And then not have the capacity to refine the minerals so they have to send the stuff to China for processing

Are we already forgetting that trump invaded Venezuela for oil, then the oil companies said "excuse me but we can't profitably exploit their notoriously shitty oil"?

Part of being a literal Nazi is that the o.g. Nazis got themselves stuck in an increasing number of military quagmires not because they had to but because they refused to do consider the obvious peaceful solutions for their problems. The war machine had to be fed even at the cost of their own self-destruction.

Except this time they have a nuclear arsenal capable of wiping all civilization and somehow people aren't freaking out nearly enough about that.

• Venezuela: oil, because renewables are becoming more expensive due to all of the raw materials going into AI-related tech and the US needs a backup plan if shit hits the fan and their bets don’t pan out
• Greenland: rare Earth metals, because they are the strategic bottleneck amongst said materials, and China stopped exploring them recently and I guess Australia and Canada are harder targets?
• Can you guess why China is circling Taiwan so hard nowadays? Because they want TMSC in order to overcome their current chip production limits (nm/transistor count)
• But why is that important? Because of Moore’s Law. We’ve hit the practical physical limits of transistor size vs molecular complexity with current manufacturing methods. We (humanity) are stagnating now, and can’t climb up The Kardashev scale no more.
• But we can’t stop because our resources and time are limited. Our planet is on a clock right now. So their apparent solution is: secure/stockpile rare Earth metals, sufficient energy reserves, and production means to train AGI, because apparently someone at some point put the idea that AGI would be the solution to the manufacturing problem.
• But this is all being exasperated by AI training since the start: resources invested, materials wasted, energy spent, planet heated/polluted. Now it’s a recursive problem and a self-fulfilling prophecy
• And everyone is betting they can solve it first, the will be the ones that’ll win the AGI race, and save us because they’re the good guys and know what they’re doing. Our wise leaders will sacrifice anything to save their citizens, even their own public image (see how noble Trump/Putin/whatever are being?) to save the planet. The end will justify the means surely, and people will forgive them once they realise what was going on all this time. Poor them.
• Nobody is even stopping to ask: “but what if we (countries) worked together instead of against each other?” because of people like Trump being in power.

There you go. My current working theory.

P.S: wonder where the existing rare Earth metals went? Ask the planned obsolescence/anti-repair people and the Phoebus Cartel.

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