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North Carolina Town Defeats Big Solar's Plan To Suck Up the Sun (arstechnica.com)
mdsolar writes with this excerpt from Ars Technica: The citizens of Woodland, N.C. have spoken loud and clear: They don't want none of them highfalutin solar panels in their good town. They scare off the kids. "All the young people are going to move out," warned Bobby Mann, a local resident concerned about the future of his burg. Worse, Mann said, the solar panels would suck up all the energy from the Sun. Another resident -- a retired science teacher, no less -- expressed concern that a proposed solar farm would block photosynthesis, and prevent nearby plants from growing. Jane Mann then went on to add that there seemed to have been a lot of cancer deaths in the area, and that no one could tell her solar panels didn't cause cancer. "I want information," Mann said. "Enough is enough."
The mayor and 3 council members are Democrats, the final council member is unaffiliated.
Woodlawn is 65% registered Democrats. The state does have a single House member who is a Dem and one GOP senator and one Dem senator and a GOP governor.
So this is a Dem town, like other longtime Dem towns like Detroit, Baltimore and D.C.
Of course, Ars Technica can't let some accuracy in reporting interfere with getting a big hate going for Republicans who are pretty scarce in Woodlawn. The writer at Ars is one of their most shameless hacks on these kinds of tabloidy stories that play loose with facts. He is their lousiest writer.
At any rate, I would support these Woodlawn residents' right to refuse to put a big solar farm in their backyard. Clearly, they could find an area with less population density. You don't have to site these utility sites right next to a town. The solar plant can go buy some land out in the rural where it isn't zoned. Woodlawn is a tiny village of 800 people and the area has low population density.
Shocking news for some of you but communities do have a right to control where development occurs and what kinds of development occurs via their zoning laws. And every city, town and burg does so.
More than 50%.
100 on the IQ scale is not an average. It's a standard.
http://www.photius.com/ranking...
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
No it is not implicit, but have you read Flynn's The Bell Curve? An IQ test is supposed to be normed such that the mean is 100. That is the definition. That the test is flawed is a whole other ball game.
Like your shit doesn't stink as bad. There are plenty of stupid people, and America has its fair share. It also has a fair share of extraordinarily ordinary and exceedingly intelligent ones. Any deviation in distribution from the developed worlds average is almost certainly minimal. Insinuating that a country is full or morons isn't going to achieve any kind of constructive discussion.
As other people have pointed out here there are other reasons why the project was turned down that probably paid a bigger part; however, a story about a couple of deranged residents causing concern amongst the uninformed population makes for a better 'news' story.
Other AC here.
The IQ tests are designed and adjusted to give a bell curve with an 100 mean in actual countries. Then they adjust the raw test score so people fit the curve.
Oh, and I hope you know that the only thing IQ test measures is how good you are at IQ test.
So the "real" intelligence distribution doesn't matter at all.
IQ is normalised so that 100 is where the divisor between half the people lies.
Yes, it keeps changing.
Please, please don't judge North Carolina by these rubes. This dumb little town is about 100 miles from Research Triangle Park, the largest concentration of PhDs in the world. North Carolina is a progressive and beautiful state with the best climate in the eastern US. It has traditionally had the best public education system in the South.
Yes, we are currently in the clutches of a backwards Republican state government so there are lots of headlines about regressive policies. But this is an aberration ( the first Republican government in over 100 years) and it will not last long.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
If one looks deeper, they'll find that this is really a zoning decision and has nothing to do with fear of solar. The town already has approved other solar farms which are actively being built, but they don't want another one in this particular area. The writer of an article chose to ignore the entirety of the panel discussion and select a few ignorant and irrelevant statements made during the proceedings just to give the people a rise.
And thus the reaction we see here. It looks like there are more ignorant folks out there than just the few in this town.