Why Italy (and Greece and Spain) are in debt, not to mention why other westerners have been calling them (us?) lazy for 200 years:

Today, Sicily’s regional government has 1,800 employees — more than the British Cabinet Office — and the island employs 26,000 auxiliary forest rangers; in the vast forestlands of British Columbia, there are fewer than 1,500. 

Out of a population of five million people in Sicily, the state directly or indirectly employs more than 100,000 of them and pays pensions to many more. It changed its pension system eight years after the rest of Italy. (One retired politician recently won a case to keep an annual pension of 480,000 euros, about $584,000.)

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/07/sicily-fact-of-the-day.html

Olympic Sailing NOT on TV

why have sports that won't be televised at all???  Learn from the America's cup here folks:

Team racing, match racing, catamarans, skiffs, windsurfing, and kiting would be a lot of fun to have on TV.  Everything else is boring to watch, so find a different way to celebrate the sport internationally. That said, good luck to all my friends over in England competing.

Is it just preference?

Krugman may wax nostalgic about a childhood spent in the suburbs where plumbers and middle managers lived side by side. But I doubt that many of his fervent fans would really want to live there. If so, they might try Texas.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-19/how-the-elites-built-america-s-economic-wall.html 

From the department of unintended consequences:

“They also receive free dental and medical services during their imprisonment. “Combined with the relative safety of their work in prison compared to the dangerous work at sea, Australian imprisonment is very desirable.”

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/marginalrevolution/hCQh/~3/XyRhDWuoJFE/immigration-to-australian-jail.html 

is this coming east?