toddchambery
But, as others have mentioned, with only one exception, every Mormon I've met has been kind, honest, hard-working (with an emphasis on thrift and education) and polite. Whatever the nutty origins and strictures (no tea or coffee, but Diet Coke is ok?) of their beliefs, I have a lot of respect for the people who come out of the system.
1 https://www.jstor.org/stable/1893428?seq=1#page_scan_tab_con...
If Russia had not released the DNC emails (or had somehow done so surreptitiously) to queer the US election, there would be no story to report on.
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2010/12/10/131784161/what-...
Most office environments I've worked at are not rigidly policy-driven, are populated with sensible humans, and the overwhelming majority of my teammates are working for the success of the team and each other.
[1]: http://www.hudson.org/events/1356-are-plutocrats-drowning-ou...
[1]: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2011/05/caplan_on_paren.htm...
I could not agree more: I once bumped into someone in the bathroom on a different floor that I had met briefly years before during a re-org meet-and-greet. In a few moments of catching up, I found out he had worked on an in-house project that was essentially the same category as the products I was on a team to evaluate.
We didn't end up resurrecting his project, but his insight into the ultimate selection and experience with the rollout was extremely valuable.
A similar thing for a casual acquaintance who told me in passing about his private work in app development, and I was able to put him in touch with someone on our app team (it was a big company with a lot of silos).
I ended up later working remotely for a few months with the same company, and lost the serendipity of accidental human interaction when all my communication was low-bandwidth, narrowly focused, topic-at-hand meetings and communication.
I can sympathize with others complaining about the high cost of interruptions, but for the way I work and think, non-directed conversation is invaluable.
edit: Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell is up there http://www.amazon.com/Jonathan-Strange-Mr-Norrell-Novel/dp/0...
I find J G Keely's judgement aligned to my own: http://starsbeetlesandfools.blogspot.com/2012/06/suggested-r...
"keep a permanent record of the messages you send to your friends" "keep a permanent record of the photos you have shared on Facebook"
That's great! A free backup.
"keep a log of all the websites you have visited that contain a "like" button."
That's great! So I'll get feeds that better reflect my interests.
I haven't used Facebook since the EFF experimental app that showed all the actual, real information (real names in the graph) FB leaked to any game you clicked 'OK' to. But noone else cares, FB is still growing, and that's OK.
I'm OK with the way Google handles my personal information (doing the match making with advertisers and keeping my details private), and enjoy the benefits this enables.
[1] http://sourceforge.net/projects/pycmd/ [2] http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/