If we reduce land use for food production, it's not like that land will turn into a parking lot. Other plants will grow there, hopefully with richer biodiversity than an agricultural monoculture.

Also some locations do not have climates great for agriculture, but may have climates suitable for solar panels.

You are both ignoring the "soils" part of my comment; Even deserts have things growing in their soils.

Putting solar panels into these places disturbs the natural soils. Transporting that energy requires infrastructure that also messes with habitats. Using it on-site requires different infrastructure and activity that is also disruptive.

Just because the land is "virgin" or "barren" doesn't mean nothing is there biologically. Part of biodiversity is biodiversity in the soil itself. Much of that diversity hasn't been officially studied/documented. ie: We don't even know what we are killing off.

Solar panels do have an ecological cost. Expanding to cover the entire planet is the wrong approach (IMO.) We have plenty of urban space and existing infrastructure that we can cover with solar without disturbing farm land or what's left of natural habitats.

Beyond all of this, TFA was comparing corn vs solar. That implies we are talking about farmable land.

Farm land has less healthy soil than if you stop tilling, fertilizing and pesticides and put solar panels on it. I also think you’re overestimating the area needed to cover our energy needs.

Which combustion engines have good efficiency in real world scenarios? Diesel can do reasonably well under optimal conditions, but in real world driving it’s much less. A small car uses 5l/100km, so about 50kWh. An EV needs well under 20kWh.

Carnot also puts pretty harsh limits on future improvements in fuel efficiency in scenarios like ocean shipping where the engines can get close to their theoretical efficiency.

Why use tricks to support a company that is hostile to your use case?

Negative mutations can survive for a long time if they're not too bad. For example the loss of vitamin C synthesis is clearly bad in situations where you have to survive without fresh food for a while, but that comes up so rarely that there was little selection pressure against it.

You can still buy phones with weeks of runtime, they’re just not „smart“

Wikipedia says Athlete's heart is benign: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athletic_heart_syndrome

This is an excellent rant, thanks for sharing. I didn’t have to work with csv s mich as you, but what experience I had I share your sentiment.

I don’t think the source of the electricity is particularly relevant to whether or not you have the transport capacity to add tens of megawatts of demand to the grid. The problem is generally not the supply but whether your local transformers have capacity left.

When you're talking about something that draws megawatts existing transformers are pretty irrelevant because you're going to run high voltage lines directly to the site itself and install new dedicated transformers on site.

What's more common is that they don't have the transmission capacity itself, but that one's pretty easy in this case too, because what that means is that you have an existing transmission line which is already near capacity with generation on one end and customers on the other. So then you just build the data center on the end of the transmission line where the generation is rather than the end where the existing customers are, at which point you can add new generation anywhere you want -- and if you put it near the existing customers you've just freed up transmission capacity because you now have new customers closer to the existing generation and new generation closer to the existing customers.

Are people of Philippine decent that are born and raised in the Netherlands statistically the same height as native Dutch?

Rewriting in c# is a lot more work than recompiling. That’s the point.