China produces the entire world’s supply of samarium, a rare earth metal that the United States and its allies need to rebuild inventories of fighter jets, missiles and other hardware.
  • huf [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    67·
    7 months ago

    “grip” lmao. they mine it in china, in their own country. and the only reason they stopped trading it to you is because biden started a trade war for no reason and trump tripled down on it. you basically told them to stop trading with you, and instead of bombing you to death to open up your free markets, they just stopped.

    • KobaCumTribute [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      17·
      7 months ago

      Don’t you see, the devious celestials have rudely and sneakily placed their country atop this bounty of naturally occurring industrial extractive capital and resource extraction operations, and in their peerless arrogance they have not simply gifted it to us, the divine and rightful masters of all creation!

  • BodyBySisyphus [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    45·
    7 months ago

    Samarium is not found free in nature, but, like other rare earth elements, is contained in many minerals, including monazite, bastnäsite, cerite, gadolinite and samarskite; monazite (in which samarium occurs at concentrations of up to 2.8%)[13] and bastnäsite are mostly used as commercial sources. World resources of samarium are estimated at two million tonnes; they are mostly located in China, US, Brazil, India, Sri Lanka and Australia, and the annual production is about 700 tonnes.

    Oh noes, our mighty military is being brought to its knees by a shortage of a thing we have the second most of in the entire world, how dare China hoard it all to itself.

      • BodyBySisyphus [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        15·
        7 months ago

        Yeah, my preference would be for all the generals to come to their senses and realize the continued production of the instruments of death will only lead to tragedy, but in the meantime the lamentation over outsourcing production of critical materials to someone they’ve decided is a mortal enemy is pretty funny.

    • ExotiqueMatterEnglish
      26·
      7 months ago

      It’s not our fault that we couldn’t be bothered to invest in mines and refineries instead of de-localizing production to maximize our profits! capitalist coping

    • InevitableSwing [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      10·
      7 months ago

      Discovered in 1879 by French chemist Paul-Émile Lecoq de Boisbaudran, samarium was named after the mineral samarskite from which it was isolated.

      Samarium has no swagger. The chemist should have named it after himself. Boisbaudran is missing from the periodic table.

  • eldavi@lemmy.mlEnglish
    31·
    7 months ago

    i wonder if this contributed the piles of weapons the american military was expending on the houthi’s

    • Grapho@lemmy.mlEnglish
      27·
      7 months ago

      Who knew carpet bombing anyone for any reason all the time would exhaust the arsenal a bit?

    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆OPEnglish
      21·
      7 months ago

      likely, along with having to divert a bunch of military production to propping up the war in Ukraine

  • Utter_Karate [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    23·
    7 months ago

    Some small part of my brain keeps expecting competency from the West like some kind of evil mastermind. This despite decades of both foreign and domestic policy basically going “It hurt itself in its confusion!” over and over like a pokémon battle log. And that’s on me. That part of my brain is screaming “YOU DIDN’T PLAN FOR THIS!?” in disbelief, despite the fact that they have never given me any cause to believe that they would plan for this.

  • Sleve_McDichael [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    18·
    7 months ago

    Does it really or is this just one of those articles that manufactures consent for giving more money to the military and/or expanding destructive mining operations in the US

    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆OPEnglish
      20·
      7 months ago

      It absolutely does because you need rare earths for producing basically any sort of tech, and China controls the vast majority of production and refining. It would take the US decades of concerted effort to replicate that.