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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.
From TFA, emphasis mine:
. The writer pretty much argues that the last trade war wasn't really won at all,
and even that limited success was more a factor of specific global issues and not because of American industry. Give it a read, it makes an interesting argument.
China's rare earth supply should be boycotted anyway, because of the massive pollution caused by their unregulated mining practice.
first models predicted peak oil between 1965 and 1970 http://www.hubbertpeak.com/hubbert/1956/1956.pdf
...in the US. And that's when it peaked.
I like to think that the parent was not referring to people who work for the gov't, but rather people who let employers direct most or all of their professional lives. A self-employed person is a rarity these days, and I think that's behind many/most U.S. problems (WARNING: RANT FOLLOWS)
An example: Let's say you're a senior computer programmer at a Fortune 500 corp. You get interesting work, reasonable vacation time, your co-workers and boss are friendly, and the pay is great. The problem here is that you're still working for someone else's (the owner's, the board of directors', whatever) dream, not your own. That means someone else is profiting more from your work than you, that someone else is deciding what projects to begin and what projects to cancel, and that someone else is free to delegate whatever duties they don't find enjoyable. I think that the employee's role as a stone in a corporate pyramid is to be avoided, unless servile habits can somehow be considered virtuous. I've noticed a couple tendencies among employee friends of mine, tendencies that become more noticeable the more heavily said employee invests in his career. They're unhappy, and their personal lives are fixed in humdrum routine. They spend so much time ignoring their own instincts and goals in lieu of company orders that they become listless and unable to motivate themselves to do anything new or bold in their personal lives.
Back in the 18th and early 19th centuries, most Americans had their own livelihoods, often organized as family businesses where each worker was involved or at least consulted in most every other aspect of the business. People generally did what they wanted and found a way to monetize it enough to get by. Massive, rigid corporate hierarchies only really emerged after the mid-19th century, when sweatshops and compulsory schooling started to indoctrinate everyone into obediently following the commands of the elite "experts".
Nowhere is this more evident than the way most people participate in elections. They are astoundingly passive, focusing almost entirely on voting, the least important step in the electoral cycle. On average, they don't work for political campaigns, they don't participate in primaries, and they tend to vote for whatever football team ^W^W party they've always voted for (if they vote at all; voter turnout sucks). The really politically active ones usually don't do much more wait until the candidates are narrowed down before voting against someone. Every November, people brag about how they did their civic duty by voting, content to ignore the much larger difference they could have made earlier in the process. With a population as politically apathetic as ours, it's no wonder that those in power treat our wishes with such contempt. They are sure in their ivy-league belief that the electorate is composed of adult-age children who need to be closely managed as wards of the state ("liberals") and/or rallied to the cause of our fearless leader's foreign adventures ("conservatives").
In short, a reluctance or outright refusal to think for onesself is the root cause of many of the U.S.'s failings. This problem could probably stop within a single generation if we got our children out of state schools and into countless work apprenticeships and charities with people of different social classes instead. Just think of the kind of well-rounded, genuinely worthwhile people such a liberal education would produce.
Hear, hear! In the long term, I think it will be a good thing that China's regime is finally showing its true colors as a childish mannequin of a government, too brittle to accept even the mildest criticism due to having no legitimacy. They were never elected, and the Heavens aren't smiling like they used to in the olden days when claiming a Heavenly mandate was all that was needed.
This will force the U.S. and the West in general to get smarter about what materials are necessary for modern life and find substitutes for the ones China controls. It will have the effect of shifting the West's economy further away from China's.