[ExI] Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

[Adrian Tymes]

On Sat, Oct 25, 2025 at 1:48 PM spike jones via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com>
>
> On Sat, Oct 25, 2025 at 8:06 AM <spike at rainier66.com> wrote:
>
> snip
>
> >>... Sure but for tax advantages, wind turbines have been placed in locations which are sub-optimal and don’t really generate enough power to break even.
>
> >...Can you cite any published study on this?
>
> No.  I flew across country a lot between about 1995 and 2011 on business.  I saw a lot of wind farms where nothing was moving, or (something I haven't been able to understand) a few of the turbines spinning, which indicates there was wind that day.

That's just normal for wind turbines.  If there's no wind or the
wind's in the wrong direction, the turbines don't spin.  Also,
sometimes they spin slowly enough that you won't see it just looking
for a bit.

> But clearly there was a lot of capital sitting there doing nothing.  Businesses cannot survive when capital sit idle.

There's a difference between "sit idle all the time" and "not going
full blast 24/7".  Odds are, those wind farms were making enough
electricity, even if it didn't seem like it - or they would have
threatened to make too much electricity, so their owners were being
paid to keep them in park, meaning those businesses could survive
while their capital sits idle.  (Like an oil power plant, they can be
idled to avoid overloading the grid.)

https://www.google.com/search?q=why+do+windmills+look+idle

Maybe do a bit of research when things look odd before assuming the
worst next time.

But even in that latter case, they were only being paid because they
could ramp up, and might need to.  Where that is the case, an AI data
center - were one to be built - might find that its additional load on
the system would not immediately result in blackouts.  See
https://www.google.com/search?q=difference+between+baseline+and+peak+power .

> Conclusion: the notion about China having this big monopoly on REEs must be exaggerated.  If those elements are needed badly enough, we can mine the defunct turbines.  But good chance we will find enough neodymium without taking those turbines apart.

They don't have enough to be worth taking apart.