The U.S. military exercise that shot live-fire artillery rounds over Interstate 5 on Saturday dropped metal shrapnel onto a California Highway Patrol protective services detail for Vice President JD Vance, agency officials said Sunday.

Every decade or so there is a freakout out about China’s monopoly in rare earths. The last time was in 2010 when Paul Krugman wrote:

You really have to wonder why nobody raised an alarm while this was happening, if only on national security grounds. But policy makers simply stood by as the U.S. rare earth industry shut down….The result was a monopoly position exceeding the wildest dreams of Middle Eastern oil-fueled tyrants.

…the affair highlights the fecklessness of U.S. policy makers, who did nothing while an unreliable regime acquired a stranglehold on key materials.

A few years later I pointed out that the crisis was exaggerated:

• The Chinese government might or might not have wanted to take advantage of their temporary monopoly power but Chinese producers did a lot to evade export bans both legally and illegally.
• Firms that had been using rare earths when they were cheap decided they didn’t really need them when they were expensive.
• New suppliers came on line as prices rose.
• Innovations created substitutes and ways to get more from using less.

Well, we are at it again. Tim Worstall, a rare earths dealer and fine economist, is the one to read:

…rare earths are neither rare nor earths, and they are nearly everywhere. The biggest restriction on being able to process them is the light radioactivity the easiest ores (so easy they are a waste product of other industrial processes — monazite say) contain. If we had rational and sensible rules about light radioactivity — alas, we don’t — then that end of the process would already be done. Passing Marco Rubio’s Thorium Act would, for example, make Florida’s phosphate gypsum stacks available and they have more rare earths in them than several sticks could be shaken at.

Some also point out that only China has the ores with dysprosium and terbium — needed for the newly vital high temperature magnets. This is also one of those things that is not true. A decade back, yes, we did collectively think that was true. The ores — “ionic clays” — were specific to South China and Burma. Collective knowledge has changed and now we know that they can exist anywhere granite has weathered in subtropical climes. I have a list somewhere of a dozen Australian claimed deposits and there is at least one company actively mining such in Chile and Brazil.

…No, this is not an argument that we should have subsidised for 40 years to maintain production. It’s going to be vastly cheaper to build new now than it would have been to carry deadbeats for decades. Quite apart from anything else, we’re going to build our new stuff at the edge of the current technological envelope — not just shiny but modern.

As Tyler says, do not underrate the “elasticity of supply.”

The post Rare Earths Aren’t Rare appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

In an extract from her posthumous memoir, Virginia Roberts Giuffre remembers the day an ‘apex predator’ recruited her from Mar-a-Lago, aged just 16; how she was trafficked to a succession of wealthy and powerful men – and how everyone knew what was going on

I can still remember walking on to the manicured grounds of Mar-a-Lago for the first time. It was early morning – my dad’s shift began at 7am, and I’d caught a ride to work with him. Already the air was heavy and moist, and the club’s 20 acres of carefully landscaped greens and lawns seemed to shimmer.

My dad was responsible for maintaining the resort’s in-room air-conditioning units, not to mention its five championship tennis courts, so he knew his way around. I remember he gave me a brief tour before presenting me to the hiring manager, who agreed to take me on. That first day, I was given a uniform – a white polo shirt, emblazoned with the Mar-a-Lago crest, and a short white skirt – and a name tag that said JENNA in all capital letters. (Although I was called Virginia, everyone at home called me Jenna.)

While we chronicled the fall of Nikola, a company that promised over-the-road trucks built with hydrogen propulsion systems, it’s useful to note that it was literally only this past February that the company declared bankruptcy. What came before that was the company’s previous CEO, Trevor Milton. Milton made wild promises to investors in order to get more funding, including showing them video of its prototype truck zooming down a highway under its proprietary propulsion system. The only problem is that it was doing no such thing. Instead, it had been towed to the top of a hilly road and then it coasted down that road, with the footage being taken at a tilted camera angle to make it look like it was actually being driven when it wasn’t. Yes, it really was as cartoonish as that.

From there, the company suddenly lost a bunch of contracts, copyright was invoked in a failed attempt to silence criticism of its actions, and Milton was eventually convicted of fraud and sentenced to 4 years in jail. And then Donald Trump pardoned him, because of course he did. I’m sure it had nothing to do with the millions of dollars Milton donated to the Trump campaign and other Republican candidates, nor anything to do with Milton being represented by Brad Bondi, brother of current U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Milton never did a day in prison and lied publicly after his pardon, saying that the pardon indicated he was innocent, when it did no such thing. But never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that mere months after that pardon for fraud would Milton suddenly become the CEO of a well-established company.

The disgraced founder of Nikola Corp., who was sentenced to four years in prison for fraud for lying to investors about technological breakthroughs at the once-hyped electric-truck maker, has been named CEO of SyberJet Aircraft, the company announced Tuesday.

In a press release, SyberJet said Milton would guide the development of a new nine-seat light jet called the SyberJet SJ36. The company said it would be the fastest jet of its kind ever developed, with speeds clocking in as high as Mach .88.

Now, SyberJet is not a publicly traded company, unlike Nikola. But it is backed by private equity, meaning raising funds for this ambitious project is going to be important. And Milton has a lot of, ahem, runway to get this new jet off the ground. Deliveries on the product aren’t expected until 2032.

There is something of a con job already happening on the SyberJet website, where you can see this.

“Renowned”? That should be “infamous”. And these claims about what Milton did and did not bring to market are pretty laughable. The context about what happened after a few hundred trucks got sold is pretty damned important. For fuck’s sake, guys.

And I do mean “guys.” This is the kind of failing upward you can only get from a white guy. The ink on Milton’s pardon isn’t even dry yet, and he’s already a CEO of another company. And they say you can’t get justice in America anymore.