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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

#651

Post by chrismorgan »

nerdsniper wrote: post #628
chrismorgan wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 notice…

> which I don’t know enough to quantify the effects of You probably do, actually! People constantly underestimate the grand utility of their basic education. At near-atmospheric pressure and typical ambient temperatures, the ideal gas equation (PV=nRT) from introductory physics works very well and indicates that a 3% overpressure would make gases 3% more dense (linear direct proportionality). At some threshold of hig…

Yeah, I didn’t know enough to quantify those effects! :-)

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

#652

Post by fluidcruft »

rootusrootus wrote: post #140
fluidcruft wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think you're correct it's just air being mixed in not nitrogen, specifically. Stores like Party City started pushing things like arches and stems and other things that hold up balloons up rather than float. It is a lot cheaper to sell a larger quantity of balloons filled with air than a few helium-filled balloons. They also switched their floating gas mix to 60/40 to reduce costs (except for mylar balloons which are heavier and require 100 to float). That's how I remember it from buying balloons for birthday parties a few years ago.

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

#653

Post by znnajdla »

pas wrote: post #614
znnajdla wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is equivalent to investing capital at a negative interest rate, so it’s not done anymore. Stupidity of financializing everything. There’s no amount of money in the world that can quantify the safety of having critical items like food in supply. You can’t eat money. If everyone builds “just in time” supply chains the world collapses after a single shock.

but there's finite resources. cost-benefit analysis still makes sense. there are things that consumers can easily substitute. for example meat is a high-quality but luxury source of protein, as in it's expensive, but people like it a lot so they pay a lot for it, see beef prices, but except specific allergies everyone can switch to poultry, fish, or plant-based protein sources easily, as in anyone people who prepare…

Nope, this is bullshit. Some things you simply cannot put a price on, and therefore are not amenable to cost benefit analysis. What’s the cost of a human life? The cost of sovereignty and freedom and independence? The cost of wanting to live the lifestyle we want, such as eating meat even when there are alternatives? The cost of beauty and love? Financializers simply ignore all of the things they cannot put a price on and lose all of the above.

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

#654

Post by phendrenad2 »

randomNumber7 wrote: post #501
phendrenad2 wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Drinking more water would be healthy for most americans.

That's true. Do you have something to say about inflation, though? Because that's the topic here.

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

#655

Post by idiotsecant »

pseudohadamard wrote: post #450
idiotsecant wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

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.

Yes, where the population density supports it the US has tons of underground.

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

#656

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

lovich wrote: post #284
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You have no fucking clue what you are talking about at all. Your knowledge of the GOP is what you are told.

    Recess Appointments:
    Reagan: 240
    W. Bush: 171
    Clinton: 139
    H.W. Bush: 77
    Washington: 39
    Obama: 32
    Kennedy: 29
    Trump: 0
The GOP absolutely hates Trump. Trump knows he needs them to do anything.

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

#657

Post by radley »

tempaccount5050 wrote: post #341
schiffern wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, dish…

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.

I live in Oakland, and the Easy Bay has had its share of random outages without incident. The last outage was just a split-second blip, but it broke a $1k computer monitor.

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

#658

Post by ssl-3 »

freeone3000 wrote: post #557
ssl-3 wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

Residental-scale transformers can and do explode. Shorts happen not-infrequently with freezing rain and ice storms especially causing issues - the internal oil gets displaced by the water, and the dirty water causes an internal short. It wipes out power to a few blocks here when it happens, but we get an outage due to it every year or two.

They can. They do.

But when the wind is whipping along on a warm day and there are bright flashes and audible bangs, that's (usually!) not signs of transformers blowing up... even though the popular vernacular often erroneously describes it that way.

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

#659

Post by pas »

znnajdla wrote: post #653
pas wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but there's finite resources. cost-benefit analysis still makes sense. there are things that consumers can easily substitute. for example meat is a high-quality but luxury source of protein, as in it's expensive, but people like it a lot so they pay a lot for it, see beef prices, but except specific allergies everyone can switch to poultry, fish, or plant-based protein sources easily, as in anyone people who prepare…

Nope, this is bullshit. Some things you simply cannot put a price on, and therefore are not amenable to cost benefit analysis. What’s the cost of a human life? The cost of sovereignty and freedom and independence? The cost of wanting to live the lifestyle we want, such as eating meat even when there are alternatives? The cost of beauty and love? Financializers simply ignore all of the things they cannot put a price o…

Trade offs are still real even if you decide to run away from them.

Finance is a service that facilitates a form of this. The questions you ask all require context.

For example we have a rough estimate of how much the Iranian regime spent on chasing the dream of nuclear deterrence. About 2 trillion dollars. This is the trade off they went with. This is the money that they did not put into desalination plants, for example. And similarly, just to again see how important context is. They decided to make themselves more sanction-proof, which means growing a lot of food in a very arid region, which requires a lot of water. Again, even though a bushel of wheat on the global market is cheaper than growing their own, they decided the risk of getting cut off was not worth it.

Also I'm not saying "sell 'em all; let the market sort it out", quite the opposite. But without even having a way to put prices on things we can't even talk about what and how much to tax, and what we are collectively then spending that public money on, and then see how much sense that makes.

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

#660

Post by tencentshill »

throwup238 wrote: post #175
abeppu wrote: post #98

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 heliu…

You seem to have a very deep knowledge of aluminum and helium supply chains. Curious, what industry do you work in?
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