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by arjie7 hours ago |
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upvoteby MontyCarloHall6 hours ago|
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>There’s always The One Factory In North Carolina That Produces The Essential Ingredient and it turns out that it’s just the price optimal one and there is enough capacity around the world to substitute.

If you're referring to Spruce Pine in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene [0, 1], the predictions that chipmaking would be severely disrupted turned out to not come true because the Spruce Pine mine sustained a lot less damage than initially feared and was made operational within a week or two [2], not because high-purity quartz is commoditized.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2024/09/30/nx-s1-5133462/hurricane-helen...

[1] https://www.aveva.com/en/our-industrial-life/type/article/hu...

[2] https://www.cbs17.com/news/north-carolina-news/spruce-pine-q...

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upvoteby foobiekr5 hours ago|
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I think his bigger point is that it seems to always go this way. About two weeks ago there was a panic about helium and chipmaking and the crisis that the strait would cause. One that didn't even bother to look into where helium is sourced.

I think the world is much, much more varied and complex than these "this is the one true doom" mindsets can fathom. It's a constructed theory that makes perfect sense until it meets the real world.

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upvoteby IgorPartola2 hours ago|
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The simpler explanation is that an industry insider who can publish a piece saying “helium shortage will mean the end of chip making as we know it” can get a lot more views and clicks than one who published “chip making will get mildly more expensive because one of the key ingredients is going to need to be sourced from farther away or from more expensive suppliers”. There is always an angle, whether it is clout, pumping the market, selling you something, etc. and when you are not an industry insider there is little you can do to understand where else you can buy the particular ingredient from so it sounds plausible.
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upvoteby grosswait5 hours ago|
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I think they are saying it isn’t so rare that it couldn’t become commoditized
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upvoteby youngtaff4 hours ago|
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The Spruce Mine story was a classic case of this hysteria as there were other sources of pure silica e.g. Norway
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upvoteby tyre4 hours ago|
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The issue is that these areas are optimized for—so we don’t build capacity or the surrounding infrastructure for fallbacks—and relatively small likelihood events have tremendous risk-adjusted costs.

If you have one event with a 10% chance of throwing off the world’s semiconductors, that’s incredibly dangerous and worth talking about. If you have five such things (the quartz mine, bromine conversion, helium supply, etc.), there is a 60% chance that none of those events land.

Even still, it’s worth raising alarm about each and every one of them, because a single failure causes so much collateral damage. But people assume if something didn’t happen, it wasn’t worth prepping for.

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upvoteby scythe5 hours ago|
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Bromine is unusually concentrated in the Dead Sea, representing 0.4% instead of 0.0065% in the oceans:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bromine#Occurrence_and_product...

The largest producer outside the Dead Sea is China by far, and the only other significant producer is Japan (!) which produces a paltry ~10% of worldwide output. It's possible to produce bromine from other places but you'd basically be starting from zero on the infrastructure involved. The short-term risks are real.

https://www.reportlinker.com/dataset/6b01d1a976f7ec9db71e35b...

However, it may be hard for Iran to disrupt bromine production. They may also not think about it.

EDIT: According to other links in this thread the US produces a significant but undisclosed (?!) quantity of bromine, practically all of which is consumed domestically. So it was probably missing from my data. Not great for other bromine users.

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upvoteby jiggawatts4 hours ago|
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Efficiency is the opposite of robustness.

You can’t have slack in a system and be efficient, because it would be more efficient to use up all 100% of the (cheapest) capacity.

There is a fundamental tradeoff between the two that capitalists chasing 1% margins discover only when there is a disaster somewhere.

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