The 'fuel' may be free. But you still have the capital costs which need to be amortized over the expected lifespan of a solar farm. Then there's property taxes, maintenance, interconnect agreements, leases, etc. Here in the US - take away the subsidies/tax credits - and the per kWh costs to the consumer are on par with that of nuclear and fossil fuel generation costs.

Location is also a factor in the cost of solar electricity production. A solar farm in southern Arizona is going to be far more productive and profitable than a solar farm in upstate NY.

Even on a sunny day - you still have times of day called dusk, dawn and night. On a good clear summer day, midnight to midnight, - your solar generation is still at ~50% capacity factor.

Telephone voice traffic has been packetized and transmitted over fiber optics between central offices and remote switching centers since the 1990's. So this is nothing new.

And the locks are ridiculously easy to pick.

If it's a Rohn 45G - it comes in 10 foot sections that weigh 70 lbs each. 200' tower = 1,400 lbs. It's a guyed tower with nothing on it except maybe a 900 MHz STL antenna - so minimal wind loading. The tower is the antenna for AM stations.

All you need is someone with a cut-off saw to cut where one set of guy wires is tied to a ground support, and it'll tip right over as the base rests on an insulator. Cut it up with a cut-off saw (it's tubular steel). Have a buddy or two with you and be out of there in an hour. It's in a remote location and being 199' tall - no FAA lighting. Perfect opportunity to cash in on $125 of scrap metal.

If it's a Rohn 45G - it's made of 20 ten-foot sections that weigh 70 lbs each. So 1,400 lbs. Scrap steel is ~$200/gross ton - making its scrap value $125. Once something that tall hits the ground - it's unusable as a radio tower anymore as it'll be too mangled.

Seems like an awful lot of work to make $125 (not to mention the safety hazards). But I suppose it could have been done in a couple of hours to cut it up with a sawzall (it's tubular steel), load it on a landscape trailer and drop it off at a scrap dealer who doesn't ask questions.

FWIW - I know plenty of incompetent white guys who manage to keep their jobs for decades thanks to unions. The amount of fuck-ups I've seen over the years in safety sensitive places is astonishing.

Not saying black people are prone to mistakes too - but it's not only them.

Total cost?

4 cents/kWh? More like 7 cents supply and 12 cents delivery - seeing 19 cents/kWh here in upstate NY. But speaking of upstate NY - solar is seeing an annual capacity factor of about 10-12%. In other words, panels are producing power 10-12% of the time. For a $25,000 rooftop system - that's gonna be a very long time until I see some return on that investment.

I pay ~$1,000/yr for electricity (1500 sq ft house heated with high efficiency natural gas, divorced, kids out of the house - I don't use much energy). With a 10% capacity factor - I'm generating about $100/yr in solar - saving me 10% over the local utility. After tax credits, etc... say that $25k system cost comes down to $20k - it'll take 200 years before I recoup my investment in rooftop solar. Hard pass. That and I work in nuclear anyway... solar doesn't pay my bills, Montgomery G. Burns does.

In the southwest US - if you got 2000 sq ft, running heat pumps and a house full of kids - sure, it makes more sense. Not sure why they keep pushing it where it's cloudy 2/3rds if the year and days are shorter.

Nope. That's because in states with deregulated grids - all that power is sold by the generators to the utilities for the same price per megawatt/hour.

And in places like upstate New York - those solar farms, in a good year, are producing energy with a 10-12% capacity factor. Better than nothing? Sure. But it's a money losing bet.

If there was to be a major disaster in my neck of the woods - there is nothing out there to educate the public to tune to the city's major news/talker.

But let's get real. No one is gonna depend on a battery powered AM radio in the dark waiting for the government to tell them what to do. Frankly, the last person I'm going to trust my life to is someone from the government.

Most people have the wherewithal to figure it out on their own. I got a generator, firewood, food and fuel to get me through a few days. If it's so bad that I gotta bug out - I have a new Subaru with AWD and friends/family who live within an hour's drive. If worse comes to worse, I have enough guns and ammunition to take what I need.

If said disaster was to knock out that major 50kw news/talk AM station - then what? Where do we go next?

AM radio is a dying breed. Smaller / local stations are going dark. Larger stations are all automated corporate rebroadcasters with actual on-air people voice tracking from home 6 states away. You may have 2-3 actual live local voices who come in to do the morning and afternoon news - but they're also doing remote/voice work for other corporate stations too. As for getting out breaking doomsday news - this assumes that the station is physically or remotely accessible. The AM highway travel info stations are all gone here in NY.

I rarely use the AM/FM function of my car's entertainment center. It's usually whatever streaming service I'm listening to via Android Auto. If I am tuning into a local station to listen to the news - it's on their FM simulcast. Maaaaaybe I'll go to the AM version if the FM station is out of range - but that's rare... they have a phone app for that. If AM disappeared from my dashboard, I won't miss it.

Now in a real shit hits the fan scenario - I live in one of the (if not THE) most disaster free part of the US. So bad days are exceptionally rare for us. I know what the major AM news/talk station here is. Other AM stations - couldn't tell you who's what. Hit 'scan' and hope for the best - and odds are it's playing some satellite fed syndicated programming anyway. But between home internet, 4G/5G, AM, FM, OTA TV - something will work for most people.

Keep this in mind - unless you live in Florida or along the Gulf Coast during hurricane season and are in the path of a CAT 4 or 5 hurricane, most natural disasters are fairly localized in nature. The worst ones I've been through was Hurricane Gloria on Long Island in 1985 - power was back in several days, an ice storm in upstate NY in 1991 where the region lost power in places for up to 2 weeks (we were back on within 36 hours) and while that got tough for some people - they got through it. We had the big power outage in 2003 in the northeast but power was back in later that evening. I honestly don't recall any widespread suffering or agony. People got through it. TV/AM/FM radio stations largely stayed on the air. Landline telephones mostly worked.

Not everyone has a built-in nav system. In an emergency you want communications for the lowest common denominator - and AM radio is usually it.

We killed 3 astronauts on the launchpad during testing for Apollo 1 to keep our collective egos from getting hurt if the Soviets beat us to the moon. And look how many more died in 2 space shuttle disasters because of incompetence and time pressures. The moon isn't going anywhere. Sending us there didn't do anything for humanity and going back won't do anything for humanity. It's a huge gov't jobs program to make scientists look cool - nothing more.

Don't get me wrong - the Apollo program was some really cool shit given the technology of the day. But I'd be hard pressed to believe that we have an actual articulable **need** to go back there.

"bUt iT wiLL HeLp uS GeT tO mArS"

Again. What's the need? A manned mission to Mars is a suicide mission.

Raspberry Pi 5 with 8 GB RAM weighs in at 46 grams (0.101413 lbs) and costs $80 USD. That works out to $788.85/lb.

We once drove across the Navajo Nation in 2020. Spent the night in Chinle in Arizona as a stopover point since we were traveling between Page and Sedona - and hitting the sights in between. It's a 3rd world shit hole... abject poverty everywhere you looked. Cell phone service only worked if you had the Navajo Nation's cell phone plan (full bars on Verizon - but no service).

They should look into fixing their own problems - and not worrying about a thimble of cremated remains landing on the moon.

If they could - they'd open up a casino, gas station and smoke shop next to the first Apollo lunar lander and happily dump human feces in a nearby crater.