Spencer Kimball, reporting for CNBC one week ago:

The Defense Department will become the largest shareholder in rare earth miner MP Materials after agreeing to buy $400 million of its preferred stock, the company said Thursday.

MP Materials owns the only operational rare earth mine in the U.S. at Mountain Pass, California, about 60 miles outside Las Vegas. Proceeds from the Pentagon investment will be used to expand MP’s rare earths processing capacity and magnet production, the company said. Shares of MP Materials soared about 50% to close at $45.23. Its market capitalization grew to $7.4 billion, an increase of about $2.5 billion from the previous trading session. [...]

MP Materials CEO James Litinsky described the Pentagon investment as a public-private partnership that will speed the buildout of an end-to-end rare earth magnet supply chain in the U.S.

“I want to be very clear, this is not a nationalization,” Litinsky told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Thursday. “We remain a thriving public company. We now have a great new partner in our economically largest shareholder, DoD, but we still control our company. We control our destiny. We’re shareholder driven.” U.S. miners are facing a unique threat from “Chinese mercantilism,” Litinsky said. The Pentagon investment in MP could serve as a model for similar deals with other U.S. companies, the CEO said.

This news caught my eye when Taegan Goddard linked to it from Political Wire yesterday (quipping, “I’m old enough to remember when this was called ‘socialism’”), because yesterday MP Materials landed a $500 million deal from Apple. Apple Newsroom:

Today Apple announced a new commitment of $500 million with MP Materials, the only fully integrated rare earth producer in the United States. With this multiyear deal, Apple is committed to buying American-made rare earth magnets developed at MP Materials’ flagship Independence facility in Fort Worth, Texas. The two companies will also work together to establish a cutting-edge rare earth recycling line in Mountain Pass, California, and develop novel magnet materials and innovative processing technologies to enhance magnet performance. The commitment is part of Apple’s pledge to spend more than $500 billion in the U.S. over the next four years, and builds on the company’s long history of investment in American innovation, advanced manufacturing, and next-generation recycling technologies. [...]

When complete, the new recycling facility in Mountain Pass, California will enable MP Materials to take in recycled rare earth feedstock — including material from used electronics and post-industrial scrap — and reprocess it for use in Apple products. For nearly five years, Apple and MP Materials have been piloting advanced recycling technology that enables recycled rare earth magnets to be processed into material that meets Apple’s exacting standards for performance and design. The companies will continue to innovate together to improve magnet production, as well as end-of-life recovery.

Apple pioneered the use of recycled rare earth elements in consumer electronics, first introducing them in the Taptic Engine of iPhone 11 in 2019. Today, nearly all magnets across Apple devices are made with 100 percent recycled rare earth elements.

The timing of these two announcements could be purely coincidental, but I can’t help but wonder if both moves were fueled by concerns about China cornering the market on rare earth magnets. Conversely, I wonder if this deal (and promotion of it) from Apple is aimed just to placate the Trump administration. A $500 million commitment is surely a big deal for MP Materials. It’s not that big a deal for Apple. What makes it interesting is that it’s with an American company.

Jason Snell:

If you find yourself walking down the street in the 1980s and you see someone coming who prefers the VIC-20 to the Apple II, cross to the other side of the street. (That said, the VIC-20 really was revolutionary. It was by far the most affordable home computer anyone had ever seen at that point. It was laughably underpowered … but: it was only $300! They sold a million of ’em.)

Snell takes issue (correctly!) with Drew Saur’s framing of the Apple II as “corporate”. As Snell points out, Commodore was founded by a suit — Apple was founded by two guys whose first collaboration was making phone-phreaking blue boxes.

But a more pertinent point was made by Dr. Drang on Mastodon:

I don’t want to get on the bad side of @gruber and @jsnell, but when they say the Commodore 64 cost $600, that’s misleading. Yes, it cost $600 when it was released, but its price dropped quickly. By the time I bought one in late ’83 or early ’84, it was selling for $200 at Kmart. To recognize that it was a great computer for the price, you have to know what that price really was.

When I wrote the other day that the C64 cost $600, it didn’t jibe with my memory. But my thinking is too set in the ways of Apple, where a computer debuts at a price and then stays at that price. A price around $200 is more what I remember for the C64, at a time when a bare-bones IIe cost $1,400. Inflation-adjusted, $200 in 1984 is about $620 today, and $1,400 is about $4,300. That’s why so many more kids of my era got their parents to spring for a Commodore 64 but not an Apple II. They were rivals in some sense, but really, the Apple II was a different class of computer, and cost nearly an order of magnitude more. Inflation-adjusted, it’s very similar to the difference in both price and capabilities of the Meta Quest versus Vision Pro.

(Me, I didn’t own a computer until I went to college. My parents wouldn’t buy me one because they feared if they did, I’d never leave the house. I resented it at the time, but in hindsight, they might have been right. I didn’t fight too hard because we had an Atari 2600 and a generous budget for game cartridges. Plus, my grade school had a few Apple IIe’s (alongside a bunch of cheap TI-99/4A’s), and my middle/high school had an entire lab of Apple IIe’s and IIc’s.)

Drew Saur, pushing back on my post slagging on the Commodore 64:

I cannot argue with your nostalgia. It is uniquely yours.

That said: The Commodore 64 as cheap-feeling and inelegant! Oh my.

I was fourteen when the Commodore 64 came out, and I want to convey — in as brief a form as I can — why it captured so many hearts during the 8-bit era.

What a great post. Fond memories all the way down the stack with that whole era of computing. As I told Saur in email, my fondest memory of the Commodore 64 is that they sold them at Kmart, and for years had a working model on display. And every time I’d go to Kmart with my mom, I’d swing by the electronics department and type:

10 PRINT "KMART SUCKS!!!!"
20 GOTO 10
RUN

Sometimes I’d be clever and do something like add an incrementing number of spaces to make the lines go diagonally. Something like:

5 LET X = 0
10 PRINT SPC(X); "KMART SUCKS!"
20 X = X + 1
30 IF X > 28 THEN X = 0
35 FOR T = 0 TO 100 : NEXT : REM SLOW DOWN
40 GOTO 10
RUN

This never got old for me. Try it yourself. (And of course I never actually commented my code at Kmart — that REM is for you, if you’re wondering what that do-nothing FOR loop is for.)

With WorkOS you can start selling to enterprises with just a few lines of code. It provides a complete User Management solution along with SSO, SCIM, and FGA. The APIs are modular and easy-to-use, allowing integrations to be completed in minutes instead of months.

Today, some of the fastest growing startups are already powered by WorkOS, including Perplexity, Vercel, and Webflow.

For SaaS apps that care deeply about design and user experience, WorkOS is the perfect fit. From high-quality documentation to self-serve onboarding for your customers, it removes all the unnecessary complexity for your engineering team.

Check out our Summer Launch Week announcements to see our latest.

David A. Graham, writing at The Atlantic:

Not that long ago, believe it or not, Donald Trump ran for president as the candidate who would defend the First Amendment.

He warned that a “sinister group of Deep State bureaucrats, Silicon Valley tyrants, left-wing activists, and depraved corporate news media” was “conspiring to manipulate and silence the American people,” and promised that “by restoring free speech, we will begin to reclaim our democracy, and save our nation.” On his first day back in office, Trump signed an executive order affirming the “right of the American people to engage in constitutionally protected speech.”

If anyone believed him at the time, they should be disabused by now. One of his most brazen attacks on freedom of speech thus far came this past weekend, when the president said that he was thinking about stripping a comedian of her citizenship — for no apparent reason other than that she regularly criticizes him.

“Because of the fact that Rosie O’Donnell is not in the best interests of our Great Country, I am giving serious consideration to taking away her Citizenship. She is a Threat to Humanity, and should remain in the wonderful Country of Ireland, if they want her,” he posted on Truth Social.

The people who griped that the Biden Administration was anti-free-speech because they ... checks notes ... applied soft pressure on companies like Meta to clamp down on algorithmically promoting disinformation are pretty quiet these days.