot of metals that can only be economically produced as secondary ore products.
It only takes a decade or two if there is zero urgency and you give every rando with an axe to grind, both imaginary and real, veto power over the project.
The other option is to just build things that need to be built.
> It only takes a decade or two if there is zero urgency and you give every rando with an axe to grind, both imaginary and real, veto power over the project.
The issue is the vetoes are layered and entrenched.
Some EPA rules makes it effectively impossible but are to varying extents actually protecting the environment, so you'd want someone who knows what they're doing to rewrite them in a way that can do both things at once. Zoning rules prohibit anyone from operating a mine there or building housing for the workers near the mine and local NIMBYs control the local zoning boards. Various OSHA regulations, state and federal mining rules, transportation rules, etc. are in the same state as the EPA ones.
There isn't any one place you can go to unbotch it all at once but getting them each to do it individually is non-trivial unless your plan is to just vaporize them all simultaneously.
If the political will is there, anything is possible, rules, regulations and laws be damned.
NASA put a human on the moon in less than 10 years in the 60s, and today it's taken then a little longer than 10 years to get a single unmanned launch up with SLS.
> If the political will is there, anything is possible, rules, regulations and laws be damned.
That's a big part of the problem. The vetoes have evolved to resist political reformists.
Most of these regulations come from unelected administrative agencies. You can swap out the President of the United States and they're still mostly the same people. The President can issue them general orders but a single elected individual doesn't have the bandwidth to drill down into all the specifics in all the agencies, even though that's what it'd take to fix it.
The nearest you could come to it would be to actually vaporize them -- stop doing these things at the federal level at all. It was never intended to be that way, that's why the federal executive branch has only one elected official. Instead you have the states do it, which a) gives you a house cleaning because they have to start over and b) gives you 50 chances to get it right instead of just one so that one bad regulatory choice can't destroy an industry nationwide.
But that's just a major problem, not the only problem. Zoning is nearly as bad, maybe even worse, but is local. Because that one isn't caused by unaccountability, it's caused by NIMBYs. For that you can't just limit the powers of the federal government, you even need to restrict the local governments from doing that.
That one would be easy to fix, on paper -- require that in any 100 square miles of land area at least 50% of the land can't prohibit anything other than noxious industrial uses, meaning you can build mixed commercial and residential with unlimited density, and in any 10,000 square miles of land area, at least half of that 50% (i.e. 25%) has to be completely unzoned, meaning you can build literally anything. Then the people who want single family homes can have the other 50% of the land area, just not the >90% it currently is in many areas. But now actually do that.
1. US government contracting preferentially selecting over the last 75 years for people who are used to working slow and dotting every i / crossing every t -- i.e. business as usual
2. Regulations during business as usual slowing down the maximum throughput of processes
That isn't to say that other people don't still exist in the US, just that they're not currently at government contractors, because the government hasn't prioritized their core competencies (speed).
It's entirely possible that, similar as was done to military command staff at the outbreak of WWII, the US rewrites its regs, fires people who are incompetent at working at a faster pace, and recognizes and elevates talent.
Unfortunately the current executive branch, while tearing down regulations, then has more interest in profiteering and nepotism than truly pushing exceptional engineers.
The US has an abundance of rare earth and many other metals, substantially more than all but a few other countries. Aggressive and cynical environmental activism that buries mine development in decades of lawsuits has made it financially infeasible to develop domestic resources to the point where even mineral exploration is rarely done in the US anymore. No point in exploring for minerals if you won’t be allowed to mine them.
In principle, metal refineries are not that difficult to build and operate. It isn’t rocket science and could be done relatively quickly if the US really wanted to. In practice, any attempt at doing so will be buried in decades of cynical blocking actions by political activists. It wouldn’t be surprising to find out the parties blocking this are substantially albeit indirectly supported by adversarial countries.
It is no different than why we can’t build housing. Unless the US adopts an attitude of telling the haters to go pound sand because building things is important to the furtherance of civilization, nothing will happen.
We as a culture and society give veto power over damn near everything to far too many people that couldn’t be trusted with authority over a lemonade stand.
How is environmental activism cynical? My understanding is that RE mining is terrible for the environment. If I must cause some level of pollution, I don't think it's cynical to want it to happen far from where I am.
The is an enormous amount of environmental activism that exists to achieve an ideological result, it has nothing to do with science or a reasonable analysis of tradeoffs. They cynically exploit people’s ignorance of the subject to justify their actions.
A well-known example of this were regulations that require super-low arsenic levels in water. The thresholds were set extremely low, far below natural levels in most mining districts. The proposed limits were so low that ironically it would put some populations at risk of arsenic deficiency — arsenic is an essential micronutrient in animal biology, much of which comes from water. The people pushing to set levels so absurdly low were anti-mining activists.
If you operate a mine, that benchmark for water quality is now your problem, even if the natural levels are much higher. This puts the mining operation in the somewhat intractable position of remediating the arsenic levels of ambient nature as a pre-condition of mining. You can’t just ensure the arsenic is at the level it was when you found it, you have to reduce to some idealized standard that can be intractably expensive to meet and has no scientific basis. It is exploitive and ugly by people that don’t care about the long-term implications as long as it serves their short-term ideological purpose. Civilization requires mining, it does little to help the environment by exporting it to other countries.
I’m a major nature lover and conservationist, grew up in remote rural areas, and spend more time in the deep wilderness than most, but I am also a relevant scientist by training. The amount of scientific malpractice that happens under the pretext of “saving the environment” in the US is pretty damn gross. There are good people inside the Department of the Interior that try to mitigate the worst excesses but the onslaught is unrelenting.
On the specific point of rare earth mining, the chemistry of rare earth ores are naturally unpleasant, much like gold and silver ores. For historical reasons, the massive deposits of gold and silver in the US were developed before any real regulations. Some of those made quite a mess (see: silver mines of Idaho). Modern versions run quite clean but the hurdles to opening new mines are so prohibitively expensive that the US mostly only still operates the grandfathered pre-regulation mines.
REE mining has none of these advantages. The demand for REE is almost entirely modern, so none of it was grandfathered in. I’m sure the US could operate them at a level that is adequately clean but there is a huge contingent of activists that are against all mining and refining on principle and use the myriad levers created by policy over the last several decades to make sure that never happens in the US.
That said, a few months ago the US government announced a strategic investment in the largest REE deposit in the world, which happens to be in the US but has spent most of its time in bankruptcy. I have to imagine that the intention is to streamline production under some kind of exemption.
In US history, the pendulum swung hard in favor of mining interests getting whatever they wanted at the expense of workers and the people who lived near mines, and the environment.
But the pendulum swung back just as hard when blowing the tops off of mountains and letting towns of people live surrounded by poisons became unacceptable.
The way to prevent the excesses from pendulum swingbacks isn't to call people cynical or ideological for reacting in a disproportionate way to the very real excesses and psychopathic tendencies of purely profit driven resource exploitation, but to understand those tendencies and to put real guardrails in that will stop the incentives from becoming powerful enough to drive them.
Mountain Pass is not a great deposit. It requires blasting to extract from the bastnasite and is low in heavy rare earths such as Dysprosium and Terbium.
There are many better deposits in Australia with more HRE or Brazil (huge ionic clay deposits). Lynas's Mt Weld is weathered carbonatite so also lot more economical for mining.
Halleck Creek is the one to watch in the US as it looks to have a lot more HRE.
Greenpeace activism against golden rice in the Philippines is the quintessential case study even though it's adjacent to environmentalism. It displays not just cynicism but the abject cruelty - mass death and bodily harm - that these disgusting activists are capable of inflicting on the world's most vulnerable people.
Why is it harder to supply people with vitamins than to supply them with seeds that require advanced engineering? Will the golden rice stay golden without careful breeding? Someone is cynical here.
Because getting special seeds into the hands of a few farmers is feasible, but getting vitamins into the hands of millions of extremely poor people and getting them to change their habits is not feasible. These people already eat rice and the distribution of rice to them is already established. They don't have to change a single thing.
it's cynical because these activists who do it are using it for fame and clout; they still enjoy the benefits of these environmental destruction (which is simply exported else where, or the costs borne by someone else other than them).
What would be your definition of meaningful climate activism against rare earth elements?
Or is this one of those "there is no ethical consumption, therefore everyone is a hypocrite and nobody can criticize anyone over anything" type gotchas?
Rare earths are messy to refine on the cheap, and refining them without environmental damage is expensive. One reason China got a leg up on rare earths is they didn’t sweat the environmental damage for a long time (now they are sweating it which is one reason they are holding back exports, but the advantage is too good for the, to completely swear it off).
Yes.. that.. If you are against oil and plastics, walk your talk. If you are against rare earth, walk your talk. If you have a degree in chem-eng, and you're building low plastic solutions, and you're critical, then you're being honest.
Saying "no no no" but doing it on a new cell phone you know was built on rare earth is like a vegan giving a talk while sitting on their new leather couch.
I'm sorry, but how many activists have any fame or clout that they use in any way other than for causes ? I can only think of Greta Thunberg, but can't really remember her ever using her "fame and clout" for anything other than bringing attention to problems. When she signs a sponsorship deal, then we can talk, but until then...
In this context, because the environmental activists don't want an end to their lifestyle products or especially the pillars of modern civilization (plastic, concrete, fertilizer, steel), they just want the costs to be borne by poorer countries, which in turn have less responsible resource extraction regulations than the developed world, which is WORSE for the environment on net.
The environmental activists aren't arguing for responsible resource extraction at home, they effectuate the ban of resource extraction at home, and only at home.
The global appetite for energy and resources doesn't recede because you choose not to mine, the mining is just done elsewhere. In China, in the Congo, etc.
True concern for the environment would mean that each consumer (at least the largest ones) should be stewarding their own extraction requirements. The endless lawsuits, protests, and rhetoric often make onshoring impossible.
The know-how has been lost so those currently looking to build plants have to relearn the processes. At the same time they need to examine new methods using different chemicals depending on the material they are extracting from and the particular impurities that need to be removed.
Ball park for a processing plant is 1.5b and 2-3 years from digging foundations to operations if the funds are there and it's fully approved. A lot of the metallurgical testing can be done in parallel with the build, but getting off-take partners requires being able to prove you can supply, and the off-take partners usually supply a lot of the funding.
Case in point, Lynas' Seadrift project in Texas is stalled and may not proceed due to an waste-water permitting issue and the USG not wanting to provide the additional funding required, or fully commit and guarantee off-take.
If supply was cut off and critical defense tech was at risk of being crippled I am certain it would be deemed a matter of nation security and things would move very quickly.
The project was given a waiver that allowed them to skip much of the endless environmental review process that makes energy projects so expensive in the US. This cancels that waiver.
The reasoning appears to be forcing politically-connected projects to be subject to the same environmental reviews as every other project, including other clean energy projects that are not politically connected. As a matter of principle I agree the rules should be uniformly applied.
If the environmental review process is that onerous, which it is, then we should reform the process for everyone rather than allow politically connected people buy waivers.
you need a godly amount of faith to accept that this is about applying the laws equally and that this is not a change in who will be getting the favours from now on.
To satisfy these conflicting requirements, the US government places it in the Public Domain in the US to satisfy US law. Additionally, they make it available internationally under a license that approximates the intent of Public Domain while still being recognized as a legally valid thing.
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