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Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock
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Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
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%
I wonder if one of you could be going by number of atoms, and the other could be going by weight?
Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
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Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
The kind of people who voted for trump would never admit they made a mistake. They double down on stupidity instead.
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.
Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock
#155Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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).
Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock
#158Qatar 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
Even if this nonsense was true it is absolutely normal tactic used by the US when bombing is out of question. Use economic pressure by way of tariffs and sanctions until vassals are put in their place. So what's your problem
Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock
#159Aren’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.
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.
Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock
#160I'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.
Silver lining: literally all Macs are a total steal right now.