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China Now Halting Shipments of Rare Earth Minerals To US
blackraven14250 writes with news that China, after putting at least a temporary stop to rare earth exports to Japan, is now doing the same with exports to the US; according to the linked article, this is in response to recent US promises to investigate certain Chinese trade practices.
Hey now... no need to be sexist. (north) American men have large, pendulous breasts too, although I can't speak for the Chinese or Japanese, but I'm sure the same holds true.
War between America and China? It must be cool to grow up in an isolated wood cabin reading dusty tomes about world history from the 1950s then suddenly the satellite dish arrives and you can post on the internet.
Sorry, I missed which country is invading the other.
China could stamp out a billion machetes in just a few weeks. Rwanda was barely an hours worth of China's productive capacity. 18,000 Japanese soldiers cut off from their supply chain defended Iwo Jima for 35 days. You'd face 18 million Chinese just landing on the beach. Some would have weapons.
Or how about the Chinese invading Los Angeles. I don't think they'd survive the first commute. By the first number that came up, there are 65 million handguns in America. Imagine that these were not all pointed at fellow Americans for a few hours. It would make Mogadishu look like a mild celebration of Chinese new year. The bullets would be flying thicker than rice at a Mafia wedding.
Or maybe the Americans could hatch a plot to pump sulphur dioxides into the atmosphere and reverse global warming while secretly stock-piling a million M1A1 tanks to cross the newly exposed land bridge to China. Hey, it almost worked for the Germans.
A final possibility is that both sides would follow "A Taste of Armageddon" and China agrees to manufacture a few million suicide booths at an unbeatable low, low price with Walmart branding. This would be good for Texas, but might strain the agreement as the Chinese complain "do we really have to make them so large?" Meanwhile the Japanese embargo the entire deal in an effort to collect royalties on the bundled BluRay player and the Cell chips sourced from IBM overheat running the provably-fair thermonuclear simulation. It would be a fiasco all around.
So you keep paying the kid to mow your lawn for a couple of years. One day he shows up with his own lawnmower. No point having your own mower when it's not being used, so you put your mower on eBay. A few years later you lose your job at the lawnmower factory and find yourself mowing lawns for $20 a time, of which $5 goes to the kid for borrowing his mower.
Oh, also the kid is exerting increasingly firm control over the South China Sea, but I'm not sure how to work that into the analogy. ;-)