Lifestyle topics
Result of a survey of CEO backgrounds: Background: 55% of FTSE 100 chiefs have a background in finance or accounting. 15% come from marketing; 14% technology. The best industries for working through the ranks are retail and hospitality, where around 21% of bosses started out in lowly roles. Education: The majority of CEOs have at …
In 1839 a Cyclone slammed south eastern India with high winds and a 40 foot storm surge, destroying city of Coringa. Storm waves swept inland, destroying 20,000 ships and killing an estimated 300,000 people. My comment: Was that a freak, one-off event? I don’t know. Maybe no one knows. But it is the sort of …
Continue reading ‘Maybe an historical event that had escaped your notice ?’ »
A propos yesterday’s posting about student accommodation……… a study by researchers at Georgetown University found the the inflation-adjusted costs of attending college rose 169% between 1980 and 2019. Over the same period the earnings for workers aged 22 to 27 rose 19%. (CNBC.com). My comment: One of the things I find amazing are the exorbitant …
A college dorm designed by Warren Buffet’s right hand man, Charlie Munger, is being compared to an 11 storey prison. Buffet has donated 200 million dollars to the University of California, Santa Barbara, provided they adopt Munger’s design, in which 94% of the rooms have no windows, the idea being to encourage students to spend …
“Being President is like running a cemetery; you’ve got a lot of people under you and nobody is listening”. (President Bill Clinton, quoted in the Pittsburg Post-Gazette)
More than 40 countries at the United Nations’ COP26 climate summit have pledged to phase out the use of power plants fueled by coal, the single biggest contributor to climate change. The countries signing onto the deal included major coal users, including Poland, Vietnam, and Chile. Some of the world’s biggest consumers of coal, including …
Graduates face stiff jobs competition. Competition for graduate jobs has reached a record high with more than 90 applications for every position, according to the Institute of Student Employers. Last year’s graduates left university in the toughest jobs market since the last recession, as a backlog of unemployed graduates intensified the scramble for jobs. A …
There is a backlog of more than 250,000 unsolved murders in the US, a backlog that grows by 6000 every year. Police departments are resolving a lower percentage of cases than ever before. In prior decades the rate of homicide resolution was 70%; it is now down to about 60%, and continuing to fall. In …
loneliness pushed many Americans online in search of a love connection. But romance scams often left them with an empty bank account as well as a broken heart. For the past three years, people have reported losing more money on romance scams than on any other type of fraud, according to the FTC’s Consumer Sentinel …
“Scarce labor is becoming a fixture of the U.S. economy, reshaping the workforce and prodding firms to adapt by raising wages, reinventing services, and investing in automation,” The Wall Street Journal reports. The exodus of workers spans the labor market but is most pronounced in the service industries, and the numbers are very large: 4.3 …
The following are some facts about violence against women in the UK: – A woman dies at the hands of a man every three days. – 1,425 women were killed in the UK between 2009 and 2018. – Almost all young women have experienced sexual harassment in public places. – Almost one in three women …
The University of Sussex, UK, has said it will not tolerate threats to “academic freedoms” amid calls for a professor to be sacked over her views on transgender issues. Defenders of Professor Kathleen Stock, an expert in analytic philosophy, have claimed transgender activists have launched a campaign to “bully” her out of her role, The …
Continue reading ‘Bullying vs. transphobia: the Sussex culture war’ »
I recently asked a British publisher if they could send a publication to an address in Washington DC. The publication never, apparently, arrived, so I contacted said publisher again. This time they said they had sent it to “Washington DC, United States Minor Outlying Islands” I had to point out to them that Washington DC …
The Washington Post reported Sunday that millions of private financial records shared with the newspaper showed that members of the global elite, including King Abdullah II of Jordan and other country leaders, used a secretive offshore system to hide billions of dollars from tax authorities, creditors, criminal investigators, and others. The documents detailed the Jordanian …
We arrived in New York last Tuesday and had to change airlines to reach our final destination. I thought for a moment that we had landed in an undeveloped country. The chaos, lack of help or helpful signs, the rather surly staff, the quixotic building layouts and what seemed like a route march to the …
