From the blog PR and Unemployment, a list of dozens of questions you are likely to encounter on a job interview. Here are some of them:

Who was your favorite manager and why?

What kind of personality do you work best with and why?

Why do you want this job?

Where would you like to be in your career five years from now?

Tell me about your proudest achievement.

If you were at a business lunch and you ordered a rare steak and they brought it to you well done, what would you do?

If I were to give you this salary you requested but let you write your job description for the next year, what would it say?

Why is there fuzz on a tennis ball? (Answer here)

How would you go about establishing your credibility quickly with the team?

There’s no right or wrong answer, but if you could be anywhere in the world right now, where would you be?

How would you feel about working for someone who knows less than you?

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Time for another animated episode of Odd Todd’s “Laid-Off.”

Laid-Off: Career Day

Click on an image to see it full size.

More photos here

The Girl’s Guide to Homelessness is now over a year old. In February, 2009, 24-year-old Brianna Karp started blogging when she realized she would soon be without residence after losing her job. Things have picked up considerably for her since then (she has a book coming out), but here was the situation when she started, explained in her initial, gripping post:

In three days, I will be homeless.

This is not by choice… Personally, I enjoy having a permanent residence and the sense of stability and security that it gives me. I look forward to living in an actual house again. However, it is what it is – in three days, I will be homeless. There are no caveats here, no “maybe” or “unless” or “possibly I can come up with something before then.” Come Thursday, February 24, I will be making my way on the streets of Orange County as best I can, and I will be considered that most stigmatized of people – a homeless woman.

Initially, the idea of this terrified me. Here is a summary of the commentary that first ran through my head: This would never happen to me. I am not the kind of person that lives on the street. I have a life, I have friends, I have a dog, I have stable employment and residential history, references, education, skills, talents – I have worked hard all of my life to ensure stability for myself. How did this happen, HOW CAN I DO THIS?!?!?!?!

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From a recent post titled “What Are These Three Numbers” on the economics blog Econbrowser comes this chart:

These numbers, represented in billions of 2010 dollars, were taken from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office.

As you can see, the two tax cuts increased the deficit about $1.8 trillion dollars, while the proposed health care bill will actually modestly decrease the deficit. As one of the main anti-health care bill criticisms is its cost, this is a potentially effective talking point. (Plus, both of the tax cut bills passed via the reconciliation process, the proposed path to passage for the health care bill and the subject of a major to-do between the two political parties.)

But not everyone is buying the argument. Two responses to the post on the site:

You betray your agenda in that you are using statistics to lie.

These are not even remotely similar and your facile comparision is misleading. You juxtapose two laws that are mostly tax cuts (which allow people to keep more of what they earn) with a tax increase and spending bill.

Yes, I will stipulate that the Republicans were irresponsible by cutting taxes without also cutting spending, but they were at least starting from a position of small surpluses. It isn’t immoral to return some of that income to those that produced it.

The CBO score for the (health care bill) is also horribly misleading. It omits the “doctor fix” and is frontloaded with deficit reduction before the expanded benefits kick in. Tax increases start immediately and ramp up ahead of outlays until they take the lead in 2016.

In addition, I find it hard to take the cost estimates from 2015-2019 at face value. Every single expansion of government involvement in health care has ended up costing more than the initial estimates. I fail to see why this would be different…

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This analysis is BS. It basically states that the health care act doesn’t hurt the deficit. However, a lot of the taxes are back end loaded (read, never going to be enacted) and the other taxes to pay for this cover 10 years, to provide services for 4 or 6 years, meaning it takes twice as many taxes per year to cover the costs on an annualized basis, meaning this really is all a bunch of BS and going to result in additional huge deficits. Especially since there are no real cost control measures.

As you struggle to pay your mortgage or break even on the sale of your home, does it help to take a gander at Big Time Listings? This blog by a Chicago-area real estate site focuses on the sales of celebrity homes. Considering the current state of the housing market for folks who don’t appear regularly on “Entertainment Tonight”, reveling in the purchase of a $35 million mansion by Dreamworks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg might or might not be just the ticket. Or try this “exclusive”:

Brad and Angelina enlarge their Los Angeles compound further; long-goateed actor quietly pays $1.1M to buy a missing link for his estate in Los Angeles’ Los Feliz neighborhood — a two-bedroom, 3,232-square-foot house that his compound had bordered on three sides

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have increased the size of their compound in Los Angeles’ Los Feliz neighborhood, with Pitt quietly paying $1,100,000 to buy a missing link for his property in the form of a 3,232-square-foot house that his estate largely had surrounded.

In a Big Time Listings exclusive, we can report on Pitt’s latest purchase, which like some other property of his was made through his Mondo Bongo Trust. Records show that Pitt purchased the property on August 6 from the estate of the late Anne Tyler Sherman.

Built in 1920, the two-bedroom, former Sherman house — whose property is shaped like a key — sits on a 0.25-acre (10,759-square-foot) lot in the Oaks area of Los Feliz. It helps Pitt round out his compound and means that Brad now owns close to 2 full acres in the Oaks…

Features in the house include two baths, a stone fireplace, a huge main room, a bonus room, and “a bar area and a secret cave,” according to the MLS.

Secret cave? Well, they gotta keep all those kids somewhere…

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I was in my credit union to do some banking recently and I asked the guy helping me if he’d seen an uptick in new customers lately. “Definitely,” he said. “A lot of people are coming in from the big banks, because they said they read about doing it on the Web.”

Two months ago we did a post about the Move Your Money site, a project started at the Huffington Post with the goal of encouraging people — and in some cases universities and even cities — to move their money from the big financial institutions at the heart of the 2008 financial crisis to local credit unions and community banks.

Since then, some in the media have caught on to the story, and the Move Your Money Facebook page has grown from 5000 to 33,000 fans. (One person not a fan, apparently: Timothy Geithner, who said he didn’t think this was a good idea when asked about it during an interview with Politico. Start watching at 3:40.)

There’s also a contest afoot to come up with the best song called “Lookin’ Like A Fool With Your Money In a Bank,” based on Larry Platt’s “Pants on the Ground” audition for “American Idol.”

Two entries:

Clearly, Geithner hasn’t seen these yet, or he wouldn’t be such a sourpuss.

Others may be cutting back, but the EconomyBeat Podcast is growing! On this episode we have a full hour of economy stories from independent and station based producers compiled, curated and constructed by the fine folks at Michigan Radio. From a story about a family living on a beach, to a former GM employee looking to downsize his life, to a teenager weighing options for after high school, this one hour documentary explores how people are finding the strength to get them through economic hard times. It’s a great mix of personal stories and intimate portraits alongside contextual interviews and reports. Check it out.

Podcast: Download (Duration: 55:12 — 37.9MB)

Do you have a piece you think should be considered for the EconomyBeat Podcast? Put it on PRX, and add the tag ‘ebpodcast’.

Our second post featuring the graphics of Mike Licht, of NotionsCapital.

Click on an image to see it full size.

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See the first post of Licht’s work here.

Last week the Commerce Department announced that new home sales had dropped to their lowest level in almost 50 years of tracking. Below is a chart of Case-Shiller-index price declines in real estate from 2007-9, by city. Posted on Dr. Housing Bubble.

Las Vegas has been the worst market for sellers, having dropped from 15% to 45% to a shocking 55% off the highest level, in 2007, 2008, and 2009, respectively. Phoenix, Miami, Detroit, and Tampa also continue to look just dreadful, while San Diego, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington, and Boston appear to have stabilized somewhat.

For an in-depth analysis of and/or more news about the real estate situation, check out Dr. Housing Bubble and The Housing Bubble Blog.