Solar Energy Farm Would ‘Suck Up All The Energy From The Sun’

I don't get what all the hub bub is bout. It's their community they can do what they want regardless of the reason. If it was such a good deal I'm sure there will be plenty of other communities lined up to do it.
 
http://www.snopes.com/north-carolina-town-rejects-solar-panels/

The town as a whole did not reject the installation because it would "suck up all the energy from the sun", but rather based on the true assertion that:
1) It does displace flora that would be using that ground and sunlight to grow, and the fauna that depend on it, thus impacting the ecosystem.
2) It is an eye-sore and that can affect light commercial business development if it ruins otherwise attractive scenery.

But regarding the teacher, I've said it before and I'll say it again, teachers are NOT overpaid. They are mostly underqualified half-educated house-wives playing teacher, not experts in their fields, and the reason that they reject standardized testing for their students is because it would make it obvious that they can't teach in an objective manner. But most of the US, and [H] is no exception, insists that our teachers are so great and that women like this should be the ones coming up with their own tests, and not held to any standards and paid more... *rolleyes*
 
I saw this earlier.

This is a bit silly. Those of you who feel solar panels are green are mistaken. Production of solar panels is really bad for the environment. They are green after construction though.

Drawbacks of solar

1. Solar Radiation is absorbed by panels and increases the surrounding air temp. Black solar panels are quite good at this.

2. It's not really attractive looking.

3. CSP's (concentrated solar plant)- can kill anything that comes in between the water tank, and the reflectors.

4. CSP's use quite a bit of water to cool the reflectors, and believe it or not are not most are usually not closed systems so a lot of the water is lost as steam after it turns the turbines.


I have no problems with solar panels, other than how they are made, but they are improving their methods.
 
To hell with wind and solar. Build more supercritical nuke plants.
 
This is my favorite:

She is a retired Northampton science teacher and is concerned that photosynthesis, which depends upon sunlight, would not happen and would keep the vegetation from growing. She said she has observed areas near solar panels where vegetation is brown and dead because it did not receive enough sunlight.

Brown and dead because it was cooked by the excess heat generated the sun hitting the panels, not because solar panels are black holes for the sun's energy.

Apparently teaching science doesn't require you to apply the scientific method to your own conclusions.
 
http://www.snopes.com/north-carolina-town-rejects-solar-panels/

The town as a whole did not reject the installation because it would "suck up all the energy from the sun", but rather based on the true assertion that:
1) It does displace flora that would be using that ground and sunlight to grow, and the fauna that depend on it, thus impacting the ecosystem.
2) It is an eye-sore and that can affect light commercial business development if it ruins otherwise attractive scenery.

But regarding the teacher, I've said it before and I'll say it again, teachers are NOT overpaid. They are mostly underqualified half-educated house-wives playing teacher, not experts in their fields, and the reason that they reject standardized testing for their students is because it would make it obvious that they can't teach in an objective manner. But most of the US, and [H] is no exception, insists that our teachers are so great and that women like this should be the ones coming up with their own tests, and not held to any standards and paid more... *rolleyes*

Maybe. My ex is a teacher. Before she became a teacher, she worked in the chemical industry - she has dual degrees in Chemistry and Biology. Pretty sure she's qualified for 6th grade science. Half the time though they want her to teach English. The problem isn't poorly qualified teachers (this idiot in this article notwithstanding), it's that the bad and lazy ones are held up with the actual good ones by the unions. There's no incentive to go above and beyond. I know the kind of hours my ex put in, I helped plenty with grading homework. Many of her co-workers though, the union contract said they had to stay in the building until 3:25pm - at 3:26 they were getting in their cars. Homework? If hey bothered to give any, the only 'grading' they did was a quick scan to see if it was completed or only half done. Never altered their teaching plans year to year. That's the problem - why are THOSE kinds of teachers held in the same regard as the ones who actually DO do something?
 
What do you expect when 4 in 10 Americans Believe God Created Earth 10,000 Years Ago?? :confused:

What do you expect when 6 out of 10 Americans believe that a system vastly more complex than the most sophisticated supercomputer gradually evolved by random chance against mathematically impossible odds?
 
Maybe. My ex is a teacher. Before she became a teacher, she worked in the chemical industry - she has dual degrees in Chemistry and Biology.
Sure, but do you really believe that is the norm?
The problem isn't poorly qualified teachers (this idiot in this article notwithstanding), it's that the bad and lazy ones are held up with the actual good ones by the unions. There's no incentive to go above and beyond.
Which is the problem with unions in general, and don't get me started on my opinion on how its even LEGAL that government employees are allowed to unionize (should be illegal). Non-unionized and adhering to a good standard where everyone in the country takes the same tests so you can compare apples to apples, would provide data points so that teachers can be rewarded accordingly. A bonus based on the score compared to the national average, and a bonus based on a county average (so teachers in areas with stupid kids can still get a monetary reward for improving them, even if they are below average nationally). Money makes the world go round, and teaching should be no exception.

In my English class for example, our teacher was feeling lazy and so just put on Superman for us one day. Literally just let us watch TV. If she was worried about how our grades on a standardized test would affect her paycheck, you bet your ass she would have put in more effort and not tolerated tomfoolery. IMO, that incentive system would also attract a whole different breed of person into the industry, and that work ethic and capitalist ideology of "work hard and get paid more" would rub off on the kids through example.
 
What do you expect when 6 out of 10 Americans believe that a system vastly more complex than the most sophisticated supercomputer gradually evolved by random chance against mathematically impossible odds?

Well, I'm thinking the mathematicians side with the 6 out of 10...
 
What do you expect when 6 out of 10 Americans believe that a system vastly more complex than the most sophisticated supercomputer gradually evolved by random chance against mathematically impossible odds?

evolution very often isn't a "random" thing, it's a mutation used to adapt to a given situation... yanno kind of like how people from more sun drenched regions are naturally much darker skinned.
 
evolution very often isn't a "random" thing, it's a mutation used to adapt to a given situation... yanno kind of like how people from more sun drenched regions are naturally much darker skinned.

The key word you used is "evolutionary", which in means small incremental steps

Expecting something for example a flipper to evolve into a arm with fingers to "evolve" is a pretty large step change and if you think about it, a pretty large logical jump. Anyway, last I checked, exposure to radiation led to cancer, not becoming the hulk and birth defects often led to malformed organs versus an improved functional one. The intermediary steps are infinitely more likely to lead to a evolutionary dead end compared to a new evolutionary branch
 
I guess that makes sense, its just really easily misread, especially since we are expecting to be reading crazy talk.

The best part is, that's by design. The media exists to twist facts into some kind of fake outrage that drives clicks and viewers.

This one person's opinion, regardless of the accuracy of the quote - IS.NOT.NEWS
 
Crazy, indeed. Construction generates jobs. Solar farms require almost no labor - i.e. jobs - at all.

You know what requires even less labor? A field full of native plants that seems to be what these people are arguing against, you can't argue farm jobs because those would destroy the "pretty stuff" even quicker.
 
http://www.snopes.com/north-carolina-town-rejects-solar-panels/

The town as a whole did not reject the installation because it would "suck up all the energy from the sun", but rather based on the true assertion that:
1) It does displace flora that would be using that ground and sunlight to grow, and the fauna that depend on it, thus impacting the ecosystem.
2) It is an eye-sore and that can affect light commercial business development if it ruins otherwise attractive scenery.

But regarding the teacher, I've said it before and I'll say it again, teachers are NOT overpaid. They are mostly underqualified half-educated house-wives playing teacher, not experts in their fields, and the reason that they reject standardized testing for their students is because it would make it obvious that they can't teach in an objective manner. But most of the US, and [H] is no exception, insists that our teachers are so great and that women like this should be the ones coming up with their own tests, and not held to any standards and paid more... *rolleyes*

The problem is this argument cherry picks and ignores what those of us against standardized testing and for teacher raises are actually asking for.

Fact is standardized testing has never once proven what students are actually learning. Even before the idiocy that was no child left behind or common core, they were nothing more than an exercise in memorizing the test material. At no point has critical thinking or usable knowledge ever been successfully measured using standardized testing. They don't work and they never have worked. What we need is a two part system that actually starts with validating teacher knowledge and performance every 3-5 years. Any teacher that cannot validate that they know the material they are teaching should obviously not be teaching, much less on a higher pay grade. The second part of this would be coming up with a system to test what students actually learn through the year. Now interestingly this is less about the test and more about what they are actually taught. The first problem is that the states flatly have too much power to control what their schools teach. There needs to be an absolutely standard curriculum taught in every single school at every single grade level. No non private school should be allowed to teach anything except exactly what the standard program is. This way if the loonies in Kentucky want to teach their kids bullshit, they have to pay private schools to do so. Once everyone is being taught the same material at the same grade level, then and only then can we create successful tests that measure a childs critical thinking and what they have actually learned. But it starts with the teachers.
 
I wish I could find that recording of someone in congress saying that they need to consider that wind farms may counteract the rotation of the Earth.

Fossil fuel interests have a lot to lose over the next century, they are fighting a last ditch effort for survival even though we will not be able to get rid of fossil fuels in the short term.
 
My science teacher once told us you could breathe on Mars. He said it was similar to high altitude areas, difficult but totally possible. That was 8th grade and 20 minutes outside a 1st class city. So I can't say I'm surprised. There's a lot of dumb people and sometimes they end up with jobs like Teaching.... As for the other citizens it's even less surprising of course. I heard this story a day or two ago on the radio and was laughing the whole time.
 
Source

Not included in graph:
Cell towers and radio towers: 6.8 million
Buildings: between 100 million and 1 billion
Cats: between 1.4 billion and 3.7 billion

Well, I really hate cats, so if anything that tells me to burn more coal.
 
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