Horrible advice for expert tools. If you can make the assumption that the end user is going to learn the tool you can design it for peak effectiveness after a learning curve. If you have to consider retards and hostage situation level panic you can't do that, and create a worse product overall.
I think the point is that you can design for peak effectiveness while considering usability, and that makes the tool more effective. There’s a lot more scrutiny on edge cases when designing expert tools.
On “Expert Tools” I’d argue it’s imperative to consider high stress levels interactions, because the outcome outweighs the expert using it.
You are missing the point, it's obvious that a cockpit needs to account for stress or a crisis. Extending this to CAD software for example is nonsense.
I like your confidence, but it also manifests lack of experience and understanding of what engineering is. Expert tools have much lower tolerance for user mistakes because there are big money at stake (or sometimes lives of other people). A typo in Instagram post is not the same as a wrong number in CAD. I have personally seen a construction project where incorrect input in CAD resulted in several dozen foundation piles for a 16-story building installed outside the site boundary. Just because an architect responsible for aligning the building on site made a mistake working in a hurry, confusing two fields in the UI. Of course, there was a chain of failures, each next step costing more than previous one, but it could have been prevented if the software cared about the user and did not assume he is a superman.
It is so easy to squeeze as much functionality as possible on a screen trying to optimize productivity, but then quality of labels is sacrificed, click zones become too small and feedback is reduced to a barely visible message in status bar. It takes one sleepless night or a family argument for the user to get distracted and make a wrong but very expensive mistake.
The part I hate about the math used in this argument, is that really we should be working with a goal of much cheaper energy production, to enable other green technology.
Yeah, if you use standard new construction capacity planning in some cases solar + wind wins.
If you target a much lower average/maximum cost per GW (and higher consumption) nuclear wins.
Things like EVs, electric furnaces for recycling, greener chemical plants and carbon capture mechanisms all become more viable with consistently cheap electricity.
> Yeah, if you use standard new construction capacity planning in some cases solar + wind wins. If you target a much lower average/maximum cost per GW (and higher consumption) nuclear wins.
I'd love to see your sources for this. To the best of my knowledge it isn't even close and solar is several times cheaper that nuclear. They used to be more comparable a decade or two ago, but solar costs have dropped dramatically since then.
Mostly the viability studies in the French reactor program.
It heaviy depends on how you set up the comparison. If you look at most current energy markets and say "how can I make money with these rules" the answer is almost always build a small amount of renewables. If you say, how should a government invest to retire coal power and achieve a low and stable energy cost, then nuclear can be viable (in some places).
Anything French on nuclear is simply suspicious, they have a massive interest in selling it - to then double or treble prices during construction, as seen with Hinckley C.
I've seen several studies, none that reached the conclusion you are putting forward. The closest was one that said a lower, but still high percentage nuclear power in France is optimal for reducing CO2 emissions given the nuclear infrastructure that already exists there.
Do you have any specific studies in mind I may have missed?
Keep in mind that solar and wind alone can't power a single city. You need something to compensate, something like coal/natgas or storage. The amount of storage you need, depends on geography and local weather conditions. If your storage comes short, even a bit, the amount of conventional power stations you need to keep the lights on is exactly the number if power stations you would have to operate if you never had invested into wind or solar in the first place.
This is usually missing in typical cost calculations for solar or wind.
Nuclear needs the same compensation. The high fixed cost low variable cost model lends nuclear power to only run at 100%.
Take the California grid, peak energy usage is 2x minimum. Nuclear plants are insanely costly when ran at 100%. Imagine running at much lower capacity factors. Say the peaking plants run at 50%, that means the cost for consumers would be ¢2.4-4/kWh. [1]
Logically this entails that if we can solve a nuclear grid then we can solve a renewable grid since they impose the very similar constraints on the grid operators.
> To the best of my knowledge it isn't even close and solar is several times cheaper that nuclear.
Only if we build reactors in the modern way rather than like the French did in the 1970s. (The reasons why its so much more expensive are complex, but mostly a regulatory ratchet and an tolerance for risk so low that if applied to the rest of life we'd close down parks as too dangerous)
Ah, you mean back when French wages were much lower?
Nuclear (and construction in general) is a victim of the Baumol Effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect , where the cost of something increases over time if it does not see labor productivity improvement, simply because other sectors of the economy do see labor productivity improvement.
Inflation adjusted wages in France increased by 33% from 1991 to 2023. During that time the inflation adjusted cost of nuclear power plant construction has gone from around 1500/kWe to 4000/kWe.
>If you target a much lower average/maximum cost per GW (and higher consumption) nuclear wins.
It loses every way. Its LCOE is 5x higher. The PR campaign to save it was about neither its cost nor the environment but economically buttressing the nuclear military industrial complex.
It's SO much more expensive in fact that it's actually cheaper to use wind/solar to electrolyze hydrogen, store it underground in a salt cavern and burn that to generate electricity.
>Things like EVs
Things like EVs are even less suited to nuclear power because they dont need constant power and can charge while electricity is cheap. Ditto electric heating.
Electricity is cheap mostly when there is more base load than demand; i.e. at night. I don't think you can have that concept if you want to remove base load and just make electricity when the weather lets you.
The problem with the whole nuclear vs. renewables argument is that we don't have the luxury of choosing anymore. We need a huge amount of carbon-free electricity right now, not just to meet current demand but to actively decarbonize our industry.
The only reason we can realistically get to net zero with batteries and renewables is because we export our polution abroad by having China produce everything. And we then ship it back to us using incredibly carbon-intense modes of transportation.
If we had to onshore all that production and actually count it towards our own emissions we'd have no hope of meeting our climate goals with solar panels and wind power.
This argument is clearly bogus. There's a huge set of preposterous ways of generating electricity. No one is going to say we need to do all of them. So why is nuclear not also in that set? You can't just assume it isn't.
I suspect that you will have to get add in cards or drive caddies that also do power conversion, but these already exist (although expensive).
More than 2-4 drives is starting to hit a point where you should start thinking about a different platform anyway.
It will be a bit lower due to higher use of public transport and lower average income. But it represents a large fraction of car ownership (about 30% of total cars; not sure about new)
I would compare them to other companies: they’re not going to lightly outshow their own products since that both affects sales and increases the odds of a lawsuit on behalf of everyone who bought the older models under false advertising. It’s more likely to end badly in court if the lawyer can say everyone else in the industry got this right but their clients vehicles will never get the promised features because they lack the necessary hardware.
I feel like a focus on minimum wages is misplaced, it's hiding the real problem that is the value of labour has been diluted.
The minimum wage should be set based on determining the rate a sound minded well informed advocate could negotiate for the work. That is preventing exploitation. It should not be used to try to set a living wage, because as we have seen, this just leads to the COL increasing for everyone... Leading to a greater concentration of wealth as the average person now has less ability to save.
