Or vice-versa. It is increasingly hard to figure out which way the partisanship will go. IMHO this started with masks for COVID, which initially were a right-wing thing (there were plenty of posts saying you don't have to shut stores if everybody wore masks) and at least to me seemed to be a right-wing thing while "free to live my own life" is more left-wing. Yet it came out exactly reversed, probably because some idiot expressed their own opinion rather than the party line.

I agree that if either party makes any kind of statement on this, the other party will be forced to say the exact opposite, and both will come up with convoluted explanations as to why they are right and why it matches their general logic.

EarPods

Yes I absolutely agree.

The sentence I am questioning is this one: "Even when the farmers offered to buy or lease the land at significantly higher value than what it's worth (or in one case, higher than what the solar company was leasing it for) the leasing company refused because..."

I would like to see proof of this. I think there is some hand waving there and in fact the farmers did not offer more money than the solar did.

If the land is "derelict" then no farming is destroyed by using it for solar.

Yes that is the type of antenna proposed for the very large microwave beam. Other poster pointed out that these have so much empty area that you could put solar panels in them as well.

However the much tighter beams being proposed for these satellites might require solid, or at least very dense, surfaces.

You need to get a sense of scale. The changes in amount of energy received are unmeasurably small. The changes to the rate might be observable but is tiny as well.

That's exactly my point. The 1970's geosynchronous designs used a very large microwave beam, partly because of distance, but mostly because they wanted to keep the radiation below a level where it would kill birds. They neglected the fact that this required an antenna larger than a solar farm that could produce the same energy (at peak, so you could argue that it is smaller than enough solar farms to produce that energy 24 hours a day). I believe the antenna was a lot of dipoles spaced a few feet apart, so basically structures made of thin pipes, like spaced-out solar panels they would allow the land to be used for agriculture.

I think any serious modern proposals have much lower orbits, many more satellites (because now they have "night" half the time), and dangerous levels of the beams (either microwaves or just intense light and infrared like this proposal), steered by the satellites to point at the antennas. There are good schemes so that the satellites are unable to transmit at anything other than the antennas, usually there is a reverse transmitter in the antenna that the satellite must see to produce a coherent beam. I'm not sure but I suspect the antennas have to be solid surfaces.

You seem to be a bit confused even though you said exactly why this is right. The temperature is going to reach an equilibrium point. Small changes to how much energy is received will change the speed at which it reaches this equilibrium point but will not change the point itself.

The early advice about cleaners for COVID was wrong. It is interesting that all the complaints from the right about the CDC they seem to ignore this, the biggest mistake they made. It was believed that COVID would only survive in heavy water droplets and would infect a person by them touching a surface and then touching their eyes or mouth, this was also used as an argument against masks (masks would encourage touching around the mouth). It turns out COVID is inhaled and can't survive in a drop on a surface.

Various conservatives I knew went completely wild with excess amounts of bacterial cleaning and gloves (which they dumped all over the parking lots apparently unaware that they would have to pick up their COVID-covered purchases again after they drove home). They LOVED it. Somehow they have blocked all of this out and completely ignore their own past with their vilification of the CDC and vaccines and masks.

Other mistake CDC made was thinking that a previous infection with COVID (or a working vaccine) would reduce transmission or the ability to catch COVID again. This is still remembered by the right though they always drop the previous-infection part.

The lies from the right where they make up other "mistakes" by the CDC are despicable.

He's just going to claim those panels are hiding illegal immigrants.

I'm going to need some significant proof that "farmers offered more than what the solar company did" for the land. You are making things up. You seem to have forgotten to delete the word "derelict" when describing the land, try not relying on AI so much.

Generally the utility company rents the land the solar and wind farms are on, so it is not free. Maintenance is not zero either.

The data centers are being directly prevented from building solar or wind power. Idiot.

The jet stream is way above any windmills and I don't think has anything to do with the amount of wind. That varies considerably in a much smaller pattern. Offshore of course is by far the best place (on both coasts) which is why Trump is trying harder to stop that than anything else.

The serious proposals require rectenna receiving farms that are actually larger than a solar field producing the same energy.

They do shade the underlying ground somewhat less than solar panels so may have lower environmental effects. But the land use and the need to build transmission lines makes this very similar to solar as far as problems go. And that is ignoring the cost of putting this huge thing in space and maintaining it.