Thread by @wmhuo168

You’ve heard of rare earths. What you haven’t heard is that the West can’t even finish turning them into a magnet.

theverge.com/news/680247/au…

The Verge has discovered that China's rare earth magnet restrictions are disrupting car production in the West. Stop the presses. Somewhere in Munich, a BMW exec just spilled his oat milk. (1/11)

What The Verge doesn't grasp, and what no one in the Western press will admit, is that the real problem isn't supply chains. It is amnesia. The West has unlearned how to make a magnet. (2/11)

Not mine the ore. Not separate the oxide. But the final step: pressing, aligning, and sintering neodymium into precision magnets for motors and defense. A lost industrial art. (3/11)

China’s new rules now require its own magnet makers to apply for export licenses. That is not red tape. That is a message. Even if the West had the metal, it still would not get the magnet. (4/11)

And no, there is no western NdFeB magnet industry ready to take up the slack. The factories were shuttered or sold off years ago by men with spreadsheets and exit strategies. (5/11)

So European auto suppliers are freezing lines. American firms are warning of shutdowns. Not because China stopped selling minerals, but because the West cannot press a magnet. (6/11)

This is what strategic capture looks like. One country kept the entire value chain. The rest outsourced and forgot. It was never a trade. It was a surrender. (7/11)

The Western tech press will not say this out loud. They will talk about supply issues, tariffs, unexpected bottlenecks. Anything but the truth. We gave up industrial autonomy for margin. (8/11)

There are no miracle startups coming to the rescue. No SaaS solution for magnets. Just decades of rust and a long road back, if anyone even remembers how to begin. (9/11)

The magnet, humble and silent, is now geopolitical gold. And the modern West, trained to optimize spreadsheets instead of factories, never saw it coming. (10/11)

But take heart. At least someone at The Verge finally Googled “neodymium.” The rest, as they say, is electromagnetism. (11/11)