FilterHN

randerson

22 minutes ago

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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.

SlightlyLeftPad

8 minutes ago

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

CrzyLngPwd

55 seconds ago

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This is, according to Hegseth, just something they planned for, since they knew what was going to happen.

abeppu

3 hours ago

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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?

observationist

59 minutes ago

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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.

arunc

5 hours ago

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So the RAM prices are going to skyrocket again?

HerbManic

1 hour ago

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

trollbridge

6 hours ago

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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.

hrmtst93837

1 hour ago

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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.

stevenwoo

8 minutes ago

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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.

1 hour ago

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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.

emsign

5 hours ago

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

icwtyjj

34 minutes ago

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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%

inaros

5 minutes ago

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"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.”

bee_rider

17 minutes ago

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

stevenwoo

6 minutes ago

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

bryan0

25 minutes ago

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source? the value I found is 97.5%+ helium for party balloons: https://www.grecogas.com/learn-our-industry/your-complete-gu...

38 minutes ago

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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%.

pfdietz

8 minutes ago

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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.

qwertox

46 minutes ago

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This is very likely not true.

estimator7292

34 minutes ago

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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".

loloquwowndueo

29 minutes ago

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> You could do 30 seconds of research

So could you, right?

49 minutes ago

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

fluidcruft

5 hours ago

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

ralferoo

1 hour ago

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

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

35 minutes ago

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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.

bilsbie

5 hours ago

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Is lifting gas? That’s pretty cool.

nerdsniper

5 hours ago

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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.

cpncrunch

5 hours ago

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No.

vasco

6 hours ago

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

bix6

5 hours ago

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

piva00

5 hours ago

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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.

forgetfreeman

5 hours ago

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

4 hours ago

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

kristjansson

54 minutes ago

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

stvltvs

3 hours ago

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

forgetfreeman

2 hours ago

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

2 hours ago

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

cagenut

5 hours ago

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sorry thats too far left wing an opinion in america today

infogulch

5 hours ago

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The sale was completed in 2024.

actionfromafar

5 hours ago

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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.

phr4ts

5 hours ago

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

baldeagle

5 hours ago

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"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/...

4ggr0

4 hours ago

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> too far left wing

> biden

uhm...

edgyquant

14 minutes ago

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

ImPostingOnHN

6 minutes ago

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Please don't call everyone who doesn't disagree with you, names.

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.

owebmaster

6 hours ago

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Foi de vasco (died).

lpcvoid

6 hours ago

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Great timing that the US recently sold its strategic helium supply.

infogulch

5 hours ago

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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...

baldeagle

5 hours ago

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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)

robmccoll

1 hour ago

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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".

embedding-shape

1 hour ago

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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.

Noumenon72

1 hour ago

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Wouldn't another alternative be to renew the authorization to sell? This doesn't seem much different from just deciding to sell it.

TehCorwiz

1 hour ago

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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.

4 hours ago

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thanks obama?

actionfromafar

5 hours ago

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Those party ballons were very cheap for a while.

desireco42

5 hours ago

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yeah that was completely crazy... never understood why they would do something like that

linkregister

5 hours ago

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An explanation is particular political group was ideologically enthralled with privatization.

karmakurtisaani

3 hours ago

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The same group will later happily blame the government for doing said stupid thing.

etchalon

41 minutes ago

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It's almost like war is a bad thing.

nDRDY

3 hours ago

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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.

tencentshill

3 hours ago

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The goal is to keep the oil in the ground, to not be burned or to be made into plastics.

1 hour ago

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Isn't the main source of helium from oil production? It's not like we have fusion reactors turning H into He.

ac29

1 hour ago

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The main source of helium is natural gas production, not oil

37 minutes ago

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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.

emsign

5 hours ago

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Iran will make AI go pop.

BigTTYGothGF

1 hour ago

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We can only hope.

heyitsmedotjayb

5 hours ago

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inshallah

4ggr0

4 hours ago

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let's see if it turns into mashallah :)

spiderfarmer

5 hours ago

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Lindsay Graham has an easy solution to this unnecessary conflict: send your sons and daughters.

This whole administration is such a fiasco.

hinkley

1 hour ago

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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.

pelotron

35 minutes ago

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Thank deities someone else remembers this.

coreyh14444

6 hours ago

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Remember all the e/acc people telling us to vote for Trump? Some mea-culpas are in order.

lpcvoid

6 hours ago

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The kind of people who voted for trump would never admit they made a mistake. They double down on stupidity instead.

28 minutes ago

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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.

Imustaskforhelp

15 minutes ago

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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.

fhdkweig

6 hours ago

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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.

overfeed

3 minutes ago

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> I don't think I have ever heard a MAGA talk about AI.

Lots of ex-Bitcoin-bros turned AI hypemen went all-in on maga for Trump II. Even the silicon valley C-Suites and VC-class went mask-off around February 2025. Some have tried to walk it back since then, after realizing the kind of administration they had hitched their wagons to - thankfully, the internet ever forgets.

spiderfarmer

5 hours ago

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The MAGA Web3 bros have all switched to the Clawdbot hypetrain, still flogging courses and slop.

31 minutes ago

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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.

karmakurtisaani

2 hours ago

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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.

24 minutes ago

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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.

karmakurtisaani

14 minutes ago

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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.

ReptileMan

6 hours ago

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Do you remember this quote from wheel of time?

"Let the lord of chaos rule" ...

6 hours ago

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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

fabian2k

6 hours ago

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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.

5 hours ago

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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

1 hour ago

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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!

fabian2k

5 hours ago

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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.

5 hours ago

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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

nottorp

5 hours ago

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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?

4 hours ago

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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

BigTTYGothGF

1 hour ago

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Oh, well, if it was by mistake...

ceejayoz

5 hours ago

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That's precisely how you close the straits; by making everyone scared to go through.

Macha

5 hours ago

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As the houthis have long demonstrated, you can screw up shipping from the coast

tekla

1 hour ago

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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.

int0x29

1 hour ago

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The strait is now mined at least partially. Country of origin doesn't matter when there are mines in the water.

hinkley

59 minutes ago

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This is going to be an environmental disaster.

noelsusman

5 hours ago

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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.

FpUser

11 minutes ago

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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

A7OM

47 minutes ago

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Helium shortages affecting chip fabs is a good reminder of how fragile the whole compute supply chain is. GPU availability, fab capacity, and now raw materials. The infrastructure behind AI is more precarious than most people realize.