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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

This is how the free market works. Sky rocketing price of lithium is the world screaming to entrepreneurs, “Hey! We need lithium!” And the supply will increase to meet the demand, or substitutes will be found for use cases where the price is too high.

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The free market unfortunately responds quite slowly in capital intensive markets like lithium (or oil).

More unfortunately, planned economies respond even slower.

It depends on how well they are planned and who's doing the planning. Tesla leaadership has a clear understanding that access to raw materials will be a key challenge in the next 15 years in the move to battery storage based technologies.

Which is working-as-intended, because the market needs to remain in disequilibrium long enough for entrepreneurs to reap the windfall profits to finance the large capital investment. If the market responded instantly, the price would drop quickly, no profits would be generated, and the capital would've been misallocated into an industry with no payoff.

This is the market saying "It's going to take a significant amount of effort to fix this problem. Is it really such a big problem that it's worth sacrificing all the other things that capital could've been invested into?"

Is it really free if we are dependent on the benevolence of a handful of countries? At least lithium has the potential to kickstart a circular economy (recycling).

And in the meantime, capitalists like Musk threaten to coup “whoever they want” for their lithium, worsening conditions and tightening control over the global south

Could you give some examples of coups for resources other that oil?

Plenty in the mid 20th century in South America, etc over agricultural resources.

Hawaii too.

Bananas, hence the term "banana republic".

Why are you omitting coups for oil? They are still coups?

Sigh, that tweet was a joke. It was clearly a joke, come on.

We live in a post-joke world now.

Just like his first tweet about buying Twitter?

You mean couping Twitter.

for the HN readers who aren't clued in to everything Elon Musk says over the last two years, i believe parent is referring to this tweet (AFAICT Elon deleted the original, hence screenshot): https://twitter.com/panoparker/status/1318157559266762752

"We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it." (2020/07/25) -- topic being a coup in Bolivia for their lithium.

i have no background in this situation. personally, i think it's a little ridiculous to allude to this sort of thing and just expect that readers know wtf you're talking about.

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