Maybe I'm wrong. I gained my knowledge second-hand/third-hand from books and podcasts so I would defer to you to your actual experience and observations about Chinese REE. What is your estimate on how long it would take the West to catch to at least supply some of the rare earth components and what the real barriers might be? Would love to hear your take on this.

Thanks for sharing your observations. I had no idea about the minutiae of that industry, i.e. the ecological control and its effects on the industry.

Basically, if we want to replicate what they did, we will have to do it mostly from scratch -- Japan and Australia has done some of the work already so it's not totally from scratch. It's obviously not impossible but it could take almost a decade for us to do that.

That said, I don't think this should be enough for Japan to stop investing in EVs. If Japanese car makers are really worried about this then they can build their plants in the US and leverage any deal the US has with China on real earths. They've already starting importing Japanese cars made in India and the US back to Japan so that's an established practice. Then once they've secured their own supplies they can make the EVs in Japan too. I think OP's point about the suppliers have more merit as a reason why Japan might not want to develop EVs.

I do think the original point about lower complexity vehicles being a threat to the suppliers has some merits though. Germany faces a very similar dilemma and made similar decisions.

I would add that despite joint ventures, China's domestic internal combustion engine industry never really caught up. In fact their best engines were made by wholly domestic companies but those were not nearly as good as those made by Western and Japanese companies.

As Warren Buffet noted over a decade ago, BEV is an opportunity for China to simply skip over all of that and just leapfrog everyone else. So it's even better than greenfield. It's green field for them while allowing them to completely disrupt existing foreign competitors.

This makes me really curious because that behavior seems very maladaptive for a species. That leads me to wonder if something else, ie. the environment or domestication, is leading to this behavior rather than pigs being really, really prone to wiping out their own species. Does anyone know why they do this in a farm environment?

CBS self censoring is basically the same thing.

The Chinese government can then say "What censorship?" or "It's rare" and now the FCC can do the same.

Playing whack-a-mole is not a good strategy for censorship. The chilling effect of self censorship is the winning strategy.

Their end users are what they ultimately sell. They are captive audiences. This is what monopolies/platforms do. It's never been part of MSFT's DNA to care that much about end user experience. Who they really cater to are the IT decision makers, etc. These people can then show some numbers about "AI adoption" and "productivity" gains on their Power Point slides presented to their bosses. MSFT's value is delivering that to them.

We don't hate Celery at all. It's just a bit harder to get it to do certain things and requires a bit more coding and understanding of celery than what we want to invest time and effort in.

Again, no hate towards Celery. It's not bad. We just want to see if there are better options out there.

I've never heard of Oban until now and the one we've considered was Temporal but that feels so much more than what we need. I like how light Oban is.

Does anyone have experience with both and is able to give a quick comparison?

Thanks!