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.