It'd be like if the US used it's strategic oil reserve to supply the US with oil at a low price at all times.
A strategic reserve isn't supposed to be used as a supply. The existence of a strategic reserve shouldn't have an effect on the supply of helium except in an emergency. The fact that selling the helium reserve could create a shortage should tell you that it wasn't being used as a reserve but as a supply.
The US was, essentially, artificial subsidizing the price of helium. What's happening now is that people are actually paying the real price of helium.
The false equivalence of doing the "both bad!" song and dance serves to so radically under-emphasize the absolute wanton, orders-of-magnitude-worse levels of corruption and evisceration of norms of one side by reducing it to "more bad than the other but they're both very bad." It allows the window to shift to normalize the sort of destruction of systems we're seeing by hand waving away how "the other guys aren't great, either!" It's borderline discourse malpractice at this point, and should be called out as such.
While the right is comfortable holding their nose when white supremacists hang around because it gets them a bigger coalition, the left will excommunicate someone for saying out loud that they think trans women are not exactly equivalent to biological women. This shrinking of the coalition is how we ended up enduring another Trump presidency.
Not to mention the complete fiasco that was the 2024 presidential race. We should have thrown out the entirety of DNC leadership several levels deep for letting that happen.
From an outside perspective the US does not have a political left. The policies proposed by the Democrats are roughly in line with the mainstream right-wing parties in the rest of the world. A mainstream left-wing party would look an awful lot like someone like Bernie Sanders - and we all know the Democrats would rather platform a wet paper towel and lose than see him gain any kind of power!
One side is clearly interested in helping others simply because they need help. The other is clearly interested in help others that they can relate to (look like themselves) and have earned the right to help (such as believing in the right god.) or only helping people that can help them back.
Being awesome because you help those in need? How horrible!
> more interested in the appearance of helping than in the substance of helping
This is a common and tired talking point: "virtue signalling". It often comes from people who are less helpful than others, and resent how more helpful people receive accolades. Their own personal judgement about whether something actually helps isn't authoritative, and is usually motivated reasoning anyways.
The root of the matter is the malicious harms committed against society by a given person or company or corporation.
The fact that people and companies and corporations are, in a general sense, "allowed" to exist by the government, seems vaguely tangential to the matter.
That probably doesn't seem rational but remember loads of these people think the Bible is a true story.
> That probably doesn't seem rational but remember loads of these people think the Bible is a true story.
Those are the (sizeable) subset who are obsessed with a literal interpretation of the Old Testament rather than the turn-the-other-cheek teachings of Christ, who is little more than a totem for these fundamentalists.
Arguably there is less harm in believing that Christ's ministry was historical than believing that Sodom and Gomorrah were historical.
"I have not come to bring peace, but a sword."
Which like, you don't need to twist that very hard to get to a place where you're going around "bringing the sword" to people who you think need it...
The Old Testament is big on genocide though, "We should definitely murder these children" has a lot more justification at the start of the book, or if you're batshit and think that stuff about Revelation, right at the end is a concrete prediction of future events then maybe that too.
Giving money to someone who could otherwise work is very different from giving food to a single mother who is already working 10 hours a day. Giving needles to a drug addict "helps" them in a certain way, yes. But it also enables their addiction to continue.
Yea it's easy for everyone to say "I believe in helping people!!". But which side of the fence you sit on in the US is non-trivially determined by what you believe "help" looks like in practice.
Approximately nobody is just bad and wants to harm people. That's a characterization both sides use against each other because they refuse to understand each other.
If someone really wanted to stop illegal immigration, punishing the businesses that betray American workers by hiring cheap illegal labor.
That seems a bit more efficient than hunting people on the streets with technology that can also be used to hunt anyone for any reason.
That sounds overly generous. It seems more like the right believes in social darwinism and feels like it benefits society overall by ridding us of lower quality people. The left believes there should be a fundamental minimum standard for existence that all members of society are entitled to.
I believe we should do this because if we are the greatest nation in the world, we should be able to do this. The greatest nation in the world should be unlike any other nation. An inspiration. A wonder.
> Approximately nobody is just bad and wants to harm people
Garbage. Mitch McConnell was on-record as saying during the Obama years that Republicans would be blocking any legislation from his administration that they could "even if it benefited the American people in any way" (his words, not mine) just so they could say it was a "do-nothing Presidency".
The right-wing wants to narrow the concentration of power and increase inequality and rigidity of social heirarchy, the left-wing wants to increase the distribution of power and decrease inequality and rigidity of social heirarchy.
Each side views their orientation as being what helps people (or, at least, the people who should be helped) in the long term, and usually the short term as well.
The needles is really a distraction. It is a very narrow special case.
Let’s talk healthcare. One side believes everyone should have the right to at least a minimum level of help regardless of who that person is. The other side believes everyone should receive at most the minimum level of care commiserate with the ability to pay. (Earned the help.)
Apparently the regime is quite serious about the US being the actual devil.
All I'm saying is, I could see how someone who believes Satan influences the world would come to that idea.
1: God commands King Saul: attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants
2: When the Israelites entered the Promised Land, they were often commanded to carry out total destruction against the Canaanite nations. "they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass"
1. While approaching the land, the Amalekites had attacked them, preying on the weak. God had said that they would be destroyed. Now, probably partly as a test for their first king (he failed, didn’t eradicate them), God said, get on and do it.
2. God had promised the land to Abraham and his descendants, but said they’d only get it in four hundred years’ time, because “the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete”—they still had time to choose God’s ways. Only once they were irredeemable were they to be destroyed.
Not all of it, banning mixed fabrics (19:19) and having land ownership revert every 50 years including houses outside walled cities (25:31) and animal sacrifice (all of chapters 1 and 3) would reveal how disconnected such people are, possibly even to the speakers themselves, so it has to be selective.
There's a reason why I asked the guy.
And I asked him a few years ago now, so "what the US did" that the regime found objectionable has more to do with the US support for Israel and all the consequences of that than it has to do with any direct attacks by the USA against Iran; for direct action I think you might need to look at the 1979 revolution to undo the 1953 CIA- and MI6-backed coup?
The same Russia that Trump can’t get enough of.
And even if they go through some kind of traumatic experience with a stranger from the Middle East and call them friend, it wouldn't stop the racism. I know plenty of racists with "black friends" who will tell you all about how "there are black people, and then there are n**rs". Some of their black friends will even parrot this kind of propaganda.
A good rule of thumb is to always say for yourself.
Leaving aside that I am skeptical millions of Ukrainians sincerely believe the devil has been launching missiles at them from the northeast (regardless of what you write here)... it's rather hypocritical to speak for millions of Ukrainians and then tell me to only speak for myself, don't you think?
The Iranians have been pragmatic and relatively restrained, while USA and Israel have repeatedly escalated.
Iran has been helping USA dealing with Al Qaida in Afghanistan and Isis in Iraq. As a payback, they have been included into the 'Axis of Evil' and subjected to heavy sanctions. Just one of the cases...
That's because the US (and the UK) are about the only countries in this world that haven't had the entirety of their legal, economical and political system completely revamped at least once in the last 100 years - most countries average more than that.
At the same time, such a revamp is desperately needed - the issues with the status quo are reeking - and everyone knows that it is highly, highly unlikely to get that done by ordinary democratic means due to the sheer inertia of hundreds of years of fossilized bureaucracy and individual/party interests.
And that is why so many people tend to vote for whoever shouts "destroy the country" the loudest - and not just in the US (MAGA) or UK ("Reform"), but also in Germany (AfD), Spain (Vox) or Italy (Salvini/Meloni), where economic inequality and perspectivelessness has hit absurd levels. Let it all burn to ashes, burn everything, even if one goes down with the fire, eat the rich, and try to build something more sane this time.
I usually get downvoted when I make an observation along these lines, but I will go for it again -- IMO some of the reason Europe has pulled ahead in infrastructure and policy is because a couple world wars last century reduced much of it to rubble, including the systems of governance. The UK mostly escaped that, and the US escaped nearly all of it. Which is one reason we can still have a lot of old electrical infrastructure, for example, that is pushing 100 years old, and a Constitutional system 250 years old.
I think a major problem with the system in the US is the difficulty changing it. There is a balance, and a lot of room for differing opinions on how flexible it really ought to be, but I suspect there is broad agreement that it is too inflexible. We rely too much on changing interpretations rather than changing the fundamentals.
Perhaps we really do need to risk a second Constitutional Convention. Or we will end up with a worse alternative.
It couldn’t open the straits and begged for help from is ‘weak’ ‘allies’.
Europe wouldn’t have been all that impressed.
The comparison is stark.
I wish my country had achieved half as much in terms of infrastructure.
And in terms of protecting themselves, if the US stopped protecting Russia, the situation there would be a lot tidier.
I could probably go on for another ten pages. Europe definitely has its flaws, but let's not pretend like the US is a paradise where everything is perfect and nothing ever went wrong.
The tragedy is that right wing parties are sponsored by the rich snd serve primarily them. Economic grievances of ordinary people are exploited to make them vote agains their interests.
I love my country quite literally to death. Death plays a strong role in the concept of freedom in American philosophy: Give me liberty, or give me death (yes, I know the real context of this quote), etc.
And so when my government wants to destroy my country, its land and its people, divide us, commodify us and our life experiences, and also export this kind of systematic industrial exploitation across the world, through colonies and coups and political assassinations; yeah, I hate that government a lot. I hate it to death. The American government has been an enemy to America, and an enemy to Americans. Since the beginning, with our treatment of the natives.
You'd do well to separate the land, people and government of a nation; confusing them only further serves State propaganda. We force children to say a pledge to our country in school, but it's really to our government. It's political brainwashing. I have refused to say the pledge since becoming politically aware enough around age 7. I cannot tersely express the amount of institutional abuse I suffered for this position. Teachers would ostracize me, bully me, punish me, attempt to physically force me to say it, write me up for detention, get my guardians to abuse me at home over it, etc. Like I said, the American government is a psyop.
I've already discussed how I was personally targeted in my scholastic years as they only person in my schools refusing to participate, so you already knows what happens if you exercise your first amendment rights.
> made thru free and fair elections
Where? What does "free" or "fair" mean here? It is not a secret that the US is a failed democratic republic that looks more like an inverted totalitarian state today. It's hard for things to be "fair" when there exists a vast capital asymmetry between those writing the law and those "voting" for it. Lobbyists, state actors and NGOs deploy billions of dollars into brainwashing the public about the US's image and actions, both domestic and foreign.
We are a neoliberal colonial state, that even in this exact moment are actively attempting to expand our colonial reach.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism#Criticism
> PS: There is no country on Earth that doesn't have some sort of pledge
And my grandfather used to say, as he beat me viciously, "This is nothing, you should have seen what my father used to do to me." Historical presence does not justify anything, and never has.
Yes lobbying and money in politics is a problem, but people are not as gullible as you seem to believe. The California wealth tax passed, despite billions spent against it. On the other end, Harris outspent Trump by millions and was still effectively crushed. Often grass-roots movements are far more effective then big-money campaigns.
What America has are Client-States, Countries that are subordinate. but this is nothing unusual, and can be beneficial for a country with little power of its own. In-fact many former colonies have ended up becoming Client states to their Former European masters. In contrast Colonies are directly controlled with imposed Governors, backed by a military force of the Colonial Master.
I was raised in the Catholic church and it's the same style of blind, rote memorization -> brainwashing. And to that point, sneaking "under God" into the pledge was a disgusting move that weakens a core tenet of American philosophy and law, the separation of Church and State. Each and every further recitation weakens it further, and all who participate are complicit in weakening our democracy.
> people are not as gullible as you seem to believe
Not sure where any notion of gullibility was discussed prior to this.
> Often grass-roots movements are far more effective then big-money campaigns.
How often? Want to share some numbers that paint a different picture than 250 years of American history? Our treatment of the natives? The centralization of wealth and power accelerated by the Industrial revolution?
The authoritarian ratchet of American politics is well-studied and frequently discussed. Temporary wins have not prevented the overall trend towards the US government increasing federal power and becoming an inverted totalitarian colonial state.
> What America has are Client-States, Countries that are subordinate. but this is nothing unusual
It is not what the spirit of the United States was about. The federal government was never meant to be this powerful. It has been twisted and abused into something considered "normal" but it is in no way the intended state.
> In-fact many former colonies have ended up becoming Client states to their Former European masters. In contrast Colonies are directly controlled with imposed Governors, backed by a military force of the Colonial Master.
Yes, that is neoliberal colonialism. Just ask Greenland how they have been doing. They ended their status as a colony in 1953 after establishing a Constitution. A few years later, Denmark began systematically castrating women in secret, a common tactic for preventing a nation from attaining real political sovereignty and power by controlling their population levels.
https://www.thedial.world/articles/news/issue-12/greenland-i...
I'm not even going to go into what else Denmark has done to Greenland, or what has come out of other such relationships between "former colonies" and their political masters. The occasional outlier is an exception to the rule, not proof to the contrary.
We can look at how the US treats colonies right now by looking at colonies such as Puerto Rico or Guam, which are historically oppressed through social and financial means. And we can examine our current foreign meddling in dozens of countries, or our history in participating in non-democratic regime changes in other countries. The bottom line is that the US government is a psyop and anyone who is a patriot to this country, its land and its people should understand the US government is an enemy to those things.
And the pledge is meant to convey allegiance to a symbolic flag and government, not to its land or people. Again, this can be evidenced simply by observing the routine punishment I received for not participating and comparing the pledge to other cult rites. This is Hitler Youth level shit. I was lucky enough to eventually go to a high school with a principal who refused to do morning pledges for my final scholastic years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pledge_of_Allegiance#Controver...
> One objection is that a constitutional republic built on freedom of dissent should not require its citizens to pledge allegiance to it, and that the First Amendment to the United States Constitution protects the right to refrain from speaking or standing, which itself is also a form of speech in the context of the ritual of pledging allegiance.
> Another objection is that the people who are most likely to recite the Pledge every day, small children in schools, cannot really give their consent or even completely understand the Pledge they are making.
> Another criticism is the belief that a government requiring or promoting the phrase "under God" violates protections against the establishment of religion guaranteed in the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
I’m Canadian for example.
There were several announcements, a lot of discussion, and a long process before they started selling it. It was also a temporary action, with a well known end-date (that TBH, I never looked at). It had a known and constant small pressure over investments, it wasn't something that destabilized a market.
[1] https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/bush-dome-reserv...
Basically political bike shedding so elected officials could avoid making any hard or controversial decisions that would have a material impact but maybe upset some folks due to raising taxes or reducing spending.
A strategic petroleum reserve makes a lot of sense, petroleum is part of the food supply chain and it'd be stupid to be in a position where a short disruption could cause people to starve. Not to mention the military implications if an army can't zoom around because the petrol stations run dry for whatever reason.
I don't see anything on the list of uses for helium that looks particularly time- and helium- sensitive in the way that a strategic stockpile would help with.
I'm not seeing any need for a strategic reserve here. There aren't any strategic issues. It is a bit far-fetched that a helium shock will even lead to the end of MRIs.
Also, last I knew about it, the reserves were only reduced, and the US still has some. I have absolutely no idea on the cost/benefit of it, but I don't think any other country keeps a large reserve of Helium.
Is there a widely-accepted definition of "an emergency" in the context of strategic reserves?
[Thinking of the SPR] "Oil/gas prices are currently higher due to geopolitical events, my [potential] voters are getting increasingly unhappy, and there is an election soon" would probably constitute an "an emergency" in the mind of a typical politician and his/her advisors.
Whether eg the SPR was created to (indirectly) help politicians keep their jobs is debatable.
The reserves are there to soften any quick price spikes or avoid them entirely, they aren't there to set the price in the long term. To my knowledge, the oil reserve has generally been used that way, even when the price change is self inflicted.
If they're not paying for the negative externalities that come from the methane extraction that comes along with it they really aren't paying the real price at all.
It could be free if we imagine some crazy advances in autonomous self-replicating spacecrafts. But by then we live in the post-scarcity diamond age probably.
Sending the harvest down could maybe happen inside plastic containers built in place, made with the abundant sunlight, some Co2 and water (not sure if there's CO2 this high though. In retrospect we'd need also some metals to print some sort of the antenna reflecting radar frequencies (for the ground stations tracking them on the approach)?
And with the hundreds of small containers (carefully balanced so they don't smash in the ground but slowly rain onto the area) maybe it'd be easier.
I don't know. I think it's hard sci-fi, achievable within our lifetimes :)
Oxygen, nitrogen, CO2 and argon make up 99.94% of the atmosphere. The remaining 0.06% has 5ppm is nearly 1% helium. That's up 200x from the original concentration and is well above the 0.3% that is sometimes quoted as the limit for economic extraction of helium (and well below the 7% of some natural gas).
Furthermore, the leftover gas is also already cold. It is absolutely true that 85K isn't very close to the boiling point of helium, it is a lot closer than starting at the temperature of gas at the well head.
The gotcha is almost certainly going to be that an ASU probably doesn't liquify most of the gas it takes in. That means that the exhaust gas will only be slightly enhanced.
https://mriquestions.com/uploads/3/4/5/7/34572113/philips_bl...
GP ain't wrong, but the phrasing implied we'd have it closer by than it actually is.
But, I'm also confident they were making a silly joke.
http://wordpress.mrreid.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/atmos...
Awesome graph! Worth stating that the increase in the relative fraction of He isn't so much because there's a lot of He out there as because there's a lot less of everything else. Overall density falls off roughly exponentially but lighter elements have a longer tail.
So once you get out to a few earth radii quite a bit of what you see might be ionized helium but that doesn't mean you can do much with it.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chemical_composition_of_a...
The context of this discussion and the fourth word in that sentence is important. Something existing isn't the same as something being practically available. That graph isn't wrong, percentage wise, but it's missing both density an cost per liter that makes it relevant to this discussion.
the amount of people simply considering extraction of such helium
the amount of research into comparing hypothetical methods of extraction
the level of technology of a civilization
For an idea of the difficultly, compared to not bleeding helium into the atmosphere (as the petrol companies do now): the atmospheric pressure at those elevations is around 1/10,000,000,000,000 of that at sea level. To fill one party balloon, you would need to capture something like 5,000,000,000,000 party balloons of that atmosphere. Note: math might be a relatively negligible couple orders of magnitude off.
the density is low though
observe that where Helium becomes a significant percentage, there is also Hydrogen and (monoatomic) Oxygen.
if one were driven by purism or vanity for stoichiometric exactness, then at a height of 1000 km theres 2 Hydrogens per Oxygen atom, so this could be reacted to water, and the energy used to power compression of the Helium, the water would freeze.
without this vanity, helium becomes a significant fraction at much lower heights... and thus higher densities.
The energy to compress becomes nearly insignificant at low pressures.
if humanity ever builds space elevators, this will be one of many benefits of having space elevators.