Apple's iPhone as the prototype for China's future success via its dominance of rare earth processing

 Last update: Thursday 3/6/26 7:00am

Deng Xiaoping, the 'father of modern China', implored his country's leaders in 1992 to greatly enhance its power by attaining a position of unchallengeable dominance of the world's markets rare earth elements (REEs).  Rare earths would be for China what oil was for the Middle East. Ever since then, China has been developing an ecosystem that is centered on its rare earth mining and processing assets. 

China's evolving ecosystem facilitated the phenomenal success that Steve Jobs achieved by locating the production of his visionary iPhone in China. In other words, China's successful production of Jobs' vision was a 'proof of concept' for Deng's vision. China's ecosystem would ensure that the iPhone's success would be a prototype for future success, not a never-to-be-repeated one-off. 

Full text ➡ HERE

China vs. Obama at the WTO 2015

Last update: Tuesday 3/2/26 8:09pm

Deng Xiaoping's image appears on this page because, as the 'father of modern China', he inspired his country to greatly enhance its power by leveraging its abundant rare earth resources.  In 1992 he famously declared, "The Middle East has its oil, China has rare earth: China’s rare earth deposits account for 80 percent of identified global reserves, you can compare the status of these reserves to

that of oil in the Middle East: it is of extremely important strategic significance; we must be sure to handle the rare earth issue properly and make the fullest use of our country’s advantage in rare earth resources." 

Full text ➡ HERE

America’s bipartisan pursuit of the wrong rare earth strategies”

Last update: Saturdayday  3/8/26 12:55am

The original title of this first in a series of installments that was posted on this blog in January 2026 was "America's unlikely but successful bipartisan path to a reliable rare earth supply chain " -- a title that reflected its editor's optimism. He was optimistic because he didn't yet know that China was really leveraging its dominance of the tiny $4 billion global market for rare earths by embedding them in innovative high tech products worth hundreds of billions as exports, e.g., iPhones and 'cPhones' (a/k/a Huawei smartphones) and Teslas and 'cTeslas' (a/k/a BYD's) . 

-- Note: Huawei's smartphones grossed larger sales than iPhones in 2025 ; BYD's EVs grossed larger sales than Teslas in 2025.

Full text ➡ HERE

The PJM Part 2 … Negative Externalities, Data Center Alley, and future historically high electricity bills throughout the PJM

Last update:  7:36am Wednesday 11/26/25

This note, Part 2 in what was originally planned to be a three part series, will now be the final installment. It highlights some operational structures of the PJM that facilitated the stunning success of Virginia’s Data Center Alley. Then it sketches a strategy that might enable the founding members of the PJM -- Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland -- to join Virginia as major national and international data center hubs via consortiums that would also guarantee stable lower electricity bills for their regular customers, i.e., households, businesses, schools, government agencies, etc. 

Unfortunately, recent surprising announcements from two powerful utilities — Dominion and Exelon — threaten to burden regular customers throughout the 13 states in the PJM with historically high electricity bills.  Exelon’s announcement requires extensive revisions to Section F and Dominion’s requires the addition of a forthcoming Section G to this note.

Op-Ed ➡ HERE

TL;DR 4Nov25 ... (1) Big Tech Quarterly reports, and (2) Innovative data center proposal from governors of Pennsylania, New Jersey, Maryland, and Virginia

Last update: Wednesday 11/5/25

Welcome to our 4Nov25 TL;DR summaries by ChatGPT of the past week's top 2 stories on our "Useful AI News" page ➡  (1) Big Tech Quarterly reports, and (2) Innovative data center proposal from governors of Pennsylania, New Jersey, Maryland, and Virginia

 

TL;DR ➡ HERE