As reported this week on Slashdot, some hackers have got X desktops (Gnome, KDE, LXDE, IceWM), "All Working On Android".
If I can have an Android "phone" and seamlessly use "Android" apps alongside Linux apps (and use a Debian-style APT for installation/maintenance), I've got the first real 21st Century platform.
If someone hooks up Android with X features that let me "grab" my session from a desktop (or other PC with a big display), keep using it (but scaled/arranged for Android) as I leave with my "phone", then pop it over to a nearby PC (scaled back up) intact, I've finally got "mobile computing". If my VoIP phonecalls remain intact throughout the transfer, the "computer" will eventually disappear unnoticed, with only me and my "computing" session really mattering. We're going to have to come up with new words for these things, once they're just our constant virtualized telecoms companion.
Copyright exists to ensure that everyone in the creative world from the artist to the record label, from the independent film producer to the TV program maker - can choose how their creations are distributed and get fairly rewarded for their work. The record corporations have violated those rights and, as the evidence in Court will show, they did so to make substantial revenues for themselves. That kind of abuse of the rights of others cannot be allowed to continue, and that is why these criminal proceedings are so important for the health of the creative community.
Free expression is an inalienable human right. Some governments have compromised that right with the privilege of restricting free expression (which, with liberty, includes copying someone else's expression as a new expression in the copy) in order to charge money for exceptions to the restriction. That is how free expression is governed as "copyright", the exception to free expression. Even the government apologies offered for copyright infringing free expression rights are typically claimed (as in the US constitution) as necessary to "promote science and the useful arts", and maintained "for limited times". Because they're infringing our rights, copyrights are permitted only because they're necessary and brief. But they're not. They might have been necessary once, but our Information Age finds them not only unnecessary for promoting science and the useful arts, but in fact more a burden than a help. They might have been necessary to make a profit, which itself was only important because it was necessary to promote science and the useful arts, but they are no longer necessary to make a profit, nor is making a profit itelf even necessary to promoting science and the useful arts. Since it's clear that copyright's entire basis is now false, the copyright business doesn't even pretend it's not corrupt, except when pressed hard. That's why copyright brevity, that used to give the author/artist a full 14 years to recoup costs before leaving the content to become folk art, public property, without restriction, now lasts a lifetime, or longer. In every way, copyright is now merely an abuse of our free expression rights, not at all justified by promoting science or the useful arts, or limited in duration.
The record corps are keeping the copyright without the justification. In the US, they're basically defying the Constitution (and it's the US record corps, and their RIAA association, that's running these shows). They are the great criminals here. Not only are they violating our rights, the most important crime, but they don't pay the artists/authors from whose copyrights they get the money. Their whole show is a sham and a fraud. If only a case like this one against Pirate Bay could be turned around, and stop these criminal enterprises once and for all.
"Life" is just the organized processing of energy that perpetuates itself through a system that generates local order even at the expense of global entropy, at some degree of complexity. All life that humans have recognized so far also typically replicates its independent units, even if there are a few exceptions (mules and other sterile offspring), but that's not necessarily a requirement. Some degree of complexity both in composition and in interactions with the environment is also necessary, which is why viruses are at the boundary of life and "mere organic chemistry", and prions outside it, while whole ecosystems (or the Earth entirely) are usually considered "life", but rather collections of life. However, those subjective boundaries are more a measure of human understanding of life, and have gradually grown more inclusive as we've learned more.
Wherever we find such objectively measurable systems, we have found a candidate for life. Where those systems fail to meet our subjective requirements of complexity, we can either learn to expand our sense of life, or we can learn more about the nature of that artificial boundary.
None of that prevents us from recognizing life that's not based on carbon chemistry. Anywhere we see the entropy/enthalpy dynamics that define life, we can recognize it. Just as we discovered the ecosystems independent of solar energetic that are powered by geothermal flows, we can discover other life that is not in the chain that starts with sunlight. Regardless of what kind of chemistry is at work in it, or its other dissimilarities with familiar life. We just have to look for it, and be ready to recognize it when we find it.
The PS3 (running Linux), for example, can't take any more RAM, but it has SATA. There is only a single product that plugs RAM into SATA, and it's expensive (and a HW kluge). A really fast Flash RAID might be suitable for storing running programs as "RAM", with the real RAM used for data fed to the super-fast SPEs.
If someone actually knows how to config a Flash RAID like that (not swap), instead of telling me to change my requirements, I'd like to hear about it.
Other than just using one of these Flash RAIDs as a swap volume, is there a way for a machine running Linux to use them as RAM? There are lots of embedded devices that don't have expandable RAM, or for which large RAM banks are very expensive, but which have SATA. Rotating disks were too slow to simulate RAM, individual Flash drives probably too slow, but a Flash RAID could be just fast enough to substitute for real RAM. So how to configure Linux to use it that way?
Even just using Firefox (on HTML-only pages) and Evolution (or not), and GTerm for top, the machine crawls. It was just fine until sometime in early December, after which switching between the proprietary and open drivers were fixing the problem. Since mid January, nothing really helps.
Until today, when an Xorg patch for h/vblank (though on Intel, not GeForce2 Go) seems to have fixed things a little. It's still a lot slower than before December, but it's like 5x faster than yesterday, and Xorg spikes to consume all available CPU for only a few seconds when performing a major window operation like switching windows, or opening a new window or a new HTML page in an existing window.
There's something wrong with Xorg, maybe multiple things that are gradually being fixed. I hope it's completely gone soon, but I'd be more confident if there were more diagnostics to specify it and look for a fix.
The way we do science is to say we're going to bring the therapies, then set about proving we can't. When we fail, we get the engineering and medicine. None of that says we should start by ignoring our reasons to hope we'll produce the therapies.
There are over 400,000 frozen embryos stored in IVF clinics around America that won't be used for pregnancies. Some of them won't be released by the people whose gametes were used to create them, some won't be in a condition usable for science. But there's a lot that could be used for science. They should be, immediately. Actual people with actual diseases are already waiting for the therapies that research will bring, and the line forming behind them lines up forever into the future.
The memory usage is only about 40% for all procs. Xorg is using only about 5% max, Firefox only about 25-40% max. It's not paging VM. Clearly those inflated CPU usages are the problem.
How about my old Inspiron 8000 notebook that started to be slow starting a few months ago, running Xorg at 20-40-50% of CPU while Firefox runs up the rest, 40-50-85%? Its running the latest Ubuntu Intrepid/8.10 updates. I tried switching between the proprietary nVidia driver by activating it with System:: Administration:: Hardware Drivers and the one automatically installed by (dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg) , which worked a few times to return its speed over the past few months, but no more. The GPU is a GeForce2 Go, which got upgraded in nvidia-glx-96, but not since then (it's up to nvidia-glx-180 now).
How do I nail this thing down, and fix it? Firefox shouldn't slow to 30-60 seconds to switch between tabs, submit this post, etc.
Let them all use fears of, and laws against, monopoly and privacy abuse to try to kill each other. Let's have a business atmosphere of damnation and recriminations for any raised evidence of monopoly and privacy abuse, brought on by experienced, rich, aggressive and well funded competitors. That's how our system is supposed to harness competition to drive enforcement of open access to a fairly competitive market governed by rules that protect us from unfair competition.
I'm not worried about Google. It's at least as smart, rich and connected as is Microsoft, and nearly as connected as AT&T. Let it slam them for their monopolies and abuses. It's got a lot more material to use than they do. Every move they make against each other along those lines is a move in the public service, against monopoly and privacy abuse.
And I'm not worried about Yahoo, either. It got a $half-billion in that original IPO, and $billions since. If it couldn't use its early lead, vast riches, top brand and huge audience to make it, it should die. And if Yahoo + Google is more monopolistic and worse for privacy, then dead Yahoo is better.
Bush bought that Crawford mansion right before he ran for president, and just sold it now that he's not the perpetual campaigner anymore.
He never raised anything on that "ranch" except brush to cut. Hell, Bush is scared of horses, just like a fake cowboy. The ranch was purely a prop. And you fell for it.
Where electricity is uber expensive, and there's lots of heating and cooling (like here in the Northeast) that can use ground heat pumps instead of electricity, is exactly where heat pumps are worth the most money. Because they replace expensive energy.
And if Greenpeace is making your electricity expensive by owning either an electric utility or an OPEC country, you should get the kind of Greenpeace that everyone else has, which doesn't.
Extending a career of almost entirely bad performances (including the ones where that's appropriate, like _The Matrix_), Reeves ruined _The Day the Earth Stood Still_. It would have been a formulaic remake anyway, but Reeves made it his own with his craptastic performance. Ruining one of the greatest classic SF movies.
Anyone who gives him any work at all should be run face-first through a 70mm film projector.
The main benefits of that chest freezer to (chest) refrigerator are its extra insulation, and its horizontal orientation that holds the cooled air rather than spilling it down and out of an open vertical door.
But horizontal orientation is a pain to use. I wonder whether orienting it vertically would work. To prevent the cold air pouring out, how about just a clear plastic door between each shelf, that keeps in the air except when that small door is briefly opened? If the door rolls up and under the shelf above it, the only air escaping is from that opened shelf, impeded by the smaller opening into which warmer room air can flow to replace the colder air escaping.
If a chest freezer can be flipped up vertically, I'd try it.
Yeah, I made some dumb math errors (which I corrected, but not that "3600%" mistake). But as you agreed, they're inconsequential to the reason for thinking this through. Taking a small mortgage to install an efficiency system is a good use of the home equity, appropriate in every way, as the basic numbers show. And that's just the savings in our still highly subsidized energy economy. The other savings, in decreased foreign trade dependency, decreased pollution including Greenhouse pollution, stretching the dwindling petrofuel supplies, are all good reasons for the public to prime the pump with the incentives that today offer about a 30% discount. We should probably offer more subsidies, like perhaps really low interest second mortgages to get lots more people over the hump, and improve the scale economies of the entire architectural infrastructure.
Where is the better rate of return for your money today than over 4.5%?
And while jumpstarting PV isn't necessarily the best program for the public money, it is a good one, and its money isn't the only available for those public investments. We're about to spend somewhere from $800B to $1.5T in necessary economic stimulus, and solar incentives are a tiny fraction of that.
Solar PV is a good replacement for utility electricity, as this article demonstrates.
Solar heating of water is supposed to be even more economical. The equipment is cheaper (basically a black pipe looped across area), and captures a lot more than 20% of the sun's power in the heated water. The only problem is that the extra power not consumed by using the hot water (washing or heating the building's air) is lost, dissipated through the system, or discharged when it exceeds even the water tank's heat storage capacity. But the tank can be made very large, and its heat can be converted to electricity (inefficiently, but better than losing it). You don't get to send unlimited surplus power back to a "bottomless reservoir" like the surplus PV electric to the utility, but some large tank should be sufficient to store all the extra heat. And perhaps store some extra PV power beyond what the electric utility will stop taking when the net annual utility consumption reaches zero. Elevating the water stores energy at close to 90% efficiency (the multiplied efficiencies of the elevating electric pump and the electric turbine in the downpipe).
It seems that there's a compelling case for installing both, and using a large tank as storage that increases the total efficiency substantially beyond the basic operating parameters. Which sounds like it's even better than the 3-4x+ 30 year ROI from just the PV demonstrated in the article.
They do have progressive rates, as detailed in the article, something like $0.30:KWh for power consumed more than 300% of their utility's baseline consumption. About half their $cost during peak months is due to those expensive KWh'es.
But sizing the panels to give him a zero net annual bill is worth it. The current panels pay off completely in about 9 years, so their 30 year lifetime is better than 3:1 instead of spending that money on utility bills. Incremental area doesn't cost the full amount with its system overhead for labor and shared components, so 4x ROI over 30 years should be achievable. And that's looking at his actual past and new bills (six months solar).
There should be tax benefits for effectively promoting solar installs like his. The benefits to everyone are clear.
You're right about the future value / interest calculation. I mistakenly used the paydown for a $37K 30 year mortgage to cost $136K in interest. The proper calculation shows that $37K would earn about $136K over 30 years at only 4.43% annual compound interest. Which is a little lower than the low mortgage rates today, so financing it with a mortgage is a net loss, but not a big one, with no (annual) cash flow impact. Better than leaving that equity in the home not working for you.
But the real investment of $58K (according to the article, not $55K) gets about $21K subsidies repaid within a year or so, atop the energy savings. Yes, various people in large amounts have to pay those subsidies (tax rebates, etc), but they are paid. If everyone were just directly buying unsubsidized systems like this one, the economy of scale (and increased R&D improving operating ROI) would probably at least equal the 31% subsidy. The purpose of the subsidies is to jumpstart the massification of the industry. That's how we get the "green feeling" before we're fully green.
I detailed this analysis in "It Will Pay Off in 9 Years".
They paid $37K. The panels save them about $4200 a year, or about 8.8 years break even. That's about 15% ROI. Show me an investment today that gets anything like that ROI over 30 years (or even a reliably positive ROI over the next few years).
The depreciation doesn't cost them anything, and the comparatively better place to put their $37K doesn't exist. Plus the increased value to their home (which should be at least $37K-depreciated plus the bills savings).
If there are better places to invest $37K in their home that increases energy efficiency better than the 90% benefit these PVs bring, that might argue for the alternate investment. If $6K insulation could improve efficiency by 15%, that could be a good investment. But insulation has a pretty rapid cap in benefit, and is complementary to the solar efficiency increase.
Slashdot Mirror
As reported this week on Slashdot, some hackers have got X desktops (Gnome, KDE, LXDE, IceWM), "All Working On Android".
If I can have an Android "phone" and seamlessly use "Android" apps alongside Linux apps (and use a Debian-style APT for installation/maintenance), I've got the first real 21st Century platform.
If someone hooks up Android with X features that let me "grab" my session from a desktop (or other PC with a big display), keep using it (but scaled/arranged for Android) as I leave with my "phone", then pop it over to a nearby PC (scaled back up) intact, I've finally got "mobile computing". If my VoIP phonecalls remain intact throughout the transfer, the "computer" will eventually disappear unnoticed, with only me and my "computing" session really mattering. We're going to have to come up with new words for these things, once they're just our constant virtualized telecoms companion.
Let me switch that around:
Free expression is an inalienable human right. Some governments have compromised that right with the privilege of restricting free expression (which, with liberty, includes copying someone else's expression as a new expression in the copy) in order to charge money for exceptions to the restriction. That is how free expression is governed as "copyright", the exception to free expression. Even the government apologies offered for copyright infringing free expression rights are typically claimed (as in the US constitution) as necessary to "promote science and the useful arts", and maintained "for limited times". Because they're infringing our rights, copyrights are permitted only because they're necessary and brief. But they're not. They might have been necessary once, but our Information Age finds them not only unnecessary for promoting science and the useful arts, but in fact more a burden than a help. They might have been necessary to make a profit, which itself was only important because it was necessary to promote science and the useful arts, but they are no longer necessary to make a profit, nor is making a profit itelf even necessary to promoting science and the useful arts. Since it's clear that copyright's entire basis is now false, the copyright business doesn't even pretend it's not corrupt, except when pressed hard. That's why copyright brevity, that used to give the author/artist a full 14 years to recoup costs before leaving the content to become folk art, public property, without restriction, now lasts a lifetime, or longer. In every way, copyright is now merely an abuse of our free expression rights, not at all justified by promoting science or the useful arts, or limited in duration.
The record corps are keeping the copyright without the justification. In the US, they're basically defying the Constitution (and it's the US record corps, and their RIAA association, that's running these shows). They are the great criminals here. Not only are they violating our rights, the most important crime, but they don't pay the artists/authors from whose copyrights they get the money. Their whole show is a sham and a fraud. If only a case like this one against Pirate Bay could be turned around, and stop these criminal enterprises once and for all.
"Life" is just the organized processing of energy that perpetuates itself through a system that generates local order even at the expense of global entropy, at some degree of complexity. All life that humans have recognized so far also typically replicates its independent units, even if there are a few exceptions (mules and other sterile offspring), but that's not necessarily a requirement. Some degree of complexity both in composition and in interactions with the environment is also necessary, which is why viruses are at the boundary of life and "mere organic chemistry", and prions outside it, while whole ecosystems (or the Earth entirely) are usually considered "life", but rather collections of life. However, those subjective boundaries are more a measure of human understanding of life, and have gradually grown more inclusive as we've learned more.
Wherever we find such objectively measurable systems, we have found a candidate for life. Where those systems fail to meet our subjective requirements of complexity, we can either learn to expand our sense of life, or we can learn more about the nature of that artificial boundary.
None of that prevents us from recognizing life that's not based on carbon chemistry. Anywhere we see the entropy/enthalpy dynamics that define life, we can recognize it. Just as we discovered the ecosystems independent of solar energetic that are powered by geothermal flows, we can discover other life that is not in the chain that starts with sunlight. Regardless of what kind of chemistry is at work in it, or its other dissimilarities with familiar life. We just have to look for it, and be ready to recognize it when we find it.
I said no swap.
The PS3 (running Linux), for example, can't take any more RAM, but it has SATA. There is only a single product that plugs RAM into SATA, and it's expensive (and a HW kluge). A really fast Flash RAID might be suitable for storing running programs as "RAM", with the real RAM used for data fed to the super-fast SPEs.
If someone actually knows how to config a Flash RAID like that (not swap), instead of telling me to change my requirements, I'd like to hear about it.
Other than just using one of these Flash RAIDs as a swap volume, is there a way for a machine running Linux to use them as RAM? There are lots of embedded devices that don't have expandable RAM, or for which large RAM banks are very expensive, but which have SATA. Rotating disks were too slow to simulate RAM, individual Flash drives probably too slow, but a Flash RAID could be just fast enough to substitute for real RAM. So how to configure Linux to use it that way?
Even just using Firefox (on HTML-only pages) and Evolution (or not), and GTerm for top, the machine crawls. It was just fine until sometime in early December, after which switching between the proprietary and open drivers were fixing the problem. Since mid January, nothing really helps.
Until today, when an Xorg patch for h/vblank (though on Intel, not GeForce2 Go) seems to have fixed things a little. It's still a lot slower than before December, but it's like 5x faster than yesterday, and Xorg spikes to consume all available CPU for only a few seconds when performing a major window operation like switching windows, or opening a new window or a new HTML page in an existing window.
There's something wrong with Xorg, maybe multiple things that are gradually being fixed. I hope it's completely gone soon, but I'd be more confident if there were more diagnostics to specify it and look for a fix.
I get the high Xorg and Firefox CPU without any Flash on the page. Xorg CPU is above 40-50% (sometimes above 80%) even without Firefox.
Clearly there's something wrong with Xorg. I can't see how to diagnose it more precisely, or how to fix it.
The way we do science is to say we're going to bring the therapies, then set about proving we can't. When we fail, we get the engineering and medicine. None of that says we should start by ignoring our reasons to hope we'll produce the therapies.
There are over 400,000 frozen embryos stored in IVF clinics around America that won't be used for pregnancies. Some of them won't be released by the people whose gametes were used to create them, some won't be in a condition usable for science. But there's a lot that could be used for science. They should be, immediately. Actual people with actual diseases are already waiting for the therapies that research will bring, and the line forming behind them lines up forever into the future.
The memory usage is only about 40% for all procs. Xorg is using only about 5% max, Firefox only about 25-40% max. It's not paging VM. Clearly those inflated CPU usages are the problem.
How about my old Inspiron 8000 notebook that started to be slow starting a few months ago, running Xorg at 20-40-50% of CPU while Firefox runs up the rest, 40-50-85%? Its running the latest Ubuntu Intrepid/8.10 updates. I tried switching between the proprietary nVidia driver by activating it with System:: Administration:: Hardware Drivers and the one automatically installed by (dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg) , which worked a few times to return its speed over the past few months, but no more. The GPU is a GeForce2 Go, which got upgraded in nvidia-glx-96, but not since then (it's up to nvidia-glx-180 now).
How do I nail this thing down, and fix it? Firefox shouldn't slow to 30-60 seconds to switch between tabs, submit this post, etc.
Let them all use fears of, and laws against, monopoly and privacy abuse to try to kill each other. Let's have a business atmosphere of damnation and recriminations for any raised evidence of monopoly and privacy abuse, brought on by experienced, rich, aggressive and well funded competitors. That's how our system is supposed to harness competition to drive enforcement of open access to a fairly competitive market governed by rules that protect us from unfair competition.
I'm not worried about Google. It's at least as smart, rich and connected as is Microsoft, and nearly as connected as AT&T. Let it slam them for their monopolies and abuses. It's got a lot more material to use than they do. Every move they make against each other along those lines is a move in the public service, against monopoly and privacy abuse.
And I'm not worried about Yahoo, either. It got a $half-billion in that original IPO, and $billions since. If it couldn't use its early lead, vast riches, top brand and huge audience to make it, it should die. And if Yahoo + Google is more monopolistic and worse for privacy, then dead Yahoo is better.
How much per foot deep to drill the well?
How much did digging the 200m (really that deep?) well cost? Is it linear in cost per foot?
Bush bought that Crawford mansion right before he ran for president, and just sold it now that he's not the perpetual campaigner anymore.
He never raised anything on that "ranch" except brush to cut. Hell, Bush is scared of horses, just like a fake cowboy. The ranch was purely a prop. And you fell for it.
How do I find the NY state rebate on these ground heat pumps, independent of the Federal subsidy?
Where electricity is uber expensive, and there's lots of heating and cooling (like here in the Northeast) that can use ground heat pumps instead of electricity, is exactly where heat pumps are worth the most money. Because they replace expensive energy.
And if Greenpeace is making your electricity expensive by owning either an electric utility or an OPEC country, you should get the kind of Greenpeace that everyone else has, which doesn't.
Extending a career of almost entirely bad performances (including the ones where that's appropriate, like _The Matrix_), Reeves ruined _The Day the Earth Stood Still_. It would have been a formulaic remake anyway, but Reeves made it his own with his craptastic performance. Ruining one of the greatest classic SF movies.
Anyone who gives him any work at all should be run face-first through a 70mm film projector.
The main benefits of that chest freezer to (chest) refrigerator are its extra insulation, and its horizontal orientation that holds the cooled air rather than spilling it down and out of an open vertical door.
But horizontal orientation is a pain to use. I wonder whether orienting it vertically would work. To prevent the cold air pouring out, how about just a clear plastic door between each shelf, that keeps in the air except when that small door is briefly opened? If the door rolls up and under the shelf above it, the only air escaping is from that opened shelf, impeded by the smaller opening into which warmer room air can flow to replace the colder air escaping.
If a chest freezer can be flipped up vertically, I'd try it.
Yeah, I made some dumb math errors (which I corrected, but not that "3600%" mistake). But as you agreed, they're inconsequential to the reason for thinking this through. Taking a small mortgage to install an efficiency system is a good use of the home equity, appropriate in every way, as the basic numbers show. And that's just the savings in our still highly subsidized energy economy. The other savings, in decreased foreign trade dependency, decreased pollution including Greenhouse pollution, stretching the dwindling petrofuel supplies, are all good reasons for the public to prime the pump with the incentives that today offer about a 30% discount. We should probably offer more subsidies, like perhaps really low interest second mortgages to get lots more people over the hump, and improve the scale economies of the entire architectural infrastructure.
Where is the better rate of return for your money today than over 4.5%?
And while jumpstarting PV isn't necessarily the best program for the public money, it is a good one, and its money isn't the only available for those public investments. We're about to spend somewhere from $800B to $1.5T in necessary economic stimulus, and solar incentives are a tiny fraction of that.
Solar PV is a good replacement for utility electricity, as this article demonstrates.
Solar heating of water is supposed to be even more economical. The equipment is cheaper (basically a black pipe looped across area), and captures a lot more than 20% of the sun's power in the heated water. The only problem is that the extra power not consumed by using the hot water (washing or heating the building's air) is lost, dissipated through the system, or discharged when it exceeds even the water tank's heat storage capacity. But the tank can be made very large, and its heat can be converted to electricity (inefficiently, but better than losing it). You don't get to send unlimited surplus power back to a "bottomless reservoir" like the surplus PV electric to the utility, but some large tank should be sufficient to store all the extra heat. And perhaps store some extra PV power beyond what the electric utility will stop taking when the net annual utility consumption reaches zero. Elevating the water stores energy at close to 90% efficiency (the multiplied efficiencies of the elevating electric pump and the electric turbine in the downpipe).
It seems that there's a compelling case for installing both, and using a large tank as storage that increases the total efficiency substantially beyond the basic operating parameters. Which sounds like it's even better than the 3-4x+ 30 year ROI from just the PV demonstrated in the article.
They do have progressive rates, as detailed in the article, something like $0.30:KWh for power consumed more than 300% of their utility's baseline consumption. About half their $cost during peak months is due to those expensive KWh'es.
But sizing the panels to give him a zero net annual bill is worth it. The current panels pay off completely in about 9 years, so their 30 year lifetime is better than 3:1 instead of spending that money on utility bills. Incremental area doesn't cost the full amount with its system overhead for labor and shared components, so 4x ROI over 30 years should be achievable. And that's looking at his actual past and new bills (six months solar).
There should be tax benefits for effectively promoting solar installs like his. The benefits to everyone are clear.
You're right about the future value / interest calculation. I mistakenly used the paydown for a $37K 30 year mortgage to cost $136K in interest. The proper calculation shows that $37K would earn about $136K over 30 years at only 4.43% annual compound interest. Which is a little lower than the low mortgage rates today, so financing it with a mortgage is a net loss, but not a big one, with no (annual) cash flow impact. Better than leaving that equity in the home not working for you.
But the real investment of $58K (according to the article, not $55K) gets about $21K subsidies repaid within a year or so, atop the energy savings. Yes, various people in large amounts have to pay those subsidies (tax rebates, etc), but they are paid. If everyone were just directly buying unsubsidized systems like this one, the economy of scale (and increased R&D improving operating ROI) would probably at least equal the 31% subsidy. The purpose of the subsidies is to jumpstart the massification of the industry. That's how we get the "green feeling" before we're fully green.
I detailed this analysis in "It Will Pay Off in 9 Years".
They paid $37K. The panels save them about $4200 a year, or about 8.8 years break even. That's about 15% ROI. Show me an investment today that gets anything like that ROI over 30 years (or even a reliably positive ROI over the next few years).
The depreciation doesn't cost them anything, and the comparatively better place to put their $37K doesn't exist. Plus the increased value to their home (which should be at least $37K-depreciated plus the bills savings).
If there are better places to invest $37K in their home that increases energy efficiency better than the 90% benefit these PVs bring, that might argue for the alternate investment. If $6K insulation could improve efficiency by 15%, that could be a good investment. But insulation has a pretty rapid cap in benefit, and is complementary to the solar efficiency increase.