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
The headline buried the lede, which is the $5M spent per job created in the Honda EV factories. Tell me again how privatization is more efficient though?
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!
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.
Don’t carry water for people who would let you die to increase their mountain of gold a little. What you’ve described might be true of millionaires, even multi millionaires; but no one gets to a billion dollars without stepping on those below them in the pursuit of more money than one person could ever spend in their lifetime.
Being a billionaire is pathological, if the human race was a biological organism and one part of it started hoarding that many resources, we would call it cancer and cut it out.
Especially baffling considering that a community of people whose single guiding light is hatred for soul-less corporations should not depend on a platform that’s hosted and controlled by a soul-less corporation…
Immediately shared this, great job OP
Definitely a bitter, almost aggressive tone to this one. It also comes off as a “fuck you, I got mine” kind of messages to say “North American infrastructure sucks, which is why I emigrated to the Netherlands”, because it’s not as if emigration is an option for most people in the US or Canada since it’s expensive and most people don’t have a viable path to a resident visa.
That being said, nothing he said was wrong, but sharing this video is probably not going to help anyone change their view.
Counterpoint: “40 percent of the officers stated that in the last six months prior to the survey they had gotten out of control and behaved violently against their spouse and children.”
And that’s just the ones who freely admit to being abusers. It doesn’t take a huge mental leap to realize that a position of authority with a low barrier of entry is a magnet to people who want to abuse that power.
You can find the source for that survey, as well as the context here: https://sites.temple.edu/klugman/2020/07/20/do-40-of-police-families-experience-domestic-violence/