I am pretty interested and waiting to get excited...

[CaffeineAddict]

Modern electronics is garbage.
No one will convince me otherwise.

All manufactured with the cheapest components.
All designed and manufactured with planned obsolescence.

Hahah, there are fights going on for rare earths you know, they're needed to make chips.
Not sure if their rarity affects quality, more like affecting price, but just because chips are expensive doesn't mean it's garbage.

 

[KGIII]

Not sure if their rarity affects quality, more like affecting price, but just because chips are expensive doesn't mean it's garbage.

That's a fairly common misunderstanding. Rare Earth elements are not actually rare. They're quite plentiful. They're just difficult to separate from the minerals around them. They're abundant but difficult to process.

Scientists, of whom I suppose I am one, are horrible at naming things. For example, both 'dark matter' and 'dark energy' have caused so much confusion over the years. When people say that true randomness doesn't exist, we cite things like 'Bell's Theorem', but nobody knows what that means. It gets even worse when you have a bunch of specialists communicating. They use jargon that is gibberish to others, even others who work in a similar field.

I guess it is what it is, but I figured I'd mention this. Instead of calling them REE, we could have said, 'hard to process minerals'. That would actually explain it. People would actually understand that. Alas, nobody listens to me. I suppose that's for the best, but this is one of the things that annoys me. It strikes me as 'gatekeeping' to an extent, even if unintentional. (I'm not entirely sure that it's unintentional, at least in some cases.)

 

[Trml]

They're just difficult to separate from the minerals around them.

I once visited a manufacturer of mining machinery. You sure have all seen the conveyor systems where they dump the mined raw materials onto. The manufacturer is specialised in the machinery that separates the rocks containing the minerals from the rest of rock, clay, etc.

They use all sorts of sensors, mainly lights including laser beams to distinguish the reflections of mineral rich ore from the rest. After that the machines have high-pressure water nozzles that basically shoot the identified ore rocks into containers on the side, while most of the material gets transported on and eventually gets ground down into building material. It was fascinating to see how high-tech that initial processing has become. I was most flabbergasted by the machines being able to keep track of individual rocks to blast aside, at an operating speed equivalent to running. Of course only the start of the process. Next comes further separation of the ore rocks according to type of mineral (rare, precious, semi-precious, etc) , before the actual chemical and furnace processing to separate and extract them.

 

[KGIII]

It was fascinating to see how high-tech that initial processing has become.

I haven't seen it in person, but I have seen various documentaries about this and similar things. They do pretty much the same thing when processing some produce, and while looking for defects in a rapidly produced process. In those cases, they're doing the opposite. They use the jet of water to remove the bad stuff and not the good stuff.