The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Tesla:

The other day, my boss explained to me that several people from his former employer joined our fair corporation at about the same time. All of them held the same title and did the same work at the former employer, and all of them did it well.

However, they got hired into positions at five different levels in our corporate hierarchy (meaning, among other things, that the lowest of their salaries was around one-quarter of the highest).

He attributed the discrepancy quite literally to "the different stories that they were able to tell about what they had done." And he thought the outcome was perfectly reasonable, never wondering whether the story was more likely to be compelling if it was embellished than if it was a simple recounting of actual events.

To me this is just more evidence to support my opinion that the qualities we select for when hiring are rarely the qualities that will be most helpful in performing the job. This is even more true (and significantly more disturbing) when it comes to electing our government officials.

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Not only does it not matter what the odds are that any given photographer is a terrorist, it doesn't even matter how anybody feels about the issue - except for the guy whose job it is to keep anything bad from happening, ever. I suppose it's no wonder that guy doesn't want anything happening in his corner of the world that could possibly lead to some occurrence that somebody might think of connecting (however tenuously) to the idea of an Evil Plot.

After all, he's being judged on the basis of the stories people tell.

I was born in 1973.

I have a vague memory of President Carter on television urging us to conserve energy in our holiday decorating.

My first very solid memory is of the 1980 elections; I remember some of the debate of the time, the fact that my parents split their vote (Mum liked Anderson), and that I got to go into the voting booth and flip the little levers.

@95: "[sic-by-parallel]"

But I thought that every malformed sentence was malformed in its own way?
(Tolstoy-by-parallel)

Richard @ 54:

Do you include Myron Orfield's work in this? I had heard his was a cut above and am considering delving into it.

$87 billion is the shocking amount that Dubya requested from Congress in order to attack Iraq.

"If we spread...$87 billion over an American football field, we would not be able to see much of the game. The players would be buried in 55 feet of money."

More shocking is that we've spent three and a half times that much to date.

Calluna V. @ 26: The way that things are currently labeled, with the "chocolate-flavored chips" and so forth, works for me. I would be deeply irritated if I suddenly couldn't tell the difference between this junk and chocolate without reading the nutrition information.

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