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Czarcasm

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In 2015-2016 I did some mechanical engineering work at BWXT, designing nuclear waste containers for the Bruce Power CANDU reactor refurbishment program.

I learned that the spent fuel storage is pretty trivial for a few reasons:

1. The amount of fuel waste produced by a reactor is volumetrically tiny. So it's not too expensive to just have a relatively small guarded yard of sealed storage casks next to the reactor, where the fuel can sit and decay until safe for offsite disposal (typically around 60 years).

2. Safe waste storage containers are relatively easy to make. Most containers only need to be a thick stainless steel inner liner and a stainless steel outer liner filled with a special mixture of concrete. The nuclear waste is dropped in, the lid is bolted shut, then the container can be safely left in a guarded open yard for >100 years. They are safe by virtue of just having ridiculously thick welded stainless steel walls. We designed them to fall off a train going over a bridge, fall 300ft onto solid rock, and not break.

3. Reactor technology keeps getting better at extracting more energy from fuel. So what was "waste" in a past decade, can be put back into a reactor that is better at pulling energy out of the fuel. For this reason, there hasn't actually been much actual "fuel waste" in the history of the nuclear industry. It's all just being stored for future use by better reactors.

Rubber alone would require pressure pushing the battery against the housing to maintain the battery position during a drop. This pressure against the underside of the display module would mess with the display.

Adhesive is needed because there can’t be any pressure against the underside of the display module, and the battery can’t be allowed to move even a slight amount during drop impacts.

I fail to see your argument. How would opening up immigration benefit Japan, other than depressing wages? Japan is an island already overpopulated relative to it's native energy and agricultural resources. Importing more low-value workers will only lower the quality of living for existing inhabitants of Japan.

Japan should focus instead on better utilizing the high-skill labor force that they already have.

Flawless communication between team members is important when developing complex products. If my team was primarily comprised of people who only fluently speak German, and we are located in Germany, is it not reasonable for me to set a requirement that new candidates must speak fluent German?

Why are you entitled to have people speak your language, when you are the immigrant?

They have an operating profit, but they choose to reinvest it all back into the company, thus they don't have an overall profit. They could reduce the amount they are reinvesting into the company at any time in order to produce an overall profit.

This is exactly what Amazon did/does. Doesn't mean that they have "limped along"

Github can't monopolize the word "copilot". It's a basic english word to describe someone that is assisting you to steer a vessel/team/project. It's been around for hundreds of years in naval industry, and in aviation since the dawn of flight.

In rural areas with no cell service, AM radio is often the only available form of weather and news. It's also a great form of emergency information broadcasting in the event of a natural disaster.

The Airpods and Apple Watch I think were both legitimately innovative when first released. They were massive leaps over what previous existed in their respective segments.

Over the last 10 years Dassault has slowly been destroying Solidworks. Each update brings new bugs, and almost no new features.

They are now trying to force all users over to their new 3DExperience platform which is a half-baked pile of garbage for all but large companies which can afford to have a dedicated IT team to support it.

Dassault did kill Solidworks, it just took them some time.

What you can do instead, is slip under the car and splice into the wire harness that is running under the car to the transmission or differential.

The transmission controller and differential speed sensor (or even differential controller on some cars) will be post gateway on the CAN bus.

I've done this on GM vehicles to spoof different vehicle behaviors while evaluating traction control systems.

This is probably the best counterargument to raise in response to the "late-bloomer" anecdotes that many people raise.

For every unit of societal productivity created by a late bloomer that is saved by a common-stream system, I would personally argue that there is an order of magnitude more societal productivity lost by holding back the more typical high performers.

Late blooming intellectuals aren't the norm. Most highly intelligent people begin performing as such from a young age.

I'm a mechanical engineer, and ASME Y14.5 (the leading drafting standard in the west) requires the use of all capitol letters for technical drawings. Because of this, I use the CapsLock key very very frequently.

Removing the CapsLock key would piss off a lot of people in the hardware engineering world.

Canada has the largest nuclear power station in the world [1], led the development of one of the most successful reactor designs [2], and continues to be a leader in nuclear fuel, steam generators, and nuclear waste management engineering [3]. Also, most of Ontario's power generation comes from nuclear. You can see the supply breakdown live here: https://www.ieso.ca/power-data

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Nuclear_Generating_Stati...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor

[3] https://www.bwxt.com/about/business-units/bwxt-canada

Of course it’s not ideal, but in the real world the designs are often impossible or impractical to build. If work halted every time construction workers came across a design that didn’t work, instead of tweaking the design onsite and keeping going, nothing would get built.

Source: multi-generational heavy construction family business.

Nearly every engineer I know would benefit from =>32GB of RAM as opposed to 16GB.

On the consumer side, if more of the market has 32GB available, you can bet that applications will expand to utilize the available space.

Applebot 6 years ago

Same. I have no idea how I would navigate in China without an iPhone. All the other English language map applications are straight up unusable.

Automotive engines are designed to produce power at a wide range of operating speeds, at the detriment of peak power output and peak efficiency. Aircraft engines can take advantage of the fact that they will be operating at a single RPM range for most of their life, which allows you to optimize every single aspect of the system for that speed. Aircraft engines also have much, much higher reliability, lifecycle, and quality control requirements than automotive engines.

For these reasons and a few others, you would basically end up redoing most of the engineering work on an automotive engine to repurpose it for aerospace applications, thus negating the savings of reusing the existing design.

This is my biggest issue. I tried using Firefox exclusively for a period of time but experienced a 10x increase in the number of reCaptcha manual verifications I had to complete. Going to the same sites on Chrome has no reCaptcha.

For me, this is blatant anti-competitive practice and should be punished.