It's good to have production capacity ready to go, underutilizing input streams. Things like steel can do this very well, things like state of the art microchips? not as much.
It's the natural resources in the ground that we should be using as slowly as possible, if we could buy the bulk ores and just have our own mines ready to start producing if the ore shipments ever stop, that's the ideal circumstance - but going at it like that is a little transparent.
To be fair, I was afraid T1 was going to be much more like T2, but I think the powers that be were in shock with what fell in their laps and couldn't organize quickly enough to be "as effective" as they are this time with 8 years of prep time.
They had 4 years to engineer another Brexit, and they made it stick again - my neighbor still is living in some kind of reality distortion fog even as of last weekend.
In my experience, the further up the foodchain you move (from worker bee to manager, director, VP, CEO, Board, Investors) the more they take for granted, the more they "go with their gut."
I have always thought that it makes the most sense to import your non-renewable resources regardless of whether you have them domestically or not. Then, if the SHTF, you've got what you imported, the exporters don't have it anymore, AND you have your domestic sources to develop.
Schrodenger's Douchebag: a guy who says something highly offensive to see how everyone reacts, then decides if he's going to say "Oh I was just joking." or not.
All the crap they're doing with downsizing of federal agencies, they just wave a hand without knowing what they are doing and when the protests get loud enough they take it back.
View from inside the funny farm: I just hope we can remove the head clown and tell the rest of the world "sorry about that, we'll try to not let it happen again, can we just call a do-over?"
With 4x as many people, they can be 4x more kinds of stupid...
My local oriental market has their business up for sale...
Just give me money, that's what I want.
Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can.
I mean, if people will pay us for gases extracted from the atmosphere, I'm all for that. And iron ore doesn't seem to be nearly as concerning as things like copper, cobalt, lithium (though I bet the "lithosphere" has much more available lithium in it than we currently know.)