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Geologists doubt Earth has the amount of copper needed to develop the entire world

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  • Copper doesn't get used up. The blue rocks in the picture are basically copper rust. We just need to use it in smart ways...no copper pots or door handles. Or at Least identify and recycle it more efficiently by returning used electronics to the stores we purchased them from. Those places should have a plan on how to dismantle the used electronics and how to reuse the materials.

    We just need to use it in smart ways

    We're more likely to get copper from asteroids first or die trying

  • Capitalism is bad at pricing in externalities. It's pretty good at using price signals to allocate finite resources to more productive uses.

    Markets do not equal capitalism. You can have the efficiencies of free markets (worker owned co-ops which are market socialist) without the all consuming greed of capitalism.

    I don't disagree, but I don't see the relevance of these particular flaws of unrestrained capitalism to this specific stated problem: that there might not be enough copper to be able to continue to use it as we always have.

    There are lots of flaws to capitalism. Running out of useful copper, while copper is being used in wasteful ways, doesn't really implicate the main weaknesses of capitalism systems.

  • Ever since the crisis of over production, MAJOR, unceasing psycho-social campaign have been continuously been running not just to foster demand but to ensure it exceeds the planned supply and ensure the price margin always remains on the right side of the curve.

    This is the central reason why nearly everyone works ceaselessly to buy things they don't need and dont have the time nor energy to use.

    What does this have to do with how the world distributes useful copper? Nobody is buying up copper because of being tricked by advertising, so I'm not sure what the relevance of your comments are, to the topic at hand.

    I don't think you're wrong, I just don't think this thread really raises the issues you want to talk about.

  • We just need to use it in smart ways

    We're more likely to get copper from asteroids first or die trying

    Didn't China just punt off a ticket to some asteroids? Viability tests maybe?

  • What does this have to do with how the world distributes useful copper? Nobody is buying up copper because of being tricked by advertising, so I'm not sure what the relevance of your comments are, to the topic at hand.

    I don't think you're wrong, I just don't think this thread really raises the issues you want to talk about.

    We are all literally being tricked into bringing home more copper.

    I bought a whole ass Samsung S25 In February, only to discover in March that a $6 part and $20 bucks of labor made my S22 perfectly serviceable (needed new USB charging port)

    But like a dumbass I bought a phone after 3 years of waiting, and was giddy about it and I'm literally typing on the older phone now.

    I have been trying to trick myself into letting devices grow into a more full obsolescence before replacing them, and have had very poor luck in doing so.

    Plenty of this is my own impulse control, but plenty of this is by design and marketing, and if enough people are satisfied with their three years old cell phones bad things happen to your 401k and to my friends employed in South Korea.

    I realize that this is an infinitesimally smaller amount of copper, Even all-in with accessories, and the institutional and industrial requirements for copper.

    But if we don't start to figure out some sort of degrowth, we're going to hit that wall as others have mentioned, and it all seems to start with the marketing demand and design.

  • There's a lot of copper pairs left underground. Many hundreds of thousands of kilometres of it. Use it as a pull-through for fibre-optic bundles, and everyone can have gigabit internet.

    Seriously though, there'll come a time when that underground obsolete copper will become economic to retrieve.

    One of my family members had that job for a good while. What's interesting is the phone companies did not keep great records of what's copper and where it is, so a lot of it is likely to remain in place for a long time. Something else he has seen is thieves cutting fiber, thinking it is copper, and causing outages, although that is less frequent than it was years ago.

  • What does this have to do with how the world distributes useful copper? Nobody is buying up copper because of being tricked by advertising, so I'm not sure what the relevance of your comments are, to the topic at hand.

    I don't think you're wrong, I just don't think this thread really raises the issues you want to talk about.

    I think this kind of artificial demand creation is the main driver for all resource consumption

  • We are all literally being tricked into bringing home more copper.

    I bought a whole ass Samsung S25 In February, only to discover in March that a $6 part and $20 bucks of labor made my S22 perfectly serviceable (needed new USB charging port)

    But like a dumbass I bought a phone after 3 years of waiting, and was giddy about it and I'm literally typing on the older phone now.

    I have been trying to trick myself into letting devices grow into a more full obsolescence before replacing them, and have had very poor luck in doing so.

    Plenty of this is my own impulse control, but plenty of this is by design and marketing, and if enough people are satisfied with their three years old cell phones bad things happen to your 401k and to my friends employed in South Korea.

    I realize that this is an infinitesimally smaller amount of copper, Even all-in with accessories, and the institutional and industrial requirements for copper.

    But if we don't start to figure out some sort of degrowth, we're going to hit that wall as others have mentioned, and it all seems to start with the marketing demand and design.

    Copper is a material that is used in many more orders of magnitude for infrastructure and basic development. It's technically "consumption" to eat food everyday and have running water and electricity in your home, but the type of materialist luxury consumption you're talking about doesn't factor into global copper demand. There are 7.2 billion smartphones in use, and about 14g of copper in each one. That's about 100,000 metric tons of copper, when the article talks about 110 million as a baseline (11,000 times as much), and above 200 million (20,000 times as much). So no, consumer electronics aren't going to move the needle on this scale of a problem.

    If you're going to tell the developing countries that they need to stop developing, that's morally suspect. And frankly, environmentally suspect, as the article itself is about moving off of fossil fuels and electrifying a lot of our energy needs in both the developed and developing nations, whether we're talking relatively clean energy source like natural gas or dirtier sources like coal, or even dirtier sources like wood or animal dung.

  • Copper doesn't get used up. The blue rocks in the picture are basically copper rust. We just need to use it in smart ways...no copper pots or door handles. Or at Least identify and recycle it more efficiently by returning used electronics to the stores we purchased them from. Those places should have a plan on how to dismantle the used electronics and how to reuse the materials.

    Copper pots and door handles are very smart products as copper has killing bacterias properties, it is self cleaning, in some way.

  • Copper pots and door handles are very smart products as copper has killing bacterias properties, it is self cleaning, in some way.

    Its possible to just coat the surface if that's the effect needed. I was so happy a year ago that I had found copper Ethernet wire. However upon inspection recently the wire is basically aluminum coated in copper. Usually, platers will first clean the surface and then electro less coat nickel on aluminum. Then you can coat other things like copper. Aluminum forms an oxide almost instantly in normal atmosphere so its difficult to coat with anything. But electroless nickel works very well after an HCl bath or a nitric bath.

  • Copper is a material that is used in many more orders of magnitude for infrastructure and basic development. It's technically "consumption" to eat food everyday and have running water and electricity in your home, but the type of materialist luxury consumption you're talking about doesn't factor into global copper demand. There are 7.2 billion smartphones in use, and about 14g of copper in each one. That's about 100,000 metric tons of copper, when the article talks about 110 million as a baseline (11,000 times as much), and above 200 million (20,000 times as much). So no, consumer electronics aren't going to move the needle on this scale of a problem.

    If you're going to tell the developing countries that they need to stop developing, that's morally suspect. And frankly, environmentally suspect, as the article itself is about moving off of fossil fuels and electrifying a lot of our energy needs in both the developed and developing nations, whether we're talking relatively clean energy source like natural gas or dirtier sources like coal, or even dirtier sources like wood or animal dung.

    First of all, thank you.
    I don't want to be telling developing nations to halt their progress. You underscore where my mindset could be prescriptive and harmful.

    Second, my point is that we seem to only get infrastructure or 'progress' when it can be weaponized under capitalism to make someone money, the same way we can't have meaningful recycling systems because it will never be profitable over virgin plastics and other single-use materials.

    My attitude has been morphing into "nobody gets second until everybody gets first plates" but for housing, accessories, tools, etc -- that plays directly into the kinds of capital equipment, network buildouts, and supply chains that deliver iPhones to us for $1,000 when the actual material, energy and human cost could be easily 30x that.

    I'm saying the paths and lanes that deliver consumer goods and experiences are obscuring the waste therein, and that they drive copper crisis just like every other scarcity crisis.

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    It’s ok just 3D print it 🙂

  • Well, I suspect we've got enough copper for the next 50 years, so... good timing.

    And, you don't start with a Manhattan sized rock, you practice with little ones just big enough to survive re-entry and work your way up. The key is learning to operate long term with "rock moving tech" in solar orbit. We're not there, which is why we should have started 50 years ago...

    We have enough copper for a lot more than that, depending on how far and deep we want to go

  • We have enough copper for a lot more than that, depending on how far and deep we want to go

    Well, that's a big component: how efficient / environmentally destructive is the mining?

    Also, as electricity consumption in areas like China, India, Africa increases, they're going to start needing big multiples of the amount of copper used in the US/Europe/ANZ to-date.

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    tal@lemmy.todayT
    In the past five years, India’s imports of rare earths from China have gone up 60 to 80 per cent, and the government is now trying to cut this reliance by increasing local production. In March it announced a liberalised scheme allowing private companies to explore minerals and rare earth elements and opened some 13 acreages up for auction. Under this policy, the government will also reimburse half the exploration costs in areas where no minerals are discovered. I don't think that India needs extraction so much as processing, where China is really dominant.
  • Where do I install this nvme drive on my laptop?

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    K
    ??? The thing is on the right side of the pic. Your image is up side down. Edit: oh.duh, the two horizontal slots. I'm a dummy. Sorry.
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    K
    I was pretty lucky in university as most of my profs were either using cross platform stuff or Linux exclusive software. I had a single class that wanted me using windows stuff and I just dropped that one. Awesome that you're getting back into it, it's definitely the best it's ever been (and you're right that Steam cracked the code). It sounds like you probably know what you're doing if you're running Linux VMs and stuff, but feel free to shoot me a PM if you run into any questions or issues I might be able to point you in the right direction for.
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    L
    Make them publishers or whatever is required to have it be a legal requirement, have them ban people who share false information. The law doesn't magically make open discussions not open. By design, social media is open. If discussion from the public is closed, then it's no longer social media. ban people who share false information Banning people doesn't stop falsehoods. It's a broken solution promoting a false assurance. Authorities are still fallible & risk banning over unpopular/debatable expressions that may turn out true. There was unpopular dissent over covid lockdown policies in the US despite some dramatic differences with EU policies. Pro-palestinian protests get cracked down. Authorities are vulnerable to biases & swayed. Moreover, when people can just share their falsehoods offline, attempting to ban them online is hard to justify. If print media, through its decline, is being held legally responsible Print media is a controlled medium that controls it writers & approves everything before printing. It has a prepared, coordinated message. They can & do print books full of falsehoods if they want. Social media is open communication where anyone in the entire public can freely post anything before it is revoked. They aren't claiming to spread the truth, merely to enable communication.
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    L
    The U660F transmission in my wife's 2015 Highlander doesn't have a dipstick. Luckily that transmission is solid and easy to service anyway, you just need a skinny funnel to fill it.
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    J
    Of course they don't click anything. Google search has just become a front-end for Gemini, the answer is "served" up right at the top and most people will just take that for Gospel.
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    ohshit604@sh.itjust.worksO
    It’s infuriating that Safari/Apple only allows me to choose from five different search engines. I self-host my own SearXNG instance and have to use a third-party extension to redirect my queries.
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