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
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.
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”.
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.”
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.
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".
So could you, right?
One’d think that they’d keep more than a couple of weeks’s supply of critical materials —to bad many copied Cook’s and others’s JIT inventory management for everything.
More than just from inflation? (sorry, not sorry!)
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.
Messer Completes Acquisition of Federal Helium System from BLM | June 27, 2024 | https://www.messer-us.com/press-releases/messer-completes-ac...
But yeah, that would make more sense.
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.
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 kind of administration they had hitched their wagons to - thankfully, the internet ever 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.
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.
The correct way of putting it is so old rich suited men can engage in pedophilia.
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.
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.
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" ...
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.
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!
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.
--- 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.