Yes. I catch myself all the time when I wonder how people are so willing to place these spy devices inside their home. But, "oh yeah, I have a phone on my nightstand every night :-/".
BepiColombo [0] uses 581 kg of Xe gas for its electric propulsion. I remember reading at the time this was being built that it consumed a measurable portion of the global xenon production for that year. This post reminded me to look that up, and it seems to be only ~1% of the ~50 tons, which is quite a bit less than I remember but still quite significant for a single application to use a non-trivial amount of the supply.
Given that ~100 million tons of oxygen are produced annually, extracting all the xenon from that air would yield about 170 tons/year. So there's a bit of room for growth.
The BepiColombo number is similar, I think, to the amount of xenon made annually in nuclear reactors (where it occurs in spent fuel as the result of fission.)
I think it might have taken a larger percentage of high-grade ultrapure xenon, a narrower market than the global bulk supply. A 1% impurity is fine if you are using xenon for welding, not so much if you are firing zenon plasma at a grid carrying a few hundred volts. A little bit of o2 in there and your grid would be rust very quickly.
Inert gas in welding isn't used to carry heat, it's used as shielding to prevent oxidation, nitridation, and ingress of hydrogen. In any case, the heat capacity of the noble gases are almost identical. What xenon might do is reduce diffusion of heat away from the weld, as its thermal conductivity is just 1/3rd that of argon.
In practice I think a combination of argon and CO2 is typically used for inert gas welding of steel.
It depends on the process. Argon/CO2 is used for MIG welding, while TIG generally uses pure argon. In some situations that justify the expense, helium is used instead as it allows deeper weld penetration.
I wish I could properly cite it, but one of my favorite HN comments recently was, to paraphrase, "thing, but from the Internet". Which is to say that old rules don't apply, for some reason.
Fortunately deaths are only a fraction of the accidents though, and it's not even necessarily the kind of accident that bothers insurance companies the most as long as the driver only kills himself.
As an outsider, how did silicon valley turn so fast? Or was it always ~50/50 with the dominant image reflected by what the powerful thought should be the dominant narrative?
I am an outsider too but I think there’s a mix of things like:
1. People being richer already due to Silicon Valley pay, think they’re immune to harm. It’s easy to be in a bubble in SF, where life is good, without truly knowing what it’s like to see ICE kidnapping children in black SUVs on the streets of Minneapolis.
2. If someone is fitting to the dominant demographic group (white, male, straight, born in America to citizens, etc.) then there is little empathy or understanding of what others are going through and what risks they face from the current administration and the far right shift in general.
3. Many people genuinely think they will belong to an ultra rich class in the future. They want to get into that same group through startups or whatever. And they don’t want that opportunity to go away.
4. People in tech skew younger. And the young often lack the maturity to understand how the world truly works. Sure the top 1% pays most of the income taxes. But they are also hoarding most of the capital and profits to begin with, so of course they would be paying most of the taxes. Those in this article view the rich as generous for paying the taxes they do, instead of realizing that everyone else is not competing with the super rich in a fair way, because they have to live paycheck to paycheck and any risk is existential.
Trump himself, one of Epstein's most frequent fliers, was at one time one of the most openly vocal supporters of releasing the files when it was politically convenient for him to do so. He knew he was prominent in those files, but had no real intention of actually releasing them if he could help it. Elon is no different. When it was convenient to be outspoken about it, he did, despite knowing his name was included.
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