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.
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.
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 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.
Anyone have a good take on how well Asahi linux keeps the power management working on mac hardware? The biggest killer feature for me of mac hardware is the battery/weight. I have found it hard to get a good laptop in the linux ecosystem mainly because of power consumption. If Asahi doesn't really impact the battery life then I would seriously consider going that route. Similar question about support for pytorch on linux/arm64 / Asahi.
I bought a Mac Mini in February and maxed out the ram and storage. Now, it seems like that was a prescient move, but honestly I really only bought it for photo editing and playing the new World of Warcraft expansion (don't judge me!).
The AMD395+ PCs have unified memory and since it's not tied to a garbage OS nor reasonably affected by future dram costs, it's a better choice for reasonable people, unless you're going for greater than 128GB
> South Korean memory giant SK hynix has since said it had diversified supplies for helium and secured sufficient inventory. Meanwhile, TSMC said that it doesn’t currently anticipate a notable impact following Ras Laffan going offline, but that it’s monitoring the situation.
I bought a PC in early 2021 IIRC. It was good for the time and a good deal for a high end PC. IIRC it was $2800 and had a 6900 XTX. Last year I accidentally killed it. The CPU temps were higher than I'd like (~85C). the thermal grease can become hard and ineffective over time so I figured I'd replace it. Instead, it had become like cement and by twisting the AIO off, I snapped the socket on the motherboard.
This was an expensive mistake as I both looked into buying a replacement motherboard and CPU but that quickly gets to the price of a new PC. Paying someone to rebuild my PC is expensive and I'm beyond the age of wanting to fully remove a motherboard and effectively rebuild my entire PC myself. So I didn't know what to do with it.
Anyway, I ended up buying various alternatives like a NUC with 32GB of RAM, a laptop (with a 4080) and a Mac Mini. But I also ended up buying a new 9800X3D PC with a 5070Ti. Like I said, it was an expensive mistake.
But I decided for no particular reason to upgrade the (already good) 32GB of DDR5-6000 to 64GB with a $200 kit of DDR5-6000. This was in July I think. I also upgraded my laptop to 64GB for no readily apparent reason.
I recently checked and that $200 64GB kit now costs $950. SSDs are through the roof too but through complete accident I'm surrounded by about 5 PCs and a bunch of spare RAM. I don't see myself upgrading anytime soon.
I will say that there are some good deals (relative to current pricing) for combos including CPU, motherboard and memory or even some pretty good prebuilts.
These devices are basically autotransformers. So they reduce the noise by providing inductive filtering. But they don't really protect against strong surges by themselves.
So Tripp Lite uses a regular varistor for that, just like any other surge protector. In Europe you'd be far better off buying a voltage relay and adding it to your electrical panel, but it's not usually possible with the non-modular US electrical panels.
Financialization of everything is so funny to me, because even I, who is extremely stupid when it comes to big money stuff, can see not having state capacity on important stuff is insane. By that, I mean hard resources, materials, THINGS.
It’s almost shocking that people in an era of unlimited resources could see this was not renewable and important to hold, and that later in the era of limited resources, we decided to privatize this. It’s so shortsighted, willfully ignorant.
We’re about to get a preview of the world after fossil fuel extraction and some of the knock on effects. Semi is one thing, wait till you can’t get an MRI.
In related news, diesel is $7/gallon, and peets coffee is $25/lb, and computers (hardware and cloud) are up 25-50%.
The official numbers claim 3% inflation. Does anyone actually believe that? We were seeing 30% YoY before Iran here in California.
The discrepancy is so large, I’m wondering if there’s an official explanation or some reasonable explanation, or if they’re just not bothering anymore.
None. But you don't put a non refined cruide oil in your diesel, it not only has to be refined but DELIVERED to your country. Depending where that country is, delivery could be even 60% of the final price. And when, you know, tankers with oil explode due to drone attacks, you will see quick large spikes in pump price.
Not sure how that impacts fertilizer demand, but it certainly screws up planting season.
The ground will be dry in a week or two, and they’re predicting the worst spring snowpack on record (after the wettest Christmas in Southern California on record).
Freight rate volatility is one of the most underappreciated risks in physical product businesses. During the 2021-2022 shipping crisis, ocean freight from China to the US West Coast hit $20k+ per container — a 10x jump that wiped margins for importers who hadn't hedged. Air freight as a backup is worth keeping in your model even if you never use it; knowing your break-even point at air rates tells you a lot about product viability.
There was a lot written about this in the 1990s during the rise of globalization and just in time supply chains.
Basically, you build a big warehouse and keep it full when prices are below projection.
This is equivalent to investing capital at a negative interest rate, so it’s not done anymore. Instead, the system is designed to pass supply shocks on to the consumer when possible.
I’ve noticed the local grocery stores have started replacing shelf price tags with little computers so they can reprice food in real time. (And hire fewer stock people),
Anyway, the keyword you want is “just in time supply chain”.
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 helium in downstream processes but there’s only so much they can do without expanding their core competency into yet another complex chemical manufacturing process.
MRI machines don’t need high purity helium and the contamination doesn’t “gunk up” all the tools so it’s not an issue to recycle it there.
Now I'm imagining a procedural cop show where they bust an illegal helium dealer, and one of the cops takes a huff to gauge what they're dealing with, and then squeaks out "that's the good stuff".
> The infrastructure to get it that pure becomes very specialized
I think some of the most advanced fab infrastructure is the ultra pure water system. Water becomes quite aggressive chemically when it has no dissolved ions in it. You have to use exotic or highly processed materials simply to transport it around. If the factory didn't need such massive quantities of it, trucking it in would likely be preferable.
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 few tons a day, with an MRI only using a few liters and losing 5% or less.
During the year 1986, there was an anomalous increase in LSI memory problems. Electronics in early 1987 appeared to have problem rates approaching 20 times higher than predicted. In contrast, identical LSI memories being manufactured in Europe showed no anomalous problems. Because of knowledge of the radioactivity problem with the Intel 2107 RAMs, it was thought that the LSI package probably was at fault, since the IBM chips were mounted on similar ceramic materials. LSI ceramic packages made by IBM in Europe and in the U.S. were exchanged, but the European computer modules (with European chips and U.S. packaging) showed no fails, while the U.S. chips with European packages still failed at a high rate. This indicated that the problem was undoubtedly in the U.S.-manufactured LSI chips. In April 1987, significant design changes had been made to the memory chip with the most problems, a 4Kb bipolar RAM. The newer chip had been given the nickname Hera, and so at an early stage the incident became known as the "Hera problem."
By June 1987, the problem was very serious. A group was organized to investigate the problem. The first breakthrough in understanding occurred with the analysis of "carcasses" from the memory chips (the term carcasses refers to the chips on an LSI wafer which do not work correctly, and are not used but saved in case some problem occurs at a future time). Some of these carcasses were shown to have significant radioactivity.
Six weeks was spent in the manufacturing process lines, looking for radioactivity, and traces were found inside various processing units. However, it could not be determined whether these traces came from the raw materials used, or whether they were transferred from the chips themselves, which might have been contaminated earlier in their processing. Further, it was discovered that radioactive filaments (containing radioactive thorium) were commonly used in some evaporators. A detailed analysis by T. Zabel of some of the "hot" chips revealed that the radioactive contamination came from a single source: Po210 This isotope is found in the uranium decay chain, which contains about twelve different radioactive species. The surprising fact was that Po210 was the only contaminant on the LSI chips, and all the other expected decay-chain elements were missing. Hundreds of chips were analyzed for radioactivity, and Po210 contamination was found going back more than a year. Then it was found that whatever caused the radioactivity problem disappeared on all wafers started after May 22, 1987. After this precise date, all new wafers were free of contamination, except for small amounts which probably were contaminated by other older chips being processed by the same equipment. Since it takes about four months for chips to be manufactured, the pipeline was still full of "hot" chips in July and August 1987. Further sweeps of the manufacturing lines showed trace radioactivity, but the plant was essentially clean. The contamination had appeared in 1985, increased by more than 1000 times until May 22, 1987, and then totally disappeared!
Several months passed, with widespread testing of manufacturing materials and tools, but no radioactive contamination was discovered. All memory chips in the manufacturing lines were spot-screened for radioactivity, but they were clean. The radioactivity reappeared in the manufacturing plant in early December 1987, mildly contaminating several hundred wafers, then disappeared again. A search of all the materials used in the fabrication of these chips found no source of the radioactivity. With further screening, and a lot of luck, a new and unused bottle of nitric acid was identified by J. Hannah as radioactive. One surprising aspect of this discovery was that, of twelve bottles in the single lot of acid, only one was contaminated. Since all screening of materials assumed lot-sized homogeneity, this discovery of a single bad sample in a large lot probably explained why previous scans of the manufacturing line had been negative. The unopened bottle of radioactive nitric acid led investigators back to a supplier's factory, and it was found that the radioactivity was being injected by a bottle-cleaning machine for semiconductor-grade acid bottles. This bottle cleaner used radioactive Po210 material to ionize an air jet which was used to dislodge electrostatic dust inside the bottles after washing. The jets were leaking radioactivity because of a change in the epoxy used to seal the Po210 inside the air jet capsule. Since these jets gave off infrequent and random bursts of radioactivity, only a few bottles out of thousands were contaminated.
An excerpt from:
Ziegler, James F., et al. "IBM experiments in soft fails in computer electronics (1978–1994)." IBM journal of research and development 40.1 (1996): 3-18
Polonium is debuggable. More subtle statistical aberrations would be exponentially harder.
Can someone explain why helium is used for these purposes, as opposed to some other noble gas? I think there's more argon (it's about 1% of the atmosphere) than helium so is helium somehow special, or is it just cheaper, despite being rarer and non-renewable?
Helium has the second highest [1] specific heat capacity (after hydrogen); it's significantly higher than that of even water. It's damn efficient at cooling or heating. With that, it's chemically inert, unlike hydrogen or ammonia. There's no reasonable substitute.
Heat capacity is irrelevant -- argon and helium have exactly the same heat capacity per liter of gas, which would be the figure of merit in this context.
Heat conductivity, on the other hand, is an order of magnitude higher for helium, compared to argon, because its atoms are moving faster due to their lower mass.
When the gas is used for cooling, heat conductivity is important because it determines the conductivity through the boundary layer near surface, where the velocity of the flow drops to zero at the surface itself, and all the heat transport is through conduction rather than advection.
I had a stroke of luck this week - I am due a new laptop at work, and ordered a new ThinkPad T14, as they have served me well in the past.
Then IT calls back and says that I shouldn't configure one directly at Lenovo's website, as we are to buy them from a retailer instead.
OK, can do - but they only stock a few models, and the one with the CPU and disk I had configured with Lenovo was only available with 64GB RAM at the retailer. What to do?
'Ouch, that's gonna make accounting hurt. We'll order it for you right away.'
Helium for party balloons is low grade and not pure enough for chip fab use, so stacking up birthday tanks won't keep TSMC running. Industrial grade helium has a restricted and oddly international supply chain thanks to regulation and a few weirdly-placed depots. The US 'helium stockpile' isn't really a menu you can just order from when a factory across the planet runs dry, especially if offtakes and logistics are tied up by decade-old government contracts. If you want to see supply chain fragility, try pricing MRI-grade helium after a shutdown and watch everyone in medical procurement panic quitely.
Isn't Helium one of the easiest elements to purify? Just cool it below 14 Kelvin, which will make everything else freeze out. Collect the remaining liquid, which should be pure Helium.
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.
We have so much gas where I live that there are places it’s just flared off and burned, because it’s less greenhouse emissions than it escaping unburned.
You sure about that? Everything I've ever heard says that balloon gas is generally grade 4, which is 99.99% pure. Not good enough for MRI, but quite a lot better than 80%.
I believe that that's the stuff you buy in the shop, the non-refillable containers. If you buy a proper refillable balloon gas cylinder it's the higher grade stuff. Source: bought the shop stuff, got disappointed, bought the cylinder, happy.
I can personally attest that this is not foolproof, if it is even the case. Those helium tanks you can buy for large parties knocked me out as a kid. Lost consciousness fell to the ground, blacked out. Supervise your kids if you buy one!
Depending on who you go to, some places will not sell you tanks of Helium. We did a balloon launch expecting to use Hydrogen because Helium was going to be problematic. The sales rep at the supply place took a look at the group of us knuckleheads with absolutely no Hydrogen experience and ended up selling us the Helium while also exchanging all of our connectors. Hydrogen tanks use specific connectors different from all other tanks to make using a hydrogen take by mistake very difficult. I was nervous about using hydrogen and had no issue with the higher price for the helium knowing I wasn't going to catch on fire.
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.
Good old JIT stock management for essential materials, right?
One’d think that they’d keep more than a couple of weeks’s supply of critical materials —too bad many copied Cook’s and others’s JIT inventory management for everything.
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 people trump relies on to make his decisions (if he's making them) include tons of far right accelerationists; so they'd be happy to watch modern society fall.
This situation would be laughable if the consequences weren't so dire.
I have problems adequately stating just how incompetent and ill-thought out this entire misadventure was. I say this because everything that's happened has been completely foreseeable and foreseen, including the ability of Iran to retaliate by closing the Strait of Hormuz.
This has been something many militaries around the world have planned scenarios for. Word has it any warnings from allies, the NSC and the Joint Chiefs were just completely ignored. And those estimates probably underestimated how numerous and effective Iranian SRBMs and Shahed drones are.
Beyond direct impacts on crude oil, refined oil products and natural gas, there are secondary effects such as ~30 of the world's fertilizer goes through the Strait. Helium from Qatar is an issue but at least there are other sources for Helium, being pretty much any natural gas well so equipped to capture helium.
Not just many foreign militaries. Our military. General Dan Caine by report advised Trump about the negative consequences of this action. MAGA elected a fantasist and narcissist and we will all bear the consequences. I was no fan of Kamala but the appalling limitations of Trump are of a different order and it is a disgrace that our voters by majority elected him.
The point is it doesn’t take giant tankers going through the Strait of Hormuz to move this volume. It could be handled by tanker trucks going to Suez….
I had an eye opening discussion with an IT admin who stated with a straight face that their “patching strategy was not to patch”.
They have a patch strategy! They considered requirements when deciding the strategy! They have a documented strategy, it’s just very brief. (“Don’t.”)
The Trump admin may have similarly thought about this issue for a few seconds, shrugged their shoulders and decided that this might force manufacturers to go on-shore.
You and I know it won’t, certainly not in the immediate future, which means massive disruption to industry, but that’s not the same as “no plan”.
Somewhat tangential question - for the "Just Stop Oil" folks - is it the extraction of oil that is the problem, or the burning of it? If the former, then we have an opportunity to investigate more renewable sources.
Well primarily the goal is to ensure that we don't build any homes for people or any clean energy. There's a reason a group of people funded by an oil heir are anti-nuclear.
If Iran hits AI data centers (without people in it of course), 70% of the world would cheer. If there's one thing hated more than a theocratic regime ... /s
The theocratic regime wasn't bothering us much until we started blowing them up for no reason. (or the practical reason: we are blowing them up because they didn't build a nuke fast enough)
That isn't true. There's actually a large number of people, probably in the millions, but probably not a majority of those who voted for him, who no longer support him in any way. And of the ones who remain, yes: they're pretty dense to still support him now. There are some lunatics who genuinely believe that the US has the right to dominate and exploit all other nations, but the majority of them simply believe the lies he's telling. I've already seen that when they are confronted with the facts about, say, Gaza, some of them can change their minds. It would be a mistake to turn them away instead of treating them like potential allies. There really is something more important at stake.
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.
Could you define the acronym "e/acc"? DDG seems to think it means: "What Does E/Acc Stand For, And What Does It Mean? E/acc stands for the phrase effective accelerationism, and it basically indicates one's personal ideological belief that artificial intelligence will one day become an all-powerful being that can fix the vast majority of humanity's problems."
I don't think I have ever heard a MAGA talk about AI.
> I don't think I have ever heard a MAGA talk about AI.
Lots of ex-Bitcoin-bros turned AI hypemen went all-in on maga for Trump II. Even the silicon valley C-Suites and VC-class went mask-off around February 2025. Some have tried to walk it back since then, after realizing the administration they had hitched their wagons to didn't have the mandate or levels of public support they had hoped for - thankfully, the internet never forgets.
We live in the dumbest possible timeline. As someone who came of age in the late 80s and was lucky enough to fully experience the 90s and 2000s ... what we have done in the last 20 years makes me sad. I never saw this coming. I admit that I maintained my delusion even though I was in OKC in 1995. Should have been a wake-up call.
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) a plausible claim to being well informed.
That is just a thought experiment, though, I do not believe it would play out beneficially if we tried to implement it in real life.
And I say that with his permission, since he’s on camera asking to be called out if he did exactly what they did with the Supreme Court not four years later.
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 the same reasons.
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.
That's one of the most disappointing things to me. These people have such resources and the limit of their vision is: bang young girls, accumulate bling, push divisive hateful politics, start wars.
That's it. That's the best they can do.
Even nominally selfish far-sighted things like genuinely funding a deep research program for life extension is not really something they're into. I mean some of them are "into" it in that they talk about it and occasionally toss money at things but they're not interested in funding or being involved in the kind of multi-year high-focus moonshot program it would actually take to deliver. The problem is that's hard and it takes a long time when banging girls and winning power games is instant dopamine.
It makes me keep thinking of paperclip maximizers. It's like we are paperclip maximizers, only our paperclips are sex and dopamine hits from winning power games. A paperclip maximizer with such resources would squander it all on paperclips, and we squander it all on these goal functions built in by evolution. Are we actually intelligent or just clever animals? We can seek what we want, but we don't think much about what we want to want.
Can not see them fuck it up more than my own government spending millions to pour concrete into our own excellent natural gas wells (while selling whatever did come out under market price to other countries), and our neighbors on the east celebrating while they blow up nuclear power plants. At least the US and Israel have a chance of improving their position in the geopolitical landscape. We are just slowly then swiftly committing suicide.
> At least the US and Israel have a chance of improving their position in the geopolitical landscape.
Does the improved geopolitical landscape consist of closed strait of Hormuz? Not sure what else they can geopolitically achieve compared to how things were a few weeks ago.
The US appears to be ideologically committed shitting on their trade partners and ending the dollar's run as a reserve currency and you see this leading to improving it's geopolitical standing? Through what mechanism?
However Qatar stopped production before the straits were officially closed and their stated reason is "due to military attacks", also Russian or Chinese ships can pass
Shutting down production doesn't pressure the US at all since the oil and gas can't go anywhere anyway. They're shutting it down because they have to, there's nowhere to put the oil.
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
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.
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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.
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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.
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Living in California taught me this
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...
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Over the last two years I bought 2 4TB SSDs, 64GB DDR5 ECC UDIMM and 4 14TB HDDs.
I couldn't justify buying any of them today.
Silver lining: literally all Macs are a total steal right now.
Anyone have a good take on how well Asahi linux keeps the power management working on mac hardware? The biggest killer feature for me of mac hardware is the battery/weight. I have found it hard to get a good laptop in the linux ecosystem mainly because of power consumption. If Asahi doesn't really impact the battery life then I would seriously consider going that route. Similar question about support for pytorch on linux/arm64 / Asahi.
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Too bad I can’t play the games I want to play on them
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I bought a Mac Mini in February and maxed out the ram and storage. Now, it seems like that was a prescient move, but honestly I really only bought it for photo editing and playing the new World of Warcraft expansion (don't judge me!).
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You pay an $1k extra just to get the model with 1TB disk. How is that a steal?
I mean they're still expensive, they just seem relatively good value because everything else has gotten more expensive.
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Good Mac Pro models are still spendy, but the M3/M4 laptops are great if your software use-cases are met. =3
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The AMD395+ PCs have unified memory and since it's not tied to a garbage OS nor reasonably affected by future dram costs, it's a better choice for reasonable people, unless you're going for greater than 128GB
It sounds like it won't affect prices that much?
> South Korean memory giant SK hynix has since said it had diversified supplies for helium and secured sufficient inventory. Meanwhile, TSMC said that it doesn’t currently anticipate a notable impact following Ras Laffan going offline, but that it’s monitoring the situation.
It also just be the typical “don’t scare the shareholders just yet” PR speak. Time will tell.
I got to get me some new surge protectors and not the cheapies. maybe a small ups.
Thankfully UPSes are still cheap. Get one before Sam buys the entire yearly production of cyberpower.
I have a UPS with surge protection which I plug my computer into for this reason. Do others do the same or use something else?
I bought a PC in early 2021 IIRC. It was good for the time and a good deal for a high end PC. IIRC it was $2800 and had a 6900 XTX. Last year I accidentally killed it. The CPU temps were higher than I'd like (~85C). the thermal grease can become hard and ineffective over time so I figured I'd replace it. Instead, it had become like cement and by twisting the AIO off, I snapped the socket on the motherboard.
This was an expensive mistake as I both looked into buying a replacement motherboard and CPU but that quickly gets to the price of a new PC. Paying someone to rebuild my PC is expensive and I'm beyond the age of wanting to fully remove a motherboard and effectively rebuild my entire PC myself. So I didn't know what to do with it.
Anyway, I ended up buying various alternatives like a NUC with 32GB of RAM, a laptop (with a 4080) and a Mac Mini. But I also ended up buying a new 9800X3D PC with a 5070Ti. Like I said, it was an expensive mistake.
But I decided for no particular reason to upgrade the (already good) 32GB of DDR5-6000 to 64GB with a $200 kit of DDR5-6000. This was in July I think. I also upgraded my laptop to 64GB for no readily apparent reason.
I recently checked and that $200 64GB kit now costs $950. SSDs are through the roof too but through complete accident I'm surrounded by about 5 PCs and a bunch of spare RAM. I don't see myself upgrading anytime soon.
I will say that there are some good deals (relative to current pricing) for combos including CPU, motherboard and memory or even some pretty good prebuilts.
We used those Tripp Lite LC1200 to knock down the noise floor (14dB) on remote equipment.
These line-conditioners actually perform well given the cost, but never buy used surge-arresters given the finite spike hit-count. Best of luck =3
These devices are basically autotransformers. So they reduce the noise by providing inductive filtering. But they don't really protect against strong surges by themselves.
So Tripp Lite uses a regular varistor for that, just like any other surge protector. In Europe you'd be far better off buying a voltage relay and adding it to your electrical panel, but it's not usually possible with the non-modular US electrical panels.
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The US just finished divesting itself from its strategic helium reserve in 2024 due to the "Helium Stewardship Act of 2013"[1]
But, now we have a strategic bitcoin reserve.
[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/527
Financialization of everything is so funny to me, because even I, who is extremely stupid when it comes to big money stuff, can see not having state capacity on important stuff is insane. By that, I mean hard resources, materials, THINGS.
They started selling in 1996: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve
Big self own here
It’s almost shocking that people in an era of unlimited resources could see this was not renewable and important to hold, and that later in the era of limited resources, we decided to privatize this. It’s so shortsighted, willfully ignorant.
We’re about to get a preview of the world after fossil fuel extraction and some of the knock on effects. Semi is one thing, wait till you can’t get an MRI.
In related news, diesel is $7/gallon, and peets coffee is $25/lb, and computers (hardware and cloud) are up 25-50%.
The official numbers claim 3% inflation. Does anyone actually believe that? We were seeing 30% YoY before Iran here in California.
The discrepancy is so large, I’m wondering if there’s an official explanation or some reasonable explanation, or if they’re just not bothering anymore.
[delayed]
Entry level Dell servers that used to cost 1,700 US are now going for 17,000!!! I'm talking absolute basics with 16GB of memory etc. Wild times.
Diesel is $5 in the Southeast, what kind of supply chain issue could cause 40% diff? Should we hire some tanker trucks and arb this?
None. But you don't put a non refined cruide oil in your diesel, it not only has to be refined but DELIVERED to your country. Depending where that country is, delivery could be even 60% of the final price. And when, you know, tankers with oil explode due to drone attacks, you will see quick large spikes in pump price.
> We were seeing 30% YoY before Iran here in California.
We didn’t even see that across the board during the height of Covid-flation. What metrics are you using to get that number?
Food, fuel, utilities, insurance, electronics, services and digital goods.
This administration is America slitting its wrists.
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...
It’s going to be 90-100F in California next week.
Not sure how that impacts fertilizer demand, but it certainly screws up planting season.
The ground will be dry in a week or two, and they’re predicting the worst spring snowpack on record (after the wettest Christmas in Southern California on record).
Maybe someone else can use the fertilizer?
Aluminum too, Qatar shutdown a smelting plant which take a year to restart
They released a statement clarifying that they’re running the Qatalum smelter at reduced capacity, not shutting it down.
Why does it take so long?
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I did some research.
They were shutting down because of lack of gas. They secured some, so they will not shut down, only operate at 60% capacity.
If they shut down they represent less than 1% of world production.
Step 1: Put the helium in a blimp Step 2: Fly around the straight and over to Taiwan Step 3: Pump it into the chip factory
There you go, solved it.
You do realize helium is a byproduct of LNG production and if you’re not pumping gas you’re not getting helium? It’s not a transportation issue.
Yes, except for this one flaw it's a perfect plan which would have worked perfectly.
How do you get the blimp back?
I think bigger question is, how do you bring the blimp down without dumping out helium?
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Fold it up and ship it.
Hydrogen
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An easy target for a drone!
At least it'd be non-flammable helium!
Zeppelins are back, baby!
put the chip factory on the blimp
Nonsense. Deploy the SLS. Use the hydrogen tanks.
If the seals can hold hydrogen, helium should be easy for them.
/s
The Hindenburg wants to know your location
Edit: oh right, know your chemistry...
Freight rate volatility is one of the most underappreciated risks in physical product businesses. During the 2021-2022 shipping crisis, ocean freight from China to the US West Coast hit $20k+ per container — a 10x jump that wiped margins for importers who hadn't hedged. Air freight as a backup is worth keeping in your model even if you never use it; knowing your break-even point at air rates tells you a lot about product viability.
How would you model your business like this? Like what tools / literature can you recommend?
There was a lot written about this in the 1990s during the rise of globalization and just in time supply chains.
Basically, you build a big warehouse and keep it full when prices are below projection.
This is equivalent to investing capital at a negative interest rate, so it’s not done anymore. Instead, the system is designed to pass supply shocks on to the consumer when possible.
I’ve noticed the local grocery stores have started replacing shelf price tags with little computers so they can reprice food in real time. (And hire fewer stock people),
Anyway, the keyword you want is “just in time supply chain”.
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 helium in downstream processes but there’s only so much they can do without expanding their core competency into yet another complex chemical manufacturing process.
MRI machines don’t need high purity helium and the contamination doesn’t “gunk up” all the tools so it’s not an issue to recycle it there.
Now I'm imagining a procedural cop show where they bust an illegal helium dealer, and one of the cops takes a huff to gauge what they're dealing with, and then squeaks out "that's the good stuff".
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> The infrastructure to get it that pure becomes very specialized
I think some of the most advanced fab infrastructure is the ultra pure water system. Water becomes quite aggressive chemically when it has no dissolved ions in it. You have to use exotic or highly processed materials simply to transport it around. If the factory didn't need such massive quantities of it, trucking it in would likely be preferable.
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From the article I thought the helium was used mostly for cooling (where I imagine the purity wouldn't be that important)
But what other processes do the fabs use the helium for then?
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Do we have a process to make new helium from hydrogen?
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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 few tons a day, with an MRI only using a few liters and losing 5% or less.
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:
An excerpt from: Ziegler, James F., et al. "IBM experiments in soft fails in computer electronics (1978–1994)." IBM journal of research and development 40.1 (1996): 3-18
Polonium is debuggable. More subtle statistical aberrations would be exponentially harder.
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Can someone explain why helium is used for these purposes, as opposed to some other noble gas? I think there's more argon (it's about 1% of the atmosphere) than helium so is helium somehow special, or is it just cheaper, despite being rarer and non-renewable?
Helium has the second highest [1] specific heat capacity (after hydrogen); it's significantly higher than that of even water. It's damn efficient at cooling or heating. With that, it's chemically inert, unlike hydrogen or ammonia. There's no reasonable substitute.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_specific_heat_capacit... (Sort by the third column.)
Heat capacity is irrelevant -- argon and helium have exactly the same heat capacity per liter of gas, which would be the figure of merit in this context.
Heat conductivity, on the other hand, is an order of magnitude higher for helium, compared to argon, because its atoms are moving faster due to their lower mass.
When the gas is used for cooling, heat conductivity is important because it determines the conductivity through the boundary layer near surface, where the velocity of the flow drops to zero at the surface itself, and all the heat transport is through conduction rather than advection.
Tech divers are also probably gonna be having a Bad Time. Helium mixes are already pretty expensive, I assume this will make it far worse.
This is an extremely pure form of He, not the stuff used by the divers. That's a completely different supply chain.
Also, copper welding involves the use of helium as shielding gas. Helium shortage is painful
So the RAM prices are going to skyrocket again?
Of course, everything at the moment regardless of good or bad means higher RAM price.
Have a bad first date? Higher RAM prices.
Your dog ran away? Higher RAM prices.
Lower RAM prices? Believe it or not, higher RAM prices.
I tried upgrading to 32 GB of RAM...but the bank offered me a mortgage instead...
I had a stroke of luck this week - I am due a new laptop at work, and ordered a new ThinkPad T14, as they have served me well in the past.
Then IT calls back and says that I shouldn't configure one directly at Lenovo's website, as we are to buy them from a retailer instead.
OK, can do - but they only stock a few models, and the one with the CPU and disk I had configured with Lenovo was only available with 64GB RAM at the retailer. What to do?
'Ouch, that's gonna make accounting hurt. We'll order it for you right away.'
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It's a good time to be Messer.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/us-just-sold-heli...
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.
Helium for party balloons is low grade and not pure enough for chip fab use, so stacking up birthday tanks won't keep TSMC running. Industrial grade helium has a restricted and oddly international supply chain thanks to regulation and a few weirdly-placed depots. The US 'helium stockpile' isn't really a menu you can just order from when a factory across the planet runs dry, especially if offtakes and logistics are tied up by decade-old government contracts. If you want to see supply chain fragility, try pricing MRI-grade helium after a shutdown and watch everyone in medical procurement panic quitely.
Isn't Helium one of the easiest elements to purify? Just cool it below 14 Kelvin, which will make everything else freeze out. Collect the remaining liquid, which should be pure Helium.
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after what kind of shutdown?
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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-...
Makes sense.
We have so much gas where I live that there are places it’s just flared off and burned, because it’s less greenhouse emissions than it escaping unburned.
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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%
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You sure about that? Everything I've ever heard says that balloon gas is generally grade 4, which is 99.99% pure. Not good enough for MRI, but quite a lot better than 80%.
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I believe that that's the stuff you buy in the shop, the non-refillable containers. If you buy a proper refillable balloon gas cylinder it's the higher grade stuff. Source: bought the shop stuff, got disappointed, bought the cylinder, happy.
I can personally attest that this is not foolproof, if it is even the case. Those helium tanks you can buy for large parties knocked me out as a kid. Lost consciousness fell to the ground, blacked out. Supervise your kids if you buy one!
source? the value I found is 97.5%+ helium for party balloons: https://www.grecogas.com/learn-our-industry/your-complete-gu...
People commit suicide with it because it's supposedly painless and quick.
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We're dumb enough now to have forgotten history.
Moar hydrogen party balloons. Making partying fun again!
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This is very likely not true.
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Depending on who you go to, some places will not sell you tanks of Helium. We did a balloon launch expecting to use Hydrogen because Helium was going to be problematic. The sales rep at the supply place took a look at the group of us knuckleheads with absolutely no Hydrogen experience and ended up selling us the Helium while also exchanging all of our connectors. Hydrogen tanks use specific connectors different from all other tanks to make using a hydrogen take by mistake very difficult. I was nervous about using hydrogen and had no issue with the higher price for the helium knowing I wasn't going to catch on fire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve
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.
> balloon use ... helium became much, much more expensive
More than just from inflation? (sorry, not sorry!)
Is lifting gas? That’s pretty cool.
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Good old JIT stock management for essential materials, right?
One’d think that they’d keep more than a couple of weeks’s supply of critical materials —too bad many copied Cook’s and others’s JIT inventory management for everything.
not just. huge deposits opened (actively being exploited) up in colorado, utah in the past few years and Minnesota this year
Messer Completes Acquisition of Federal Helium System from BLM https://www.messer-us.com/press-releases/messer-completes-ac...
Why did we sell it instead of lease? This seems like something that should be in public hands.
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Foi de vasco (died).
Great timing that the US recently sold its strategic helium supply.
BLM [(Bureau of Land Management)] completes $460M sale of federal helium reserve to private company | 12/12/2024 | https://www.eenews.net/articles/blm-completes-460m-sale-of-f...
Messer Completes Acquisition of Federal Helium System from BLM | June 27, 2024 | https://www.messer-us.com/press-releases/messer-completes-ac...
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)
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Those party ballons were very cheap for a while.
yeah that was completely crazy... never understood why they would do something like that
An explanation is particular political group was ideologically enthralled with privatization.
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The people trump relies on to make his decisions (if he's making them) include tons of far right accelerationists; so they'd be happy to watch modern society fall.
This situation would be laughable if the consequences weren't so dire.
I have problems adequately stating just how incompetent and ill-thought out this entire misadventure was. I say this because everything that's happened has been completely foreseeable and foreseen, including the ability of Iran to retaliate by closing the Strait of Hormuz.
This has been something many militaries around the world have planned scenarios for. Word has it any warnings from allies, the NSC and the Joint Chiefs were just completely ignored. And those estimates probably underestimated how numerous and effective Iranian SRBMs and Shahed drones are.
Beyond direct impacts on crude oil, refined oil products and natural gas, there are secondary effects such as ~30 of the world's fertilizer goes through the Strait. Helium from Qatar is an issue but at least there are other sources for Helium, being pretty much any natural gas well so equipped to capture helium.
We are the bad guys.
Not just many foreign militaries. Our military. General Dan Caine by report advised Trump about the negative consequences of this action. MAGA elected a fantasist and narcissist and we will all bear the consequences. I was no fan of Kamala but the appalling limitations of Trump are of a different order and it is a disgrace that our voters by majority elected him.
Helium output from the Persian Gulf is about 5 million cubic meters a month. Which (liquefied) is about 40 truckloads a week
This article is just hysteria
Removing 30% of the supply of a very important, and completely irreplaceable for most of its uses, resource isn’t hysteria.
The point is it doesn’t take giant tankers going through the Strait of Hormuz to move this volume. It could be handled by tanker trucks going to Suez….
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This is, according to Hegseth, just something they planned for, since they knew what was going to happen.
I had an eye opening discussion with an IT admin who stated with a straight face that their “patching strategy was not to patch”.
They have a patch strategy! They considered requirements when deciding the strategy! They have a documented strategy, it’s just very brief. (“Don’t.”)
The Trump admin may have similarly thought about this issue for a few seconds, shrugged their shoulders and decided that this might force manufacturers to go on-shore.
You and I know it won’t, certainly not in the immediate future, which means massive disruption to industry, but that’s not the same as “no plan”.
Will this crash the AI bubble?
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Iran will make AI go pop.
We can only hope.
so we'll get the actual Mahdi and a Butlerian Jihad? Bless the Maker
inshallah
let's see if it turns into mashallah :)
Somewhat tangential question - for the "Just Stop Oil" folks - is it the extraction of oil that is the problem, or the burning of it? If the former, then we have an opportunity to investigate more renewable sources.
The goal is to keep the oil in the ground, to not be burned or to be made into plastics.
It's not just plastics. Practically every substance we use and rely on to maintain civilisation as we know it has a petrochemical or fossil fuel base.
I understand the not burning fossil fuel thing, but why can't it be seen like another mineral resource?
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Isn't the main source of helium from oil production? It's not like we have fusion reactors turning H into He.
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Well primarily the goal is to ensure that we don't build any homes for people or any clean energy. There's a reason a group of people funded by an oil heir are anti-nuclear.
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If Iran hits AI data centers (without people in it of course), 70% of the world would cheer. If there's one thing hated more than a theocratic regime ... /s
The theocratic regime wasn't bothering us much until we started blowing them up for no reason. (or the practical reason: we are blowing them up because they didn't build a nuke fast enough)
Remember all the e/acc people telling us to vote for Trump? Some mea-culpas are in order.
The kind of people who voted for trump would never admit they made a mistake. They double down on stupidity instead.
That isn't true. There's actually a large number of people, probably in the millions, but probably not a majority of those who voted for him, who no longer support him in any way. And of the ones who remain, yes: they're pretty dense to still support him now. There are some lunatics who genuinely believe that the US has the right to dominate and exploit all other nations, but the majority of them simply believe the lies he's telling. I've already seen that when they are confronted with the facts about, say, Gaza, some of them can change their minds. It would be a mistake to turn them away instead of treating them like potential allies. There really is something more important at stake.
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/r/LeopardsAteMyFace contains many counterexamples.
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.
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Could you define the acronym "e/acc"? DDG seems to think it means: "What Does E/Acc Stand For, And What Does It Mean? E/acc stands for the phrase effective accelerationism, and it basically indicates one's personal ideological belief that artificial intelligence will one day become an all-powerful being that can fix the vast majority of humanity's problems."
I don't think I have ever heard a MAGA talk about AI.
> I don't think I have ever heard a MAGA talk about AI.
Lots of ex-Bitcoin-bros turned AI hypemen went all-in on maga for Trump II. Even the silicon valley C-Suites and VC-class went mask-off around February 2025. Some have tried to walk it back since then, after realizing the administration they had hitched their wagons to didn't have the mandate or levels of public support they had hoped for - thankfully, the internet never forgets.
The MAGA Web3 bros have all switched to the Clawdbot hypetrain, still flogging courses and slop.
Hum... He seems to be doing the most accelerationist government from recent history of any large or rich country.
We live in the dumbest possible timeline. As someone who came of age in the late 80s and was lucky enough to fully experience the 90s and 2000s ... what we have done in the last 20 years makes me sad. I never saw this coming. I admit that I maintained my delusion even though I was in OKC in 1995. Should have been a wake-up call.
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) a plausible claim to being well informed.
That is just a thought experiment, though, I do not believe it would play out beneficially if we tried to implement it in real life.
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People are admitting that now. It's happening. There's some hope that something can be done about him.
Thanks DJT, I am tired of winning, can we become losers again? /s
Lindsay Graham has an easy solution to this unnecessary conflict: send your sons and daughters.
This whole administration is such a fiasco.
I recommend anybody looking at the US land invasion proposal to do that with an altitude map of Iran on the side.
Even Alexander the Great's conquest of Persian was mostly a soft coup. That country is a fortress.
In addition to history, Americans don't really "do" geography. Apparently it's harder than math.
Lindsey Graham is a lying sack of shit.
And I say that with his permission, since he’s on camera asking to be called out if he did exactly what they did with the Supreme Court not four years later.
Thank deities someone else remembers this.
I was not aware of this 'on camera' request. Does anyone have a citation?
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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 the same reasons.
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.
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Bold of you to call young, underage children (including those as young as 6) escorts.
The correct way of putting it is so old rich suited men can engage in pedophilia.
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That's one of the most disappointing things to me. These people have such resources and the limit of their vision is: bang young girls, accumulate bling, push divisive hateful politics, start wars.
That's it. That's the best they can do.
Even nominally selfish far-sighted things like genuinely funding a deep research program for life extension is not really something they're into. I mean some of them are "into" it in that they talk about it and occasionally toss money at things but they're not interested in funding or being involved in the kind of multi-year high-focus moonshot program it would actually take to deliver. The problem is that's hard and it takes a long time when banging girls and winning power games is instant dopamine.
It makes me keep thinking of paperclip maximizers. It's like we are paperclip maximizers, only our paperclips are sex and dopamine hits from winning power games. A paperclip maximizer with such resources would squander it all on paperclips, and we squander it all on these goal functions built in by evolution. Are we actually intelligent or just clever animals? We can seek what we want, but we don't think much about what we want to want.
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Can not see them fuck it up more than my own government spending millions to pour concrete into our own excellent natural gas wells (while selling whatever did come out under market price to other countries), and our neighbors on the east celebrating while they blow up nuclear power plants. At least the US and Israel have a chance of improving their position in the geopolitical landscape. We are just slowly then swiftly committing suicide.
> At least the US and Israel have a chance of improving their position in the geopolitical landscape.
Does the improved geopolitical landscape consist of closed strait of Hormuz? Not sure what else they can geopolitically achieve compared to how things were a few weeks ago.
Are you complaining about the Groningen gas wells?
I thought that they were being decommissioned due to seismic risks?
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The US appears to be ideologically committed shitting on their trade partners and ending the dollar's run as a reserve currency and you see this leading to improving it's geopolitical standing? Through what mechanism?
> At least the US and Israel have a chance of improving their position in the geopolitical landscape.
This seems, uh, awfully optimistic.
For the US, thus far, we keep discovering that we have yet to hit bottom — so probably more.
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This is a bot/shill account
Are AIs actually participating in public discourse to… protect themselves!?
Isn’t this the future sci-fi nerds were predicting? It’s just that instead of “unplugging SkyNet” we have “supply chain disruption”?
Maybe instead of triggering WWIII the AIs will force a peaceful resolution to major conflicts that disrupt the supply of their substrate.
The accelerators must flow.
It's almost like war is a bad thing.
Do you remember this quote from wheel of time?
"Let the lord of chaos rule" ...
Completely self inflicted at the request of Israel.
Qatar 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
Where are they supposed to put all that gas and oil if they can't transport it? I don't think they have much choice here.
And as far as I understand, helium is a byproduct of the extraction, so they can't choose to keep only the helium.
However Qatar stopped production before the straits were officially closed and their stated reason is "due to military attacks", also Russian or Chinese ships can pass
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Shutting down production doesn't pressure the US at all since the oil and gas can't go anywhere anyway. They're shutting it down because they have to, there's nowhere to put the oil.
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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