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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

#281

Post by ianburrell »

Onavo wrote: post #241
srik wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Living in developing countries taught me to never plugin expensive computers without a surge protector UPS.

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.

Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock

#282

Post by schiffern »

srik wrote: post #192
randerson wrote: post #150

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.

Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock

#283

Post by roywiggins »

stevenwoo wrote: post #159
trollbridge wrote: post #7

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.

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-...

Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock

#284

Post by lovich »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #246
spiderfarmer wrote: post #43

Lindsay Graham has an easy solution to this unnecessary conflict: send your sons and daughters. This whole administration is such a fiasco.

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…

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.

Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock

#285

Post by jltsiren »

kelipso wrote: post #259
srik wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Living in developing countries taught me to never plugin expensive computers without a surge protector UPS.

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.

Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock

#286

Post by sillystuff »

edgyquant wrote: post #155
4ggr0 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> too far left wing > biden uhm...

His admin was by far the most left wing in history, only the actual far left think otherwise

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

Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock

#287

Post by fc417fc802 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #197
robmccoll wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock

#289

Post by vdfs »

ordu wrote: post #271

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...

Aluminum too, Qatar shutdown a smelting plant which take a year to restart
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