[ToucanLoucan]

And the solar industry is currently repeating this entire mess with low-income homeowners, offering to add the cost of the panels (and whatever else needs to be done to the home to accommodate them) to people's mortgages, oftentimes causing people to lose their homes due to living on fixed/low incomes already.

In so far as most people here believe in capitalist markets, we can agree to disagree. But at the very least I don't think it's too radical pinko commie scum of me to suggest maybe large industries shouldn't be able to just... fuck their customers like this? Over and over? Like I just don't care if people sign on the dotted line, that's not good enough. The layman clearly doesn't understand these contracts well enough to agree and they are blatantly, openly predatory in nature. I don't give a shit if someone has signed a legally binding document that says Solar Inc gets to fuck them, I still don't think it's right to let them do it.

[bombcar]

Incentives make it worse, because it provides a fig leaf - we’re doing this because the $Xk incentive is available to homeowners only.

Otherwise if it was a good deal the companies would do it directly, and you’d be able to ask why they’re not and instead selling you something.

[robertlagrant]

> In so far as most people here believe in capitalist markets, we can agree to disagree. But at the very least I don't think it's too radical pinko commie scum of me to suggest maybe large industries shouldn't be able to just... fuck their customers like this?

At least over here in the UK, people got money from other taxpayers to buy solar panels. This isn't a very capitalist scenario. You're right that some regulation around advertising TCO would have been useful, and markets that do well need informed consumers. So add good regulations and subtract incentives; both of these aren't things markets can control. They sound like government failings.