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oh i'm sure state of the art has advanced since then. i have the necessary physics background, but it's not otherwise my domain: i once used xfoil to design an airfoil for an autonomous model glider as a hackerspace project back when i had free time for things like that many years ago. the glider was also loaded into x-plane to develop and test the autonomous part. so whenever various experimental aircraft projects popup, i'm likely to look into them, and then also notice the peculiar foils they use.

"better" airfoils are used in experimental craft design. for example mark drela wrote and used xfoil to design wings for mit's project daedalus, a human powered long distance flight aircraft. this is the case where, like sibling commenter stated, you need that extra % to get better performance characteristics. you can still run xfoil, it's a delightfully oldschol fortran program.

there's a lot of technical solutions but i think dad needed to have trusted friends who could come in in this kind of situation. that used to be how men operated, you had life long associates that were both part of your vocation, and were trusted enough in case of your untimely demise to do the right thing by your family. i have a handful of friends like that, they have verbal instructions of where to physically recover master passwords from for all my home infrastructure.

(in before "oh no! what if they steal your stuff! what if they leave your wife and kids with nothing and steal your money" i have two answers to that, get better friends of course is the main one. but the second one is that reason our mind goes in that direction is because there's been a lot of moral stories written, bulk of them in victorian times, of wives left destitute because of unscrupulous associates. those stories make for nice drama, and they are also warnings for individuals and society in general. you gotta trust someone, better be people i knew for a long time, rather than some random consultant from reddit, or a geek squad member)

i don't otherwise follow solar, beyond being a strong supporter in theory. i'm an eastern european autist, who used his soviet education to price financial instruments for capitalist. i bought a farm to raise ponies, and got into solar contracts purely because a friend asked me to look at hers. the opening paragraph strongly resonates though. at least the people i deal with are country rich, they have land, they have some savings, they want to leave a little something for their grandkids. i wasn't aware of the details of rooftop solar (another sibling commentor pointed it out also), but i'm smh not surprised.

i appreciate your comment, i'm glad that industry is developing mitigations, even if they are profit driven. i haven't looked at solar contracts in a few years (hence "were" in op), but i'm sure recent improvements make them significantly more attractive. like a sibling commentor given the massive information assimetry i would prefer significant regulatory scrutiny, specifically standartization, mandatory disclosure of known externalities, perhaps established by cfpb.

the op link though is about solar installations approaching their lifetime, which means contracts from 10-20 years ago. i'd like to point out that you started with a very strong statement ("in practice not true"), which was then variously hedged. more importantly the fact that in practice the mitigations have manifested ("repowering is a windfall") doesn't after the fact negate that the initial contracts were exploitative. in my experience simply verbalizing and pricing various hidden factors (i used Shannon L. Ferrell's "understanding solar energy agreements" as starting point), decomissioning being one of them but other points in ferrell also played a role, or even just developing a rudimentary payments schedule, ended up strongly discouraging land owners (and smh als the solar representatives). i'm glad that we're having this dialogue though, because i'm sure there was no malicious intent behind those omittions, and solar industry has become significantly more transparent since.

solar panels on small mom and pop properties (100 or so acres) were entirely exploitative and people in the comments don't seem to realize the nature and the extent of the exploitation. there was an analysis document from an ivy law professor which at some point was the only such source, but now googling for keywords brings up a lot of relevant material. few years back i was helping a number of farmland owners in a row with their solar installation deals, and every single one of those deals took a scorched earth approach (ianal, but i read contracts in my day job)

cleanup specifically is a huge part, because it's an externalized cost burdened on the land owner. bringing up the necessity of documented cleanup strategy in the contract pretty much immediately leads to the solar company withdrawing its proposal (in fact only one company even bothered to politely say no, everyone else just ghosted).

elsewhere in comments people are saying "well panels still work at 50% capacity, so why even dismount", but that's not how it works. the entire installation is leased and operated by the third party, the owners typically have neither expertise nor the ability to continue operating an industrial site past the lifetime of a contract, or past its operational lifetime for that matter. a lot of these installations exploit the old age and the effective poverty of the site owners (those 100 acres are a low-liquidity asset, while the industry they supported is no longer there due to aging population and regulatory changes), the companies despite the good cause they are attached to seem to be interested purely in short term gains, the contracts are all about externalizing as much cost as possible, the installed equipment is presumably all treated as write off (i sort of wonder how subsidies factor into this, i suspect that they are significantly enabling this kind of behavior).

american socioeconomic model somehow managed to take a wonderful future looking thing and turn it (at least in some instances, but also every single one i had to deal with) into a scorched earth, after après moi, le déluge thing. recyclers will possibly improve the situation, at least for the people who are already locked into financially disadvantageous contracts, but that really depends on how much deinstallation they'll be willing to take up.

oh yeah i should've added share to my list! when i moved to nyc i was so poor i was subleasing a room from a carribean dude in prospect park, and would bike to lafayette with a hand me down ibook g3 :>

i really don't know how to contextualize that experience. i'm glad i was part of it, but like a lot of things immediately pre-pervasive digitalization, i feel like it will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

but you're one of the meso guys, it would've been interesting to hear your opinions on what i said, outside the quible about dates. in my recollection vvvv leaned heavily into the aesthetic conventions around toplap at the time, and you must recall what i'm talking about judging by dates on your project page.

the dates are vague, while the point remains, because trying to remember things clearer i did livecoding at toplap in brooklyn 2004-2005, and i wasn't a pioneer. but also i'm talking artistic trends, something could've happened prior to it becoming part of bigger whole, but then evolved as part of the whole that it itself has brought about.

there was a period in computer arts around 2008 or so (edit, björn's comment prompted a reflection, it might've been earlier than that, let's call it "early 2000s"), that went away like many things with pervasive computerization. vvvv including it's naming and otherwise opaqueness is a product of that period. it was represented by groups like TOPLAP and dorkbot, and it was kind of marriage of technologists and artists, back when such a marriage would've still been self-conscious. stylistically it was a lot of algorithmic generation, live coding, and noise, people liked to use puredata, and vvvv, and other such projects to produce sharp jittery zigzaging lines on a projector screen at get togethers in brooklyn. a kind of deliberate, practiced obscurantism was part of aesthetic, you weren't supposed to keep your PD patches organized. there was a particular typographic convention associated with projects of that time, involving a lot of deliberate but arbitrary additions of punctuation marks, -/////lower case letters, repeating letters00xxx. terms like psychogeorgaphy were involved, there was of course an {esoteric}} component to it. downstream the movement took chiptunes mainstream, and produce early minimal house. some of the conventions remain in the digital arts, and video production circles.

so if you think vvvv is not propertly marketed, maybe will benefit from a mission statement, then it's not for you.

revised report on scheme which introduced LET to scheme at the time still didn't guarantee left-to-right order of evaluation, "the argument forms can in principle be evaluated in any order. this is unlike the usual LISP left-to-right order". so when introducing LET, which is defined in terms of LAMBDA, the report reiterates that order of evaluation is not guaranteed.

the correct answer as far as LET vs LET* will be lost to all the noise, but here it goes. people are just defending a historic artifact like it actually makes any kind of sense, or like it was a deliberate design choice. it's not and it wasn't, and you're totally correct as far as it being confusing. common lisp is compromise between a variety of lisp vendors, who all were working on variously mutated dialects of the same language in the 80s, while the languages was evolving from the 60s! much of the languages functionality was added while people were figuring out how to do high level programming, so constructs that seem fundamental to us weren't introduced until much later in the process, because nobody knew that such a thing could exist.

if you read documents from that era, the code that they write is wildly alien, because present day programming wasn't invented yet. things that you take for granted just didn't exist. common lisp and to a lesser extent scheme carry all that baggage for backwards compatibility.

so when lisp came out, it didn't have LET, and LET didn't appear until mid 70s. and it was added as a convenience macro for ((lambda (VAR1 VAR2 ...) ...) FORM1 FORM2 ...), which is how people did dynamic binding (also called lambda-binding) for a decade prior. evolution of lisp claims that LET came from lisp machine lisp, but people were independently inventing it all over the place, as a custom macro. depending on how your lambdas were evaluated or how your LET macro was written, you're not just assigning VARs simultaneously, you might not even have a guarantee of the order of evaluation of FORMs. but it got its job done, which is according to revised scheme manual "allowing the forms for the quantities to appear textually adjacent to their corresponding variables". this was a novel convenience at some point!

LET* was invented after LET as a convenience for LET, because sequential binding was even more convenient than binding in general. it would've made sense to then make LET* the "default" of some sort, but the subtle distinction stuck for reasons of legacy code, writing conventions, acquired preferences, and then it got crystalized and preserved for posterity in the common lisp standard.