I don't think this is comparable. One is generally taking long-time exposures for astronomy pictures (hence the streaks).
So if the satellite is simply blocking light, in the worst case, it will block the light of a star, maybe for a few milliseconds(?) dimming the star in the final picture by a minuscule amount.
This might still be problematic (influencing spectroscopy? dimming the star slightly, influencing some measurements there?) but probably still better than potentially mixing in light from a difference source (?)
Regarding wind and mountains. Some perspective from someone from neighboring Tyrol:
The reason there is so little wind power: Probably the same reason the western, alpine parts of Austria have basically zero wind power - and why neighbouring Carinthia recently voted in a referendum to ban it completely.
People who live in the Alps generally don't like seeing the mountains altered. It is treated almost as sacrilege. And since these areas are heavily dependent on tourism, where the appeal rests on a romantic, Disney-fied fantasy of wild, untamed nature, locals worry that turbines would make the region less attractive to tourists. Of course, this "untouched" landscape is largely a fiction in the first place: most of it looks the way it does precisely because people have lived in it and shaped it for centuries.
I think this is just another case of "over-optimization to make shareholders happy in the end ruins everything". I.e., the normal enshittification problem.
Pretty sure all of that does make financial sense:
- Being able to write 4k will bring people in to re-watching/watching the show for the first time.
- Redoing the CGI, etc., would have cost a lot of money.
- Very few people will cancel their subscription or stop watching because of stuff like that
- So in the end, no one cares
I.e., it makes financial sense to do the minimum possible.
Sure, if this were a project you care about, if it were your company that you are also emotionally invested in and maybe proud of, etc., things might look different. But your actual customers are shareholders, which in the end are predominantly giant ETF brokers and pension funds, that don't care about anything else but what your stock price looks like and whether you are in the S&P500. They probably don't even know what your company is doing.
It's shocking how much pictures influence judgment: Without reading much, at first, I thought: Poor guy, maybe he got pulled into something, ...
Then I saw the pictures of him in a leopard fur pajama and indoor sunglasses, and with his (an assumption on my side) trophy wife, and thought: "Naah, he probably deserves it"
Just because something has been done for hundreds of years does not mean it has been scientifically shown to actually do more than placebo.
A lot of people do a lot of stuff that has been proven to do nothing detectable, and they still swear by it.
"It has been done for hundreds of years" isn't a good argument. There is a reason "Appeal to tradition" is one of the more famous logical fallacies.
Also: The radiation doses used in this trial are very likely much, much higher than what you would get from such a bath in radioactive water (otherwise the water would be so radioactive that staying in there or even drinking it would kill you very quickly), so this doesn't really tell us anything about whether the traditional modalities do anything or not. And yes, stuff like that also exists in Austria with Radon caves, and many other places.
After all the talk in the article how the Romanian system makes part of the population perform higher by throwing a lot of the resources at them, lowering the performance of the people that are already below average. Which is a problem for Romania because a lot of the highly educated people leave the country afterwards ...
I was not really prepared for the final sentence where the author recommends as a solution that more countries should do it like that.
So if the satellite is simply blocking light, in the worst case, it will block the light of a star, maybe for a few milliseconds(?) dimming the star in the final picture by a minuscule amount.
This might still be problematic (influencing spectroscopy? dimming the star slightly, influencing some measurements there?) but probably still better than potentially mixing in light from a difference source (?)