> That's not the point.

That is the point. That's my point. It's irrelevant whether it's your point or not because we're not arguing about your point. We're arguing about my point.

I didn't say anything about land converted back to wild land. I said protected wild land shouldn't be being converted in the first place.

> It has value whether we are considering to use that land for farming or for solar energy collection.

So...you're saying that what you just claimed isn't the point actually is the point. I'm not saying it's okay to put agricultural land on protected woodlands, but not solar farms, and I'm not saying that no land anywhere should be used for energy generation. I'm saying that protected lands shouldn't be being released from their protected status so they can be razed for solar farms when there are perfectly viable alternatives. Feel free to re-read what I said if you think that wasn't my point (although I stated it explicitly by saying I don't care if you want to build a 10 mi^2 solar farm in the mojave.)

You're trying to discredit my position by equating lands already in agricultural use with protected wetlands and woodlands. It is both a false equivalency and a strawman.

You keep trying to use economics to manipulate my opinion, but my point was never an economic point to begin with. My point is an environmental point. The environment should be preserved when it can reasonably be preserved, even if it's not the most economically viable option.

If there is a more reliable, albeit slightly more expensive way to produce the equivalent amount of beef at the equivalent rate to that which is already being produced on agricultural land that also requires the conversion of less wild land than conventional agricultural techniques, then I'll advocate fully for its use, provided that it's not being carried out on otherwise protected land.

What is the more reliable, albeit slightly more expensive way to produce and equivalent amount of beef at the equovalent rate to that which is already being produced on agricultural land?

Additionally, how many new agricultural projects are slated to begin on protected land?

You're the one claiming they're the same thing. The burden of proof is on you to demonstrate how your equivalency is not false.

EDIT: Your equivalency is false because it's founded on the basis that I'm claiming electricity is a superfluous luxury, which I've never claimed.

You're just making the false equivalency worse. Borderline strawman territory.

Food is not electricity. That's one of the worse false equivalencies I've seen in a while.

I'm not arguing on behalf of society. Obviously society agrees with you, which is why we see the massive construction of solar farms compared to very little construction of new nuclear power plants.

I'm disagreeing with society. In the next town over from where I live a private company was given a variance by the state to construct a 2 mi^2 solar farm on protected wooded wetlands. A SMR could easily provide the same output without compromising protected wooded wetlands, and it would've created more specialized jobs in the area.

Those kinds of projects shouldn't be happening. If you want to build a 10 mi^2 solar farm out in the middle of the Mojave, then I'm all for that, but if we're switching to green energy to protect the environment, then we shouldn't be compromising the environment to do it.

Sure, but burning fossil fuels isn't the only environmental concern.

The Rolls-Royce 470MW SMR takes up 10 acres (40,500 m^2.) A 1 MWp solar farm takes about 10 acres.

Now assume that the 470MW outputs 400MW/hr 24 hours per day. That's 9,600 MW/day. A solar farm can only generate about the peak equivalent of 5hrs per day, so that 10 acres is only going to give you about 5MW per day (in perfect weather conditions.) To reach the same 9,600 MW/day that the SMR puts out, you'd need 3 square miles of land (7.77 km^2).

And that's not taking into account all the extra land you'd need for the storage and backup systems.

I meant to delete that edit when I realized it was wrong.

No one's arguing about the cheapness. We're arguing the reliability.

EDIT: And environmental concerns.

I'm sorry...did you say solar and wind with a battery are more reliable than nuclear?

Inb4 people start saying "the fillers make it different medicine," because people have been saying that back to me for years when I tell them this.

No they don't. It's the same medicine.

iPods in 2009 were not "basically iPhones that couldn't make calls."

Yes, the first iPod touch did exist in 2009, but it was ludicrously expensive compared to a shuffle or a nano, and adoption was slow. Nanos and Shuffles were much more popular in 2009, along with people hanging onto their Classics.

I don't want to be "that guy," but the iPod classic had been discontinued by 2009. Gen 6 was released in 2007. I remember my junior year of high school (2008) when one of the guys came in bragging and showing off his customized/engraved 160 GB Gen 1 iPod, and we were all like "Bro...iPod nano." Almost everyone I remember having an iPod in my school had either an iPod nano or an iPod Shuffle. For an 8GB device, you're talking about 1500-2000 mp3s, which is a lot of songs.

Most people I knew who had an iPod Classic and an iPhone had both because they had their iPod Classic before the iPhone came out, so they kept using it.

I agree with that. 2001 was about the time we got our first DVD player. My point was that the person I replied to implied that The Fast and the Furious (a 2001 film) is an accurate representation of the technological landscape in 2009, which it's not.

This is an interesting take. I did not know that Twitter was originally SMS-based.

The first Fast & Furious came out in 2001. In 2001, only 56% of American households had a computer, and well over 90% of all internet access was on dial-up modems. That was a massively different time, technologically speaking, than 2009.

By 2009, over 74% of households had computers, many of those households had multiple comouters, and 63% of internet access was broadband. In 2008, Netflix and Hulu were already competing for streaming customers, and in 2009 Netflix had more streaming customers than DVD rental customers.

I remember people having iPhones and iPods. The issue was because of the first iPhone's super garbage battery life. If you listened to music on your iPhone all day, it'd be dead before you got home. Having a dedicated device to listen to music for hours at a time is way more functional than having a dedicated device to check Twitter once in a while, especially when the Twitter app did the exact same thing the dedicated device would do.

I assume a marketing failure was the first prong of the failure. I graduated high school in 2009, so I should have been in their target demographic, and this is the first I'm hearing of it.

The second reason I assume it failed is because it's a stupid idea. I had a Samsung Impression in 2009 that I could use to get on Twitter just fine, and I was pretty late in my age group getting an internet-enabled cell phone.

I have to guess that the 2009 edition of the venn diagram of "people who want mobile access to Twitter" and "people who already have an internet-enabled phone in their pocket," had a pretty large overlap.