Tri-Valley Cares needs to be on this if they aren't already. We need to make sure that NNSA and LLNL does not make good on promises to pursue such stupid ideas as doing Plutonium experiments on NIF. The stupidity arises from the fact that a huge population is placed at risk in the short and long term. Why do this kind of experiment in a heavily populated area? Only a moron would push that kind of imbecile area. Do it somewhere else in the god forsaken hills of Los Alamos. Why should the communities in the Bay Area be subjected to such increased risk just because the lab's NIF has failed twice and is trying the Hail Mary pass of doing an SNM experiment just to justify their existence? Those Laser EoS techniques and the people analyzing the raw data are all just BAD anyways. You know what comes next after they do the experiment. They'll figure out that they need larger samples. More risk for the local population. Stop this imbecilic pursuit. They wan...
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The rest of you "worker bees" doing the real science... not so much.
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Nice to see that LLNS upper management occasionally likes to posts to the blog.
Sorry to disagree, 7:09pm, but with the "success" of gaining gobs of new lab funding, the LLC corporate policy will likely be to substantial raise salaries of the upper management upwards. Of course, the LLC's "proprietary" label will keep all of this under wraps from the regular staff (just the way they like it!).
I would predict something along the following lines:
LLNL/LANL Directors:
~ $1 Million --> $2 Million per yr
PADs:
~ $600k --> $ 1 Million per yr
Everybody else below Div Leader:
Static - No Change.
It is also very telling to watch how at LANL the upper management team constructed the upcoming TCP1 salary contributions.
The cap for salary contributions ends at $245k. This means their Director, who makes around $1 million (at the moment), will only have to contribute a small portion of his total salary to pay for his future pension payout. The rest of his "shortfall" on his total $1 million salary will end up being supported by the contributions of all the regular staff!
You can rest assured that the executives who run LLNS and LANS are *not* working for the good of the regular staff. They're working to line their own pockets.
April 8, 2010 7:09 PM
This guy is absolutely correct. The extra money will be put into the existing PBIs or creating new PBIs that can be easily met or even exceeded. A legal option to stuff more money into LANS executives pockets.
More likely what it really means is that anyone making over $245k at LANL is senior management covered by a separate retirement plan.
April 11, 2010 12:03 PM
Nah, they'll all be dipping out of the same TCP1 asset bucket in the future, just like all the general employees.
Only now the employees will be putting in an extra dose into this asset bucket with their lab salaries... just to help cover for the senior management team who are putting in far less than what that should be!
The NNSA's for-profit LLC scheme is sorta like a Mafia racket. Anastasio is the god-father and Bechtel is the "cover" company.