Demand is up and supply is increasingly getting more costly. Ripe conditions for this kind of behavior.
When it comes to a lot of metals it is kind of amazing how some of the biggest mines of this stuff are some of the oldest. It makes sense as we go for the low hanging fruit first and they are the biggest deposits.
Alas, as an aggregate, the ratio of overburden on mining has been going up for almost a century now and it is starting to catch up in some materials. Copper, nickle being a big two. Iron... not so much. So far we have managed to 'Red queen' ourselves out of the situation by throwing massive amount of resources (mostly energy), but one does wonder what happens if we even hit an energy plateau. Many have speculated, most are wrong, time will tell.
Yep. You occasionally see alarmist articles about the rate of metal theft in places like South Africa, but this is an issue every where. Different rates but it is there. I say alarmist because, they aren't done to inform but most to shock readers.
About a year back here in Australia, so a wealthy country, my local council had the issue where over night, 500 meters of copper water pipe was stolen over night. Have to admit I was kind of impressed at the scale of it.
What I did find interesting in OP's article was the mention of the US Tariffs. I didn't create the problem but it certainly will accelerate it. Interesting times.
Here in southern Australia we would endlessly see this one guy with his broken down leaf on the side of the road. If I recall it was one of the very first generation models and they did not handle our summers well at all. To be fair to Nissan a lot of their issues did get resolved in come generations but it was funny to see that, yeah, they didn't do too great on those first few rounds.
As to your Tesla *. I do endless tire of folks who are like "But what if you want to circle the planet!?! Check mate EV dorks!". For 99% of the time they are absolutely fine.
A friend of mine had one as a work car and drove the 940km (580 miles)from Melbourne to Sydney with only a single charge up of $20 half way through, got lunch at the same time. I mean yes if you really stretch it, you could do it on a single tank of fuel on a combustion engine but it would be a tight run. Also to the recharge time, that drive takes about 9 hours if you do not stop. I have never done it in less than 12 hours because you end up having a lot of down time on trips like that. There is plenty of time to charge if needed. Like you say, for the most part these are solved issues.
They have been playing the long game for decades, the speed up in recent times feels like they realised the windows was closing and they need to lock things down before many wise up.
I am still endlessly fascinated by how modern GPUs can handle stuff like UE5, raytraced lumin (whatever) but still struggle to do 2D rendering. I mean I get it logically, but it just feels so disconnected.
Always neat to see this kind of stuff however. Very cool.
Yup, but getting people to try it involve so much effort you only really do it for people you care about.
It's amazing how resistant people are to eating only meat for a month or two, but drinking alcohol is no problem. Chemical preservatives? No problem. Added sugars? No problem. Seed oils washed in solvents? No problem.
While it is challenging, looked at one a life time scale it is kind of a neat thing. It isn't a purely linear decline and that means while the later years kind of suck, you get a lot of decent time before then.
Yes, we should try and work against this but I am just looking at the silver lining.
When it comes to a lot of metals it is kind of amazing how some of the biggest mines of this stuff are some of the oldest. It makes sense as we go for the low hanging fruit first and they are the biggest deposits.
Alas, as an aggregate, the ratio of overburden on mining has been going up for almost a century now and it is starting to catch up in some materials. Copper, nickle being a big two. Iron... not so much. So far we have managed to 'Red queen' ourselves out of the situation by throwing massive amount of resources (mostly energy), but one does wonder what happens if we even hit an energy plateau. Many have speculated, most are wrong, time will tell.
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