Folly of the DayThe Provost Warned the World That Artificial Intelligence Was Hollowing Out a College Degree. He Had a Machine Write It for Him.
The essay was not plagiarised in the ordinary sense; it was outsourced to the very thing it denounced, by the one man on campus with the authority to punish a student for doing it. That is not hypocrisy, which requires a private belief at odds with a public one — it is something emptier. He did not disbelieve his argument. He simply could not be troubled to be the author of it, and never imagined that the detector he presides over would be turned around and pointed at him.
Source: The College Fix
The WireThe Council Is £113.5 Million in the Red, So It Is Advertising Two Six-Figure Posts to Find the Savings.
There is a defensible case for every line of this, which is precisely what makes it exemplary: no one in the chain did anything indefensible, and the outcome is a bankrupt authority buying two more executives to supervise its poverty. Institutions in difficulty do not reach for a smaller version of themselves; they reach for a more senior one, because the only instrument a bureaucracy fully trusts to cut a bureaucracy is another layer of bureaucracy.
Source: Barnet Post
The WireTwelve Councillors Had to Elect a Mayor From Among Themselves. The Council Paid a Private Contractor Nearly $5,000 to Count the Votes.
Twelve people in one room, each capable of raising a hand, and the council concluded the operation required a professional. The expense does not buy accuracy — a dozen votes can be counted twice by a child — it buys deniability, which is the commodity every committee is really shopping for. Somebody on that body did not trust eleven colleagues to count to seven, and was willing to put ratepayers' money behind the suspicion.
Source: ABC News (Australia)
The WireThe City Spent €28,000 Replacing a Logo It Had Used Since 1984. Councillors Were Then Told They Had No Power to Stop It.
A city that has stood since the thirteenth century decided its chief communications problem was the shape of a letter. Note where the money actually went: not on the design, which was cheap, but on the proposition that identity is something an executive purchases rather than something a place accumulates. The councillors' impotence is the real finding — the decision was placed beyond the reach of the only people in the building anyone had voted for.
Source: RTE
The WireHe Carried His Rubbish to a Footpath Beside the Communal Bins and Left It There. The Delivery Label on the Box Had His Address on It.
He walked the full distance to the bins and then declined the last two feet, which is the exact measure of the thing — not an inability to dispose of rubbish but an unwillingness to complete the act of being a neighbour. And he posted his own name to the scene, because a man who cannot be bothered to lift a lid is unlikely to be bothered to check what is written on the box.
Source: Royal Borough of Greenwich
The WireHe Took Over £200,000 From Seven Householders for Work He Could Not Fund, and Emptied the Business Account and His Own at the Same Cash Machine Minutes Apart.
The two withdrawals at the same machine minutes apart are the whole character of the man in one gesture: he did not think of the business account and his own as different places, merely as different cards in the same wallet. Fraud of this kind is rarely a plan. It is a habit of mind that treats other people's money as an administrative detail, maintained with such confidence that it never occurs to the holder that a bank keeps a record of which card went in first.
Source: GOV.UK / Insolvency Service
The WireInvestors Were Promised Legal Ownership of Three Liverpool Buildings, Registered at the Land Registry. The Company Selling Them Did Not Own Any of the Three.
A hundred companies is not an empire, it is a hedge maze, and its purpose is that no one standing at the entrance can see which turning leads to the thing being sold. The investors asked the sensible question — who owns the building — and received a true-sounding answer about a company that owned nothing. This is what corporate structure is for, in the hands of a man who has built enough of it to forget it was ever meant to be a container rather than a disguise.
Source: GOV.UK / Insolvency Service
The WireThe Company Claimed £37,500 of Pandemic Support on a £150,000 Turnover. The Company Had Never Traded at All.
The invented turnover was £150,000 — a figure chosen to be unremarkable, which is the fraudster's instinct and his undoing, because an unremarkable figure still has to have come from somewhere. He understood that the scheme asked a question and required an answer. It did not occur to him that the answer would later be compared against a bank statement showing a company that had never sold anything to anyone.
Source: GOV.UK / Insolvency Service
Black-Robed EgomaniaHe Wrote to the Supreme Court to Ask for More Time. He Used the Last Two Paragraphs to Advise the Supreme Court on When It Ought to Grant Bail.
He was writing to confess that he had not finished the work, and could not resist appending instruction to the court that had set him the deadline. That is the particular vanity the robe cultivates: a man accustomed to being the most authoritative voice in his own room comes to believe the authority travels with him, and reaches the Supreme Court of India in the form of a postscript nobody asked for.
Source: LiveLaw
LazyTownTwenty-Eight Times a Lorry Went Out With No Driver Card in the Tachograph, Over 3,323 Kilometres. Drivers Told Investigators the Cards Were Pulled Out So the Hours Would Not Be Recorded.
Inserting the card takes a second and is the single easiest obligation in the whole of road transport; the drivers found it less effort to commit a regulatory offence twenty-eight times. Half a fleet is now idle, an auditor is on retainer until 2027, and the consultants are booked for a year — the entire edifice erected because nobody could be troubled to push a piece of plastic into a slot.
Source: GOV.UK / Office of the Traffic Commissioner