Are you sure of that characterization that the UK was the poorest member when it joined? That seems incorrect. The UK has always been one of the stronger economies in the European zone.
In 1972 the UK still hadn't recovered economically from WWII, and the other members of the EU at the time were France, West Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy. With the possible exception of Italy, all those are (per capita) economic powerhouses.
Thanks, I'm never sure about when Italy seemed to have declined (relative to some of the more wealthy neighbors). Or maybe tourism and partially remembered facts aren't a reliable source and their economy is still doing well.
Yep. I have done quite a bit of work in the SDoH space. It's pretty widely discussed thst there is a negative correlation of SDoH measures like ADI and age.
4. What contracts are in place to maintain the panel, and lease the space? What happens if the building decides to discontinue service. Will the solar panel be delivered to me (at what fee?) will the solar panel be re-placed on top of another building? (at what fee?)
5. are the devices insured against common forms of damage? (wind, hail, acts of humankind)
6. Can we implement at "DRIP" style reinvestment program where our ROI just funnels back into more?
These are all great questions - so far we've worked with accredited investors to place $100K+ solar facilities while we've built our product. They are basically beta testers while de get out design, software, payments integrations, etc going.
We answered those questions for accredited, for everyday retail investors it will depend on the solar facility we select and the financial structuring design.
I really wanted to take you seriously but that's impossible if you won't answer any fo these simple questions. This is a real bad look that does not inspire confidence.
Great questions, lacking in answers... would you care to share what you expect the answers to be? It is hard to get on board with the number of unanswered questions.
Never mind my peer's noise. Thanks for helping me understand where you're at. I kinda guessed that this really was a launch testing kind of scenario where you'd check for demand before fully "finishing" the offering. No problem, it's a good idea to do research before sinking your life into something no one wants.
I dont know if you heard of or followed sweater ventures. But this kinda feels like a similar niche, but w/ a solar angle instead of VC .
Happy to answer any questions. The fact is that financial return will depend on the risk profile - which we will depend on factors like
a) Will the investor take on construction risk
b) Will the facility be insured
c) Who is the power customer (off taker) how creditworthy are they, and what are the terms?
d) Will the financing include tax equity incentives and how will they be distributed.
These questions are all a matter of design and pragmatism. I want the financial design to be as considered as, and will integrated to, the user experience design.
We hope to eventually operate a secondary market where you could do this. Depends on a few regulatory factors we are still considering. Definitely a priority.
I'm curious the legal structure of what you're selling here. The terms and conditions on your website[0] seem generic, and don't describe the offering.
You're promoting something you call "shares"[1], which promise to pay a dividend. Regardless of whether or not they can be resold, I assume your counsel has figured out a way that these aren't considered "marketable securities" within the meaning of the Securities Act of 1933, which would trigger all sorts of SEC scrutiny.
I assume you're familiar with the early business model of Prosper Marketplace and their struggles[2] with the SEC over a similar issue.
Does this fall under the Regulation Crowdfunding exception[3] or is there another loophole?
(This is not meant as criticism; I'm genuinely curious. I'm not an expert, and the legal landscape has quite possibly changed since I last researched this issue.)
We are still structuring our first product - so it will depend, but we have options for all of these questions. From the securities side, we might consider Reg A+ or other crowdfunding regulation. I'd look into the structure Masterworks.io uses to learn more (I've in fact discussed this with their GC).
We've been building our beta with accredited investors under Reg D.
For others (like me) that haven't heard of Masterworks:
Masterworks creates a Delaware LLC issuer (taxed as a partnership) and files an offering of ordinary shares with the United States SEC under Regulation A. Each issuer will use proceeds from the offering to acquire a single work of art and title to the artwork will be contributed to a Cayman Islands segregated portfolio company for the benefit of the issuer. The issuer will have no indebtedness, no other assets and will conduct no operations other than relating to the ownership, maintenance and eventual sale of the artwork. The issuer is administered by Masterworks pursuant to an administrative services agreement that provides that Masterworks pays all ordinary and necessary fees, costs and expenses in exchange for membership interests in the issuer.
The Regulation A amendments from the JOBS Act ("Regulation A+", circa 2015) are indeed more recent than my last look at this, so I can't comment further. The Cayman Islands domicile rubs me the wrong way, but that may be out of ignorance.
Great question! We've often contemplated the Vinovest.io model. Vinovest sells fine wine as an investment. Because you own the individual bottles and are entitled, for a fee, to have them sent to your door, they avoid most securities headaches.
I wonder if we could do that for individual panels, particularly given deployment of module level Enphase micro inverters.
Both Texas and Maine would be unlikely candidates. Maine has some pretty stringent and arbitrary rules about behind-the-meter commercial power arrangements. Texas is possible with commercial facilities, but their regulatory framework is also deterrent, really to any kind of development.
To be honest, in all odds the financial return is more likely to be dependent on factors like who the off-taker is, if the financing includes construction risk, if we are insuring the facility, etc than its physical location.
Litestream author here. The tl;dr is that Litestream trades operational complexity for reduced durability guarantees and increased write performance. Those 3 options mentioned use distributed consensus to ensure higher durability but that consensus also takes time so writes can be slowed. Litestream is an async replication tool so you can have a configurable window (1 second by default) where you could lose data if you have a catastrophic failure.
The key component that is missing from many of these digital voice assistants is multi-listening device coordination: which device should answer if there are many devices listening.
It's a hard problem. From my understanding, homepods use bluetooth to coordinate who is going to answer. Google Home, at least in my home, is terrible at this problem. Often devices in another room will answer.
Once someone has solved this problem, I'm on board!
Even homepods get this wrong, and I'd be surprised if they only used bluetooth. I know they use wifi for presence (being on the same wifi is required for things like managing lists). Homepods also support UWB (you can bring your phone close to a homepod to transfer music playback to it, and it's used for setup). But I still get my living room homepod responding to me while I'm in the kitchen mere feet from the kitchen homepod with my phone in my hand (working on grocery list, for example).
Depending on the phone's proximity is still annoying, though. It seems weird that they don't seem to use voice proximity to determine which one is closer.
I'm afraid that is not a good argument. There are many historical predictions that didn't come true [1]. In 1970s, there were concerns about extensive glaciation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling. I think it is fairly uncontroversial that it is very hard to make detailed predictions about climate. This Bloomberg article discusses a recent relevant issue: https://archive.ph/FMOn5
I think a better argument would be to say that we certainly know more about climate now, and we have a lot more computational power to construct more detailed models.
[1]: There is a positive side to wrong historical predictions: that people actually dared to make concrete assertions, instead of waving hands.
> Some press reports in the 1970s speculated about continued cooling; these did not accurately reflect the scientific literature of the time, which was generally more concerned with warming from an enhanced greenhouse effect.
Well, unfortunately the lead line from the Wikipedia article is a bit misleading, as it makes it sound like it was merely a bunch of sensationalist news stories. That is not true. There were genuine concerns by climate scientists about that (apparently they were misled in part becauase of low time resolution of paleoceanography studies). Check out the references and the rest of the article.
It is probably true that there was no consensus about it back then though. (I do not know enough about it to be completely sure.)
