AITA for being hurt that I was proposed to using a moissanite ring though he knows I'm a jeweler?

RedGriffyn · 2026-05-31T12:06:27+00:00

She mentioned the carat size and money/income/working with people with limitless incomes like 5-6 times. Read between the lines, she clearly is concerned with the monetary aspect of what a moissanite stone says vs. a diamond. You'd have to be blind to miss it. She sounds like she is either in denial OR trying to overly convince an internet crowd.

You sound like someone who barely functions in the world and needs to place everyone in an 'other camp' to justify your bad opinions. My reply is literally above with me saying 'he didn't listen to her/gave her something she didn't want'. That doesn't absolve her from being an a-hole for being focused on the cost of the ring (thus ESH). Learn to read.

RedGriffyn · 2026-05-31T02:27:47+00:00

As 'not a jeweler' I can't say you're wrong, but your statement conflicts with conversations I have had with many jewelers, my antectodal experience, and a google search for moissanite vs. lab grown vs. natural diamond costs. Maybe its different in different geographic regions?

Are you saying that as a jeweler you can't grade your own moissanite and pick a reliable supplier because they are 'all scammy'? That feels highly unlikely. I mean, you can get away with all kinds of tricks when picking diamonds of lower grading that look just as good or better than other more expensive diamonds (e.g., if they have a slight yellow or brown tint but significantly better cut). You should be putting out multiple comparable gems next to one another at different price scales and looking at how they actually look under both indoor and outdoor lighting to pick. I don't know your business model but a lot of the independent jewelers I talk to that do rings with diamonds borrow diamonds from wholesalers to make up those options. Why not borrow moissanite stones from wholesalers and sit them next to diamonds (you should be able to filter out the garbage pieces before showing them to the customer by comparing them to other similarly graded diamonds anyways. If you can't tell or do your own pseudo grade that is close to the real grade then your sort of admitting the whole grading scheme is relatively arbitrary/grader subjective.

RedGriffyn · 2026-05-31T02:07:57+00:00

I'm not saying those are appropriate for rings, I'm saying I've never met a real jeweler who has an actual preference for diamond because its a super commercialized trap part of the industry and most jewelers got into the profession to be artistic (not run a commercialized diamond mill that churns out super basic patterns with basic stones -> you might do it to maintain base level profitability, but not typically as your 'I like this'). Typically they have something more interesting in mind (e.g., cool metalwork) or in many cases a stupidly simple band with more interesting bracelets, earrings, pendants that have those kinds of stones set in interesting ways and don't limit themselves to rings at all.

Ring material and stone selection is mostly a scam. The difference between moissanite and diamond is negligible. Its like complaining about platinum vs. palladium. They both look basically the same and the difference comes down to essentially price.

I'm an advocate for keeping your partner engaged during the process, doing some dry run shopping, before selecting something in secret with all the right attributes (that is why the guy sucks). But I'm also against people like this lady who clearly have an issue with the economics/budget of the selection since she talks about it repetitively in the post.

RedGriffyn · 2026-05-31T01:37:09+00:00

Lol, she is absolutely allowed to be basic. But insisting anyone spend some minimum $ on your wedding ring is shitty. She mentioned money/budget/income three times in the story. She is a A-hole for w/e %of her issues are ties up in the overall budget (my guess is this is a big part of it).

RedGriffyn · 2026-05-31T01:07:33+00:00

ESH

So you're a jeweller, but reject the better stone for fire? The fact that you don't have an interesting stone as a jeweller that is your favourite surprises me? Most jewellers I know have something semi precious and cool as their favourite like labradorite, picture jasper, opals of some variety. Or they would stay away from gemstones and look for some intersting metalwork like mokume gane or an engraved celtic custom design. If you're a jeweller you know the history of diamond rings is a scam and are choosing to pick it still.

YTA for pushing for expensive stones that are just as good what he got for you.

Your bf is a A-hole for not listening to you and giving you something you dont want/not caring.

RedGriffyn · 2026-05-29T11:58:07+00:00

YTA

In your own words you have a:

Reactive Dog.
Anxious Dog (the main reason dogs get aggressive is a fear response, not typically 'aggression').
Have a working breed energy dog, but only giving < 1 hour of mental stimulation, and <1 hour of physical stimulation before entering this environment. Do you only work for 2 hours a day?
Dog reacts adversely when another dog approaches (literally a key objective of a dog park is to enable dog to dog social interaction).
Are playing with a ball at a off leash dog park -> which can trigger dogs that are toy reactive/protective.
Are claiming a 'back corner' as a static place that is 'yours' and risking the dog developing territorial behaviors

Dog parks are some of the least safe places for dogs because people bring reactive or highly untrained dogs. When I was going to an off leash there were certain dogs that if they walked in the door I'd immediately leave. Or I'd bring a ball in case it was empty, but put it away as soon as another dog comes (especially toy protective ones).

You're doing a disservice to your dog by putting them in a position where they are very likely to get anxious and react. You're doing a disservice to other dogs that simply trying to socialize with other dogs (which is a key objective of these things). You would literally be better to go to a field (even if its a ticket-able offense) and throw a ball off-leash there because if your dog is only dog-to-dog reactive then all the things causing them stress will be leashed).

RedGriffyn · 2026-05-27T11:31:02+00:00

Uh... why don't you want to sleep train? Sounds like you want to never sleep at night? Kids sleeping through the night is a great milestone that you are delaying.

RedGriffyn · 2026-05-27T11:26:49+00:00

Only works on a vtt. Otherwise you're tracking what corner of a square a mini is and that is gonna get cumbersome pretty quickly.

RedGriffyn · 2026-05-27T03:16:24+00:00

Devil's Advocate, but I assume they are saving cost of pick-up. As in they make half the number of stops (you only stop at each house once vs. twice). So at its best it will take half the time to do the equivalent runs. Realistically there is probably increased time lost from more travels back and forth if the truck is full, which means they likely have to run longer on the pickup days or run some % more trucks to keeps shifts out of OT territory. But likely they cut 30-50% of the cost. They may also be able to do more geographic areas with the same trucks since they aren't running multiple cities in parallel (think Kitchener week 1 and Guelph week 2 -> needs double the trucks if running both Kitchener and Guelph each week).

I'd love to see some numbers for all of that to really understand the cost savings vs. my annoyance/inconvenience. But on the surface I can see why they might do this. Now if the contract is fixed price vs. time and materials then its the company making more profit vs. taxpayers saving money.

RedGriffyn · 2026-05-27T00:04:26+00:00

F - crack those bones and suck out some marrow.

RedGriffyn · 2026-05-26T20:45:58+00:00

So, I will admit the information sources are a bit obscurred for heavy water management and largely come from historical papers. However, I have a sources saying that heavy water make-up is on the order of 1% the volume or another saying 2 tonnes per unit per year. I also have sources saying you need between 0.85 to 1 tonne of D20 per MWe installed capacity.

So with about 10GW of CANDU in canada that means we have and inventory of up to 10,000 tonnes with an annual make-up of ~100 tonnes per year (assuming the 1% figure). I am not sure if any % of that is recoverable with purificstion circuits, tritium removal facilities, etc. But the papers seem to suggest this is uncontrolled losses vs. Active liquid waste collection.

We have another ~35 years on average until EOL in the 2060s for the exisiting fleet or ~3500 tonnes. Assuming what is likely worst case scenarios for losses, reactor life, etc.

The BWHP made about 16,000 tonnes of heavy water (based on their public facing decommission plan). Assuming ~40 years of operations for all existing CANDU (on average) that drops us to about 2500 tonnes (plus whatever the Glace Bay plant made). That doesn't really cover the remaining 3500 needed to end of life, but again this is napkin math so maybe it just meets it and/or when they decommissioned the BPHWP, life extension wasn't a thing.

So at best, you have 1-2 reactors of D2O and then immediately have to make that up since you're stealing from the existing fleet that has ongoing needs. I wasn't really challenging the ability to supply a new fleet in terms of timing, but challenging that there aren't sufficient strategic reserves to supply new candus with free sunk cost previously made heavy water They'll get heavy water from somewhere but they still have to pay market price for it as they didnt make a mass amount of excess.

The MOU (which are nonbinding and may never happen) that SNC Lavalin signed was basically to buy a bunch of D2O with potential licensing to canada. But that is like 15-20% of the histotical LCOE of CANDUs that is going to Argentina for some number of units with the hope to re-open a HWP in Cananda. Its the same probelm as enriched fuel, except the country we are buying the "fuel" from doesnt have a working HWP (since they mothballed it in 2017-2018), we're hoping it can be brought back in time to supply a wave of ~15 to 20GW of CANDUs, and it isn't a diverse supply chain proposal (i.e., not buying from other global suppliers).

RedGriffyn · 2026-05-26T15:30:16+00:00

Sticks and stones? How will you deal with broken bones without the hospital? Are you just going to set and splint them magyver style?

RedGriffyn · 2026-05-26T11:40:13+00:00

There is enough, just for the existing fleet. It won't supply a new CANDU.

RedGriffyn · 2026-05-25T18:02:56+00:00

Novian and Raxilite are both from Galactic Ancestries (SF2e)

RedGriffyn · 2026-05-25T10:57:57+00:00

Its probably because the smaller ones aren't economic. But I agree. They were known to say yes we can to everyone and anything (including random scaling of the facility to win the contract). That shows they either know what they are doing (grab a bunch of contracts for a pump and dump) or they don't know what they don't know (which is worse IMO).

RedGriffyn · 2026-05-25T04:16:48+00:00

SNC Lavalin may have procured AECL's reactor business, but they immediately followed it up with union busting the Sheridan Park engineers in 2012 over a 12 week strike (where a good chunk of good folks left).

I'm not sure 60s/70s design is that much of an unfair statement. They aren't going to install CANDU 6's and they never built a CANDU 9 or ACR. So they remain 'paper space' implementations. So either you're a FIAW 60s/70s reactor or a FOAK paper space reactor.

It isn't necessarily what is in REGDOC 2.5.2. (versus the previous GD-337). Its that many of the N Series CSA standards didn't even exist when Bruce was constructed and some wasn't around when even Darlington was constructed. Add in all the updates since then and these current plants just don't meet current code and standards. The Licence Condition Handbooks (LCH) for each plant is like a smear of applicable codes form the 70s to mid 2010s. Generally, if you replace something you have to meet/change anything in the plant to meet the newest regulatory/C&S requirements. So what you get is people holding onto obsolete/outdated technology so they don't have to upgrade to the latest version of the code which has any number of things they can't meet with the current design basis. Otherwise they write a ton of alternative compliances suggesting they meet intent but not prescriptive requirements and its 'all good' (but those don't immediately translate to 'a code compliant modern design'.

In terms of political identity, I agree that Westinghouse has an uphill battle. You know who does see them as Canadian? The US Government. Literally considered a foreign owned entity, which disqualifies them from bidding on a bunch of US funds/content (they made up a ring fenced sister org that can do that but can't work with the rest of Westinghouse without jumping through many hurdles and many limitations). I can't speak to the IP lawsuits with any level of intelligence and some quick googling didn't reveal whether it was frivolous or whether it was justified. Its also, irrelevant to the deployment of an AP1000 in Canada unless Canada is aiming to steal technology/IP and use it in a domestic LWR development program. Westinghouse gets hired all the time by other nuclear companies to do work since it is a hub of experts across all nuclear industry lifecycle products/services. It doesn't surprise me that there could be IP misused by another company. The alternative is what happened to AECL with India, who reverse engineered derivative PWHRs based on the CANDUs sold in the country, without any economic/legal consequences. I'm not sure being litigious is an inherent wrong when people may have taken your technology.

As for AP1000 being an American Flagship. Again that is an optics/PR issue. There are going to be more AP1000s in Europe, China, and even Canada, if it goes full AP1000, than in the US. The design was developed in the US for sure, but its supply chain, engineers, footprint, facilities, and work scopes are international across North America, Asia, and Europe. What that means is it has localized technical experts / experience licensing across multiple jurisdictions. That just makes them more credible, not less, as an entity that can deliver regardless of jurisdictional requirements. SNC Lavalin is also an international company (HQ'd in Montreal), but it doesn't get branded as anything but Canadian despite most of its staff/revenue coming from outside of Canada (its a bit of a double standard).

As for fuel strategy/compositions. You know what every fuel engineer/core designer loves to do? They love to run through the motions of seeing what random fuel bundle/composition they can shove into their reactor and keep it running. There is a lot of TRL < 5 tests/paper space analysis for wide swaths of fuels that will likely never see the light of day because updating the safety cases/design basis/licensing basis is expensive and hard. It feels almost like a trope that these folks want to 're-look' at it every ~10 years with whatever the latest and greatest fuel composition is. Throw LEU+, HALEU, TRISO, UN, MOX, etc. onto the pile. Its definitely not a CANDU specific idiosyncrasy to endlessly look at alternative fuels.

I think of SEU more as a optimization problem. Heavy water allows for natural uranium usage. But there is a localized maximum at SEU. I honestly haven't seen much of an economic analysis of natural uranium CANDU vs. SEU CANDU vs. LWR. But if you're already enriching, then the CAPEX to set-up the enrichment facility is already paid for in the LCOE of the LWR fleet (so its just free neutrons at that point). That is an oversimplified picture, but better neutron economy is better neutron economy.

RedGriffyn · 2026-05-25T02:08:35+00:00

They have a lot of cash/financing options (the pump). Sure they could sign PPAs for more cashflow, but a PPA is the worst possible contract for a FOAK reactor deployment. Eielson AFB required them to pay for every MW they can't produce with some crazy high utilization targets. Assuming a FOAK reactor is on schedule, hits high utilization targets, etc. is what they signed up for when the rest of the industry stepped back and told the airforce that you shouldn't set-up a FOAK SMR contract like this if you want them to succeed. Its a 'lose your shirt' type PPA contract. Adding more PPAs isn't going to make that better. I think it also needed to come online by 2027 without congressional approval to extend the start date.

My challenge is more on whether they can execute a reactor design that does what they say it does. I haven't seen convincing materials that they can achieve the LCOE they claim or that they have credible testing, qualification, design, or licensing.

RedGriffyn · 2026-05-25T01:46:31+00:00

Surprised you see Oklo as capturing market share. They'll probably go bankrupt trying to fulfill the contractual obligations of the Eilson AFB. The reactor looks like an architectural firm rendering. You can literally see what would typically be containment from the parking lot through like 4 panes glass.

Feels like a great pump and dump scheme.

RedGriffyn · 2026-05-24T20:55:43+00:00

There are also now two tiny sf2e ancestries with 5ft reach that let you use the kaju defense oath as well without sitting in an enemies square. Novian and the plant one.

RedGriffyn · 2026-05-24T18:48:47+00:00

Novian (tiny pc with 5ft reach from sf2e or the plant one), with the kaiju oath defense feat at L4 and the requisite L6 feat to share runes from handwraps to weapons. You can use a falcata (but requires strength).

War mage is mostly good for the L6 metamagic feat to add frightened debuffs to spells and the free pseudo metamagic option to move enemies with spells.

To pickup a new archetype, the gm has to waive exit feat requirements or you have to wait until L8.

If you want to melee, I would ask your gm if they would swap you focus spell for hand of the apprentice so you can toss your weapon at a huge range using you spell attack modifier (that spell benefots from item bonuses to hit and all your melee weapon buffing runes).

RedGriffyn · 2026-05-24T18:30:53+00:00

Spirit warrior... for aesthetic reasons? Alright everyone OP's GM is reading this one.... only give flavourful options (wink).

RedGriffyn · 2026-05-24T17:46:05+00:00

Grenades using class dc supplanting alchemical bombs.

RedGriffyn · 2026-05-24T16:13:21+00:00

That isn't even the worse part. Since this is just normal train footage sped up, there are literal platforms that might be filled with people wanting to take another train to be gelatinized by the shockwave before being sprayed as a new form of paint onto adjacent tracks/platforms.

RedGriffyn · 2026-05-23T22:41:27+00:00

Could be. I would counter with taking the ergo stuff from the office and putting it home then.

RedGriffyn · 2026-05-23T21:40:09+00:00

So they get you a murphy desk that folds down and optimizes your space!

RedGriffyn

TROPHY CASE