Discussion
When the world's at stake, go beyond the headlines.
chromacity: Ah, this week's iteration of "we're running out of sand". I'm sure one of these predictions will eventually come true, but we have articles that overstate the likelihood and consequences of running out of <some basic material> pretty much every month.I'm not keeping track, but some of the things we ran out of include sand, helium, tellurium, tantalum, niobium, bees...
arjie: I have a sense of complacency regarding all these. There’s always The One Factory In North Carolina That Produces The Essential Ingredient and it turns out that it’s just the price optimal one and there is enough capacity around the world to substitute.Everything from Peak Oil to today has the globalized market/trade machine meeting the needs continuously with only leaf nodes for products being the constraint. Almost all inputs have been commoditized.
MontyCarloHall: >There’s always The One Factory In North Carolina That Produces The Essential Ingredient and it turns out that it’s just the price optimal one and there is enough capacity around the world to substitute.If you're referring to Spruce Pine in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene [0, 1], the prophecies about chipmaking being severely disrupted turned out to not come true because Spruce Pine sustained a lot less damage than initially feared and was made operational within a week or two [2], not because high-purity quartz is commoditized.[0] https://www.npr.org/2024/09/30/nx-s1-5133462/hurricane-helen...[1] https://www.aveva.com/en/our-industrial-life/type/article/hu...[2] https://www.cbs17.com/news/north-carolina-news/spruce-pine-q...
chasil: Ukraine previously sold half the neon used in semiconductor manufacturing, between Mariupol and Odessa.https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/11/ukraine_neon_supplies...
littlestymaar: The more efficient a system is (due to specialization and removal of redundancy), the more fragile it becomes.That's why biological systems look so wasteful (chlorophyll reflecting the more abundant wavelength, etc.)
mullingitover: This particular thing may or may not blow up in our faces, but as long as the US and Israel fail to take vast military power away from their corrupt despots it's only a matter of time before something seriously bad blows up.Despots will keep pushing their limits until they get punched in the nose, and so far the only limits they've hit have been a few angry parades.
varispeed: Funny they will blow up the world, just so they don't face the reality of Epstein files and kompromats in the archives of Moscow.Essentially cowards.and the reckoning will come anyway.
dbspin: Boy do you need to look in a mirror.
baq: Nothing ever happens eh?
ACCount37: Nothing Ever Happens Bias has served me pretty well on those dubious semiconductor supply chain claims.The main reason being: materials are cheap - plant time is what's expensive.First, raw materials are such a small fraction of chip costs that even if the market price of a given material spikes up two orders of magnitude briefly, the market can eat the spike. For many broadly used materials, this alone is "end of story" - the majority of consumers will balk at the price and exit the market long before semiconductors supply chains will. And second, between the costs of halting production and the low volumes of actual materials involved, supply buffers exist on sites. That plays against supply chain fragility.It's one thing to have everything JITted within an inch of its life on a razor thin margins car plant. It's another matter entirely to have a "potential supply disruption" in semiconductor manufacturing that will, if all supply truly and fully stopped tomorrow, convert to actual stopped plants in 4 months unless something is done about it in the meanwhile. And that "unless something is done" bites hard when you have a lot of engineering capability underlined by general price insensitivity. As semiconductor industry does.
chasil: Eisenhower's Iranian coup in 1953 set much of this in motion.I really don't understand the motivation, as British Petroleum (BP) was not a direct U.S. interest.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
vlovich123: Helium has been increasing in price at about 8% per annum compared with 2% for inflation, so it seems like a strong case that we are actually running out of easily accessible, cheap helium access. Since 2006 there have been 4 global supply disruptions and it’s now believed to be a regular occurrence vs not really happening before.It only seems like nothing happens if you stop paying attention.
mullingitover: Soviet Union containment policy. Same reason CIA didn't really care about the 1979 revolution (until it was too late): in their back channel talks with Khomeini, he told them that he wasn't opposed to US interests and wasn't going to let the Soviets in. That was exactly what the US wanted to hear.The real head-scratcher is why the US refused to extradite the Shah back to Iran for trial. What a different world we'd be in right now: the hostage crisis never would've happened. Moderates would've been empowered. Iran's completely valid historical grievances would've been addressed. Who knows, maybe the Iran-Iraq war never would've happened. The US wouldn't have provided WMDs to Saddam Hussein. No Gulf War I and II.
chasil: I understand what you are saying, but we allowed Hugo Chavez to nationalize Exxon holdings in Venezuela (forming PDVSA), which was a direct U.S. interest.Why Mosaddegh was denied what Chavez was allowed is not clear to me.
csnover: The article isn’t arguing that if ICL facilities are disrupted, that’s it, no more bromine forever. It is saying that if these facilities are disrupted there will be an even bigger problem with DRAM supply than already exists because there is no excess supply, no good alternative, and no quick way to ramp up production.This dismissive contrarian Pollyanna attitude might serve well to minimise your personal anxiety, but I do not see how what you are saying is in any way the correct approach for making decisions or managing risk.This is not some article saying that the sky is falling without evidence. It is not even an article saying the sky is falling with evidence. It is an article that says that there is a significant risk, due to an entirely preventable man-made problem, where steps can be taken now to reduce the medium-term impact of the problem. And then it lists those steps. Why is this not OK to you?
chromacity: > The article isn’t arguing that if ICL facilities are disrupted, that’s it, no more bromine forever. It is saying that if these facilities are disrupted there will be an even bigger problem with DRAM supply than already exists because there is no excess supply, no good alternative, and no quick way to ramp up production.This is literally the thesis of each and every one of these articles. Only one mine in the world can produce sand for semiconductors, etc. It makes the arguments incredibly persuasive and the predictions almost always wrong.And in reality... I'd wager that the semiconductor industry uses relatively little bromine, that it can be recycled or sourced from other places with minimal technological investment (e.g., as a simple byproduct of salt production), and so on.
rootusrootus: As long as we're still throwing away the lion's share of what comes out of the ground, it seems easy to dismiss the problem. Perhaps we were just paying a subsidized price and now the market is getting involved?
ErneX: PDVSA exists since 1975. What you referred to wasn’t the 1st oil nationalisation that happened in Venezuela.
