Terminating an employee can present significant legal risk if not handled carefully. In this episode of California Employment News, Weintraub Tobin attorneys Nikki Mahmoudi and John Slavik discuss best practices and key considerations employers should evaluate before making a termination decision.
Listen for a breakdown of what California employers need to know to approach employee terminations thoughtfully and stay compliant
When people talk about semiconductor supply chains, they talk about TSMC, ASML, and Nvidia. They rarely talk about helium — which is a significant oversight, because without helium, none of those advanced fabs work.
Helium is used in semiconductor manufacturing as a coolant and purge gas. Its extremely low boiling point makes it irreplaceable for maintaining the cryogenic temperatures required in certain fabrication steps. There is no substitute at current technology levels. When you run out of helium, the fab stops.
Global helium supply is heavily concentrated — the U.S., Qatar, Russia, and Algeria account for the vast majority of production. Russia’s Gazprom operates one of the world’s largest helium facilities in eastern Siberia. Sanctions, supply disruptions, or deliberate restriction could tighten an already constrained market with very little warning.
Craig Tindale’s broader argument applies here with full force. The material dependencies of the technology economy run far deeper than the technology economy acknowledges. We have built an extraordinarily complex industrial system and then systematically dismantled our understanding of what holds it together. Helium is one of those invisible load-bearing walls. It doesn’t appear in most supply chain risk assessments because it doesn’t fit neatly into the categories that analysts use.
The same pattern repeats across dozens of industrial gases and process inputs: chlorine, ammonia, sulfuric acid, argon. Each one is essential to some critical production process. Each one is either supply-constrained, geographically concentrated, or both. The lesson from helium is the same as from copper, gallium, and tantalum: the modern economy’s vulnerabilities are not financial. They are physical. And physical constraints don’t respond to monetary policy.
Congress passes a defense budget. The press covers the number. Analysts debate whether it’s enough. Almost nobody asks the question that actually matters: can the industrial base physically produce what that budget is supposed to buy?
Craig Tindale’s answer, drawn from direct contacts inside the defense procurement system, is uncomfortable. Budget allocation is not capacity allocation. You can appropriate $100 billion for ships, missiles, and munitions. But if the steel mills, specialty chemical plants, rare earth processors, and skilled workforce required to build those things don’t exist at sufficient scale, the money is a number on a spreadsheet. It doesn’t become a weapon.
The rare earth dependency is the sharpest edge of this problem. An F-35 is roughly 25% titanium by weight. Titanium production requires magnesium as a process input. America’s primary magnesium facility in Utah went bankrupt and was retired — largely for ESG reasons. The facility polluted. That’s true. It was also irreplaceable on any short timeline.
Gallium is another example. Gallium is essential to directed energy weapons — the microwave-burst systems used for drone defense. China controls 98% of global gallium supply. If Beijing decides those weapons shouldn’t be built, they simply decline to license gallium exports. No kinetic conflict required. Just a licensing decision.
The deeper problem is institutional. Defense contractors have optimized for lobbying efficiency, not manufacturing efficiency. The incentive structure rewards cost-plus contracts, not industrial capacity. A defense budget is only as real as the industrial base behind it. Right now, that base has gaps that dollars alone cannot close. Until we’re honest about that, we’re funding a fiction.