only in your wet day dreams.

let's just look at Gallium which is arguably one of the most critical for defence. to produce 100 tons of Gallium, which counts for 10% of the global supply each year, you have to have 200 million tons of Alumina capabilities. "other countries" won't be able to do it, as they don't have affordable electricity and skilled workers to make the Alumina business itself profitable. how they are going to use or sell those Alumina? to absorb loss of 2 million tons of Alumina for each 1 ton produced Gallium, "other countries" will have to lift their Gallium prices to stupid level.

that is assuming Chinese choose not to fight back on the Alumina front - they control 60% of Alumina production worldwide, they can just flood the global market with cheap Alumina to bankrupt your Gallium production.

remember - 2 million tons of Alumina for 1 ton of Gallium.

I don't know about defense needs, could be true, but I guess they are much less important in volume that the other. You may be able to store them in case of disruption.

It doesn’t solve the production issue, but there are ways to counter that dépendance over china.

I'm wondering how that works. I have written software that was still being used, 25 years later, but it was pretty much a "Ship of Theseus," by then.

Quite common on old industrial machinery and other capital equipment like lab equipment. San Francisco BART for example has to scrounge eBay for old motherboards that still allow DMA to parallel ports via southbridge because it’s too expensive to validate a new design for controllers.

The software they would buy, cost tens of thousands of dollars, and they couldn’t afford to keep upgrading (or the original vendor went belly-up).

My gut reaction is that the software you're describing relies heavily on external integrations. Is that correct?

Basically, a driver. Pretty involved one.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47502310

He had upgrades, but I was running Kubuntu about 20 years ago, still have a bunch of Red Hat and Mandrake ISOs from the early 2000s, and can confirm they still work.

My secret suspicion is that Trump knew of Israel's attack on the Qatar/Iran natural gas in advance.

If the Persian Gulf is closed for a long period, shale oil in North America will do very well.

Israel also has new natural gas reserves that will be in high demand.

Is the loss of market share of the Persian Gulf nations an unintended side effect?

I always take issue with the expression "buying a house now" when you actually mean "pay a mortgage for a house now". With a mortgage, you are at the mercy of the bank and whatever contract you signed. With a rent tenancy, you are at the mercy of the landlord and whatever contract you signed. A landlord will wake up tomorrow and tell you to leave, you have some notice period. Your fixed period deal ends and you can only get a deal that triples your rate.

It's like when people say that self-employed people have no boss, your customer becomes your boss. And you always have one. Everyone that exchanges services/products for money has one.

Even besides that, there is a dramatic difference between a typical (U.S.) mortgage that locks your payments for 30 years, and a month-to-month rental where your rent can go up next month. It's the same difference as buying a solar panel that fixes your costs for 30 years vs. paying whatever electricity rates the local utility charges this month.

(And there is also a dramatic difference between having 1 boss vs. 10 clients vs. 1000 customers vs. 3 billion users. The amount you can ignore any one of them goes up exponentially, and the risk that they will all stop paying you goes down correspondingly.)

In a tenancy, your rent can go up but most decent countries have legal restrictions in regards to how many increases you can do in a period of time and by how much you can increase it at any given time, and gives tenants legal tools to contest it if needed. And you still get the freedom to move to a different city without losing money. Here, most people don't do anywhere near 30 year mortgages so maybe that's more of a US thing.

In an ideal world, businesses would have customers that are all equally valuable. But in the real world, many businesses have a few customers that account for most of the revenue and the rest of the customers. Those few customers become your boss and they indirectly dictate significant parts of your business because an average customer not spending as much will be ok but a major customer not spending as much will get you sweating and looking at your cashflow.