471–480 of 675 posts
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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
Don't reply to breppp it's an obvious spy/operative account.
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Living in developing countries taught me to never plugin expensive computers without a surge protector UPS.
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.
Do you live in a bunker to protect against artillery shells?
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.
Silver lining: literally all Macs are a total steal right now.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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?
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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 crack…
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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…
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.
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.
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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 heliu…
Do we have a process to make new helium from hydrogen?