I think the kind of laptop this person wishes should simply be made illegal to make. We cannot sustain having all electric devices being thrown after a year or two, these things need to last, to be repairable and make it easy to grab pieces and materials when they die anyway
I agree with him. My personal laptop is an m1 MacBook Pro, and 5 years on it’s still a better experience than my work laptop which is a high spec dell with an i9 and 32GB ram. I’m more likely to chuck the dell than upgrade it because whatever combination of stuff it’s doing just doesn’t work.
Give me something solid that will last 5 -6 years with a serviceable (I don’t care if it’s glued or torx’ed or whatever in, just as long as it’s replaceable) battery, and I don’t care if the RAM and SSD is soldered to the chipset.
In the past I’ve replaced spinning rust with SSDs and that’s given that machine a lease of life but those kinds of upgrades don’t really exist anymore - adding an extra 8GB ram isn’t going to turn my stupid dell machine into something that works.
There are lots of ways of "just not working" but IME the problem with corporate Windows laptops is often the enterprise software crap on them rather than the hardware, necessarily.
My work laptop with a high(ish)-end AMD laptop CPU and reasonable hardware quality drains the battery in a couple of hours. It also doesn't feel any faster than my personal three-year-old more lightweight (also AMD, same brand) laptop. In some cases the private device is faster despite its lower specs. Its battery would also easily last 5 times longer than the work one, probably, if I used it on the road.
(Incidentally, the poor battery life isn't much of a practical concern with the work device either because I need to use it at the desk 98% of the time anyway. But I can certainly see how crappy software and configurations can make using those devices a pain.)
> Give me something solid that will last 5 -6 years with a serviceable (I don’t care if it’s glued or torx’ed or whatever in, just as long as it’s replaceable) battery, and I don’t care if the RAM and SSD is soldered to the chipset.
I'm okay with that, even if I'd personally prefer the serviceability. But I'm honestly not okay with the idea that it's fine to just toss a laptop after two years. I want people who do that to get their own planet.
Also, an 8 GB RAM upgrade makes little sense nowadays but a 16 -> 48 GB or 32 -> 64 GB or 32 -> 96 GB upgrade can actually make an otherwise reasonable device better if the amount of RAM becomes a bottleneck.
> IME the problem with corporate Windows laptops is often the enterprise software crap on them rather than the hardware, necessarily.
I work for a small org, the laptop was bought from Dell and shipped to me. It's running vanilla Windows 11 with OpenVPN and Windows Defender, with a decent sized dev drive. There are so many issues with it - keypresses being 10-20 seconds delayed, random window tearing/partial display updates, the machine deciding to ignore sleep and just dying while the lid is closed. These aren't things that will be solved by replacing the SSD, or the RAM, they're likely CPU (and as a result motherboard) replacements.
> Also, an 8 GB RAM upgrade makes little sense nowadays but a 16 -> 48 GB or 32 -> 64 GB or 32 -> 96 GB upgrade can actually make an otherwise reasonable device better if the amount of RAM becomes a bottleneck.
There's practically no devices (framework is the only one that comes to mind) that will ship with that little RAM and allow an upgrade by that much, even in the desktop space. My 2015 Macbook pro (the device before this) has 16GB RAM , giving it an extra 32GB isn't really going to help it much, the problem is that it's "i7" is an order of magnitude slower than a 3/4 year old replacement device (and ironically probably closer to the Intel® Core™ Ultra 7 258V which is in my work machine)
The assumption here is that the MacBook is better because of soldering components rather than because Apple simply made a better chip and has a better OS than Windows.
Is there a reason to believe that if Apple didn’t solder memory on, it would make the performance/battery worse, as opposed to making the device slightly heavier/bigger?
> The assumption here is that the MacBook is better because of soldering components rather than because Apple simply made a better chip and has a better OS than Windows.
That's your assumption - my point is that I don't care as long as it's actually good. The only part I really care about is the battery because it has a limited number of cycles that is shorter than the lifetime of the rest of the components.
The issue is precisely that you don't care, and as a result laptop makers have no incentive to making long lasting repairable laptop and our planet will look like a giant electric waste (not counting the problem will producing the required minerals etc).
If they were required to make things long lasting and repairable, they would put the effort into designing things this way, and you'll probably have laptops as perfect as you require, probably not much more expensive if at all in a few years but also have the required properties to f*ck our planet less.
That's the main issue with our current system, companies are only incentivised to maximize their profits, so they will happily f*ck our planet if they can save 1 cent in r&d on a 4000€ product.
You're getting all up in arms about a strawman argument that you feel very strongly about. I'
> as a result laptop makers have no incentive to making long lasting repairable laptop and our planet will look like a giant electric waste (not counting the problem will producing the required minerals etc).
And yet pretty much every windows machine on the market right now has user replacable RAM, storage and batteries.
My point is that hardware is not changing at the same pace as it was - a laptop from 2015 with a fresh battery is absolutely perfectly usable in 2025. A laptop from 2005 would be unusable in 2015. An SSD would help you get from 2010 to 2015, but going from 2GB to the chipsets maximum 8GB is going to do nothing for the longetivity of the machine - that 2005 laptop processor is unlikely to even be able to boot a web browser.
I don't have concrete number to give you but I have a feeling that the trend is to have more soldered ram (at least that was my impression last time I shopped for a laptop). I think things like batteries and disk replacement is something that buyers cares (cared?) a bit more about than repairability and as a result, makers delivered.
My laptop from 2007 with an old core 2 duo cpu can boot a web browser fine. Some websites with "modern" web tech might not work well (ie it's slow), but I don't think the CPU is the issue here :)
Apple Silicon is a slightly customized ARM processor soldered onto a main board. That's not the reason for it's better performance.
Microsofts support for these is still kinda bad ime, which is easily the biggest impact on their battery longevity.
Furthermore, Most super intrusive and performance hindering spyware aka antivirus is only deployed on windows, hence it gets double-punched by having subpar processor support and wastage in the processes running in corporate environments. The latter being the biggest performance impact.
These are however all software, not hardware bound issues
> These are however all software, not hardware bound issues
Completely agree, which is why the only part that I really care about being replaceable is a battery - the hardware from 2017/2018 holds up to most use cases.
Yes, if they did not solder on the memory it would use more power. The longer the lines are to your DRAM, the more impedance there is and you need higher drive power on your memory controller. LPDDR has been soldered forever as far as I know, though with the introduction of CAMM (compression attached memory modules), this has changed. I don’t know but I would bet money CAMM is still higher power for less bandwidth than DRAM packaged on the SoC base die or however apples does it.
The half-life of Apple kit is so high, they are arguably a lot more sustainable than their repairable PC counterparts.
Apple laptops I have that boot include a 2007 iBook (my folks used it until this Summer and then bank websites would stop working with the Chrome browser they could get working on it), which I'll be putting a BSD or Linux distro on over Christmas, a 2012 Intel MBP that has Linux on it and a couple of 2015-2017 era MBPs that I inherited via one means or another.
I'm typing this on an M4 MacBook Air I picked up cheap during Black Friday sales. I fully expect it to still be functional in 10 years.
I don't think I've ever had a PC laptop last close to that.
Apple’s support for MacOS can been shorter than their laptops longevity (the longevity of their laptops got quite bad when then tried to make them as thin as an usb-c port). So Linux support is also important there imo, and as the original post pointed out because Apple makes it so hard to for Linux to support their hardware, long-term software support may be something to think about before buying a MacBook.
MacOS is abysmal with backwards compatibility. In the music space, everything just breaks every few years. With Snow Leopard, Lion, Catalina, Sequoia. While Windows versions work forever, you're stuck having to upgrade and buy new versions of software to run on newer versions of MacOS. That's if you're lucky. Sometimes you might have no path and you need to look for new software.
My experience of being one of the only dev with a Linux/Lenovo laptop in a company where everyone else has Macs, is that my Thinkpad from 2018 outlived all the Macs from the same period, most of which had become overheating helicopters.
Electronic devices usually get thrown away because nobody wants them anymore because they are obsolete. Having removable RAM will do you little good if you can only fit ddr3.
That's why you'd want to be able to replace the mainboard, screen, keyboard, speakers, trackpad, etc., and not just the RAM. Like https://shop.mntre.com/products/mnt-reform, but presumably easier for non-technical people to use.
Don't get me wrong, I like the approach, but if you want a laptop, it's the wrong tradeoff and not one that 90% of the users will take. Sure, _some_ will choose this, and small companies can do well to sustain themselves but it probably won't do a dent in ewaste numbers and you won't see iphone like adoption numbers, relegating it to just a niche product.
There's no reason such a laptop can't be repairable. Sure, it may be harder to do, but that's the tradeoff you choose when buying such a device.
The main obstacles to repairability in such devices are intentional: part serialization, lack of documentation, and so on. Those don't help making the device any more compact or easier to manufacture, it's pure greed.
Address those problems and you can happily have your ultra-slim, tightly integrated laptop. It may be slightly less repairable, but as long as repair isn't intentionally being prevented, life will find a way.
Restricting access to documentation, part serialization, or restricting OEMs from selling components directly has nothing to do with laptop form factor though.
Whether repair of such devices is economically viable is one thing and that's up to the market to decide, but making repair intentionally harder is a choice of the manufacturer and has nothing to do with how slim the laptop is.
Sorry I wasn't clear, my point is: that reason is completely separate from a laptop's form factor or method of construction.
You can have a somewhat repairable laptop even if it's slim and tightly integrated, and you can also have a completely unrepairable one even if all components are modular and accessible but then use strong cryptography to authenticate to each other.
Form factor is not the primary reason current tech is hard/impossible to repair, though the industry loves that people believe so, since it diverts attention from their intentional efforts to hinder repair.
It's a major reason. Back when TVs were made of tubes, you could expect any tech-savvy guy to be able to learn how to go in there and swap the tubes out.
Nowadays? A techpriest that can take apart Apple's iPhone stacked PCB assemblies, replace large BGA components in there, and then put them back together and have it work is a rare specimen. And "rare" means "expensive".
A hour of labor of someone who does neurosurgery on electronics isn't going to be cheap.
Not that Apple has any good reasons to make it even harder on the madmen who attempt and learn such repairs.
Because they put assembly in countries with cheap labor, and optimize the assembly process so that most workers don't have to perform any complex operations, or any operations that involve thinking.
Things like PCB manufacturing? Putting those BGA chips where they go? Done entirely by machines.
Now, a notable exception to this rule is the "rework" or "remanufacturing" lines - where actual human specialists take devices that failed QC, or used devices, diagnose them, and bring them up to standard.
Those can be very involved. But official manufacturing still has strict limits on how far are they willing to go - and unofficial refurbishment lines have them beat on repair complexity.
It doesn't have to be thrown out. It can be re-used by someone else. Just build durable electronics. It will last a decade easily. Upgradeable laptops are actually less sustainable: people buy not 1 or 2 laptops, but 1.6 laptops: effectively throwing away 0.6 laptop.
Also I see no reason why a non-upgradeable laptop would also be non-repairable.
Heck most people won’t be upgrading every few years, the m1 Macs are still plenty good today, it sounds like this guy just wants a MacBook Pro that runs highly tuned Unix based OS that is not macOS
Well, top performance electronics is usually going to be more expensive than the more nominal options.
And if there's not enough to go around to begin with, it might as well be a niche of some kind, you can't expect everyone to choose the most expensive option by any means.
Now if the user base is nowhere near the majority, and you're already in a high-dollar niche anyway because of the desired performance level, might as well escalate from the merely expensive, to the glaringly overpriced in addition. That's a well-worn playbook.
When the sweet spot is hit with loads of customers striving to afford the top-shelf items, while in actuality everyone is settling for a shadow of what should be offered by the biggest business machines companies, it's not the hardware that's the problem. Too few people are grumbling and accept they just have to make do with what they have.
Most buyers do not use consumer electronics as money-making machines, the genres and cost-structures have undergone generations of evolution to be optimized for consumption of the electronics, as actually opposed to the business machines they once were.
If you want to use yours as a money-making machine, it will probably pay for itself even if the purchase price is a small multiple of the popular budget consumer version. But way more money is being put into making it difficult to tell the difference, more money than most small companies are even worth.
>supported by a company that is user aligned.
Interestingly, you can't buy that with money, even from the most financially-oriented of companies.
I also want it. I dislike this idea "make it illegal I don't want other people to have the freedom to do something I dislike". Of you don't like unupgradable products, then don't buy them. I like upgradability - apple makes some things like the SSD non-uogradeable without much benefit. But many other parts gain different benefits when you don't try to make everything infinitely upgradable. I really want this non-enshittified macbook alternative!!!! Shut up and take my money.
I don't mind people doing things I dislike (and honestly I'd enjoy changing laptop every month as much as anyone else), I simply don't want people to damage too much the planet where I and my family live.
> I don’t care one bit about upgradability or customizability. After a year or two, I’m happy to throw it out and buy a new one. It’s not like upgradability is a bad thing, but it usually comes with tradeoffs to weight and power draw, and I’d rather it all be in one solid package glued together. And I don’t like customizability because I like when all the testing and polish work is put into one configuration.
Jesus christ. What a wasteful and selfish way to look at things.
To defend OP somewhat: his throw out should be someone else’s pre-owned and then we are square.
Not in defense: This is a customer who sees itself as an ultra pro user that only wants the best on all dimensions regardless of economics. Nice that there are about a few hundred of these customers in the world. This is a market that doesn’t exist and frankly, give this customer their wish and they only have other or more wishes.
The MacBook currently has two models, each available in two sizes, each size has three to six default configurations. There are dozens of MacBooks before you even get into the customization options.
Selfish how, because he clearly does not say that upgradability or customizability are bad things? Its also not like hes proposing something that isnt reality for most manufacturers, especially Apple.
I think the selfishness here is related to being fine with generating a pile of electronic waste that becomes a problem for everyone else, as long as he can avoid carrying a few ounces extra.
It's hard to recycle electronics, because separating materials that are chemically bonded together is very labor intensive and isn't worth it from the price of aluminum, copper, lithium, etc alone.
It would have to cost more to dispose of a laptop for this to work out financially.
People don't buy into this kind of signaling these days. It just does not work anymore.
Which e-waste are you currently running on?
You're just not. I know it.
Instead you run out and buy the newest shiniest thing so you can put a docker container into another docker container. And fill landfills with ewaste as a result.
Your engineering practices most directly contribute to ewaste, because extremely powerful PCs from 15 years ago doesn't hold up anymore to ever more shitty layers of javascript and vibecoded python stuffed recursively into ever more docker containers.
geohot is just being honest. That is respectable. All the signaling bullshit - is not.
Could you please not post in the flamewar style to HN? You've done it repeatedly in this thread, unfortunately, and we're trying for the opposite here.
I'm tired of this insane right-wing opinion that having an opinion against waste is just virtue signalling, so we shouldn't care about anything because it's all just "signalling" and it's somehow more honest to not give a shit about anything. It's tired and it's disgusting and it's how we get a world where we don't care about improving our society or our environment.
I do care. You might not, but that's a you problem and not anything to do with me signalling anything. I'm being honest about everything I say. You not accepting that says more about you than it does about me.
Could you please not post in the flamewar style to HN? You've done it repeatedly in this thread, unfortunately, and we're trying for the opposite here.
That's unfair. I'm going unfairly called out even though I stand by my beliefs and I'm only trying to defend myself. How are the replies to my comments in any way acceptable and according to HN guidelines???
"Put your money where your mouth is", come on. That's not acceptable and it's provoking. How can you defend bullies like this?
I specifically responded with an identical reply to the other main commenter you were arguing with, who was also breaking the rules.
Still, someone else breaking the rules doesn't make it ok for you to do so, and pointing the finger at others instead of taking responsibility is not a helpful response.
Seeing the latest Valve Steam Machine made me disappointed. No replaceable GPU, soldered memory, no socketed CPU. I really hope Valve isn't going to lead the way for unrepairable gaming PCs.
Yes, and I am afraid that gaming PCs will move from the fully modular repairable computers we have today to small little boxes where you can only upgrade the SSD.
Maybe the most depressing part of all this is if people start thinking they would not have been able to do things without the LLM. Of course they would have, it's not like LLMs can do anything that you cannot. Maybe it would have taken more time at least the first time and you would have learned a few things in the process.
Sure, I can write all of it. But I simply won’t. I have Claude generated Avalonia C# applications and there is no way I would have written the thousands of lines of xaml they needed for the layouts. I would just have done it as a console app with flags.
But reducing friction, eliminating the barrier to entry, is of fundamental importance. It's human psychology; putting running socks next to your bed at night makes it like 95% more likely you'll actually go for a run in the morning.
I understand the point, and to some degree agree. For myself, I really couldn't (not to say it wouldn't have been possible). I tried many many times over so many years and just didn't have the mental stamina for it, it would never "click" like infra/networking/hardware does etc and I would always end up frustrated.
I have learnt so much in this process, nowhere near as much as someone that wrote every line (which is why I think being a good developer will be a hot commodity) but I have had so much fun and enjoyment, alongside actually seeing tangible stuff get created, at the end of the day, that's what it's all about.
I have a finite amount of time to do things, I already want to do more than I can fit into that time, LLMs help me achieve some of them.
The "only" 12 days might be disappointing (but totally understandable), however I won't mourn the global leaderboard which always felt pointless to me (even without the llm, the fact that it depends on what time you did solved problems really made it impractical for most people to actually compete). Private leaderboards with people on your timezone are much nicer.
The global leaderboard was a great way to find really crazy good people and solutions however - I picked through a couple of these guys solutions and learned a few things. One guy had even written his own special purpose language mainly to make AoC problems fast - he was of course a compilers guy.
Agreed! It’d be nice to surface that somehow. The subreddit is good but not everyone is there. I found a lot of interesting people and code in the folks who managed to finish challenges in like 4 minutes or whatever..
My understanding is that Christian extremists, who are voting for Trump, have some belief that some territories needs to be occupied by Jews so that something happens (I don't remember what, but I guess something good to them), so they are happy with the genocide and Trump is happy to collaborate with Israeli government to make his electors happy.
> One main strand of evangelical theology holds that the return of Jews to the region starts the clock ticking on a seven-year armageddon, after which Jesus Christ will return.
> Hagee, despite having a long history of antisemitism – he has suggested Jews brought persecution upon themselves by upsetting God and called Hitler a “half-breed Jew” – founded Christians United for Israel in 2006.
They think that Jews must be in Israel to enable the return of Jesus and eventually the rapture. I'd love a rapture. Think of the improvement to traffic!
Read only does not carry (to me) the fact that something cannot change, just that I cannot make it change. For example you could make a read only facade to a mutable object, that would not make it immutable.
You can also decide to look at countries which went 100% renewable and have even better CO2/kWh rating than France (Iceland, Norway, Albania for example).
Yes, situations are different I agree :) my point was just that you can pick and choose what you want to look at. We'll see how things evolve, but it's not very fair to compare the situation of France which did their switch to low carbon energy many years ago, to Germany which is currently doing it. When we have more countries with finished transition to full/mostly renewable, we can compare again.
In the last 90 days France's CO2 footprint is at 78% of Iceland's.
Also, what lessons learned in Iceland, Norway or Albania should we apply in central Europe? We don't have their geothermal and hydro potential (all your examples are not solar+wind but hydro primarily).
Funny story I like to tell here when nuclear chat come up: this summer (in France) they had to stop some nuclear plant because of the heat, which was causing the river used to cool the reaction to over heat. Right when people needed plenty of electricity for A/C. At least solar was there and working at it's best when we needed it ^^ (this is just for trolling the "renewable are not there when we need it" discourse ;) )
Anyway, the thing we'll need for better using solar is storage, if we can make some clean ones, it will be a solution for intermittentcy. But not matter what we do, we should target using less energy, because the only clean energy is the one we don't have to produce. I think that's the thing people miss (volontarily I think) when they answer anti nuclear discourse. Insulating homes and and designing cities so that people don't have to use cars, rather than producing more and more nuclear reactors doesn't seem dumb to me, no matter what's your opinion on nuclear itself.
Germany and Belgium’s net electricity imports from France for 2024 are 27 TWh, which dwarf anything imported from Germany to France. [0]
If anything, this only showed that renewables and nuclear actually work very well together and relying on just one of both is shortsightedness and bad planing.
I don't disagree with this point of view. Then the debate remain: should we (France) create more nuclear power plants now, or invest in reducing energy consumption and adding more renewables to the mix.
France was a net exporter of electricity all summer so no idea of what you are talking about. Slowing down some nuclear plants due to this kind of external condition is fully expected. They are not stopped by the way just slowed down. Nuclear is modulable.
People barely use A/C in France by the way.
> Anyway, the thing we'll need for better using solar is storage, if we can make some clean ones, it will be a solution for intermittentcy
Storage is a short term solution. Batteries are ok to manage intra-day variation, two days at most. Long term storage of electricity plainly doesn't exist. Saying some storage solution will somehow at some point solve the issue of intermittency is at best wishful thinking, at worst a dramatic lack of risk management.
Before someone asks how China is doing it, I will answer the question: they are not. Despite China being much larger and thus being able to somehow compensate variation by having more production sites, they are using battery storage for short term variation but have to rely on expensive and polluting small thermal power plants when energy is lacking. It's a stop gap while they build a ton of nuclear power plants.
People do use A/C more and more in France for obvious reasons, even in the northern part (it has been the trend in the south already for a while now).
I'm not sure what I said is incompatible with being a net exporter? There was a lot of sun and heat, they had to shutdown some nuclear power plants, but the overall electricy production was doing fine, because they did not have to shutdown all the plants (but how about in a few years with even hotter weather?) and obviously solar was doing well.
And yes, I agree we don't have good storage yet, but then we can decide to invest in finding solutions or to try to re-learn how to make nuclear power plants in less than 12 years. Personally my intuition is that more distributed / local energy and also which doesn't have to rely on a state monopoly is better and more resilient (ask Ukraine) so I'd put my money on storage.
> And yes, I agree we don't have good storage yet, but then we can decide to invest in finding solutions or to try to re-learn how to make nuclear power plants in less than 12 years.
Things don’t magically stop at some point. Not in 2030, not in 2050, not even when we reach net zero.
The question now is do we think it’s easier to reach and sustain net zero using a grid composed of renewable which we have no idea how to scale, don’t know how to manage and have no good solution for the inter-seasonal variation or using nuclear for which we already know how to do all that and we just need to scale up construction.
Well, personally, I think the rational answer is clearly obvious.
You choose to underline the issues of renewables (which are real) and to ignore the ones of nuclear, some of them I mentioned in my previous message, which indeed makes the choice easy and obvious. Taking into account all the parameters requires more head scratching.
Not that it's really hidden, but this article is biased toward pro nuclear point of few and carefully not mention when we (France) had to import electricity from other European countries right when the prices were super high due to Russia's war to Ukraine because half of our reactors were shut down because of technical issues...
A cheaper alternative could have been solar for example. I don't mind keeping our nuclear capacity (it's certainly better than coal) while we switch to renewable and find good (eco friendly) and cheap storage but I don't really see it as a good target for producing the majority of our energy given the downsides.
On this, another funny story that pro nuclear also don't mention: this summer when it was very hot (and electricity demand for AC was high) they had to shut down several reactors because the cooling river would have been over heated too much. People criticize renewable for not being available all the time (which is indeed a problem without storage) but here thankfully solar saved the day by being available when it was needed.
Last thing that people tend to forget when they criticize ecologists views on nuclear: part of many ecologist program is to make it so that we use less energy. Heating and cooling poorly insulated housing is wasteful and stupid. Having everyone having their own transportation mean rather than having collective and energy efficient transportation system or having housing too far from commodities such that people can't walk or bike to them is also wasteful. And AI... Bref, let's fix that then maybe we won't need that much nuclear power in the end.
We invested massively in nuclear power in recent decades? Vogtle, Virgil C. Summer, Hinkley Point C, Olkiluoto, Flamanville were the west ensuring nuclear investment while at the same time investing in the nascent renewable sector.
In total something like a ~$100-200B investment in nuclear technology. The nuclear investment evidently did not pan out.
How much more should we have spent? Should we just push through no matter the cost even though we have cheaper alternatives?
Haha as if anyone cared about what environmentasist think. Gaz or nuclear are choosen for reasons that have nothing to do with environment (like whatever fuel is convenient to get for the given country and is pushed by the local financial interests). If environmentalists were listened a bit, we would be using a fraction of the energy we use, regardless of how it's produced. The only clean energy is the one we don't use / produce.
If we had invested all that public funding into renewables instead of nuclear since the 40s we would have had plentiful renewables decades earlier. Nuclear misadventures had a very high opportunity cost.
Why not just replace the CEO of the electricity company with someone who has less political connections, and accept that the primary function of EDF is not accounting, but making electricity work, and pick someone who is either an engineer or just has a little bit more experience with planning instead?
France has cheap electricity because of the nuclear buildout, in other words: because engineers saved 50% on the price, not because an MBA saved 0.1% on the price.
It's not like it took much planning to avoid that outcome, it just wasn't done. But I'm sure this saved EDF 5 bucks and the costs were carried by everyone else.
Yes, that's one of the issue with nuclear, it appears cheap because the cost are/will be carried by someone else. After all why take into account the waste management in many years or the price of dismantling old reactors into account when we have electricity now and we won't have to handle all that ourselves ^^
The issue in this case was management not properly planning (ie. don't repair all your plants at the same time), and doesn't have anything to do with nuclear versus any other source of power. If you disconnect all your generators at the same time, it will go down, no matter the technology.
Some of them were stopped for planned maintainance but some of them were stopped because they noticed some issues (corrosion I think?), so I'm not sure it was really a choice.
It was a choice delaying maintenance to save a few bucks every time for years, dozens of times by now. Then they got into critical trouble in a number of places at the same time. Wait, sorry.
I say "they got into trouble", which is true, they caused the trouble. But not financially, of course, WE got into trouble there. Given that the CEO is an accountant I'd bet my firstborn this was not lost on him. But all of France is paying for their systematically wrong decisions over a long period (which still leaves the power pretty cheap tbh).
There were some questions about some pipes condition indeed but it turned out to be a nothing burger.
The thing is that nuclear power is still a relatively new thing and we don't have historical experience to rely on. Since it is basically the first time reactors are this old and there are a lot of risks, it was decided to verify just to be sure.
But now we know they can run fine for much longer than was anticipated. That is something the anti-nuclear conveniently avoid, the reactors have cost a lot to build but they are still providing value and it's expected that their life will be extended by quite a lot.
Finally, I have found someone who understands the purpose of using someone else's tiny header-only C library; someone who sincerely thought about it before looking for an excuse to bitch and complain.
How is plastic on bread related with food poisoning? Here in France baguettes are wrapped in paper and are eaten within a day or two of being made (or else they get dry). if you keep them for long enough, molds will grow on it, then you see them and don't eat that old bread (even though it's unlikely to be too bad for most people, the taste is certainly not great). I'd be surprised if anyone ever got food poisoned with bread.
> I'd be surprised if anyone ever got food poisoned with bread.
I'm about to blow your mind. It was and is one of the most common food poisoning types, especially B. Cereus and everyone's favorite religion-creator, C. purpurea / ergot.
Gross image warning (not sure why it's the first thing on the page but...)
Right, I was really focusing on the bread itself, given the discussion was about the wrapping, rather than previous poisoning of ingredients (unless I'm mistaken, plastic wrapping would not help against ergotism). I'm sure people also get poisoned with chemicals they might put on the crops as well...
Bacillus Cereus is the major modern issue, and it largely comes from soggy bread/rice/pasta, so plastic is a significant factor.
I completely agree with you that we should, in general, phase out plastic as much as we can, but we have to be realistic about the benefits and drawbacks. I don't think it's anything that couldn't be replaced with oiled paper, but plastic is used for some good and bad reasons.
Not strictly food poisoning, but my wife is extremely allergic to one of the types of seeds commonly put on bread. The plastic packaging virtually eliminates contamination between breads stored adjacent to each other. Since marrying her, I've stopped taking home bread in paper bags or bread lying in the open.
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