Most European residential electric systems operate at 240v, versus 120v in the US, which means you can only backfeed a US outlet with half the power you could in a European outlet. That alone makes this system half as useful for US applications.

Remember the tmobile un-contract? This is literally from their press release in 2017: “T-Mobile ONE customers keep their price until THEY decide to change it. T-Mobile will never change the price you pay for your T-Mobile ONE plan. When you sign up for T-Mobile ONE, only YOU have the power to change the price you pay.” https://www.t-mobile.com/news/press/un-carrier-next

Remember how they promised the FTC they wouldn’t raise prices if they could pretty please merge with sprint to become the biggest telecom network in the country? https://www.yahoo.com/news/t-mobile-promises-sprint-merger-195428217.html

Sorry for the industry jargon, but measuring things in kW won’t give you the full picture, you want to compare things in “kWh”. Your utility bill should show your price in $/kWh and the solar company should have given you a production estimate from Helioscope or some kind of similar energy estimating software that shows expected annual kWh output

Their pricing looks good, you’re getting black on black modules and optimizers for a bit over $2 per watt after incentives. As someone who works in the industry I’d say that’s a pretty decent price.

What have they promised for your annual production estimate? Also what’s your current cost of power?

I work for a private solar developer in NYS, and I can see that the state regulators are either asleep at the wheel or intentionally complacent with allowing private utilities to let our electric infrastructure rot so they can keep collecting profits off of ratepayers. We have some of the worst utilities in the country and state is currently suppressing a grassroots effort to oust RG&E, who is the worst of the worst. In general though their refusal to modernize their grid is grinding the goal of 70% renewable by 2030 to a quick halt.

I had really hoped that getting NYPA behind the building of renewables would make them a heavyweight that could take the utilities to task for their failures, it’s infuriating that they’ve fallen to more regulatory capture.

I’m an engineer who designs solar array for a living, here’s how the math breaks down in fairly typical round numbers.

The all-in cost is around $2-3k per kilowatt (thats equipment, installation, permitting, utility approvals, etc), so a 5kW system (pretty typical residential size) would cost $10-15k. Each kilowatt produces about 1000-1500 kWh every year (depending on your latitude and how much sun your roof gets), so if your electric company charges you $0.10 per kWh, that 5kW system will generate $500-750 worth of energy annually. Without incentives it would pay itself off in 20 or 30 years, but if your state has good solar incentives that can be much shorter, if you pay a lot more for electricity it pays itself off sooner as well.

As others have mentioned, you can invest in the stock market within your 401k, though your options can sometimes be limited or saddled with high fees depending on what broker the 401k is through.

If yours is through a shitty broker then you might be better served by opening an individual retirement account (IRA), likely a Roth IRA given the limited info you’ve shared. You can open one with a broker of your choice, so go with one of the better ones like vanguard or fidelity. Using tax advantaged retirement accounts will always beat saving your retirement money in a non-tax advantaged one, all else being equal.

Edit to echo the flowchart from one of the other comments: https://imgur.com/u0ocDRI

This is the core of sound personal finance strategy in purified form. Great resource!

Really buying into the corporate propoganda here aren’t you? These used to be great paying jobs, but the average auto workers salary has eroded just like every other industry and is less than $40k these days, even if you arbitrarily exclude non-union auto workers it’s still barely $50k. Even those non-union workers will benefit from industry wages increasing with this new contract.

Also, this contract will be a 4 year agreement through 2027, and auto workers haven’t seen a raise since 2019. If you considered the 46% they’re asking for as an annual raise over that time period 2019-2027 it would only be a 5.75% annual raise.

And we haven’t even talked about the inflation since 2019 which has already eroded their pay by 20%, plus whatever additional inflation through the next 4 years will do. If inflation doesn’t cool down through that period this 46% may barely maintain their current wages.

This is interesting, I struggle to see how/why it makes sense as a federated service. What does the person hosting the instance get out of it once they’ve found a partner? Seems like an open source dating app would be better suited to a p2p implementation.

I burst out laughing while reading this article, it’s laughably bad, written by someone who doesn’t have the slightest understanding of the content matter.

Virtually all existing communication mediums are light based, since “Light” is a term that covers electromagnetic waves spanning a range from radio waves, all the way up to xrays, with visible light getting a small part of that range in the middle.

With all light there is a tradeoff where higher frequency light can carry more information at the cost of lower penetration. It’s why your 5Ghz wifi is faster than your 2.4Ghz wifi but the 5Ghz doesn’t reach as far in your house

Visible light is in the 400-800Thz (Terahertz), so it’s orders of magnitude better for transmitting a lot of data but since it’s blocked by most materials it works better if you use something to channel it, like a glass tube. Which is why visible light is already used extensively as the backbone of the internet, aka fiber optic cable. (to be completely accurate, most fiber optics use near visible infrared light, just below the visible spectrum, since it doesn’t scatter in glass as easily)

The new communication standard referenced is nothing ground breaking, it’s just a standard for any niche application which can make use of it. It’s not a new technology, and if it was better than existing methods we would already be using it.

I’ve enjoyed your memes the past couple weeks!

If we thought about this enough, we’d be two steps from nationalizing the (insert industry here)

This works for so many things, railroads, electric utilities, healthcare system, communication infrastructure, etc. Any industry which operates with a defacto monopoly and which maintains our nations critical infrastructure has no business being run by capitalists on wallstreet. They don’t provide any value to these industries, they extract it.

Ironically their “reason” for why they can’t afford to provide sick days (“we don’t have enough manpower to give people more days off”) is going to do the exact opposite by increasing attrition and making attracting new talent more difficult. But don’t worry, they’ll just lobby congress to repeal the minimum safe staffing requirements to address their created “labor shortage”.

Don’t believe me, look up how hard they’re pushing for one man crews right now. Soon they’ll have just one guy (who has been working 80 hour weeks and hasn’t seen his kids in months) running a 3 mile long industrial machine solo, carrying hazardous materials through all weather conditions, likely right through your residential neighborhood.

Will there be casualties? Without a doubt. But the returns for shareholders will be glorious.

CEO: “punish him anyway”

Doesn’t matter, if the corporation can afford to pay its C-suite millions and rake in billions for it’s shareholders, then it should be forced to pay it’s workers a thriving wage. Solidarity to all workers, no worker in any industry should be making starvation wages, regardless of how menial or simple their labor.