alt Hacker News> With respect to avoidance of “dirty” jobs. The EU is far, far worse in this respect than the United States is or was.
Well yeah. Because we care about the environment and people like to enjoy their retirement instead of sitting in a wheelchair with COPD due to inhaling a lifetime of toxic dust.
China is getting better at it too, but only a few years ago I remember a story of all the toxic lakes where all the byproducts of neodymium mining were dumped.
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You don’t care about the environment. You care about the environment in your backyard. Otherwise you would not import rare earths and minerals from China (which Europe does).
Sorry but while that was once true, the current administration has reversed that pretty dramatically. You personally might care about the environment, but when you use “we” in the context of US/China it no longer holds true.
> a few years ago I remember a story of all the toxic lakes where all the byproducts of neodymium mining were dumped.
You might be thinking of Baotou, Inner Mongolia, China.