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Comment by tehjoker | Hacker News Reader

It's still pretty amusing to regard this as "decentralized" when solar panels are produced in a centralized fashion. This is just changing who is buying things, not something fundemental.

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CPU production is centralized, but email is decentralized. Email changed a lot about the distribution of information without necessarily changing the distribution of industrial manufacturing. Likewise solar will change the distribution of energy without necessarily changing the distribution of industrial manufacturing.

Once the panel arrives at your home it keeps making electricity for decades, without asking anyone's permission.

Email is decentralised if you ignore that 99% of email must go through the gatekeepers known as Microsoft and Google. Sure, anyone can spin up an email server, but either one of the gatekeepers can arbitrarily decide to reject all email coming from your small server and there is no recourse beyond begging them to reconsider.

The real infrastructure is the backbone providers and telecom companies. You can't do anything without them.

It is true that once they are installed after making a consumer choice, you will be more resilient, so I should concede it is a real difference, but nonetheless, it's control of production that still controls the entire ecosystem. In the case of utilities, control of production is felt instantaneously whereas with solar the lag is years.

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