Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock
tomshardware.com523 points by johnbarron 19 hours ago
523 points by johnbarron 19 hours ago
I understand oil part. But why everything else can only be manufactured in these desert regions of the world?
I've developed a new fear of my 2025 desktop PC being damaged by a power surge or something, because it would cost at least $2K more to replace than I paid for it, assuming I can even find parts now. Compared to the rest of my adult life when I used to secretly pray for something to fail so I would have a reason to upgrade.
Living in developing countries taught me to never plugin expensive computers without a surge protector UPS.
Commercial uses layered surge protectors (Type I, II, and III), which is also recommended for other users but rarely followed.
In surge prone areas, at a minimum I would have good quality whole-house surge protector (eg Siemens 140 or Eaton 108), and a good quality surge protector strip for any computer/TV/phone charger.
I also put surge protectors in front of expensive white goods like the fridge, washer/dryer, dishwasher, and garage door opener. Besides being costly to replace these can contain "sparky" motors and this provides protection in the other direction too. Over time smaller surges can degrade the main surge protector for your computer.
Nothing (reasonable) can protect against direct lightning strikes, but for anything less it should provide decent protection.
Are you in an area with a bad electrical grid or something? In 40+ years I've never had a single device get fried from a surge/storm. My "surge protector" power strips are from the 90s and probably don't even work.
Not only should you get rid of them, but also they are a fire hazard.
Also, do not accidentally plug surge protectors into each other, metal oxide varistors can star fires _without_ meaningful surge conditions when you do so.
I prefer to buy products without MOVs entirely due to the risk, with the exception of one, Tripp Lite Isobars; but I prefer to use series mode protectors such as Brickwall or SurgeX.
This. Same timeframe and I've lived through both lots of lightning storms and in areas with lots of power failures. Some of them intermittent and essentially caused by transformers blowing up. Like earlier this winter, we had multiple storms where you'd hear a transformer blow up, in many cases even seeing the sky light up as well from it, power going out, couple seconds, power coming back, next transformer blowing out, rinse, repeat.
On the other hand I've read about plenty of stories of the "cheap" UPSs you'd usually buy as a consumer (not to name any brands coz I've never had any) actually causing such issues in the first place. Without any actual surges from the grid.
That said, being totally not superstitious (for real, but someone's gonna "kill me" if they find out I wrote this and something dies from a surge...), now I guess I need to knock on wood like seventeen times ...
I do use surge protectors when we're on generator power temporarily.
The things people often call "transformers blowing up" are usually not transformers blowing up.
Instead, it's usually just overhead wires that are too close or literally touching, often from influences like wind and ice. The electricity arcs between the wires, creating bright blue-white flashes that can be seen from far away, sometimes with instantaneous heat that makes hunks of metal wire evaporate explosively. It can be violent and loud, and repetitious as different parts of even a single run fail.
Transformers can certainly blow up, but that's less common. They're (generally) filled with oil for cooling purposes, and they're massive things that tend to take time to get hot. A failed transformer can produce arcing and blue-white light, but if things are that hot then the oil is also ready to burn.
And when the oil burns it isn't blue-white -- it burns with about the same yellow-orange color we saw the last time we accidentally flambéed dinner on the kitchen stove, or a Hollywood fireball.
A bright flash without a fire is probably not a transformer.
Here's a video of a transformer actually-exploding (note the prominent fireball): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFkfd31Wpng
And here's a video of what someone describes as a transformer exploding, even though there are no transformers in the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHVh0KwG_0k
Haha, I hear you. But yes, it really is transformers blowing up sometimes. Sometimes it really is just branches blowing up the line, sure.
A branch hitting a wire, happenes all the time here too. Lots of trees in this community. The video of a transformer you shared: that's not the transformer I'm talking about. That's at a transformer station.
I'm talking transformer on a street pole. The kind that hangs right across the street from me. This kind: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/y3E7avUvj6I
See it's the kind in your second video. It's a transformer. You just chose a narrower definition I suppose. It's a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_transformer ;)
And yes, I know it's transformers and not just wires (but also wires do happen definitely) coz I do walk the neighborhood regularly and I can tell when a transformer is new vs. old up there. Ours is old. The ones a few streets over sometimes are very new and I see the Hydro trucks go by the next day(s) to make them new ;)
Again, like seventeen times knock on wood but the ones next to us have not actually blown up. But three streets over, seen the new ones. Literally last weekend, we had an ice storm come through and while no blowouts we could see or hear, the outage map showed plenty of failure.
It's not just cheap UPSes, it's cheap surge protectors as well. They exist because the vendor can throw in a MOV costing a few cents and increase the price of the power strip by 50%, not because they're any good. MOVs are sacrificial components which have either degraded to uselessness by the time they're actually needed or, if they're still working, can explode or catch fire from the energy dissipated. Even if they don't, all they're doing is converting an x-kV spike on active into an around-x-kV spike on neutral or ground. If you want to do it properly, use a series tracking filter, not a "surge protector".
No offense, but can you tell me how my 4.5 kW generator is gonna generate that kind of power surge?
When I lived in Costa Rica, I lost three surge protectors in a year to power surges. During one such power surge, I didn't notice that the red light indicating surge protection was already out, and a power surge fried my (knockoff) Macbook power adapter, leaving me without a way to work for a day.
Not too bad, just rural. We used to lose stuff every 10 years or so.
One day The Big One came along and fried nearly everything. "Once burned, twice shy."
Hopefully someone can learn from my mistake and not have to do it post-mortem.
If your close neighbours have surge protectors then you benefit little from installing your own.
Another perspective: we should install whole house surge protectors if we can afford them, not only for ourselves, but to help our neighbors - even if in reality the help is minimal and they need their own as well. In the best case scenario, if everybody in a neighborhood has them, each individual house will be more resistant to surges than if they were the only house with one (five houses with surge protectors nearby is a lot better than one) - everybody wins.
You might as well phrase that as "If your close neighbours have gotten vaccines then you benefit little from getting your own."
We live in a society. Everybody chips in. And each surge protector adds to the robustness of the grid.
> Nothing (reasonable) can protect against direct lightning strikes
Belkin make a number of surge protectors which offer a connected equipment warranty in the UK. Admittedly: financial protection, not data protection, but I felt it was worthwhile for the peace of mind.
https://www.belkin.com/id/p/6-outlet-surge-protection-strip-...
>Admittedly: financial protection, not data protection
You should have data backups regardless, because there are plenty of ways to lose data that don't involve power surges.
Have they ever paid out on one of those, or is it like CAs who offer liability protection for their certificates carefully set up in such a way that they never have to pay out.
>In surge prone areas
What areas are surge prone?
The California bay area, at least all the sides of it I’ve lived on. We currently have a whole house battery, whole house surge protector, a second surge protector, and a UPS between the router/nas/etc and PG&E.
It’s not good enough. At least the power stays on once the grid stops bouncing (or once I manage to log into the rebooting battery gateway computer to have it flip the “off grid” breaker, or go outside and flip the manual one by the meter).
Color me skeptical. I've lived in several different Bay Area cities for decades. There are usually a couple power outages per year but I've never experienced a surge strong enough to cause equipment damage.
Open aerial wiring can shortcircuit two phases, bringing a low impedance surge that can damage most electric and electronic equipment.
Areas with lots of thunderstorms. Also more rural areas with long power lines with few taps off for customers — the long runs are both exposed to many nearby strikes and accept induction well, and the few customers are fewer power sinks to dissipate the spike. So, you're more likely to get hit, and hit harder.
Sounds like if you're in an urban area with buried lines, you don't have to worry?
In urban areas you probably can just have the whole-house surge protector and skip the rest, since that protects all costly electronics not just a single device. With just a surge strip on the PC I'd say you're a tad under-protected, yeah.
Incidentally whole-house surge protection is now required by code in new houses. Existing buildings aren't required to upgrade, but by my reasoning what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
I would recommend a circuit surge protector in urban areas.
Lightning getting through some structure and hitting the electric lines happens. Even when they are buried. It's less of a problem when the ground absorbs a lot of the power before it even get into copper, but it's even less of a problem if there's some cheap device that will burn and protect you from it.
Lightning can mess you up in every country lol. Had to replace a PSU because of that, thankfully it was just that and minor damage to GPU.
Lightning damage is mostly an issue if the last-mile power lines are above ground. In my experience, power surges in urban areas with a decent grid are so rare that people generally don't bother protecting their devices.
I have lived in the DC metro area inside the beltway or in Sillicon Valley my entire adult life and have only had above ground power wiring. Despite tree ordnances and wind storms and a grid so aged if we see lightning we lose power.
I've heard that before, that the US apparently loves above ground power lines. In NL it's only the long distance ones that are above ground. Even in most rural areas, I think everything is below ground.
Yes, we love them on account of our country having approximately 230 times the surface area and the Netherlands having approximately 13x the population density. We not only have vastly more line to run, but also many, many fewer people per square mile to absorb the costs. Underground line is expensive.
It turns out that the fires caused by above ground power lines are also quite expensive, at least in certain areas.
That explains rural areas but not urban areas. We've got above-ground in rural areas but pretty much all urban stuff is underground. We get maybe one power cut a year, usually for scheduled maintenance work, and no problems with surges and whatnot.
> Lightning damage is mostly an issue if the last-mile power lines are above ground.
So 99.99999% of the world.
Honestly even in "developed countries" it's not worth blindly trusting that the power in your house/building is clean. It's cheap and easy enough to just put any expensive hardware on a UPS rather than speculating what's going on behind the walls.
I work on embedded systems. I can often see whether my A/C or other appliances are running on my oscilloscope signals. They often affect the output of USB power supplies.
Eh, if these surges are rare enough, then you are statistical better off just risking your 'expensive' hardware to a one in a trillion possibility rather than spending money on gear you don't need.
Do you live in a bunker to protect against artillery shells?
Doesn't even sound like a developed country to me. Is that the US or something?
Do you still need a UPS if you have one of those household (Powerwall style) battery packs? Also Apple switched mode power supplies are pretty well built.
But then again there's horror stories like
https://www.reddit.com/r/applehelp/comments/1maegvb/i_burned...
My understanding is that home batteries are not UPSes, they don't go through the battery. They have a switch between power company, solar, or battery. I think that means would be exposed to surge from power company.
You can install a whole house surge protector. Those go in the panel and would protect from different sources.
Yes. The power walls are like cheap UPS topology. You could still get whacked with a transient from the grid before the ATS decides to island the house.
Depends on how they are configured, I think in some regions (where power outages are very rare), they are wired to sync up with external network, and without external network they shut down as well.
Over the last two years I bought 2 4TB SSDs, 64GB DDR5 ECC UDIMM and 4 14TB HDDs.
I couldn't justify buying any of them today.
Silver lining: literally all Macs are a total steal right now.
Anyone have a good take on how well Asahi linux keeps the power management working on mac hardware? The biggest killer feature for me of mac hardware is the battery/weight. I have found it hard to get a good laptop in the linux ecosystem mainly because of power consumption. If Asahi doesn't really impact the battery life then I would seriously consider going that route. Similar question about support for pytorch on linux/arm64 / Asahi.
Bought a used MacBook Air M2 past summer to run Asahi linux exclusively on it, the installation went hassle-free. One charge lasts 9+ hours easily, sometimes up to 12 hours. Thunderbolt, DP Alt Mode and TouchID would be nice to haves, but I'm super happy how everything runs. Thank you everyone on the Asahi team!
I think the support for linux/arm64 is already very good in general, can't answer on pytorch though. The only app I'm really missing is Signal Desktop. The virtualization to run games is a noticeable performance hit and shows occasional glitches in the Steam overlay, but all my games run smoothly.
I think it's improved from when I last tried it, but it still isn't great. You can get like 60% of the battery life compared to macOS.
Someone with more recent knowledge correct me on this, but I believe idling is the biggest power drain in Asahi. You will want to shutdown and/or hibernate whenever possible.
How good is Mac virtualization? Would it be doable to put an Ubuntu inside a VM and just run it full screen all the time?
Too bad I can’t play the games I want to play on them
Crossover[1] is surprisingly good for this purpose if you game occasionally and don't need FPS-level responsiveness. You also need 3rd party software like LinearMouse and Mos to make a mouse usable.
[1]: https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover?srsltid=AfmBOor-7wbD-o...
Hint : GE Force Now
ssshhhhh... do not tell anyone I told you...
No idea why you're down voted... I blissfully played cyberpunk 2077 for two years on GeforceNow. I still keep my membership even though I have a dedicated gaming pc now, for occasional laptop or living room pc use. It was beyond brilliant to play a hyper demanding game on a bare spec pc :-)
Mind you,I have gigabit internet. I don't know what the experience would be like on other types of internet / worldwide.
You have to be joking, you don't own anything and enjoy your price hikes as people adopt it
What are you talking about? Geforce Now is specifically only playable with games you own.
It's horrible. Bad quality, bad latency, can't mod the games etc. And worse you have to pay for it when you already have a more than capable computer.
i wouldnt go as far to say "its horrible".
i would never recommend it to someone who otherwise has a capable computer, of course, but it really isnt that bad. i gave it a pretty thorough test out of curiosity, and when they sponsored a few streamers i watch, it was totally fine. with the caveat that you have a decent internet connection and its probably not good for twitchy games like counter strike.
and, as far as i know, there is limited support for modding and some unsupported workarounds.
Is the computer in question really "more than capable" if it "can't play the games [you] want to play"?
I've used geforce now on my mac before and didn't have latency issues. I wasn't using it for any competitive games where you need ultrafast twitchy response, but I did use if for plenty of FPSes and never had any issues. And I don't have super fast internet, just the basic package from Spectrum. So I wouldn't say it's bad, though admittedly it might not be the best latency achievable in the gaming world.
I used Shadow PC for a long time. Never any issues over several years. Lots of reasons in preferred it over GeForce. I can expound on that later if needed
I bought a Mac Mini in February and maxed out the ram and storage. Now, it seems like that was a prescient move, but honestly I really only bought it for photo editing and playing the new World of Warcraft expansion (don't judge me!).
Serious question: how does WoW still appeal to players except for habit social connections to keep them locked into the game? I used to spend nights and love the game, now, even with all these expansions it feels exactly like it was in 2006 but without what happened to the gaming world in the past 20 years.
It's still fun. The social connections are also hugely important to me. One of my characters is in the same active guild that I joined in 2006. It's hard to put into words how meaningful that is to me. The game has improved, the newly re-done Silvermoon City is beautiful and richly detailed, but you are right, in many ways it's the same game as 20+ years ago, except made more casual-friendly in a lot of ways. I like it and there really isn't anything else like it out there. ...and surprising to me, if you believe Blizzard, there are around 9 million people who still play.
I don’t know. I still fire up FF14 every couple of weeks for a few dungeon runs. No more social interactions with the various channels, I barely talk to my party even.
I think it’s just familiarity and not wanting to learn a whole new system when I’m looking to shut my brain down for a couple hours.
You pay an $1k extra just to get the model with 1TB disk. How is that a steal?
I mean they're still expensive, they just seem relatively good value because everything else has gotten more expensive.
All value is relative, so everything else getting more expensive is essentially the same as macs getting cheaper.
Good Mac Pro models are still spendy, but the M3/M4 laptops are great if your software use-cases are met. =3
I’m still doing great even with an M2!
Still loving my M1 to be honest!
It’s super annoying. I’m salivating over all the new announcements but my M1 16GB 1TB will likely last another 5 years.
The SSD don't last forever, after about 3 to 4 years of daily use the drive/system should be replaced. At >5 years, one could hit retention issues and corruption losses.
Good excuse to upgrade though, as a $1500 recovery bill would not be cool. Best regards =3
Never used a computer less than 8yrs and never had an ssd have an issue in that time.
The AMD395+ PCs have unified memory and since it's not tied to a garbage OS nor reasonably affected by future dram costs, it's a better choice for reasonable people, unless you're going for greater than 128GB
It sounds like it won't affect prices that much?
> South Korean memory giant SK hynix has since said it had diversified supplies for helium and secured sufficient inventory. Meanwhile, TSMC said that it doesn’t currently anticipate a notable impact following Ras Laffan going offline, but that it’s monitoring the situation.
It also just be the typical “don’t scare the shareholders just yet” PR speak. Time will tell.
Thankfully UPSes are still cheap. Get one before Sam buys the entire yearly production of cyberpower.
I have a UPS with surge protection which I plug my computer into for this reason. Do others do the same or use something else?
I bought a PC in early 2021 IIRC. It was good for the time and a good deal for a high end PC. IIRC it was $2800 and had a 6900 XTX. Last year I accidentally killed it. The CPU temps were higher than I'd like (~85C). the thermal grease can become hard and ineffective over time so I figured I'd replace it. Instead, it had become like cement and by twisting the AIO off, I snapped the socket on the motherboard.
This was an expensive mistake as I both looked into buying a replacement motherboard and CPU but that quickly gets to the price of a new PC. Paying someone to rebuild my PC is expensive and I'm beyond the age of wanting to fully remove a motherboard and effectively rebuild my entire PC myself. So I didn't know what to do with it.
Anyway, I ended up buying various alternatives like a NUC with 32GB of RAM, a laptop (with a 4080) and a Mac Mini. But I also ended up buying a new 9800X3D PC with a 5070Ti. Like I said, it was an expensive mistake.
But I decided for no particular reason to upgrade the (already good) 32GB of DDR5-6000 to 64GB with a $200 kit of DDR5-6000. This was in July I think. I also upgraded my laptop to 64GB for no readily apparent reason.
I recently checked and that $200 64GB kit now costs $950. SSDs are through the roof too but through complete accident I'm surrounded by about 5 PCs and a bunch of spare RAM. I don't see myself upgrading anytime soon.
I will say that there are some good deals (relative to current pricing) for combos including CPU, motherboard and memory or even some pretty good prebuilts.
I got to get me some new surge protectors and not the cheapies. maybe a small ups.
We used those Tripp Lite LC1200 to knock down the noise floor (14dB) on remote equipment.
These line-conditioners actually perform well given the cost, but never buy used surge-arresters given the finite spike hit-count. Best of luck =3
These devices are basically autotransformers. So they reduce the noise by providing inductive filtering. But they don't really protect against strong surges by themselves.
So Tripp Lite uses a regular varistor for that, just like any other surge protector. In Europe you'd be far better off buying a voltage relay and adding it to your electrical panel, but it's not usually possible with the non-modular US electrical panels.
The simple line-conditioners were surprisingly effective, and are a fraction of the cost of lab/medical grade galvanic isolation ferroresonant transformers. =3
What’s with the ‘cock and balls’ emoticon?
It's a woffly bunny face, imo.
Don't kink shame lol =3
https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/Harequin_Romance_Book_Publ...
Can never unsee that now
Don't worry about it =3
welcome to the internet, sometimes people make smiley faces :)
You can find all types of people on the Internet, even some without noses :-)
The US just finished divesting itself from its strategic helium reserve in 2024 due to the "Helium Stewardship Act of 2013"[1]
But, now we have a strategic bitcoin reserve.
[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/527
You know that it was basically sold to be able to claim a more responsible budget that year? Basically selling off of an asset to record higher revenue. Like selling your building fire extinguishers to claim that you were able to pay off your credit card bill, and who cares what those were originally meant for.
Financialization of everything is so funny to me, because even I, who is extremely stupid when it comes to big money stuff, can see not having state capacity on important stuff is insane. By that, I mean hard resources, materials, THINGS.
They started selling in 1996: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve
Big self own here
It’s almost shocking that people in an era of unlimited resources could see this was not renewable and important to hold, and that later in the era of limited resources, we decided to privatize this. It’s so shortsighted, willfully ignorant.
We’re about to get a preview of the world after fossil fuel extraction and some of the knock on effects. Semi is one thing, wait till you can’t get an MRI.
In related news, diesel is $7/gallon, and peets coffee is $25/lb, and computers (hardware and cloud) are up 25-50%.
The official numbers claim 3% inflation. Does anyone actually believe that? We were seeing 30% YoY before Iran here in California.
The discrepancy is so large, I’m wondering if there’s an official explanation or some reasonable explanation, or if they’re just not bothering anymore.
so every inflation number has to be understood by following (a) when is it measuring and (b) what is it measuring. For when: a lot of economic data is lagging indicators, e.g. last quarter - and inflation is usually % more year over year, whereas a lot of people seem to care about inflation on the 2-5 year time frame instead of just 1 year. For the what - we'd have to dig into whether it's national averages, state averages, or local; what percentage of the measurement is rent vs housing prices vs groceries (and what grocery items) vs clothing vs computers vs utilities etc etc. It's very likely that the idealized basket of goods that they are measuring the cost of doesn't actually match your expenses or even the average household expenses for your area. Or possibly even, for the whole country.
The meta problem is that price data - assuming we can even reliably observe it - is super high dimensional, and we're trying to reduce it all to a single number.
Entry level Dell servers that used to cost 1,700 US are now going for 17,000!!! I'm talking absolute basics with 16GB of memory etc. Wild times.
Diesel is $5 in the Southeast, what kind of supply chain issue could cause 40% diff? Should we hire some tanker trucks and arb this?
None. But you don't put a non refined cruide oil in your diesel, it not only has to be refined but DELIVERED to your country. Depending where that country is, delivery could be even 60% of the final price. And when, you know, tankers with oil explode due to drone attacks, you will see quick large spikes in pump price.
EDIT: also, oil is a commodity traded worldwide, and downside of this is the price of oil is directed by future contracts bet on said oil. In other words, if enough people assume there will be future upticks related to raising cost of transportation insurance, they buy more futures. If they buy more of this virtual contract on price going up (called "long") then eventually real price of oil catches up. Sure, this is upside down, but markets live in this setup for many years now where tail wags the dog.
> We were seeing 30% YoY before Iran here in California.
We didn’t even see that across the board during the height of Covid-flation. What metrics are you using to get that number?
I dug up walmart ads from 8 and 16 years ago. In the first 8 years, a case of pepsi went up 5%. In the last 8 years, it went up 200%. Make of that what you will.
It is not just oil and helium supply chains, it is nitrogen fertilizers also, and in a season when they are needed the most:
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/nitrogen-ammonia-a...
It’s going to be 90-100F in California next week.
Not sure how that impacts fertilizer demand, but it certainly screws up planting season.
The ground will be dry in a week or two, and they’re predicting the worst spring snowpack on record (after the wettest Christmas in Southern California on record).
Maybe someone else can use the fertilizer?
Aluminum too, Qatar shutdown a smelting plant which take a year to restart
They released a statement clarifying that they’re running the Qatalum smelter at reduced capacity, not shutting it down.
Why does it take so long?
Aluminum smelters use the Hall-Heroult process, where alumina is dissolved in molten cryolite and reduced in massive “pots” which are large electrolytic cells. Each pot contains a carbon cathode lining that must be kept at around 950C during operation. If the pot cools down, the frozen electrolyte and solidified aluminum contract at different rates than the carbon and steel shell, cracking the lining.
Once it’s cracked, the pot has to be completely cleaned out and relined which takes weeks. A smelter usually has hundreds of pots so this alone takes a while as the liner and anything in it are basically frozen solid and need to be broken apart and torn out. Once relined the pots must be brought back up slowly and the chemistry balanced. The pots also draw a ton of power and are wired in series so they have to all be brought up slowly together (or in batches).
That assumes it was a clean shutdown with nothing else clogged up in the system. “Cleaning” in smelting means that the hardware involved needs to be replaced because it fused to molten metal while cooling down.
How much of this process is cleaning up from the previous run and how much is purely for starting up the process again? Does it make sense to clean up the system as soon as you can after shutdown, in preparation for restart, whenever that may be?
It’s one and the same. The sodium and other atoms from the molten cryolite intercalate into the carbon cathode structure and swell it by a few percent. Once in use, a cathode is held together by the steel shell and thermal equilibrium of the running pot. Once it cools the cracking is inevitable.
You also can’t fully drain a pot. You can siphon most of the aluminum and cryolite off but at those temperatures they behave like a proper liquid with surface tension and the metal wicks into the pot like solder instead of flowing with gravity.
I'm not sure in this instance, but for industrial plants, the expectation is for them to run 24/7/365 without disruption. They're not designed to be turned off and then on again. When you shut something down, how do you "reset" it to a clean state so production can start again? Think about all the existing stuff still in the pipes, residual, etc.
I did some research.
They were shutting down because of lack of gas. They secured some, so they will not shut down, only operate at 60% capacity.
If they shut down they represent less than 1% of world production.
Step 1: Put the helium in a blimp Step 2: Fly around the straight and over to Taiwan Step 3: Pump it into the chip factory
There you go, solved it.
How do you get the blimp back?
I think bigger question is, how do you bring the blimp down without dumping out helium?
Airships have air bags inside. Same deals as submarines. They take in and out ambient stuff into the bags to control buoyancy.
What ambient stuff is available at the altitude where a zeppelin typically flies?
so balloons appear to have negative mass, it's actually just the result of having lower density than the air. the upward force balances out with the gravity where the lbs/in^3 figure of its entirety matches that of ambient air. it's exactly the same as how an empty tank underwater floats, and a water filled tank underwater sinks.
or I guess one could say it's the bottom side getting more compressive load from air than the topside, given the observable effect, whatever floats our zep...
Hydrogen
What do you do with the hydrogen once you're back
You do realize helium is a byproduct of LNG production and if you’re not pumping gas you’re not getting helium? It’s not a transportation issue.
I always thought the socially inept computer enthusiast who can't detect social cues was an anachronism by this point in history but then I started visiting hackernews.
Yes, except for this one flaw it's a perfect plan which would have worked perfectly.
Nonsense. Deploy the SLS. Use the hydrogen tanks.
If the seals can hold hydrogen, helium should be easy for them.
/s
> South Korea is among the most exposed countries, which, according to the Korea International Trade Association, imported 64.7% of its helium from Qatar in 2025. The country relies heavily on helium imports to cool silicon wafers during fabrication and is understood to have no viable substitute.
I assume the helium is enclosed in a a chip's hermetically sealed package, if it were just for cooling wafers I don't understand why it can't reuse the helium?
It's not enclosed in the final product. It is used during manufacturing. For example, you mechanically compress helium to get liquid helium, then when it depressurizes back to ambient pressure, it's -269 C, which is pretty close to "as cold as possible", and colder than any alternatives.
Freight rate volatility is one of the most underappreciated risks in physical product businesses. During the 2021-2022 shipping crisis, ocean freight from China to the US West Coast hit $20k+ per container — a 10x jump that wiped margins for importers who hadn't hedged. Air freight as a backup is worth keeping in your model even if you never use it; knowing your break-even point at air rates tells you a lot about product viability.
How would you model your business like this? Like what tools / literature can you recommend?
There was a lot written about this in the 1990s during the rise of globalization and just in time supply chains.
Basically, you build a big warehouse and keep it full when prices are below projection.
This is equivalent to investing capital at a negative interest rate, so it’s not done anymore. Instead, the system is designed to pass supply shocks on to the consumer when possible.
I’ve noticed the local grocery stores have started replacing shelf price tags with little computers so they can reprice food in real time. (And hire fewer stock people),
Anyway, the keyword you want is “just in time supply chain”.
I remember hearing somewhere on this site that medical imaging got pretty good at building systems that recycle helium. Does chip manufacturing not do this or are the losses at their scale are still large enough that you need a substantial constant supply?
The big problem is purity. Fabs use grade 5 and 6 helium where contaminants are 1-10 parts per billion. The infrastructure to get it that pure becomes very specialized and any time the helium goes through a process it picks up so much contamination that recycling it would require the entire purifying and quality control infrastructure for pressure or temperature swing adsorption.
Some fabs are starting to reuse helium in downstream processes but there’s only so much they can do without expanding their core competency into yet another complex chemical manufacturing process.
MRI machines don’t need high purity helium and the contamination doesn’t “gunk up” all the tools so it’s not an issue to recycle it there.
Now I'm imagining a procedural cop show where they bust an illegal helium dealer, and one of the cops takes a huff to gauge what they're dealing with, and then squeaks out "that's the good stuff".
> The infrastructure to get it that pure becomes very specialized
I think some of the most advanced fab infrastructure is the ultra pure water system. Water becomes quite aggressive chemically when it has no dissolved ions in it. You have to use exotic or highly processed materials simply to transport it around. If the factory didn't need such massive quantities of it, trucking it in would likely be preferable.
From the article I thought the helium was used mostly for cooling (where I imagine the purity wouldn't be that important)
But what other processes do the fabs use the helium for then?
It is used a lot for cooling but in many systems its used without a classical heat exchangers where the helium is isolated from the workpiece.
Helium is pumped beneath the wafer to keep it cool so any impurities can leak through the chuck seal into the chamber above and disrupt the process. It’s also very precisely controlled so impurities change the uniformity of the thermal conductivity of the gas, creating hot spots on the wafer.
In EUV it’s used to both to cool the optics and as a buffer gas to manage debris from the plasma so any contaminants can deposit on the optics. At 13.5nm even a single layer of hydrocarbon molecules can create problems and the light bounces many times between mirrors so the error compounds.
There are many places where helium doesn’t have to be as pure but contamination events and surprise maintenance are so expensive that it’s not worth the extra savings (or the risk of mislabling and using dirty helium in the sensitive parts).
Thanks a lot for the info. Yeah, it makes sense that if you need pure helium anyway, you probably wouldn't create an entire second supply chain for impure helium.
Do we have a process to make new helium from hydrogen?
If you want to make new helium, it's far easier to go the other way.
You just need quite a bit of Polonium, Thorium or Radon. Put it in a pool - and then wait a while. You just gotta collect what bubbles to the surface.
If you come up with a process to do that efficiently, the helium will be a lovely bonus but not remotely the most important result. :D
Some of the fabs do recycle as effectively as they can, but MRIs use it in a single process, in liquid form, in a relatively constrained container. Fabs use it for a variety of processes, ranging from wafer cooling to purging environments, to making ultra ultra clean chambers. The scale of what they use is higher, too, so even if an individual process is more efficiently recapturing helium, they might go through a few tons a day, with an MRI only using a few liters and losing 5% or less.
Also fab companies have had to learn to be incredibly conservative about perceptively meaningless changes.
Most famously illustrated by Intel's "Copy Exactly!" methodology. https://duckduckgo.com/?q="copy%20exactly"+Intel
An adjacent IBM story that kinda explains why:
During the year 1986, there was an anomalous increase in LSI memory problems. Electronics in early 1987 appeared to have problem rates approaching 20 times higher than predicted. In contrast, identical LSI memories being manufactured in Europe showed no anomalous problems. Because of knowledge of the radioactivity problem with the Intel 2107 RAMs, it was thought that the LSI package probably was at fault, since the IBM chips were mounted on similar ceramic materials. LSI ceramic packages made by IBM in Europe and in the U.S. were exchanged, but the European computer modules (with European chips and U.S. packaging) showed no fails, while the U.S. chips with European packages still failed at a high rate. This indicated that the problem was undoubtedly in the U.S.-manufactured LSI chips. In April 1987, significant design changes had been made to the memory chip with the most problems, a 4Kb bipolar RAM. The newer chip had been given the nickname Hera, and so at an early stage the incident became known as the "Hera problem."
By June 1987, the problem was very serious. A group was organized to investigate the problem. The first breakthrough in understanding occurred with the analysis of "carcasses" from the memory chips (the term carcasses refers to the chips on an LSI wafer which do not work correctly, and are not used but saved in case some problem occurs at a future time). Some of these carcasses were shown to have significant radioactivity.
Six weeks was spent in the manufacturing process lines, looking for radioactivity, and traces were found inside various processing units. However, it could not be determined whether these traces came from the raw materials used, or whether they were transferred from the chips themselves, which might have been contaminated earlier in their processing. Further, it was discovered that radioactive filaments (containing radioactive thorium) were commonly used in some evaporators. A detailed analysis by T. Zabel of some of the "hot" chips revealed that the radioactive contamination came from a single source: Po210 This isotope is found in the uranium decay chain, which contains about twelve different radioactive species. The surprising fact was that Po210 was the only contaminant on the LSI chips, and all the other expected decay-chain elements were missing. Hundreds of chips were analyzed for radioactivity, and Po210 contamination was found going back more than a year. Then it was found that whatever caused the radioactivity problem disappeared on all wafers started after May 22, 1987. After this precise date, all new wafers were free of contamination, except for small amounts which probably were contaminated by other older chips being processed by the same equipment. Since it takes about four months for chips to be manufactured, the pipeline was still full of "hot" chips in July and August 1987. Further sweeps of the manufacturing lines showed trace radioactivity, but the plant was essentially clean. The contamination had appeared in 1985, increased by more than 1000 times until May 22, 1987, and then totally disappeared!
Several months passed, with widespread testing of manufacturing materials and tools, but no radioactive contamination was discovered. All memory chips in the manufacturing lines were spot-screened for radioactivity, but they were clean. The radioactivity reappeared in the manufacturing plant in early December 1987, mildly contaminating several hundred wafers, then disappeared again. A search of all the materials used in the fabrication of these chips found no source of the radioactivity. With further screening, and a lot of luck, a new and unused bottle of nitric acid was identified by J. Hannah as radioactive. One surprising aspect of this discovery was that, of twelve bottles in the single lot of acid, only one was contaminated. Since all screening of materials assumed lot-sized homogeneity, this discovery of a single bad sample in a large lot probably explained why previous scans of the manufacturing line had been negative. The unopened bottle of radioactive nitric acid led investigators back to a supplier's factory, and it was found that the radioactivity was being injected by a bottle-cleaning machine for semiconductor-grade acid bottles. This bottle cleaner used radioactive Po210 material to ionize an air jet which was used to dislodge electrostatic dust inside the bottles after washing. The jets were leaking radioactivity because of a change in the epoxy used to seal the Po210 inside the air jet capsule. Since these jets gave off infrequent and random bursts of radioactivity, only a few bottles out of thousands were contaminated.
Polonium is debuggable. More subtle statistical aberrations would be exponentially harder.
this story would make a killer asianometry video
CSI parody style?
I'm most familiar with software and home electronics debugging, but it would be wonderful to hear some stories from other disciplines where a culprit is found, and also about the forensic tools specific to other domains.
Good to find another fan of asianometry channel ;)
I agree, this story above would be a perfect for another asianometry document.
So turning our backs on globalisation was a mistake after all. Everyone needs everyone to work well together. So much winning.
My PC was due for an upgrade this year (still using a video card from 2019)… so I really hope this keeps working for another … 5 ?! years
Can someone explain why helium is used for these purposes, as opposed to some other noble gas? I think there's more argon (it's about 1% of the atmosphere) than helium so is helium somehow special, or is it just cheaper, despite being rarer and non-renewable?
Helium has the second highest [1] specific heat capacity (after hydrogen); it's significantly higher than that of even water. It's damn efficient at cooling or heating. With that, it's chemically inert, unlike hydrogen or ammonia. There's no reasonable substitute.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_specific_heat_capacit... (Sort by the third column.)
Heat capacity is irrelevant -- argon and helium have exactly the same heat capacity per liter of gas, which would be the figure of merit in this context.
Heat conductivity, on the other hand, is an order of magnitude higher for helium, compared to argon, because its atoms are moving faster due to their lower mass.
When the gas is used for cooling, heat conductivity is important because it determines the conductivity through the boundary layer near surface, where the velocity of the flow drops to zero at the surface itself, and all the heat transport is through conduction rather than advection.
I feel like people in these comments and commentators in general are just kind of ignoring the fact that the US produces more helium than Qatar, and in fact more helium than the entire Middle East combined, nearly 50% of the global total. The sale of the "helium reserve" is (mostly) irrelevant as well, because there's massive domestic helium production. https://www.wmi.badw.de/the-institute/helium-liquefaction-pl...
I get that the current situation is stupid, but can we at least be accurate? Qatar is FAR from the only source of helium. (And yes, helium of any type can be purified to high levels. That's also not just a Qatar thing.)
Tech divers are also probably gonna be having a Bad Time. Helium mixes are already pretty expensive, I assume this will make it far worse.
This is an extremely pure form of He, not the stuff used by the divers. That's a completely different supply chain.
Also, copper welding involves the use of helium as shielding gas. Helium shortage is painful
So the RAM prices are going to skyrocket again?
Of course, everything at the moment regardless of good or bad means higher RAM price.
Have a bad first date? Higher RAM prices.
Your dog ran away? Higher RAM prices.
Lower RAM prices? Believe it or not, higher RAM prices.
I tried upgrading to 32 GB of RAM...but the bank offered me a mortgage instead...
I had a stroke of luck this week - I am due a new laptop at work, and ordered a new ThinkPad T14, as they have served me well in the past.
Then IT calls back and says that I shouldn't configure one directly at Lenovo's website, as we are to buy them from a retailer instead.
OK, can do - but they only stock a few models, and the one with the CPU and disk I had configured with Lenovo was only available with 64GB RAM at the retailer. What to do?
'Ouch, that's gonna make accounting hurt. We'll order it for you right away.'
Aren’t there huge stockpiles of helium in the US? I can buy party sized tanks at Target or big tanks at the usual places like welding supply places.
Helium for party balloons is low grade and not pure enough for chip fab use, so stacking up birthday tanks won't keep TSMC running. Industrial grade helium has a restricted and oddly international supply chain thanks to regulation and a few weirdly-placed depots. The US 'helium stockpile' isn't really a menu you can just order from when a factory across the planet runs dry, especially if offtakes and logistics are tied up by decade-old government contracts. If you want to see supply chain fragility, try pricing MRI-grade helium after a shutdown and watch everyone in medical procurement panic quitely.
Isn't Helium one of the easiest elements to purify? Just cool it below 14 Kelvin, which will make everything else freeze out. Collect the remaining liquid, which should be pure Helium.
14 kelvin is not easy to achieve at scale + after that, you need to keep it pure.
Apparently 14 K cooling is not used even up to 5N or 6N purity, commercial large-scale sources use various other tricks to remove the other gases. They do cool the input gas down to liquid nitrogen temperatures as one of the first steps.
My point is that there's "maximally efficient / profitable" versus "can be made available as an emergency alternative".
Cooling to 14 K isn't the cheapest option, but it has very low complexity. You can "simply" pressurise the source gas, cool it to room temperature through an ordinary heat exchanger, then allow it to expand. The only issue is that if you do this naively, the expansion nozzle will get clogged with ice.
Obviously, this wastes a lot of Helium, but we have lots of it. If what's needed is high purity Helium, then throwing away even 90% to get 10% that's 6N pure should be no problem for an industrial nation.
You can't just spin up such a facility in a few days or weeks though, surely? Even if the core of a process is relatively simple physically, you still need all the supporting infrastructure to make it happen.
Starting from an empty lot, no, it would take nearly a year.
However, any air (or gas) liquefaction / separation plant that is already making purified industrial gases from air or other sources could be adapted in a matter of weeks or at most a couple of months.
after what kind of shutdown?
If the helium gets warm, you have to vent it outside before it goes kaboom from the pressure.
https://radiology.ucsf.edu/patient-care/patient-safety/mri-s...
Damn, that's intense:
> If the scan room door is closed when a quench occurs and helium escapes into the scan room, the depletion of oxygen causes a critical increase in pressure in the room compared with the control area. This produces high pressure in the scan room, which may prevent opening of the door. If this should happen, the glass partition between the scan and control rooms should be broken to release the pressure. The scan room door can then be opened as usual and the patient evacuated. In such a case the patient should be immediately evacuated and evaluated for asphyxia, hypothermia and ruptured eardrums.
Most MRIs vent their helium in an emergency shutdown. https://medprotech.de/en/what-is-an-mri-quench/
All natural gas deposits contain helium at various concentrations, it's only commercially worth harvesting above a certain percentage but speculate the problem is the US can't just fill the Qatar loss in supply immediately since we have plentiful natural gas.
An unusually large helium deposit in the US made the news recently, not sure if it's being exploited:
https://www.minnpost.com/other-nonprofit-media/2024/07/what-...
Makes sense.
We have so much gas where I live that there are places it’s just flared off and burned, because it’s less greenhouse emissions than it escaping unburned.
If it's being burned, it isn't helium.
Today, I learned Helium does burn, and when it burns, it forms Carbon.
https://www.britannica.com/science/chemical-element/Processe...
Granted, the flare gas probably doesn't reach the prerequisite 100M-200M kelvin. I suspect high pressure is also required so the Helium stays close to the heat source.
Helium deposits don't exist is the thing, the same structures in the Earth which trap methane gas also trap helium gas and some of them trap enough to make recovery economically viable.
Balloon gas is ~20% oxygen, so your kids don't go unconscious while doing the funny voices.
https://www.bocgases.ie/files/balloon_grade_helium_factsheet... says 95% helium and 1% oxygen while https://dan.org/alert-diver/article/helium-gas-purity-what-i... says 97.5% helium but very unlikely for it to be as low as 80%
"An overview of the different common grades of helium" - https://zephyrsolutions.com/what-are-the-different-grades-of...
Grade 6 (6.0 helium = 99.9999% purity) The closest to 100% pure helium, 6.0 helium is used in the manufacturing of semiconductor chips – Grade 5.5 (5.5 helium = (99.9995% purity) Like 6.0 helium, 5.5 ultra pure helium gas is typically considered “research grade,” also used in chromatography and semiconductor processing
Grade 5 (5.0 helium = 99.999% purity) This high purity grade helium is also widely used for gas chromatography, mass spectrometry, and specific laboratory research when higher purity gases are not necessary, as well as for weather balloons and blimps.
Grade 4.8 (4.8 helium = 99.998% purity) The highest of the “industrial grade” heliums, 4.8 grade helium is often used by the military. The rest is classified...
Grade 4.7 (4.7 helium = 99.997% purity) A “Grade-A” industrial helium, 99.997% helium is mostly used in cryogenic applications and for pressurizing and purging
Grade 4.6 (4.6 helium = 99.996% purity) Grade 4.6 industrial helium is used for weather balloons, blimps, in leak detection
Grade 4.5 (4.5 helium = 99.995% purity) Often the grade most commonly referred to when people say “industrial grade,” 99.995% helium is most commonly used in the balloon industry
Grade 4 (4.0 helium and lower = 99.99% purity) Any helium that is 99.99% and down into the high 80 percents is within the range of purities referred to collectively as “balloon grade helium.”
Interesting bit from that article wrt to transport infrastructure:
"most distributors simply stick to the industry standard transport of Grade 5. That is why for and [sic] end user of helium, a lower grade can cost more than the higher grades."
I wonder if one of you could be going by number of atoms, and the other could be going by weight?
Helium for diving is going to be a different mix than what's used for balloons. In diving it's used to reduce the partial pressure of oxygen, and also to quickly diffuse back out of tissues when returning to the surface. Very different application!
Sorry i was referencing "Balloon grade H is the least pure at 97.5 percent." from the diving article
You sure about that? Everything I've ever heard says that balloon gas is generally grade 4, which is 99.99% pure. Not good enough for MRI, but quite a lot better than 80%.
Economically I expect it wouldn't be that pure, since it doesn't have to be that pure to provide lift, and party balloons are not trying to maximize lift.
Out of curiosity I did a minor amount of research to get an idea.
Turns out that you are right, some balloon gas is 80%. Specifically, the "Balloon Time" tanks you can buy at places like Target say "not less than 80%" helium.
On the other hand, I went to AirGas and a few other suppliers and they seemed to have 95%-97.0% helium gas as their definition for balloon grade.
Perhaps "balloon grade" here is not "party balloon grade". Weather balloons? Research balloons?
My guess is that places like AirGas aren't really supplying many weather or research balloons. I suspect the easier answer is 'Balloon Time is low grade crap aimed at people who don't know any better and just want to pick up some balloon gas while grocery shopping.' It's like the difference between people who go to a gas station to refill propane tanks, and people who swap them at Home Depot. (though the smart fellers do swap at Home Depot occasionally, if they need a fresher tank...)
Definitely worth knowing what you're getting, in any case, so you don't get ripped off, and so you can actually get that lawn chair contraption into the sky.
AirGas prioritizes industrial users, in the case of helium, copper welding. Argon is perfectly good enough for almost all welding purposes, but copper is different because of its heat conductivity. The heat from the weld really wants to go anywhere else. Helium has substantially higher heat conductivity than argon, which allows the heat to flow from the electric arc into the metal faster, resulting in better welds.
Obviously you can't have oxygen in welding gas; it would oxidize the shit out of everything.
A little bit of oxygen in party balloon gas is beneficial. Some kid will breathe it, and when they do, you didn't want them to asphyxiate themselves.
>99.99% pure. Not good enough for MRI
What is the reason that MRI needs grade 6 vs grade 4 helium? I'm imagining that the superconducting wire is within a cryostat filled with liquid helium. Doesn't seem like there would be any appreciably partial pressure of things like nitrogen or oxygen at 4 Kelvin. I imagine the reactivity of oxygen is pretty low at 4 K as well. How much dissolved oxygen or nitrogen can liquid helium support? And how much solidifies out and sinks to the bottom of the cryostat?
I believe that that's the stuff you buy in the shop, the non-refillable containers. If you buy a proper refillable balloon gas cylinder it's the higher grade stuff. Source: bought the shop stuff, got disappointed, bought the cylinder, happy.
I can personally attest that this is not foolproof, if it is even the case. Those helium tanks you can buy for large parties knocked me out as a kid. Lost consciousness fell to the ground, blacked out. Supervise your kids if you buy one!
source? the value I found is 97.5%+ helium for party balloons: https://www.grecogas.com/learn-our-industry/your-complete-gu...
People commit suicide with it because it's supposedly painless and quick.
Same applies to every gas that isn't carbon dioxide. Your body only cares about expelling CO2, it hasn't evolved a way to detect oxygen in the breathing gas mix. Divers know all about this.
We're dumb enough now to have forgotten history.
Moar hydrogen party balloons. Making partying fun again!
This is very likely not true.
Would you like to offer a rebuttal more well reasoned and thought out than "nuh-uh"?
You have the entire collected knowledge of mankind at your fingertips. You could do 30 seconds of research and find an answer better than "I don't think that sounds right".
What is asserted without evidence may be dismissed without evidence.
(The form in which Christopher Hitchens actually stated "Hitchens' Razor" is more symmetrical but unfortunately wrong: "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence". Anything can be asserted without evidence! It's only when something actually has been, in a given context, that dismissing it is -- in the same context -- a reasonable course of action.)
While a reasonable principle I don't think it applies in context. People aren't expected to exhaustively source comments on HN. There's subjective etiquette to it.
In this case it would be reasonable to inquire about the basis of the original remark, or to reject based on personal knowledge, or to reject based on a concrete citation. But an arbitrary non-technical vibes based rejection doesn't fit with how things generally work here.
Depending on who you go to, some places will not sell you tanks of Helium. We did a balloon launch expecting to use Hydrogen because Helium was going to be problematic. The sales rep at the supply place took a look at the group of us knuckleheads with absolutely no Hydrogen experience and ended up selling us the Helium while also exchanging all of our connectors. Hydrogen tanks use specific connectors different from all other tanks to make using a hydrogen take by mistake very difficult. I was nervous about using hydrogen and had no issue with the higher price for the helium knowing I wasn't going to catch on fire.
A lot of the balloon use has switched to nitrogen (helium became much, much more expensive after the strategic helium reserve was sold off)
Nitrogen? That's basically just air, what good would a balloon be using nitrogen? Might as well just blow it up with your lungs. It's certainly not going to float in any case.
> balloon use ... helium became much, much more expensive
More than just from inflation? (sorry, not sorry!)
Is lifting gas? That’s pretty cool.
Technically yes, but practically no. Air is 78% nitrogen. Nitrogen is 3.3% lighter than air. Helium is 86.2% lighter than air. Hydrogen is 93% lighter than air.
How much does that matter for party balloons, though? It's still buoyant.
A spherical balloon 20cm in radius is displacing 41g of air. Even ignoring compression (which I don’t know enough to quantify the effects of, except that it will make the numbers more unfavourable), nitrogen’s 3.3%-lighter gives you a budget of only 1.35g for the balloon. I believe balloons hare heavier than this, so the balloon will still sink (a little more slowly than an air-filled one, but I’m not sure how noticeable the difference will be).
I feel like people really need to learn basic physics.
The gas inside a standard party balloon is generally compressed 3% to inflate the balloon. This wipes out even the theoretical buoyancy of nitrogen. And trust me, there was never any practical buoyancy to begin with. You’d need a ridiculously large balloon in a room with impossibly still air and impossibly null thermal gradients to even measure the buoyancy of nitrogen vs air. The buoyancy of nitrogen vs air would never be perceptible to human senses in any real-world setting.
It would be the same as just filling the balloon with air.
Good old JIT stock management for essential materials, right?
One’d think that they’d keep more than a couple of weeks’s supply of critical materials —too bad many copied Cook’s and others’s JIT inventory management for everything.
not just. huge deposits opened (actively being exploited) up in colorado, utah in the past few years and Minnesota this year
Messer Completes Acquisition of Federal Helium System from BLM https://www.messer-us.com/press-releases/messer-completes-ac...
Why did we sell it instead of lease? This seems like something that should be in public hands.
The Helium Privatization Act of 1996 (HPA) required it. It passed to House on a voice vote and the Senate by unanimous consent and was signed by President Clinton.
After sales paid off the debt that has been incurred from the expansion of scope of the helium program in the 1960 Helium Act, which was one of the main points of the HPA, it was update by the Helium Stewardship Act of 2013 (which passed the House 394-1, and the Senate 97-2, and was signed by President Obama).
Ideological idiocy, the dismantling of anything public turning into private hands is ideologically pure for libertarian-inclined folks, no matter how strategically stupid it might be.
sorry thats too far left wing an opinion in america today
The sale was completed in 2024.
I feel that as soon as the existential threat easened with the splintering of the Soviet Union, the US started doing some self-harming libertarian flavored shit to itself.
In the 1980s, I assume getting rid of the "strategic reserve" of anything would have met more pushback, because of primal fear overriding greed.
Wasn’t the original purpose of the strategic helium reserve to build fleets of zeppelins?
> We are going to do a terrible thing to you — we are going to deprive you of an enemy.
– Georgi Arbatov, Soviet political scientist, 1988
Yes, Reagan was noted for his desire to avoid privatization of anything. /s
Kidding aside, the US has had libertarian pipe dreams for the better part of its history. The aberration was the New Deal period up until the mid 60s.
For those who don't understand, Biden sold the Helium not Trump - he took office on Jan 20, 2025.
"Current law (cira 2013) requires BLM to sell off the crude helium remaining in the Federal Helium Reserve in order to repay the U.S. Treasury the $1.3 billion debt incurred creating it. This debt will be repaid this fiscal year and that, as a consequence, the helium program will terminate at the end of the current fiscal year (October 1, 2013), absent Congressional action. Currently, the Federal Helium Reserve supplies roughly 40% of domestic and 30% of global helium demand. Loss of access to the Federal Helium Reserve would result in significant disruptions to a large number of critical U.S. industries." https://www.energy.senate.gov/services/files/494b2f9e-c8f5-4...
Sounds like Obama kept the gas taps flowing, instead of locking it up because authorization to sell it had expired. Here is the whole record: https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/527/...
> too far left wing
> biden
uhm...
His admin was by far the most left wing in history, only the actual far left think otherwise
Please don't call everyone names for not agreeing with you.
There are billions of people in the world, and you are one, and you have your one set of opinions out of billions.
Nobody endowed you or your opinions with any sort of infallibility or superiority over others.
Biden is an anti-abortion Catholic Zionist who wouldn't even do anything (but empty talk) to raise the minimum wage during high inflation. He enabled a genocide so his gods would reward him. I guess he would be a radical commie to the extreme far right. Nixon, JFK, LBJ and Lincoln, for example, signed into law actual left policies (whether they agreed with them or not-- none were lefties).
Words have meaning. Someone a bit left of a Nazi is not on the Left even if they are to the left of the person speaking.
The Democrats are a right-wing party. They spend more energy attacking the left than they do, the Republicans. Look at what they did to the center-left Sanders and their constant lawfare to keep left parties, like the Greens and Peace and Freedom, off the ballot and out of the debates (last election, the Greens spent half their campaign funds fighting these frivolous lawsuits from the Democratic party who seek to subvert democracy [Republicans attack anyone more left/darker than them, through voter suppression and other techniques to also subvert democracy]). There is very little daylight between the two. They serve the same masters, Oligarchs and Israel.
The United States is also a one-party state but, with typical American extravagance, they have two of them. - Julius Nyerere
crypto-libertarian "government bad" ideology is one hell of a drug.
well it was signed into law by obama, so there's that.
yes the president is the law giver, he who conceives, imposes, and bears in perpetuity all responsibilities for all laws passed during his term
I like the guy, but he was GOP-lite as a president, served corporate interests.
The GOP isn't "crypto-libertarian" by any stretch of the imagination. That's probably even more absurd than the people who suggest the GOP is "financially conservative".
The thing there is the GOP was financially conservative a few decades ago and it's like nobody bothered to update the wiki.
I'm no partisan. Politicians elected to serve corporate interests come in your choice of red or blue.
of course but i think characterizing obama as a Crypto-Libertarian is a disservice to carter, who was actually a crypto-libertarian
It's a good time to be Messer.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/us-just-sold-heli...
Accelerationists gonna accelerate
Great timing that the US recently sold its strategic helium supply.
BLM [(Bureau of Land Management)] completes $460M sale of federal helium reserve to private company | 12/12/2024 | https://www.eenews.net/articles/blm-completes-460m-sale-of-f...
Messer Completes Acquisition of Federal Helium System from BLM | June 27, 2024 | https://www.messer-us.com/press-releases/messer-completes-ac...
BLM was required (to sell it) by Congress in the Helium Stewardship Act of 2013, as the alternative was to not offer any H to the market due to the authorization to sell expiring. Sponsored by a Republican and passed basically unanimously with the proceeds used to pay of the debt (back when we cared about that)
The idea of selling things like our strategic helium supply for $460M to "pay off the debt" would be like me selling bricks from the foundation of my house for a penny to "pay off my mortgage".
$460M was for what was left after the large majority had already been sold.
In the best case, "strategic reserves" are the government speculating on commodity prices. They use tax dollars to buy a commodity -- raising the price on everyone so they can hoard it -- and then more tax dollars to pay for a storage facility, and if they're lucky the price goes up by enough to pay for the storage and the time value of money by they time they sell it again. That frequently doesn't happen.
In the common case it's the government subsidizing corporations -- including foreign ones -- by using tax dollars (at government contractor rates) to operate a storage facility at a loss so the industry doesn't have to do it themselves. Then, when they go to unload it, they generally unload enough to lower the market price on purpose, practically guaranteeing that the taxpayer is getting a below-market return. This unloading also has a statistical correlation with the election cycle (see also "strategic petroleum reserve") which is extra stupid. And the expectation that it will happen deters others who aren't paying government contractor rates from storing the commodity, so from a "strategic" perspective you don't get anywhere near as much of a buffer as you're paying for.
If the tech industry wants a reserve of helium then they should buy some land, install some tanks and fill them with helium in years when there isn't a shortfall.
That strategic helium reserve was from WWI, IIRC.
I've heard it claimed that it was a massive oversight to sell that much helium at such a low price. Helium is a non-renewable resource. When it escapes, it just floats off into space.
And it's an absolutely critical resource for MRIs, advanced science and research, and industry. And we are selling it at a price that's attractive as an amusement for children.
> In the best case, "strategic reserves" are the government speculating on commodity prices.
A horrendously misinformed take. Strategic reserves have broadly one of two primary purposes. First, providing the government with the ability to stabilize market prices in the short term when volatility strikes. Second, providing a supply of an essential resource to an essential industry in the event that external supplies are unexpectedly cut off temporarily.
Supply shocks are bad. The economy grinding to a halt at the whim of a geopolitical adversary or natural disaster is also bad. Ensuring a stable market is one of the most fundamental purposes of having a government at all.
What if it's not actually your house, but some unspecified "somebody else's", and you only stand to profit from it? Starts to make sense why some unscrupulous people would go that way, shitty as it is.
Wouldn't another alternative be to renew the authorization to sell? This doesn't seem much different from just deciding to sell it.
Republicans believe that the federal government shouldn't be involved in it at all. So a reauth bill would effectively be DOA.
But yeah, that would make more sense.
> Republicans believe
So frustrating when every conversation leads to R vs D. Doubly so in this situation since both bills that got us to where we are today had overwhelming BIPARTISAN support and were signed into law by presidents Clinton and Obama…
yeah that was completely crazy... never understood why they would do something like that
An explanation is particular political group was ideologically enthralled with privatization.
The same group will later happily blame the government for doing said stupid thing.
The people trump relies on to make his decisions (if he's making them) include tons of far right accelerationists; so they'd be happy to watch modern society fall.
This situation would be laughable if the consequences weren't so dire.
I have problems adequately stating just how incompetent and ill-thought out this entire misadventure was. I say this because everything that's happened has been completely foreseeable and foreseen, including the ability of Iran to retaliate by closing the Strait of Hormuz.
This has been something many militaries around the world have planned scenarios for. Word has it any warnings from allies, the NSC and the Joint Chiefs were just completely ignored. And those estimates probably underestimated how numerous and effective Iranian SRBMs and Shahed drones are.
Beyond direct impacts on crude oil, refined oil products and natural gas, there are secondary effects such as ~30 of the world's fertilizer goes through the Strait. Helium from Qatar is an issue but at least there are other sources for Helium, being pretty much any natural gas well so equipped to capture helium.
We are the bad guys.
Not just many foreign militaries. Our military. General Dan Caine by report advised Trump about the negative consequences of this action. MAGA elected a fantasist and narcissist and we will all bear the consequences. I was no fan of Kamala but the appalling limitations of Trump are of a different order and it is a disgrace that our voters by majority elected him.
Helium output from the Persian Gulf is about 5 million cubic meters a month. Which (liquefied) is about 40 truckloads a week
This article is just hysteria
Removing 30% of the supply of a very important, and completely irreplaceable for most of its uses, resource isn’t hysteria.
The point is it doesn’t take giant tankers going through the Strait of Hormuz to move this volume. It could be handled by tanker trucks going to Suez….
This has nothing to do with transport. Iranian drone strikes disabled a Qatari helium _production_ facility.
Will this crash the AI bubble?
This is, according to Hegseth, just something they planned for, since they knew what was going to happen.
I had an eye opening discussion with an IT admin who stated with a straight face that their “patching strategy was not to patch”.
They have a patch strategy! They considered requirements when deciding the strategy! They have a documented strategy, it’s just very brief. (“Don’t.”)
The Trump admin may have similarly thought about this issue for a few seconds, shrugged their shoulders and decided that this might force manufacturers to go on-shore.
You and I know it won’t, certainly not in the immediate future, which means massive disruption to industry, but that’s not the same as “no plan”.
[dead]
Somewhat tangential question - for the "Just Stop Oil" folks - is it the extraction of oil that is the problem, or the burning of it? If the former, then we have an opportunity to investigate more renewable sources.
The goal is to keep the oil in the ground, to not be burned or to be made into plastics.
It's not just plastics. Practically every substance we use and rely on to maintain civilisation as we know it has a petrochemical or fossil fuel base.
I understand the not burning fossil fuel thing, but why can't it be seen like another mineral resource?
Because that's still geological carbon entering the overall cycle on the surface. The air and ocean are giant buffers of it. When it's needed it needs to be pulled from there somehow (such as by felling trees or directly extracting CO2). Unfortunately that's not economical when it's legal to tap the giant lakes of it sitting underground.
Many of the other things (plastics esp) are byproducts after refining for fuel. If the fuel isn't consumed, the byproducts would become cost ineffective.
Don't "worry" though. Oil consumption is going up not down.
Just don't have kids.
Isn't the main source of helium from oil production? It's not like we have fusion reactors turning H into He.
The main source of helium is natural gas production, not oil
Okay, but while technically correct, it does nothing to change the situation. They are punching holes in the ground to extract the sweet sweet nectar. They have to store what has been extracted. When that storage is full, what does one do? Stop the input into the storage.
The amount of activity required for helium is insubstantial compared to the amount of natural gas being extracted globally. And the amount of natural gas extracted pales in comparison to total combined gas, oil, and coal.
Helium extraction doesn't pose a notable environmental issue on its own.
Well primarily the goal is to ensure that we don't build any homes for people or any clean energy. There's a reason a group of people funded by an oil heir are anti-nuclear.
Remember all the e/acc people telling us to vote for Trump? Some mea-culpas are in order.
The kind of people who voted for trump would never admit they made a mistake. They double down on stupidity instead.
That isn't true. There's actually a large number of people, probably in the millions, but probably not a majority of those who voted for him, who no longer support him in any way. And of the ones who remain, yes: they're pretty dense to still support him now. There are some lunatics who genuinely believe that the US has the right to dominate and exploit all other nations, but the majority of them simply believe the lies he's telling. I've already seen that when they are confronted with the facts about, say, Gaza, some of them can change their minds. It would be a mistake to turn them away instead of treating them like potential allies. There really is something more important at stake.
And yet others who are able to disagree with some (or even many) of his decisions while also continuing to believe he was the better of the 2 options. Most people I know hate politics or anything to do with it for this very reason. We can argue about political philosophy all day long but eventually you go vote and often have to choose between a wildcard and the walking dead.
For better or worse, Donald Trump has absolutely earned his place in the history books. There will be so many lessons from this era, though I think it is very much open to debate what form those lessons will take and which ones will be the most consequential.
To be honest, much of the lessons of this were something that we could've already looked back during all the wars humanity has fought all throughout history to learn from.
We are in here, because we didn't learn from our history. You feel this way because this is recent and its hitting everything all at once but I do feel like these were all very avoidable lessons. Being honest, I don't feel like we learnt anything new aside from seeing how the world is still trying to clutch itself back to stability even after all the instability Donald Trump is causing within the world (for better or for worse) and seeing how the world reacts to all of this live.
But I am not quite sure if future will learn from these lessons given that its feeling to me like history doesn't repeat itself but it often rhymes and we somehow don't really learn from the history to be honest.
Could you define the acronym "e/acc"? DDG seems to think it means: "What Does E/Acc Stand For, And What Does It Mean? E/acc stands for the phrase effective accelerationism, and it basically indicates one's personal ideological belief that artificial intelligence will one day become an all-powerful being that can fix the vast majority of humanity's problems."
I don't think I have ever heard a MAGA talk about AI.
> I don't think I have ever heard a MAGA talk about AI.
Lots of ex-Bitcoin-bros turned AI hypemen went all-in on maga for Trump II. Even the silicon valley C-Suites and VC-class went mask-off around February 2025. Some have tried to walk it back since then, after realizing the administration they had hitched their wagons to didn't have the mandate or levels of public support they had hoped for - thankfully, the internet never forgets.
The MAGA Web3 bros have all switched to the Clawdbot hypetrain, still flogging courses and slop.
Hum... He seems to be doing the most accelerationist government from recent history of any large or rich country.
We live in the dumbest possible timeline. As someone who came of age in the late 80s and was lucky enough to fully experience the 90s and 2000s ... what we have done in the last 20 years makes me sad. I never saw this coming. I admit that I maintained my delusion even though I was in OKC in 1995. Should have been a wake-up call.
Even the nation's #1 dingleberry Joe Rogan is now turning against Trump. Would be a great time for folks to start admitting they fell for it again.
I will dare to admit aloud that I think maybe the founders were making a rational choice when they decided that only certain citizens would have the right to vote. As awful as that sounds, there are halfway decent arguments in favor. Maybe not just restricting to white wealthy landowners, but sometimes I do wonder if we would benefit from a filter that adequately screens for people 1) with real skin in the game and 2) a plausible claim to being well informed.
That is just a thought experiment, though, I do not believe it would play out beneficially if we tried to implement it in real life.
I like this idea in theory. In practice, the problem is that someone gets to decide who is allowed to vote and on what grounds. If that institution is corrupted, it leads to worse outcome than allowing everyone to vote. And the bad actors would have all the incentives in the world to corrupt that institution.
The answer isn’t less voters, it’s more. Australia’s compulsory voting system has successfully taken the edge off extremist ideology.
Not quite sure this works out as nicely as that. Argentina has both compulsory voting and a legal voting age of 16 and it managed to produce Javier Milei (who makes Trump look like Kissinger).
What's the best way to have a sane system? I'm not sure. I personally lost all faith in democracy.
> What's the best way to have a sane system?
A start that would not require big changes to our existing system would be open primaries. That would incentivize moderate candidates. Or perhaps eliminate primaries altogether and go with a two-stage general election like some places have for their local elections. Everybody runs, then the top two run against each other (unless one got an outright majority in the first run). Skip the more elaborate instant-runoff styles of voting because that is too advanced for average people.
Argentina is notoriously corrupt and suffers from an overly politically powerful military. Not even compulsory voting can fix those. There are dark private forces currently waging war on democracy it will be a catastrophic disaster if they win.
> Argentina is notoriously corrupt and suffers from an overly politically powerful military.
Huh? If there's one thing that Argentina did correctly that no other Latin American country under military regimes in the past century did, it was breaking the political power of the military. Most members of the National Reorganization Process died in jail, the army was greatly downsized and culturally reprogrammed and it strengthened civilian institutions. It worked well until it didn't (and the breaking point happened before Milei, to be entirely clear).
But the point is that the issue lies elsewhere. Do you think Australia won't lurch to the anti-liberal and anti-democratic side as soon as someone with the right combo of charisma and psychopathy arises?
I know how it will happen. Nearly every single veto power group will give them a free pass. Naïve humanist liberals will pontificate about the ideals of democracy and freedom to do whatever you want. Boring fence-sitters will legitimate their discourse and ideas under the veil of neutrality and objectivity. Those who worship Ba'al will seek to build a symbiotic relationship. And before you realize it, White Australia has risen up once again.
> Do you think Australia won't lurch to the anti-liberal and anti-democratic side as soon as someone with the right combo of charisma and psychopathy arises?
Indeed, all of our friendly western liberal democracies should not get too comfortable thinking this insanity won't come to them. Some of them already experience increasing amounts of it, and the rest could easily be in that position.
Kissinger was a war criminal with a huge amount of blood on his hands.
That's half of the point of the comparison (otherwise I'd have picked Einstein or some other cliche smart guy).
The other half is that Kissinger was a smart and cunning piece of shit, and Trump is an absolute imbecile.
> Trump is an absolute imbecile
And thank god for that, at least. He is too stupid to make his petty policies more durable, instead relying on methods that are just as trivial to undo as they were to implement in the first place. We would be in a much worse place if he had the cunning of Kissinger.
There are far more pressing changes needed, like reducing the impact of vote buying (reasonable spending limits for political campaigns, and the lobbying problem) and a voting system that doesn't inevitably reduce down to two sides.
If people still elevate the worst candidate to POTUS after that, then blaming the voter might be in order.
The problem is what to do with those people who can't vote. At worst, they'll rise up in arms and create an ever bigger mess.
If you're not into social and demographic engineering, then you're going to face a real problem.
My solution would be to get it over with and shoot everyone who disagrees with the system I'm trying to build. It sounds childish but it does actually genuinely work. It has been put in practice in so many places it's easy to lose count.
That only works in the immediate term. It isn't even a stable short term solution, let alone medium to long term. Consider what the incentives of such an approach are when iterated.
Unless you aspire to the way of life in places like North Korea.
It really depends on what stage of a regime's lifecycle you apply it at.
Obviously it's not going to be as extreme and as simple as 'go shoot people house-to-house until you're powerful :D', but repression is much more often than not effective. Think of the Arab Spring, the 2018 color coup attempt in Nicaragua, etc.
Hell, even if the incentives are completely misaligned, you can get away with it as long as you're strong and ruthless enough. The whole world thought Myanmar's military junta would implode and break under the weight of all the freedom fighters… and it's still hanging around, not the worse for wear. If you're willing to burn everything to the ground before you lose power, you can often raise the stakes to a level the other party simply can't afford.
> Unless you aspire to the way of life in places like North Korea
Here's the thing: the right-wingers already aspire to that way of life. They will implement it. At this point, it's not about whether I aspire to live like that, but about who's going to take the reins of power of that type of political structure.
Better us than them.
Right but all those examples you're listing are what I was vaguely referencing when I referred to the incentives of such an approach when iterated. The resulting government won't inevitably implode (although it often will eventually) but it doesn't result in a particularly functional society either.
> They will implement it.
> Better us than them.
Well sure, if you've already accepted defeat then I suppose that's the logical course of action. But that doesn't seem like a reasonable position to me given the available evidence.
People with those characteristics are often wealthy: can't have "real skin in the game" if you're just a pleb with a mortgage, 2 kids and 2 cars in a middle-class neighborhood, right? At which point, once again, those with $$ are more equal than others.
Sure, they might be better informed - which lets them figure out how best to corrupt the system.
Edit: in fact, I could see a strong reason to DISALLOW anyone in the top 1% to vote or spend any $$ towards the election.
1% of the vote isn't all that significant. It's the money that creates the problem.
Yes, part of the solution could be strongly curtailing how we apply the first amendment to political spending. Maybe elections should all be taxpayer funded, access to media guaranteed, etc. And if we do allow donations, it has to be something fairly trivial. Maximum $50 or something per person regardless of net worth.
The unregulated, unlimited money situation we have now is a big part of the problem.
Everybody should be allowed to vote, except for people who don't want everyone to vote.
Even people who openly aim to violently overthrow the government and abolish elections?
Yes, why not? If they are a minority, then there's no issue. If they are a majority (or close to it), then perhaps they have a point.
This makes me think the other comment in this thread about mandatory voting may be on point. Part of our problem is that not only can we elect petty dictators with less than 50% of the vote, we can do it with way less than 50% of the adult citizenry when people cannot be bothered to vote.
Make voting mandatory, and require vote-by-mail. Or if that is too 'risky' then mandate a sufficient number of voting locations with a maximum travel distance from their voters (and maybe allow voters to go to any location convenient for them) and make it a paid federal holiday.
Pipe dream, of course. One party is too strongly incentivized to suppress the vote. They could just moderate their positions somewhat to attract more centrists, but for some reason that has not occurred to them.
In a sane world, we could compromise. I would hate to give up vote-by-mail, but as part of a grand compromise I would accept it. Empower the FEC to issue ID for voting (and only voting), give them the budget and mandate to go roving around the country periodically like the census and track down every last citizen and give them an ID. Then require that ID for in-person voting. Ostensibly this should also satisfy the GOP, but of course it won't, because it isn't actually about the ID.
If they're an electoral majority then you already have a problem.
But the point is they're less likely to get there if they're part of the power structure.
A presumed but frequently not mentioned component of democracy is the peaceful transition of power once a decision is made.
> Maybe not just restricting to white wealthy landowners,
Some of those people are not white and/or not straight. They - very incorrectly - think that wealth will shield them from the sharp teeth of White Christian Nationalism. They should consult with the Log Cabin Republicans and women who voted for both Trump and enshrining abortion into their state's constitution on the same ballot.
People are admitting that now. It's happening. There's some hope that something can be done about him.
Lindsay Graham has an easy solution to this unnecessary conflict: send your sons and daughters.
This whole administration is such a fiasco.
I recommend anybody looking at the US land invasion proposal to do that with an altitude map of Iran on the side.
Even Alexander the Great's conquest of Persian was mostly a soft coup. That country is a fortress.
In addition to history, Americans don't really "do" geography. Apparently it's harder than math.
Lindsey Graham is a lying sack of shit.
And I say that with his permission, since he’s on camera asking to be called out if he did exactly what they did with the Supreme Court not four years later.
I was not aware of this 'on camera' request. Does anyone have a citation?
They showed it on The Daily Show at least once. Talking the rest of a committee out of entertaining a nomination under Obama. Which they ignored entirely in the same time frame for the next administration.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kw8SSQHQitg is Lindsay Graham in 2016 defending the Republicans' refusal to consider a nomination to the Supreme Court in the last year of Obama's presidency, and saying "you can use my words against me and you'd be absolutely right".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CR2A6FDiGEA is about Lindsey Graham in 2020 defending the Republicans' insistence on pushing through a nomination to the Supreme Court in the last year of Trump's presidency. It also includes a clip of Lindsay Graham in 2018 saying that if a Supreme Court vacancy opens once the primaries have started, "we'll wait till the next election".
Wow, WILD to imply that Lindsey Graham is part of this admin. They hate each other. Trump worked with Graham and McConnell first term because Trump does have to work with the establishment but they despise him. He still has to work with Graham who has a little more Koch power now that McConnell is gone-but-not-gone.
I’ll always find it hilarious that progressives manage to hate the GOP and Trump at the same time for the same reasons.
Graham is doing media interviews where he’s backing this war currently.
Also why you find that hilarious instead of expected? Trump is the GOP now. Everyone with more than the barest of pushback to him have been purged from the party and he’s working on getting rid of those people too.
Thanks DJT, I am tired of winning, can we become losers again? /s
[flagged]
[flagged]
That's one of the most disappointing things to me. These people have such resources and the limit of their vision is: bang young girls, accumulate bling, push divisive hateful politics, start wars.
That's it. That's the best they can do.
Even nominally selfish far-sighted things like genuinely funding a deep research program for life extension is not really something they're into. I mean some of them are "into" it in that they talk about it and occasionally toss money at things but they're not interested in funding or being involved in the kind of multi-year high-focus moonshot program it would actually take to deliver. The problem is that's hard and it takes a long time when banging girls and winning power games is instant dopamine.
It makes me keep thinking of paperclip maximizers. It's like we are paperclip maximizers, only our paperclips are sex and dopamine hits from winning power games. A paperclip maximizer with such resources would squander it all on paperclips, and we squander it all on these goal functions built in by evolution. Are we actually intelligent or just clever animals? We can seek what we want, but we don't think much about what we want to want.
I think about how we could've paid for two brand new, gigawatt-scale nuclear power plants for the same amount of money as Elon Musk flushed down the toilet to try to shut down a website he didn't like. Extreme wealth is a mental illness, and wealth caps are healthcare.
It's worse when you realize that Musk at least does something with his insane wealth, even if it's also insane.
Most either do nothing really of note, or donate it to "causes", which may be good, but kind of boring.
He’s not “doing something with his insane wealth”. He’s wealthy because he’s doing something. The moment he announces he’s stepping back and going to be boring he loses half his wealth or more.
God does not come down from the heavens and bestow money that one spends on what one chooses. People value his companies because he’s there. TSLA will instantly collapse in valuation if he exits.
At this point I wish he had shut it down. Instead he turned into a mouthpiece for the right and duped his followers into thinking he’s “liberated” the site and made it into some bastion of free speech.
If you can guarantee two brand new gigawatt scale nuclear power plants for $44b then you can raise that money easily. The problem isn’t the access to money that prevents it. It’s that the the number of NRC approved reactors built since it came into existence is countable on your fingers.
I’m not even kidding. If you can pass the regulation, environmental, land permits, local opposition etc. you will be a hundred millionaire maybe a billionaire.
[flagged]
Please make your substantive points thoughtfully and don't cross into personal attack on HN.
I fail to see how British sarcasm qualifies as a personal attack. Specifically in reference to plain English that is the specification of the NRC as cited
I'm a fan of British wit, but these things don't necessarily translate across contexts. On a broad and shallow internet forum like HN, a line like "if you can read and understand plain English how about you go make yourself a couple billion dollars" pattern-matches to boxed wine sarcasm, not ripping port sarcasm.
[flagged]
Please make your substantive points thoughtfully and don't cross into personal attack on HN.
I think we are somewhere in between. Most of us know what we should be doing but actually doing it is hard!
As an aside this might indicative of today's defective rich. Carnegie built over 2,500 libraries for example.
To put that in context, Wikipedia says about Carnegie:
> he gave away around $350 million (equivalent to $6.9 billion in 2025 dollars), almost 90 percent of his fortune, to charities, foundations and universities
Those famously "richest Americans" were worth single digit billions in today's money. Musk is reportedly worth $600-800 billions. Imagine what he could do with that money. The Gilded Age industrialists were already devils, but to say the quality of the ultra-rich today is in the gutter would be an offense to the gutter.
It seems like when someone does a historical analysis of the wealth of these past tycoons, they often don't do a simple inflation calculation, they relate the wealth to the GDP of the US at the time. By that measure, both Rockefeller and Carnegie were quite a lot more wealthy than single-digit billions, though maybe not quite the same level as Elon Musk.
What makes Musk's wealth really incredible is how much of it is based on hot air (TSLA).
It's incredibly distressing, but I think the issue here lies with 'we'. Those at the very top are a very, shall we say, unique group. Those who seek power at such a level are not like the rest of us. There's established research showing that psychopathic and sociopathic traits are vastly more common among the "CEO class". It's not that wealth and power _makes_ them so, it's that relatively few are willing to be completely amoral or malicious in order to obtain as much power as possible. I believe that this effect is greatly magnified at the very top.
It's a tale as old as Plato: those most likely to WANT to rule are exactly the 'candidates' who absolutely should not.
Are they unique? What would happen to an ordinary person if you gave them a billion dollars?
One of the things this does is gets you surrounded by supplicants and yes-men trying to tell you what you want to hear to get your money. It destroys social feedback. Nobody will tell you you're wrong. This is not good for mental health.
Imagine you suddenly had $100MM. You never have to work again and can do practically whatever you want. But most of us appreciate experiences with the company of others.
Who would you be able to spend time with? Most of your friends and family would still have to work. Of course, you could offer them to leave their jobs and give them money so they won't have to worry and they could spend time with you. But then it leads to the social feedback issue, so even those closest to you don't want to rock the boat.
People will always keep looking to politicians to make the world better despite their terrible track record.
If they aren't doing a good job primary the hell out of them.
Where you get the exciting opportunity to choose between the next set of huckster lawyers and shallow ideologues.
> These people have such resources and the limit of their vision is: bang young girls, accumulate bling, push divisive hateful politics, start wars.
I really don't like how Bill Gates and Microsoft made their money, but at least he has realized that in his twilight years to try to make amends via humanitarian work. Buying the stairway to heaven.
Except that foundations are massive tax shelters - maybe he did some good along the way, but the also blocked IP release of covid vaccine technologies
Can you give me more information on that? DDG on Bill Gates and COVID just keeps finding stuff about Epstien (for some bizarre reason).
Bold of you to call young, underage children (including those as young as 6) escorts.
The correct way of putting it is so old rich suited men can engage in pedophilia.
Perhaps at this point it's more like not getting held accountable for engaging in pedophilia.
[flagged]
Can not see them fuck it up more than my own government spending millions to pour concrete into our own excellent natural gas wells (while selling whatever did come out under market price to other countries), and our neighbors on the east celebrating while they blow up nuclear power plants. At least the US and Israel have a chance of improving their position in the geopolitical landscape. We are just slowly then swiftly committing suicide.
> At least the US and Israel have a chance of improving their position in the geopolitical landscape.
Does the improved geopolitical landscape consist of closed strait of Hormuz? Not sure what else they can geopolitically achieve compared to how things were a few weeks ago.
Are you complaining about the Groningen gas wells?
I thought that they were being decommissioned due to seismic risks?
Yeah, but even the local (groningen) residents think it's a bad idea to not keep some resources available for emergency situations (they also would like to heat their houses in winter) like when other sources are cut off.
Is it even possible? My understanding is that the whole region is connected to those gas wells. There's so much you can take before the underground is hollow.
They may not have a house to heat if tremors get too bad.
the mystical time when the wind on the see is not there and there is no sun? Maybe even the tides stop working?
haha yes, the grand seismic risks (economic risk in single digit percentages of the profits available) but not talking about not using them, they are actively and very costly going to fill them with concrete to ensure in the future (even in whatever extreme scenario) they cannot be used again. On top of the fact that we suckered ourselves into long term agreements which led to having to sell our own gas, far below market price to other countries. Full blown retardedness, and the moral high ground was theirs.
And our German neighbors, I can still see them laughing at the Orange Man Bad... Boo hoo... what a shitshow.
> haha yes, the grand seismic risks (economic risk in single digit percentages of the profits available)
If I lived in the region I wouldn't really care if the economic risk is single digit percentage. I would prefer my house to keep standing.
> they are actively and very costly going to fill them with concrete to ensure in the future (even in whatever extreme scenario) they cannot be used again.
I think you are arguing in bad faith. If you hollow the underground, filling it with something is a way to mitigate the seismic risk.
> And our German neighbors, I can still see them laughing at the Orange Man Bad.
Okay, I see now that talking to you is a waste of time.
Have a great afternoon.
Groningen gas field produced 40 billion m3 a year. 100m3 is 1MWh, currently sold for 50 eur. So the production would generate revenue of 20 billion eur a year. Tax it at 10%, get 2B eur. Buy/build houses for 400k a piece, 5.000 a year. There are cca 10.000 houses with minor or major damage. In 2 fucking years everyone gets a new second house for free and we get cheap gas.
Ah, sorry, this will not work, we are not capable of building new houses in any significant capacity. I don't know why but it's the reality.
You realize that people's houses are more than a number in a balance sheet?
Losing all your personal items and memories + living homeless for a few years while the reconstruction is in progress isn't minor inconvenience.
You realize cost of gas has direct consequences to 17M people's health as well? Our oma in her G-class building set her thermostat to 16 degrees in 2022. Because her heating bill shot to 1000+ eur/month. Only when the black mold started appearing did we manage to persuade her that 19 would be more appropriate. Of course that just traded it for money-related stress.
And I didn't say kick everyone on the street while the reconstruction is taking place. Everyone can stay where they are. Earthquakes are rare and so far in 50 years of extraction there have been no injuries. Groningen isn't the only place with earthquakes in the world you know?
> You realize cost of gas has direct consequences to 17M people's health as well? Our oma in her G-class building set her thermostat to 16 degrees in 2022
16°C in itself doesn't have health consequences whatsoever.
> Only when the black mold started appearing did we manage to persuade her that 19 would be more appropriate.
And you made the wrong diagnostic: mold is a moisture problem, not a heating problem per se. Sure heating improve air moisture but it's a very inefficient way to do so. You're complaining about the cost of a problem when you're using the most inefficient possible method to address it.
And again, if world market gas price rise, the consumer cost of gas rise as well, no matter if you have gas production in the country or not.
Bullshit they are, houses are entirely replaceable and in fact many people do so every couple of years.
Some jurisdictions even have “tenants rights” laws that literally force landlords to terminate all contracts whenever a tenant is about to have lived in a location for too long.
Love you too!
(to clarify, the concrete has nothing to do with the seismic risks, and is solely intended to make it impossible to extract gas later, which some people see as a valid way to lower potential seismic impact in the future due to no extraction... as if it is the only way to deal with seismic risks... and the whole point of the profits being ample to mitigate any economic loss is that people's houses can be either made resistant, or, you know, we could buy affected people a brand spanking new house)
Good luck with the rest.
The US appears to be ideologically committed shitting on their trade partners and ending the dollar's run as a reserve currency and you see this leading to improving it's geopolitical standing? Through what mechanism?
> At least the US and Israel have a chance of improving their position in the geopolitical landscape.
This seems, uh, awfully optimistic.
For the US, thus far, we keep discovering that we have yet to hit bottom — so probably more.
[flagged]
The theocratic regime wasn't bothering us much until we started blowing them up for no reason. (or the practical reason: we are blowing them up because they didn't build a nuke fast enough)
[flagged]
This is a bot/shill account
Are AIs actually participating in public discourse to… protect themselves!?
Isn’t this the future sci-fi nerds were predicting? It’s just that instead of “unplugging SkyNet” we have “supply chain disruption”?
Maybe instead of triggering WWIII the AIs will force a peaceful resolution to major conflicts that disrupt the supply of their substrate.
The accelerators must flow.
It's almost like war is a bad thing.
Do you remember this quote from wheel of time?
"Let the lord of chaos rule" ...
Completely self inflicted at the request of Israel.
Qatar is probably intentionally shutting down production of gas and oil in order to pressure the US to stop, independently of Iranian attacks.
In that respect they may be bombed by Iran but they have the same interests
Where are they supposed to put all that gas and oil if they can't transport it? I don't think they have much choice here.
And as far as I understand, helium is a byproduct of the extraction, so they can't choose to keep only the helium.
However Qatar stopped production before the straits were officially closed and their stated reason is "due to military attacks", also Russian or Chinese ships can pass
There is no such thing as "officially closed". The moment people start shooting there, driving a ship across becomes dangerous. This was an absolutely predictable consequence of the attacks on Iran, you didn't need to wait until several tankers were burning to know these attacks were likely to happen and the strait would become essentially too risky to pass.
Back then there were only two ships attacked in the straits, and one was an Iranian shadow fleet ship. I am not sure that is "closing the straits" in any shape or form
So if there's an active shooter on the one alley to your workplace you should still be at work in time, right? :)
Or let's make the analogy clearer: if your Uber driver cancels the ride because there's an active shooter on the only road between him and you, it's their fault not the shooter's?
no, but if two ships were hit, while one clearly by mistake, it is very early to say the straits are going to be closed as opposed to incorrect targeting
your analogies have went past me though, generally although a common misconception, countries are not people and wars are not comparable to crime
The active shooter is shooting a specific group of people who don't include you. Will you walk past?
That's precisely how you close the straits; by making everyone scared to go through.
You don't even have to scare everyone. You just have to scare the insurers. Without insurance ships won't sail. The exposure is huge, so a small blip in risk makes all the modeling go kerplooie. Traffic stopped when the insurers said drop the anchors.
To restore traffic, we need that risk to return to previous levels, which requires diplomacy and trust. I don't expect resolution any time soon.