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Politics : A Real American President: Donald Trump -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: didjuneau who wrote (435978)	9/22/2024 1:58:41 AM
From: FJB	1 Recommendation Recommended By didjuneau Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 458552

They have two women doing college football highlights from today on ESPN. No wonder their ratings went down the shitter. How stupid are these people...

To: didjuneau who wrote (435978)	10/14/2024 7:42:15 PM
From: didjuneau	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 458552

Supply chain alert: 5 Unassuming Cities That Secretly Control the World cracked.com Our world exists thanks to a network of roads and ships that move goods in every direction. That means you can get your socks from any of countless suppliers, which is good news if 75 percent of all sock factories get bombed. But sometimes, you’ll find yourself using an item that is guaranteed to come from one single spot. All baseballs are coated in mud from one river in New Jersey. All Tabasco sauce is made on one island in Louisiana. And quite a few other items are similarly sourced from one tiny place. 5 The Semiconductor Industry Revolves Around Spruce Pine, North Carolina Computer chips are made of semiconductors, and semiconductors are made of silicon. That’s why you’ll hear the chips biz referred to as the “silicon industry,” or hear the tech part of California referred to as “Silicon Valley,” or hear cool kids saying, “I’ll call you on my sil.” Silicon is an extremely common element here on Earth, second only to oxygen in abundance. But to melt down the relevant silicon mineral, you need a crucible that’s made of an extremely pure silicon mineral of its own. That mineral is ultra-pure quartz, and unlike silicon in general, it’s not easy to get. The bulk of it comes from one source, in Spruce Pine, North Carolina, a town of only 2,000 residents. An informal estimate of how many chips worldwide use quartz from Spruce Pine is that all of them do. A slightly more formal estimate would say 70 percent, which is still pretty huge considering chips control pretty much every electronic device you can think of. EChastain/Wiki Commons Except for your boss' computer, which still uses just vacuum tubes.Spruce Pine has had a bit of a hiccup recently, in the form of a catastrophic hurricane named Helene. Cutting that town off from the rest of the world isn’t great for the global silicon supply chain. Manufacturers have quartz stockpiled at the moment, but if we don’t hook Spruce Pine back up soon, everyone’s going to feel the pain of a shortage. Maybe factories are going to have to switch from natural ultra-pure quartz to artificial ultra-pure quartz. Or maybe they will abandon all hope and start smashing every existing computer, with hammers.