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Meta had the right idea of adding older RAM to their existing servers instead of just buying more. Shame how nobody really noticed. Reduce, REUSE, recycle is the correct order and what we should be doing.
https://www.neowin.net/news/meta-is-reusing-old-ddr4-ram-in-...
As someone that just got done doing a legal dig in a national park (inholding from the 1800s owned by a mining company, preparing to trade that land to the park for another mineral patent elsewhere) before you think of recycling you should perhaps think of developing your own domestic supply to recycle in the first place.
And maybe introduce some technological improvements, too. Like portable millsites and leach pads so you don't fuck up the landscape with dead buildings and environmental waste. And maybe look into some chemical process improvements, like using DMSO instead of cyanide for leaching gold.
Oh, and look into using Z-pinching for mining so we don't need explosives, we just need capacitors and metal tubes and drills to make precision tunnels to grab ore and leave more of the land intact.
Micron had to delay their New York memory fab by a year because there were some bats in trees. This stuff is DOA in most states.
If the government want to pay for my electronic scrap, great! I've got a box of 2nd-gen Intel CPUs, bidding starts at $3000.
Start by banning disposable vapes. The sheer waste of lithium from those fucking devices is insane in 2026. We need every scrap of it we can get!
Its market value is clearly not high enough or they wouldn't use it in disposable vapes.
I think the problem is more that non disposable vapes are illegal and unavailable to most people.
95% come from China? Why ban importing the materials you desire, which are not going to magically be cheaper by banning them, instead of providing services to simply and easily recycle them?
Collection and recycling these safely at scale seems mind boggling difficult. Various batteries, electronics, resin encrusted elements, oils, plastics, and mouthy guckiness.
I would love to see how this process works. Banning them seems to be the most economic and safest solution.
TFW "near term potential" F35s will get their radars.
Why is everyone preparing for war so hard
Because China has stated they will take Taiwan, they have been threatening Philippines sovereignty too. Japan and others are on edge too. China currently has been behaving very adversarial and has a huge fraction of the minerals under their control that this article is posting about. I think sovereignty is a good thing. Plan for the worst, hope for the best.
And yet all sorts of people are advocating for using Chinese LLMs because they are less expensive. It seems like a very risky move to save a few dollars.
The USA keeps threatening my country; Canada.
I can say with a reasonable amount of confidence that going "but china" isn't going to help the US much going forward.
That's misattribution of the the why. The real why is US can't do the sensible thing and cede regional hegemony to growing PRC. There's always the normal solution of watching PRC bomb PH schoolgirls while buying their rare earth and selling them semi, like the rest of the world when US bombs school girls. The why is US leadership pathologically can't not fight, including the fights most of their pop don't want to fight.
A war with large geographic scope has been independently modeled as having a high probability of occurring circa 2030 by major governments for a decade or more. As time has passed, reality has not diverged from those models, so confidence in the conclusions have grown. It is worth noting that this pre-dates current political dramas, Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, etc. The underlying strategic geopolitics driving it is much deeper than those issues.
It has been accompanied by a large spike in military spending globally. The backlog of foreign military sales of US weapons just waiting for approval is ~$1T.
> A war with large geographic scope has been independently modeled as having a high probability of occurring circa 2030 by major governments for a decade or more
Do you have more information about this, or a source?
There is a lot of nuance missing in public discourse about the US threats of leaving NATO, stopping direct arms support of Ukraine (except for intelligence), and generally scaring NATO members and Europe into funding their own defense.
Every USA president since the fall of the Berlin Wall has implored NATO members take control of their own defense. The US has long since abandoned the two theater war doctrine. The US is not going to fight Russia. Doing so would just be taking the bait to split their forces when China simultaneously decides to mobilize in the South China Sea. All of USA military planning has been in preparation for that theater.
Trump's belligerence has accomplished the US foreign policy goals of every administration for the last 40 years.
A lot of the answe are reddit-esque throwaway answers and political shill bots, but for a more nuanced answer. For a long timeant people were brought up on the "End of History" idea. That after the Cold war mankind would all get together and sign kimbaya, that war as we knew it was over, sure there would be atrocities and "policing actions" that would be needed to stop some bad guys but everything was good wars of the past were over and it was all good.
This started to unravel as things got more tense with the increasing militarization of China and centealzatuon of power in Xi as well as well as Putins more aggressive moves.
The Ukraine war kicked the whole structure over and dillusioned a lot of people. The problem is that if suddenly history isn't over and war is a possibility again you need to start preparing for it. If you choose not to play the great game you don't avoid it, you just get crushed, and so as a matter of national survival and security you need to start preparing to meet near peer adversaries, but they see you preparing and they up their defensive preperations and military spending because you did and if they don't they might be crushed, and you see this and have to up your spending, and suddenly a massive amount of wealth is going to preparing for conflict.
The whole situation is almost identical to how things were on the eve of the 20th century, with radical advances in technology overturning decades of military theory and strategy, everyone is tense with alliances constantly shifting and real politick dominating everything because the alternative is the fate of the Belgians who had their country shorn from them and their people massacred by Imperial German forces. At the same time we see growing social unrest within nations (stoked by foreign actors trying to disrupt social cohesion of their potential enemies) and everyone posturing with more and more bluster because to be precieved as weak is to invite death as no one wants to make friends with a weak link.
The one important lesson to be taken however is that WW1 didn't have to happen the Great War could've been prevented, a major part of the conflict was the certainty that there was going to be a war. If we can choose to instead try and be peacemakers and bring the overall temprature of discourse down we can avoid another human catastrophe.
China is dependent on world exports for its future and seems to be trying hard to keep that going, particularly under Xi. It's the US that seems hellbent on breaking globalization.
Also, technological changes in our times are slow compared to the end of 19th century. Nukes are 60 year old tech and cheap drones are not particularly sci-fi tech machines.
The Ukraine war was far from the start of things. Wars were still happening in other parts of the world long before that.
As a wise man once said, we didn't start the fire. It was always burning since the world's been turning.
War with China has been on the roadmap for 10+ years.
Yeah, but not for 2030. IIRC, Xi has demanded that China's military be ready to take Taiwan in 2027.
This level of preparation does not strike me as "so hard". Seems to me that if we in America and Europe were really preparing for a war there are a lot of things we would want to do that we are not doing.
The military build-up in China is world war scale.
because the empire sees no other way but war to maintain dominance, scratch that, avoid dissolution. so folks all over the world prepare, and rightly so if u ask me.
spoiler alert: the cozy days of the colonial west are over. it will all be over soon, and one can hope but i don't guarantee surviving will be necessarily a lucky draw.
btw, this would explain fermi's paradox pretty well.
I have always figured the fermis paradox is that civilizations run out of resources before they can become large scale sustainable. Having wars over a shrinking world would accelerate this however.
Because some idiot leaders threw diplomacy & international law out the window?
So.. back to how things were done in the old days.
The Juche is on the loose.
I hope its less because of war and more because its better to not be so dependent on other countries, similar to how Europe is trying to rely less on the US for digital infrastructure.
I also feel like the boomers offshoring everything to China in the 70's is one of the reasons things are worse off nowadays, but I digress.
In the 70s it was offshoring to Japan. China’s market opened to the west in the late 80s/90s.
When goods don't cross borders, armies do. Dependence is necessary for peace
> Why is everyone preparing for war so hard
Unfortunately I think the actual reason is because they know (despite what they say in public) that climate change is a real and present danger, and the resource and migration wars are coming.
If you look at everything that seems strange through this lens (see for example: Trump talking about how the US needs to take Canada and Greenland) it looks a lot less strange. There's at least some sort of rational throughline, even if its awful and militaristic (and likely only revealed at all to the public at this point because Trump is an age-addled old fool that has a broken public-speaking filter).
Almost definitely this. It explains the build up of forces, signaling of land grabs, hardening of boarders and increase of surveillance. It is all about built a fortress.
There is a lot of dramatic stories in the climate change space but when you see the military's and actuaries around the world talking about the conditions of the coming decades in very matter of fact terms, that is why I worry. They are the level heads that are signaling to those in power, now is the time to harden defenses. Both external and internal.
There have been many Climate Risk Assessments by many countries that we only have little pieces of, but due to freedom of information requests and what bits we have are fairly grim.
Here in Australia there was a report that is still not public on this. But the more open politicians that have seen it said they had to change all their future plans and promises based on what the findings were. That we are moving towards a much more unstable and resource limited world.
As it has been termed by many militaries, Climate change is a threat multiplier.
I have said it for a long while now, in future we will welcome immigrants with open arms. Those arms being machine guns, rockets and drones. I really hope I am wrong but I can see many hermit kingdoms rising and they will loot others before they go hungry.
Humans have had major wars throughout history, it's unrealistic to really think that will change. It's in our nature.
Yet we have wars for oil, not water.
Canada needs a nuclear deterrent.
great distraction for the masses from the files
Cuz they don’t believe in anything else anymore except violence
War is profitable and the people who profit run the US and Europe
that's one term of the equation. the other is that war is the tool of banking cartels.