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4 comments

[–] Justintoxicated 2 points (+2|-0)

Pretty cool, I dig rare earth minerals. The main issue I see is that Japan was devoting quite a bit of time and resources to finding ways to replace rare earth minerals with new design/more common materials so they would not have to be at China's whim which is better than relying on rare earths. Of course the the more in demand minerals neodymium and samarium where not among the mentioned cache so work on lessening usage of those will likely continue.

[–] xyzzy 2 points (+2|-0)

So finally the prices of the Japanese capacitors might come down.

The predictions are pretty flawed though. Future demand is hard to extrapolate from current data with the demand for rare-earths being from the fastly changing electronics industry.

[–] CDanger 2 points (+2|-0)

Humans vastly underestimate uncertainty (both ways) when making future predictions about anything.

[–] jobes [OP] 1 points (+1|-0)

It's almost like we're working with extremely incomplete sets of data that can't be extrapolated from, yet we tend to put compete confidence into those predictions for no reason whatsoever