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Comment by aplummer | Hacker News Reader

I’m surprised at the skepticism here on HN.

Was everyone this skeptical / glib when the (insert technology) was useless when it was invented? Anyone seen the efficiency of a solar panel in 1970?

Factory farming is a real problem to solve.

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Never mind efficiency - anyone seen the price of a solar panel as recently as in 2000?

Good thing someone took one for the team and invested in scaling this up.

That was Germany, they basically financed solar energy with tax money (about 200 billion), then their industry was killed by China.

It's so strange that a mostly cloudy country at 51ºN spent so much money developing solar energy.

Solar works when it’s cloudy.

It does but at a greatly reduced output (5-20% of rated output depending on the thickness of the cloud cover). Partly cloudy weather leads to a very bumpy output graph.

I mean, of course, but is it really the best use of the limited resources of a nation? Germany isn't playing to its natural competitive advantage by pursuing solar, vs. someplace like Morocco. Nuclear would be a much better option, but we know how that ended up.

A country making solar panels doesn't necessarily plan to use all of them.

It was an exports/services (consulting) play. "Skating where the puck will be" and all that—become the experts with plenty of production capacity before the market per se justifies it. IIRC they made similar efforts for other renewables, like wind power. Not sure how all that's going, but I know it was regarded by many as a good move, a couple decades back when they were investing in it all.

> I’m surprised at the skepticism here on HN.

I would be surprised if some HN topic does not provoke any skepticism at all.

There are people who have a genuinely held belief that they are being "attacked" and liberals will force them to eat "unnatural" lab grown meat and "bugs". There are lots of those people here on HN and they have commented plenty on similar articles to this.

It's similar in vein to the people who were absolutely convinced that Biden was preparing a team to confiscate gas stoves and responded by.... running their gas stoves on full burn for no reason, as a "protest".

I have no moral qualms with raising, killing, and eating an animal. If lab grown meat is tasty, safe, and affordable, it will be great.

The people who comment on stuff like this are people with something to say. So yeah there’s being to be a tint of negativity.

The skepticism comes from a keen awareness that technology is not a solution in itself. You've made a common logical fallacy; it is true that factory farming and solar panels can solve specific problems. But measuring the progress of the proposed solution doesn't measure its effectiveness at solving the fundamental problem at scale. Nor does it prove that the technology is appropriate or necessarily better than alternatives.

If solar panels are a solution to replace fossil fuels, then show me a decrease in fossil fuels (nope, solar panel adoption and fossil fuel burn are positively correlated). If factory farms are a solution for providing reducing the impact of traditional farms, then show me a decrease in the total ecological footprint of our agricultural system (nope, we can't even do so on a small scale per this study and others like it). What you call "skepticism", I call critical thinking about empirical data.

> If factory farms are a solution for providing reducing the impact of traditional farms

You've misread their comment:

> Factory farming is a real problem to solve.

Ironically “factory farming” would be a great name for lab-grown meat at scale if it wasn’t already taken.

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