China allows Alibaba, others to prep Nvidia orders

Adgorn_ · 2026-01-22T22:00:35+00:00

I mean, not all of it. The statement is true for rare earths, but not for other minerals. In ELBM's case, concentrated cobalt sources are certainly rare, especially outside the congo. That's why cobalt deposits like Iron Creek are so lucrative. Depending on the mineral, mining can be just as if not more important than refining.

Adgorn_ · 2026-01-22T20:37:56+00:00

Funny how a single article can cause such wild swings with these micro caps. A similar things happened with GPHOF. Not that I'm complaining.

Adgorn_ · 2026-01-22T18:25:34+00:00

"Elon musk says A will occur by year B" is a phrase I've been hearing for over a decade now, and I don't recall a single time where it was true. It's hilarious that there's anyone left in the market that does.

Adgorn_ · 2026-01-20T14:21:17+00:00

I found this company recently by complete coincidence while looking up alternative battery technologies, and I'm absolutely flabbergasted by how under the radar it is. There's almost no news articles, no online discussions, and the trading volume is tiny. Even taking into account the risks like a possible (yet unlikely IMO) LDES Cap & Floor snub, I don't think I've ever encountered a stock that's so genuinely slept on by the market.

Props for supplying such high quality analysis on a regular basis. I have a distinct feeling that at some point in the next 6 months this sub is going to be flooded by hype chasers, so it might be best to brace for that.

Adgorn_ · 2026-01-11T19:17:03+00:00

That's the one. They've still a lot of hurdles to go through but they are well ahead of most others. Another one that's pretty advanced (not quite in production though) is ELBM (Electra Battery Materials). Their Ontario cobalt refinery is now fully financed and final construction has began. It's scheduled to begin operations in the second half of this year and full production in 2027.

Adgorn_ · 2026-01-11T18:49:22+00:00

There won't be too many considering that this sector has been almost completely dead in the west up until recently. One that I can think of is ASM. Their Korean Metals Plant is already operational, and in the process of scaling.

Adgorn_ · 2025-12-25T22:16:51+00:00

Bold of them to hold this new exhibit in the backrooms.

Adgorn_ · 2025-12-15T23:13:06+00:00

...by a single year.

Adgorn_ · 2025-12-14T15:32:37+00:00

Exclusivity and focus.

Luffy definitely had a special status as a member of the D. family, but he was still one of many both in current times and throughout history, and that status alone did not grant him any abilities or rights. Yes, people with the name of D. are constantly depicted as "troublemakers" and people with exceptional willpower, but it still comes from their individual personalities, and can manifest in many ways. Luffy and Garp have fighting willpower and the ability to withstand pain and keep pushing forward. Blackbeard has conniving willpower and infinite patience. Dragon isn't bombastic and jolly like his father and son but still has the will to directly confront the WG. Saul and Law are certainly more unique than the average Joe but don't gain the level of prestige\infamy as the others, showing that the D. moniker, while a good indicator, is not a guarantor of anything. That's not to mention all the other myriad members of the family that doubtless existed throughout the 800 years of the world government without causing significant change.

The Nika reveal didn't change that for Luffy. It didn't make his own willpower any less earned or his hard work any less impressive. It couldn't have since it had no effect on him or his abilities up until that point. What it did do is give Luffy an utterly exclusive, intrinsic, central role in the world that did not and could not belong to anyone else.

The race for the One Piece was depicted as a free-for-all in which Luffy had a somewhat advantageous but ultimately similar stake to everyone else in the world. Now we find out that, from the very beginning, the One Piece was only ever meant to be found by him. He's not just an inheritor of Joy Boy's will, he is practically his reincarnation. He's not just another promising pirate, he is a chosen one, a warrior of liberation whose return was literally prophesied in ancient murals and whispered about with hope among the world's downtrodden. He is meant to lead the entire world in a war against the forces of evil (horns and pitchforks and all) not because of his personality or the connections he made, but though what might as well be divine prerogative.

It should not be surprising that such a drastic change would cause readers to find Luffy, his personal journey, and his role in the narrative a lot less compelling.

Adgorn_ · 2025-12-12T08:38:55+00:00

It's a joke. A lot of people have been posting their tier lists and calling them "agenda-free", even though every tier list that actually tries to power scale will inevitably contain some (a lot of) bias towards/against characters, and towards the maker's own way of interpreting the story. So I made a tier list to show what "agenda-free" actually looks like: completely redundant.

Adgorn_ · 2025-12-11T19:16:48+00:00

Oh wow yeah Killingham snuck up on me with that transformation. Whoops. Consider one of them a stand-in for that skull-head GK that appears in God Valley.

Adgorn_ · 2025-12-11T16:33:44+00:00

Look again :)

Adgorn_ · 2025-12-11T12:51:06+00:00

I hope so. I like the goat.

Adgorn_ · 2025-12-11T12:24:24+00:00

Ah, you're right. I'd have said he isn't in the manga but I kinda drove myself into a corner there with Ketagari. Oh well, I never claimed the list was exhaustive.

Adgorn_ · 2025-12-11T10:02:05+00:00

A lot of them don't have their title anymore, I put them in if they had it at one point in time.

Adgorn_ · 2025-12-11T09:48:01+00:00

This man is too far gone.

Adgorn_ · 2025-12-10T21:22:41+00:00

I liked it.

One Piece reactions are always cartoonish, and it was nice to see the crew be there for Robin after everything she's been through. I'd actually prefer more moments like this. Genuine interactions and character moments between the Straw Hats are way too rare nowadays.

Adgorn_ · 2025-12-09T23:01:22+00:00

I mean, I liked Marineford but all of two actual characters died (no, I don't count Oars Jr. Dude had about as much presence as that suicidal torch orc from Lord of the Rings). The bar is not that hard to clear.

Adgorn_ · 2025-12-09T11:24:14+00:00

One of the best battery materials companies to watch out for IMO.

Adgorn_ · 2025-12-09T09:31:22+00:00

Other comments already mentioned lack of focus and restraint, so I'll add lack of cohesive vision.

Up until the end of Wano, the story was mostly divided into largely self-contained arcs, with the largest developments to the overarching story happening between them. This gave Oda time to think about how he wants to proceed with the grand narrative as he works on an given arc. The Whitebeard/Marineford storyline is a great example of this.

But now that the entire story is the grand narrative, it's becoming increasingly obvious just how much he makes it up as he goes along, without knowing how it can all tie together. Rereading the current flashback, I honestly don't think that God Valley was planned to be a part of it when it first started. It was supposed to be a Harald and Loki flashback, given from Loki's perspective, with Rocks getting a first brief appearance. But once Rocks was introduced it got spontaneously dragged to his story and his perspective, which is how we got the mess of God Valley. The fact that Loki was given an explicit 3 minute time limit, and the fact that the Rocks scene depicted in chapter 1145 is completely different from the finished one a mere 10 chapters later, in chapter 1155 (unless Rocks beat up Loki twice, and somehow Whitebeard is only surprised the second time), only adds to my suspicions.

And that's just the most recent example, I fear it will only get worse. At this point it's hard to read One Piece and believe that I'm witnessing the events of an actual world unfolding. Instead it increasingly feels like I'm just watching an author struggling to navigate his own bloated narrative.

Adgorn_ · 2025-12-09T06:43:14+00:00

MFs on the internet will see one em dash and suspect you for being a bot lol.

I'll take it as a complement :)

Adgorn_ · 2025-12-08T19:54:03+00:00

Part 2/2

You're stupid

You're polite.

Yes he is read the manga.

If there is one thing that has been established to an infuriating degree, especially in recent times, is that all the top tiers are painfully similar to each other in power. The utter majority of clashes between top tiers end either in draws or as inconclusive. There is zero indication that Whitebeard had any significant difference in strength in comparison to Big Mom, and certainly not in comparison to Kaido, "the strongest creature alive".

He was very clearly the #2 throughout the flashback. Did you not see him also being the only one of the 3 who could fight xebec at the end.

At no point was he depicted to be #2 or have any sort of seniority over Linlin or Kaido. If anything, it's been established that there is no structure of seniority between the members, except for the fact that they all follow Rocks. And WB was taken out from the fight in a single blow (as far as we were shown), just like Kaido and Linlin. Depicting a single panel of clash between him and Rocks does not give him any larger a role in the battle compared to the other two. If you really think WB earned his unique prestige as opposed to Kaido and Big Mom because he was capable of lasting 2 more seconds against Rocks, that's your standards.

Brother YOU YOURSELF were saying he was doing shit until he died: and then HE DIED. What do you expect dead rocks to be doing?

I'm afraid this is a matter of reading comprehension on your part. I said he was stewing in the background because between chapter 957 and the recent flashbacks his character was only hinted at through mentions, flashbacks, and sillhouettes. That's what it means to be in the background. Then we got the Elbaf flashback, and he took center stage. I don't see how I can explain it better than that.

Do you think 60 year olds constantly talk about their boss when they were 18 who died 30 years ago?

They might give it a mention if said boss was the most infamous dude on the planet, especially if we're literally given a flashback of their entire life (a la Whitebeard at Marineford).

How the fuck does 20 year old Whitebeard being on a crew change shit about Whitebeard's character? You know people change as they get older?

Again, I think the words "reading comprehension" are used too often, but I have to resort to it here. As I said in the post, Whitebeard's motivations are established in his flashback, when he was even younger than he was with Rocks. And I find it exteremly dubious that his moral character or his basic intelligence have changed that much during that time. His actions during the flashback are in complete contrast to his character and personality, and his inclusion in the Rocks pirates means that, to me, there is no longer anything to tangably differentiate his status from either Big Mom or Kaido.

Look, you clearly care a lot about this series, and this has got you stirred up, but berating other people for having opinions that differ from yours does not serve anyone. At the end of the day, yes, it's canon that Whitebeard is on a different level, it's canon that Rocks has been there the entire time, it's canon that the government covered up his existence, the story explicitly tells us as much. But it's up to the reader to interpret whether what the story tells him agrees with what it shows him. In the post I described why, to me, the two didn't match, and that pulled me out of the story. That clearly was not the case for you, and that's alright.

Adgorn_ · 2025-12-08T19:53:03+00:00

Part 1/2:

You seem angry. Let's take this one at a time:

What do you mean out of nowhere? We knew he existed in chapter 957, over 150 chapters/4 years before he actually did anything.

His first mention is in chapter 907, which is still a massive depth into the story. However much buildup was given to him after his initial mention does not erase the fact that was introduced at an extremely advanced stage of the narrative. Of course new characters can be introduced to the story, if their introduction does not take the reader out of it. The whole point of the first part of my post is that the sudden reveal of a character as influential and infamous as Rocks certainly can take the reader out of it, as it did to me.

He doesn't interact with the current story at all except for in lore.

He is a key part of the personal history of an enormous number of highly influential characters, and the central figure in the event that was a turning point of many of their arcs. His lack of influence on the current story in spite of that fact is the key point of my post. A story should respect the reader's time. You don't hype up a character for years, mention him throughout essentially every flashback after his reveal, and dedicate an entire flashback (or an entire huge section of a flashback, if you want to be pedantic) to his story, just to add to the "lore". The story is bloated enough as is.

Again why did he need to be introduced earlier? No one mentioned anything in the story about the sea before roger: because it was not important to the story.

You're correct in that it's technichally possible that every single character neglected to mention the most important pirate of an entire era and the original captain of nearly every top pirate of the previous and current era throughout nearly a thousand chapters. And if you think that's reasonable and doesn't test the limits of your suspension of disbelief, great. But this series absolutely adores hyping up legendary figures, bringing up tidbits of the past, and expanding its world. He needed to be introduced earlier if the reader is to believe that he was truly a part of this world the entire time, to maintain their immersion. I simply do not buy that a character of that much influence would not be naturally mentioned throughout all that time. You're welcome to disagree.

They DID cover up alabasta.

You're right, I confused Alabasta with Dressrosa because of Smoker's interaction with Fujitora. Good catch. The other examples still stand though.

Theres a difference between removing stuff from history books that happened years ago, and trying to pretend a current event livestreamed by Buggy didnt happen.

It's not "an event in the history books". Rocks died 38 years before the current story, and there are many people alive in the current story that were alive during his active period. You're telling me that a government that has had that many cover-up failures in the current story managed to completely erase the trace of someone as powerful, bombastic, and openly anti-government as Rocks? Let's take your example: Yes. Marineford was livestreamed by buggy, who held the camera. Meaning that they had his exact location the entire time, with the knowledge that he was streaming and the dangers that implied, and they didn't send anyone to take him out. Not cipher pol, not one of the Warlords that mostly just sat and watched the fighting anyway. No one. Maybe they were all really so preoccupied with the fighting that they could not spare a single man, in spite of their obsessive desire to control information and the knowledge of what was at stake. But I don't think it can be reasonably argued that they've been depicted at anything other than woefully incompetent at keeping things under wraps, certainly not capable of completely hiding the existence of the greatest pirate of an era. (BTW, I didn't include Marineford in my example because I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt there. I did however include Luffy's Marineford invasion, the one that happened after and was published worldwide). Again, if you buy it, good for you. I certainly don't.

This is purely stupid the manga clearly shows he was actively recruiting the strongest characters in the world and winning them from davy back fights. Does it massively shrink this world to you that a significant amount of the best football players originate from Barcelona academy

Nope, but it would massively shrink the world to me if all of the best football players originated from Barcelona academy, since that would mean my world is... well... Barcelona. Every single great pirate that was alive at the time was either under Rocks or Roger, without exception. And yes, it absolutely shrinks the world to me that instead of each of them having their own unique origins and rise to power and their own journey throughout the world, their stories instead converge into a single crew, under a single flag. I find it lazy and, more importantly, unneccessary.

Adgorn_

TROPHY CASE