News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
Fair enough, that makes sense.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1445285/gallium-share-of-production-worldwide-by-country/
As of 2022, China basically produces all (98.4%) of the world's gallium.
... Statista has much more great info, but unless you want to pay for a subscription or spend a day hopping through proxy IPs... yeah, good luck.
The previous article says: "The largest global producers of gallium are Russia, Germany, Australia, and France. "
Ok, looking at this: https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/energie/china-seltene-metalle-100.html
I can see that the reason China became this huge producer is because everyone else decided to stop and by from them instead, though that doesn't mean they can only rely on China for it.
But indeed it is now the largest gallium and germanium producer.
And Gallium is combined to make late-factorio stuff, so him who controls the Gallium, controls the future.
That's how we're saying 'high-tech' now?
...fine, I dig it
They produce 98% percent of low-purity Gallium. We produce plenty of high purity Gallium, and Gallium, like Germanium, comes from Zinc mining. Which we still do plenty of in the US. So if we need more high quality Gallium, it's not going to be hard to get.
Ah, so it's not a matter of "that's where the gallium is", it's "might as well buy it from China if they're sellin' it", same as the dollar store
Edit: I wouldn't be surprised if the places in the US producing high-quality gallium are using poor-quality Chinese gallium as feedstock though.
They are, but we have plenty of Zinc mining we can get it from ourselves. It's just an economics matter, so we'd subsidize that. We only use enough to fill one truck load per year. So it's likely we'd just get a defense contractor to do it and subsidize it
I will add that this isn't really that huge of a deal:
https://cybernews.com/editorial/gallium-germanium-semiconductor-alternatives/
The US and any other developed country can produce it, they just choose not to since the demand isn't that economical to go out of your way to mass produce:
(From the article I linked)
Not enough for a business to specialize in the material. But, seeing as the US does produce a lot of zinc and aluminum and it can be refined as a byproduct of those materials, I won't be surprised if a company steps up to fill the gap after awhile.
Really, just read the article I linked. It gives a good rundown on all this plus the germanium. Ultimately, this isn't that big of a deal for the US.
If it became an issue we would over pay Raytheon to refine it.