I earn 2x my Beau's salary. This is in no small part due to my being about 8 or so years ahead of him career-wise, despite being 5 years older. We have the same level of education, so I think it is possible we will earn the same salary in the future, but it won't be the near future.

It ain't the press that did the families down.

I don't think the decision was necessarily made out of heartlessness.

It took several hours to tell the families that the good news was all a big mistake, a huge mistake. Hatfield said he waited because he felt his information might be incomplete and he wanted to avoid passing along further misinformation. Some might be dead and others alive, perhaps, he thought.

"I didn't know who to tell to stop celebrating," he said.

You don't need heartlessness when stupidity will suffice.

He could have shared his uncertainty. He could have said "All this rejoicing is premature; we've just been told that some of them are dead. We don't know for sure how many or who."

I don't think the decision was necessarily made out of heartlessness.

No, I think it was made out of cowardice. Sure, he doesn't know which families to tell to stop celebrating. I get that. But he needed to go in there as soon as it was clear that all 12 miners weren't alive and say something to the effect of "I deeply regret that I have to tell you this, but the initial report from the rescue workers was incorrect. There have been some fatalities, but the rescue team is working to determine how many."

Something like that. You don't just let the families walk around with this joy that you *know* you'll have to shatter. Which is why I think it was cowardice -- he didn't want to face the devastated families after destroying the extreme joy they had just been feeling.

It's not easy, but if you're the CEO of a company, you do it. Or you don't deserve to be CEO.

t edit Or, What Betsy Said in WAY fewers words than it took me.

This morning, the CEO kept saying "It got out of control. It just got out of control." As if it wasn't his job to control the release of information. He did control it; he withheld it. His choice. If it got out of control, it was because he let the celebration continue long after he knew it was premature.

You don't need heartlessness when stupidity will suffice.

He could have shared his uncertainty. He could have said "All this rejoicing is premature; we've just been told that some of them are dead. We don't know for sure how many or who."

I'm not certain he didn't.

QUESTION: Mr. Hatfield, our condolences as well. This is not the outcome that I don't think anyone around the country or around the world watching this story -- but, I guess my question is, is how come as soon as -- why didn't we hear that that information was wrong sooner?

MORE HATFIELD: Because we couldn't correct the information without knowing more about it.

At the point that we could have told you there was an issue, we did send word to the church or through police channels that there were some issues with the numbers; We're trying to find out what's correct.

[link]

The whole mine thing just sucks. And I think that's all I have to say about that.

My mom has pretty much always made more money than my dad, and has more education than he does, too. AND she was higher-class when they met. It's worked out OK for the past nearly-forty years. (Nearly 40! Eek.)

I just saw a Kansas City Star newspaper. Headline in huge print "12 miners found alive after 41 hours".

I've heard this aphorism called the Ted Kennedy Corrollary: "Tell the bad news soonest and in as much detail as possible." (Meaning that Chappaquiddick wouldn't have been such a big honking follow-the-rest-of-his-career deal if he'd told the first rescuer that Kopechne was in the jeep, even though she was surely dead and beyond help by then.)

My mom has pretty much always made more money than my dad, and has more education than he does, too. AND she was higher-class when they met. It's worked out OK for the past nearly-forty years. (Nearly 40! Eek.)

I have to say, some of my parents' big relationship issues were related in some way to differing levels of education, the priority they put on things like education, their learned financial behavior...IOW, a lot of things that basically came down to class backgrounds. And that was true a long time before my mom started making more money. (Though by that point, it wasn't about numbers so much as the strain of one career in its ascendency while the other was backsliding.)