Perhaps you should simply look up how refining of rare earth material work.

Stupid idiot.

If you have not burned the Clinton flags by now, I take one.
Sent me a message on ebay, please :D

Canada is mountains, rivers, lakes and forest.

I guess a random Canadian survives in the wilderness much better than a random USAsian.

They could bomb the cities, but not conquer the land. Sad is: they might sooner do that than we even imagine.

The problem is not "close enough", but that people call one system better than the other one: for no rational reason.

Divide ability for example makes no sense at all. You never have the problem in real live to count 3/16th from a whole unit and it is kind of important that this is a kind of even number. You take a fucking ruler or any other tool to do that: and measure it.

The only "point" those silly people arguing with that is: 1/2, 1/4, 1/8 and 1/16 are kind of easy to do "by hand". And then I backfire to them: and now see, 1/12 is not.

But the imperial morons have stupid ideas why dividing by ... uh, can not even remember the numbers ... 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 ... makes more sense, or is more easy then simply have a decimal system.

In your mind everything is decimal anyway. Or a foot would be 10 inches ... hint, that means 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, XYZ, ZXY, 10. And you need to invent two new signs for XYZ, ZXY.

So, you are doing math in a 10 based number system and have measurements in a 12 based, 16 based, or other based system, but have to use numbers based on 10, to use those other systems ... and you do not see the funny shake heads discrepancy the rest of the world is seeing?

The point is: rare earths are not rare. It is just a name they got in the 1800ds when "they knew" those elements need to be there, but had no clue how to find/detect them.
They are eerywhere.

They do not cause any particular environmental hazard. Unless you kind of deliberately make one. They do not involve slave labour or child labour unless you have earth moving equipment cheap enough to entrust it a slave or small enough to entrust it a child.

And so on ...

The US does not mine them because they do not want. That is all. There is no damn other reason.
They do not want it, because it saved them a few million bucks ... and that's it.

Before I have a kitchen in my factory, with 10 cooks and 100 staff, and a small extra "sourcing group" aligned to the department doing all of our purchases ... I rather optimize that away, sell the kitchen building and dining area, and give out vouchers for my workers to buy from MacDoof. Because that saves me ... $10,000 a year. And the moment I sell the kitchen I make a profit of $50,000,000 - shareholders holler!

Only marginable decent.
But for old versions of Pac Man, it might be okay.

Well, prices in Germany are like:
- 30cents for households (including grid costs)
- 4cents per kWh for the industry, plus grid cost, which can be "whatever" but is usually similar to the pure energy cost, so it is 8cents in total.
- mid range business is in the 8cents range + grid cost of 4cents, in total 12cents

Well, the "negative stuff" you mention, "cancer village" (what is that?) and all the other BS: does not exist in China - since decades.

But you have a worldview you have to protect so that's not on the menu.
No, you got it all wrong.

You have a wold view from 30 years ago, or even 50.

China has slaves, yes. Real slaves. People that get or got kidnapped and are forced to be slaves. Just recently they freed a dozens.

And mind boggeling story of an ~80 year old man who finally found his 60 year old son who was kidnapped at roughly age of 16.

Slavers usually get executed. Still happens. After all: it is a bit difficult to free a slave ...

Sorry, your world view does not reflect anything about China.

For example, rare earths are mined with Excavators in the deserts and refined with water. Perhaps the legal amount of hours one can work per day is far over 8h - no idea.

But there is no fucking difference in worker protection or environmental protection in China versus the USA. If you want to dig into the differences: then China is far ahead versus your 3rd world country.

Children in the workforce in China, HA HA HA HA. They are in SCHOOL. Or in UNIVERSITY.

It does not really make sense to compare "local costs" that way.
Especially if you do not even know if that is home consumer end price or an industrial price.

If you want to compare prices, you have to figure how much one for example can buy from a monthly wage.

Silly example, a good bottle of beer in Germany costs about 1EUR. Minimum wage per hour is ca. 1OEUR. After taxes let's say it is 5.
So for one hour working a simple job, you can buy 5 beers. Or a bit more than one gallon (3l) gasoline. Or 15kWh if electricity.

In Thailand a beer is much more expensive. But the bottle is a tick bigger. Let's say it is about 1.5OEUR per bottle.
Minimum wage is about 6 bottles per day.

Now let's turn this around and look at a beer price in a restaurant. The price doubles (actually it is less) in Thailand but goes up factor 5 or 6 in Germany. While a pub or bar in Thailand is a little bit more than double, but in Germany easy 10 times the super market prices.

Now we have the basics about the beer.

How many meals can a German (at minimum wage) buy for one day work?
Ca. 65,- money per day, yields about 5 or 6 meals (talking about simple meals at a random shop, not home cooked).
For a Thai the minimum wage yields about 8 meals.

I have no idea about the energy prices in China versus USA. However if it concerns you, you have to know how much you earn per energy unit produced/consumed.

Because 10 year old sweat shop workers are difficult to find.

Written by an idiot who does not know how "rare earth mining" (or probably any kind of mining) works.
Hint: it is not done by little children with a pickaxe, or a hammer and a chisel under ground in bad air, with collapsing rocks behind you and the fumes of candles in your face.

USA outsourced rate earth mining/refining/trade to the world market, because they wanted to Dave a dollar on the ton of material.
As China happens to have mining options where "the stuff just lies around", they literally simply shovel it into sacks and sell it on the world market. That's it.

In general "mining" rare earth is so simple: everyone can do it without violating any worker safety concerns or environmental issues.

In Germany we have geo thermal power plants that "mine lithium" as a side trade.

Well, for large values of 60, that is close, or not?

Only in a country where you use imperial units.'
At all other places on earth, the units are extremely unhandy.

No idea why you can not cope with the fact that a pint is 620ml, or 625ml or 630ml, what ever the vendor thinks a pint should be: and has printed it on that bottle.

After all you only buy a bottle of beer ...

And all other bottles are either 333ml, 250ml or 1000ml or 1500ml and in rare cases 2000ml.

There is never any reason to "divide the number" by any other number, and get "interesting simple" results.

When you make drought for a cake and need 250g flour, who funk cares into which numbers you can divide that, when it is about 0.55 of your pounds? You have a weight/scale. And you put flour into it, until you have what you want.

And if you think you go fancy and only make a quarter of it: then you damn calculate 250/4 which is roughly 62g ... every child can do that in his mind. Divide by 2 -> 125g, divide by 2 again, so simple.

No idea why Americans always come up with this "divisible" myth.

No one cares how base unit can be divided. Unless you are an American, obviously.

The year has roughly 360 days, hence we have a 360 degree circle.

Cut this into 4, gives you the 4 majour directions. Or 4 nice spots on a clock. Now the only question is: how to divide such a quarter. Basically every culture on the planet settled on dividing such a quarter into 3 segments. Hence we have 12 around the circle, and 12 hours (originally 12 double hours) and 12 months.

While some "esoteric" measure systems use 400 degrees (called gon) for a circle, in daily life of an astronomer or navigator: 360 is simply better. Because a star rising yesterday "over there" will rise today, on degree off. And tomorrow 2 degrees off. If the circle base was not 360, but an arbitrary number, like 660 ... the star positions would not be obvious by simply adding one degree each day.

Now as you have divided the sky into 360 degrees, it makes no sense to pick a different base for the planet, or circles. Splitting up the 360 degrees into 12 parts, is simply convenient. As it is close to ten, is easy to paint by hand, and so on. On top of that, plenty of places on earth have close to 12h daylight and 12h night ... so making the whole day 10 hours long, like the french tried, means your daylight is only 5hours. That basically means, sunrise and sunset and noon or midnight are at completely odd numbers.

The analog clock hanging there in the school room is hanging there probably since the school got opened ... and got never replaced.