Reuters;

New York City has agreed to pay Occupy Wall Street protesters more than $100,000 for property damaged or lost when police cleared out their encampment in a downtown Manhattan park in 2011, according to court documents signed on Tuesday.

h/t signaler222

Italy may be providing a preview of how other countries are going to handle their out-of-control spending problems: Spend even more!

Those old solutions [to financial woes] … emphasize fiscal frugality (cuts to social welfare), flexible labour markets (low wages) and structural adjustment (throwing people out of work).” Given a choice, voters will choose anything else: “they will vote for anyone who promises another way. If the only ones promising another way are racists, sybarites and clowns, that’s who people will vote for.”

h/t Mark L.

And that’s why my basement windows are booby-trapped.
(Related)

If you’re an old fogie like me then you may have been similarly perplexed over the years as to how high school and university students were able to achieve extremely top marks yet seemed exceptionally ignorant about so-called basic facts. Quiz many of them on basic economics or history or geography or even the Times Tables and more often than not a blank stare is all you get back.
There is now an explanation for this and it lies in a trend called Grade Inflation. Simply put, this is the tendency of student grades to rise over time. There are several possible reasons for this phenomenon. All of them should lead employers to be very suspicious about the veracity of transcripts provided by younger applicants.
Some educators are trying to fight back against it but guaranteed there will be a lot of forces pushing back against them. Too many students now feel entitled to top marks even if they’ve done little to no work to justify them.

Continue reading →

In what will surely have the heads of big government supporters spinning in surprise, the following was recently revealed about the free phone program in America:

The U.S. government spent about $2.2 billion last year to provide phones to low-income Americans, but a Wall Street Journal review of the program shows that a large number of those who received the phones haven’t proved they are eligible to receive them.
A review of five top recipients of Lifeline support conducted by the FCC for the Journal showed that 41% of their more than six million subscribers either couldn’t demonstrate their eligibility or didn’t respond to requests for certification.

And that’s why I’m doing bug-out drills;

Spots at the event, which was organized by the University of Toronto Sexual Education Centre (SEC) to kick off its sexual awareness week, were coveted. By 7 p.m., the hour when nudity became allowed in most of the venue, the event was at capacity with 189 people inside, said Dylan Tower, the external education and outreach co-ordinator of the centre, which is an affiliated levy group of the U of T student union.
[…]
Daniel, who asked to only use his first name, said he’d already texted his girlfriend about coming to the club with him on another night. “It kind of made it a really safe environment, almost with training wheels,” he said.

Interesting times in Canada’s business world these days:

Walking into a job interview with a Canadian architectural firm, a young candidate brings something unexpected: mom. An employee with the British Columbia company says it was the first time she had seen a parent shadow the hiring process, describing what ensued as “a bit of an awkward situation.” But she adds that there have been at least five or six recent occasions in which a mother or father sat with their grown child in the waiting room before an interview. According to experts, this could soon become commonplace.

Discussion here (audio podcast).
Actual Conversation between a management official at a prominent Canadian business school and a senior HR businesswoman:
Business school manager: “We see these parents all the time. They do their kids no favours.”
HR businesswoman: “You’d think the kids would be absolutely mortified?!”
Business school manager: “Believe it or not, the kids aren’t mortified at all. They get their parents to complain about their grades, push for interviews and attend coaching sessions. I don’t get it. At that age, I wanted to be independent more than anything. These kids just want to be coddled. Doesn’t say a lot for our next generation of leaders!”

It appears there’s a lot more going on at New York University, Columbia, Cornell and Syracuse than just studying. In a recent article it was revealed that more than a few female students are turning to other sources of income than traditional student jobs like waitressing:

Alex Cranshaw, 22, who graduated from NYU last year, said three of his female classmates had sugar daddies — including a woman whose benefactor financed a whole semester in Madrid. “He funded her tuition, paid for her housing, gave her spending money and paid for her airfare,” Cranshaw said. “She told her parents she got a scholarship. They had no idea.”

These young girls grew up in an environment of supercharged entitlement, told never to judge, and the s-word, “shame”, scrubbed from their lexicon. Why is anyone surprised they turned out this way?

And that’s why I’ve invested in subterranean housing – University of Toronto student group hosts “epic sex club adventure”.

We’ve long known about Internet Addiction but this is ridiculous!