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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • That’s pretty cool honesty.

    However, I’m personally more concerned about the move away from cheap, off the shelf, replacement parts and simple, standardised designs, and more towards costly assemblies, highly integrated mechanical designs that are very complex to disassemble and repair, and deliberately anti-repair preactices that push consumers back towards manufacturers like how phones and laptops have become recently.

    I was talking to a coworker the other day about how even simple things like car headlights have become severely integrated and expensive.

    When an led in his headlight blew and took out half of the series strip and rendered the entire indicator on one side of his car entirely dead, the only replacement part you could get for it was a replacement headlight cluster, all lights included, for around £500. To replace the cluster meant borderline stripping the front end of the car including the radiator to access 5 screws holding it in place.

    On my old car from the mid 2000s, if an indicator light blew, I could fit a new one for £2.50 in under 10 mins. If the cluster smashed a brand new unit would set me back £25 now or around £50 back when it was new. The whole job could be completed though the open bonnet with only a screwdriver.




  • Hot Swapping batteries is actually surprisingly good for the life of the battery if done well.

    Rapid charging the battery does do permenant damage over time especially if you fast charge every time. Whereas if you can hot swap a battery and have a suitable stockpile of them you can trickle charge the battery over a couple of hours instead of 30 mins and prolong the overall lifespan of the battery. Even slowing down the charge rate to 1 hour reduces wear on the battery significantly. Plus, without time pressure from a customer, more time could be taken to replace damaged cells or blocks in a battery so that one pack will more effectively use the whole battery up instead of throwing away perfectly good cells.


  • Not at all! Nuclear is an excellent compliment to renewables and as a companion source to support the grid they are actually really effective. They’re also really useful in situations where renewables just aren’t an option such as large scale shipping. Obviously we haven’t seen any nuclear container ships yet but that’s mostly around startup and infrastructure costs as well as outdated regulations.

    With small nuclear reactors becoming commonplace I wouldn’t be supprised if we start to see nuclear shipping becoming a thing in industry in the next 20-50 years.

    Its already been proven as a reliable, safe, and effective power source in a naval context. The main hangup people seem to have is with accidents at sea, however again, the militaries of the world have already proven nuclear reactors safe in a number of accidents where a nuclear vessel has been lost and the reactors shut down safely and did not cause release of nuclear material.