Recipe for Disaster
Recipe for Disaster
With the announcement of another export quota, maddog laments the unreadiness of nations who allow themselves to fall prey to national monopolies.
Today in the newspaper I read that China was considering limiting the amount of rare earth it exports to other countries. Since China produces about 97 percent of all the rare earth metals used in electronics, such as integrated circuits, LCD TVs, and other high-tech components, this limit would do two things: raise prices on all these components and force companies to build more electronics factories in China to skirt the limit on raw materials.
Although these rare earth elements exist in other countries, for a long time it has been cheaper to get them from China, so potential rare earth supplies in other countries were not developed. Because rare earths are used in relatively small quantities to build relatively high-value goods, their shipping costs were negligible. Now that the prices of these rare earth materials are rising, other sources outside China are being developed, but they will not be ready until 2015.
Read full article as PDF »
092-092_maddog.pdf (1.18 MB)Tag Cloud
News
-
Google and NASA Partner in Quantum Computing Project
Vendor D-Wave scores big with a sale to NASA's Quantum Intelligence Lab.
-
Mageia Project Announces Mageia 3 Linux
Many package updates and Steam integration highlight the latest from the Mandriva-based community Linux.
-
FSF Outs the World Wide Web Consortium over DRM Proposal
Richard Stallman calls for the W3C to remain independent of vendor interests.
-
Debian 7.0 Debuts
The new release supports nine architectures, 73 human languages, and zero non-Free components.
-
Alpha Version of Fedora 19 Released
Fedora developers release the first alpha version of Fedora 19, known as Schrödinger’s Cat, for general testing. The final release is expected in July 2013.
-
ack 2.0 Released
ack is a grep-like, command-line tool that has been optimized for programmers to search large trees of source code.
-
SUSE Studio 1.3 Released
New features in SUSE Studio 1.3 include enhanced cloud integration, VM platform support, and lifecycle management.
-
Xen To Become Linux Foundation Collaborative Project
The Linux Foundation recently announced that the Xen Project is becoming a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project.
-
RunRev Releases Open Source Version of LiveCode
Open source version of LiveCode is now available for developing apps, games, and utilities for all major platforms.
-
OpenDaylight Project Formed
OpenDaylight is an open source software-defined networking project committed to furthering adoption of SDN and accelerating innovation in a vendor-neutral and open environment.
