You would need a lot of people actively involved to pull something like that off and the number of conspirators involved is inversely proportional to how long the conspiracy can be kept secret. So if it happened, the truth will come out in a fairly short time. Until then, I don’t see any point in entertaining these ideas or getting overwrought by them.

I’m sure Salman is elated.

The tax bill and the tariffs are separate. In sum there would be a $40M surplus each year for a decade.

Inverters and solar battery storage generally have some combination of wired and wireless communication. You need to communicate with the grid for real-time pricing and forecasts so the system knows when to charge and discharge. Also you want the system status of all the panels and batteries. If somebody slices through the wrong fiber line near your site, it’s important to still be able to get that information.

If you get a home PV system, they’ll often have the option of a cellular modem. The controller on my home system has Wi-Fi and Ethernet with the option of a cellular modem. It wouldn’t surprise me if the board comes populated with some of the components necessary for cellular functionality even if you don’t opt for it.

I’m just saying they need to divulge more details before one can conclude this is nefarious.

Over the past nine months, undocumented communication devices, including cellular radios, have also been found in some batteries from multiple Chinese suppliers, one of them said.

The two people declined to name the Chinese manufacturers of the inverters and batteries with extra communication devices, nor say how many they had found in total.

They’re very light on details. Sometimes it’s cheaper to make one PCB in huge numbers and only enable the cellular modem on the higher priced models or when a subscription fee is paid. Their mere existence without any additional information shouldn’t be particularly alarming.

Fronius is Austrian and there are a few others but none producing microinverters that I’m aware of. If you are doing an install with no shading issues during the day, regular inverters are preferable though since the costs are cheaper and there’s no DC-AC-DC loss if you include a battery backup.

There are two links to this slop site on /hot and both have a suspiciously high number of upvotes.

We need something to chuckle at while we’re taking a break from making IEDs and bioweapons in our terrorist cells.

They have a “basement dweller” achievement if you hit two years.

Being on a food TV show and becoming slightly famous therefor allows you to increase your prices and still keep all the seats filled. The best burger place near me has increased to $10 from $5 over roughly the same time period, in keeping with the increase in beef prices over that time.

There was a poll showing that Trump won voters who don’t follow politics at all by 14 points. There seems to be a substantial proportion of the population who just picks who they vote for based on how well things have been going for them for the last 4 or 8 years.

With inflation, the pendulum swung towards Trump. After 4 years of tariffs, declining dollar value and Trump being unable to run again, I think that pendulum will swing fairly hard to the left. So conventional wisdom on not picking a candidate who will scare off centrists could be out the window. In which case, you might as well nominate AOC or someone similar.

Of course, president AOC won’t be able to accomplish all the things she wants to without a supportive congress and getting that to happen is a much bigger challenge than winning the presidency.