Help wanted: must love snow, penguins
Canada Post Corp. may not need the same staffing levels as it moves toward ending home delivery, but job opportunities exist elsewhere, if you're prepared to move south. Way south.
The Antarctic Heritage Trust has put out the call to "committed individuals" interested in joining a team of four to spend five months running the shop, post office, maintenance and museum operation in beautiful downtown Port Lockroy (Population: 4) on the tiny Goudier Island, just off the Antarctic Peninsula.
Among the qualities the trust is looking for is good health and fitness, retail experience and co-ordination. This last quality is needed, the job description notes, as candidates must be able to "carry a big heavy box over slippery rocks and slushy snow whilst dodging penguins."
EU's power rangers step it up a notch
On the heels of bans on incandescent light bulbs and high-powered vacuum cleaners, the European Union is taking aim at the kitchen.
Kettles, toasters, bread makers, steamers and blenders are all in the EU's sights, but today the curtain falls on the sale of energy-wasting ovens and stovetops as the EU continues to roll out its program to slash household energy use.
EU directives have long been a favourite pet peeve of euroskeptics, and their banner carrier, the Daily Mail, sounded the alarm for cooking appliances a month ago: "Now Europe comes for the Sunday roast."
Coffee makers have already taken one for the team, Reuters reports, with last month's directive that requires insulated jugs and warming plates that power down five minutes after brewing.
And don't even mention "Hoovergate," the hue and cry which arose when the EU's Sept. 1 ban on high-powered vacuum cleaners sparked panic buying, with stock flying out the doors faster than euros out of a Greek bank.
But there's another benefit to the ecodesign program – European appliance makers will gain an advantage over cheaper foreign manufacturers.
"These rules mean that design standards will go up, and low-quality Asian imports that cannot stand the heat will have to leave the kitchen," Stamatis Sivitos, campaigner for the lobby group Coolproducts Campaign, told Reuters on Thursday.
Carnegie Mellon wants … not you
Carnegie Mellon University's graduate computer science program sent out about 800 e-mailed messages around noon on Monday congratulating applicants on being accepted.
Later that evening, the prestigious Pittsburgh institution sent out a second message to the lucky grad students: Sorry, you're not in – we goofed.
The initial "Welcome to Carnegie Mellon!" messages were the result of "serious mistakes" (you think?) in the university's process for generating acceptance letters, and Carnegie Mellon would conduct a review to prevent another error, spokesman Kenneth Walters said.
"We mistakenly sent you an offer of admission to Carnegie Mellon's MS in CS program," the notices said.
"This was an error on our part. While we certainly appreciate your interest in our program, we regret that we are unable to offer you admission this year."
Maybe they should think of getting some kind of computer whizzes in to to fix the problems with the … graduate computer science program system.
By the way, Carnegie Mellon's computer science graduate school tied for No. 1 with Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley in U.S. News & World Report's most recent rankings, according to Associated Press.
Help wanted: must love cash, have ego
"[Hedge funds managers] earn half the performance of index funds, charge 30 times the fees of mutual funds, pay half the income tax rates of school teachers, have triple the ego of rock stars and fewer disclosure requirements than the NSA."
Motley Fool columnist Morgan Housel's imagined take on a conversation between managers of hedge funds, which he calls indistinguishable from most mutual funds other than the fact their fees are astronomically higher.
Anyone want to split the bill?
Vice Media Inc. chief executive Shane Smith had a good week at the blackjack tables during the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last month, and so naturally wanted to treat himself and friends to a nice dinner.
And when your winnings hover around $1-million (U.S.), as his guests told the New York Times, you might well want to splash out a bit. And that's what the native Montrealer did, ringing up a $300,000 tab at the Prime steakhouse at the Bellagio casino.
No word whether he checked each item on the bill – the highest-priced main course is a 28-ounce bone-in rib-eye for $85.
But with $20,000 bottles of wine in free flow, and throw in appetizers and desserts, you can get to 300 grand pretty fast.
U.S. student debt nears Canada's GDP
So just how big has the U.S. student loan debt load gotten? Big. Plenty big.
Their total debt accounted for the smallest proportion of Americans' household debt until 2009, Quartz reports.
But things turned around after Americans paid down their household debt during the recession, while students continued to borrow for school, even in the face of rising tuition costs.
Now, just five years later, $1.2-trillion (U.S.) in outstanding U.S. student debt is higher than all other types of non-mortgage debt (which still accounts for 69 per cent of Americans' total borrowing).
Another way of looking at it: The debt load of American students has far surpassed the GDP of Australia, Ireland and New Zealand combined.
And if it continues to rise along the same trajectory, its next milestone – Canadian GDP, at $1.5-trillion – won't be far off.