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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   19880 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

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China just chose the nuclear option:

TLDR:

China’s Ministry of Commerce just created an extra-territorial export-control net around rare earths and anything made with Chinese rare-earth technology. The bar is set extremely low, so this will ripple through EVs, wind, electronics, and defense supply chains worldwide.

(Assuming that this isn't a ploy designed to be a bargaining chip in order to get Trump to overturn export restrictions on advanced chips).

Now, while rare earths are very much not rare (though they do come from the earth, mostly), 90% of the actual processing happens in China, even if many deposits are elsewhere. Why is that the case? Well, rare-earth mining is not the most eco-friendly of industrial processes, and everyone else prefers it happen outside their backyards.

Just about every consumer and commercial electronic item is wrapped up in this. China dominates processing and magnet making, so the 0.1% trigger will catch a very large share of motors, drives, sensors, HDDs, speakers, drones, missiles, EVs, and wind-turbine components that contain NdFeB or SmCo magnets.

Assuming that a pleasant agreement isn't reached by Trump and Xi, this is going to do numbers on the trout population, and the economy. I don't even have to specify which economy, it's that global. It'll take years to onshore or friend-shore processing, even if deposits could ramp up to meet the demand. Really, I can't stress the chaos this will cause if the Chinese truly exercise their discretion, so we're going to have to strap in and see. Maybe nothing ever happens, maybe it does.

Can we avoid the headline hyperbole endemic to other forums?

China has nuclear weapons, so describing something as choosing the 'nuclear option' for them seems more appropriate for something involving thermonuclear devices or policy. If the news is so monumental, I think instead state what it entails and let it stand on its own.

If you really think this is economic Armageddon, how have you reacted? How you divested from all non-Chinese investments and strongly advised your family to do the same? Have you bought real-estate in Shenzhen?

I had the same thought when I read that first line. How can the 'nuclear option' for a nuclear power be anything except using nuclear weapons? Surely that's the nuclear option.

I mean, economic Armageddon doesn't imply that Chinese assets will do great. And in fact they're doing poorly, this is a lose-lose move. I'd be investing into… idk, India?

American reactions are pretty bizarre, I don't understand how these people take themselves seriously. Take this «House Select Committee on the […] CCP»:

“China’s action today is an economic declaration of war against the United States and a slap in the face to President Trump amid his efforts to fight for a level-playing field. China has fired a loaded gun at the American economy, seeking to cut off critical minerals used to make the semiconductors that power the American military, economy, and devices we use every day including cars, phones, computers, and TVs. Every American will be negatively affected by China’s action, and that’s why we must address America’s vulnerabilities and build our own leverage against China. We should immediately pass my legislation to end preferential trade treatment for China, build a resilient resource reserve of critical minerals, secure American research and campuses from Chinese influence, and strangle China’s technology sector with export controls instead of selling it advanced chips. Xi Jinping only respects strength and I am ready to work with patriotic business leaders, our congressional leadership, and the Trump Administration to show China that its belligerent trade actions will be met with serious efforts to protect the American people, secure our supply chains, and cut off the flow of U.S. capital and technology into China."

Man, why the pearl-clutching? Why the shocked Pikachu face? It's unbecoming. This is explicitly a retaliation for your ongoing and already very impactful attempts to throttle their tech sector, you've declared this war many years ago when you sentenced Huawei to death. Moreover the fact that they'll eventually be in a position to retaliate via REE dependence has been known for well over a decade, and there's been a warning shot in Japan over Senkaku. You chose this route, your team was consistently rejecting all offers of deescalation because you believed to have escalation dominance. So own it. The extent of third-worldist hypocrisy is breathtaking:

China’s new rare earth export controls prove one thing: Beijing will weaponize any leverage it has.
America needs a new normal—not tit-for-tat.
We must strategically decouple and throttle the PRC tech sector before it’s too late. 🧵

Chinese export controls are obviously tit-for-tat for US export controls, so by new normal they basically mean unrestricted always-defect economic warfare. It seems that the US isn't really capable of negotiating, the notion that you can't always bully your way to an objective is alien to these folks (we've already seen this with Bessent's "China has revealed itself as a bad actor"). There's the assumption that the US (or at least "with allies") necessarily possesses some hidden strength that can be activated to indignantly reject the adversary's offer.

Well, maybe there is. I'm optimistic that out-of-China production can be scaled up in a matter of years, if no deal is made. Primarily China intends to cripple defense applications, and frankly how can you object to that, this idea «greedy communists will sell us the materiel to shoot them with» has always been risible. They are also likely going to suppress the planned reindustrialization and (very dubious) robotic labor revolution in the US. All of that «just» reduces CAGR in a wide range of industries for the next 3-7 years, while Chinese physical productive capacity keeps growing exponentially. The demand for chips, though, will definitely be met. In the meantime, the US will have to capitalize even harder on its software/AI advantage. We'll see which is more important.

Personally, I would not put any more stock into that announcement than in the announcement about the autism-paracetamol link. Trump has been known to chicken out before.

I am also unsure what the CCP really wants. Perhaps getting full access to ASML products is really the hill they want to die on. Or they could be satisfied with a bunch of AI chips. Or it might be about Trump's tariffs.

My understanding is that REE refining infrastructure is something the US could easily sink a whole lot of money in before getting anywhere, even if the goal is just strategic and not competing on the REE world market.

That is kinda the difference between REE and chip manufacturing: if you can only build chips which have a feature size 10x larger than the latest TSMC fabs, there are still a lot of niches you can compete in. If you can only refine REE at 10x the costs that China has, you will not be able to compete once they undo their embargo.

I think the market-based way the US could handle this is to commit to buying a certain amount of REE which is refined without tech from China per year for their defense sector for the foreseeable future. Of course, future presidents may not honor such a commitment. The alternative is that the US directly invests in such firms.

Personally, I think Trump will try to give the CCP what they want, especially if it is just some AI chips instead of the capability to build their own.

What did people expect? The US places sanctions on China with a clear goal to keep the Chinese economy down and people expect them just to accept it?

The US occupied a neighboring country for 20 years killing hundreds of thousands of people and had massive airforce bases right next to China. Last week Trump talked about retaking the airforce bases so it would be easier to bomb China. The Chinese are just going to accept it? The US just stole tiktok and China is just supposed to accept it?

Wait, which country are you talking about? There are too many options.

Japan is too many people killed. Vietnam is somewhat too many people killed. Afghanistan is not enough. The only one that fits is Korea. Checking news shows that Trump actually did talk about bases in Korea recently.

I would not count that as "occupied".

Japan, perhaps?

I believe Afghanistan is the only choice. The US never occupied North Korea or Vietnam (you could argue the US occupied South Vietnam when it existed, or South Korea, but neither is adjacent to China). Afghanistan has a very narrow and closed border with China, though I imagine there's unofficial traffic across it.

Agreed, it seems that Afghanistan is the one @functor meant. Especially the part about Trump wanting the airbases back, an unlikely endeavor if there ever was one.

Trump doesn't want any airbase in Afghanistan back, though. He threatened Afghanistan with "bad things" if they don't "give (Bagram) back to those who built it".

Now exactly why Trump feels so strongly that Afghanistan should give an air base to the Soviet Union we'll probably never know.

The US would have occupied North Korea in the Korean War if the Red Chinese hadn't chased them out.

"if".

It pretty much seemed like a done deal except recon somehow missed the 200k Chinese who were doing a creditable effort at not being seen and mostly marched at night iirc.

Reminds me of a bit from back when I read a biography of Lewis "Chesty" Puller. General C.A. Willoughby, MacArthur's intelligence chief, had come to X Corps HQ in Wonsan from Tokyo, along with his staff. Evidently, when Willoughby asked General Almond how things were, Almond told him about the seventh division fighting the Chinese, and that both sides had taken casualties, to which Willoughby replied, "that's another goddamn Marine lie." Almond promptly led him out to the POW stockade and showed him around 80 Chinese POWs that the 7th had captured. Willoughby reportedly departed without saying another word and that evening, the situation map from Tokyo that showed detailed positions of the troops suddenly showed 500,000 Chinese troops scattered around the map. It was clear from Puller's point of view that the issue was political. Quoth Chesty:

Now that's the fastest damned troop movement in the history of the world, gentlemen. You'll never see another such. And don't forget this lesson: Tokyo wouldn't admit that we had Chinese fighting us even after the Eight Army was in flight, because some damned staff officers hundreds of miles away willed it to be so. You can't will anything in war.

Should I read the book or can you briefly explain the motives of Willoughby here?

More comments

They also restrict export on diamond grit and tools. So it is a lot wider. And I think this will hurt too. And it seems is global, not only targeting US

I’m nearly certain that I’m the only person here that has actually been to a REE processing plant. And while I don’t work in that industry, I’m adjacent to it.

I kind of think people are blowing this out of proportion. It will be painful for some. I doubt 99.9% of people notice. For reasons stated below.

After tariffs I don't think I can handle becoming an expert on rare earth metals this year too. I'll just go to production with your opinion.

I’m nearly certain that I’m the only person here that has actually been to a REE processing plant.

I think you're less unique than you think; most of us have been on 4chan at least once.

Everyone's focused on rare-earths themselves, but the issue's that this restriction applies to any product with them like motors and batteries - which China truly leads in price and capability.

Obviously the best solution for the US is to bring all of these capabilities in-house (to one degree or another) but the funniest solution would just be to say "these Chinese have made their ruling, let them enforce it" and then buy secondhand from India, same way the Russians have been getting around our sanctions.

Obviously the best solution for the US is to bring all of these capabilities in-house

Actually, the best solution would be for the US to perform a magic ritual, invoking Moloch and begging him to supply them with rare earth metals in exchange for sacrificed children - which is more likely to succeed than your proposal. The USA isn't actually capable of replacing China's role in the productive economy in any timeframe that's actually relevant. Do you think the tech and defence industries can sustain a complete pause in production for the 10-15 years it'll take to onshore this stuff? This means no more harddrives, no more lithium batteries etc.

If the defense industries can't function without Chinese support then they're useless and should be destroyed. What were they planning to do if war with China ever came?

They exist elsewhere on the planet. It’s not like it’s impossible. Furthermore, the long term benefits of getting REE and bringing home the manufacturing of chips especially for defense are getting those critical components out from under the thumb of a geopolitical rival, creating jobs that would be decent paying manufacturing jobs, creating an industry with the potential for export. Those are not trivial wins, especially if China decides to wield its power in ways we oppose. If China makes a play for Taiwan, do you really think they’ll continue to sell us the material, let alone the chips themselves that we’d use to defeat them? Would any sane person in the Cold War feel comfortable sourcing critical components from Eastern Europe? That’s pretty much where we are, hoping that China will continue to sell us weapons that they know in a hot war we’re going to use on them.

I would agree. If rare earths are essential for the defense industry, shouldn't they already be sourced only from domestic companies? If we rely on China for them, that's a problem that needs solving, not a way to get cheap materials.

It's not an either/or, the US can pursue onshoring as a permanent long-term solution while pursuing other avenues in the interim.

The USA isn't actually capable of replacing China's role in the productive economy in any timeframe that's actually relevant.

Replacing China's worldwide economic production isn't necessary; what the US ideally needs to be able to do is fulfill domestic national security needs. Nevertheless, it's worth noting that the US (re)opened a single rare earth mine in 2018 and in a couple of years it supplied 15% of worldwide production.

This means no more harddrives, no more lithium batteries etc.

First off, it does not. It means the Chinese are putting regulations on export. If you read the article it suggest the Chinese will likely ban exports to defense companies. So yes, I suspect the tech and defense industries will actually be able to source harddrives, lithium batteries, etc. for the next 5 - 10 years.

Why? Well, setting aside the fact that the US actually has at least some rare earth mining and refining capability in-country (and is currently, as I understand it, in the process of building more, so 7 - 10 years to have at least some replacement for Chinese goods is probably pessimistic even if you don't assume the US invokes national security to cut through red tape), I'd just remind you that Russia has been able to source actually embargoed items for its military from Western sources despite the US having a much better ability to deploy soft and hard power worldwide to sanction them than China does to sanction the US. If the Chinese move to cut US defense firms out of the loop, that

  1. Does not impact the tech sector, and
  2. Is no guarantee that the US won't just import them via shell companies.

There is almost no big USA company that has not some DoD contracts.

I suspect this will make it harder, not easier, for the Chinese to enforce the rule, unless they actually intend to cut all trade of rare earth with the US (which is not what they are saying, as I understand it).

Either way, if the US wants to get stuff, and the Chinese are Serious About It, they probably won't go to the Chinese and say "hi yes we want to put these rare earths in our stealth bombers" they will use third party cut-outs in other nations, just like they did the last time the US needed rare metals from its main geopolitical rival/Communist totalitarian enemy.

Surely Trump backs down here. US MIC hard-needs rare earths, can't do without them.

I think this is a targeted blow against the defence and EV industries, not against chips or electronics generally. Chips have only a tiny amount of rare earths. Only things with Big Motors or Exotic Electronics like military hardware are really affected. HDDs should be fine if we recycle more, F-35s on the other hand are in real trouble.

Yet another huge environmentalist error: https://x.com/skepticaliblog/status/1912469666272059526

When was the last time Trump “backed down” on his pet policy? On anything, really? At best, he’ll quietly drop a losing issue. Doesn’t help in this case.

I’ve gotten the impression that he really doesn’t care for defense spending and only really tolerates it as part of the Reagan package. Golden Dome is a prestige project. If he does spring for some sort of deal, it’s not going to be on behalf of the MIC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Always_Chickens_Out

There's at least a few examples of him doing so. That being said, tariffs are still a thing, so YMMV.

The nominal tariff rate and the actual effective tariff rates are quite different though. It's an amazing slight of hand from Trump.

For example, the USA and Canada tariffs are nominally high (I think, I've stopped paying attention) but given the vast vast majority of goods traded between the USA and Canada fall under the USMCA trade agreement, there are actually very tariffs being applied to trade between the two countries.

It's an amazing slight of hand from Trump.

Given all the criticism Trump has received for the rather unimpressive size of his hands, I love this typo.

LOL

I actually didn't realize it was a different word. How fun(ny).

Yet another huge environmentalist error:

I don't think you can actually blame the environmentalists for a corporate executive deciding to cash out and make vast profits in exchange for fucking over his workers and the country he lives in over the long term, or the government failing to protect and nurture critically important businesses. In China, strategically important industries are protected by the government in recognition of how important they are - letting this industry get sold off to China is the equivalent of the CCCP deciding to save on costs by outsourcing all their internal communication infrastructure to Google and Microsoft.

Later on in the thread it brings up the closing of Mountain Pass for environmentalist reasons, one of the richest rare-earth mines in the world.

From your link:

The new regulations create Beijing's version of US rules which block countries from selling chip-making equipment to China.

The US has used those measures to slow China's development of powerful chips that could be used for artificial intelligence (AI) with military applications.

Interestingly enough, I think that chip production does not require tons of rare earth elements. Even if the REE prices increased by a factor of 100, I am not sure if the chips themselves would be much more expensive. Of course, for ceramic capacitors the story is different, and a lot of other tech in data centers uses REE as well.

I think that the US (and it's loose allies, like Taiwan or the Netherlands) leading in chip feature size is them being ahead in a race which is relevant (at least if you believe that AI will not simply fizzle out, and care about who builds the paperclip maximizer).

By contrast, I am not sure that having cheaper REE extraction tech (which China likely has) is much of a game-changer. The price of Neodymium is a few hundred dollars per kilogram. As you need about 1kg for an EV, changing the price to 1000$/kg would increase the price of EVs slightly. For headphones, the relative price hike is probably even smaller.

That being said, investing in US REE refining is probably not a solid business decision. Sure, while China blocks exports your product is competitive, but as soon as they put their stockpiles on the market, you will no longer sell anything.

I think that the best thing you can do as a nation if a competitor controls a market of strategic importance is to (a) have a strategic reserve and (b) pay companies to produce the product at prices far above what the market would pay in moderate quantities, so that once an embargo happens you have some tech which you can scale up. (Arguably, (b) is also the strategy most countries use for military hardware. In three decades, Europe produced 609 Eurofighters. By contrast, in the six years of WW2, 800 thousand airplanes were produced by all combatants. The point of paying astronomical sums for a few Eurofighters is not that they will be very useful, but that if one ever finds oneself in the situation of wanting to spend a decent fraction of the GDP on fighter planes, one can ramp up the production in a few years rather than spending decades developing new planes.)

As a negotiation strategy with Trump, I think China's approach is decent, and as an European I wish them wholeheartedly success in standing up to Trump's protectionism.

The point of paying astronomical sums for a few Eurofighters

A quibble: the importance of ramping up is overstated. Operating costs are much higher in the modern age than they were in WW2, and there are real diminishing returns from additional planes in the air. One modern strike fighter—with the proper logistical tail—can provide more value than a wing of heavy bombers. At less human cost, too, which is much more important than it used to be.

These constraints relax in a high-intensity, high-intel conflict, but they don’t go away. You’ve still got to fuel and arm and dispatch your planes. You still need confidence that they won’t die to cheaper SAMs or get blown up on the ground. In that scenario, 6000 Eurofighters aren’t worth 10x as much as 600.

Neither the U.S. nor Europe has faced a serious threat to air superiority since the mid-century. I hope we never do.

I think the main point where having more planes helps is if the airspace is contested. Fighters carry a limited number of air-to-air missiles, and once they are out their ability to interdict airspace even to inferior enemies seems questionable. Any nation fighting an existential war and having problems with air superiority would likely be willing to pour a sizable chunk of the GDP into planes (or drones).

I agree that nobody is keen to re-enact the battle for Britain, and as long as you have air superiority, how many planes you can have in the air at once is much less of a concern. And if a large-scale war were to break out, the primary concern would be how fast you can ramp up the production of iodine tablets, at which point I tend to lose interest in the timeline.

Modern air combat is looking more and more attrition heavy. Ukraine and Russia basically can’t use close air support because it’s too dangerous. Even operating far from the front lines, both still regularly lose aircraft. And with drones and hypersonic missiles, both sides are still suffering aircraft losses even when the planes aren’t in combat.

Meanwhile India and Pakistan just recently had the only major air-to-air engagement of the 21st century and even though it was barely a skirmish it caused the loss of six to eight planes on both sides. Imagine what would have happened if they had been seriously trying to get air superiority.

And then you have Israel, who is fighting an enemy with no Air Force and no air defenses, and they are still running into problems with wear and tear because they are having to run too many missions with too few aircraft.

All in all this would seem to imply more planes are better, because you need to be able to afford losing quite a few.

My understanding is that close air support was always understood to be extremely attrition heavy in a peer war - supposedly, the USAF expected to lose 60 A-10s against the Soviets daily.

Other sorties are much lower risk - while the Russian Su-34 and Su-25 fleets have been hit hard, the MiG-31s and strategic bombers have been quite safe in the air.

(Frankly if anything the Su-25 losses are lower than what we might expect from Cold War projections, the Russians have been using them for close air support - and I think continue to do so, Wikipedia lists one as lost in February to a MANPADS, which suggests a CAS role, and they've lost around 40, it looks like, over the course of years, not weeks. However without knowing the total number of sorties I can't compare to the supposed USAF projections for the A-10.)

My understanding is that contrary to stereotype the Russian Air Force has been extremely risk averse in how they employ their aircraft because they know that they're not that great at building airplanes.

The VKS basically did nothing other than relatively ineffective close air support with frog foots and helicopters (which, on a side note, proved quite effective at using anti-tank missiles at the extreme of their range against Ukrainian armor during the '23 counteroffensive) or lob missiles from outside the range of Ukrainian air defenses for the first year and a half or so of the war (notably expending a large number of them to little effect during Surovikin's campaign against the Ukrainian energy grid).

The major game changers have been the Russians introducing their equivalent of the JDAM (allowing them to drop far more tonnage for far less money from outside the range of Ukrainian air defenses) and their development of the Geran series of suicide drones. The latter has provided a cost-effective way of attacking into the teeth of Ukrainian air defenses and saturating them such they more frequently achieve hits with their ballistic missiles.).

Rare earth refining is a regulatory issue on heavy metal contamination for groundwater and waste disposal, which is itself critical to even perform the refining in the first place due to the circular recycling of outputs to generate usable high purity rare earths. You can't just Abundance permitwaive your way to rare earth mastery, you need a whole ecosystem of internal processes to even get something useful to begin with. Rare earths are a definitional misnomer because the elements are everywhere, but what IS rare is the critical processing mass necessary to even get something usable for modern high end technology.

I think what is highly underappreciated is how differentiated rare earth streams actually are. A single refiner can't actually just take in any raw material and convert it to intermediate rare earths, it requires significant chemical injection at many stages of the industrial separation process before it can be refined for intermediate stage. Rare earths is actually a humongously heterogenous process, so institutional knowledge is not 1-1 transferrable across different types of rare earths. Thats not to include all the corrosion effects that happen at transportation stages between facilities which require networked facilities with clear logistics between them. Chinese investments in clean tech and workers safety isn't because they valued human life, its because the usable material at the end of the process is useless if Wangs wang is inside the smelter. This is why you can't do either western permitwaiving or third world bodywasting to get a REE facility spun up at all, let alone quickly or economically viably.

What makes Chinas REE export ban so troubling is that China isn't actually losing out that much economically from it - as OP stated, REE isn't actually that expensive on a unit cost basis. However for receiving so little direct pain this causes huge downstream problems for other manufacturers elsewhere. This is frankly a repeat of the recycling debacle which ended the economic viability of shipping recyclable materials to China for processing, except the economic effects are more directly felt.

Stockpiling for rare earths is also a dead end. End output metals like neodynium etc are oxygen and moisture sensitive, so stockpiling is normally in terms of intermediate products... which still need refiners after that. WW2 saw fighter engines produced by the thousand, but honestly the more relevant example is WW1, where phosphate import restrictions forced Germany to develop the Haber process to continue arms manufacturing. I'm sure there are smart dicks at DARPA who are trying to find materials that can overcome REE or other foreign dependencies, but if it turns out chips and magnets really are only manufacturable in certain locations and reshoring is impossible then honestly the world can turn really ugly really fast.

Hmm. Major questions for me are:

  1. To what extent is China’s economy now independent on exports? That is, to what extent can China exercise their right to not export items without catastrophic damage to their industries?
  2. Is the most likely non-Chinese partner for rare earth processing America (I imagine so, Trump will see this as a great way to bring EU in line), Russia via India, or can Europe do this in house?

I wouldn't trust Europe to figure out a way to manufacture toilet paper really. Low cost manufacturing or processing just isn't their strong suit. Either way, no matter where it happens, it'll take a while to even begin to catch up with Chinese output.

I suppose a great deal hinges on how targeted China wants to be with the restrictions, and how capable other states are at circumventing them. A queer state of affairs, but we're setting a thief to catch another thief. If China sticks to crippling specific competitor industries, such as the automotive or military sectors then they should be able to do plenty of damage for little pain. I don't think they really care about the fridge magnet market.

I do wonder how easy it will be to... divert less valuable end-products elsewhere. Are we going to see children's toys selling at record rates so they can be stripped for parts?

I wouldn't trust Europe to figure out a way to manufacture toilet paper really. Low cost manufacturing or processing just isn't their strong suit.

Its funny you say that seeing as europe is the world leader in the production and export of toilet paper.

I stand corrected then. Or perhaps it's because TP has given me hemorrhoids and sitting is agony.

Toilet paper is the literal worst, bidet fam for life. Unfortunately the British seem to be set against moving into the twenty first century when it comes to personal convenience (see the separate taps in a sink instead of a simple mixer).

I can't speak for the rest of Europe, but when I lived in the Czech Republic their TP felt like sandpaper. American TP, even the cheaper stuff, is consistently nicer. Only the super cheap one ply stuff used in public restrooms in the US is comparable in awfulness to what I experienced of European TP.

I haven't noticed a large difference in TP quality between countries (including last time I was in Prague), although the quality improvement in cheap TP in the UK since I was a kid in the 1980's is massive, so there is definitely a correlation with economic growth.

Leave me out of this bleeding anus business 😤

I guess there are more fun way of obtaining one.

I wouldn't trust Europe to figure out a way to manufacture toilet paper really.

My entire nation is screaming in pain RN.

Yes, from scraping your anus raw with barely processed wood. The best feature of TP is that the designers managed to make it turn red to let you know it was done!

You are doing something very wrong. Or you have bought sandpaper from the hardware store by mistake.

Some of the really budget single ply stuff is somewhat similar to sand paper tbh, and given that he works for the NHS I wouldn't be surprised if he's encountered literally the worst toilet paper ever produced by humankind.

Your suspicions are correct, NHS toilet paper was originally invented in a bid to discourage the practice of sodomy on the wards, much like breakfast cereal prevents too much masturbation. Or as an exercise to see if graphene-like 2D structures were practical to make from cellulose.

While triple-ply is still not what I'd want to use (bidet supremacy), it at least doesn't make one long for death.

The big issue with processing rare earths is the pollution AFAIK so yes, Europe probably not a great place to start. Though I bet the Poles or somebody would be happy to stick some factories in a less-used area and reap the increased influence and military protection that comes with it.

Not if it comes with risk of being sanctioned for violating EU environmental regulations and losing access to the cash money.

Europe probably not a great place to start.

By far the best locations within western civilisation for this kind of business are the empty bits of the western US and the Australian Outback.

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Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


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