In what region of China are the best diapason grown? The harvesting vehicles would need at least an 8 foot bed.

It's not a surprise but this sort of thing (along with the less consumer-facing; but also pretty serious, tariff burdens on obtaining manufacturing equipment) really emphasizes how counterproductive the "announce huge blanket tariffs based on some mixture of nonsense and a quasi-mercantilist-with-a-heap-of-bitterness theory of balance of trade" 'strategy', if you can call it that, really is.

If you want American greatness generally, or onshore manufacturing in particular, you are making things vastly harder for yourself by just abruptly making more or less anything that isn't already domestically manufactured harder and more expensive to get. Does Adafruit or Sparkfun's catalog run a bit into fairly casual nerd toys at the shallow end? Arguably. Does it also include a wide variety of bits and pieces that people who are most likely to be interested in entering the engineering pipeline as they grow up, along with people who are doing engineering and need a given bit or piece quickly and reliably, would definitely want? Indeed it does.

Are you going to win the future by making it harder for someone interested in robotics to get a PWM/servo driver board because it's on a Chinese PCB? Even if your desired end-goal is a 100% vertically integrated mine to customer production chain it's absurd to think that the most efficient(or even possible) way of doing that is by blanket restrictions on basically everything all at once. If anything (not unlike we've been accusing China of doing for some decades) you'd presumably want zero to effectively negative tariffs/other regulatory incentives on certain things precisely because you wish to develop capability in areas downstream of them.

It's only really in more or less purely frivolous consumption goods where just flatly increasing the cost of the foreign stuff isn't obviously self-destructive(still not necessarily good policy; but if football-watchers went from 65in TVs to 45in ones and more tailgating it wouldn't cause obvious injury to the football industry; while someone doing boutique electronics for specialist applications could easily go from viable to out of business if they can't get a PCB spun quickly or get some test leads nice and fast).

The source is nontoxic clay.
The output is nontoxic clay.
The solution to the tailings is "put them back in the hole".

Anyone who makes some simple claim about "sodium-ion batteries are X" doesn't even know the start of what they're talking about.

Sodium-ion batteries are not a single chemistry. Each chemistry has its own advantages and disadvantages; they don't share a single set of properties. Heck, if there's any single most common advantages and disadvantages, it's ones almost nobody talks about: high diffusion rates and poor SEI formation.

The investment over the past several years on Na-ion was in large part a bet that lithium prices were going to stay super-high ('22-23 price spike), which should have been obvious to anyone that they wouldn't.

The simple fact is that you simply just don't need that much. A typical li-ion battery, despite the name, is only 2-3% lithium by mass. And lithium deposits are on the order of 1% lithium, give or take depending on the type and quality of deposit (salar and clay less, spodumene more).

He didn't just make geographically-ignorant comments, but also also didn't bother to read the paper, which had this picture as its cover.

It's a lithium clay in an enclosed hydrologic basin. Barren scrubland in the middle of nowhere. The extraction process involves digging up clay, running it through an extraction process (if an acid extraction, then followed by neutralization), and then put back from whence it came.

A typical EV only contains 5-10kg of lithium, and the clay at the adjacent Thacker Pass is ~0,3% lithium. It's really not much at all. And lithium is recycleable. Once again, for the people in the back: a clean energy economy involves way LESS mining than today's dirty-energy economy. And the mining involved tends to be much cleaner. The average ICE vehicle burns its entire mass in fuel every single year for ~20 years, 0% recycling on that oil. That oil is typically produced from sensitive or politically problematic locations around the world, and comes out of the ground carcinogenic, neurotoxic, hepatotoxic, renal toxic, etc etc, as an easily-spilled, highly-flammable liquid. But oh, no no, THAT's okay because we're used to polluting the hell out of our planet with THAT.

And for the record: lithium is neither rare nor expensive. Today, lithium carbonate (the primary traded form) is about $9/kg. We're talking less than the price of most cheese, nuts, meat, etc.

Apparently this doesn't apply to slashdot moderators....

Lol, like even 1% of today's tech users could tell you their Mac address.

I guess you missed the part where it said "capital or infamous crime".

A guy breaks into your house, you don't have to ask a judge if you have permission to throw him out on his ass. Exactly the same situation with illegals - they're not even technically being punished, just returned.

If we wanted to kill them, then yes, we should ask a judge first.

Increasingly, it seems to be just that.

About $0.45 actually.

When I was in school, the local ice cream chain gave out free book covers. All the cool kids had them.

Given how over-priced text books are these days, I wouldn't be surprised if the issued books cost more than the chromebook.

As I said above, when Mom and Dad get the bill, there will be consequences for the kid. I'm sure if the kid caused a fire at the school and mom got THAT bill, there would be more than a slap on the wrist coming.

I'm sure when Mom and Dad get the bill, they'll make sure there are consequences. There's no need for a judge to get involved for that.