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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

#381

Post by jamiek88 »

sroussey wrote: post #273
john_strinlai wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And it works on the Vision Pro via the next update.

finally!!!

Can’t wait to try that and for the f1 stuff to come out.

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

#382

Post by schiffern »

gruez wrote: post #357
toss1 wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#383

Post by andrewflnr »

robocat wrote: post #205
observationist wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fe…

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 t…

What a horror story. Incredible detective work.

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

#384

Post by rootusrootus »

erxam wrote: post #221
smackeyacky wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#385

Post by gopher_space »

FreezingKeeper wrote: post #220
Joel_Mckay wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#386

Post by rootusrootus »

erxam wrote: post #350
hermitcrab wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#387

Post by xuki »

permalac wrote: post #329
vdfs wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why does it take so long?

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.

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

#388

Post by rootusrootus »

erxam wrote: post #355
smackeyacky wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 st…

> 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.

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

#390

Post by rootusrootus »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #310
hn_acc1 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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