What Exactly Is College For? - Freakonomics - "SCHAPIRO: The question I’ve always thought about community colleges is, how do they succeed so vastly in excess of the resources that go into them? They’re so underfunded."
The University of Impossible-to-Get-Into - Freakonomics - "BLAIR: Over the past 50 years, the number of students going to school in the U.S. has increased almost twofold... When we look at this expansion of colleges to absorb this increase in demand, most schools have been expanding except schools at the very top... In most markets, what you want to do is get more market share. Even companies like Apple are engaged in this process. What’s surprising about this is that for most of their lifetime, elite colleges have been the largest colleges. So, Harvard, Yale — at one point they were the first, they were the only, and they were the largest. In fact, between 1940 to 1980, Stanford and Princeton expanded by quite a bit. This puzzle really is a modern phenomenon. Elite colleges have historically expanded with the population.
It was in the 1970s and ’80s that the elite schools stopped expanding. This happened even as demand was rising, and as less-elite schools were growing. Back then, even the most-selective schools weren’t that selective. As recently as the 1990s, in fact, admissions rates were much higher than today... in a normal market, firms tend to increase their supply to meet a rise in demand. But there is one market where that doesn’t happen.
BLAIR: The one market where you see this not happening as much is in the market for luxury goods. Take, for example, Hermes...
Did the student who got into both Penn State and Yale and went to Yale do better than if they’d gone to Penn State instead?
MILLER: Their result is that there was on average, no benefits in terms of higher earnings to attending a more elite school or a more selective school than a less selective school... They actually have a follow-on paper that uses more data. And they do find potentially a wage benefit for people from more economically disadvantaged groups, and minority students."
What Is the Future of College — and Does It Have Room for Men? - Freakonomics - "MILLER: There’s no effect on earnings from attending a more elite school for men once you control for applications and admissions. But we do find a significant effect of school selectivity on women. And then when we look deeper into this effect for women, we see that it is coming from including part-time and non-working women. So, women who attended a more selective school for college are more likely to participate in the labor force. For women, we find that attending a school that is more selective leads to a 14 percent increase in earnings.
In other words, the female wage premium isn’t necessarily driven by having a more lucrative career; it’s driven by college-educated women going from not working or working part-time to working full-time...
SIMMONS: Boys often get into trouble in school. They get very negative messages, often, in school. They turn away from some of the advantages of school because of those negative messages. The way that we are orienting ourselves toward particular behavior of children and rewarding children who are quiet and submissive and do everything that we want them to do — that’s a formula for girls, okay? Because we tend to be socialized in our families to do exactly that, to be obedient and to not resist what we are told to do and so forth. Naturally, the one thing girls are good at is staying in school, and they can keep going because that’s what we’ve been told that we should do. Boys are not quite the same...
BLEEMER: The year that affirmative action stopped, the Black and Hispanic population of U.C.L.A. fell by 60 percent.
That was in 1996. Between 2013 and 2020, U.C.L.A. expanded by 3,000 students; 90 percent of those new spots went to women. But it isn’t just Black and Hispanic men who were skipping college. According to a Pell Institute analysis, lower-income white men are less likely to go to college than their Black, Hispanic, and Asian counterparts. There is one group of men who attend college at rates even higher than women: gay men... he knows why so many fewer people are enrolling in college these days, especially young men. One of the main promises of a college education is that it opens your mind to new ideas, new bodies of knowledge, new ways of thinking. But he says that on most college campuses, that promise isn’t being kept.
KANELOS: I’ve spent a few decades in higher education, and I’ve had literally dozens of conversations with students and faculty who have felt the walls closing in the classroom or in the ambient culture of their institution. The statistics are out there. Sixty-six percent of students in higher education say they self-censor.
“Self-censor” as in not speaking their minds out of a concern they’ll be singled out as intolerant or politically incorrect. And yes, the statistics are out there. The Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology recently published research which found that more than 80 percent of Ph.D. students were “willing to discriminate against right-leaning scholars.” Meanwhile, more than a third of conservative professors and Ph.D. students say they have been “disciplined, or threatened with discipline, for their views.” It has long been established that college administrators and faculty members lean overwhelmingly left, so we shouldn’t be surprised they create environments conducive to students who do the same. And if you’re asking why college enrollment has been falling, especially among young men — well, in addition to all the reasons we’ve already heard about, including cost, one reason may be that a lot of potential college students simply feel unwelcome on most college campuses. And so Pano Kanelos is doing something about that.
KANELOS: The University of Austin is a university that’s in the process of being developed and built in Austin, Texas. It’s going to be America’s newest university.
And Kanelos is its first president. The University of Austin is presenting itself as a college devoted to liberal ideals of free speech as opposed to wokeism and political correctness"
Yale Now Has More Admins Than Undergrads Due To Huge Bureaucracy - "professor of English Leslie Brisman made light of the situation, remarking, “I think we don’t yet have a Vice President for the rights of the left-handed, but I haven’t checked this month,” before adding, “I think that if there weren’t so many people interfering with students’ lives … and faculty choices … there would be plenty of funds for more real teaching and research positions.” While some have suggested that burdensome government regulations have forced institutions such as Yale to hire an increasing number of administrators in order to ensure compliance, professor of law at the University of Colorado Paul Campos told the Yale Daily News that these burdensome regulations are “overblown.” Campos reportedly “suggested that the main driver has been the desire of administrators to accumulate power and influence within their institutions.”"
Saying no to teenager’s fancy college dreams: It’s worth the pain. - "Why are we parents so loath to set financial limits on our kids’ college ambitions? Maybe because it seems crass to bring money into their reach-for-the-stars dreams. Maybe because we cling to the hope of generous scholarships and lavish financial aid packages that will make our money worries moot. Maybe because we deeply believe the destiny of smart teenagers is to attend their dream school, and ours is to finance it. To do otherwise is to fail at middle-class parenting. So we finance it, or our kids do, 45 million of us owing a collective $1.6 trillion in student debt that not even Bernie Sanders could make disappear. You know what makes it disappear? Death... So my husband and I decided to go ahead and become the villains in a John Hughes movie... I’ve continued my scared-straight campaign ever since, periodically texting Ella links to articles about twentysomethings with $100,000 in debt, describing how massive student loans would hamstring her future. While there may be a few good reasons to opt for a fancy college and suck up the student loan debt (you need a really specific program, for instance, or statistics show you’ll earn far more money after you graduate), those didn’t apply to Ella’s situation. “If you want to be an artist and you graduate with a ton of student loan debt, you can’t afford to be an artist, anymore,” I told her, explaining that you become a creatively stymied wage slave instead... saying no is part of my job as a parent. Hasn’t it been my role all along to steer my kid toward smarter but seemingly less desirable choices? Carrots instead of Kit Kats, an early bedtime instead of an all-night YouTube binge? Children naturally hate those kinds of limits. They may temporarily hate us. But they’re too young and myopic to see how this one decision could make their lives harder for a long, long time. We can."
Clearly, a "toxic" parent who deserves to be abandoned in a nursing home
College Bribe Scandal Shows Elite-College Obsession - The Atlantic - "Instead of focusing on a college “search” to find the schools that will best fit a student, too many families are focusing on college “prep,” molding the student to fit a school... Students aren’t automatically happier at selective schools. At Harvard, rates of attempted suicide are nearly twice the national rate for college students. Graduates of elite schools aren’t necessarily better off in the working world, either. In 2018, more CEOs of the top 100 Fortune 500 companies graduated from Texas A&M than Harvard... In one survey, respondents listed Princeton as one of the top 10 law schools in the country. The problem? Princeton doesn’t have a law school... Nearly 90 percent of college students say they have cheated in school. An estimated 15 to 40 percent of high-school students have abused prescription drugs as study aids. As an Illinois high-school senior told me, many students view life as “a conveyor belt,” making monotonous scheduled stops “at high school, college, graduate school, a job, more jobs, some promotions, and then you die.”"
You don't need a college degree to land a high-paying trade job - "a growing number of people without a bachelor's degree are now out-earning those with one. The study found that in the years 2017 through 2019, on average, 16% of high school graduates, 23% of workers with some college and 28% of associate degree holders earned more money than half of all workers with a bachelor's degree. Tony Carnevale, one of the report's authors, says these findings support the idea that "you have to go to college" isn't always the best advice for high schoolers... The new report suggests that a student's field of study, the type of job they're training for and where they live can affect their earnings more than their type of degree... air traffic controllers, construction inspectors, respiratory therapists and cardiovascular technicians all earn more than, or about the same as, the median bachelor's degree holder."
Majority of college students have a mental illness: study - "depression among college students increased by nearly 135% over eight years, while anxiety surged 110%... Between 2020 and 2021, over 60% of students met the criteria for at least one mental illness — double the rate of 2013... they noted a decrease in the rate of college students seeking help and mental health services, especially among racial and ethnic minorities."
What Are College Students Paying For? - "deep discussions and dialogue in college classes can be rare. So what else are college students paying for? Some colleges have tried to make the campus experience itself the attraction... The University of Missouri “has a lazy river, waterfall, indoor beach club, and a grotto modeled after the one at the Playboy Mansion. Not to be outdone, Missouri State has put in a waterpark complete with zipline and lazy river, but insists on calling the lazy river a ‘current river’ because ‘Missouri State students are not lazy.’” So, the answer to “What else are students paying for?” includes college campuses as vacation destinations... as admissions offices at elite colleges increasingly deprioritize academic qualifications in favor of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” many of the most academically gifted students are landing at colleges outside the “Top 25,” and even the “Top 50,” like academic versions of Stephen Curry. Thus, just as the Internet broke up colleges’ monopolies on access to rare books and rare academic expertise, the deprioritization of academic qualifications in admissions is inadvertently breaking up the monopolies that highly ranked colleges used to have on students with the top test scores and grades. The Stephen Curry Effect is making it increasingly obvious that one does not need to go to a “top college” to have top students as peers... COVID stripped away many of the trappings of the modern university... In the 1960s and 1970s, proliferating colleges, with their swelling enrollments, needed more teachers. And it so happened that this era of college expansion coincided with the civil rights era, an era of protest. Many radical leftists, socialists, progressives, and Marxists saw an opportunity to use teaching to preach and promote their causes. Thus it was that during this time, the idea of using—or, rather, abusing—education as a platform to promote ideologies and activism began to spread. The fruits of this phenomenon still poison classrooms today. On the replacement of education with indoctrination in identity politics ideology, Brown University economics professor Glenn Loury says that “[t]o jump on a bandwagon, and to fill [students’] heads with slogans, rather than challenging them with the best that human beings of any color have thought through the ages … is a criminal abdication of our pedagogic responsibilities.”... many humanities departments today indoctrinate students in identity politics, which points fingers at races and genders that are said to “oppress” and focuses on calling out, canceling, and tearing down. As Joshua Mitchell points out in American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time, identity politics is a modern form of the ancient practice of scapegoating. It separates humanity into the pure and the stained based on race and gender and promises that, somehow, purging the stained can make things right. Many college students come ready to dig down to the depths of the human soul to see what’s there, but instead, they’re told that what matters is on the surface: race and gender. "Is this what we're paying for?" they're asking. Notre Dame political philosopher Patrick Deneen argues that a true education in the liberal arts is first and foremost not about pointing fingers but learning how to overcome one’s own weaknesses, malice, and addictions, which is hard work... America gutted its vocational training programs in the 1970s, and they have not recovered. This loss has contributed to turning a $4 billion US trade surplus in 1970 into an $860 billion trade deficit today. Vocational training is one of the great voids in American education. It most hurts disadvantaged populations, who have been stung by the worst effects of outsourcing and globalization. Many students who desperately want to work with their hands (often high “sensors” on the Myers–Briggs test and high in 3D spatial intelligence) go to college because they don’t know what else to do... Downsizing is another imperative to restore some normalcy to higher education. The length of college itself can be downsized to three years. Many Americans do not realize that in many other countries, such as the UK and France, three years is the norm for a college degree. And there are great colleges overseas offering staggeringly inexpensive—and sometimes free—degrees taught in English, in places like the Netherlands, Ireland, Belgium, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, France, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and Australia... a single year at either of the two American schools costs more than an entire bachelor’s degree at the University of Amsterdam, and two years at the two American schools cost more than an entire bachelor’s degree at University College London. The American degrees take an extra year to complete. The European schools offer world-famous cities and the chance to explore Europe and study or work for up to a year in an additional country through the European Union’s ERASMUS+ study abroad program. Thus, I tell my students that they should seriously consider going to college abroad. And the most obvious downsizing needed is in college administration, which is bloated ad absurdum. Consider that the University of Pennsylvania paid its “chief diversity officer” some $580,000 in the fiscal year ending in 2018. Meanwhile, Penn’s adjunct professors are paid about $6,000 per class. So, for the price of one chief diversity officer, 96 additional classes could have been offered. Moreover, to deliver what students are paying for, colleges are woefully in need of accountability... given that part of college is credentialing, should professors be held accountable for ensuring the value of the credentials they essentially regulate by having standardized exit exams, and tests to get out of college rather than just to get in?"
Opinion | My College Students Are Not OK - The New York Times - "the sociologists Daniel F. Chambliss and Christopher G. Takacs, who in their 2014 book, “How College Works,” found that students learn when they’re motivated, and “the strongest motivation to work on basic skills comes from an emotionally based face-to-face relationship with specific other people — for instance, the one-on-one writing tutorial with a respected professor who cares about this student’s work.” Those relationships are much harder to forge remotely, and students who don’t discover early on that they learn through relationships will never know to seek them out. Even Mr. Vancil, who wishes he could take all his classes remotely, said he learns a great deal from his frequent visits to his professors’ office hours."
Too bad for the libertariansDoes Philosophy Still Matter? - Freakonomics - "DUBNER: Here’s an easy question. What’s philosophy?
HERSHOVITZ: That is not an easy question. In fact, it was a question that my father asked when I first came home and said I wanted to study philosophy. And I had no idea how to answer the question. And I was stymied actually for years. And then Rex actually helped. So Rex was in second grade, and on the very first day, the teacher was memorializing what everyone wanted to be when they grew up, and she sent home a list. There were, like, doctors and firefighters and teachers. And then one of the things on the list was a math philosopher. And I knew this was my kid. I said to him, “Ms. Kind says you want to be a philosopher of math? What’s philosophy?” And just instantly, he says, to me, “Philosophy is the art of thinking.” And I think that’s a phenomenal answer. Philosophy is the art of thinking. So here’s what I think marks out a philosophical question: It’s a question that requires you to think in an effort to understand the world better.
DUBNER: You cite David Hills from Stanford saying that philosophy is, “The ungainly attempt to tackle questions that come naturally to children using methods that come naturally to lawyers.”...
Even if we do sometimes engage with philosophy in our ordinary lives, it has plainly lost some of its standing in society. If you go back to just 1970, nearly one of every 100 bachelor’s degrees was awarded in philosophy and religious studies; today, it’s barely half of that. Philosophers and philosophy used to figure prominently in statecraft and government — including in ancient Greece, of course, but in the formation of the United States, too. Our founders engaged deeply with the work of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and others; today, philosophy is pretty much absent from our political and policy conversations."
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, What is the countryside for? - "I bet that the people on the panel tonight who don't go to the countryside much are the ones who are going to be most in favor of rewilding it. I suspect there's a cultural war battle coming about what the countryside is for and for whom and my sympathies tend to lie with those who do live in it. Farmers who are worried that what's going on here is middle class activists seek to turn our countryside into a kind of artificial bourgeois Eden"
Twilight (painting) - Wikipedia - "Twilight (Norwegian: Skumring) is a 1981 painting by the Norwegian artist Odd Nerdrum. It depicts a woman defecating in a forest clearing. Nerdrum presented the painting as a "tribute to the natural, the true human being whom we all fear"... Joseph Beuys, who had been Nerdrum's teacher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, described Twilight as "possibly the most radical" painting he knew of."
Daniel N. Gullotta 🇺🇦 on Twitter - "I know I am going to sound like an old man yelling at a cloud, but "back in my day," the idea of protesting my grade seemed unimaginable. Yet the frequency of complaints I get about grades, the pleas for extra credit, etc. is astonishing. Has it always been like this?"
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Peace and Goodwill - "'The British, apparently are world leaders in saying sorry, we do it all the time, eight times a day on average., much more than other nations. And a lot of the time when we've nothing to be sorry for. It probably goes up over Christmas. Most things do over the season of peace and goodwill. Joy for many, certainly, but also domestic violence, suicides, and so much family breakdown lawyers call the first working day after the holiday divorce Monday. There's a real sense that however much we may apologize, we fall out a lot, not just in our personal relationships, but in our political discourse. We’ve become more dogmatic, more strident, less able to disagree decently. When should we keep quiet? When should we say sorry, properly? When should we compromise? Agree respectfully to disagree? And when should we stick to our guns? Because it's a matter of principle on which we are, of course, undoubtedly, right'...
‘Truth is essential for peace, because only when we've spoken the truth and reconciled ourselves to the truth, can we find a genuine and lasting peace'...
‘I am one of those Brexiteers. And actually, I find that whenever I meet family, I'm not the one starting an argument. I feel interrogated by other people because they want me to morally justify my position. And because I'm, I'm a peaceful person, I just try to avoid the argument. And I find that whenever I just try to deflect or move on, I sense that they think I'm weak, or my argument actually has no moral foundation, and I can't defend it. So I find that whenever I try to be peaceful or amicable, sometimes with family, it just looks like I've lost and that makes me feel kind of wretched.’...
‘You know, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which everybody seems to understand. You start with safety, and then love and belonging, and then self acceptance. And then you reach this great place of self actualization. The interesting thing about Maslow's hierarchy of needs is that’s our name for it. He called his book, a theory of human motivation. And in the last decade of his life, he said, There is something that lies beyond self actualization, being yourself. He said, it's self transcendence. When you can come to that place where actually you say, well, this is my view, this is how I see the world. But others see it differently. I can transcend my ego, my, my need to be right and to be heard, I can listen more, I don’t have to speak as much. I realize this program is all about speaking.’"
Pinocchio - Rotten Tomatoes - "Tomatometer 27%
Audience Score 29%"
Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio - Rotten Tomatoes - "Tomatometer 97%
Audience Score 85%"
Crucify Jesus yourself - Filemon Wesselman - artKitchen Gallery - "CRUCIFY JESUS ??BY YOURSELF! (DIY kit) - 3D print, Edition 1/3- last available. one of the exhibits at the Twente Biennale contemporary art festival in Enschede, Netherlands, in 2015. The "trademark" of Christians is the crucifix; the image of the body of Jesus on the cross. I was raised Christian and have seen this image all my childhood. I stared in amazement at the large wooden crucifix behind the preaching pastor or pastor. During a trip to the holy places of Israel I was confronted with this image many times a day. At the same time there were many tourist market stalls where toys were sold. Just like in almost every toy store there was a lot violent toys. Weapons were held by "action figures". Children could wage their own fantasy war. But the cruel image of Jesus on the cross was nowhere to be seen. Also no action figures the person that it was all about. This self-crucifixion set raises many questions. Which side are you on when you nail Jesus on the cross? After all, without crucifixion, Christianity would not have been so great. Is this allowed by the Christians? And when they approve of this, what does it say about the state of Christianity? Do people feel guilty when they buy this and the crucifixion is completed? And if one feels guilty, isn't one by definition religious? The city where the Twente Biennial takes place was also the setting for the TV spectacle The Passion. The "disneyfication" of Christianity started to rise. This is the next step in the desecration of Christianity."
Whatsapp Freezes Because Indians Send Over 100 Crore Good Morning Messages It Just Can't Handle - " If you're a Whatsapp user in India, then this scenario should sound very familiar. Immediately after sunrise, or sometimes even before the crack of dawn, your incoming message alert starts chiming at regular intervals. As family friends and relatives wake up to a new day, all of them are thoughtfully wishing you a Good Morning through an assortment of images -- sun rising, flowers, baby photos, inspirational quotes and then some. Before the clock hits 8 am, hundreds of millions of messages have fired off in either directions... Whatsapp, for instance, crashed and couldn't handle the stress of Indians firing off Happy New Year messages at the turn of the year, where over 20 billion messages were sent just in India -- a Whatsapp record for any single country... Google search volume has also seen a tenfold increase for "Good morning messages" queries originating from India alone"
From 2018
Meme - *Man hugs person in yellow top with ponytail*
"Kyaah!"
Man in yellow top with ponytail: *stunned*
Girl in yellow top with ponytail: *annoyed*
Male students made to do push-ups over their female comrades for 'military training' - "a video has been circulating on Chinese social media which has once again made Chinese netizens question what kind of "training" the country's youth is being put through. In the video, a group of male teens in military uniform are seen hovering above their female comrades lying on the ground. As the instructor counts, the men start doing sexually suggestive push-ups while the women try to hide their faces in shame. While the site of this particular "training exercise" has not yet been uncovered, it is more than likely part of the mandatory military training that university freshmen must undergo in China at the start of each school year. These weeks of training, which involve millions of students, have been criticized for years for being useless and occasionally cruel. However, on the bright side, they have at least left us with some memorable pics, like this"
Would You Name Your Kid "Sword"? - "Jihad – meaning War in the Cause of Allah – for example, is a common given name in the Muslim world, and appears in various forms. Westerners, on meeting men named Jihad, are at first often startled, but then get used to hearing it. The name Jihad is also common in Turkish in two forms: "Cihat," the Turkish variant, pronounced Ji-hat, and also "Savaş," the Turkish word for war. From time to time, one also finds a variant, Jihad al-Din, meaning Holy War of the (Muslim) religion... although there are Muslims with names such as Rahman and Rahim, loosely translated from the Arabic as the "compassionate" and "merciful," both of these names are shortened versions of the names 'Abd al-Rahman and 'Abd al-Rahim, which refer to characteristics of Allah, not of man. Many popular names are derived from the word "Fath," Arabic for "Conquest in the Name of Islam." The Arabic name "Fathullah," and its Turkish variant, Fethullah , meaning "The Muslim Conquest in the Name of Allah," are used frequently throughout the Muslim world, along with other variants, such as, Fathi and Fatih. The Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, later renamed Istanbul, is referred to as Futuh Costantiniya. Another common name, Sayf, in Arabic means "sword." Its variants follow suit: Sayf al-Islam means "the sword of Islam"; Sayf al-Din means "the sword of the Law/religion" (that is, Islam), and Sayf-Allah means the sword of Allah. The son of Libya's late dictator, Colonel Mu'ammar al-Qaddafi, was named Seif al-Islam. Among Arab Shi'ites in Lebanon (and in one Christian family) there, we find the family name "Harb," which means "war" in Arabic. Another name, Ghazi (Gazi in Turkish), means "Warrior for the Islamic Faith." The name Qutb, in Arabic meaning "pole" – as in "one who polarizes the community" -- and its variants, Qutb al-Din and Qutbzade (used in Iran), are also popular. Sa'id Qutb, for example, was the intellectual godfather of modern Islamic fundamentalism. Ghotbzadeh, (the Iranian variant of the name Qutb plus the Persian suffix zadeh meaning "son of") was the name of one of Ayatollah Khomeini's trusted assistants whom Khomeini later had killed. Polarization, however, creates discord; it is not a signal of peace and harmony... In the Muslim world, the idea of living within your own territory and not trying to conquer others was revolutionary. Until then, the purpose of the state had been to conquer, enlarging the territory over which Islam ruled. Atatürk , moreover, made peace with his Christian Greek neighbors, and refused to get involved in Muslim quarrels to Turkey's south. He emphasized peace in the Western sense of the word: his motto was Yurt'ta Sulh; Cihan'da Sulh ["Peace at Home, Peace Abroad."] His new policy was reflected in the new and non-warlike names -- previously unknown in Turkish culture -- that people began to adopt in Turkey. New Turkish names such as Aydın [Enlightened); Bariş [Peace, in the Western sense of putting the past behind you] and Can (pronounced "Jan," meaning "soul" or "life"] all became the rage. Although the Atatürkist, secular model might eventually be one way for Islam to reform, at least for now Atatürkism is, at best, on life-support"
Loan shark prank? Rider gets beaten up after delivering bak kut teh to Malay family - "A woman was just trying to earn her keep, but was hurt after she allegedly got caught in a loan shark's scheme. The GrabFood delivery rider, surnamed Wang, told 8World she received a cash on delivery order for bak kut teh (pork rib soup)... When she arrived at the doorstep of a flat at Bukit Batok West Avenue 5, a teenage boy opened the door and refused to pay, saying he didn't order the food. He told her that as a Malay family, it was impossible for them to order bak kut teh. "I encountered a prank order before, so I thought I was unlucky," Wang said. So she left the flat and called the person who placed the order. "But he told me someone was at home and urged me to deliver the food quickly, so I went upstairs again." When she returned, she was stunned to see two people attacking a middle-aged man outside the flat. The pair — the teen and a woman who appeared to be his mum — turned their attention to the delivery rider and cornered her. "His mother hit me on the head and mouth several times. They also kicked me. They thought I took a photo them and tried to grab my phone," Wang said. The boy even "chased away" passing neighbours, telling them not to "meddle in their business"... "I heard that the father of the family owed loan sharks $400, so the latter placed a bogus order to remind him to pay back the money," she said. According to her, the middle-aged man she had seen earlier was a real estate agent who was tricked by loan sharks to go check on debtors living in the flat... A 62-year-old man was taken conscious to hospital while a 45-year-old woman suffered minor injuries. She declined to be taken to hospital. The police added that a 32-year-old woman and a 13-year-old boy are assisting with police investigations. Since 2020, the police have noted an increase in cases involving loan sharks making use of food deliveries to harass debtors. "The unlicensed moneylenders would order large quantities of food or make multiple orders on the same day, and arrange for the food to be delivered to the debtors' homes, often late at night""
'I've never borrowed money from loan sharks': Over 20 delivery riders turn up at residents' doors in suspected harassment - "Residents of two blocks — one at Upper Aljunied and another along Ang Mo Kio Avenue 3 — found themselves at the receiving end of not one or two, but multiple food deliveries, none of which they had asked for... eight delivery riders had turned up at his door within a span of one hour on Saturday (Feb 20), giving his 81-year-old mother a shock."