The problem is that solar won't start off able to deal with 50 year events like utilities used to be capable of handling. I say used to be because these days they can't any more due to cost savings measures they've taken to increase profits.

For example- land lines used to stay on unless the line was cut down. After our last hurricane, the land lines went off after 6 to 24 hours when the batteries at the local substation ran dry--- these days any new lines are fiber optic (no copper- no power) and old lines are being replace.

Likewise- our electrical power used to be back up within a few days after a hurricane. I'm not sure what has changed but it was 2-3 weeks in many areas. I suspect cost cutting there too- less repair supplies kept on hand (don't want all that stuff sitting around causing inventory taxes), fewer staff retained (enough for normal times but no extra capacity), and less proactive tree cutting.

But hit solar with a 5 day storm- people die-- and a five or even seven day backup will come to be normal.

I see the mistake I was making.

Lol. It sort of made me feel better as I've been comparing my income to household income.

There is still a minor gap between our figures and then one issue with the data..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

$27,500 to $29,999 52.16 Median income.appears about $29000.

The 80% level
$57,500 to $59,999 80.90 agrees with your figures

$100,000 or more 93.39 The top 6.4% make over 100k

--
Okay the problem.
This data which agrees with your figures includes "Of those individuals with income who were older than 15 years of age,"

So it has about 8 years worth of millions of young people who really not representative of people working for a living but rather working for a little extra spending money. It also includes millions of retired seniors with any income besides social security. Like the retired guy who works at my kroger two days a week.

If you look at actual prime working year people, you have two major groups
Overall median wage: 39,509 This is $10,000 higher than the figure above.
College Grad median wage: $56,027.

So it seems reasonable that among the "real" working population the 80% level is closer to $70,000.

This discussion has been pretty helpful for me.

I'm in a high income crowd and had crossed household income with personal income because we individually all make as much as households.

Personal income here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

Shows median personal income is somewhere between $27500 and $29999.
$25,000 to $27,499 48.01 make less.
$27,500 to $29,999 52.16 make less.

And more to the point, in a greement with your figures...

$57,500 to $59,999 1,876 0.89 80.90% make less.

Of course, that's not correcting for age and includes a lot of 18-26 year olds who haven't started their first "real" job yet. But point taken.

He he. To those of us older folks, many today's ads feel like that.

At least they are not FIVE TIMES THE VOLUME any more. That was a pretty terrible 20 year period before that was mostly outlawed. They even sold sets that would specifically lower the volume if the signal coming in was too loud because of it (sort of an adblock of it's day).

I'm sure they can argue that you chose to open the web site (just like you chose the tv channel or opened the magazine).

However- unlike a magazine, the ads can be very abusive of bandwidth. It shouldn't be fair that because you go to a page that they send you a gigabyte of data.

I use adblock and noscript myself and prefer giving small ($5, $10) donations to sites myself.

Because the current rules are written specifically to favor the incumbents.

It's what all businesses do - break the lower rungs of the ladder they climbed up.

Why can't a customer decide to buy a car without a dealer? Once it's 2 minutes old, they can purchase the same car from a private individual.

In texas, the oil executive sued to prevent fracking. His stated reason was that the water towers would lower his property values and ruin the view.

What about everyone else's property values and views?

I got them from the Congressional Budget Office.

Here is a 2009 document that shows the top quintile then was 218,800
http://www.cbo.gov/sites/defau...

Okay- I see that while it's not as low as you are saying, I did make a mistake using the average. Here is a breakdown by smaller pieces from the same document.
81st to 90th Percentiles 125,800
91st to 95th Percentiles 169,800
96th to 99th Percentiles 266,200
Top 1 Percent 1,219,600

But keep in mind these figures are from 5 years ago. On the same 2013 version of the document, the average was 234k instead of 219k The 81th to 90th percentiles was higher in 2012 (I vaguely recall that it was 131k) and so on.

Anyone can send an email. I'm not sure how they know for certain gop sent the email and not some random 13 year old with bad english skills.

It would certainly be a great way to discredit gop too. Just have someone send an over the line email claiming to be gop. The fbi, a private contractor, etc.

Not really.

Coders are expected to perform in a dynamic deadline oriented environment while maintaining a positive, can do attitude.

They need to be self-starters who also comply well with bureaucratic documentation requirements of up to 6-8 signed off documents and meeting schedules of 4-6 meetings before they can do the project.

They need to be good and completing projects in a week doing "what ever it takes" after the executives sat on a project for 6 weeks after the requests were submitted early because "it is what it is."

I already posted this in another thread but...

CBO 2010 income quintiles.
Lowest Quintile 8,100
Second Quintile 30,700
Middle Quintile 54,800
Fourth Quintile 87,700
Highest Quintile 234,400 --- this is where people should be exempt from overtime unless they are a manager.

I could see the argument you are making for managers but they were always expected to work overtime in return for a shot at being a vice president, president, CEO or chairman of the board.

Special rules were passed in the 1980's exempting computer professionals and engineers from labor law protections already in place. These days the exceptions even applies to people who simply install software on computers.

Your figure is way off.

53k is the middle income amount..

Here are the 2010 figures from the CBO
Lowest Quintile 14,200
Second Quintile 30,700
Middle Quintile 54,800
Fourth Quintile 87,700
Highest Quintile 234,400 --Here is where people should be exempt from overtime rules.

Most people in IT are in the lower end to the middle of the fourth quartile making $60,000 to $110,000 (and above $100k your odds of being let go/replaced every couple years skyrocket).

Lol.

Nailed it. Only they didn't fix anything. As far as we could tell, many of the $150 to $200 per hour consultants were training on our dime. About 90% of them. The other 10% were very good and worth every dime. So we were covering about 60 people who were about as good as we were and 6 people who were solid gold and worth every penny.

but not first post.

Hurts me tsu much.

Exempt status used to be reserved for highly paid professionals (doctors, lawyers, managers).

At my last company, they made people work 72 hours a week for months. We had multiple heart attacks- and several divorces. They took advantage of the bad job market created partly by the fact that companies can work IT people 72 hours a week.

Anything over 45 hours a week should be overtime until you hit the top 20% of income or you are supervising, hiring, firing, and making pay decisions over at least a few other people.

Any work on actual holidays should be double time.

Conditions in many IT shops in the united states are horrific now.