As sibling comments mentioned deceptive comparison as well. How about comparing in percentage of Gross Energy Output. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09218...

What's your setup/usecase? Enhanced intellisense?

I guess they don't like Monika.

Just Monika?

Isn't it like underground? Why would it be expensive?

It wasn't. It was injected into the porous rock at the Bush Dome Reservoir [1], which acted as a natural container of helium. The strategic helium reserve was "expensive" because buying helium for storage was funded by treasury debt, but it was expensive purely only on paper.

[1] https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/bush-dome-reserv...

The Bush Dome Reservoir is a giant underground formation. So yes, it's being stored underground.

I was replying to the last question: "Why would it be expensive?"

The question wasn’t why filling it would be expensive, but why maintaining it once stored would be considered expensive.

I answered that. It wasn't expensive. Building up the stockpile was expensive (but only on paper; financed via treasury debt), but once stored, it required very little maintenance because it was all held underground in porous rock. The only real expense was maintaining the wells.

It was a penny wise and pound foolish political move to pretend to be financially responsible and reduce the deficit by some tiny rounding error on top of a rounding error amount.

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.

I suppose I'm neutral on the topic of strategic helium reserves; but what aspect of this is supposed to be pound foolish? What exactly is the buffer meant to be for?

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.

The article for example mentions MRI macines, aerospace engineering, fiber optics and semiconductors, so I guess it depends on if you want those things to still be available in a crisis

That does sound kinda minor? A worst-case scenario of a month or two without MRI machines or "aerospace engineering", whatever that means doesn't sound particularly scary. And that is making some pretty unrealistic assumptions like there is literally no helium, hospitals don't have private reserves that can last a few months and there are no replacement gasses or alternative options of any sort. And people can make do with limited fibre-optic or semiconductor manufacturing. We have crisises in various computer components every few years (I can think of HDD, RAM & GPU supply shocks over the last few years). Doesn't seem to be a major problem. A couple of months of disruption isn't a strategically interesting event.

It all depends on what you care about. People dying waiting for an MRI doesn't end society as we know it, but someone will probably be sad about it

If you're worried you can keep your own helium reserve? Then if there is an emergency and it turns out that you don't need an MRI you can sell the helium to whoever does and feel really good about your foresight.

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.

Everyone also could keep their own supply of gas and their own batteries for electricity but it turns out that is not expensive and foolish compared to centralizing such backups.

A month or two without an MRI is a lot of dead people.

A lot of people die every month. We're talking about a probability near-0 event where I imagine it'd be difficult to pick that deaths out from general background mortality - admittedly just based on the fact I don't recall anyone I know who needed a life-saving MRI but I know a few who died. That isn't much of a justification for a strategic helium reserve. Some level of risk just has to be tolerated, we can't afford to have a contingency for every possible hypothetical.

AFAIK, it was created to fill airships in case of a war. So the original intent is completely outdated.

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.

Maybe similar to boy who cried wolf?

You can do that. It's called a restricted donation. If you make a donation with a cover letter or a check memoizing a specific purpose and the nonprofit accepts it, then by law they're legally obligated to follow through and use that money for that purpose. With bugs it's probably easier because you can just write the bug ID on the check.

MZLA Technologies, the organization that these donations go to, is not a non-profit.

There are also a couple of bug bounty websites out there for exactly this kind of thing: you and others throw some money into the pot for fixing a given bug or implementing some feature, and coders can claim that bounty once they've written the code.

I've seen a few of these sites over the years but I can't remember the name of any RN. Search engines are your friend.

At work where LLM based tooling is being pushed haaard, I'm amazed every day that developers don't know, let alone second nature intuit, this and other emergent behavior of LLMs. But seeing that lack here on hn with an article on the frontpage boggles my mind. The future really is unevenly distributed.

It seems to be human nature to chase after easy to understand solutions rather than addressing ifficult bottlenecks and friction. Doctors are a great example. In order to be a doctor, you have to study for 12 years. But four of those years involve studying generally unrelated topics like any other college degree despite medicine effectively being a trade. Then on top of that, you have the limited spaces for residents anyway, so more great med students still != more doctors. And then on top of that you have the issue that teaching hospitals are usually split apart from regular hospitals and A med student who ends up at a particular teaching hospital basically ends up locked in until their residency finishes leaving them vulnerable to even more pressure.

> But four of those years involve studying generally unrelated topics like any other college degree despite medicine effectively being a trade.

There's a lot of value in knowing about more than just one thing. Anyone leaving their university with a degree should have at least some exposure to topics outside of the field they want to work in. People are more than just their jobs, having a well rounded education is useful, and matters outside of the field of medicine still have real impacts on the lives of doctors.

I'd certainly feel better about going to a doctor who has a reasonable baseline understanding of the rest of the world outside of his work. You could argue that people looking to become doctors should able to avoid some percentage of the other classes they're forced to take, but doctors can often pick up some relevant credits while still fulfilling those requirements too.

Maybe the particularities, but there are overall issues with placing in EU as well. There's a big discrepancy in general practice availability between large cities / capitals and smaller cities / country side. And it's not necessarily a lack of "living wages" nor is it poor conditions (often they'll have strong support from local municipalities w/ things like clinic space, local community support, etc) but it's simply that younger doctors don't want to move there.

Yep, this is the same almost everywhere. You're not going to find many young people who will go to a university to get the qualifications to be a medical professional, and then willingly move back to their middle-of-nowhere small town to do that job, even if it pays more.

The Soviets would attempt to solve it by requiring the graduates to work off about 3 years in the place chosen by the joint commissions from Gosplan/Ministry of Labour/Ministry of Higher Education (those same commissions determined the number of students to enroll in the first place, so...). And this system (called "distribution", as in, "distributing the graduates to the workplaces") was widely unpopular for obvious reasons.

In the US today, they try to entice people to those places by forgiving their student loans if they work there long enough.

I knew someone who got a master's in nursing and did this. She ended up really liking the population that she worked with and stayed there past the required number of years.

I should have done better with my comment. I intended to reference the pre-med undergraduate degree.

Thanks appreciate the broader context in this post. As to your meta comment, besides bots, I think a lot of people are facing a great deal of pain and fear. They're emotional and even in hn a critical mass has switched to reading and writing with their gut. Good vibe project, analyse the level of emotionality in comments over time, I'd bet it's gone vertical in the past few months.