Comment by parineum
12 hours ago
Part of the reason there's a shortage is because the US was the main supplier. There was no market incentive for anyone to invest into helium extraction.
It'd be like if the US used it's strategic oil reserve to supply the US with oil at a low price at all times.
A strategic reserve isn't supposed to be used as a supply. The existence of a strategic reserve shouldn't have an effect on the supply of helium except in an emergency. The fact that selling the helium reserve could create a shortage should tell you that it wasn't being used as a reserve but as a supply.
The US was, essentially, artificial subsidizing the price of helium. What's happening now is that people are actually paying the real price of helium.
The US government decided (maybe correctly, IDK) some years ago that their strategic helium reserves were too high (and thus expensive).
There were several announcements, a lot of discussion, and a long process before they started selling it. It was also a temporary action, with a well known end-date (that TBH, I never looked at). It had a known and constant small pressure over investments, it wasn't something that destabilized a market.
Isn't it like underground? Why would it be expensive?
It wasn't. It was injected into the porous rock at the Bush Dome Reservoir [1], which acted as a natural container of helium. The strategic helium reserve was "expensive" because buying helium for storage was funded by treasury debt, but it was expensive purely only on paper.
[1] https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/bush-dome-reserv...
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It was a penny wise and pound foolish political move to pretend to be financially responsible and reduce the deficit by some tiny rounding error on top of a rounding error amount.
Basically political bike shedding so elected officials could avoid making any hard or controversial decisions that would have a material impact but maybe upset some folks due to raising taxes or reducing spending.
> The existence of a strategic reserve shouldn't have an effect on the supply of helium except in an emergency.
Is there a widely-accepted definition of "an emergency" in the context of strategic reserves?
[Thinking of the SPR] "Oil/gas prices are currently higher due to geopolitical events, my [potential] voters are getting increasingly unhappy, and there is an election soon" would probably constitute an "an emergency" in the mind of a typical politician and his/her advisors.
Whether eg the SPR was created to (indirectly) help politicians keep their jobs is debatable.
Exactly right. We may yet find out what happens when someone sells the strategic oil reserve.
Despite all the online rhetoric, and the popularity of mis-naming political movements, sometimes I think the people who hate America the most and want it to fail are Americans themselves.
It might be hard to accurately tell if those who hold those opinions are Americans or not, just from online rhetoric.
I’m Canadian for example.
Nah; last but one job I had an Iranian coworker, and I asked if the way the regime calls Israel and the US the "Great Satan and Little Satan" was serious or a quirk of translation.
Apparently the regime is quite serious about the US being the actual devil.
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It is not a matter of hate or love. But the fact that people in charge doesn't give a fuck at any other thing beyond their personal interests. But this problem is not exclusive to America.
> sometimes I think the people who hate America the most and want it to fail are Americans themselves.
That's because the US (and the UK) are about the only countries in this world that haven't had the entirety of their legal, economical and political system completely revamped at least once in the last 100 years - most countries average more than that.
At the same time, such a revamp is desperately needed - the issues with the status quo are reeking - and everyone knows that it is highly, highly unlikely to get that done by ordinary democratic means due to the sheer inertia of hundreds of years of fossilized bureaucracy and individual/party interests.
And that is why so many people tend to vote for whoever shouts "destroy the country" the loudest - and not just in the US (MAGA) or UK ("Reform"), but also in Germany (AfD), Spain (Vox) or Italy (Salvini/Meloni), where economic inequality and perspectivelessness has hit absurd levels. Let it all burn to ashes, burn everything, even if one goes down with the fire, eat the rich, and try to build something more sane this time.
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The American government is a psyop.
I love my country quite literally to death. Death plays a strong role in the concept of freedom in American philosophy: Give me liberty, or give me death (yes, I know the real context of this quote), etc.
And so when my government wants to destroy my country, its land and its people, divide us, commodify us and our life experiences, and also export this kind of systematic industrial exploitation across the world, through colonies and coups and political assassinations; yeah, I hate that government a lot. I hate it to death. The American government has been an enemy to America, and an enemy to Americans. Since the beginning, with our treatment of the natives.
You'd do well to separate the land, people and government of a nation; confusing them only further serves State propaganda. We force children to say a pledge to our country in school, but it's really to our government. It's political brainwashing. I have refused to say the pledge since becoming politically aware enough around age 7. I cannot tersely express the amount of institutional abuse I suffered for this position. Teachers would ostracize me, bully me, punish me, attempt to physically force me to say it, write me up for detention, get my guardians to abuse me at home over it, etc. Like I said, the American government is a psyop.
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I think that's broadly true: both sides want America to fail when the other side is in power in order to prove they're right.
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About half of the strategic petroleum reserve was sold off in 2022.