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Comment by db48x | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

Was there a good reason not to build there?

It seems at a glance like we should have just built the turbines, not paid off or stiffed them.

Since we seem to desperately need more energy, currently expanding with every other short term high polluting source we can.

That’s a separate issue, and irrelevant to the issue of cancelling the lease early.

I'm confused then. Cancelling the lease early is unrelated to the decision to build the turbines or not?

No, it's merely a separate decision. Given that they have decided to cancel the lease, for good reasons or bad, the question then is what they do with the lease payments. I am pretty sure that you would not be happy if your landlord wanted to evict you and also wanted you to keep paying rent.

When and why was the decision to cancel, and how was the money already allocated not part of that though?

I can't say I've ever signed a lease where the terms of payment or deposit return weren't extremely clear and part of my decision to move in.

I posit that "to halt operations" is actually related to "$1.2B deal to pay", in TFA.

In similar manner to how "Hacker" and "News" are fantastically separate utterances, but when we're talking on Hacker News it's pretty regularly a package deal, not an exercise in Levenshtein distance from "Hacker" to "News".

Yes, returning the money is a consequence of terminating the lease. That’s precisely what I said!

Yes, I am quite certain that the contract was quite explicit about the terms of cancellation. That’s certainly relevant, but we still had the opportunity to refuse to return the money even though it would certainly have ended up in a lawsuit. Would that have been better? No, I do not think that it would have been. In fact, it would have been unethical, possibly even fraud. Articles that phrase this as additional money being paid rather than money being returned are deliberately misleading.

You might want to reconsider using "gypped" in that way.

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