>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 predictions that chipmaking would be severely disrupted turned out to not come true because the Spruce Pine mine 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...

The issue is that these areas are optimized for—so we don’t build capacity or the surrounding infrastructure for fallbacks—and relatively small likelihood events have tremendous risk-adjusted costs.

If you have one event with a 10% chance of throwing off the world’s semiconductors, that’s incredibly dangerous and worth talking about. If you have five such things (the quartz mine, bromine conversion, helium supply, etc.), there is a 60% chance that none of those events land.

Even still, it’s worth raising alarm about each and every one of them, because a single failure causes so much collateral damage. But people assume if something didn’t happen, it wasn’t worth prepping for.

Bromine is unusually concentrated in the Dead Sea, representing 0.4% instead of 0.0065% in the oceans:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bromine#Occurrence_and_product...

The largest producer outside the Dead Sea is China by far, and the only other significant producer is Japan (!) which produces a paltry ~10% of worldwide output. It's possible to produce bromine from other places but you'd basically be starting from zero on the infrastructure involved. The short-term risks are real.

https://www.reportlinker.com/dataset/6b01d1a976f7ec9db71e35b...

However, it may be hard for Iran to disrupt bromine production. They may also not think about it.

EDIT: According to other links in this thread the US produces a significant but undisclosed (?!) quantity of bromine, practically all of which is consumed domestically. So it was probably missing from my data. Not great for other bromine users.

Efficiency is the opposite of robustness.

You can’t have slack in a system and be efficient, because it would be more efficient to use up all 100% of the (cheapest) capacity.

There is a fundamental tradeoff between the two that capitalists chasing 1% margins discover only when there is a disaster somewhere.