Rare earth crisis: Innovate, or be crushed by China

Re:Rare earth crisis: Innovate, or be crushed by China by leoedin on Friday December 30, 2011 @03:07PM (#3408886)

Essentially, environmental and safety standards, along with mandatory wages, have driven almost every activity that the Chinese can do to China, because they'll do it cheaper. It won't last forever though - Chinese standards are rising, and while there may be a shortage for a short while, if the Chinese don't balance their exports right, the high prices they're forcing will drive other mines to open and destroy any control that they had over the market.

Westerners like to think that we have great environmental standards, but that's only because we export our environmental atrocities elsewhere. There's a large embedded cost in our gadgets, and we ignore it because it makes us uncomfortable.

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Re:Rare earth crisis: Innovate, or be crushed by China by joe_the_user on Friday December 30, 2011 @03:57PM (#3409072)

Yes, the hypocrisy here is just screaming...

The US and/or the WTO could have created trade/tax structures that would have penalized environmentally devastating activities like poor mining practices and removed the incentive to shunt these things to poor countries. This would have also removed the "monopoly" that China is now "exploiting". Crocodiles tears all round...

Edit: typos

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Re:Rare earth crisis: Innovate, or be crushed by China by yzhengyu on Friday December 30, 2011 @10:16PM (#3410003)

As I see it, its not really crocodile tears, but the end result of evolution, becoming the apex predator on our planet, and with a society based on our innate dichotomous nature.

Someone else bears the true costs - example, say some random Chinese factory worker at Foxconn who though is able to survive on meagre wages, is unable to spread his genes since he is not able to find a wife and set up a family - while you reap the rewards and go on to sire a new generation which has the incentive to behave in a similar manner.

I use to be very high falutin about all this thing, thinking some true Marxist society will emerge eventually when capitalism collapses. Now, after looking at all the neuroscience and psychology research that has been done, I'm not so sure if we can ever escape the more primal and insidious parts of our nature.

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