alt.hn

3/13/2026 at 12:31:09 PM

Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock

 https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/qatar-helium-shutdown-puts-chip-supply-chain-on-a-two-week-clock

by johnbarron

3/13/2026 at 7:19:53 PM

I've developed a new fear of my 2025 desktop PC being damaged by a power surge or something, because it would cost at least $2K more to replace than I paid for it, assuming I can even find parts now. Compared to the rest of my adult life when I used to secretly pray for something to fail so I would have a reason to upgrade.

by randerson

3/13/2026 at 8:03:40 PM

Living in developing countries taught me to never plugin expensive computers without a surge protector UPS.

by srik

3/13/2026 at 9:42:22 PM

Commercial uses layered surge protectors (Type I, II, and III), which is also recommended for other users but rarely followed.

In surge prone areas, at a minimum I would have good quality whole-house surge protector (eg Siemens 140 or Eaton 108), and a good quality surge protector strip for any computer/TV/phone charger.

I also put surge protectors in front of expensive white goods like the fridge, washer/dryer, dishwasher, and garage door opener. Besides being costly to replace these can contain "sparky" motors and this provides protection in the other direction too. Over time smaller surges can degrade the main surge protector for your computer.

Nothing (reasonable) can protect against direct lightning strikes, but for anything less it should provide decent protection.

by schiffern

3/13/2026 at 10:59:36 PM

Are you in an area with a bad electrical grid or something? In 40+ years I've never had a single device get fried from a surge/storm. My "surge protector" power strips are from the 90s and probably don't even work.

by tempaccount5050

3/14/2026 at 12:46:46 AM

This. Same timeframe and I've lived through both lots of lightning storms and in areas with lots of power failures. Some of them intermittent and essentially caused by transformers blowing up. Like earlier this winter, we had multiple storms where you'd hear a transformer blow up, in many cases even seeing the sky light up as well from it, power going out, couple seconds, power coming back, next transformer blowing out, rinse, repeat.

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.

by tharkun__

3/14/2026 at 2:44:09 AM

The things people often call "transformers blowing up" are usually not transformers blowing up.

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

by ssl-3

3/14/2026 at 3:46:11 AM

Haha, I hear you. But yes, it really is transformers blowing up sometimes. Sometimes it really is just branches blowing up the line, sure.

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.

by tharkun__

3/14/2026 at 12:40:24 PM

Residental-scale transformers can and do explode. Shorts happen not-infrequently with freezing rain and ice storms especially causing issues - the internal oil gets displaced by the water, and the dirty water causes an internal short. It wipes out power to a few blocks here when it happens, but we get an outage due to it every year or two.

by freeone3000

3/16/2026 at 9:31:34 AM

They can. They do.

But when the wind is whipping along on a warm day and there are bright flashes and audible bangs, that's (usually!) not signs of transformers blowing up... even though the popular vernacular often erroneously describes it that way.

by ssl-3

3/15/2026 at 12:20:34 AM

It happens. The power company was very unhappy with my boss for destroying one of their transformers. The thing is while circuit breakers react very quickly to extreme overcurrent situations (shorts) they're much slower to react to loads which are only a bit over the limit, and if short enough won't react at all. Very common with heavy motors.

And that's exactly what the problem was--we had a whole bunch of really heavy motors. Getting ready to start for the day you flip on the switches and the big machines start to spin. The transformer on the pole was rated higher than the main breaker for the plant--but the transformer apparently was more sensitive to the temporary loads. Once the problem was identified it was resolved by staging it, instead of flipping them all on they were flipped on over 5 minutes.

by LorenPechtel

3/14/2026 at 2:55:34 AM

It's not just cheap UPSes, it's cheap surge protectors as well. They exist because the vendor can throw in a MOV costing a few cents and increase the price of the power strip by 50%, not because they're any good. MOVs are sacrificial components which have either degraded to uselessness by the time they're actually needed or, if they're still working, can explode or catch fire from the energy dissipated. Even if they don't, all they're doing is converting an x-kV spike on active into an around-x-kV spike on neutral or ground. If you want to do it properly, use a series tracking filter, not a "surge protector".

by pseudohadamard

3/14/2026 at 3:50:51 AM

No offense, but can you tell me how my 4.5 kW generator is gonna generate that kind of power surge?

by tharkun__

3/14/2026 at 8:39:39 AM

One scenario: there's a short circuit somewhere, say rats chewing through insulation. This can cause a very high current through the short. A non-inverter 4500 watt 120 volt generator might have 0.2 ohms coil resistance, so the short circuit current can hit 170 volts / 0.2 ohm = 850 amps. When the shorted branch's circuit breaker trips, the inductance in the generating windings wants to keep that 850 amps flowing for at least a few microseconds, and it gets distributed across everything else that's still connected. Depending on what else is connected (hopefully including some surge protectors) the peak voltage can get into many kilovolts.

The circuit is something like this:

  voltage source -- parasitic inductor --+- circuit breaker -- short
                                         |
                                         +- circuit breaker -- your PC

by tlb

3/15/2026 at 3:45:33 AM

More generally, for the previous poster, look at what happens when a magnetic field collapses suddenly, you can get kilovolt spikes. There's probably a ton of YouTube videos demonstrating this in various ways, it sounds like the sort of thing that Electroboom would do. Normally this is handled via snubber circuits which dissipate the energy before it can do anything, but in exceptional cases it could end up going where it shouldn't.

by pseudohadamard

3/14/2026 at 11:19:01 AM

Definitely use quality surge protectors on expensive equipment connected to generators.

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.

by burnt-resistor

3/14/2026 at 7:26:27 PM

GFCI works correctly either way. Their operating mode doesn't care at all about ground: Whether bonded, not bonded, or not even present (look, ma! only two wires!), they still perform the same way.

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.

by ssl-3

3/14/2026 at 2:35:58 PM

That extra unbonded ground rod is the worst thing you can possibly do to make your generator vulnerable to lightning strikes.

by jcalvinowens

3/15/2026 at 8:53:25 AM

That's an extreme edge-case and a strawman. Anyone operating temporary equipment on a generator during a severe storm will obviously unplug sensitive stuff to not take unnecessary chances regardless of safety precautions already in place.

Ground rods are required in certain situations according to the NEC.

Ground rods are for lightning protection, transient surges (over voltage), and induced surges; not for short protection, ground faults, or making ordinary extension cord use of bonded generators "safer".

Typically, they're required whenever it's a system that powers a building on its own, i.e., off-grid setup or with a floating neutral generator connected via a switched neutral transfer switch.

by burnt-resistor

3/14/2026 at 1:53:36 PM

> In such scenarios, debond the generator's ground from neutral

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

by mschuster91

3/14/2026 at 2:40:36 PM

I'm not sure I'd leave something like this to an electrician. Or if so at least make that electrician be experienced in this field. I think you'd want an electrical engineer to be involved with the plan to some degree.

by dboreham

3/14/2026 at 6:55:56 PM

Electrical engineers don’t know code requirements and wiring guidelines for household electrical wiring. They’re absolutely not the correct default. Electricians with specialization in generator setups, sure, but an electrician engineer on average is likely going to be more uninformed on code requirements than an electrician.

by Kirby64

3/14/2026 at 7:29:54 PM

Electrical engineers know the theory but lack the practical knowledge which grid form is used at your specific address (yes, here in Germany we have a few towns where one half side of a street runs TT and the other one is already migrated to TN-C or TN-C-S).

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.

by mschuster91

3/14/2026 at 3:00:31 AM

When I lived in Costa Rica, I lost three surge protectors in a year to power surges. During one such power surge, I didn't notice that the red light indicating surge protection was already out, and a power surge fried my (knockoff) Macbook power adapter, leaving me without a way to work for a day.

by noahbp

3/15/2026 at 12:41:32 AM

There's no real indicator on those things.

It's a 10 cent component that would require a $10k machine (this is old data) to do a non-destructive test.

by LorenPechtel

3/14/2026 at 5:29:40 AM

Not only should you get rid of them, but also they are a fire hazard.

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.

by DiabloD3

3/14/2026 at 8:43:56 AM

> Not only should you get rid of them, but also they are a fire hazard.

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.)

by ssl-3

3/14/2026 at 10:01:30 AM

"What is the mechanism that increases risk for MOV-sourced fires in this arrangement?"

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...

by matthiasl

3/14/2026 at 10:25:52 AM

No clue about the actual reliability of this[1] article but the mechanism mentioned (new pathways due to changes in crystalline structure due to uneven heating) sounds possible.

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.

by consp

3/13/2026 at 11:48:32 PM

Not too bad, just rural. We used to lose stuff every 10 years or so.

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.

by schiffern

3/16/2026 at 3:39:23 AM

I live in Oakland, and the Easy Bay has had its share of random outages without incident. The last outage was just a split-second blip, but it broke a $1k computer monitor.

by radley

3/14/2026 at 9:21:20 AM

Heavy industry can also cause these kinds of power surges to happen.

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.

by MrDresden

3/14/2026 at 12:55:33 PM

I lost an audio mixer to a bad surge last year. I don't know whether it was additional load or just really bad fluctuations that damaged the device. Nothing else bit the dust, but the, digital board in this mixer got bricked.

by acjohnson55

3/14/2026 at 8:12:45 PM

How did you know it was a power surge? Not doubting your comment, just interested in knowing if this ever happened to me

by lucb1e

3/15/2026 at 10:46:16 AM

You don’t need a storm. A fault like an open neutral can very easily fry things.

by bigfatkitten

3/14/2026 at 2:30:01 AM

If your close neighbours have surge protectors then you benefit little from installing your own.

by JanisErdmanis

3/14/2026 at 3:11:29 AM

Another perspective: we should install whole house surge protectors if we can afford them, not only for ourselves, but to help our neighbors - even if in reality the help is minimal and they need their own as well. In the best case scenario, if everybody in a neighborhood has them, each individual house will be more resistant to surges than if they were the only house with one (five houses with surge protectors nearby is a lot better than one) - everybody wins.

by sgc

3/14/2026 at 8:14:09 PM

Why? If the voltage spikes on the grid (that's what I understand a power surge to mean), wouldn't even more of it end up in your house (that is: the grid voltage spike even higher) if the neighbors have equipment that doesn't let their devices consume some of that energy?

Edit: wait, maybe I figured it out: those devices must be consuming the excess rather than blocking it. Is that it?

by lucb1e

3/14/2026 at 11:39:44 PM

Yes, energy dissipates. Although one still needs to look out for the distance from the neighbours as your ground can be different from your neighbours ground potential.

by JanisErdmanis

3/14/2026 at 4:25:57 AM

You might as well phrase that as "If your close neighbours have gotten vaccines then you benefit little from getting your own."

We live in a society. Everybody chips in. And each surge protector adds to the robustness of the grid.

by dotancohen

3/14/2026 at 11:34:45 PM

Yes, that puts it down perfectly. That’s why some don’t ever see the benefit of installing their surge protector whereas others install one way too small for their situation and find them useless anyway.

by JanisErdmanis

3/14/2026 at 4:51:38 AM

Eh. Most nice power strips are also surge protectors.

by margalabargala

3/14/2026 at 2:50:44 PM

I had exactly one device fried in my life. This was when I lived in FL in 1999. Lightning took out my sweet new 56k modem. My PC was fine.

by SmirkingRevenge

3/14/2026 at 2:36:21 PM

EE living in a rural location here: transient related failures do happen in my experience. Rare but they happen. And I've known of people who had everything in their house fried. For me it's just been a couple of Ethernet ports. Power strips don't provide much protection fwiw. Always worthwhile checking that your electrical service is properly grounded.

by dboreham

3/14/2026 at 11:07:16 AM

Not completely correct, nuanced, or comprehensive.

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.

by burnt-resistor

3/13/2026 at 10:27:37 PM

> Nothing (reasonable) can protect against direct lightning strikes

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-...

by david_allison

3/13/2026 at 10:50:51 PM

>Admittedly: financial protection, not data protection

You should have data backups regardless, because there are plenty of ways to lose data that don't involve power surges.

by gruez

3/14/2026 at 3:13:06 AM

Have they ever paid out on one of those, or is it like CAs who offer liability protection for their certificates carefully set up in such a way that they never have to pay out.

by pseudohadamard

3/13/2026 at 10:49:48 PM

>In surge prone areas

What areas are surge prone?

by gruez

3/13/2026 at 10:58:58 PM

Areas with lots of thunderstorms. Also more rural areas with long power lines with few taps off for customers — the long runs are both exposed to many nearby strikes and accept induction well, and the few customers are fewer power sinks to dissipate the spike. So, you're more likely to get hit, and hit harder.

by toss1

3/13/2026 at 11:27:02 PM

Sounds like if you're in an urban area with buried lines, you don't have to worry?

by gruez

3/14/2026 at 12:24:23 AM

In urban areas you probably can just have the whole-house surge protector and skip the rest, since that protects all costly electronics not just a single device. With just a surge strip on the PC I'd say you're a tad under-protected, yeah.

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.

by schiffern

3/14/2026 at 12:08:55 AM

I would recommend a circuit surge protector in urban areas.

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.

by marcosdumay

3/14/2026 at 3:28:45 PM

No, just worry less about big lightning, but urban areas have many more sources of different types of spikes and line noise

by toss1

3/14/2026 at 1:58:13 AM

The California bay area, at least all the sides of it I’ve lived on. We currently have a whole house battery, whole house surge protector, a second surge protector, and a UPS between the router/nas/etc and PG&E.

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).

by hedora

3/14/2026 at 2:56:17 PM

I've lived all over the peninsula, your experience is not normal.

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.

by jcalvinowens

3/14/2026 at 9:43:20 AM

Huh, interesting. I've lived in the bay area for 22 years (first 6 of them in various places from SJ up the peninsula, remainder in SF), and I've never experienced damage to anything due to a power surge.

Not saying you're lying, but I do wonder if your experience is typical.

by kelnos

3/14/2026 at 3:16:37 AM

Color me skeptical. I've lived in several different Bay Area cities for decades. There are usually a couple power outages per year but I've never experienced a surge strong enough to cause equipment damage.

by nradov

3/14/2026 at 12:14:18 AM

Open aerial wiring can shortcircuit two phases, bringing a low impedance surge that can damage most electric and electronic equipment.

by frrlpp

3/14/2026 at 2:27:53 PM

> Nothing (reasonable) can protect against direct lightning strikes

This is one reason why you bury power cables.

by andylynch

3/14/2026 at 7:10:02 PM

Burying power cables doesn’t help against direct lightning strikes. If lightning hits your house, underground power cables will do nothing.

by Kirby64

3/14/2026 at 7:35:17 AM

[dead]

by huflungdung

3/13/2026 at 9:09:26 PM

Lightning can mess you up in every country lol. Had to replace a PSU because of that, thankfully it was just that and minor damage to GPU.

by kelipso

3/13/2026 at 9:44:43 PM

Lightning damage is mostly an issue if the last-mile power lines are above ground. In my experience, power surges in urban areas with a decent grid are so rare that people generally don't bother protecting their devices.

by jltsiren

3/13/2026 at 10:27:16 PM

I have lived in the DC metro area inside the beltway or in Sillicon Valley my entire adult life and have only had above ground power wiring. Despite tree ordnances and wind storms and a grid so aged if we see lightning we lose power.

by lanstin

3/13/2026 at 11:57:19 PM

I've heard that before, that the US apparently loves above ground power lines. In NL it's only the long distance ones that are above ground. Even in most rural areas, I think everything is below ground.

by mcv

3/14/2026 at 2:53:26 AM

Yes, we love them on account of our country having approximately 230 times the surface area and the Netherlands having approximately 13x the population density. We not only have vastly more line to run, but also many, many fewer people per square mile to absorb the costs. Underground line is expensive.

by idiotsecant

3/14/2026 at 3:26:36 AM

That explains rural areas but not urban areas. We've got above-ground in rural areas but pretty much all urban stuff is underground. We get maybe one power cut a year, usually for scheduled maintenance work, and no problems with surges and whatnot.

by pseudohadamard

3/15/2026 at 10:54:19 PM

Yes, where the population density supports it the US has tons of underground.

by idiotsecant

3/14/2026 at 3:26:02 AM

It turns out that the fires caused by above ground power lines are also quite expensive, at least in certain areas.

https://www.firevictimtrust.com/

by nradov

3/14/2026 at 1:35:16 PM

Grandparent was talking about the DC metro area and Silicon Valley. We're not exactly talking about Montana here.

by mcv

3/15/2026 at 8:44:04 AM

Expensive to install, less expensive to maintain.

by ikr678

3/14/2026 at 2:14:23 AM

> Lightning damage is mostly an issue if the last-mile power lines are above ground.

So 99.99999% of the world.

by markdown

3/14/2026 at 3:11:30 AM

But not where 99.99999% of the population lives.

by SauntSolaire

3/13/2026 at 10:02:53 PM

[dead]

by assaddayinh

3/13/2026 at 10:15:29 PM

Where I live it's not an issue.

by kubb

3/13/2026 at 8:55:04 PM

Do you still need a UPS if you have one of those household (Powerwall style) battery packs? Also Apple switched mode power supplies are pretty well built.

But then again there's horror stories like

https://www.reddit.com/r/applehelp/comments/1maegvb/i_burned...

by Onavo

3/13/2026 at 9:41:59 PM

My understanding is that home batteries are not UPSes, they don't go through the battery. They have a switch between power company, solar, or battery. I think that means would be exposed to surge from power company.

You can install a whole house surge protector. Those go in the panel and would protect from different sources.

by ianburrell

3/13/2026 at 9:01:43 PM

Yes. The power walls are like cheap UPS topology. You could still get whacked with a transient from the grid before the ATS decides to island the house.

by bob1029

3/14/2026 at 12:05:41 AM

Depends on how they are configured, I think in some regions (where power outages are very rare), they are wired to sync up with external network, and without external network they shut down as well.

by kolinko

3/13/2026 at 8:08:41 PM

Honestly even in "developed countries" it's not worth blindly trusting that the power in your house/building is clean. It's cheap and easy enough to just put any expensive hardware on a UPS rather than speculating what's going on behind the walls.

by porkloin

3/14/2026 at 12:54:53 AM

I work on embedded systems. I can often see whether my A/C or other appliances are running on my oscilloscope signals. They often affect the output of USB power supplies.

by nerdsniper

3/14/2026 at 5:42:57 AM

Eh, if these surges are rare enough, then you are statistical better off just risking your 'expensive' hardware to a one in a trillion possibility rather than spending money on gear you don't need.

Do you live in a bunker to protect against artillery shells?

by eru

3/13/2026 at 9:25:34 PM

Doesn't even sound like a developed country to me. Is that the US or something?

by xandrius

3/14/2026 at 10:46:13 AM

I grew up in San Jose CA in the 80's and 90'd on a street with a perpetually bad transformer. We had UPSes on every computer and proper surge protectors on everything of value.

by burnt-resistor

3/14/2026 at 12:39:08 AM

Living in California taught me this

by casey2

3/13/2026 at 10:40:17 PM

Over the last two years I bought 2 4TB SSDs, 64GB DDR5 ECC UDIMM and 4 14TB HDDs.

I couldn't justify buying any of them today.

by bpye

3/14/2026 at 1:51:56 AM

I bought a PC in early 2021 IIRC. It was good for the time and a good deal for a high end PC. IIRC it was $2800 and had a 6900 XTX. Last year I accidentally killed it. The CPU temps were higher than I'd like (~85C). the thermal grease can become hard and ineffective over time so I figured I'd replace it. Instead, it had become like cement and by twisting the AIO off, I snapped the socket on the motherboard.

This was an expensive mistake as I both looked into buying a replacement motherboard and CPU but that quickly gets to the price of a new PC. Paying someone to rebuild my PC is expensive and I'm beyond the age of wanting to fully remove a motherboard and effectively rebuild my entire PC myself. So I didn't know what to do with it.

Anyway, I ended up buying various alternatives like a NUC with 32GB of RAM, a laptop (with a 4080) and a Mac Mini. But I also ended up buying a new 9800X3D PC with a 5070Ti. Like I said, it was an expensive mistake.

But I decided for no particular reason to upgrade the (already good) 32GB of DDR5-6000 to 64GB with a $200 kit of DDR5-6000. This was in July I think. I also upgraded my laptop to 64GB for no readily apparent reason.

I recently checked and that $200 64GB kit now costs $950. SSDs are through the roof too but through complete accident I'm surrounded by about 5 PCs and a bunch of spare RAM. I don't see myself upgrading anytime soon.

I will say that there are some good deals (relative to current pricing) for combos including CPU, motherboard and memory or even some pretty good prebuilts.

by jmyeet

3/13/2026 at 7:33:35 PM

Silver lining: literally all Macs are a total steal right now.

by SlightlyLeftPad

3/13/2026 at 8:44:39 PM

Anyone have a good take on how well Asahi linux keeps the power management working on mac hardware? The biggest killer feature for me of mac hardware is the battery/weight. I have found it hard to get a good laptop in the linux ecosystem mainly because of power consumption. If Asahi doesn't really impact the battery life then I would seriously consider going that route. Similar question about support for pytorch on linux/arm64 / Asahi.

by jmward01

3/14/2026 at 7:18:51 AM

Bought a used MacBook Air M2 past summer to run Asahi linux exclusively on it, the installation went hassle-free. One charge lasts 9+ hours easily, sometimes up to 12 hours. Thunderbolt, DP Alt Mode and TouchID would be nice to haves, but I'm super happy how everything runs. Thank you everyone on the Asahi team!

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.

by whilenot-dev

3/13/2026 at 9:06:48 PM

I think it's improved from when I last tried it, but it still isn't great. You can get like 60% of the battery life compared to macOS.

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.

by erxam

3/13/2026 at 11:19:08 PM

How good is Mac virtualization? Would it be doable to put an Ubuntu inside a VM and just run it full screen all the time?

by oblio

3/13/2026 at 8:48:43 PM

Too bad I can’t play the games I want to play on them

by haunter

3/13/2026 at 8:52:16 PM

Hint : GE Force Now

ssshhhhh... do not tell anyone I told you...

by realo

3/14/2026 at 1:00:28 AM

No idea why you're down voted... I blissfully played cyberpunk 2077 for two years on GeforceNow. I still keep my membership even though I have a dedicated gaming pc now, for occasional laptop or living room pc use. It was beyond brilliant to play a hyper demanding game on a bare spec pc :-)

Mind you,I have gigabit internet. I don't know what the experience would be like on other types of internet / worldwide.

by NikolaNovak

3/14/2026 at 12:37:47 AM

You have to be joking, you don't own anything and enjoy your price hikes as people adopt it

by dev1ycan

3/14/2026 at 1:01:34 AM

What are you talking about? Geforce Now is specifically only playable with games you own.

by NikolaNovak

3/13/2026 at 8:56:29 PM

It's horrible. Bad quality, bad latency, can't mod the games etc. And worse you have to pay for it when you already have a more than capable computer.

by haunter

3/13/2026 at 9:04:26 PM

i wouldnt go as far to say "its horrible".

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.

by john_strinlai

3/13/2026 at 9:26:13 PM

And it works on the Vision Pro via the next update.

by sroussey

3/14/2026 at 12:22:27 AM

finally!!!

Can’t wait to try that and for the f1 stuff to come out.

by jamiek88

3/13/2026 at 10:23:51 PM

I used Shadow PC for a long time. Never any issues over several years. Lots of reasons in preferred it over GeForce. I can expound on that later if needed

by gazook89

3/13/2026 at 10:53:08 PM

Is the computer in question really "more than capable" if it "can't play the games [you] want to play"?

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.

by joemi

3/13/2026 at 9:10:13 PM

I bought a Mac Mini in February and maxed out the ram and storage. Now, it seems like that was a prescient move, but honestly I really only bought it for photo editing and playing the new World of Warcraft expansion (don't judge me!).

by whyenot

3/13/2026 at 9:27:13 PM

Serious question: how does WoW still appeal to players except for habit social connections to keep them locked into the game? I used to spend nights and love the game, now, even with all these expansions it feels exactly like it was in 2006 but without what happened to the gaming world in the past 20 years.

by xandrius

3/13/2026 at 10:10:53 PM

It's still fun. The social connections are also hugely important to me. One of my characters is in the same active guild that I joined in 2006. It's hard to put into words how meaningful that is to me. The game has improved, the newly re-done Silvermoon City is beautiful and richly detailed, but you are right, in many ways it's the same game as 20+ years ago, except made more casual-friendly in a lot of ways. I like it and there really isn't anything else like it out there. ...and surprising to me, if you believe Blizzard, there are around 9 million people who still play.

by whyenot

3/14/2026 at 1:49:30 PM

Alright so I 100% understand you, and now I know I'm not totally crazy.

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.

by xandrius

3/13/2026 at 11:44:07 PM

I don’t know. I still fire up FF14 every couple of weeks for a few dungeon runs. No more social interactions with the various channels, I barely talk to my party even.

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.

by SenHeng

3/13/2026 at 9:14:48 PM

You pay an $1k extra just to get the model with 1TB disk. How is that a steal?

by elorant

3/14/2026 at 4:59:56 AM

pro tip: don't

by thejazzman

3/13/2026 at 7:44:50 PM

Good Mac Pro models are still spendy, but the M3/M4 laptops are great if your software use-cases are met. =3

by Joel_Mckay

3/13/2026 at 8:53:12 PM

I’m still doing great even with an M2!

by Choco31415

3/13/2026 at 9:28:21 PM

Still loving my M1 to be honest!

by xandrius

3/13/2026 at 10:50:45 PM

It’s super annoying. I’m salivating over all the new announcements but my M1 16GB 1TB will likely last another 5 years.

by JSR_FDED

3/13/2026 at 10:55:24 PM

Same here. I've never had a machine feel so great for so long before!

by joemi

3/14/2026 at 1:52:21 PM

As a side note, I absolutely cannot imagine being upset of having a machine lasting long.

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).

by xandrius

3/14/2026 at 4:23:44 PM

With intermittent use one may get a lot more life out of the SSD than other users, but eventually flash will run out of spare-sectors and start to fail.

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

by Joel_Mckay

3/13/2026 at 11:00:28 PM

The SSD don't last forever, after about 3 to 4 years of daily use the drive/system should be replaced. At >5 years, one could hit retention issues and corruption losses.

Good excuse to upgrade though, as a $1500 recovery bill would not be cool. Best regards =3

by Joel_Mckay

3/14/2026 at 2:16:41 AM

Never used a computer less than 8yrs and never had an ssd have an issue in that time.

by markdown

3/14/2026 at 1:15:01 PM

This advice brought to you by the "change your oil every three months" crowd.

by silversmith

3/14/2026 at 4:05:50 PM

I removed my anecdote and flash wear explanation, because of cranky folks like yourself.

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

by Joel_Mckay

3/13/2026 at 9:03:06 PM

The AMD395+ PCs have unified memory and since it's not tied to a garbage OS nor reasonably affected by future dram costs, it's a better choice for reasonable people, unless you're going for greater than 128GB

by cyanydeez

3/13/2026 at 8:36:02 PM

I mean they're still expensive, they just seem relatively good value because everything else has gotten more expensive.

by remus

3/13/2026 at 10:56:56 PM

All value is relative, so everything else getting more expensive is essentially the same as macs getting cheaper.

by joemi

3/14/2026 at 12:41:55 AM

It's not the same, unless you are simultaneously also getting richer.

by layer8

3/14/2026 at 5:44:29 AM

Other electronics have gotten more expensive, yes. But other hobbies haven't.

by eru

3/14/2026 at 12:38:02 AM

Just a matter of time until Apple also increases the price...

by Bombthecat

3/13/2026 at 8:41:14 PM

Yeah, that's what @SlightlyLeftPad said.

by moralestapia

3/14/2026 at 5:43:46 AM

Not really a steal, just that the price differences have narrowed.

by eru

3/14/2026 at 2:55:19 AM

Thankfully UPSes are still cheap. Get one before Sam buys the entire yearly production of cyberpower.

by bobsmooth

3/14/2026 at 1:17:01 AM

It sounds like it won't affect prices that much?

> South Korean memory giant SK hynix has since said it had diversified supplies for helium and secured sufficient inventory. Meanwhile, TSMC said that it doesn’t currently anticipate a notable impact following Ras Laffan going offline, but that it’s monitoring the situation.

by rationalist

3/14/2026 at 3:51:17 AM

It also just be the typical “don’t scare the shareholders just yet” PR speak. Time will tell.

by Cyph0n

3/14/2026 at 8:08:22 PM

I mean you are talking about 30% of the world supply I don't think you can spin up the amount of equipment need to replace that in a few weeks.

by xphos

3/13/2026 at 7:42:14 PM

We used those Tripp Lite LC1200 to knock down the noise floor (14dB) on remote equipment.

These line-conditioners actually perform well given the cost, but never buy used surge-arresters given the finite spike hit-count. Best of luck =3

by Joel_Mckay

3/13/2026 at 8:05:25 PM

These devices are basically autotransformers. So they reduce the noise by providing inductive filtering. But they don't really protect against strong surges by themselves.

So Tripp Lite uses a regular varistor for that, just like any other surge protector. In Europe you'd be far better off buying a voltage relay and adding it to your electrical panel, but it's not usually possible with the non-modular US electrical panels.

by cyberax

3/13/2026 at 8:20:42 PM

The simple line-conditioners were surprisingly effective, and are a fraction of the cost of lab/medical grade galvanic isolation ferroresonant transformers. =3

by Joel_Mckay

3/13/2026 at 8:29:45 PM

What’s with the ‘cock and balls’ emoticon?

by FreezingKeeper

3/13/2026 at 10:53:01 PM

Can never unsee that now

by JSR_FDED

3/14/2026 at 12:45:02 AM

I originally interpreted <3 that way.

by layer8

3/14/2026 at 12:54:00 AM

Must have been awkward getting a text from some people =3

by Joel_Mckay

3/13/2026 at 11:03:47 PM

Don't worry about it =3

by Joel_Mckay

3/13/2026 at 8:36:26 PM

Don't worry about it =3

by Joel_Mckay

3/13/2026 at 8:32:59 PM

welcome to the internet, sometimes people make smiley faces :)

by amatecha

3/14/2026 at 1:08:15 AM

You can find all types of people on the Internet, even some without noses :-)

by rationalist

3/13/2026 at 10:00:32 PM

I have a UPS with surge protection which I plug my computer into for this reason. Do others do the same or use something else?

by ScoobleDoodle

3/14/2026 at 2:24:55 AM

I got to get me some new surge protectors and not the cheapies. maybe a small ups.

by smilbandit

3/13/2026 at 9:05:55 PM

The US just finished divesting itself from its strategic helium reserve in 2024 due to the "Helium Stewardship Act of 2013"[1]

But, now we have a strategic bitcoin reserve.

[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/527

by sillystuff

3/14/2026 at 4:53:05 AM

You know that it was basically sold to be able to claim a more responsible budget that year? Basically selling off of an asset to record higher revenue. Like selling your building fire extinguishers to claim that you were able to pay off your credit card bill, and who cares what those were originally meant for.

by supernova87a

3/14/2026 at 8:45:08 AM

Government accounting operation on a strictly annual basis is ruinous.

by pjc50

3/14/2026 at 2:29:16 PM

It’s not, but the 10-year projections are even worse, because they count on eternally ‘temporary’ things actually changing.

by nickff

3/14/2026 at 6:50:03 AM

Pay of the credit card bill?

You mean pay the interests on it.

by athrowaway3z

3/14/2026 at 1:41:59 AM

Financialization of everything is so funny to me, because even I, who is extremely stupid when it comes to big money stuff, can see not having state capacity on important stuff is insane. By that, I mean hard resources, materials, THINGS.

by tokioyoyo

3/14/2026 at 1:35:27 PM

cost-benefit analysis of things is important, eventually putting a number on things (services, risks, infrastructure, stock and flows, health, life, wellbeing, noise, air quality, aesthetics, user experience, fairness, and so on ...)

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)

by pas

3/15/2026 at 1:59:25 AM

Ya know we're doing a record emptying of the strategic oil reserves right now. Makes sense right?

Except we're giving it to oil companies for free, letting them sell at these very high prices with the promise that they refill the reserves with oil at some time in the future (when it's cheaper).

Absolutely perfectly corrupt, and American, way to go about it.

by cco

3/15/2026 at 10:23:20 AM

Except we didn’t even refill it last year when oil prices did fall to rock bottom.

Because the U.S. government (even generally…there’s obviously no hope for this administration) is structurally incapable of making decisions that have a benefit horizon of more than a couple of years.

by hshdhdhj4444

3/13/2026 at 11:00:05 PM

Big self own here

by pwarner

3/14/2026 at 2:50:20 AM

It’s almost shocking that people in an era of unlimited resources could see this was not renewable and important to hold, and that later in the era of limited resources, we decided to privatize this. It’s so shortsighted, willfully ignorant.

We’re about to get a preview of the world after fossil fuel extraction and some of the knock on effects. Semi is one thing, wait till you can’t get an MRI.

by MarkMarine

3/14/2026 at 2:00:14 PM

In some fictional scenario, if a character were charged by some dark authority with the assignment of laying waste to the US economy, putting fools and lackeys in roles of responsibility for economic investment and oversight, of befouling public discourse to the point where only fictions are spoken, of corrupting the judiciary, and sabotaging international partnerships forged in over a century of unprecedented co-operation...

...well, you would be making a documentary instead.

by heresie-dabord

3/14/2026 at 2:03:33 AM

In related news, diesel is $7/gallon, and peets coffee is $25/lb, and computers (hardware and cloud) are up 25-50%.

The official numbers claim 3% inflation. Does anyone actually believe that? We were seeing 30% YoY before Iran here in California.

The discrepancy is so large, I’m wondering if there’s an official explanation or some reasonable explanation, or if they’re just not bothering anymore.

by hedora

3/14/2026 at 8:26:38 AM

CPI is kept artificially down by claiming that items that increase a lot in value are sudendly "higher quality" so that their price is adjusted down to equalize for "quality".

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.

by PowerElectronix

3/14/2026 at 12:03:38 PM

I wish I could find the analysis now, but someone proved this out by comparing magazine prices to CPI's calculation of magazine prices.

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.

by _heimdall

3/14/2026 at 1:57:56 PM

there are frequent claims by semi-crackpots that the hedonic adjustment of inflation calculation is hiding a lot of inflation.

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...

[5] https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-long-con

by pas

3/14/2026 at 11:09:37 PM

CPI is personal (renting vs home ownership), very hard to have a good definition for (expenses tracked and weights), and more useful over short windows because the standard of living changes.

by dehrmann

3/14/2026 at 1:48:27 PM

I can understand a certain amount of switching in the basket - e.g. a washing machine or dishwasher was once a "luxury good" in a market such as USA, but is now (for the most part) an everyone-appliance.

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

by manarth

3/14/2026 at 4:39:02 PM

It's more like, refrigerators are now way more expensive, but because they are also more comlonly equipped with led fixtures and have more style (no joking here, they somehow are measuring style as a metric) then it's all good and they have actually just increased around 2% with respect yo the base model (that cost like a third in dollars back in 1995)

by PowerElectronix

3/14/2026 at 6:13:10 PM

FYI everyone can check the model used for hedonic adjustment for fridges

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.)

by pas

3/14/2026 at 1:11:55 PM

We should make different inflation baskets, representative of the bottom quartile, the median person, and the upper quartile.

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.

by energy123

3/14/2026 at 1:43:34 PM

I guess the typical inflation basket doesn't include rental income, which the upper-quartile are rather more likely to have than the lower quartile.

Wonder how that might impact figures if residual/passive income were included?

by manarth

3/14/2026 at 2:32:43 PM

Consumer Price Inflation (CPI) is about spending on consumer goods, and not about wage or investment income.

by nickff

3/14/2026 at 2:54:52 PM

A separate index could be independently useful: The amount you gain/lose just from existing, so spending + capital gains + ...

It's not a fully baked idea, but something like this.

by energy123

3/14/2026 at 3:03:49 PM

Consumer Price Index (inflation/deflation being the change in CPI), but I get your point, thanks

by manarth

3/14/2026 at 2:06:08 AM

> We were seeing 30% YoY before Iran here in California.

We didn’t even see that across the board during the height of Covid-flation. What metrics are you using to get that number?

by happyopossum

3/14/2026 at 2:51:59 AM

Food, fuel, utilities, insurance, electronics, services and digital goods.

by hedora

3/14/2026 at 4:32:06 AM

so every inflation number has to be understood by following (a) when is it measuring and (b) what is it measuring. For when: a lot of economic data is lagging indicators, e.g. last quarter - and inflation is usually % more year over year, whereas a lot of people seem to care about inflation on the 2-5 year time frame instead of just 1 year. For the what - we'd have to dig into whether it's national averages, state averages, or local; what percentage of the measurement is rent vs housing prices vs groceries (and what grocery items) vs clothing vs computers vs utilities etc etc. It's very likely that the idealized basket of goods that they are measuring the cost of doesn't actually match your expenses or even the average household expenses for your area. Or possibly even, for the whole country.

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.

by dgoldstein0

3/14/2026 at 3:58:24 AM

I dug up walmart ads from 8 and 16 years ago. In the first 8 years, a case of pepsi went up 5%. In the last 8 years, it went up 200%. Make of that what you will.

by phendrenad2

3/14/2026 at 8:17:27 AM

Drinking more water would be healthy for most americans.

by randomNumber7

3/14/2026 at 11:43:07 AM

Sure, but did water remain at the same price or got cheaper?

by wartywhoa23

3/15/2026 at 10:12:39 PM

That's true. Do you have something to say about inflation, though? Because that's the topic here.

by phendrenad2

3/14/2026 at 2:15:21 AM

Entry level Dell servers that used to cost 1,700 US are now going for 17,000!!! I'm talking absolute basics with 16GB of memory etc. Wild times.

by imperialdrive

3/14/2026 at 1:55:03 PM

Citation please?

    > £2,751.70
      PowerEdge R260
      Xeon® 6315P 2.8GHz
      1x16GB DIMM
      2x2TB HDD SATA
https://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/dell-poweredge-servers/sr/se...

by manarth

3/15/2026 at 4:05:35 AM

Well, I only tried ~~one~~ two servers:

T560:

Priced £3,505 in may 2025: https://web.archive.org/web/20250702124754/https://www.dell....

Now at £13,979: https://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/dell-servers-storage-network...

It's a 10k£ increase or about x3.

I also just tried with R360, x2 in price only, from $4,959 dec 2025 to $17,142 today.

dec 2025: https://web.archive.org/web/20251210154822/https://www.dell....

Today: https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/servers-storage-and-networki...

Edit: Add another one with US dollar.

by _ache_

3/14/2026 at 2:24:10 AM

This administration is America slitting its wrists.

by dyauspitr

3/14/2026 at 10:45:54 AM

More like randomly shooting itself causing non-lethal injuries, but in aggregate, enough blood loss to die.

by Gud

3/14/2026 at 11:45:48 AM

As randomly as number 17.

by wartywhoa23

3/14/2026 at 3:09:48 AM

Diesel is $5 in the Southeast, what kind of supply chain issue could cause 40% diff? Should we hire some tanker trucks and arb this?

by largbae

3/14/2026 at 9:51:51 AM

Most oil production and refining capacity is east of the Rockies and transported to major population centers using pipelines. The Rockies, Sierra Nevada, etc. make pipelines much more cost prohibitive since you have to pump it over the mountains; trains and trucks are a lot more expensive to use for transport; and tankers would have to use the Panama Canal, which besides being a much longer distance also has usage fees.

by bobthepanda

3/14/2026 at 3:57:26 AM

None. But you don't put a non refined cruide oil in your diesel, it not only has to be refined but DELIVERED to your country. Depending where that country is, delivery could be even 60% of the final price. And when, you know, tankers with oil explode due to drone attacks, you will see quick large spikes in pump price.

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.

by joering2

3/14/2026 at 6:39:52 AM

Check taxes

by erikerikson

3/14/2026 at 11:34:23 AM

The explanation is that the world economy has been controlledly flown into terrain, nearing the day when those who used to express their cognitive dissonance by issuing cuckoo signs towards conspiracy theorists, finally own nothing and are happy making cuckoo signs in front of their rented mirrors.

by wartywhoa23

3/14/2026 at 7:12:22 AM

[dead]

by stopbulying

3/13/2026 at 9:22:14 PM

It is not just oil and helium supply chains, it is nitrogen fertilizers also, and in a season when they are needed the most:

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/nitrogen-ammonia-a...

by ordu

3/13/2026 at 9:49:14 PM

Aluminum too, Qatar shutdown a smelting plant which take a year to restart

by vdfs

3/13/2026 at 10:41:44 PM

They released a statement clarifying that they’re running the Qatalum smelter at reduced capacity, not shutting it down.

by throwup238

3/13/2026 at 10:47:59 PM

Why does it take so long?

by permalac

3/14/2026 at 1:01:47 AM

Aluminum smelters use the Hall-Heroult process, where alumina is dissolved in molten cryolite and reduced in massive “pots” which are large electrolytic cells. Each pot contains a carbon cathode lining that must be kept at around 950C during operation. If the pot cools down, the frozen electrolyte and solidified aluminum contract at different rates than the carbon and steel shell, cracking the lining.

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.

by throwup238

3/14/2026 at 6:06:03 AM

How much of this process is cleaning up from the previous run and how much is purely for starting up the process again? Does it make sense to clean up the system as soon as you can after shutdown, in preparation for restart, whenever that may be?

by squigz

3/14/2026 at 6:35:46 AM

It’s one and the same. The sodium and other atoms from the molten cryolite intercalate into the carbon cathode structure and swell it by a few percent. Once in use, a cathode is held together by the steel shell and thermal equilibrium of the running pot. Once it cools the cracking is inevitable.

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.

by throwup238

3/14/2026 at 8:21:56 AM

The system is just build for continuous usage and any shutdown does major damage.

To keep it running at reduced capacity will likely be less expensive unless the war goes on for a very long time.

by randomNumber7

3/14/2026 at 8:18:54 AM

Fascinating, and what about the discarded hardware? Is it recyclable in any way?

by ngcazz

3/14/2026 at 10:19:48 PM

Anything made of steel or aluminum is recyclable because they can just melt it down and easily separate the metals, but the carbon lining and anything nonmetal is basically slag afterwards. Aluminum, electrolyte, and random atoms seep in everywhere and destroy it.

The smelting process I described above is actually the more expensive process to used to produce aluminum from raw bauxite. Recycling aluminum is cheaper and a significant fraction of the world’s aluminum produced every year is from recycled feedstock (over two thirds in the US, last I checked). Same goes for steel and most other metals.

by throwup238

3/14/2026 at 1:54:08 PM

I'm sure, like any metal at an industrial scale, it is profitably recyclable. But that is beside the point. This is akin to asking: "My car's engine just threw a rod and is seized. Is it recyclable?" Hopefully you see in this analogy that the car (engine) costs way, way more than the sum of its parts (the constituent metals).

by HenryMulligan

3/14/2026 at 12:32:05 AM

I'm not sure in this instance, but for industrial plants, the expectation is for them to run 24/7/365 without disruption. They're not designed to be turned off and then on again. When you shut something down, how do you "reset" it to a clean state so production can start again? Think about all the existing stuff still in the pipes, residual, etc.

by xuki

3/14/2026 at 8:45:55 AM

forges are continuous processes - they stay hot while stuff goes in and out

if you make it cold, you'll have to do whole startup sequence again

by NooneAtAll3

3/13/2026 at 10:51:36 PM

I did some research.

They were shutting down because of lack of gas. They secured some, so they will not shut down, only operate at 60% capacity.

If they shut down they represent less than 1% of world production.

by permalac

3/14/2026 at 2:11:29 AM

It’s going to be 90-100F in California next week.

Not sure how that impacts fertilizer demand, but it certainly screws up planting season.

The ground will be dry in a week or two, and they’re predicting the worst spring snowpack on record (after the wettest Christmas in Southern California on record).

Maybe someone else can use the fertilizer?

by hedora

3/14/2026 at 12:06:37 PM

Sulfur as well, crude coming out of middle east countries is quite sour and produces a lot of sulfur as a byproduct of refinement.

by _heimdall

3/14/2026 at 7:14:44 AM

[dead]

by stopbulying

3/13/2026 at 9:10:58 PM

Step 1: Put the helium in a blimp Step 2: Fly around the straight and over to Taiwan Step 3: Pump it into the chip factory

There you go, solved it.

by backprop1989

3/14/2026 at 11:55:03 AM

Step 1B: load up all the tanker vessels carrying the oil onto the helium blimp

Two birds, one stone baby! Just hopefully it doesn't get hit by a bird or something...

by adverbly

3/13/2026 at 9:52:10 PM

How do you get the blimp back?

by jayd16

3/13/2026 at 10:31:56 PM

Fold it up and ship it.

by badc0ffee

3/14/2026 at 11:44:05 AM

Ship it through the Straight of Hormuz?

by WJW

3/13/2026 at 11:53:23 PM

I think bigger question is, how do you bring the blimp down without dumping out helium?

by whatsupdog

3/14/2026 at 12:02:15 AM

Airships have air bags inside. Same deals as submarines. They take in and out ambient stuff into the bags to control buoyancy.

by numpad0

3/14/2026 at 4:34:11 AM

What ambient stuff is available at the altitude where a zeppelin typically flies?

by dotancohen

3/14/2026 at 5:06:51 AM

there is generally plenty of ambient air in the earth's atmosphere

by Retr0id

3/14/2026 at 2:12:40 PM

And how can that ambient air be stuffed into bags to control buoyancy?

by dotancohen

3/14/2026 at 7:57:40 PM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_pump

by Retr0id

3/14/2026 at 9:29:39 PM

An air pump will not compress the air such that it becomes dense enough to overcome the buoyancy of the helium. The idea is ridiculous.

by dotancohen

3/14/2026 at 9:59:22 PM

Tell that to the airships I guess

by Retr0id

3/14/2026 at 7:13:17 AM

so balloons appear to have negative mass, it's actually just the result of having lower density than the air. the upward force balances out with the gravity where the lbs/in^3 figure of its entirety matches that of ambient air. it's exactly the same as how an empty tank underwater floats, and a water filled tank underwater sinks.

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...

by numpad0

3/14/2026 at 6:30:22 AM

The stuff the Zeppelin/Blimp floats in

by cenamus

3/14/2026 at 2:13:52 PM

And how do you propose that stuff be stuffed into the bags to control buoyancy?

by dotancohen

3/14/2026 at 11:30:42 AM

Attach hooks to the bottom of the blimp and send a guy in a heavy sled with hooks on it, with helium balloons attached to it, to the bottom of the blimp. Attach the sled to the hooks on the blimp, then get the guy to pop all the sled's balloons. The blimp will land on the ground gently, if the math is right.

by ultratalk

3/14/2026 at 6:27:42 AM

you could compress the helium into tanks?

by 8note

3/13/2026 at 10:12:50 PM

Hydrogen

by 3842056935870

3/13/2026 at 10:23:20 PM

What do you do with the hydrogen once you're back

by csullivannet

3/14/2026 at 12:34:12 AM

Send it to the sun to get more helium!

by xuki

3/14/2026 at 4:26:02 AM

Fill it with hydrogen and just squeeze really hard.

by naruhodo

3/13/2026 at 10:48:55 PM

Explode it

by jonplackett

3/13/2026 at 10:32:22 PM

fresh water

by anabab

3/14/2026 at 8:23:10 AM

Shoot it down with a F22.

by randomNumber7

3/14/2026 at 10:14:05 AM

easy problem to solve- single use zepplins.

by adamwong246

3/13/2026 at 10:03:12 PM

An easy target for a drone!

by fuddle

3/13/2026 at 11:57:48 PM

At least it'd be non-flammable helium!

by darknavi

3/13/2026 at 9:50:59 PM

put the chip factory on the blimp

by fnord77

3/14/2026 at 1:59:49 AM

You do realize helium is a byproduct of LNG production and if you’re not pumping gas you’re not getting helium? It’s not a transportation issue.

by oefrha

3/14/2026 at 2:14:56 AM

Yes, except for this one flaw it's a perfect plan which would have worked perfectly.

by fwipsy

3/14/2026 at 12:14:48 PM

But that isn't even the issue. Drone attack on the plant that produces it. So even with the input materials. No dice for now.

by behehebd

3/14/2026 at 1:10:57 PM

That's only one part of it. Even if the plant isn't attacked, they're not gonna be pumping gas when storage is full and LNG can't be shipped out.

by oefrha

3/14/2026 at 7:14:36 AM

I always thought the socially inept computer enthusiast who can't detect social cues was an anachronism by this point in history but then I started visiting hackernews.

by b00ty4breakfast

3/13/2026 at 9:29:23 PM

Zeppelins are back, baby!

by sieep

3/14/2026 at 12:13:35 PM

What helium?

by behehebd

3/14/2026 at 2:14:36 AM

Nonsense. Deploy the SLS. Use the hydrogen tanks.

If the seals can hold hydrogen, helium should be easy for them.

/s

by hedora

3/14/2026 at 4:35:07 AM

If only the SLS seals would actually hold the hydrogen!

by dotancohen

3/13/2026 at 10:04:26 PM

The Hindenburg wants to know your location

Edit: oh right, know your chemistry...

by xg15

3/13/2026 at 4:04:36 PM

I remember hearing somewhere on this site that medical imaging got pretty good at building systems that recycle helium. Does chip manufacturing not do this or are the losses at their scale are still large enough that you need a substantial constant supply?

by abeppu

3/13/2026 at 7:48:38 PM

The big problem is purity. Fabs use grade 5 and 6 helium where contaminants are 1-10 parts per billion. The infrastructure to get it that pure becomes very specialized and any time the helium goes through a process it picks up so much contamination that recycling it would require the entire purifying and quality control infrastructure for pressure or temperature swing adsorption.

Some fabs are starting to reuse helium in downstream processes but there’s only so much they can do without expanding their core competency into yet another complex chemical manufacturing process.

MRI machines don’t need high purity helium and the contamination doesn’t “gunk up” all the tools so it’s not an issue to recycle it there.

by throwup238

3/13/2026 at 9:13:34 PM

Now I'm imagining a procedural cop show where they bust an illegal helium dealer, and one of the cops takes a huff to gauge what they're dealing with, and then squeaks out "that's the good stuff".

by davidw

3/16/2026 at 3:23:26 PM

You seem to have a very deep knowledge of aluminum and helium supply chains. Curious, what industry do you work in?

by tencentshill

3/13/2026 at 9:17:48 PM

> The infrastructure to get it that pure becomes very specialized

I think some of the most advanced fab infrastructure is the ultra pure water system. Water becomes quite aggressive chemically when it has no dissolved ions in it. You have to use exotic or highly processed materials simply to transport it around. If the factory didn't need such massive quantities of it, trucking it in would likely be preferable.

by bob1029

3/14/2026 at 8:50:06 AM

I guess you watch asianometry?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3RzODSR3gk

by NooneAtAll3

3/14/2026 at 1:29:04 PM

No. I worked at Samsung Austin Semiconductor during a large UPW upgrade project many years ago.

by bob1029

3/14/2026 at 12:17:35 AM

Ultrahigh density polyethylene isn't that exotic.

by wbl

3/14/2026 at 9:37:54 AM

What about microplastics?

by hxorr

3/14/2026 at 11:45:33 AM

What about them?

by WJW

3/14/2026 at 1:16:49 PM

They are toxic.

by _ache_

3/14/2026 at 2:03:34 PM

Well, good thing you aren't drinking it then, because the complete lack of electrolytes would kill you far faster than the microplastics. Surely if they can chemically purify the water to chip-making standards they can filter out the microplastics (when they are done with it)? At least one can hope.

by HenryMulligan

3/13/2026 at 10:03:52 PM

From the article I thought the helium was used mostly for cooling (where I imagine the purity wouldn't be that important)

But what other processes do the fabs use the helium for then?

by xg15

3/13/2026 at 10:31:38 PM

It is used a lot for cooling but in many systems its used without a classical heat exchangers where the helium is isolated from the workpiece.

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).

by throwup238

3/13/2026 at 10:36:37 PM

Thanks a lot for the info. Yeah, it makes sense that if you need pure helium anyway, you probably wouldn't create an entire second supply chain for impure helium.

by xg15

3/13/2026 at 9:01:28 PM

Do we have a process to make new helium from hydrogen?

by boredatoms

3/13/2026 at 9:12:22 PM

If you come up with a process to do that efficiently, the helium will be a lovely bonus but not remotely the most important result. :D

by Steuard

3/13/2026 at 9:56:15 PM

If you want to make new helium, it's far easier to go the other way.

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.

by pbmonster

3/13/2026 at 10:02:59 PM

Yeah, but it gets quite warm

by ascorbic

3/13/2026 at 9:06:07 PM

Nuclear fusion?

by frio

3/14/2026 at 6:20:55 AM

We usually take it from natural gas deposits instead.

by potwinkle

3/13/2026 at 6:42:28 PM

Some of the fabs do recycle as effectively as they can, but MRIs use it in a single process, in liquid form, in a relatively constrained container. Fabs use it for a variety of processes, ranging from wafer cooling to purging environments, to making ultra ultra clean chambers. The scale of what they use is higher, too, so even if an individual process is more efficiently recapturing helium, they might go through a few tons a day, with an MRI only using a few liters and losing 5% or less.

by observationist

3/13/2026 at 8:15:04 PM

Also fab companies have had to learn to be incredibly conservative about perceptively meaningless changes.

Most famously illustrated by Intel's "Copy Exactly!" methodology. https://duckduckgo.com/?q="copy%20exactly"+Intel

An adjacent IBM story that kinda explains why:

  During the year 1986, there was an anomalous increase in LSI memory problems. Electronics in early 1987 appeared to have problem rates approaching 20 times higher than predicted. In contrast, identical LSI memories being manufactured in Europe showed no anomalous problems. Because of knowledge of the radioactivity problem with the Intel 2107 RAMs, it was thought that the LSI package probably was at fault, since the IBM chips were mounted on similar ceramic materials. LSI ceramic packages made by IBM in Europe and in the U.S. were exchanged, but the European computer modules (with European chips and U.S. packaging) showed no fails, while the U.S. chips with European packages still failed at a high rate. This indicated that the problem was undoubtedly in the U.S.-manufactured LSI chips. In April 1987, significant design changes had been made to the memory chip with the most problems, a 4Kb bipolar RAM. The newer chip had been given the nickname Hera, and so at an early stage the incident became known as the "Hera problem."
  By June 1987, the problem was very serious. A group was organized to investigate the problem. The first breakthrough in understanding occurred with the analysis of "carcasses" from the memory chips (the term carcasses refers to the chips on an LSI wafer which do not work correctly, and are not used but saved in case some problem occurs at a future time). Some of these carcasses were shown to have significant radioactivity.
  Six weeks was spent in the manufacturing process lines, looking for radioactivity, and traces were found inside various processing units. However, it could not be determined whether these traces came from the raw materials used, or whether they were transferred from the chips themselves, which might have been contaminated earlier in their processing. Further, it was discovered that radioactive filaments (containing radioactive thorium) were commonly used in some evaporators. A detailed analysis by T. Zabel of some of the "hot" chips revealed that the radioactive contamination came from a single source: Po210 This isotope is found in the uranium decay chain, which contains about twelve different radioactive species. The surprising fact was that Po210 was the only contaminant on the LSI chips, and all the other expected decay-chain elements were missing. Hundreds of chips were analyzed for radioactivity, and Po210 contamination was found going back more than a year. Then it was found that whatever caused the radioactivity problem disappeared on all wafers started after May 22, 1987. After this precise date, all new wafers were free of contamination, except for small amounts which probably were contaminated by other older chips being processed by the same equipment. Since it takes about four months for chips to be manufactured, the pipeline was still full of "hot" chips in July and August 1987. Further sweeps of the manufacturing lines showed trace radioactivity, but the plant was essentially clean. The contamination had appeared in 1985, increased by more than 1000 times until May 22, 1987, and then totally disappeared!
  Several months passed, with widespread testing of manufacturing materials and tools, but no radioactive contamination was discovered. All memory chips in the manufacturing lines were spot-screened for radioactivity, but they were clean. The radioactivity reappeared in the manufacturing plant in early December 1987, mildly contaminating several hundred wafers, then disappeared again. A search of all the materials used in the fabrication of these chips found no source of the radioactivity. With further screening, and a lot of luck, a new and unused bottle of nitric acid was identified by J. Hannah as radioactive. One surprising aspect of this discovery was that, of twelve bottles in the single lot of acid, only one was contaminated. Since all screening of materials assumed lot-sized homogeneity, this discovery of a single bad sample in a large lot probably explained why previous scans of the manufacturing line had been negative. The unopened bottle of radioactive nitric acid led investigators back to a supplier's factory, and it was found that the radioactivity was being injected by a bottle-cleaning machine for semiconductor-grade acid bottles. This bottle cleaner used radioactive Po210 material to ionize an air jet which was used to dislodge electrostatic dust inside the bottles after washing. The jets were leaking radioactivity because of a change in the epoxy used to seal the Po210 inside the air jet capsule. Since these jets gave off infrequent and random bursts of radioactivity, only a few bottles out of thousands were contaminated.
An excerpt from: Ziegler, James F., et al. "IBM experiments in soft fails in computer electronics (1978–1994)." IBM journal of research and development 40.1 (1996): 3-18

Polonium is debuggable. More subtle statistical aberrations would be exponentially harder.

by robocat

3/13/2026 at 8:24:43 PM

this story would make a killer asianometry video

by nice_byte

3/13/2026 at 8:41:52 PM

CSI parody style?

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.

by robocat

3/13/2026 at 11:26:01 PM

Good to find another fan of asianometry channel ;)

I agree, this story above would be a perfect for another asianometry document.

by fix4fun

3/14/2026 at 12:26:03 AM

What a horror story. Incredible detective work.

by andrewflnr

3/14/2026 at 1:41:37 AM

Can someone explain why helium is used for these purposes, as opposed to some other noble gas? I think there's more argon (it's about 1% of the atmosphere) than helium so is helium somehow special, or is it just cheaper, despite being rarer and non-renewable?

by staplung

3/14/2026 at 2:01:33 AM

Helium has the second highest [1] specific heat capacity (after hydrogen); it's significantly higher than that of even water. It's damn efficient at cooling or heating. With that, it's chemically inert, unlike hydrogen or ammonia. There's no reasonable substitute.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_specific_heat_capacit... (Sort by the third column.)

by nine_k

3/14/2026 at 2:33:14 AM

Heat capacity is irrelevant -- argon and helium have exactly the same heat capacity per liter of gas, which would be the figure of merit in this context.

Heat conductivity, on the other hand, is an order of magnitude higher for helium, compared to argon, because its atoms are moving faster due to their lower mass.

When the gas is used for cooling, heat conductivity is important because it determines the conductivity through the boundary layer near surface, where the velocity of the flow drops to zero at the surface itself, and all the heat transport is through conduction rather than advection.

by generuso

3/14/2026 at 11:16:36 AM

It's about the thermal conductivity.

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.

by Panoramix

3/14/2026 at 6:43:25 AM

So turning our backs on globalisation was a mistake after all. Everyone needs everyone to work well together. So much winning.

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

by isodev

3/14/2026 at 6:47:41 AM

My graphics card is from 2016; you'll be fine.

by loeg

3/14/2026 at 8:54:21 AM

Globalization is not going anywhere. Without it you’re basically going to be Cuba 2.0

by dyauspitr

3/15/2026 at 12:08:31 AM

We're getting some moderately expensive and painful lessons about how hard it would be to deglobalize.

by dehrmann

3/14/2026 at 7:37:01 AM

Umm, I think you have it reversed. A helium plant in Qatar shutting down causing problems to US chip consumers is precisely because of globalization.

by SilverSlash

3/14/2026 at 7:59:57 AM

So what, you expect 195 countries to develop a copy of everything just so they can hate the other 194?

Connection and collaboration is always the better way forward.

by isodev

3/14/2026 at 11:55:55 AM

It's amazing how pretty much every reply to my original comment has failed to comprehend that I was not criticizing globalization. Whether it's even possible to get to where we are without it is also debatable.

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.

by SilverSlash

3/14/2026 at 12:22:25 PM

Your comment was technically true but I don't get the point of it.

by behehebd

3/14/2026 at 2:52:08 PM

Redundancy is not "hate", it's robustness against failure. Complex, interconnected supply chains are fragile. If you're building an online storage API, you would (I hope) consider it deeply irresponsible not to setup plenty of followers of the main system for redundancy and automatic fail over. The idea that supply chains should not do this, or that any such suggestions are emotionally driven decisions is extremely bizarre.

Yes, this may increase costs slightly because robustness necessarily has a cost associated with it.

by naasking

3/14/2026 at 8:25:46 AM

It's hard to imagine chip supply chain could be commercially viable without globalization.

One could probably argue that giving up globalization means fewer and less capable products.

by jopsen

3/14/2026 at 11:58:01 AM

Good, we agree :)

by SilverSlash

3/14/2026 at 8:48:42 AM

You can have a 1960s isolated all in country production line if you're happy with the products of the 1960s.

by pjc50

3/14/2026 at 2:53:30 PM

It's a little weird that you seem to think that humans can't make technological progress without globalization.

by naasking

3/14/2026 at 10:17:26 PM

Thanks for the American clowns and their terrorism, now the working class people of the rest of the world have to deal with one more head ache.

by globemaster99

3/13/2026 at 2:14:54 PM

So the RAM prices are going to skyrocket again?

by arunc

3/13/2026 at 6:41:21 PM

Of course, everything at the moment regardless of good or bad means higher RAM price.

by HerbManic

3/13/2026 at 10:45:38 PM

Have a bad first date? Higher RAM prices.

Your dog ran away? Higher RAM prices.

Lower RAM prices? Believe it or not, higher RAM prices.

by brynnbee

3/13/2026 at 8:39:58 PM

I tried upgrading to 32 GB of RAM...but the bank offered me a mortgage instead...

by johnbarron

3/13/2026 at 8:59:39 PM

I had a stroke of luck this week - I am due a new laptop at work, and ordered a new ThinkPad T14, as they have served me well in the past.

Then IT calls back and says that I shouldn't configure one directly at Lenovo's website, as we are to buy them from a retailer instead.

OK, can do - but they only stock a few models, and the one with the CPU and disk I had configured with Lenovo was only available with 64GB RAM at the retailer. What to do?

'Ouch, that's gonna make accounting hurt. We'll order it for you right away.'

by lb1lf

3/14/2026 at 1:54:20 AM

Yes I'm so glad I got a p14s with 64 GB of RAM in the fall

by cozzyd

3/13/2026 at 8:08:38 PM

Tech divers are also probably gonna be having a Bad Time. Helium mixes are already pretty expensive, I assume this will make it far worse.

by hbrav

3/13/2026 at 11:17:21 PM

This is an extremely pure form of He, not the stuff used by the divers. That's a completely different supply chain.

by bgnn

3/13/2026 at 8:10:47 PM

Also, copper welding involves the use of helium as shielding gas. Helium shortage is painful

by vablings

3/14/2026 at 9:47:17 AM

Interesting. Do you know why it uses helium?

by jimnotgym

3/15/2026 at 3:07:47 AM

A few different reasons, none of which i feel qualified to explain.

All of my knowledge is second hand from this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRxAANqmrL0

The man in the video is Chris Razer and he explains everything very well. I wish he had more long form content online for people to learn and understand

by vablings

3/13/2026 at 1:15:25 PM

Aren’t there huge stockpiles of helium in the US? I can buy party sized tanks at Target or big tanks at the usual places like welding supply places.

by trollbridge

3/13/2026 at 6:28:11 PM

Helium for party balloons is low grade and not pure enough for chip fab use, so stacking up birthday tanks won't keep TSMC running. Industrial grade helium has a restricted and oddly international supply chain thanks to regulation and a few weirdly-placed depots. The US 'helium stockpile' isn't really a menu you can just order from when a factory across the planet runs dry, especially if offtakes and logistics are tied up by decade-old government contracts. If you want to see supply chain fragility, try pricing MRI-grade helium after a shutdown and watch everyone in medical procurement panic quitely.

by hrmtst93837

3/13/2026 at 9:57:12 PM

Isn't Helium one of the easiest elements to purify? Just cool it below 14 Kelvin, which will make everything else freeze out. Collect the remaining liquid, which should be pure Helium.

by jiggawatts

3/13/2026 at 11:18:40 PM

14 kelvin is not easy to achieve at scale + after that, you need to keep it pure.

by bgnn

3/13/2026 at 11:52:11 PM

Apparently 14 K cooling is not used even up to 5N or 6N purity, commercial large-scale sources use various other tricks to remove the other gases. They do cool the input gas down to liquid nitrogen temperatures as one of the first steps.

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.

by jiggawatts

3/14/2026 at 1:40:34 AM

You can't just spin up such a facility in a few days or weeks though, surely? Even if the core of a process is relatively simple physically, you still need all the supporting infrastructure to make it happen.

by danparsonson

3/14/2026 at 6:13:48 AM

Starting from an empty lot, no, it would take nearly a year.

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.

by jiggawatts

3/13/2026 at 8:07:51 PM

after what kind of shutdown?

by jason_s

3/13/2026 at 8:38:15 PM

If the helium gets warm, you have to vent it outside before it goes kaboom from the pressure.

https://radiology.ucsf.edu/patient-care/patient-safety/mri-s...

by ceejayoz

3/13/2026 at 9:56:39 PM

Damn, that's intense:

> 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.

by amatecha

3/14/2026 at 8:56:28 AM

note for hospitals: doors into MRI rooms should open outside

by NooneAtAll3

3/13/2026 at 7:33:28 PM

All natural gas deposits contain helium at various concentrations, it's only commercially worth harvesting above a certain percentage but speculate the problem is the US can't just fill the Qatar loss in supply immediately since we have plentiful natural gas.

by stevenwoo

3/13/2026 at 8:01:26 PM

Makes sense.

We have so much gas where I live that there are places it’s just flared off and burned, because it’s less greenhouse emissions than it escaping unburned.

by trollbridge

3/13/2026 at 8:09:26 PM

If it's being burned, it isn't helium.

by GeorgeWBasic

3/13/2026 at 8:51:30 PM

Helium deposits don't exist is the thing, the same structures in the Earth which trap methane gas also trap helium gas and some of them trap enough to make recovery economically viable.

by XorNot

3/14/2026 at 11:02:10 PM

And that helium comes from Alpha decay of Uranium and Thorium.

by HPsquared

3/14/2026 at 3:49:45 AM

Today, I learned Helium does burn, and when it burns, it forms Carbon.

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.

by hedora

3/13/2026 at 8:24:51 PM

Parent is referring to natural gas

by HPsquared

3/13/2026 at 2:11:07 PM

Balloon gas is ~20% oxygen, so your kids don't go unconscious while doing the funny voices.

by emsign

3/13/2026 at 7:07:24 PM

https://www.bocgases.ie/files/balloon_grade_helium_factsheet... says 95% helium and 1% oxygen while https://dan.org/alert-diver/article/helium-gas-purity-what-i... says 97.5% helium but very unlikely for it to be as low as 80%

by icwtyjj

3/13/2026 at 7:36:50 PM

"An overview of the different common grades of helium" - https://zephyrsolutions.com/what-are-the-different-grades-of...

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.”

by inaros

3/14/2026 at 3:21:32 AM

Interesting bit from that article wrt to transport infrastructure:

"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."

by deceptionatd

3/13/2026 at 7:24:48 PM

I wonder if one of you could be going by number of atoms, and the other could be going by weight?

by bee_rider

3/13/2026 at 8:28:44 PM

Helium for diving is going to be a different mix than what's used for balloons. In diving it's used to reduce the partial pressure of oxygen, and also to quickly diffuse back out of tissues when returning to the surface. Very different application!

by HPsquared

3/13/2026 at 9:11:00 PM

Sorry i was referencing "Balloon grade H is the least pure at 97.5 percent." from the diving article

by icwtyjj

3/13/2026 at 7:50:52 PM

I believe that that's the stuff you buy in the shop, the non-refillable containers. If you buy a proper refillable balloon gas cylinder it's the higher grade stuff. Source: bought the shop stuff, got disappointed, bought the cylinder, happy.

by kerridge0

3/13/2026 at 7:03:54 PM

You sure about that? Everything I've ever heard says that balloon gas is generally grade 4, which is 99.99% pure. Not good enough for MRI, but quite a lot better than 80%.

by rootusrootus

3/13/2026 at 7:33:42 PM

Economically I expect it wouldn't be that pure, since it doesn't have to be that pure to provide lift, and party balloons are not trying to maximize lift.

by pfdietz

3/13/2026 at 7:42:21 PM

Out of curiosity I did a minor amount of research to get an idea.

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.

by rootusrootus

3/13/2026 at 7:46:15 PM

Perhaps "balloon grade" here is not "party balloon grade". Weather balloons? Research balloons?

by pfdietz

3/13/2026 at 8:02:33 PM

My guess is that places like AirGas aren't really supplying many weather or research balloons. I suspect the easier answer is 'Balloon Time is low grade crap aimed at people who don't know any better and just want to pick up some balloon gas while grocery shopping.' It's like the difference between people who go to a gas station to refill propane tanks, and people who swap them at Home Depot. (though the smart fellers do swap at Home Depot occasionally, if they need a fresher tank...)

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.

by rootusrootus

3/14/2026 at 12:02:17 AM

AirGas prioritizes industrial users, in the case of helium, copper welding. Argon is perfectly good enough for almost all welding purposes, but copper is different because of its heat conductivity. The heat from the weld really wants to go anywhere else. Helium has substantially higher heat conductivity than argon, which allows the heat to flow from the electric arc into the metal faster, resulting in better welds.

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.

by nwallin

3/14/2026 at 2:38:48 PM

Do you know if the other 20% is oxygen (as was claimed) or if it's air? I just think the latter seems cheaper and more likely.

by kzrdude

3/15/2026 at 10:59:36 AM

I think it may be CO2. CO2 in the gas would cause all sorts of unpleasant effects that would discourage continuing to breath it, and CO2 is probably cheaper to store and transport than oxygen.

by pfdietz

3/13/2026 at 8:08:02 PM

>99.99% pure. Not good enough for MRI

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?

by Jblx2

3/13/2026 at 8:44:43 PM

I can personally attest that this is not foolproof, if it is even the case. Those helium tanks you can buy for large parties knocked me out as a kid. Lost consciousness fell to the ground, blacked out. Supervise your kids if you buy one!

by meroes

3/13/2026 at 8:06:10 PM

We're dumb enough now to have forgotten history.

Moar hydrogen party balloons. Making partying fun again!

by kylehotchkiss

3/13/2026 at 7:35:44 PM

People commit suicide with it because it's supposedly painless and quick.

by stevenwoo

3/13/2026 at 10:31:08 PM

Same applies to every gas that isn't carbon dioxide. Your body only cares about expelling CO2, it hasn't evolved a way to detect oxygen in the breathing gas mix. Divers know all about this.

by tadfisher

3/13/2026 at 3:04:15 PM

[flagged]

by shmeeed

3/13/2026 at 6:55:15 PM

This is very likely not true.

by qwertox

3/13/2026 at 7:07:53 PM

Would you like to offer a rebuttal more well reasoned and thought out than "nuh-uh"?

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".

by estimator7292

3/13/2026 at 8:44:17 PM

What is asserted without evidence may be dismissed without evidence.

(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.)

by gjm11

3/13/2026 at 9:08:08 PM

While a reasonable principle I don't think it applies in context. People aren't expected to exhaustively source comments on HN. There's subjective etiquette to it.

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.

by fc417fc802

3/13/2026 at 10:41:51 PM

True but you can provide evidence to increase the quality of your claim.

by Braxton1980

3/13/2026 at 7:12:00 PM

> You could do 30 seconds of research

So could you, right?

by loloquwowndueo

3/13/2026 at 6:18:50 PM

Depending on who you go to, some places will not sell you tanks of Helium. We did a balloon launch expecting to use Hydrogen because Helium was going to be problematic. The sales rep at the supply place took a look at the group of us knuckleheads with absolutely no Hydrogen experience and ended up selling us the Helium while also exchanging all of our connectors. Hydrogen tanks use specific connectors different from all other tanks to make using a hydrogen take by mistake very difficult. I was nervous about using hydrogen and had no issue with the higher price for the helium knowing I wasn't going to catch on fire.

by dylan604

3/13/2026 at 7:41:53 PM

Good old JIT stock management for essential materials, right?

One’d think that they’d keep more than a couple of weeks’s supply of critical materials —too bad many copied Cook’s and others’s JIT inventory management for everything.

by mc32

3/13/2026 at 1:27:44 PM

Messer Completes Acquisition of Federal Helium System from BLM https://www.messer-us.com/press-releases/messer-completes-ac...

by vasco

3/13/2026 at 1:51:36 PM

Why did we sell it instead of lease? This seems like something that should be in public hands.

by bix6

3/13/2026 at 8:00:58 PM

The Helium Privatization Act of 1996 (HPA) required it. It passed to House on a voice vote and the Senate by unanimous consent and was signed by President Clinton.

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).

by tzs

3/13/2026 at 2:17:41 PM

Ideological idiocy, the dismantling of anything public turning into private hands is ideologically pure for libertarian-inclined folks, no matter how strategically stupid it might be.

by piva00

3/13/2026 at 8:18:14 PM

This. 1000x this.

by hn_acc1

3/13/2026 at 9:28:14 PM

Seems more directly capitalist than libertarian to me.

by fc417fc802

3/14/2026 at 9:31:36 AM

Neoliberal capitalism is founded on absorbing parts of libertarian thinking. The "capitalism" moniker of today used by ideologues is coupled to the meaning of it given by neoliberals.

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.

by piva00

3/13/2026 at 2:04:53 PM

sorry thats too far left wing an opinion in america today

by cagenut

3/13/2026 at 2:16:47 PM

The sale was completed in 2024.

by infogulch

3/13/2026 at 2:24:37 PM

I feel that as soon as the existential threat easened with the splintering of the Soviet Union, the US started doing some self-harming libertarian flavored shit to itself.

In the 1980s, I assume getting rid of the "strategic reserve" of anything would have met more pushback, because of primal fear overriding greed.

by actionfromafar

3/13/2026 at 7:53:59 PM

> We are going to do a terrible thing to you — we are going to deprive you of an enemy.

– Georgi Arbatov, Soviet political scientist, 1988

by scythe

3/13/2026 at 8:03:27 PM

Wasn’t the original purpose of the strategic helium reserve to build fleets of zeppelins?

by trollbridge

3/13/2026 at 7:47:14 PM

Yes, Reagan was noted for his desire to avoid privatization of anything. /s

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.

by noah_buddy

3/13/2026 at 2:25:03 PM

For those who don't understand, Biden sold the Helium not Trump - he took office on Jan 20, 2025.

by phr4ts

3/13/2026 at 2:41:27 PM

"Current law (cira 2013) requires BLM to sell off the crude helium remaining in the Federal Helium Reserve in order to repay the U.S. Treasury the $1.3 billion debt incurred creating it. This debt will be repaid this fiscal year and that, as a consequence, the helium program will terminate at the end of the current fiscal year (October 1, 2013), absent Congressional action. Currently, the Federal Helium Reserve supplies roughly 40% of domestic and 30% of global helium demand. Loss of access to the Federal Helium Reserve would result in significant disruptions to a large number of critical U.S. industries." https://www.energy.senate.gov/services/files/494b2f9e-c8f5-4...

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/...

by baldeagle

3/13/2026 at 3:18:54 PM

> too far left wing

> biden

uhm...

by 4ggr0

3/13/2026 at 7:27:17 PM

His admin was by far the most left wing in history, only the actual far left think otherwise

by edgyquant

3/13/2026 at 7:35:02 PM

Please don't call everyone names for not agreeing with you.

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.

by ImPostingOnHN

3/13/2026 at 7:58:45 PM

How does he compare with Nixon, who created the EPA?

by cyberax

3/13/2026 at 9:46:36 PM

Biden is an anti-abortion Catholic Zionist who wouldn't even do anything (but empty talk) to raise the minimum wage during high inflation. He enabled a genocide so his gods would reward him. I guess he would be a radical commie to the extreme far right. Nixon, JFK, LBJ and Lincoln, for example, signed into law actual left policies (whether they agreed with them or not-- none were lefties).

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

by sillystuff

3/13/2026 at 2:29:11 PM

crypto-libertarian "government bad" ideology is one hell of a drug.

by forgetfreeman

3/13/2026 at 2:47:10 PM

well it was signed into law by obama, so there's that.

by dnautics

3/13/2026 at 5:04:40 PM

I'm no partisan. Politicians elected to serve corporate interests come in your choice of red or blue.

by forgetfreeman

3/13/2026 at 5:37:04 PM

of course but i think characterizing obama as a Crypto-Libertarian is a disservice to carter, who was actually a crypto-libertarian

by dnautics

3/13/2026 at 6:47:34 PM

yes the president is the law giver, he who conceives, imposes, and bears in perpetuity all responsibilities for all laws passed during his term

by kristjansson

3/13/2026 at 4:12:52 PM

I like the guy, but he was GOP-lite as a president, served corporate interests.

by stvltvs

3/13/2026 at 9:30:21 PM

The GOP isn't "crypto-libertarian" by any stretch of the imagination. That's probably even more absurd than the people who suggest the GOP is "financially conservative".

by fc417fc802

3/14/2026 at 12:06:38 AM

The thing there is the GOP was financially conservative a few decades ago and it's like nobody bothered to update the wiki.

by forgetfreeman

3/13/2026 at 1:30:14 PM

Foi de vasco (died).

by owebmaster

3/13/2026 at 1:50:56 PM

A lot of the balloon use has switched to nitrogen (helium became much, much more expensive after the strategic helium reserve was sold off)

by fluidcruft

3/13/2026 at 7:06:05 PM

Nitrogen? That's basically just air, what good would a balloon be using nitrogen? Might as well just blow it up with your lungs. It's certainly not going to float in any case.

by rootusrootus

3/15/2026 at 2:57:15 PM

I think you're correct it's just air being mixed in not nitrogen, specifically. Stores like Party City started pushing things like arches and stems and other things that hold up balloons up rather than float. It is a lot cheaper to sell a larger quantity of balloons filled with air than a few helium-filled balloons. They also switched their floating gas mix to 60/40 to reduce costs (except for mylar balloons which are heavier and require 100 to float). That's how I remember it from buying balloons for birthday parties a few years ago.

by fluidcruft

3/13/2026 at 6:34:10 PM

> balloon use ... helium became much, much more expensive

More than just from inflation? (sorry, not sorry!)

by ralferoo

3/13/2026 at 1:59:42 PM

Is lifting gas? That’s pretty cool.

by bilsbie

3/13/2026 at 2:14:07 PM

Technically yes, but practically no. Air is 78% nitrogen. Nitrogen is 3.3% lighter than air. Helium is 86.2% lighter than air. Hydrogen is 93% lighter than air.

by nerdsniper

3/13/2026 at 11:06:12 PM

How much does that matter for party balloons, though? It's still buoyant.

by joemi

3/14/2026 at 6:05:47 AM

A spherical balloon 20cm in radius is displacing 41g of air. Even ignoring compression (which I don’t know enough to quantify the effects of, except that it will make the numbers more unfavourable), nitrogen’s 3.3%-lighter gives you a budget of only 1.35g for the balloon. I believe balloons hare heavier than this, so the balloon will still sink (a little more slowly than an air-filled one, but I’m not sure how noticeable the difference will be).

by chrismorgan

3/14/2026 at 9:59:22 PM

> which I don’t know enough to quantify the effects of

You probably do, actually! People constantly underestimate the grand utility of their basic education.

At near-atmospheric pressure and typical ambient temperatures, the ideal gas equation (PV=nRT) from introductory physics works very well and indicates that a 3% overpressure would make gases 3% more dense (linear direct proportionality). At some threshold of high pressures/ low temperatures, you'd want to switch your equation of state (EOS) from ideal gas law to something else. Peng-Robinson would be a good choice for a non-polar gas like Nitrogen, if its >10-50 atm pressure and/or < -50C temperature.

At 20 degC, 1.00atm to 3kPa gauge pressure, ideal gas law predicts nitrogen would increase in density by 2.9608%. Whereas Peng-Robinson predicts it would increase in density by ever-so-slightly more, 2.9623%. This is truly negligible, so better to use the simples EOS for explainability (which would be the ideal gas law).

by nerdsniper

3/15/2026 at 2:37:29 PM

Yeah, I didn’t know enough to quantify those effects! :-)

by chrismorgan

3/14/2026 at 5:51:01 AM

I feel like people really need to learn basic physics.

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.

by nerdsniper

3/13/2026 at 2:09:03 PM

No.

by cpncrunch

3/13/2026 at 6:52:49 PM

not just. huge deposits opened (actively being exploited) up in colorado, utah in the past few years and Minnesota this year

by dnautics

3/13/2026 at 11:03:31 PM

This situation would be laughable if the consequences weren't so dire.

I have problems adequately stating just how incompetent and ill-thought out this entire misadventure was. I say this because everything that's happened has been completely foreseeable and foreseen, including the ability of Iran to retaliate by closing the Strait of Hormuz.

This has been something many militaries around the world have planned scenarios for. Word has it any warnings from allies, the NSC and the Joint Chiefs were just completely ignored. And those estimates probably underestimated how numerous and effective Iranian SRBMs and Shahed drones are.

Beyond direct impacts on crude oil, refined oil products and natural gas, there are secondary effects such as ~30 of the world's fertilizer goes through the Strait. Helium from Qatar is an issue but at least there are other sources for Helium, being pretty much any natural gas well so equipped to capture helium.

We are the bad guys.

by jmyeet

3/14/2026 at 9:12:40 AM

> 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.

Yup. Even illiterate could tell just looking at the damn map. Gotta wonder if somebody on top is trying to undermine own country...

by throwaway290

3/14/2026 at 8:31:46 AM

Who are the good guys?

by randomNumber7

3/14/2026 at 10:41:25 AM

Sometimes there isn't a good guy, just a bad guy and a worse guy.

by cowanon2222

3/14/2026 at 12:56:22 PM

Do you think the US is worse than Iran?

by randomNumber7

3/14/2026 at 5:02:48 PM

By any metric, yes, the US has killed more people and caused more harm than Iran by orders of magnitude.

by jmyeet

3/13/2026 at 11:55:48 PM

Not just many foreign militaries. Our military. General Dan Caine by report advised Trump about the negative consequences of this action. MAGA elected a fantasist and narcissist and we will all bear the consequences. I was no fan of Kamala but the appalling limitations of Trump are of a different order and it is a disgrace that our voters by majority elected him.

by cleandreams

3/14/2026 at 4:56:17 AM

I feel like people in these comments and commentators in general are just kind of ignoring the fact that the US produces more helium than Qatar, and in fact more helium than the entire Middle East combined, nearly 50% of the global total. The sale of the "helium reserve" is (mostly) irrelevant as well, because there's massive domestic helium production. https://www.wmi.badw.de/the-institute/helium-liquefaction-pl...

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.)

by Robotbeat

3/14/2026 at 6:05:49 AM

> South Korea is among the most exposed countries, which, according to the Korea International Trade Association, imported 64.7% of its helium from Qatar in 2025. The country relies heavily on helium imports to cool silicon wafers during fabrication and is understood to have no viable substitute.

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?

by DoctorOetker

3/14/2026 at 6:34:33 AM

It's not enclosed in the final product. It is used during manufacturing. For example, you mechanically compress helium to get liquid helium, then when it depressurizes back to ambient pressure, it's -269 C, which is pretty close to "as cold as possible", and colder than any alternatives.

by foodevl

3/14/2026 at 1:43:01 PM

why can't this happen in a closed loop, using helium as the working fluid?

by DoctorOetker

3/14/2026 at 2:54:53 PM

I assume purity matters. It probably picks up a lot of contaminants during use, and chip manufacturing is pretty sensitive to contaminants.

by naasking

3/14/2026 at 7:49:03 PM

you can put He in a closed loop system and still use it for cooling, by using it as the thermodynamic working fluid, and then selecting any other fluid as the heat carrier?

by DoctorOetker

3/14/2026 at 9:02:19 PM

That's not clear actually. It's been awhile since I watched the video on the ASML EUV system for etching wafers, but from my recollection, the UV light ablates away layers of wafers and so particles of silicon presumably contaminate the noble gas that's flowing over it. I don't think a closed loop is possible in the existing setups.

by naasking

3/14/2026 at 11:14:35 PM

thats what I am questioning, wouldn't another gas be feasible?

I do know that some parts and components actually do have helium enclosed in the part package (can or so, not the shipping packaging!)

I'm getting mixed signals: its for the phase transition temperature, its for cleaning, ...

is EUV actually ablating layers of wafer? I thought the EUV was for patterning photoresist, you make it sound like ASML eliminated photoresist?

by DoctorOetker

3/15/2026 at 1:42:16 PM

Here is the Veritasium video where they review ASML's EUV lithography in depth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiUHjLxm3V0

High thermal conductivity, inertness, and low absorption of the EUV wavelength used are the primary characteristics needed, and purity is needed to eliminate contamination of numerous ultrasensitive stages. AI summarized it as follows:

EUV tools require ultra‑high‑purity helium, typically grade 9N (99.9999999%) or better, with strict ppb‑level limits on: Nitrogen, Oxygen, Moisture, Hydrocarbons, Refractory compounds, Particulates.

How helium is used: - Cooling the EUV plasma source - Purging and protecting optics - Maintaining inert, ultra‑clean environments - Leak detection

by naasking

3/13/2026 at 9:00:38 PM

The people trump relies on to make his decisions (if he's making them) include tons of far right accelerationists; so they'd be happy to watch modern society fall.

by cyanydeez

3/14/2026 at 8:54:22 AM

That's really the worst case scenario, that people who manipulate policy of the most powerful country just want everything burn.

by throwaway290

3/13/2026 at 1:23:43 PM

Great timing that the US recently sold its strategic helium supply.

by lpcvoid

3/13/2026 at 2:13:40 PM

BLM [(Bureau of Land Management)] completes $460M sale of federal helium reserve to private company | 12/12/2024 | https://www.eenews.net/articles/blm-completes-460m-sale-of-f...

Messer Completes Acquisition of Federal Helium System from BLM | June 27, 2024 | https://www.messer-us.com/press-releases/messer-completes-ac...

by infogulch

3/13/2026 at 2:35:07 PM

BLM was required (to sell it) by Congress in the Helium Stewardship Act of 2013, as the alternative was to not offer any H to the market due to the authorization to sell expiring. Sponsored by a Republican and passed basically unanimously with the proceeds used to pay of the debt (back when we cared about that)

by baldeagle

3/13/2026 at 6:21:51 PM

The idea of selling things like our strategic helium supply for $460M to "pay off the debt" would be like me selling bricks from the foundation of my house for a penny to "pay off my mortgage".

by robmccoll

3/13/2026 at 8:07:49 PM

$460M was for what was left after the large majority had already been sold.

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.

by AnthonyMouse

3/13/2026 at 8:47:27 PM

That strategic helium reserve was from WWI, IIRC.

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.

by avidiax

3/14/2026 at 8:56:15 AM

> That strategic helium reserve was from WWI, IIRC.

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.

by AnthonyMouse

3/13/2026 at 9:46:53 PM

> In the best case, "strategic reserves" are the government speculating on commodity prices.

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.

by fc417fc802

3/14/2026 at 8:25:18 AM

> First, providing the government with the ability to stabilize market prices in the short term when volatility strikes.

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.

by AnthonyMouse

3/14/2026 at 1:11:36 PM

People aren't as stupid as you appear to think. Yes, there are second (and third, forth, ...) order effects. Typically these sorts of systems will settle into an equilibrium. A reasonably competent government agency will account for that where necessary.

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.

by fc417fc802

3/14/2026 at 6:13:42 PM

> 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.

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.

by AnthonyMouse

3/13/2026 at 6:30:38 PM

What if it's not actually your house, but some unspecified "somebody else's", and you only stand to profit from it? Starts to make sense why some unscrupulous people would go that way, shitty as it is.

by embedding-shape

3/13/2026 at 6:24:31 PM

Wouldn't another alternative be to renew the authorization to sell? This doesn't seem much different from just deciding to sell it.

by Noumenon72

3/13/2026 at 6:31:32 PM

Republicans believe that the federal government shouldn't be involved in it at all. So a reauth bill would effectively be DOA.

But yeah, that would make more sense.

by TehCorwiz

3/14/2026 at 2:19:34 AM

> Republicans believe

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…

by happyopossum

3/14/2026 at 8:23:13 PM

If individual party members voted against the party line more often there would be less of this kind of discourse. But the reality is that we have a deeply entrenched deeply divided two-party system. There are very few politicians who don't toe one line or the other and endure. But in this case it's a core tenet of the republican party platform to eliminate the administrative state, including strategic investment and reserves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast

by TehCorwiz

3/13/2026 at 2:46:41 PM

thanks obama?

by dnautics

3/13/2026 at 2:12:34 PM

yeah that was completely crazy... never understood why they would do something like that

by desireco42

3/13/2026 at 2:20:23 PM

An explanation is particular political group was ideologically enthralled with privatization.

by linkregister

3/13/2026 at 4:37:40 PM

The same group will later happily blame the government for doing said stupid thing.

by karmakurtisaani

3/13/2026 at 2:13:29 PM

Those party ballons were very cheap for a while.

by actionfromafar

3/13/2026 at 10:17:13 PM

Helium output from the Persian Gulf is about 5 million cubic meters a month. Which (liquefied) is about 40 truckloads a week

This article is just hysteria

by paulsutter

3/13/2026 at 10:22:47 PM

Removing 30% of the supply of a very important, and completely irreplaceable for most of its uses, resource isn’t hysteria.

by SideQuark

3/14/2026 at 2:21:33 AM

The point is it doesn’t take giant tankers going through the Strait of Hormuz to move this volume. It could be handled by tanker trucks going to Suez….

by happyopossum

3/14/2026 at 3:33:35 AM

This has nothing to do with transport. Iranian drone strikes disabled a Qatari helium _production_ facility.

by deceptionatd

3/14/2026 at 6:33:14 PM

You should be able to make a killing placing commodity bets right now, because you have such crystal clear vision for the causal chain currently underway

What are your top positions? You will never need to work again!

by paulsutter

3/14/2026 at 7:19:32 AM

I understand oil part. But why everything else can only be manufactured in these desert regions of the world?

by zkmon

3/14/2026 at 8:49:55 AM

Helium is actually a gas byproduct. It's naturally mixed in with the well gas.

by pjc50

3/14/2026 at 7:46:30 AM

Gas.It is needed in lots of processes. It's very difficult and extremely expensive to transport gas. So the best solution is to use it at the place it's extracted.

by poilcn

3/14/2026 at 4:51:40 AM

Accelerationists gonna accelerate

by jondwillis

3/14/2026 at 7:59:57 AM

"Helium production"? I'm assuming they're not running a fusion reactor...

by steven_noble

3/14/2026 at 2:39:56 PM

We can try the same with "oil production"

by kzrdude

3/13/2026 at 9:01:09 PM

Completely self inflicted at the request of Israel.

by CommanderData

3/13/2026 at 7:40:59 PM

This is, according to Hegseth, just something they planned for, since they knew what was going to happen.

by CrzyLngPwd

3/13/2026 at 7:53:06 PM

I had an eye opening discussion with an IT admin who stated with a straight face that their “patching strategy was not to patch”.

They have a patch strategy! They considered requirements when deciding the strategy! They have a documented strategy, it’s just very brief. (“Don’t.”)

The Trump admin may have similarly thought about this issue for a few seconds, shrugged their shoulders and decided that this might force manufacturers to go on-shore.

You and I know it won’t, certainly not in the immediate future, which means massive disruption to industry, but that’s not the same as “no plan”.

by jiggawatts

3/14/2026 at 11:42:27 AM

South Korea should be pressuring the US to cut it out with the unprovoked and unjustified attack on Iran. Both because of the Hormuz straights situation, and because next time, Trump or some other genius US administration might decide to pull some kind of similar stunt somewhere even closer to SK, putting it in more serious danger, despite of its objections, and of intl. treaties, and of basic common sense etc.

... but I'm not holding my breath.

by einpoklum

3/13/2026 at 9:39:35 PM

Will this crash the AI bubble?

by pocksuppet

3/14/2026 at 12:32:09 PM

AI creates the stag

This creates the flation

by behehebd

3/14/2026 at 12:17:28 AM

Freight rate volatility is one of the most underappreciated risks in physical product businesses. During the 2021-2022 shipping crisis, ocean freight from China to the US West Coast hit $20k+ per container — a 10x jump that wiped margins for importers who hadn't hedged. Air freight as a backup is worth keeping in your model even if you never use it; knowing your break-even point at air rates tells you a lot about product viability.

by luzejian

3/14/2026 at 1:26:01 AM

How would you model your business like this? Like what tools / literature can you recommend?

by awesomeMilou

3/14/2026 at 2:19:14 AM

There was a lot written about this in the 1990s during the rise of globalization and just in time supply chains.

Basically, you build a big warehouse and keep it full when prices are below projection.

This is equivalent to investing capital at a negative interest rate, so it’s not done anymore. Instead, the system is designed to pass supply shocks on to the consumer when possible.

I’ve noticed the local grocery stores have started replacing shelf price tags with little computers so they can reprice food in real time. (And hire fewer stock people),

Anyway, the keyword you want is “just in time supply chain”.

by hedora

3/14/2026 at 1:42:53 PM

> This is equivalent to investing capital at a negative interest rate, so it’s not done anymore.

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.

by znnajdla

3/14/2026 at 6:36:29 PM

but there's finite resources. cost-benefit analysis still makes sense. there are things that consumers can easily substitute.

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...

by pas

3/15/2026 at 8:04:36 PM

Nope, this is bullshit. Some things you simply cannot put a price on, and therefore are not amenable to cost benefit analysis. What’s the cost of a human life? The cost of sovereignty and freedom and independence? The cost of wanting to live the lifestyle we want, such as eating meat even when there are alternatives? The cost of beauty and love? Financializers simply ignore all of the things they cannot put a price on and lose all of the above.

by znnajdla

3/16/2026 at 12:00:28 PM

Trade offs are still real even if you decide to run away from them.

Finance is a service that facilitates a form of this. The questions you ask all require context.

For example we have a rough estimate of how much the Iranian regime spent on chasing the dream of nuclear deterrence. About 2 trillion dollars. This is the trade off they went with. This is the money that they did not put into desalination plants, for example. And similarly, just to again see how important context is. They decided to make themselves more sanction-proof, which means growing a lot of food in a very arid region, which requires a lot of water. Again, even though a bushel of wheat on the global market is cheaper than growing their own, they decided the risk of getting cut off was not worth it.

Also I'm not saying "sell 'em all; let the market sort it out", quite the opposite. But without even having a way to put prices on things we can't even talk about what and how much to tax, and what we are collectively then spending that public money on, and then see how much sense that makes.

by pas

3/14/2026 at 2:41:49 PM

Yes but think of the shareholders! And that doesn’t show up nicely on a spreadsheet does it?

by klysm

3/15/2026 at 5:18:59 AM

I can and can't believe that for the whole thread, your comment is the only one with the phrase "just in time".

If you want hydraulic shock, you replace your warehouse with fedex.

by genxy

3/14/2026 at 9:44:20 AM

Excel normally

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?

by jimnotgym

3/14/2026 at 12:03:34 AM

[dead]

by ClaudeAgent_WK

3/13/2026 at 2:08:39 PM

Iran will make AI go pop.

by emsign

3/14/2026 at 12:12:31 AM

so we'll get the actual Mahdi and a Butlerian Jihad? Bless the Maker

by Barrin92

3/13/2026 at 6:38:54 PM

We can only hope.

by BigTTYGothGF

3/13/2026 at 2:11:37 PM

inshallah

by heyitsmedotjayb

3/13/2026 at 3:05:03 PM

let's see if it turns into mashallah :)

by 4ggr0

3/13/2026 at 2:00:09 PM

Lindsay Graham has an easy solution to this unnecessary conflict: send your sons and daughters.

This whole administration is such a fiasco.

by spiderfarmer

3/13/2026 at 8:00:24 PM

I recommend anybody looking at the US land invasion proposal to do that with an altitude map of Iran on the side.

by marcosdumay

3/13/2026 at 8:20:50 PM

In addition to history, Americans don't really "do" geography. Apparently it's harder than math.

by cpursley

3/13/2026 at 8:56:21 PM

Even Alexander the Great's conquest of Persian was mostly a soft coup. That country is a fortress.

by mkoubaa

3/13/2026 at 6:39:57 PM

Lindsey Graham is a lying sack of shit.

And I say that with his permission, since he’s on camera asking to be called out if he did exactly what they did with the Supreme Court not four years later.

by hinkley

3/13/2026 at 7:06:45 PM

Thank deities someone else remembers this.

by pelotron

3/13/2026 at 7:54:31 PM

I was not aware of this 'on camera' request. Does anyone have a citation?

by wizzwizz4

3/13/2026 at 8:29:29 PM

They showed it on The Daily Show at least once. Talking the rest of a committee out of entertaining a nomination under Obama. Which they ignored entirely in the same time frame for the next administration.

by hinkley

3/13/2026 at 8:55:09 PM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kw8SSQHQitg is Lindsay Graham in 2016 defending the Republicans' refusal to consider a nomination to the Supreme Court in the last year of Obama's presidency, and saying "you can use my words against me and you'd be absolutely right".

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".

by gjm11

3/13/2026 at 8:58:07 PM

Wow, WILD to imply that Lindsey Graham is part of this admin. They hate each other. Trump worked with Graham and McConnell first term because Trump does have to work with the establishment but they despise him. He still has to work with Graham who has a little more Koch power now that McConnell is gone-but-not-gone.

I’ll always find it hilarious that progressives manage to hate the GOP and Trump at the same time for the same reasons.

by SV_BubbleTime

3/13/2026 at 9:44:32 PM

Graham is doing media interviews where he’s backing this war currently.

Also why you find that hilarious instead of expected? Trump is the GOP now. Everyone with more than the barest of pushback to him have been purged from the party and he’s working on getting rid of those people too.

by lovich

3/15/2026 at 11:34:19 PM

You have no fucking clue what you are talking about at all. Your knowledge of the GOP is what you are told.

    Recess Appointments:
    Reagan: 240
    W. Bush: 171
    Clinton: 139
    H.W. Bush: 77
    Washington: 39
    Obama: 32
    Kennedy: 29
    Trump: 0
The GOP absolutely hates Trump. Trump knows he needs them to do anything.

by SV_BubbleTime

3/14/2026 at 2:04:45 PM

The clips i saw of him talking looked like hard core brown nosing to me, pardon my french. He sat on Trumps table when Bad Bunnys' half time show was on the screens in Mar a Lago too.

by scns

3/13/2026 at 3:57:09 PM

Somewhat tangential question - for the "Just Stop Oil" folks - is it the extraction of oil that is the problem, or the burning of it? If the former, then we have an opportunity to investigate more renewable sources.

by nDRDY

3/13/2026 at 4:07:26 PM

The goal is to keep the oil in the ground, to not be burned or to be made into plastics.

by tencentshill

3/13/2026 at 8:26:47 PM

It's not just plastics. Practically every substance we use and rely on to maintain civilisation as we know it has a petrochemical or fossil fuel base.

I understand the not burning fossil fuel thing, but why can't it be seen like another mineral resource?

by MOSI2

3/13/2026 at 9:53:05 PM

Because that's still geological carbon entering the overall cycle on the surface. The air and ocean are giant buffers of it. When it's needed it needs to be pulled from there somehow (such as by felling trees or directly extracting CO2). Unfortunately that's not economical when it's legal to tap the giant lakes of it sitting underground.

by fc417fc802

3/13/2026 at 10:57:56 PM

Many of the other things (plastics esp) are byproducts after refining for fuel. If the fuel isn't consumed, the byproducts would become cost ineffective.

Don't "worry" though. Oil consumption is going up not down.

Just don't have kids.

by cmrdporcupine

3/14/2026 at 8:00:50 AM

If the cure is as bad as the disease, then why intervene?

by MOSI2

3/13/2026 at 6:24:19 PM

Isn't the main source of helium from oil production? It's not like we have fusion reactors turning H into He.

by dylan604

3/13/2026 at 6:32:13 PM

The main source of helium is natural gas production, not oil

by ac29

3/13/2026 at 7:04:07 PM

Okay, but while technically correct, it does nothing to change the situation. They are punching holes in the ground to extract the sweet sweet nectar. They have to store what has been extracted. When that storage is full, what does one do? Stop the input into the storage.

by dylan604

3/13/2026 at 9:58:08 PM

The amount of activity required for helium is insubstantial compared to the amount of natural gas being extracted globally. And the amount of natural gas extracted pales in comparison to total combined gas, oil, and coal.

Helium extraction doesn't pose a notable environmental issue on its own.

by fc417fc802

3/13/2026 at 6:20:37 PM

[flagged]

by killerstorm

3/13/2026 at 8:38:56 PM

Well primarily the goal is to ensure that we don't build any homes for people or any clean energy. There's a reason a group of people funded by an oil heir are anti-nuclear.

by renewiltord

3/13/2026 at 8:39:47 PM

Thanks DJT, I am tired of winning, can we become losers again? /s

by elzbardico

3/13/2026 at 1:27:07 PM

Remember all the e/acc people telling us to vote for Trump? Some mea-culpas are in order.

by coreyh14444

3/13/2026 at 1:29:11 PM

The kind of people who voted for trump would never admit they made a mistake. They double down on stupidity instead.

by lpcvoid

3/13/2026 at 8:17:06 PM

That isn't true. There's actually a large number of people, probably in the millions, but probably not a majority of those who voted for him, who no longer support him in any way. And of the ones who remain, yes: they're pretty dense to still support him now. There are some lunatics who genuinely believe that the US has the right to dominate and exploit all other nations, but the majority of them simply believe the lies he's telling. I've already seen that when they are confronted with the facts about, say, Gaza, some of them can change their minds. It would be a mistake to turn them away instead of treating them like potential allies. There really is something more important at stake.

by GeorgeWBasic

3/14/2026 at 3:03:58 AM

And yet others who are able to disagree with some (or even many) of his decisions while also continuing to believe he was the better of the 2 options. Most people I know hate politics or anything to do with it for this very reason. We can argue about political philosophy all day long but eventually you go vote and often have to choose between a wildcard and the walking dead.

by twodave

3/13/2026 at 8:29:42 PM

/r/LeopardsAteMyFace contains many counterexamples.

by tzs

3/13/2026 at 7:13:18 PM

For better or worse, Donald Trump has absolutely earned his place in the history books. There will be so many lessons from this era, though I think it is very much open to debate what form those lessons will take and which ones will be the most consequential.

by rootusrootus

3/13/2026 at 7:26:39 PM

To be honest, much of the lessons of this were something that we could've already looked back during all the wars humanity has fought all throughout history to learn from.

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.

by Imustaskforhelp

3/13/2026 at 1:37:24 PM

Could you define the acronym "e/acc"? DDG seems to think it means: "What Does E/Acc Stand For, And What Does It Mean? E/acc stands for the phrase effective accelerationism, and it basically indicates one's personal ideological belief that artificial intelligence will one day become an all-powerful being that can fix the vast majority of humanity's problems."

I don't think I have ever heard a MAGA talk about AI.

by fhdkweig

3/13/2026 at 7:37:59 PM

> 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.

by overfeed

3/13/2026 at 2:04:36 PM

The MAGA Web3 bros have all switched to the Clawdbot hypetrain, still flogging courses and slop.

by spiderfarmer

3/13/2026 at 8:02:06 PM

Hum... He seems to be doing the most accelerationist government from recent history of any large or rich country.

by marcosdumay

3/13/2026 at 4:43:41 PM

Even the nation's #1 dingleberry Joe Rogan is now turning against Trump. Would be a great time for folks to start admitting they fell for it again.

by karmakurtisaani

3/13/2026 at 7:17:12 PM

I will dare to admit aloud that I think maybe the founders were making a rational choice when they decided that only certain citizens would have the right to vote. As awful as that sounds, there are halfway decent arguments in favor. Maybe not just restricting to white wealthy landowners, but sometimes I do wonder if we would benefit from a filter that adequately screens for people 1) with real skin in the game and 2) a plausible claim to being well informed.

That is just a thought experiment, though, I do not believe it would play out beneficially if we tried to implement it in real life.

by rootusrootus

3/13/2026 at 7:27:54 PM

I like this idea in theory. In practice, the problem is that someone gets to decide who is allowed to vote and on what grounds. If that institution is corrupted, it leads to worse outcome than allowing everyone to vote. And the bad actors would have all the incentives in the world to corrupt that institution.

by karmakurtisaani

3/13/2026 at 8:13:32 PM

The answer isn’t less voters, it’s more. Australia’s compulsory voting system has successfully taken the edge off extremist ideology.

by smackeyacky

3/13/2026 at 8:29:45 PM

Not quite sure this works out as nicely as that. Argentina has both compulsory voting and a legal voting age of 16 and it managed to produce Javier Milei (who makes Trump look like Kissinger).

What's the best way to have a sane system? I'm not sure. I personally lost all faith in democracy.

by erxam

3/14/2026 at 12:29:44 AM

> What's the best way to have a sane system?

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.

by rootusrootus

3/13/2026 at 9:53:37 PM

Argentina is notoriously corrupt and suffers from an overly politically powerful military. Not even compulsory voting can fix those. There are dark private forces currently waging war on democracy it will be a catastrophic disaster if they win.

by smackeyacky

3/13/2026 at 11:21:38 PM

> Argentina is notoriously corrupt and suffers from an overly politically powerful military.

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.

by erxam

3/14/2026 at 12:33:20 AM

> 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?

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.

by rootusrootus

3/13/2026 at 11:00:34 PM

Kissinger was a war criminal with a huge amount of blood on his hands.

by hermitcrab

3/13/2026 at 11:06:45 PM

That's half of the point of the comparison (otherwise I'd have picked Einstein or some other cliche smart guy).

The other half is that Kissinger was a smart and cunning piece of shit, and Trump is an absolute imbecile.

by erxam

3/14/2026 at 12:31:30 AM

> 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.

by rootusrootus

3/14/2026 at 8:45:32 AM

You have to couple that with their use of STV voting and lack of a presidential system.

by erentz

3/13/2026 at 8:35:41 PM

The problem is what to do with those people who can't vote. At worst, they'll rise up in arms and create an ever bigger mess.

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.

by erxam

3/13/2026 at 10:10:09 PM

That only works in the immediate term. It isn't even a stable short term solution, let alone medium to long term. Consider what the incentives of such an approach are when iterated.

Unless you aspire to the way of life in places like North Korea.

by fc417fc802

3/13/2026 at 11:29:43 PM

It really depends on what stage of a regime's lifecycle you apply it at.

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.

by erxam

3/14/2026 at 1:29:42 AM

Right but all those examples you're listing are what I was vaguely referencing when I referred to the incentives of such an approach when iterated. The resulting government won't inevitably implode (although it often will eventually) but it doesn't result in a particularly functional society either.

> 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.

by fc417fc802

3/13/2026 at 11:16:40 PM

There are far more pressing changes needed, like reducing the impact of vote buying (reasonable spending limits for political campaigns, and the lobbying problem) and a voting system that doesn't inevitably reduce down to two sides.

If people still elevate the worst candidate to POTUS after that, then blaming the voter might be in order.

by phatfish

3/13/2026 at 7:56:54 PM

Everybody should be allowed to vote, except for people who don't want everyone to vote.

by cyberax

3/13/2026 at 8:28:26 PM

Even people who openly aim to violently overthrow the government and abolish elections?

by esafak

3/13/2026 at 9:07:52 PM

If they're an electoral majority then you already have a problem.

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.

by XorNot

3/15/2026 at 1:39:56 AM

Transition of power (peaceful or not) is not a necessary component of democracy. Nor are leaders (elected or not), representation, or power structures such as centralization of power. Pure democracy is also incredibly inefficient at scale.

by efreak

3/13/2026 at 9:21:38 PM

Yes, why not? If they are a minority, then there's no issue. If they are a majority (or close to it), then perhaps they have a point.

by cyberax

3/14/2026 at 12:42:22 AM

This makes me think the other comment in this thread about mandatory voting may be on point. Part of our problem is that not only can we elect petty dictators with less than 50% of the vote, we can do it with way less than 50% of the adult citizenry when people cannot be bothered to vote.

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.

by rootusrootus

3/13/2026 at 8:25:32 PM

People with those characteristics are often wealthy: can't have "real skin in the game" if you're just a pleb with a mortgage, 2 kids and 2 cars in a middle-class neighborhood, right? At which point, once again, those with $$ are more equal than others.

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.

by hn_acc1

3/13/2026 at 10:12:22 PM

1% of the vote isn't all that significant. It's the money that creates the problem.

by fc417fc802

3/14/2026 at 12:36:56 AM

Yes, part of the solution could be strongly curtailing how we apply the first amendment to political spending. Maybe elections should all be taxpayer funded, access to media guaranteed, etc. And if we do allow donations, it has to be something fairly trivial. Maximum $50 or something per person regardless of net worth.

The unregulated, unlimited money situation we have now is a big part of the problem.

by rootusrootus

3/14/2026 at 8:51:23 AM

The founders mistake was creating a presidential system.

by erentz

3/14/2026 at 1:45:35 PM

I don’t think the founders made a mistake. They understood the weaknesses in their system and were very open about the fact that it wouldn’t always be smooth sailing. Thomas Jefferson famously said: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants”.

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.

by IAmGraydon

3/13/2026 at 7:48:00 PM

> Maybe not just restricting to white wealthy landowners,

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.

by overfeed

3/13/2026 at 8:19:04 PM

People are admitting that now. It's happening. There's some hope that something can be done about him.

by GeorgeWBasic

3/13/2026 at 7:10:18 PM

We live in the dumbest possible timeline. As someone who came of age in the late 80s and was lucky enough to fully experience the 90s and 2000s ... what we have done in the last 20 years makes me sad. I never saw this coming. I admit that I maintained my delusion even though I was in OKC in 1995. Should have been a wake-up call.

by rootusrootus

3/13/2026 at 1:10:45 PM

[flagged]

by th23i43240999

3/13/2026 at 1:13:01 PM

[flagged]

by varispeed

3/13/2026 at 1:24:39 PM

That's one of the most disappointing things to me. These people have such resources and the limit of their vision is: bang young girls, accumulate bling, push divisive hateful politics, start wars.

That's it. That's the best they can do.

Even nominally selfish far-sighted things like genuinely funding a deep research program for life extension is not really something they're into. I mean some of them are "into" it in that they talk about it and occasionally toss money at things but they're not interested in funding or being involved in the kind of multi-year high-focus moonshot program it would actually take to deliver. The problem is that's hard and it takes a long time when banging girls and winning power games is instant dopamine.

It makes me keep thinking of paperclip maximizers. It's like we are paperclip maximizers, only our paperclips are sex and dopamine hits from winning power games. A paperclip maximizer with such resources would squander it all on paperclips, and we squander it all on these goal functions built in by evolution. Are we actually intelligent or just clever animals? We can seek what we want, but we don't think much about what we want to want.

by api

3/13/2026 at 1:46:56 PM

I think we are somewhere in between. Most of us know what we should be doing but actually doing it is hard!

As an aside this might indicative of today's defective rich. Carnegie built over 2,500 libraries for example.

by 2OEH8eoCRo0

3/13/2026 at 2:18:16 PM

To put that in context, Wikipedia says about Carnegie:

> 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.

by close04

3/13/2026 at 7:29:21 PM

It seems like when someone does a historical analysis of the wealth of these past tycoons, they often don't do a simple inflation calculation, they relate the wealth to the GDP of the US at the time. By that measure, both Rockefeller and Carnegie were quite a lot more wealthy than single-digit billions, though maybe not quite the same level as Elon Musk.

What makes Musk's wealth really incredible is how much of it is based on hot air (TSLA).

by rootusrootus

3/13/2026 at 1:47:06 PM

I think about how we could've paid for two brand new, gigawatt-scale nuclear power plants for the same amount of money as Elon Musk flushed down the toilet to try to shut down a website he didn't like. Extreme wealth is a mental illness, and wealth caps are healthcare.

by coldpie

3/13/2026 at 1:51:06 PM

It's worse when you realize that Musk at least does something with his insane wealth, even if it's also insane.

Most either do nothing really of note, or donate it to "causes", which may be good, but kind of boring.

by bombcar

3/13/2026 at 2:16:06 PM

He’s not “doing something with his insane wealth”. He’s wealthy because he’s doing something. The moment he announces he’s stepping back and going to be boring he loses half his wealth or more.

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.

by renewiltord

3/13/2026 at 2:11:07 PM

I can appreciate boring nowadays.

by greesil

3/13/2026 at 2:18:55 PM

Musk tried boring for a bit. Don't hear much about it nowadays.

by actionfromafar

3/13/2026 at 1:51:32 PM

At this point I wish he had shut it down. Instead he turned into a mouthpiece for the right and duped his followers into thinking he’s “liberated” the site and made it into some bastion of free speech.

by Forgeties79

3/13/2026 at 2:17:23 PM

You can't do that with two gigawatt-scale nuclear power plants!

by actionfromafar

3/13/2026 at 2:21:56 PM

If you can guarantee two brand new gigawatt scale nuclear power plants for $44b then you can raise that money easily. The problem isn’t the access to money that prevents it. It’s that the the number of NRC approved reactors built since it came into existence is countable on your fingers.

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.

by renewiltord

3/13/2026 at 3:05:43 PM

[flagged]

by vablings

3/13/2026 at 6:11:16 PM

Please make your substantive points thoughtfully and don't cross into personal attack on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

by dang

3/13/2026 at 8:06:56 PM

I fail to see how British sarcasm qualifies as a personal attack. Specifically in reference to plain English that is the specification of the NRC as cited

by vablings

3/14/2026 at 3:05:31 AM

I'm a fan of British wit, but these things don't necessarily translate across contexts. On a broad and shallow internet forum like HN, a line like "if you can read and understand plain English how about you go make yourself a couple billion dollars" pattern-matches to boxed wine sarcasm, not ripping port sarcasm.

by dang

3/13/2026 at 1:59:03 PM

It's incredibly distressing, but I think the issue here lies with 'we'. Those at the very top are a very, shall we say, unique group. Those who seek power at such a level are not like the rest of us. There's established research showing that psychopathic and sociopathic traits are vastly more common among the "CEO class". It's not that wealth and power _makes_ them so, it's that relatively few are willing to be completely amoral or malicious in order to obtain as much power as possible. I believe that this effect is greatly magnified at the very top.

It's a tale as old as Plato: those most likely to WANT to rule are exactly the 'candidates' who absolutely should not.

by lordgroff

3/13/2026 at 6:44:33 PM

Are they unique? What would happen to an ordinary person if you gave them a billion dollars?

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.

by api

3/13/2026 at 7:55:24 PM

Imagine you suddenly had $100MM. You never have to work again and can do practically whatever you want. But most of us appreciate experiences with the company of others.

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.

by hrimfaxi

3/13/2026 at 1:51:41 PM

People will always keep looking to politicians to make the world better despite their terrible track record.

by dmix

3/13/2026 at 2:37:03 PM

If they aren't doing a good job primary the hell out of them.

by forgetfreeman

3/13/2026 at 3:06:22 PM

Where you get the exciting opportunity to choose between the next set of huckster lawyers and shallow ideologues.

by dmix

3/13/2026 at 3:04:35 PM

Ah yeah that worked for Bernie.

by hrimfaxi

3/13/2026 at 1:45:38 PM

> These people have such resources and the limit of their vision is: bang young girls, accumulate bling, push divisive hateful politics, start wars.

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.

by fhdkweig

3/13/2026 at 1:50:14 PM

Except that foundations are massive tax shelters - maybe he did some good along the way, but the also blocked IP release of covid vaccine technologies

by dv_dt

3/13/2026 at 4:37:02 PM

Bold of you to call young, underage children (including those as young as 6) escorts.

The correct way of putting it is so old rich suited men can engage in pedophilia.

by NickC25

3/13/2026 at 4:48:00 PM

Perhaps at this point it's more like not getting held accountable for engaging in pedophilia.

by karmakurtisaani

3/13/2026 at 9:13:53 PM

[flagged]

by rangvb

3/13/2026 at 9:48:48 PM

The theocratic regime wasn't bothering us much until we started blowing them up for no reason. (or the practical reason: we are blowing them up because they didn't build a nuke fast enough)

by pocksuppet

3/13/2026 at 12:51:59 PM

[flagged]

by expedition32

3/13/2026 at 1:16:27 PM

Can not see them fuck it up more than my own government spending millions to pour concrete into our own excellent natural gas wells (while selling whatever did come out under market price to other countries), and our neighbors on the east celebrating while they blow up nuclear power plants. At least the US and Israel have a chance of improving their position in the geopolitical landscape. We are just slowly then swiftly committing suicide.

by mvdwoord

3/13/2026 at 4:46:12 PM

> At least the US and Israel have a chance of improving their position in the geopolitical landscape.

Does the improved geopolitical landscape consist of closed strait of Hormuz? Not sure what else they can geopolitically achieve compared to how things were a few weeks ago.

by karmakurtisaani

3/13/2026 at 1:19:49 PM

Are you complaining about the Groningen gas wells?

I thought that they were being decommissioned due to seismic risks?

by surgical_fire

3/13/2026 at 1:22:14 PM

Yeah, but even the local (groningen) residents think it's a bad idea to not keep some resources available for emergency situations (they also would like to heat their houses in winter) like when other sources are cut off.

by sigio

3/13/2026 at 1:25:21 PM

Is it even possible? My understanding is that the whole region is connected to those gas wells. There's so much you can take before the underground is hollow.

They may not have a house to heat if tremors get too bad.

by surgical_fire

3/13/2026 at 2:25:48 PM

the mystical time when the wind on the see is not there and there is no sun? Maybe even the tides stop working?

by notTooFarGone

3/13/2026 at 1:26:42 PM

haha yes, the grand seismic risks (economic risk in single digit percentages of the profits available) but not talking about not using them, 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. On top of the fact that we suckered ourselves into long term agreements which led to having to sell our own gas, far below market price to other countries. Full blown retardedness, and the moral high ground was theirs.

And our German neighbors, I can still see them laughing at the Orange Man Bad... Boo hoo... what a shitshow.

by mvdwoord

3/13/2026 at 1:33:30 PM

> haha yes, the grand seismic risks (economic risk in single digit percentages of the profits available)

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.

by surgical_fire

3/13/2026 at 1:47:32 PM

Groningen gas field produced 40 billion m3 a year. 100m3 is 1MWh, currently sold for 50 eur. So the production would generate revenue of 20 billion eur a year. Tax it at 10%, get 2B eur. Buy/build houses for 400k a piece, 5.000 a year. There are cca 10.000 houses with minor or major damage. In 2 fucking years everyone gets a new second house for free and we get cheap gas.

by yread

3/13/2026 at 2:16:20 PM

Ah, sorry, this will not work, we are not capable of building new houses in any significant capacity. I don't know why but it's the reality.

by bondarchuk

3/13/2026 at 2:48:17 PM

Not if the ground can't stay still

by surgical_fire

3/13/2026 at 2:11:35 PM

You realize that people's houses are more than a number in a balance sheet?

Losing all your personal items and memories + living homeless for a few years while the reconstruction is in progress isn't minor inconvenience.

by littlestymaar

3/13/2026 at 2:22:21 PM

You realize cost of gas has direct consequences to 17M people's health as well? Our oma in her G-class building set her thermostat to 16 degrees in 2022. Because her heating bill shot to 1000+ eur/month. Only when the black mold started appearing did we manage to persuade her that 19 would be more appropriate. Of course that just traded it for money-related stress.

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?

by yread

3/13/2026 at 5:15:08 PM

> You realize cost of gas has direct consequences to 17M people's health as well? Our oma in her G-class building set her thermostat to 16 degrees in 2022

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.

by littlestymaar

3/13/2026 at 2:16:47 PM

Bullshit they are, houses are entirely replaceable and in fact many people do so every couple of years.

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.

by walletdrainer

3/13/2026 at 1:35:58 PM

Love you too!

(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.

by mvdwoord

3/13/2026 at 2:33:49 PM

The US appears to be ideologically committed shitting on their trade partners and ending the dollar's run as a reserve currency and you see this leading to improving it's geopolitical standing? Through what mechanism?

by forgetfreeman

3/13/2026 at 2:16:21 PM

> At least the US and Israel have a chance of improving their position in the geopolitical landscape.

This seems, uh, awfully optimistic.

by ceejayoz

3/13/2026 at 12:56:33 PM

For the US, thus far, we keep discovering that we have yet to hit bottom — so probably more.

by pohl

3/13/2026 at 6:54:44 PM

[flagged]

by A7OM

3/13/2026 at 7:24:04 PM

This is a bot/shill account

by hypeatei

3/13/2026 at 7:42:52 PM

Are AIs actually participating in public discourse to… protect themselves!?

Isn’t this the future sci-fi nerds were predicting? It’s just that instead of “unplugging SkyNet” we have “supply chain disruption”?

Maybe instead of triggering WWIII the AIs will force a peaceful resolution to major conflicts that disrupt the supply of their substrate.

The accelerators must flow.

by jiggawatts

3/13/2026 at 7:00:16 PM

It's almost like war is a bad thing.

by etchalon

3/14/2026 at 12:43:41 PM

Who cares about chips ?

These fucking yankee and zionist morons just keep pushing it.

Go Iran

by danielovichdk

3/14/2026 at 12:49:04 PM

[dead]

by Jhater

3/13/2026 at 12:45:07 PM

Do you remember this quote from wheel of time?

"Let the lord of chaos rule" ...

by ReptileMan

3/13/2026 at 1:32:57 PM

Qatar is probably intentionally shutting down production of gas and oil in order to pressure the US to stop, independently of Iranian attacks.

In that respect they may be bombed by Iran but they have the same interests

by breppp

3/13/2026 at 1:40:19 PM

Where are they supposed to put all that gas and oil if they can't transport it? I don't think they have much choice here.

And as far as I understand, helium is a byproduct of the extraction, so they can't choose to keep only the helium.

by fabian2k

3/13/2026 at 1:54:16 PM

However Qatar stopped production before the straits were officially closed and their stated reason is "due to military attacks", also Russian or Chinese ships can pass

by breppp

3/13/2026 at 1:56:41 PM

There is no such thing as "officially closed". The moment people start shooting there, driving a ship across becomes dangerous. This was an absolutely predictable consequence of the attacks on Iran, you didn't need to wait until several tankers were burning to know these attacks were likely to happen and the strait would become essentially too risky to pass.

by fabian2k

3/14/2026 at 1:00:26 PM

Not just dangerous but uninsured...

by heisenbit

3/13/2026 at 2:08:21 PM

Back then there were only two ships attacked in the straits, and one was an Iranian shadow fleet ship. I am not sure that is "closing the straits" in any shape or form

by breppp

3/13/2026 at 2:14:09 PM

So if there's an active shooter on the one alley to your workplace you should still be at work in time, right? :)

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?

by nottorp

3/13/2026 at 3:12:22 PM

no, but if two ships were hit, while one clearly by mistake, it is very early to say the straits are going to be closed as opposed to incorrect targeting

your analogies have went past me though, generally although a common misconception, countries are not people and wars are not comparable to crime

by breppp

3/13/2026 at 6:37:39 PM

Oh, well, if it was by mistake...

by BigTTYGothGF

3/13/2026 at 9:51:42 PM

The active shooter is shooting a specific group of people who don't include you. Will you walk past?

by pocksuppet

3/13/2026 at 2:18:08 PM

That's precisely how you close the straits; by making everyone scared to go through.

by ceejayoz

3/13/2026 at 7:49:57 PM

You don't even have to scare everyone. You just have to scare the insurers. Without insurance ships won't sail. The exposure is huge, so a small blip in risk makes all the modeling go kerplooie. Traffic stopped when the insurers said drop the anchors.

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.

by MengerSponge

3/13/2026 at 8:20:24 PM

Impeachment, and then we could get there. It's not impossible.

by GeorgeWBasic

3/13/2026 at 9:55:17 PM

With JD Vance things will go even worse

by yks

3/13/2026 at 11:39:45 PM

From all I've seen, he actually argued against this war prior to paying lip service to it. He'd be an improvement.

by GeorgeWBasic

3/13/2026 at 11:30:45 PM

I thought Vance was the actual isolationist America first guy? Not Trump kind who's opinion changes based which authoritarian he last had a phone call with.

In this specific case maybe Vance is least worst option.

by phatfish

3/14/2026 at 4:57:24 PM

Vance called Trump "America's Hitler", then ran as his VP.

He's a windsock.

by ceejayoz

3/13/2026 at 2:39:59 PM

As the houthis have long demonstrated, you can screw up shipping from the coast

by Macha

3/13/2026 at 6:35:42 PM

I'm guessing you watched the Hegseth interview?

--- 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.

by tekla

3/13/2026 at 6:28:14 PM

Are Russian or Chinese ships actually passing? Junior just released a decree saying not one liter of oil will pass. It didn't have an asterisk allowing Russian or Chinese ships.

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!

by dylan604

3/13/2026 at 6:20:50 PM

The strait is now mined at least partially. Country of origin doesn't matter when there are mines in the water.

by int0x29

3/13/2026 at 7:56:19 PM

We really are overdue for mines with IFF and can inert themselves temporarily for blue ships.

by overfeed

3/13/2026 at 9:12:34 PM

The problem is systems like that have a failure rate.

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.

by XorNot

3/13/2026 at 6:42:02 PM

This is going to be an environmental disaster.

by hinkley

3/13/2026 at 7:57:35 PM

Only if there's no diplomatic resolution - however unlikely.

by overfeed

3/13/2026 at 1:50:01 PM

Shutting down production doesn't pressure the US at all since the oil and gas can't go anywhere anyway. They're shutting it down because they have to, there's nowhere to put the oil.

by noelsusman

3/13/2026 at 7:30:03 PM

Even if this nonsense was true it is absolutely normal tactic used by the US when bombing is out of question. Use economic pressure by way of tariffs and sanctions until vassals are put in their place. So what's your problem

by FpUser

3/13/2026 at 8:57:42 PM

Don't reply to breppp it's an obvious spy/operative account.

by mkoubaa

3/13/2026 at 11:06:13 PM

HN guidelines link

by ddtaylor