<<< Greed keeps most good things from becoming a reality >>> My point was that this greed may not be smart self-interest, but instead short-sighted and originating from tired old ways of thinking about success and competition. Greed itself {Adam Smith, Milton Friedman] can still be OK, even desireable, but could still coincide with cooperative information-sharing for mutual benefit. Unreflected beliefs in "if so-and-so wins, I must be losing" are what I'm calling into question.
And to answer Zeev - yes I agree that the ore bodies are probably very dissimilar, but don't forget in the case of GPGI the refining issue seems to have bottlenecked at the latter stages of refining, not the early ones - this makes me think everyone will face this step - maybe mother ores were different, but I suspect the differences in the refining steps gradually diminish as the production materials begin to converge towards the refined product. Maybe my ore was very different from yours at the beginning, but since we are both heading towards pure gold or pure platinum, you can bet that our problems will become more and more similar as we go through our individual refining steps. At some point our extraction issues begin to resemble each other. Perhaps two or three DDs could afford what one alone could not. For someone such as yourself with a prodigious background in the physics of ceramics/silicates/metals, you might benefit personally from such strategic alliances and pooled resources (e.g., wasn't coming to terms one of the obstacles to your involvement?). Strategic alliances are nothing new, by the way, and can even include competition within their design (e.g., juniors vs. large producers, which I suspect may emerge as an issue if the DDs can extract profitably and metals prices remain distressed)....SW |
