I don't know in what world your idea would work. Why should U.S. companies sell any drugs to other countries if they didn't make a profit? Why should I subside sales in one country with the profits from another country other than trying to increase market share to later raise the prices? If a local branch does not manage to gain the margin I expect, I just close shop there.

Ironically, in every country I have heard the same complaint. There is a rumor that a drug is more expensive in your own country than in another one. That's always a clear proof that you pay the development of the drugs sold so cheap in the other country. I've heard the same in Germany, in France, in Spain... As it seems, each country pays the development of a drug for all the other countries in the world.

No. The reality is that each company charges the maximum for a product it can get away with. If the conditions in the U.S. allow to charge on average three times the prices than in other countries, then why would a company not do so? Why should it voluntarily forfeit two thirds of revenue? It has nothing to do with Research & Development, but all with trying to maximize profits.

AI agent to optimize power consumption. From all the press about the power demands of AI that seems like a questionable proposition.

You mean, like the United Kingdom, which got a deal for their car industry so sweet that the U.S. car industry has already complained? Donald Trump will probably sign anything which has the word "Deal" somewhere just to prove he got them. No one will ask him if the deal actually makes sense.

And still, more people buy at IKEA, where you can mount everything with a Philips screwdriver and that funny Allen key you get in the bag with the hardware.

And Prussian Blue, of all things, speaking of dirt cheap

Yeah, great, if you don't care about interstitial water reducing stability and capacity (with a tendency to reabsorb more water after manufacturing); problems with cation vacancies and structural defects; voltage instability due to multi-step redox reactions; difficulty achieving sufficient purity at scale for battery applications; and moderate gravimetric / poor volumetric density compared to alternatives.

People need to stop talking about na-ion like it's just "take li-ion and swap out the cation". It's very different chemistry to master. There are absolutely no guarantees that it will ever beat li-ion on cost. People are certainly trying. They might succeed. But we cannot realistically speculate as to what the ultimate tradeoffs will be, when we don't even know the general category of chemistry that's even going to win out.

The main reason sodium ion batteries are promising as a technology is because it's cheap

No. They "are" [present tense] not cheap. Their is speculation that with sufficient development and sufficient production scales, they could be cheaper than li-ion. This has cooled a lot since the lithium price spike collapsed.

. The only downside is well, Na is a bigger atom with more protons and neutrons and thus is heavier

Borderline irrelevant and not a driving factor. Lithium is only 2-3% of the mass of a li-ion cell, and even less of a complete pack. Also, counterintuitively, despite the larger atomic radius, they actually tend to have higher ionic conductivites.

Sodium ions being cheap chemistry is also easier to recycle

Once again for the people in the back: SODIUM ION IS NOT A SINGLE CHEMISTRY. What cathodes are you talking about? P2-type layered oxides? O3-type layered oxides? Which ones? NASICON? Fluorophosphates? Prussian Blue analogues? PBAs? What anodes are you talking about? Hard carbon? Tin-based? Antimony-based? Phosphorus-based? Bismuth-based? Titanium-based? What sort of electrolytes are you talking about? Organic? Which mixtures? Ionic liquids? Aqueous? Solid (NASICON? Beta-alumina)?

They are NOT a single chemistry, and do NOT have a single list of advantages / disadvantages.

Once again: No. "the" batteries are not in production. A type of sodium-ion battery linked is in production. There are many types of sodium ion batteries in various stages of development, each with their own advantages and disadvantages.

And no, it is not a simple swap of sodium ions for intercalation rather than lithium ions. The chemistry involved is quite different. One of the biggest challenges is that sodium ions don't form very stable SEIs with traditional li-ion electrolytes.

Yes and no. The news is that the real results measured right now are at the upper level of the estimates, which means that reality is worse than the science popularizations have suggested so far - and they were already called alarmist, when in fact, they were understating the problem.

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.

This is not playing devil's advocate, this is whataboutism. Even more so, it proves the point of the security professionals. If we can't even make something designed not to have backdoors safe enough to prevent unauthorized access, how much more insecure is something which should be designed to have an obvious and an obscure access? Now we have to fight off even more attack vectors, and apparently, we aren't perfect in it.

Alcatraz was phased out because it was too expensive to operate. What would DOGE say?

And you have to keep test systems around based on the different chipsets. The list can be expanded: timing is different on different processor architectures. Memory management is different. Interrupt control is different. The number and the layout of differently privileged modes is different. That means that syscalls have to be implemented differently. And this does not in the slightest exhausts the list of 486 quirks and features (and that of every other chip architecture).