But, now we have a strategic bitcoin reserve.
[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/527
But, now we have a strategic bitcoin reserve.
[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/527
You mean pay the interests on it.
of course outright securitization, privatization, and other types of not-quite-unintentional ways of responsibility diffusion also should be put to the aforementioned analysis.
(there's, after all, now a (new) label for economically sound, responsible, sustainable, human-centered stewardship: state capacity libertarianism - https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/01/wh... because neoliberal became a swearword)
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.
...well, you would be making a documentary instead.
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.
They will just take those items off the basket, put in different ones and claim that those are better quality so the actual price increase is in line with expectations.
I believe they uses Time as the example because the covers are archived and have the price printed right on them.
They went back a few decades and the inflation difference was quite large. I want to say the real sticker price change was multiple times higher than CPI's claim of magazine prices, but I can't remember the exact numbers.
there was the famous shadowstats site, but it seems it shut down, or at least stopped publishing new stuff in 2023 publicly. (probably reverting to a good old affinity scam [5])
(fun trivia, noticed by a reddit user 11 years ago, that even though the guy claimed high inflation but the subscription fee remained the same over 10 years, and in the last post it was also "six months at $89.00".) and there are many posts [3][4] explaining why these alternate measures are very unlikely to be more correct than either the BLS' CPI or the BEA's PCE.
...
the BLS does a lot of work to have useful numbers for a lot of goods and services [0], down to computer parts [1]
and there are a lot of things that usually are now more fancy (and more expensive, of course), but don't have value adjustment in the list. (Matt Yglesias writes about the spa-ification of services, everything is nicer, fancier, from movie theater seats to barber shops, yet there's no adjustment for "haircuts and other personal care services"[2])
[0] https://www.bls.gov/cpi/quality-adjustment/home.htm
[1] https://www.bls.gov/mxp/publications/additional-publications...
[2] sorry, behind a paywall https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-spa-fication-of-everything
[3] https://www.economonitor.com/dolanecon/2015/03/31/deconstruc...
[4] https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/inflation-is-up-but-the-inflat...
Interesting to consider the alternative case though, an "everyone basket item" becoming a "luxury good".
Democracy, maybe? But I don't think they've put that in the CPI basket - yet! :-P
https://www.bls.gov/cpi/quality-adjustment/clothes-washers.h...
style is important, because stylish things are more in demand (that's why they are considered stylish), and the abstract property of style by definition is a "value quality" that doesn't affect the temperature keeping properties, whereas things like are there drawers or shelves does (as cold air is kept better by drawers - but of course they are less convenient)
that said, the style here seems to be simply a catch-all term for the organization of the inside, and the access methods (eg. doors).
https://www.bls.gov/cpi/quality-adjustment/fridges.htm
... interestingly there's no parameter for noise or energy efficiency. (I was happy to pay a bit more for a really quiet one.)
The bottom quartile has a large % of the CPI basket composed of housing rent, for example.
The upper quartile has 0% of the CPI basket composed of rents.
This should be doable quite easily, it's not like the spending habits of different socioeconomic groups are a secret.
Wonder how that might impact figures if residual/passive income were included?
It's not a fully baked idea, but something like this.
The meta problem is that price data - assuming we can even reliably observe it - is super high dimensional, and we're trying to reduce it all to a single number.
> £2,751.70
PowerEdge R260
Xeon® 6315P 2.8GHz
1x16GB DIMM
2x2TB HDD SATA
We didn’t even see that across the board during the height of Covid-flation. What metrics are you using to get that number?
EDIT: also, oil is a commodity traded worldwide, and downside of this is the price of oil is directed by future contracts bet on said oil. In other words, if enough people assume there will be future upticks related to raising cost of transportation insurance, they buy more futures. If they buy more of this virtual contract on price going up (called "long") then eventually real price of oil catches up. Sure, this is upside down, but markets live in this setup for many years now where tail wags the dog.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/nitrogen-ammonia-a...
Once it’s cracked, the pot has to be completely cleaned out and relined which takes weeks. A smelter usually has hundreds of pots so this alone takes a while as the liner and anything in it are basically frozen solid and need to be broken apart and torn out. Once relined the pots must be brought back up slowly and the chemistry balanced. The pots also draw a ton of power and are wired in series so they have to all be brought up slowly together (or in batches).
That assumes it was a clean shutdown with nothing else clogged up in the system. “Cleaning” in smelting means that the hardware involved needs to be replaced because it fused to molten metal while cooling down.
You also can’t fully drain a pot. You can siphon most of the aluminum and cryolite off but at those temperatures they behave like a proper liquid with surface tension and the metal wicks into the pot like solder instead of flowing with gravity.
To keep it running at reduced capacity will likely be less expensive unless the war goes on for a very long time.
if you make it cold, you'll have to do whole startup sequence again
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.
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?
There you go, solved it.
Two birds, one stone baby! Just hopefully it doesn't get hit by a bird or something...
or I guess one could say it's the bottom side getting more compressive load from air than the topside, given the observable effect, whatever floats our zep...
If the seals can hold hydrogen, helium should be easy for them.
/s
Edit: oh right, know your chemistry...
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”.
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.
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 food at home can easily prepare a different one, restaurants can switch too, etc.
but there are products with very fragile supply-chains, like baby formula (breast milk is not always available/possible), but there are not a lot of domestic producers, and there's some typical political meddling with it (since it's critical there's a lot of subsidy for it, and since it's quality controlled it's not easy to enter the market, since it's FDA controlled you can't just import it), yet there's no mandatory stockpiling. it would push up the price. how much? who knows. depending on how perishable the product, how much would it cost to warehouse it. should this be done with public money? should this be one more regulatory burden? yet more cost-benefit questions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_United_States_infant_form...
You type in a normal profit and loss account, prior year might work, forecast is better. Then you see how your freight cost changes from sea to air by getting a quote from your freight company of choice. If it is 5% more then change the freight line in your p&l to be 5% higher. Are you still profitable?
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.
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.
But what other processes do the fabs use the helium for then?
Helium is pumped beneath the wafer to keep it cool so any impurities can leak through the chuck seal into the chamber above and disrupt the process. It’s also very precisely controlled so impurities change the uniformity of the thermal conductivity of the gas, creating hot spots on the wafer.
In EUV it’s used to both to cool the optics and as a buffer gas to manage debris from the plasma so any contaminants can deposit on the optics. At 13.5nm even a single layer of hydrocarbon molecules can create problems and the light bounces many times between mirrors so the error compounds.
There are many places where helium doesn’t have to be as pure but contamination events and surprise maintenance are so expensive that it’s not worth the extra savings (or the risk of mislabling and using dirty helium in the sensitive parts).
You just need quite a bit of Polonium, Thorium or Radon. Put it in a pool - and then wait a while. You just gotta collect what bubbles to the surface.
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 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.
Polonium is debuggable. More subtle statistical aberrations would be exponentially harder.
I'm most familiar with software and home electronics debugging, but it would be wonderful to hear some stories from other disciplines where a culprit is found, and also about the forensic tools specific to other domains.
I agree, this story above would be a perfect for another asianometry document.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_specific_heat_capacit... (Sort by the third column.)
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.
Helium has 150mW/mK vs Argon ~18mW/mK so you can't replace it.
The only alternatives to Helium are Neon, which is 3x worse and much more expensive, and hydrogen. However, hydrogen is flammable so it's a very bad idea to use it in a fab which has extremely poisonous gases and needs a cleanroom environment. A fire would ruin your whole factory and kill your engineers.
My PC was due for an upgrade this year (still using a video card from 2019)… so I really hope this keeps working for another … 5 ?! years
One could probably argue that giving up globalization means fewer and less capable products.
Connection and collaboration is always the better way forward.
But the question you're asking me is meaningless, because the premise is wrong. My original reply was true and entirely independent of my or anyone else's opinion of whether globalization is good/bad.
Yes, this may increase costs slightly because robustness necessarily has a cost associated with it.
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?
Your dog ran away? Higher RAM prices.
Lower RAM prices? Believe it or not, higher RAM prices.
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.'
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 complexity. You can "simply" pressurise the source gas, cool it to room temperature through an ordinary heat exchanger, then allow it to expand. The only issue is that if you do this naively, the expansion nozzle will get clogged with ice.
Obviously, this wastes a lot of Helium, but we have lots of it. If what's needed is high purity Helium, then throwing away even 90% to get 10% that's 6N pure should be no problem for an industrial nation.
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.
https://radiology.ucsf.edu/patient-care/patient-safety/mri-s...
> If the scan room door is closed when a quench occurs and helium escapes into the scan room, the depletion of oxygen causes a critical increase in pressure in the room compared with the control area. This produces high pressure in the scan room, which may prevent opening of the door. If this should happen, the glass partition between the scan and control rooms should be broken to release the pressure. The scan room door can then be opened as usual and the patient evacuated. In such a case the patient should be immediately evacuated and evaluated for asphyxia, hypothermia and ruptured eardrums.
https://www.minnpost.com/other-nonprofit-media/2024/07/what-...
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.
https://www.britannica.com/science/chemical-element/Processe...
Granted, the flare gas probably doesn't reach the prerequisite 100M-200M kelvin. I suspect high pressure is also required so the Helium stays close to the heat source.
Grade 6 (6.0 helium = 99.9999% purity) The closest to 100% pure helium, 6.0 helium is used in the manufacturing of semiconductor chips – Grade 5.5 (5.5 helium = (99.9995% purity) Like 6.0 helium, 5.5 ultra pure helium gas is typically considered “research grade,” also used in chromatography and semiconductor processing
Grade 5 (5.0 helium = 99.999% purity) This high purity grade helium is also widely used for gas chromatography, mass spectrometry, and specific laboratory research when higher purity gases are not necessary, as well as for weather balloons and blimps.
Grade 4.8 (4.8 helium = 99.998% purity) The highest of the “industrial grade” heliums, 4.8 grade helium is often used by the military. The rest is classified...
Grade 4.7 (4.7 helium = 99.997% purity) A “Grade-A” industrial helium, 99.997% helium is mostly used in cryogenic applications and for pressurizing and purging
Grade 4.6 (4.6 helium = 99.996% purity) Grade 4.6 industrial helium is used for weather balloons, blimps, in leak detection
Grade 4.5 (4.5 helium = 99.995% purity) Often the grade most commonly referred to when people say “industrial grade,” 99.995% helium is most commonly used in the balloon industry
Grade 4 (4.0 helium and lower = 99.99% purity) Any helium that is 99.99% and down into the high 80 percents is within the range of purities referred to collectively as “balloon grade helium.”
"most distributors simply stick to the industry standard transport of Grade 5. That is why for and [sic] end user of helium, a lower grade can cost more than the higher grades."
Turns out that you are right, some balloon gas is 80%. Specifically, the "Balloon Time" tanks you can buy at places like Target say "not less than 80%" helium.
On the other hand, I went to AirGas and a few other suppliers and they seemed to have 95%-97.0% helium gas as their definition for balloon grade.
Definitely worth knowing what you're getting, in any case, so you don't get ripped off, and so you can actually get that lawn chair contraption into the sky.
Obviously you can't have oxygen in welding gas; it would oxidize the shit out of everything.
A little bit of oxygen in party balloon gas is beneficial. Some kid will breathe it, and when they do, you didn't want them to asphyxiate themselves.
What is the reason that MRI needs grade 6 vs grade 4 helium? I'm imagining that the superconducting wire is within a cryostat filled with liquid helium. Doesn't seem like there would be any appreciably partial pressure of things like nitrogen or oxygen at 4 Kelvin. I imagine the reactivity of oxygen is pretty low at 4 K as well. How much dissolved oxygen or nitrogen can liquid helium support? And how much solidifies out and sinks to the bottom of the cryostat?
Moar hydrogen party balloons. Making partying fun again!
You have the entire collected knowledge of mankind at your fingertips. You could do 30 seconds of research and find an answer better than "I don't think that sounds right".
(The form in which Christopher Hitchens actually stated "Hitchens' Razor" is more symmetrical but unfortunately wrong: "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence". Anything can be asserted without evidence! It's only when something actually has been, in a given context, that dismissing it is -- in the same context -- a reasonable course of action.)
In this case it would be reasonable to inquire about the basis of the original remark, or to reject based on personal knowledge, or to reject based on a concrete citation. But an arbitrary non-technical vibes based rejection doesn't fit with how things generally work here.
So could you, right?
More than just from inflation? (sorry, not sorry!)
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.
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.
After sales paid off the debt that has been incurred from the expansion of scope of the helium program in the 1960 Helium Act, which was one of the main points of the HPA, it was update by the Helium Stewardship Act of 2013 (which passed the House 394-1, and the Senate 97-2, and was signed by President Obama).
It's been coopted, not necessarily capitalism means "everything should be private", the current flavour of capitalist ideology wants that but other versions of capitalism don't put that as a foundational Ideological tenet.
In the 1980s, I assume getting rid of the "strategic reserve" of anything would have met more pushback, because of primal fear overriding greed.
– Georgi Arbatov, Soviet political scientist, 1988
Kidding aside, the US has had libertarian pipe dreams for the better part of its history. The aberration was the New Deal period up until the mid 60s.
Sounds like Obama kept the gas taps flowing, instead of locking it up because authorization to sell it had expired. Here is the whole record: https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/527/...
> biden
uhm...
There are billions of people in the world, and you are one, and you have your one set of opinions out of billions.
Nobody endowed you or your opinions with any sort of infallibility or superiority over others.
Words have meaning. Someone a bit left of a Nazi is not on the Left even if they are to the left of the person speaking.
The Democrats are a right-wing party. They spend more energy attacking the left than they do, the Republicans. Look at what they did to the center-left Sanders and their constant lawfare to keep left parties, like the Greens and Peace and Freedom, off the ballot and out of the debates (last election, the Greens spent half their campaign funds fighting these frivolous lawsuits from the Democratic party who seek to subvert democracy [Republicans attack anyone more left/darker than them, through voter suppression and other techniques to also subvert democracy]). There is very little daylight between the two. They serve the same masters, Oligarchs and Israel.
The United States is also a one-party state but, with typical American extravagance, they have two of them. - Julius Nyerere
I get that the current situation is stupid, but can we at least be accurate? Qatar is FAR from the only source of helium. (And yes, helium of any type can be purified to high levels. That's also not just a Qatar thing.)
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/us-just-sold-heli...
Messer Completes Acquisition of Federal Helium System from BLM | June 27, 2024 | https://www.messer-us.com/press-releases/messer-completes-ac...
In the best case, "strategic reserves" are the government speculating on commodity prices. They use tax dollars to buy a commodity -- raising the price on everyone so they can hoard it -- and then more tax dollars to pay for a storage facility, and if they're lucky the price goes up by enough to pay for the storage and the time value of money by they time they sell it again. That frequently doesn't happen.
In the common case it's the government subsidizing corporations -- including foreign ones -- by using tax dollars (at government contractor rates) to operate a storage facility at a loss so the industry doesn't have to do it themselves. Then, when they go to unload it, they generally unload enough to lower the market price on purpose, practically guaranteeing that the taxpayer is getting a below-market return. This unloading also has a statistical correlation with the election cycle (see also "strategic petroleum reserve") which is extra stupid. And the expectation that it will happen deters others who aren't paying government contractor rates from storing the commodity, so from a "strategic" perspective you don't get anywhere near as much of a buffer as you're paying for.
If the tech industry wants a reserve of helium then they should buy some land, install some tanks and fill them with helium in years when there isn't a shortfall.
A horrendously misinformed take. Strategic reserves have broadly one of two primary purposes. First, providing the government with the ability to stabilize market prices in the short term when volatility strikes. Second, providing a supply of an essential resource to an essential industry in the event that external supplies are unexpectedly cut off temporarily.
Supply shocks are bad. The economy grinding to a halt at the whim of a geopolitical adversary or natural disaster is also bad. Ensuring a stable market is one of the most fundamental purposes of having a government at all.
Which is the thing they don't really even do, because their existence is not a secret, but then knowing of their existence discourages anyone else from setting up a reserve because they expect the government to unload right when they'd be trying to recover the costs of operating it. Then the market has less slack in it and the government has to tap into the reserve more frequently and in larger amounts, causing the reserve to be much more easily exhausted than you would intuitively expect because the whole world is now expecting you to bail them out when the time comes.
Worse, it encourages companies to rely on its existence instead of making contingencies, and then if it does get exhausted or you get something that looks more like unexpectedly high demand than unexpectedly low supply, you now have an inadequate reserve and a market full of people operating under the impression they would never have to deal with that.
> Second, providing a supply of an essential resource to an essential industry in the event that external supplies are unexpectedly cut off temporarily.
This isn't a different thing from the first thing. There being less supply is what causes the price to go up. But encouraging the market to take all the slack out causes there to be less supply.
The basic problem is this: If the government keeps a moderate reserve, it's going to cause other people to not do that, and then it's going to run out and Cause Problems. If the government keeps an enormous reserve, they're going to cause the price to be higher even when nothing is wrong and burn through a disproportionate amount of tax money doing it.
> Supply shocks are bad.
The correct answer to this is to diversify supply and be ready with substitutes, not government hoarding.
It's strange. You object to the government here yet expect private industry to fill the same gap. Why do you believe private industry would navigate these issues better than a government agency would? Given the difference in incentives it doesn't make any sense.
It's a good thing for the regulator to be able to step in at will rather than blindly hope that things go well. Industry is notoriously bad at making short term sacrifices for long term risk management. Would you rather the government force them to maintain their own reserves via regulation?
> This isn't a different thing from the first thing. There being less supply is what causes the price to go up.
No, the two are not at all the same. Rapid price fluctuations are one issue. Essential resources are an entirely separate problem. Volatility and starving to death both involve price movement but are otherwise very different things.
> encouraging the market to take all the slack out causes there to be less supply.
So if the reserve is run by the government it's removing slack and reducing supply, but when run by private industry ... ?
No amount of regular slack is ever going to be able to compensate for a tail risk that blocks the import of an essential good. Take oil for example. No company is ever going to voluntarily warehouse enough to keep the entire US economy going for any significant amount of time. It's a crazy small tail risk and very expensive to counterbalance.
Food is similar. No grocery store or wholesaler or whoever else is going to voluntarily stockpile enough to keep people from starving in the event of widespread crop failure or similarly devastating adverse environmental event.
> If the government keeps an enormous reserve, they're going to cause the price to be higher even when nothing is wrong and burn through a disproportionate amount of tax money doing it.
Why would that be? Filling and emptying shifts demand but doesn't create additional. Anyway you seem to be arguing that private industry should do this for themselves. So whatever the effects are they will be present either way.
Why do you expect disproportionate expenditures? The cost is that of warehousing. The benefit is the entire economy running more smoothly which presumably increases taxes by quite a lot if money is all you're concerned with. It also just generally improves everyone's quality of life which I would hope is the entire purpose for the government to exist when you get down to it.
Profit-seeking actors have the direct incentive to balance risks and rewards. It's popular to hate on speculators, but "build a storage facility so you can buy a commodity when it's cheap and sell whenever the price is high" as a means to make money is actually pretty legitimate. And then they have the right incentives to manage costs and keep realistic inventory levels because they're spending their own money instead of someone else's. Whereas the government's incentive is to give lucrative contracts to cronies or hoard a ridiculous amount of the commodity because they're spending someone else's money and get blamed if there's not enough but not if there's too much.
There is also an advantage in diversity. Government tends to monoculture. How much does the price have to go up before the government starts unloading inventory? How much does the answer depend on politics? Things are better when instead of one essentially monopolist with a massive tank, you have a thousand independent entities with small ones, because then you get a smoother curve with less relationship to the election cycle. And you get different people trying to solve the problem in different ways. Speculators build tanks, entrepreneurs develop recycling systems, buyers make contingencies to use a substitute, but none of that happens if everyone is expecting the government to guarantee the price.
> Industry is notoriously bad at making short term sacrifices for long term risk management.
Middle managers in large bureaucracies are notoriously bad at this, because enormous conglomerates insulated from competition and subject to the principal-agent problem are not subject to a good set of incentives in many ways. It's why we're supposed to have antitrust laws.
Markets as a whole are pretty good at it, because "price goes up when supply is low" is a predictable opportunity to make money.
> Would you rather the government force them to maintain their own reserves via regulation?
The whole point is to stop having the people who don't pay the cost of doing it be the ones who choose how much there should be and what kind.
> Rapid price fluctuations are one issue. Essential resources are an entirely separate problem. Volatility and starving to death both involve price movement but are otherwise very different things.
They're the same problem because the problem in both cases is supply less than demand and then you're left with the same question of how best to contend with that.
Notice also that the government doesn't keep a multi-year supply of food and that doesn't seem to be any kind of a problem.
> So if the reserve is run by the government it's removing slack and reducing supply, but when run by private industry ... ?
When it's run by private industry it costs less, and more to the point costs the people who want the buffer instead of strangers without the bandwidth or domain knowledge to know if what's being done is cost effective or even necessary.
> No amount of regular slack is ever going to be able to compensate for a tail risk that blocks the import of an essential good. Take oil for example. No company is ever going to voluntarily warehouse enough to keep the entire US economy going for any significant amount of time. It's a crazy small tail risk and very expensive to counterbalance.
The US is a net exporter of oil and oil is widely traded global commodity with significant price elasticity of demand, so you don't get actual shortages unless you try something foolish like price controls. Instead people pay $4/gallon instead of $3 which causes the people who drive the most to switch to electric cars or hybrids, other suppliers to increase production, etc.
> Why would that be? Filling and emptying shifts demand but doesn't create additional.
Filling creates additional demand but if you're using a large enough reserve to be at low risk of ever running out then by design the emptying never fully happens.
> Anyway you seem to be arguing that private industry should do this for themselves. So whatever the effects are they will be present either way.
Private industry would size the reserve according to the risk instead of having the incentive to be excessively risk averse because they're spending someone else's money.
> Why do you expect disproportionate expenditures? The cost is that of warehousing.
Suppose you have a reserve which holds X amount and there is an average annual withdrawal and refilling of 0.5X, once every ten years you would use the full X amount, and once every 50 years you would use 5X if you had it.
The 5X reserve requires five times as many tanks and requires you to eat the time value of money on five times as much of the commodity, but only gets used once every 50 years instead of being mostly used every year. It's not worth having; it's better to eat the higher prices that year than to pay even more to prevent them. There are some risks it costs less to buy insurance against than to mitigate. But risk-averse people spending someone else's money will be more inclined to do it anyway, or to build a 10X reserve "just to be sure".
The government also uses government contractors which do not have a good record for cost efficiency.
I've heard it claimed that it was a massive oversight to sell that much helium at such a low price. Helium is a non-renewable resource. When it escapes, it just floats off into space.
And it's an absolutely critical resource for MRIs, advanced science and research, and industry. And we are selling it at a price that's attractive as an amusement for children.
That may have been when it opened but the current war machine has little use for dirigibles.
> I've heard it claimed that it was a massive oversight to sell that much helium at such a low price. Helium is a non-renewable resource. When it escapes, it just floats off into space.
Helium is produced within the earth by radioactive decay. It then gets trapped in the same pockets as natural gas, which is why it gets extracted along with the natural gas. But most natural gas doesn't undergo helium extraction. If we wanted more, we could do helium extraction on more of the natural gas. Not doing it releases significantly more into the atmosphere than was present in the reserve. But doing it is expensive so we only do it more if there is demand for more helium.
The first mistake was the government hoarding that much of it to begin with. It doesn't make a lot of sense to pay a high cost for extraction in an earlier year and then pay a high cost for storage for an indefinite period of time if you're already discarding (i.e. not separating) most of it and could just extract more once you actually want it.
The second mistake was unloading such a massive amount over a relatively short period of time, because then you crash the short-term price and cause people to waste the thing you spent a lot of money to extract.
But yeah, that would make more sense.
So frustrating when every conversation leads to R vs D. Doubly so in this situation since both bills that got us to where we are today had overwhelming BIPARTISAN support and were signed into law by presidents Clinton and Obama…
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.
Yup. Even illiterate could tell just looking at the damn map. Gotta wonder if somebody on top is trying to undermine own country...
This article is just hysteria
What are your top positions? You will never need to work again!
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”.
This creates the flation
... but I'm not holding my breath.
I understand the not burning fossil fuel thing, but why can't it be seen like another mineral resource?
Don't "worry" though. Oil consumption is going up not down.
Just don't have kids.
Helium extraction doesn't pose a notable environmental issue on its own.
This whole administration is such a fiasco.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CR2A6FDiGEA is about Lindsey Graham in 2020 defending the Republicans' insistence on pushing through a nomination to the Supreme Court in the last year of Trump's presidency. It also includes a clip of Lindsay Graham in 2018 saying that if a Supreme Court vacancy opens once the primaries have started, "we'll wait till the next election".
I’ll always find it hilarious that progressives manage to hate the GOP and Trump at the same time for the same reasons.
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.
We are in here, because we didn't learn from our history. You feel this way because this is recent and its hitting everything all at once but I do feel like these were all very avoidable lessons. Being honest, I don't feel like we learnt anything new aside from seeing how the world is still trying to clutch itself back to stability even after all the instability Donald Trump is causing within the world (for better or for worse) and seeing how the world reacts to all of this live.
But I am not quite sure if future will learn from these lessons given that its feeling to me like history doesn't repeat itself but it often rhymes and we somehow don't really learn from the history to be honest.
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.
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.
What's the best way to have a sane system? I'm not sure. I personally lost all faith in democracy.
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.
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 strengthened civilian institutions. It worked well until it didn't (and the breaking point happened before Milei, to be entirely clear).
But the point is that the issue lies elsewhere. 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?
I know how it will happen. Nearly every single veto power group will give them a free pass. Naïve humanist liberals will pontificate about the ideals of democracy and freedom to do whatever you want. Boring fence-sitters will legitimate their discourse and ideas under the veil of neutrality and objectivity. Those who worship Ba'al will seek to build a symbiotic relationship. And before you realize it, White Australia has risen up once again.
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.
The other half is that Kissinger was a smart and cunning piece of shit, and 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.
If you're not into social and demographic engineering, then you're going to face a real problem.
My solution would be to get it over with and shoot everyone who disagrees with the system I'm trying to build. It sounds childish but it does actually genuinely work. It has been put in practice in so many places it's easy to lose count.
Unless you aspire to the way of life in places like North Korea.
Obviously it's not going to be as extreme and as simple as 'go shoot people house-to-house until you're powerful :D', but repression is much more often than not effective. Think of the Arab Spring, the 2018 color coup attempt in Nicaragua, etc.
Hell, even if the incentives are completely misaligned, you can get away with it as long as you're strong and ruthless enough. The whole world thought Myanmar's military junta would implode and break under the weight of all the freedom fighters… and it's still hanging around, not the worse for wear. If you're willing to burn everything to the ground before you lose power, you can often raise the stakes to a level the other party simply can't afford.
> Unless you aspire to the way of life in places like North Korea
Here's the thing: the right-wingers already aspire to that way of life. They will implement it. At this point, it's not about whether I aspire to live like that, but about who's going to take the reins of power of that type of political structure.
Better us than them.
> They will implement it.
> Better us than them.
Well sure, if you've already accepted defeat then I suppose that's the logical course of action. But that doesn't seem like a reasonable position to me given the available evidence.
If people still elevate the worst candidate to POTUS after that, then blaming the voter might be in order.
Liberty isn’t a constant state, but a dynamic cycle. Even 250 years ago, they knew that a guy like Donald Trump would come along.
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 top 1% to vote or spend any $$ towards the election.
The unregulated, unlimited money situation we have now is a big part of the problem.
Make voting mandatory, and require vote-by-mail. Or if that is too 'risky' then mandate a sufficient number of voting locations with a maximum travel distance from their voters (and maybe allow voters to go to any location convenient for them) and make it a paid federal holiday.
Pipe dream, of course. One party is too strongly incentivized to suppress the vote. They could just moderate their positions somewhat to attract more centrists, but for some reason that has not occurred to them.
In a sane world, we could compromise. I would hate to give up vote-by-mail, but as part of a grand compromise I would accept it. Empower the FEC to issue ID for voting (and only voting), give them the budget and mandate to go roving around the country periodically like the census and track down every last citizen and give them an ID. Then require that ID for in-person voting. Ostensibly this should also satisfy the GOP, but of course it won't, because it isn't actually about the ID.
But the point is they're less likely to get there if they're part of the power structure.
A presumed but frequently not mentioned component of democracy is the peaceful transition of power once a decision is made.
Some of those people are not white and/or not straight. They - very incorrectly - think that wealth will shield them from the sharp teeth of White Christian Nationalism. They should consult with the Log Cabin Republicans and women who voted for both Trump and enshrining abortion into their state's constitution on the same ballot.
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.
I thought that they were being decommissioned due to seismic risks?
They may not have a house to heat if tremors get too bad.
And our German neighbors, I can still see them laughing at the Orange Man Bad... Boo hoo... what a shitshow.
If I lived in the region I wouldn't really care if the economic risk is single digit percentage. I would prefer my house to keep standing.
> they are actively and very costly going to fill them with concrete to ensure in the future (even in whatever extreme scenario) they cannot be used again.
I think you are arguing in bad faith. If you hollow the underground, filling it with something is a way to mitigate the seismic risk.
> And our German neighbors, I can still see them laughing at the Orange Man Bad.
Okay, I see now that talking to you is a waste of time.
Have a great afternoon.
Losing all your personal items and memories + living homeless for a few years while the reconstruction is in progress isn't minor inconvenience.
And I didn't say kick everyone on the street while the reconstruction is taking place. Everyone can stay where they are. Earthquakes are rare and so far in 50 years of extraction there have been no injuries. Groningen isn't the only place with earthquakes in the world you know?
16°C in itself doesn't have health consequences whatsoever.
> Only when the black mold started appearing did we manage to persuade her that 19 would be more appropriate.
And you made the wrong diagnostic: mold is a moisture problem, not a heating problem per se. Sure heating improve air moisture but it's a very inefficient way to do so. You're complaining about the cost of a problem when you're using the most inefficient possible method to address it.
And again, if world market gas price rise, the consumer cost of gas rise as well, no matter if you have gas production in the country or not.
Some jurisdictions even have “tenants rights” laws that literally force landlords to terminate all contracts whenever a tenant is about to have lived in a location for too long.
(to clarify, the concrete has nothing to do with the seismic risks, and is solely intended to make it impossible to extract gas later, which some people see as a valid way to lower potential seismic impact in the future due to no extraction... as if it is the only way to deal with seismic risks... and the whole point of the profits being ample to mitigate any economic loss is that people's houses can be either made resistant, or, you know, we could buy affected people a brand spanking new house)
Good luck with the rest.
This seems, uh, awfully optimistic.
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.
Most either do nothing really of note, or donate it to "causes", which may be good, but kind of boring.
God does not come down from the heavens and bestow money that one spends on what one chooses. People value his companies because he’s there. TSLA will instantly collapse in valuation if he exits.
I’m not even kidding. If you can pass the regulation, environmental, land permits, local opposition etc. you will be a hundred millionaire maybe a billionaire.
As an aside this might indicative of today's defective rich. Carnegie built over 2,500 libraries for example.
> he gave away around $350 million (equivalent to $6.9 billion in 2025 dollars), almost 90 percent of his fortune, to charities, foundations and universities
Those famously "richest Americans" were worth single digit billions in today's money. Musk is reportedly worth $600-800 billions. Imagine what he could do with that money. The Gilded Age industrialists were already devils, but to say the quality of the ultra-rich today is in the gutter would be an offense to the gutter.
What makes Musk's wealth really incredible is how much of it is based on hot air (TSLA).
It's a tale as old as Plato: those most likely to WANT to rule are exactly the 'candidates' who absolutely should not.
One of the things this does is gets you surrounded by supplicants and yes-men trying to tell you what you want to hear to get your money. It destroys social feedback. Nobody will tell you you're wrong. This is not good for mental health.
Who would you be able to spend time with? Most of your friends and family would still have to work. Of course, you could offer them to leave their jobs and give them money so they won't have to worry and they could spend time with you. But then it leads to the social feedback issue, so even those closest to you don't want to rock the boat.
I really don't like how Bill Gates and Microsoft made their money, but at least he has realized that in his twilight years to try to make amends via humanitarian work. Buying the stairway to heaven.
The correct way of putting it is so old rich suited men can engage in pedophilia.
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.
"Let the lord of chaos rule" ...
These fucking yankee and zionist morons just keep pushing it.
Go Iran
In that respect they may be bombed by Iran but they have the same interests
And as far as I understand, helium is a byproduct of the extraction, so they can't choose to keep only the helium.
Or let's make the analogy clearer: if your Uber driver cancels the ride because there's an active shooter on the only road between him and you, it's their fault not the shooter's?
your analogies have went past me though, generally although a common misconception, countries are not people and wars are not comparable to crime
To restore traffic, we need that risk to return to previous levels, which requires diplomacy and trust. I don't expect resolution any time soon.
In this specific case maybe Vance is least worst option.
He's a windsock.
--- Hegseth: “The only thing prohibiting transit in [Hormuz] right now is Iran shooting at shipping.”
“It is open for transit should Iran not do that” ---
Oh really? I thought it was because Mercury was in retrograde.
I guess if even Mr. Hegseth is admitting that transit is effectively prohibited in the Strait, he must actually be lying and part of the deep state.
I also find it funny that we just decided to allow Russia to pad its coffers by temporarily lifting sanctions on sale of Russian oil. Sorry Ukraine!
Self deactivating land mines exist - and sometimes fail to do this (3/100 was the rate I heard a few years ago).
Same problem with cluster munitions: it's not how they work. It's that a bunch of the bomblets fail to work, then leave UXO around which explodes a child's hand later.
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.
On the other hand I've read about plenty of stories of the "cheap" UPSs you'd usually buy as a consumer (not to name any brands coz I've never had any) actually causing such issues in the first place. Without any actual surges from the grid.
That said, being totally not superstitious (for real, but someone's gonna "kill me" if they find out I wrote this and something dies from a surge...), now I guess I need to knock on wood like seventeen times ...
I do use surge protectors when we're on generator power temporarily.
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 can be violent and loud, and repetitious as different parts of even a single run fail.
Transformers can certainly blow up, but that's less common. They're (generally) filled with oil for cooling purposes, and they're massive things that tend to take time to get hot. A failed transformer can produce arcing and blue-white light, but if things are that hot then the oil is also ready to burn.
And when the oil burns it isn't blue-white -- it burns with about the same yellow-orange color we saw the last time we accidentally flambéed dinner on the kitchen stove, or a Hollywood fireball.
A bright flash without a fire is probably not a transformer.
Here's a video of a transformer actually-exploding (note the prominent fireball): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFkfd31Wpng
And here's a video of what someone describes as a transformer exploding, even though there are no transformers in the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHVh0KwG_0k
A branch hitting a wire, happenes all the time here too. Lots of trees in this community. The video of a transformer you shared: that's not the transformer I'm talking about. That's at a transformer station.
I'm talking transformer on a street pole. The kind that hangs right across the street from me. This kind: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/y3E7avUvj6I
See it's the kind in your second video. It's a transformer. You just chose a narrower definition I suppose. It's a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_transformer ;)
And yes, I know it's transformers and not just wires (but also wires do happen definitely) coz I do walk the neighborhood regularly and I can tell when a transformer is new vs. old up there. Ours is old. The ones a few streets over sometimes are very new and I see the Hydro trucks go by the next day(s) to make them new ;)
Again, like seventeen times knock on wood but the ones next to us have not actually blown up. But three streets over, seen the new ones. Literally last weekend, we had an ice storm come through and while no blowouts we could see or hear, the outage map showed plenty of failure.
PSA: UPSes and GFCI/GFI extension cords won't work properly when connected to a stand-alone generator with a bonded neutral. I've tried using enterprise UPSes on such generators, but they absolutely won't work. In such scenarios, debond the generator's ground from neutral, apply a very large warning label to it being debonded, and drive a massive ground rod electrode into the ground as close to the generator as possible and ground the neutral there. This does work and is much safer because there's a stable voltage reference source. It's more of a hassle but can be necessary for some off grid and temporary scenarios.
They respond to an imbalance in current flow betwixt line and neutral. What goes out must return; if it doesn't, then switch off.
Ground is not part of the equation at all.
eeeeep. Please for the love of all that is holy, CONTACT AN ELECTRICIAN before messing around with that - or before creating a ground bond where none should be (i.e. TT grid [1]). You may end up endangering yourself if you do not exactly know what you are doing - in the case of TT, you get ground potential difference current from other parts of the grid flowing to ground via your generator's bond. Best case you're getting problems with electrochemical corrosion (including in your foundation), worst case enough current flows to turn your bond wire into a thermal fuse.
Also, take great care if your grounding is provided via municipal water service, or if your original grounding rod has dried out to the point it's ineffective.
Let me repeat: LET ELECTRICIANS DEAL WITH GROUNDING AND SURGE PROTECTION. Floating grounds and improper ground connections CAN BE LETHAL OR POSE A SERIOUS FIRE RISK.
AND YES THAT INCLUDES "ISLAND" SCENARIOS OR EMERGENCY POWER INPUTS (e.g. via CEE plugs and transfer switches).
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/TT-System
An electrician specializing in lightning protection, uninterruptible power installation or in radio installations can sort out all of that far better than an engineer can.
The circuit is something like this:
Also, do not accidentally plug surge protectors into each other, metal oxide varistors can star fires _without_ meaningful surge conditions when you do so.
I prefer to buy products without MOVs entirely due to the risk, with the exception of one, Tripp Lite Isobars; but I prefer to use series mode protectors such as Brickwall or SurgeX.
Are they not a fire hazard even when new? MOVs do tend to degrade with use (especially after they've gone conductive to snuff one or more surges). But AFAICT we can't really know, without potentially-destructive testing, whether a given MOV is in good shape -- whether installed last week, last year, or 30 years ago.
> Also, do not accidentally plug surge protectors into each other, metal oxide varistors can star fires _without_ meaningful surge conditions when you do so.
What is the mechanism that increases risk for MOV-sourced fires in this arrangement?
I've also noticed that many of the power supplies I've taken apart (for very pedestrian consumer goods) have internal MOVs on their line input. Whatever the mechanism is that increases risk, isn't using one external surge protector already doing that in these instances?
> I prefer to buy products without MOVs entirely due to the risk, with the exception of one, Tripp Lite Isobars; but I prefer to use series mode protectors such as Brickwall or SurgeX.
I prefer to avoid MOVs, too. Broadly-speaking, diodes seem like a better way to do it. (Transtector is another reputable brand that uses diodes.)
---
That all said, I've noticed over the years that problems with dead (presumed-to-be-hit-by-a-power-surge) electronics tend to follow particular structures. And the reason for this seems related to grounding more than it is anything else.
So when I find someone (a friend, a client, maybe someone online that I'm trying to help) complaining about repeated damage, I often ask about grounding. Almost always, it turns out that they've got multiple grounding points for the electronics: The electric service has one ground rod, and the telephone/cable feet/satellite/whatever is connected to some other ground.
This might be a dedicated rod, maybe a metal pipe; whatever it is, it is distinct from the main service ground. It happens all the time. (It is worth noting that the NEC prohibits this kind of configuration unless extraordinary effort is put forth. See 800.100(d), for example.)
The way that MOVs -- and avalanche diodes alike -- behave combines with the fact that the earth is an imperfect conductor, such that having multiple ground points promotes dynamic ground loops that can provide quite large potential -through- the electronics that we seek to protect.
The problem appears suddenly, and repetitiously. Everything is fine, and then ZANG: The cable modem gets smoked along with the router it is connected to. So the modem goes back to Spectrum or wherever to get swapped, and the router gets replaced again, until the next time: ZANG.
TV connected to satellite receiver, with coax incorrectly grounded? ZANG. Over and over again.
I'd see it all the time when I was a kid back in the BBS days: The phone line was grounded improperly, and computer was the only thing that connected to both electricity and the telephone line. Some folks would go through several modems over the course of a summer, which was very expensive -- while most people had no problems at all. Next-door neighbors would have completely different failure rates.
Structures with correct grounding tend to do very well at avoiding these issues, and I've fixed these conditions in subsequent years more times than I can count.
(A coworker installed a phone system at a business once, wherein he made extensive use of Ditek surge suppressors -- on the incoming POTS lines, and on the power inputs. It blew up one day. So he called Ditek to try to get at least the cost of the phone system hardware covered. They asked him to draw up a map of how the building was grounded and send that over, so that's exactly what he did. When they saw his map, they very quickly identified a ground loop and denied the claim.)
I wondered the same thing, and failed to find a satisfying explanation.
I can find plenty of reports of MOV fires, especially in situations where there's a persistent over-voltage, e.g. a 120 V site actually having closer to 240 V due to a floating neutral. But I don't see how chained MOVs make that worse in general. This blog post has some nice photos:
https://www.electrical-forensics.com/SurgeSuppressors/SurgeS...
1. https://incompliancemag.com/how-and-why-varistor-failure-occ...
Reread your wondering and now conclude its about chained situations which this also does not answer.
One day The Big One came along and fried nearly everything. "Once burned, twice shy."
Hopefully someone can learn from my mistake and not have to do it post-mortem.
Last year an aluminum smelter in Iceland had a transformer blow which caused a big power surge on parts of the very well developed national power grid. The surge caused damage to electronics in some households and companies near to the smelter.
We live in a society. Everybody chips in. And each surge protector adds to the robustness of the grid.
Belkin make a number of surge protectors which offer a connected equipment warranty in the UK. Admittedly: financial protection, not data protection, but I felt it was worthwhile for the peace of mind.
https://www.belkin.com/id/p/6-outlet-surge-protection-strip-...
You should have data backups regardless, because there are plenty of ways to lose data that don't involve power surges.
This is one reason why you bury power cables.
What areas are surge prone?
It’s not good enough. At least the power stays on once the grid stops bouncing (or once I manage to log into the rebooting battery gateway computer to have it flip the “off grid” breaker, or go outside and flip the manual one by the meter).
I had far more power outages during my late teenage years in suburban Dallas than I've ever had in the bay. That was due to a bad transformer in the neighborhood which took years to replace, but once it was replaced everything was perfect. The moral of the story being: if your power is bad, it's probably because some piece of mains infrastructure near you is broken.
I had a string of annoying outages in 2023-2024, but it was all due to main service upgrades on my street, can't really complain about that.
Not saying you're lying, but I do wonder if your experience is typical.
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.
Lightning getting through some structure and hitting the electric lines happens. Even when they are buried. It's less of a problem when the ground absorbs a lot of the power before it even get into copper, but it's even less of a problem if there's some cheap device that will burn and protect you from it.
Direct lighting strikes cannot be defended against without extreme costs. This type of risk is generally extremely unlikely except for certain niche use-cases like equipment or facilities on tall peaks.
Transients from lightning (E2) nearby and distant nuclear detonations can be defended against, and often require additional protection of telco and internet entry points. Whole house type 1 SPD devices exist for residential applications. This is much more likely than direct lightning strikes, especially in certain areas and can be defended against for reasonable cost. The main issue of lacking it is the unseen, cumulative degradation of semiconductor components that lead to instantaneous or eventual failure, especially in high value devices like electrically-communicated motors in HVAC systems. There is no reasonable expectation of defense against a direct lightning strike even with type 1 SPD, and there are different types of lightning with vastly different amounts of energy. A positive strike direct hit will totally fry anything and everything.
What generally isn't defended against at all in any infrastructure or system except some military equipment is H/NEMP E1 (short duration impulses) or E3 (E3a or E3b; long duration surges larger than lightning) such as from unusual space weather events or nuclear blasts.
https://www.firevictimtrust.com/
So 99.99999% of the world.
Do you live in a bunker to protect against artillery shells?
But then again there's horror stories like
https://www.reddit.com/r/applehelp/comments/1maegvb/i_burned...
You can install a whole house surge protector. Those go in the panel and would protect from different sources.
I couldn't justify buying any of them today.
Someone with more recent knowledge correct me on this, but I believe idling is the biggest power drain in Asahi. You will want to shutdown and/or hibernate whenever possible.
I think the support for linux/arm64 is already very good in general, can't answer on pytorch though. The only app I'm really missing is Signal Desktop. The virtualization to run games is a noticeable performance hit and shows occasional glitches in the Steam overlay, but all my games run smoothly.
[1]: https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover?srsltid=AfmBOor-7wbD-o...
ssshhhhh... do not tell anyone I told you...
Mind you,I have gigabit internet. I don't know what the experience would be like on other types of internet / worldwide.
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 know, there is limited support for modding and some unsupported workarounds.
Can’t wait to try that and for the f1 stuff to come out.
I've used geforce now on my mac before and didn't have latency issues. I wasn't using it for any competitive games where you need ultrafast twitchy response, but I did use if for plenty of FPSes and never had any issues. And I don't have super fast internet, just the basic package from Spectrum. So I wouldn't say it's bad, though admittedly it might not be the best latency achievable in the gaming world.
I think because I used to play on private servers, I don't have that long-standing connection to a group, which is probably what keeps many people still there. But yeah, I'd jump on a WoW 2 but the gameplay and quest system is so outdated that just doesn't give me good vibes anymore.
I think it’s just familiarity and not wanting to learn a whole new system when I’m looking to shut my brain down for a couple hours.
Sure it's nice the shiny new thing but has capitalism infiltrated people's mind that much? All my previous laptops died on me several times and became frankestein's monsters before I let them rest for a final time (to be often repurposed to other family/friends' machines).
Most M1 systems I saw use on-board BGA110 NAND flash, and thus maintenance/upgrades on the SSD are difficult. Most users don't have a hot air rework station or x-ray inspection machines to do this modification correctly.
The MTBF statistics can move around a lot depending on the use-case, but eventually people will run out of luck ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_time_between_failures .)
Not sure why people get upset by this fact, as not all Apple hardware models were built to be disposable. =3
Good excuse to upgrade though, as a $1500 recovery bill would not be cool. Best regards =3
The corrosion inhibitors in petrol engine oil get fully depleted within about a year with most brands. One may certainly sell the machine before you see acidified lubricant related problems, but the motor will not reach its full operational lifespan ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve .)
I do agree that anyone with a CVT style transmission likely won't have to worry, as that entire section will probably need replaced before you see significant hydrodynamic bearing damage.
"Buy cheap, buy twice" as they say...
ymmv, best of luck. =3
> 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.
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 line-conditioners actually perform well given the cost, but never buy used surge-arresters given the finite spike hit-count. Best of luck =3
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.
https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/Harequin_Romance_Book_Publ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDdKiQNw80c