25 years old and deep in debt

[LaCroix]

I don't think either is going to be mistaken as an actual sexual assailant. Yes the sleepwalking statue looks more realistic, can could theoretically be mistaken as a living person for a brief moment in time, and living people can theoretically commit sexual assault. I thought this potential was not so important, because he is rather obviously a statue, and with all the publicity I doubt there are many people on campus that aren't aware of the statue. Plus he gives no signs that he is about to assault anyone, and as a statue is incapable of approaching a woman.

What I was trying to express was that if we are going to see sexual violence in a statue, it would make as much sense to see it in David as the sleepwalking guy. Though personally I see it as close to zero in both cases.

My problem with the "sexual assault" theme is that this is a normal looking guy in his underwear apparently sleepwalking. If people are freaked out by the image of a normal looking guy in his underwear, I think they have issues.

the statue is creepy, as mentioned. all it takes for it to be wrong is a woman with a history (or without a history) to happen to see it from the corner of her eye, or while walking past it, and feel unsettled by it. this isn't an extreme circumstance with one outlier, either, as there have been hundreds of reports. also, whenever there is a report there tends to be several people who were equally as disturbed but decided not to report it .. just because. so, this is clearly an issue. so, i don't know why you're shrugging this off as "lol ridiculous; silly emotional women"

you're not gonna see it in david because david is obviously a statue that doesn't pretend to be hyper-realistic

i think the bigger issue is that you can't comprehend why a woman might think differently

[garbon]

I don't think silly women. I think silly college students who just learned the term "trigger" in their intro to feminism course.

[LaCroix]

I don't think silly women. I think silly college students who just learned the term "trigger" in their intro to feminism course.

wrong demographic

[Phillip V]

Student-Debt Rise Concentrated Among Those With Poor Credit

The nation's sharp rise in student debt is being driven largely by Americans with poor credit.

Overall student debt rose 12% to $1.08 trillion in 2013, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York said in a report released Tuesday. Student debt is the second-largest form of household credit after mortgages.
...
Of the 12% overall rise in student debt, a third—or four percentage points—came from borrowers with the worst credit history, or those with credit scores of 620 or lower. About five percentage points came from those with scores between 621 and 680, and roughly two points was from those in the middle quintile—scores between 681 and 720. Only about one percentage point came from those in the 720-to-780 range. And among those with scores above 780, student debt was flat.
...
But delinquencies among student borrowers are rising, a development that could inflict further damage on borrowers' credit. That could make it harder for student borrowers to qualify for loans to purchase cars, homes and other items.

Roughly 11.5% of student-loan balances were delinquent in the fourth quarter of 2013, meaning a payment hadn't been made in at least 90 days, the New York Fed said. That's up from a delinquency rate of about 8.5% two years earlier.
...
Student loans have the highest delinquency rate among any form of household debt. And the official delinquency rate likely understates the problem, since many borrowers are still in school and thus don't have to make payments yet. Excluding those borrowers from the overall pool of student debt would likely increase the delinquency rate.

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2014/02/18/student-debt-rise-concentrated-among-those-with-poor-credit/

[The Brain]

I thought black people paid cash?

[Admiral Yi]

They're big on lay away.

[Valmy]

They're big on lay away.

I never got the appeal of that.  You don't get it right then AND you have to pay a fee right?  Seems like paying more for no reason.

[ulmont]

They're big on lay away.

I never got the appeal of that.  You don't get it right then AND you have to pay a fee right?  Seems like paying more for no reason.

As you might expect, the more somebody really needs credit, the more expensive it is.  Lay-away is just a forced savings plan.

[Caliga]

It's for poors.

[Capetan Mihali]

Yi may be including rent-to-own in that.

[Admiral Yi]

Yi may be including rent-to-own in that.

Actually, it's just based on one black secretary I used to work with who was addicted to lay away.

[Savonarola]

I heard this on NPR this morning:

The Business Of Frats: Shifting Liability For Trauma And Injury
February 25, 2014 3:32 AM

Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images
For those of you keeping track of the headlines detailing sexual assault and hazing at frat houses, it may come as no surprise that fraternities have a dark side. Caitlin Flanagan, a writer at The Atlantic, spent a year investigating Greek houses and discovered that "the dark power of fraternities" is not just a power over pledges and partygoers, but one held over universities as well.

"Fraternities are now mightier than the colleges and universities that host them," she writes. Alumni do tend to give generously to their alma maters, yes, but it's more than that. The American college system is slave to its need for a continual flow of students, Flanagan says. How else to convince underprepared, soon-to-be-loan-ridden students to attend than by marketing the experience as a major party? Colleges compete for these students with perks, frats and all their glory among them.

Flanagan's piece looks deeper into the tragic and unsavory practices rampant in Greek houses, and the ways in which they protect themselves when serious problems arise.

Interview Highlights

On the role of fraternities at colleges today

One of the biggest roles that I think people will be surprised to learn, is they're the largest single provider of undergraduate housing in the United States. One out of every eight students who lives on campus lives in Greek housing. So that's just this tremendous amount of housing that colleges don't have to pay for, they don't have to maintain, they don't have to insure. And it represents one of the many ways that colleges, as much as they're bedeviled by fraternities, are deeply dependent on that.

On how fraternities are insured

They don't get insurance. They self-insure. What that means, really, is they needed to put aside their old rivalries and band together and create a vast sum of money. The main one is called the FRMT, Fraternity Risk Management Trust. No one knows how much money is in that. The closest I could get to the amount is that it is under $1 billion. And when a kid is injured, when somebody is killed, when somebody drinks himself to death, when a girl is sexually assaulted, the check ultimately comes from [the fraternities'] own pocket.

On whether the universities face liability for incidents like rape and other crimes

They may have a moral obligation to address it. They rarely have a legal obligation to address it ... . When you have the right to monitor student behavior, you have legal responsibility for it when something goes wrong. But nowadays because that policy ... has fallen, the college is not responsible for what students do on their own time. If the kid slipped and fell at 7-Eleven, the college wouldn't be responsible. And similarly, if he or she slips at the fraternity, which is a private society in a privately owned building on privately owned land, the university has no responsibility.

On who ends up paying the claims if there are civil lawsuits


The most expensive part of joining a fraternity is the portion of your dues that go to fraternity insurance. And I think a lot of parents feel calmed by that. What will happen is, if Johnny has made any mistake the night that there's a big incident, if he was downstairs at the fraternity having beers and upstairs someone is getting sexually assaulted, and he's under 21, he's going to be a named defendant. He'll get dropped from his fraternity insurance in a second. The fraternity will probably drop him from the fraternity ...

It would come from your parents' homeowner policy. College kids' legal address is their parents' home address. Their liability is covered under the umbrella policy of their parents' homeowners insurance. And the fraternity is going to drop them in a second if it possibly can because they don't want to pay their liability once there's been an incident. And if the kid needs a legal defense, his parents are going to have to find the money for that too.

On what fraternities can do to fix some of these problems

Everyone knows exactly what they need to do because there have been very careful studies on this. If you take alcohol out of the fraternity house, if you make it an alcohol free residence, the number of claims drops by 85 percent and the severity of those claims, the dollar amount of those claims, drops by 95 percent. You show me any other industry that would have a chance to drop the number of claims by 85 percent and the severity by 95 percent by making a single change. If the fraternities are serious about cleaning up their act, that's the change they need to make and it's a very painful one. It will probably devastate them, in terms of the numbers of kids who want to join, because pumping the keg is part of being in a fraternity in American culture. But that's the change that would clean the system up.

"National Lampoon's Alcohol Free Animal House" would be the lamest movie ever made.   

(Not that National Lampoon doesn't already have a number of strong contenders in that field.)

[alfred russel]

I really find the "sue the frat" theme to be unfortunate. When I was in college 5 of us rented a house from an old lady. The crap that went down in that house was every bit as stupid as what went on in frats, with plenty of underage drinking and drugs.

It was a hell of a lot cheaper for us to live in that house than in dorms or a frat. A main reason was probably the fact that the liability coverage was dealt with by simply avoiding having any deep pockets to go after (as opposed to rules combined with monitoring and liability insurance in dorms and frats). I guess that many frats would want a similar set up, and it is unfortunate they can't get it. Who wins by pushing students off campus and out of national organizations?

[garbon]

What the hell? Who wants to be a college student in alcohol free housing?

[alfred russel]

When you have the right to monitor student behavior, you have legal responsibility for it when something goes wrong.

Whoever said this is worse than Hitler.