Once upon a time, youthful indiscretions committed during college years stayed locked up in the memories of school buddies or, at worst, on a police report tucked away in a small-town police station file.

Social media and the Internet have changed that. Now, a single moment of bad judgment — an unflattering photo, an inappropriate comment or something more serious — can live forever in friends’ Facebook posts or tweets. Worse yet, the information is easily searchable by future employers. A decade later, one black mark could doom a job application in the time it takes to type “Bob Sullivan” into a search engine.

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It may not be fair, but it’s not illegal. It’s reality, according to a new book by a University of Texas economics professor who contends that good-looking folks earn higher wages, get better jobs and have more success in the workplace.

That translates into an extra $230,000 in lifetime earnings for an average-looking employee, compared with one who is below average on the attractiveness scale, according to Daniel Hamermesh, author of Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful. Typical characteristics that determine wages such as education, race and type of job were factored out, leaving good looks — or the lack thereof — as the driving influence.

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When we refer to something as being “common sense,” we usually mean that it is something we think everyone should know. Often, though, it turns out that what may seem like common sense to one person isn’t always so to someone else. For example: Veterinarians spend their days around animals, so they might consider it common knowledge that cats sleep about 18 hours per day; hence the reason your vet seems so amused when you bring Muffin in for a checkup, concerned about her inability to stay awake.

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NEW YORK (TheStreet) — If there’s one corporate sector that should have a pretty good handle on the job market, it’s staffing companies, and they don’t see what the markets see in August’s weak jobs number.

On Friday, the nonfarm payrolls report showed no net new jobs created. Yet the staffing companies insist that the markets are pricing in a much worse employment outlook than the pound-the-pavement hiring reality indicates.

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