This is the documented operational reality of what industry sources confirm as a zero-license policy that has functioned, for all practical purposes, as a complete embargo on American access to Chinese tungsten. No announcement. No formal declaration. No diplomatic incident that would trigger retaliation or international arbitration. Just forms that enter a bureaucratic process and never emerge on the other side.
sick as hell, you love to see itSixty percent of all tungsten consumed globally goes into cemented carbides. Every machining operation in modern manufacturing depends on them. No tooling, no machining. No machining, no production. The arithmetic really is that simple.
China produces eighty-two point seven percent of the world’s tungsten. The United States produces zero. Net import reliance stands at one hundred percent.
I love learning about the properties of atoms and moleculesTungsten has no futures market. There is no LME contract providing transparent price discovery or hedging mechanisms. […] Participants cannot hedge. Speculators cannot arbitrage away mispricings. Inventory positions remain invisible until shortages manifest in production stoppages.
tragic
I cannot help but respect this author. He seems to have staked his claim on the intersection of finance and physics. I cannot imagine the sheer psychic stress and exasperation that must come from playing the role of Bill Nye the Science Guy to a bunch of ivy league frat bros.
bill ‘why’m i even tryin’ guy
international arbitration
USA destroys WTO enforcement mechanism by refusing to appoint committee members, then wonders why teacher isn’t showing up to help her special American boy
Mineral Warfare
when a historical idealist tries to figure out why the world keeps being so historical materialist
Could you explain this? I don’t understand
Historical Materialism is the idea that it’s the concrete conditions that tend to be the driving force in history; the geography, the distribution of resources, the ability (or lack thereof) to meet people’s physical needs like water food and shelter. If you want to understand a given history, starting there will give you a far clearer understanding of how and why historical figures and peoples act the way they do. It’s not the be-all-end-all, but it is the terrain on which all other factors must play out.
An Idealist framing of history emphasizes the beliefs and outlooks of people, what and how they think. It’s an important consideration for any historical analysis, but (at least in the english speaking world, can’t comment on anywhere else) it gets over prioritized. If you got an education in the US, you might recognize this in the way our local history is told as though it’s the story of democracy itself, beginning as an idea and emerging into the world to shape it.
just strikes me as “this can’t mean that material conditions drive history, it must be because the tungsten spirit is angry with us”
Thank you. I’m sorry, I should have been more specific: Who is being mocked here? Is the author of this article esposuing an idealist perspective? I didn’t think so when I read it, but I might be missing something
no it’s my fault for riffing while drunk. it was a reaction purely to the phrase “Mineral Warfare”, which made me laugh and I started imagining a liberal trying to find a metals rulebook and asking to speak to the manager of tungsten
ha
Mineral warfare THEY’RE ROCKS HANK
I honestly think that Trump is to chicken shit to start a hot war with China. The next dem after Trump? Nuking China day one.
I do find dems tend to be more unhinged when it comes to foreign policy.
Any lib that actually keeps up with foreign policy tends to be horrifyingly evil. Libs on domestic policy can be sane, but any foreign affairs lib is not to be trusted.
They have this messianic thing going which is really disturbing.
(neo-)libs are at least conscious of the function the state plays in placating the proletariat and expanding the petit-bourgeois in preparatioin for their uncouth cousins.
If true, a policy exists, it is just a hidden order handed down and not leaked because the western spy network in China was liquidated.
Anyway I think I started bringing up Tungsten here around the beginning of the Ukraine war as something that would cripple the west if sanctioned by China.
Turns out China controls production of the vast majority of inputs needed for any sort of high tech manufacturing. The west is completely cooked having wasted the resources they had on a proxy war they lost.
Not just hi-tech but low-tech basic war materials too. Every single 155mm artillery shell currently fired by howitzers in Ukraine? All of them contain tungsten. Every single nato AP 7.62x51mm bullet? Tungsten cores.
Tungsten is the backbone of most frontline ammunitions the west relies on, not just their hi-tech stuff but basic frontline logistics.
For sure, from military perspective this is an unmitigated disaster that has no solution in the near term.
How much of this tungsten might be recoverable post-war from Ukrainian battefields?
vanishingly little, it’s small amounts sprinkled over a massive area
would likely be cheaper to prospect a new mine and start up extraction than going door to door in Ukraine with a cup asking if people have seen any bullets
Also, it will be Russia doing the recovering.
It’s an interesting subject, so I was dissapointed when it became clear that this text is written by AI. AI uses the following structure very often: “It’s not X, it’s Y”, so the list below tells me it’s AI beyond doubt.
I.
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This is not speculation. This is not inference from supply chain tightness or price movements or anecdotal reports from frustrated procurement officers. This is the documented operational reality of…
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This is not an analysis of a commodity market experiencing temporary tightness. This is a reconnaissance report from the front lines of a new form of economic warfare
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This is not the blunt instrument of a traditional export ban. This is a scalpel.
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The pattern suggests not reactive retaliation but proactive strategy.
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The restrictions announced in 2023, 2024, and 2025 are not isolated policy responses to specific trade disputes. They are nodes in an integrated campaign
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Tungsten is not the final escalation. It is another proof of concept.
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The question for Western policymakers and corporate strategists and institutional investors is not whether to take this seriously (…) The question is what to do about it
II.
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This is not marketing rhetoric from mining promoters or special pleading from industry lobbyists. This is physics.
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These properties are not arbitrary. They emerge from tungsten’s electronic structure
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This is not an abstract supply chain concern. This is industrial capacity disappearing in real time
III.
- This is not a simple on-off switch. It is a tunable instrument with multiple control parameters
(Anything further is for paid subscribers.)
I think that’s going to become less reliable as actual human writers read more AI slop and eventually start writing like chatbots.
Because of your comment, I was curious if AI itself could detect AI usage in this article, and it brought up even more examples of obvious stylistic patterns in this article that point to it being LLM generated. Hilarious.
as a control you should feed it a few pages of Dickens
I’d be wary of doing that, because this is what many educators have tried doing ever since Chat GPT was proven… problematic for academia. I don’t think it’s all that reliable as LLMs aren’t super deterministic, and are more likely to provide false positives rather than disagree with your assumptions. Plus, it’s also an issue that some people just write a bit like LLMs for multiple reasons. It doesn’t help that LLMs are constantly tweaked to encourage/discourage certain habits as and when they’re complained about online.
The “It’s not X… it’s Y” emphasis is an LLM smell because it’s repetitive, just like the use of the emdash – and that’s sort of how you can sniff out an LLM by vibes alone. If the rhetorical or grammatical tool is overused, especially in contexts where it doesn’t fit the structure of the writing, it just becomes obvious that the article was generated by a machine. Keeping an eye out for out-of-place facts and combinations of ideas that don’t make sense on further inspection (kind of like when you read a clock in you dream and it never says the same time twice) helps as well.
In the end, a well-edited article might be written by LLMs and modified until it looks “legit” but the real test is if the author has proven their ability to engage with the topic at hand. If they provide citations, double-check facts and proof-read they’re more likely to get away with LLM-written content, and even if not they might still produce something that’s useful to others.
AI uses the following structure very often: “It’s not X, it’s Y”, so the list below tells me it’s AI beyond doubt.
Now I understand how the emdash users feel
Good read but yeah the AI signs irked me too.
o7
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Chinese W
