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Windfarm Sickness Spreads By Word of Mouth
eldavojohn writes "Just like the many stories surrounding alleged 'Wi-Fi sickness,' research is now showing that windfarm sickness spreads by word of mouth instead of applying universally to windfarms. Areas that had never had any noise or health complaints were suddenly experiencing them after 2009 when anti-wind groups targeted populations surrounding windfarms. From the article, 'Eighteen reviews of the research literature on wind turbines and health published since 2003 had all reached the broad conclusion that there was very little evidence they were directly harmful to health.' While there's unfortunately no way to prove that someone is lying about how they feel, it's likely a mixture of confirmation bias, psychosomatic response, hypochondria, greed and hatred of seeing windmills on the horizon that drives this phenomenon."
People are still just as stupid as they've always been...
I suggest someone spread around the idea that coal power plants endager the health those nearby. A bonus is that this might actually be true.
"Windfarm Sickness"? Lame.
"Don Quixote Syndrome"? Much better.
Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
The cell phone guys already know this - people report symptoms even when the tower isn't powered on.
It's probably Carbon Monoxide and Soot withdrawal that is causing these wind farm health episodes.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
I can't find a reference to it at the moment, but a community was opposed to cell towers due to radiation. This caused much problems for anyone trying to build infrastructure in the area. One provider put up some towers and the residents complained that the towers radiation made them ill and the improvement on reception was only marginal.
In a review with the community leaders, they invited them to tour the facilities while they measured the field strength. The tour revealied that there was no equipment installed. The towers were installed early to measure the baseline illness so when the equipment was installed, that illness that was attribuitable to the radiation can be measured.
I wonder how much the baseline changed when the equipment arrived.
The truth shall set you free!
They should install some garish but non functional thing on them, a big box on the side that has blinking lights, a fan, some cables and some steam-punkish looking stuff on it.
Then tell everybody they are "Windmill Disruption Dampeners" and that the company went almost bankrupt buying them for the residents.
Placebos work, even if the person KNOWS it's a placebo. ;)
OH MY EFFING GOD the libertarians will find the government at fault for anything and everything won't they? Enron and the crisis they caused and profited from were a result of deregulation. Flat out. The "changes" that were made to the regulations? They were made to encourage a free market and competition. But there's no competition if there aren't any players with any power. And BOY OH BOY did those fuckers abuse what little power they were given.
Owning both electrical generation and the distribution of that electricity was made illegal.
Yes, they split power generation and power distribution. That's one part of it. It made for a system of competition so that there were no longer territories of my generators and my neighbors generators. It set up a system where the old boys kept control of the distribution, and the new kids were given the generation, both were given a doggy biscuit and some ground rules for playing nice, and then set upon each other.
That "capped retail price"? Think about that for a moment. The entire point of this deregulation thing is to lower the price of electricity to the users. Alright, that's the goal. That's the entire point. That's why they did this. They believed the free market would work it's magic and they'd see lower prices than in the old regulated system. If they can't do that, if the system on the whole doesn't produce prices below a certain point, GUESS WHAT? It turns out that deregulation doesn't work. The cap let the pain of a broken system land in corporate-ville rather than raping the customers. At least, you know, the excessive pain.
Now let's pretend that they DIDN'T cap those prices. Enron does it's dirty work to manipulate the system and set record prices as they did before. But now the retail sellers simply pass it on to the users. WELCOME TO MONOPOLY SHITSVILLE where you can't choose which utility company to buy your power from! The competition was supposed to be between the distributors and the generators, not between the users and the power companies. Now it turns out that the generators, Enron and such, simply won that competition. Albeit from dirty tricks and accounting fraud. And the distributors suffered. But the caps kept the people from suffering AS MUCH AS they would have without such caps.
The entire crisis was caused by the state government.
Yes, it was caused by the state government DEREGULATING the power industry and giving more control to corporate entities. It was a pretty bad move that they shouldn't have done. Some things you can't trust in the hands of businessmen. Like those things with natural monopolies. Like utilities. Congratulations, you found where the government made it's fault.