why anon left gulf stream aerospace
(subsidiary of General Dynamic)
employees were told not to say
"Merry Christmas" because it
would upset some of the customers
(those of a middle eastern persuasion presumably)
Out in the Mojave Desert in California lies the Mountain Pass mine, once the world’s foremost supplier of valuable rare earth minerals — 17 elements deemed critical to modern society. In an age where China controls 80 percent of the global output of these minerals, it is strange to believe that a once-dominant source sits within the United States. Stranger still is the tale of how this mine came to supply the Chinese rare earths industry.
In 1952, Mountain Pass opened. First explored as a uranium deposit, it soon supplied rare earths for the electronic needs of the Cold War economy. Until the 1990s, it stood alone as the only major source of rare earths worldwide.
By 2002, however, the mine was defunct. In the eyes of the U.S. government and major manufacturers, it no longer made sense to acquire rare earths from a U.S. source subject to stringent environmental regulations. Instead, the hard business of extracting useful minerals was exported to other countries, where environmental damage was safely out of sight. China happily obliged, allowing environmental harm to proliferate so long as the costs of rare earth mining were kept down.
In 2008, a group of investors formed Molycorp and convinced Wall Street to resurrect Mountain Pass under an audacious plan dubbed “Project Phoenix.” With the promise of wealth to be generated from new (but untested) technologies, Molycorp bullishly claimed that it could compete with (or even underprice) China’s near-monopoly. Molycorp’s critics weren’t convinced, pointing to the immaturity of the company’s mineral separation technology, the high barriers to entry and the lingering threat of the Chinese monopoly to manipulate prices at will.
https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/commentary/2019/11/12/the-collapse-of-american-rare-earth-mining-and-lessons-learned/