O.T. Solar power.

[krw]

quoted text -

Which just shows how far back into the 19th century your brain is.

Utter nonsense.

[krw]

here.http://buylikebuffett.com/finance/3-companies-that-have-virtual-monop...>

You can also not run *any* OS. Your choice.

[aemeijers]

Don't forget the clueless or greedy individuals who signed up for loans they knew damn well they could not afford. I blame them as much as I blame the hucksters that invited them into the tent. I could have gotten paper for twice as much house as I bought, but saw no point in it. And even with the housing crash, I think I could still sell this place for as much as I paid for it. No profit, especially once you subtract out repairs, interest, taxes, etc, but I am far from upside down. 'Blue collar' houses didn't crash near as bad as McMansions.

[gfretwell]

It is the amount of lost power they give up. There are several articles on the green power web sites explaining this. I was surprised myself. It looked like an easy solution and if maximum efficiency is not your goal they are cheap.

[krw]

Many were worse; no-doc loans with nowhere near the real income needed to support the payments.

I put 50% down. I could *easily* have bought twice the house (and the one we bought could be considered a McMansion - 2600ft^2). I never took a second on a house, either. Other than an addition (garage) on our first house I never pulled any money out of equity. That's just dumb.

I'd lose some, but I've also paid more off than it's gone down. I'm nowhere close to the water line.

It's all about location. Most housing is now below the cost of replacement. That can't last forever either.

[trader4]

ide quoted text -

That suit was started by Ramsey Clark in the last days of the Johnson administration. Nuff said..... Years passed in litigation and technology changed the market on it's own.

[HeyBub]

Good plan. Regarding the gun: get two. A long gun and a pistol.

Also hoard a vast quantity of ammunition, at least a thousand rounds for each.

In a complete breakdown of society, ammunition is the new gold.

With sufficient bullets, all other things are obtainable.

[gfretwell]

From what I see the only real thing that changed was the government's attitude on monopolies. Evidently they are just ignoring them. At the rate we are going we are going to end up with 2 or 3 unregulated phone companies instead of the 2 or 3 regulated ones we had before 1978. The situation with Microsoft and Apple/Linux et al is certainly analogous to IBM and tit's competitors in the 60s ... or even the 50s when the first anti-trust suit was filed.

[chaniarts]

yes. they're warranteed to produce 95% of rating at the 25 year mark. mine are made by one of the largest producers in the world, so i'd expect them to be around for that long.

it's the same warrantee as any other electrical component; limited to equipment replacement, not warranteed for any other expenses or losses. it's covered by normal home owners insurance (hail, loss, theft, fire, etc).

my panels went through a hail storm last fall, which is very rare in my area. golfball sized. no damage at all.

[gfretwell]

These bubbles are not anybody's plot although there were people exploiting the situation. There were some smart builders who saw the end of the party coming as soon as 3q2006. They stopped building "inventory" units (only building "pre-sold houses" with $50k down) and they tried to avoid selling to "investors", generally defined as anyone with 2 existing mortgages. This tended to preserve the communities that they were developing and they did not have that many foreclosures. Other developments where they used less discretion, became ghost towns.

It is easy to say the bankers were the only greedy ones but you can't ignore the greed of buyers who entered into contracts they had no real way of honoring, in the hopes that they could "flip" the house at a profit before they had to pay the higher "adjusted" rate they signed up for. The victims were the ones who bought a homestead in that inflated market. I tried to talk as many of those people I could into renting until things settled down. The smart ones did and I know one guy who lived rent free for over 2 years while the house he rented went through a protracted foreclosure process. In real life, he could still be living there because it is still hung up in court but he had a chance to buy a house at a price he couldn't refuse. He had 2 years rent to put down on the house ... almost $40,000. He only paid $80k for the house.

[gfretwell]

We had 125% equity loans here from the late 70s. I knew this was going to crash eventually as soon as I saw that happening. They were not even selling these loans for home improvements and other capital outlays. They were saying "take that cruise you always wanted". Houses had to sell for more because people owed more for them. When I bought this house in 1984 it was a general rule that you could have a house built cheaper than buying an occupied one. At a certain point, I knew this could not last. It was only a pair of cascading bubbles, the 90s stock market bubble, coupled with the real estate bubble that kept it going so long but that made the crash so much harder. We were really paying for the sins of two bubbles, not just one. Without the deregulation of the 90s and the ability to generate phony money out of thin air, we would have cratered in 2000 because there would not have been the capital for a real estate boom.

[krw]

 IOW, it's

It's a damned good thing you're not an EE.

Try reading, imbecile.

You really are a clueless asshat.

[gfretwell]

It is plenty if the sun can keep the batteries up during the day and I have modest usage at night. My only interest would be for enough power to keep a fridge and a water pump going after a hurricane. Maybe a little extra power for a TV. That is 9 KWH or so. That is why I was looking at the 2300W system. In an off grid configuration it would bring my batteries back from dead in a day with some left over.

[gfretwell]

South Florida. They were telling me I should count on about 5 hours worth of the rated capacity, averaged over a full day.

[gfretwell]

I am aware of that. These are 250 A/H batteries, 6 at 6 volts each, so it is 250 * 36 = 9000 w/h. I also understand you can't really use all of that if you want to keep your batteries in decent shape.