What you are saying here seems completely orthogonal to the post you are replying to. The point is that the big investors in these companies like Fidelity or Sequoia Capital (that is an investor in both) get the money they need to invest directly or indirectly from 401K's and pension funds. The acquisition of X by xAI was obviously meant to save the investors of that company (especially Elon Musk and the Tesla shares he backed his share with) from the dismal performance of the company.

Musk bought Twitter for way more than it was worth on the promise that he would make it far more profitable with ideas like firing just about everyone, switching to an all subscription model, and allowing people to buy vanity checkmarks, etc. Oh, and he planned to turn it into an "everything app". It's an idiotic plan because, if you're going to basically replace the brand, people, and software of a company like that, all that's left is the physical assets and the user base. The physical assets were not worth a fraction of the $44 billion. The user base (what's left of it) would simply materialize for any "everything app" if it was actually any good. It would have made way more sense to just start a new company since what he wanted was a new company anyway.

Anyway, when xAI bought X/Twitter, the valuation amazingly rebounded to, coincidentally, just a fraction more than the valuation that Musk bought it for. This is either an amazing coincidence (and really unlikely for a company that relies on advertising revenue where the CEO told advertisers fuck you, literally, and also threatened them if they didn't pay for advertising). So the valuation appears to have been face-saving for Musk, and also may have gotten him out of his own debt (though we don't know exactly how that was all structured). That would have been done at the expense of the xAI investors. Some of the investors were the same in both companies. It still may have been an uneven trade even for those though, because they may not have had an equal percentage of shares in each company. Once again, directly or indirectly, most of the investment comes from things like 401K plans, pension funds and the like. The big institutional investors do not have some magical separation of funds between the funds they manage for small investors and their large scale investment. Without regulators like the SEC stopping them, they can simply take any troubled asset and roll it into a security that they have their fund managers buy across their various funds, leaving the small investors to eat the loss.

Also, do you know what other company is overvalued? Tesla. It's a fairly small car company by sales, selling a little less than BMW. However, it is somehow worth $1.5 trillion, even though the actual largest carmaker Toyota is only worth a fifth as much. It can be argued that Tesla is more than a car company with up to around 25% of its sales being in other areas like power, etc., and with their robotics division theoretically up and coming. However various other car companies also do other kinds of business including robotics and power equipment. There is no rational reason for Tesla's value, it's all a speculative bubble. If Musk has to sell a bunch of Tesla stock such as because he needs to pay back a loan, the valuation for Tesla could collapse.

Basically, Musk has built a house of cards and he is currently in the process of using a chain of companies to save the others in pretty shifty ways.

I think of 401Ks and the like as a bit like the slot machines at a casino. The odds on those are centrally controlled and variable so that the casino can meet its target payout ratio and ensure that, on average, the customers are losing as much money as possible without going over the legally mandated limit. In other words, a stable block that can be used to anchor all of the crazy, risky activity. A stable block that is constantly fed with suckers.

Maybe read more slowly to comprehend what I wrote so I don't have to keep repeating myself:

OK. So, first, the article _is_ about the court cases (and the details around them). As I said, I was not referring directly to them. As I said in the sentence you _didn't_ quote, I was referring to what you wrote right before I entered the conversation:

Followed by two more paragraphs about the supposed military dangers of these wind farms. You yourself are the one who made the topic the technical reality of whether or not these wind turbines are a real problem for military imaging of the coast and general alarmism. I addressed the realities of the turbines and the alarmism.

I will reiterate. I was not the one who brought up civilian RADAR, _you were_. So I covered both civilian and military RADAR in a discussion that was meant to highlight the basic realities of RADAR that apply to both the civilian RADAR systems and the military ones. The discussion of, for example, the Nantucket airport RADAR was mostly to illustrate that, even though it's closer, it still doesn't have any practical issues. The military installations located where all or most of the turbines are not visible over the horizon in line of sight have even less of an issue being further away.

What!? Jebus. This gets dumber and dumber. Aircraft can fly East of the wind farm to cover that area. Your original argument was that the land-based RADAR couldn't see past the wind farm and one of the things I pointed out is that those areas could be covered by military ships with their own RADAR and satellites. So, now all of a sudden you're mentioning yet another system that can operate outside the area that the turbines could possibly be a problem (and also look down from the sky like satellites) and that's your argument? Also, the profile of the wind turbines from above is relatively tiny.

You have severe reading comprehension issues, don't you? If I write a lot and go into detail it's TLDR. If I keep it short, you fill in imaginary detail of your own. The point was that the only positioning for OTH RADAR where the wind Turbines would be a problem would be if you positioned it where it was looking at the wind turbines. Basically, all you're doing above with "If you want your over the horizon radar to pickup where your line of sight radar ends..." is paraphrasing what I said. No practical configuration of that RADAR would result in it being interfered with by the turbines.

I didn't miss the point. I stated it clearly and you have just once again provided more evidence that: "In other words, you have no idea what you're talking about WRT military RADAR." You're basically pontificating that, because we don't know what we don't know, that somehow it means that there must be some special threat from wind Turbines to completely unknown imaging systems that might as well be the Force, from Star Wars. So there's some amazing, super high tech, sci fi technology they have but its kryptonite is: wind turbines. Not boats, not birds, not weather, not active countermeasures. Wind Turbines. Right. Sure.

The Department of what? Sorry, I thought you were from the US and talking about the US Military. Must have been some confusion.

They aren't going into detail because of the reason you gave in your very first post. They're just lying. There is no significant issue. There never was, and there will not be once the project is finished. It is not hard to connect the dots. This is happening because the US has a President who says things like:

Of course, while that may sound like completely insane ranting, actually he understands wind power

even though

Basically, the man declared that he would not allow "windmills" to be built and this is a pretext to try give some credibility to that goal in court. We don't have to guess about this. The man regularly muses in public about how he will make up fake emergencies to justify his actions.

I am not sure why you have to measure it in acres _and_ football fields. Can we just settle on it being 1600 Libraries of Congress? Or, we could put it in terms on how long the sides would be if it were a square. That would be about 13.2 miles. I mean, sizable sure, but not that big compared to the length of the coastline. Also, um, you don't think the entire space is taken up by wind turbines do you? It's 176 turbines, apparently. So, that would be about a square mile each.

I could design and build that system and it would likely work for all the turbines. Because it would just have to work for one instance of a turbine and then you could apply the method for every instance. Also, "seas, weather, etc." Why do you need to add them. They're already there. RADAR already has to deal with adverse conditions.

Once again, there isn't actually a legitimate complaint. They just made it up as a pretext.

Boats can and do create significant clutter problems for RADAR. So, aside from the fact that your claim is not true, boats also occlude RADAR.

As usual, you just ignore what I am actually writing. I am pretty sure of one of those engineers read this conversation, they would come to the same conclusion that I have: Offshore wind turbines are just run of the mill obstacles like many other things found at sea and can be dealt with by an assortment of methods.

It's so confusing trying to follow your thinking. Why are you going on about generators/alternators in subs? The point was that what you would find in the nacelle of a wind turbine is considerably quieter. Not to mention that they are 500 feet in the air, not submerged in water. They're not noisy in the water, and they won't get confused with, or overwhelm the noise of subs.

Reading comprehension issues again I see. It is not about people disagreeing with me. It's about having a concealed agenda and pretending to be discussing something in good faith when it's just a plan to deceive. MacMann keeps posting links to: Renewable Energy: Without the Hot Air by Sir David MacKay. It purports to be a logical, data driven approach to considering renewable power. However, if you examine it, it's really just a manipulative exercise designed from the start to drive the conclusion that nuclear power is the only answer. At the end of his life, MacKay stopped pretending to be serious about honestly evaluating renewables and came out as a full on nuclear zealot. That's the sort of thing I am talking about.

As for ignoring what I write, being functionally illiterate isn't something to be proud of. Neither is being dishonest in debate. It's actually pretty pathetic to admit to not actually reading what the other person has to say and just waiting for the next opportunity to hammer your own point while ignoring counterarguments. Seriously, pride in the fact that one thinks that just getting their own two bits in is proper debate?

We know that lots of things cause clutter with Doppler RADAR (additionally, I know that includes boats, although apparently you do not.

Which is it? Is it Presidential administrations , or is it an actual military assessment? Do you think that the Biden administration would have somehow allowed it if there really was some big security threat?

That is hardly all we know. We also know how insanely dead set against wind power Trump is and how much that he lies. We also know that he will have others in his administration lie for him. Sure, you can always speculate that there's some urgent military reason for his that either only just appeared this year, or that was suppressed under Biden but I think you need to learn how to assign probabilities to things based on the evidence. I am not a big fan of Ockham's Razor, but this isn't really it anyway. There's nothing simple about the craziness of Trump's anti-renewable obsession, after all. This is about assembling the evidence and he possible explanations and weighing them against each other.

Well, the total revenue of the two (three if you count the extremely recent X/Xai merger) companies is something like $19 billion, from what I can find. Also, except for SpaceX, which only started making profit very recently, these are not profitable companies (typically a company at the very least needs to have solidly demonstrated that it will be profitable in the future for an IPO). Anyway, that makes their valuation to revenue ratio about 66 to 1. If we look at other companies with valuations in the same order, we have Apple, with about three times the valuation, and revenue of $416 billion. So about a 9.1 to 1 ratio. The other biggest companies in the world below Apple are:
Microsoft 3 trillion 305 billion 9.8 to 1
Amazon 2.5 trillion 715 billion 3.5 to 1
Meta 1.75 trillion 201 billion 8.7 to 1
TSMC 1.7 trillion 122 billion 13.9 to 1
Saudi Aramco 1.65 trillion 460 billion 3.6 to 1
Tesla 1.58 trillion 95 billion 16.6 to 1
Broadcom 1.5 trillion 65 billion 23 to 1
(note that there has been a lot of shuffling of these recently. Currently Nvidia is above Apple, but was formerly below it, for example)
So, if the market values it at $1.25 trillion, the merged company would go onto the bottom of that list with nearly three times the value to revenue ratio of the other top one on that list, Broadcom, and close to nineteen times the value to revenue ratio of the lowest on that list. Also, if we look at which companies on this list (or off it, like NVIDIA) have the highest value to revenue ratios, they're mostly ones that are being boosted by the AI bubble. On that note, I can't help noticing that Musk has just started claiming that he's going to use a merged SpaceX/xAI to put AI server farms in space. It's a totally idiotic idea on a technical or price/performance level that only a moron would suggest and/or believe. It seems likely he's just trying to boost his IPO to try to justify the ridiculous valuation.

Did you miss the part about them being inside the safety cage. Surrounded by shock absorbing casing? It's not like these are out in the open waiting for things to come flying and hit them.

OK. I don't think we live in universes operating under the same physical principles. G-forces are acceleration/deceleration. Expressed in units of distance per unit of time squared. That means the rate at which you go from one velocity to another. While there is a little bit more to impact than just acceleration, the force of impact is pretty much about the duration over which the velocity changes. In other words acceleration and, in other words G-force. With all else being equal (such as mass and the vectors of the objects involved, in other words components of momentum) the actual impulse of a collision is determined by the relative change in velocity of the objects over time. In other words, the G-forces involved. If an object is soft, like an airbag, something hitting it decelerates slowly relative to a similar collision with a solid object. Obviously the dynamics are even more complex when soft, deformable objects are hitting each other. Of course, the brain is also a soft deformable object. Very clearly, the thing that stops it squashing against the front of the skull and liquefying during a crash is reducing the g-forces by stopping gradually rather than instantaneously. So, basically if you can't understand the role g-forces (really just another term for a moment of acceleration) play in impact, either we are inhabiting different physical realities, or you're completely missing the mark. G-forces clearly are directly related to force of impact. I invite you to consider Newton's second law of motion, F=MA, and to consider what each of those letters stands for.

Anyway, this is all a bit irrelevant. Whether you want to put it in terms of g-forces or impact, or momentum, or whatever SSDs mounted inside an enclosure inside the safety cage of a car can survive a lot more than humans. One part of it is that it is a small object with a much, much smaller mass relative to its surface area than a human. This is where we agree that one of the functions of the airbag is to spread the force of impact over a wider area. Consider F=MA again. The mass of a human is around 65 kg. The mass of an SSD? Maybe what, 20 grams? We can just say the human is 3000X more massive. What is the frontal surface area of a human? Around half a square meter or 2500 cm^2. For an SSD? about 25 cm^2 for one of the larger size m.2. So, the SSD has 1/3000th the mass, but 1/100th the frontal surface area. Sure, we don't know the exact orientation, but the point is that it's clear that, in any collision, the amount of force per unit area of surface contact for the SSD is going to almost always be much lower than for the human regardless of the specific force vectors. Not to mention that the materials of the SSD are simply, on average, much more durable than a typical human body. Basically your scenario of serious impact damage to the SSD only seems to work when the SSD, which is inside the safety cage, is damaged by the other materials warping around it so badly that it is crushed, or objects somehow going flying and piercing its enclosure.

Uh, yeah. That was never in question. We were talking about the fact that the SSD is far, far more likely to survive than a human. Going beyond the theoretical. I have taken lots of used car parts out of cars at wrecking yards. Some of the cars have been pretty hideously banged up and, I will be honest, I tended to avoid the ones where someone had written "BLOOD!!! BLOOD!!!" on the car. Basically though, if it wasn't in a part of the car that had burned, or where larger structural parts had warped so badly that they destroyed smaller parts, the electronics stuff was pretty much always fine. Of course, this was generally stuff from outside the safety cage.

What the hell is this straw man nonsense? When argument of mine even appears in there. Also, do you not realize that you took an experiment designed to test the effects of _G-Forces_ on the human body, then claimed that the _G-Force_ experiment should be a big hint about the purpose of air bags, and then, somehow pivoted to ridiculing me for connecting _G-Forces_ to the purpose of airbags? Can you make this make sense?

Deja vu. What the hell is this straw man nonsense? You're claiming I somehow connected spinning disks to a Tesla? I simply provided an anecdote about how, at a job I had, when we had any issues with data recovery, we would send the disk out to professional data recovery. You're the one who got obsessed with them being spinning disks. It's irrelevant. The only point was that, if you can't do it in house, there are experts you can hire. You are also the one who brought up "thermals well beyond what they're rated for?" I discussed both ends of that, too cold and too hot to cover all the bases. Once again, you're the one getting ridiculously obsessed with it. I certainly would not have mentioned it again.

I've covered that already. It's inside the safety cage. It could happen, sure. It's just not likely. Remember, the actual premise here is that there's something to recover in the first place. That means it wasn't incinerated, the drive wasn't pulverized, etc. There's a very narrow statistical range where the drive gets mildly damaged. Pretty much all scenarios leave it entirely or mostly intact, or completely destroy it so that recovery isn't a question in the first place. When you get a drive that isn't completely pulverized, and you can't read it, you hire an expert. As I have been saying all along.

Seriously? You're making up an imaginary spinning disk comment. And what is this nonsense about me only thinking in a narrow set of boundaries? What are these supposed boundaries? If you're talking about the boundaries set by the actual topic of conversation, well, I can't plead guilty to that, unfortunately. You've dragged this conversation all over the place obsessing over irrelevant details or imagined positions that I haven't taken. The point is, and always has been that, as the original poster wrote: "Tesla is not to be trusted". They do indeed lie about things and manipulate data. The specific example was them lying about not being able to recover data that was recovered by an outside expert that the family hired. Tesla could have used an outside expert themselves.

Of course they mean something to me. I mean, I think "impact toughness" is more generally correct in engineering than "impact strength", but other than that. Do you think that spouting off a bunch of terms and asking if they mean something to me is any sort of argument? You're not making any actual claim about anything I've said. As a rhetorical technique, who is this meant to impress?

A number of times. Once to me specifically. Big bump on the highway at full speed because the highway dept had basically created a small cliff cutting across the road, but hadn't put up any signage.

Well, I'm not super concerned about that for myself, specifically. In general though, I do recognize it as a safety issue that has actually killed people. I am not sure how you don't see how that has to do with flush-mount exterior handles though. Actually, maybe I do because there's no article in the summary (there is a link in the story header, but it's not super obvious and the summary is really lacking). This story is exactly about China doing the "easy to solve" thing you suggested. From an actual article about it:

It's unrelated to being an EV. Modern ICE vehicles can have the exact same kind of door locks. Honestly, this has something I have thought is a safety concern ever since all car windows became power windows and didn't have a crank any more. Of course, if you had something to break it (and they sell car multi-tools that have a window breaking tool as part of it) that wasn't necessarily a problem. Now though, a lot of the cars have window glass that you can't break. I mean, you can shatter it, but it's laminated so that it still remains as an intact barrier.

Ultimately, these are not show stopping issues. Sure, they will kill people, but not that many statistically. Still people tend not to be too happy when they or a love one die because someone thought that a locking mechanism that relies on electricity being available would be cool.

You presented preventing monopolies as the only reason the SEC would step in. I pointed out that, while the regulations the SEC enforces might stop monopolies from forming, that is not what they're actually for. In this case, a logical reason for the SEC to step in is because the whole thing stinks to high heaven from a securities standpoint. First, Musk took one unprofitable company, X, and merged it with xAI with a made up valuation of X. This was a clear attempt to rescue X from its unprofitability under Musk and to rescue the Tesla shares he backed his position with. xAI buying X is problematic because that means the investors in xAI are trading their shares for an over-valued security. Now, some of the investors might have been investors in both, but not all of them. Now, very shortly after, SpaceX and xAI/X are merging and it appears to essentially be for the same reason. This is just a continuation of Musk completely abusing his position and ignoring his fiduciary responsibility. Just like when he uses resources from one of "his" companies in another one of "his" companies. Since he's not actually the owner of both, just part owner, it's stealing. Or, when he blackmailed Tesla directly, shamelessly in public, to give him tens of billions of stock and additional control over the company, or he would use another company to directly compete. These are insane, and frankly criminal, violations but we seem to be through the looking glass now.

So, this clearly _is_ a matter for the SEC even though it is not about the merger creating a monopoly position in any one industry. There are very good reasons the SEC should be involved, but it has basically allowed Musk to get away with just about anything.

That statement is true. The rest of your post is based off that statement. However, for the rest of your post to be valid, that statement would actually have to be: "The SEC only protects against monopolies". That statement, however, is not true. For example, the SEC protects against various forms of financial fraud and insider trading as well as producing and enforcing securities regulations. While those things could be used to reinforce or build a monopoly, no present or future monopoly is actually required for those to exist. A lot of their function is in the actual name. Securities, for example, are things like stocks, bonds, and options. Companies over a certain size that utilize securities have to be registered with the SEC whether public or private. The companies in question are not sole ownerships (no matter how much Musk likes to make everyone believe so and acts like he is the sole owner) or family businesses, etc. They have investors who own stock in the companies. So SEC rules apply.

As another poster has pointed out, in many EVs these rely on the 12v system. The 12v system, in turn, relies on an antiquated technology: the 12v lead-acid car battery. While the technology has its up sides, like reliability in extreme weather, it has a downside that no other modern electronics in cars have. That's the connectors. Those would be an anode and cathode post usually on the top. There are alternatives like side post and terminal screws, but lots of EVs still use plain old top post lead acid batteries. The connectors on the batteries are cylindrical posts, and the connections that go to them hold on with tension by squeezing. They can pop off if the car gets a bad bump. No other modern automotive electrical connector is like that. They almost universally clip on and are designed so that they will still cling on even in a bad bump.

Basically, if your car doors rely on the 12V system to open, a bad bump could leave you stuck and unable to open the doors.

I'm not confused, or at least I wasn't. I wasn't referring directly to any court cases. I was referring specifically to what you wrote where you brought up both civilian and military RADAR.

It actually still applies since many of the details apply to any line of sight RADAR and the other details establish that, for basically any relevant land-based RADAR installation, the top of the wind turbines are over the horizon or very close to it. The "wall of text" that you apparently failed to read actually addresses details of both.

There's nothing magical about military radar. The concepts are the same as other forms of imaging. It's either line of sight, or you're bouncing the signal off the sky, in which case you're going for a greatly extended range, which means that you completely pass over this wind farm so there's no interference. These wind turbines are tiny obstacles at that range. I pointed out in another post that the apparent height of these turbines, at the distance of 15 miles would be about the same as 1/3 inch at the distance of an outstretched arm. In other words, they would be appear about the height of a pinky nail. At the 35 miles to the mainland, they would appear about the same size as something 1/18 inch tall at the length of an outstretched arm. That's about the height of dime seen edge on. That's basically a speck. Even then, that's only if you can see its entire height over the horizon. At 35 miles, you would need a vantage point from an altitude over 800 feet to see the base of the wind turbine tower. The highest point in Cape cod is about 300 feet above sea level. If you exclude Cape Cod, the mainland is about 45 to 50 miles away and the nearest military RADAR installation in that direction even further. The simple fact is that there are very limited circumstances where land-based military RADAR could even "see" these because the horizon is in the way for line of sight, and they are not in the beam path for over the horizon either.

Also, are you really playing the game where you start out making technical claims about military RADAR, even though you are not a military RADAR expert and then, when I point out the flaws in your technical claims you turn around and say: "Are you an expert in military radar? No, no you are not."? I mean, really? Are _you_ a military RADAR expert? If not, your own reasoning should preclude you making your original claims.

The "far onland" I was positing would be further than that. Basically I was referring to the inexplicable scenario where, for some reason, the over the horizon systems were placed so that their range stopped around where this wind farm is. I thought that was clearer it was meant to be an absurd scenario. Why did you think I wrote it?

In other words, you have no idea what you're talking about WRT military RADAR and don't have any basis for a complaint against offshore wind turbines.

Well, thank you for noting my opinion oh great gatekeeper of knowledge who demands credentials but oddly provided none of their own. I am not a credentialed expert in RADAR specifically, but I have worked professionally with interferometric laser microscopy. Plus, you know, the basic knowledge of geometry and geography to know that these are almost, or totally out of line of sight of land based RADAR systems and that systems like OTH RADAR bypass them. Oh, also I know that the point of surface wave systems is that they rely on the conductivity of the water and aren't going to react with the moving blades that, at their lowest pass by over a 100 feet in the air. They will interact with the tower. Of course, they will also interact with boats. There's nothing special about a wind turbine to that sort of system relative to any other object of similar cross section.

I mean, I've covered all the other reasons it's irrelevant to the land based RADAR systems due to range, the horizon, etc. and covered the fact that, being an effectively stationary object at a known location, it could be compensated for. I even covered this already. If it were really necessary to try to see through the wind turbines taking up a tiny part of the field of view, and not just combine views from different angles, modern systems could use digital filtering and pattern recognition to determine the speed and orientation of the blades and filter out the results from them. You are making mountains out of molehills and you have simply dodged addressing the fact that, whether or not parts of boats are moving at high speed, they block the view much worse than wind turbines.

Oh, well, so much for this only being about military RADAR. There's basically no range from the wind turbines where this is ever going to be and more of a problem for boats than other boats would be. Aside from RADAR, they have charts. I went over all this already.

I have thought this through, unlike you. I have mentioned over and over that a combination of methods will allow a complete view around the wind farm as well as how tiny an obstruction the wind farm is in the first place. You just obtusely ignore everything I've said and focus on each little thing as if it exists in a vacuum. Masking the areas with known obstacles does not exist in a vaccuum. We have already discussed comprehensive systems that can see past the wind turbines in the air, on the water, and under the water as well as see things inside the area of the wind farms, as well as past them. You are trying super, super hard to make them into a big problem, but they just are not one.

OK, sure, we'll just ban boats then. Got it. You don't like them any more, so no more boats for others.

Anyway, do you mean the generators in the nacelle at the center of the blades, 500 feet in the air? Well, it is called a generator, but I don't think it's the kind of generator you're talking about. More specifically, it's an alternator. The alternator itself is actually very quiet. You seem to be thinking of generators that are compound units containing a noisy internal combustion engine. As I have already pointed out, and you appear to be ignoring, the noise produced underwater by offshore wind turbines is actually very low volume compared to boats, and mostly in a very low frequency range usually only used for deep water, long range SONAR. It is not going to interfere with SONAR in any appreciable way.

You realize that we're talking about ones you could mount on the wind turbines to cover a small area that might be shadowed by the land-based RADAR, right. Pretty much what any of the boats passing by will have too?

Right, but then you argued like that wasn't just a pretext that, if it had ever been a real concern, would have been handled out of public sight for national security reasons? If something is already mostly built anyway, and it actually is a real security risk, it's just basic security _not_ to yell about it in public.

Right, but all the possibilities for why that may be turn out to be either total non-issues or, where there might be some tiny issue, easily handled. But then you're writing about how it will apparently allow concealed nuclear weapons to sneak in and EMP the country.

I generally only get up on my high horse when the other person is on theirs. Your initial response to TheMiddleRoad and then to me both seemed fairly high horsey. Honestly, while I may have come off a little sarcastic about boats being as big or bigger of an issue than wind turbines, if I look through my responses, I have not done much other than answer your questions and address your concerns and ask my own questions. I did perhaps over-react to your comments about nuclear power/breeder reactors, but that's because it was a bit triggering that it seemed so familiar from all the times I have had long discussions with people about renewables where they, over and over again, just ignored what I wrote to voice some exaggerated concern and then it finally comes out that they are just arguing against renewables because they are pro-nuclear and will accept no substitutes. Also, to re-iterate from earlier, it seems a bit odd to accuse me of being on a high horse, when you started demanding credentials despite presenting none of your own.

Anyway, to be clear on my position, I think that any actual concerns are overblown because, cases where the turbines are in the way are rare, the turbines do not block much at all, and there are numerous methods to work around that, only some of which I have detailed. The Trump administration's "concern" about interfering with military RADAR is exaggerated nonsense drummed up to retroactively excuse the action.

Right. Approximately, anyway. Varies by arm length and pinkie nail size obviously, but would appear somewhere in the neighborhood of a third of an inch tall at around average arm length. Now, I could still certainly see something that relatively thin on my fingernail at arms length, but maybe not if I wasn't looking right at at. In my peripheral vision, I might have trouble noticing it. Then, as mentioned, the color, atmospheric effects, etc.

I am not sure about the light. Like you said, they may be below the horizon if the numbers you saw were correct. I don't know much about the exact requirements for lights though. Would they have lights at the top for planes? Either way, there's the scaling due to the distance, so even bright lights would presumably get pretty faint even if visible over the horizon. Of course, it is an area of the sky that should get pretty dark normally, so maybe they stand out at night. Not sure. Of course, boats have lights too.

So, generally, I quite agree, regardless of a person's opinion on their aesthetics, since they mostly can't even really see them, not an eyesore.

Exactly. Ground based RADAR has to deal with the inconvenience of the area it is surveilling not being flat all the time.

Right. At 15+ miles, depending on where you were viewing from, the very tip of a blades would still reach 760 feet above the horizon with maybe the bottom 100 feet hidden. However, that would look about as big at that distance as a pinkie nail at arms length. Add to that that it is a spindly thing made of stick-like objects and painted a non reflective light gray. Depending on conditions in the background, atmospheric haze and other weather conditions, you would expect them to be barely visible if at all against the daytime sky.

Interestingly, one of the reasons Obama cancelled it to start with is because of a perception that it was a bad deal for the US and a much better one for Canada. Then Trump uncancelled it. Then Biden cancelled it again. Then in this administration, Trump has a major grudge going against Canada (I mean, he did in his first Presidency too, but not as bad as now). This Presidency, though he has done a little towards reviving it, he hasn't fully yet and we''ll have to see how well it deals with his issues with Canada. Of course, it looks like he is trying to stir up revolution in Alberta to get it to become "independent" (I am assuming this will be like "independent" republics that Russia "liberates" then annexes) in which case, the equation will change. Of course, the actual market interest in developing it isn't there any more anyway especially with the probability that the US will slap tariffs on the oil swinging from 0% to 100% on an hour by hour basis. Also with the certain knowledge that even a signed treaty written up into law and voted on and signed by the President won't actually affect those fluctuating odds one bit. A controversial project that can't be build within a single presidential administration was enough of a boondoggle when the major factors affecting it only changed every 4 years. When they change every 4 hours, there's no hope for the project.

In the end, it's a bit different for the wind farm though because, aside from being Canadian, the pipeline required a huge number of very unpopular takings. The wind farm, on the other hand, is technically in International waters, but is in the EEZ, which is a region basically made up by the US to claim territory (and recently, they invented the ECS to extend their claimed rights even further). In any case, from the point of the US it is federal "land" (I guess) and doesn't require any takings. On the other hand, although it's not Canada, it is Massachusetts (not really because not in their waters, but it does connect to Massachusetts and Trump won't see the difference) which may be worse in Trump's eyes.

So, your memory of that starts with the Democrats attacking Trump over egg prices? You don't maybe remember any attacks related to egg prices before that? Maybe coming from another source and attacking someone else?

I suppose you also don't recall why egg prices went up and then eventually down either?