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American solar farms

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311–320 of 343 posts

Re: American solar farms

#311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is something I have noticed about the definition of 'eyesore' and it isn't just farmers. If it is something which is useful and new it is considered an eyesore. Like, say wind turbines. Yet older practical things which are no longer of use are considered pretty. Like say windmills. They also don't complain nearly as much about things which are 'established and ugly' like powerlines or coal power plants, the latter…

> They also don't complain nearly as much about things which are 'established and ugly' like powerlines or coal power plants I like industrial architecture and some plants inspire awe but post-war coal plants are as ugly and boring as it gets. Older ones look much better in my eye and I’m glad that some buildings are preserved after the stations are shut down.

Above ground power lines are a sin.

Re: American solar farms

#312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if the noise becomes a lesser concern once the turbines reach a certain size? I was in Iowa a couple of years ago and the sight of the turbines near the freeway was truly something, but I don't think I could hear them when I stopped to take a look.

The big ones can be really loud. As the blades get longer, tip speed becomes truly impressive.

This was interesting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKgN2G9d0dc

The turbines I saw in Iowa weren't loud enough to drown out distance sounds of the highway. I didn't hear them at all, but I guess there's also tinnitus to be contended with...

Re: American solar farms

#313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably ya'll need to update the driver's license exam. First, in the written exam, include rules against hitting stationary structures, and quiz them on it before issuing the learner's permit. Then also test for it during the road test. If they can't avoid a stationary structure, perhaps fail them? In the US, this is not a problem unless you are drunk. When you are driving drunk, you are violating the law anyway.

We don't know the state of the multiple drivers to cause these posts, or for the drivers to run into the corresponding posts, but they're a) in the US (Atlanta, Oakland, and Brookfield, CT) and b) it sounds like it's happened more than a few times. https://old.reddit.com/r/cars/comments/myfroy/today_the_14th... https://old.reddit.com/r/HomeImprovement/comments/5da1w1/bes... https://i95rock.com/how-to-avoid-a-car-cras…

> it's happened more than a few times.

There are 2.75 - 4 billion buildings on this planet. Something will happen a few times or more than few times. Sometimes asteroids hit the planet and most species go extinct.

Re: American solar farms

#314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High plains Nebraska land can support cattle grazing or maybe a wheat crop, given they receive less than 10” of rain per year. Nobody is converting irrigated Ogallala aquifer farmland to solar fields, they’re taking marginal land used for grazing and using that for solar fields. Productive farmland can have wind turbines within it, due to the smaller footprint of the turbine tower. Productive farmland is $10k+ an acr…

> Nobody is converting irrigated Ogallala aquifer farmland to solar fields Given the rate at which the aquifer is being depleted, they should. There are some water districts in CA that have encouraged conversion to solar but it's controversial. https://calmatters.org/commentary/2025/07/california-agricul...

I agree with you 100%, but the unfortunate truth is that irrigated farmland will be farmed until the aquifer runs dry :/

Re: American solar farms

#315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People drive into buildings all the time. Like it's actually like over a hundred per day sort of thing in the US. Happens really frequently here in Canada as well. If you include stuff like stop signs, light poles, mailboxes, and fences its probably in the several thousands. Fixed object collisions are super common.

Even animals (with significantly smaller brains) know how to avoid stationary structures (and even moving things that are trying to eat them!). Where are ya'll from that people are running into stationary structures all the time? If people have an epidemic of running into stationary things, wouldn't there be a 100x problem of them running into moving things - like cars, trucks, trains, airplanes? Regardless, why is i…

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Re: American solar farms

#317
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, the rainfall. Some farmers go from morning to night never saying a word that isn't a complaint about the rainfall being wrong. Yes. Some of them use proper rain gauges but some just complain about it. Basically none of them understand the difference between a point measurement and an areal average estimate.

> Some of them use proper rain gauges OOOhh is there a device I can get that tracks this for home?

Easiest thing in the world, put a cup outside: https://www.zoro.com/acurite-rain-gauge-magnifying-12-12-in-...

Re: American solar farms

#320
post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That textbook chapter you linked is quite revealing, thanks. I see that diagram in particular as a good demonstration of how the "sex is a spectrum" concept can't possibly work in practice. The number of arrows criss-crossing back and forth shows how impossible it would be to order disorders of sex development (DSDs) into a spectrum in any logically consistent manner. More importantly, there's not really any reason t…

Hi! I'm a little confused what the confusion is. Yes, talking about binary terms and using them as an abstraction and a summary is perfectly convenient, and can be useful, but that doesn't change the data. It's just a summary of a very complex system. The terms "female" and "male" have multiple definitions because of that. Here's an example from the dictionary: Female: (1) Of or denoting the sex that produces ova or…

It makes sense but it is a false framing. The whole point of female and male is to distinguish the two reproductive roles in sexually reproducing species, whether those are hermaphroditic or gonochoric. The sex binary is based on anisogamy, that is, two classes of gamete being of unequal size.

All the "dimensions" you mention - hormones, chromosomes, etc. - are downstream of this, and they vary across species (e.g. some don't use hormonal signalling for reproduction, but neuropeptides). While there are variations, including those in sex development that may lead to a disordered system, it doesn't logically follow that sex itself is a spectrum.

To take one of your examples: a hirsute woman with elevated testosterone due to PCOS is female, and having this condition doesn't make her less so. Indeed, this is a condition that only affects people who are female, tied to ovarian function. Her condition can be described perfectly well without pretending that her sex lies on some sort of ill-defined spectrum.

Your comment about "drawing an arbitrary line" doesn't really fit with how biologists see this either, as it's not arbitrary at all but is based on understanding the mechanisms of reproductive function and development. And not based on gathering and arbitrarily categorising data without reference to the underlying system. The mechanistic insight is important.

Going way back upthread, this was originally about fairness in sport, male physiological advantage, and the other commenter getting surprisingly cross at me describing males as male, as he seemed to think there are medical interventions that can be performed on humans that convert males to female, which is not the case. Then you commented stating that sex is a spectrum. This is typically introduced into an argument to try to bolster the claim that it is possible for humans to change sex, the idea being to redefine sex as a cluster of characteristics to be considered separately to reproductive function, and then argue that because things like breast size (through a male taking exogenous oestrogen) and genital morphology (such as surgically inverting a penis to make a hole, and lining the entry point with scrotal tissue) can be changed, this constitutes a change in sex (e.g. a male, by this redefinition, supposedly becoming more female).

So that leads into another issue of why this "sex is a spectrum" idea has been introduced to the world at large. It is not to gain greater understanding of reproductive system, sex development and evolutionary questions regarding sexual reproduction. We can see even from this back and forth between the two of us how it only has rhetorical use, with my requests for precise detail on how this model might work in practice remaining unanswered.

Thanks for the discussion, interested to hear your thoughts on this.

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