Signs that the economy is bad, September 2, 2011 edition

Welcome to another edition of "Signs that the economy is bad" here at The Itinerant Librarian. Not a whole lot going on this holiday weekend. Well, holiday for some people. Some of us actually have to work this weekend. I will be working this Sunday (deity of choice knows why, but so have the powers that be decided). Anyhow, here are your cues that the economy is bad for this week.

• You know things are bad when the owner of a building wants to demolish it before even opening it. That is the situation with this Las Vegas hotel (via Yahoo! Real Estate). For some reason, this story reminds me of one of the last scenes in the film Casino, the one where all the casinos are demolished. Here is part of the quote from the scene: "The town will never be the same. After the Tangiers, the big corporations took it all over. Today it looks like Disneyland. And while the kids play cardboard pirates, Mommy and Daddy drop the house payments and Junior's college money on the poker slots." (read the rest of the quote here). 
• Freshmen are opting to live at home rather than on campus (via The Daily Camera), even when the campus requires dorm living.Tuition can take a big chunk of money already, so if you can avoid living on campus and not paying for the dorm, I am all for it. The alleged benefits of campus living (social dynamics, so on) are probably not enough justification for those who can live at home just fine and just commute. In fact, we have told our daughter that, assuming I am still employed here in Tyler, that she is more than welcome to stay at home while she goes to school in town (if she chooses to go school in town), and save that money for something else. I think over time, if the economy stays bad, campuses will find requiring freshmen to live in dorms to be an unsustainable requirement, at least for their locals.
• Librarians have to moonlight. According to this story, this librarian and taxi driver was caught with £129K in his bank account (via Cambridge News). According to the story, he was selling cannabis. Now, we can certainly insert all sorts of jokes here, but it is a known fact that librarians overall are not exactly well-paid (for the most part. Try not to go by the ALA's salary survey, which can be a bit rosy-eyed at times, to put it mildly). On a serious note, given the atrocious employment market for librarians, the only surprising thing is that more of them, given the many skills they have, do not decide on a life of crime.