Lobby Design Quotes

And so, because business leadership is still so dominated by men, modern workplaces are riddled with these kind of gaps, from doors that are too heavy for the average woman to open with ease, to glass stairs and lobby floors that mean anyone below can see up your skirt, to paving that’s exactly the right size to catch your heels. Small, niggling issues that aren’t the end of the world, granted, but that nevertheless irritate. Then there’s the standard office temperature. The formula to determine standard office temperature was developed in the 1960s around the metabolic resting rate of the average forty-year-old, 70 kg man.1 But a recent study found that ‘the metabolic rate of young adult females performing light office work is significantly lower’ than the standard values for men doing the same type of activity. In fact, the formula may overestimate female metabolic rate by as much as 35%, meaning that current offices are on average five degrees too cold for women. Which leads to the odd sight of female office workers wrapped up in blankets in the New York summer while their male colleagues wander around in summer clothes.

Jubal shrugged. "Abstract design is all right-for wall paper or linoleum. But art is the process of evoking pity and terror, which is not abstract at all but very human. What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudo-intellectual masturbation. . . whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce- render emotional-his audience, each time. These ladies who won't deign to do that- and perhaps can't- of course lost the public. If they hadn't lobbied for endless subsidies, they would have starved or been forced to go to work long ago. Because the ordinary bloke will not voluntarily pay for 'art' that leaves him unmoved- if he does pay for it, the money has to be conned out of him, by taxes or such." "You know, Jubal, I've always wondered why i didn't give a hoot for paintings or statues- but I thought it was something missing in me, like color blindness." "Mmm, one does have to learn to look at art, just as you must know French to read a story printed in French. But in general terms it's up to the artist to use language that can be understood, not hide it in some private code like Pepys and his diary. Most of these jokers don't even want to use language you and I know or can learn. . . they would rather sneer at us and be smug, because we 'fail' to see what they are driving at. If indeed they are driving at anything- obscurity is usually the refuge of incompetence. Ben, would you call me an artists?” “Huh? Well, I’ve never thought about it. You write a pretty good stick.” “Thank you. ‘Artist’ is a word I avoid for the same reasons I hate to be called ‘Doctor.’ But I am an artist, albeit a minor one. Admittedly most of my stuff is fit to read only once… and not even once for a busy person who already knows the little I have to say. But I am an honest artist, because what I write is consciously intended to reach the customer… reach him and affect him, if possible with pity and terror… or, if not, at least to divert the tedium of his hours with a chuckle or an odd idea. But I am never trying to hide it from him in a private language, nor am I seeking the praise of other writers for ‘technique’ or other balderdash. I want the praise of the cash customer, given in cash because I’ve reached him- or I don’t want anything. Support for the arts- merde! A government-supported artist is an incompetent whore! Damn it, you punched one of my buttons. Let me fill your glass and you tell me what is on your mind.

I didn't care for the energy of the place—too many people and too much cigarette smoke—so I ventured instead near the lobby and the shops. At first I was a little intimidated by all the designer labels, but after a while I ventured into Dolce & Gabbana and Louis Vuitton and of course my favorite, Jimmy Choo. I was like a kid at the petting zoo, stroking the luxurious fabrics, cuddling with the fine leather purses, and cooing to the shoes. "Want to come home with me?" I asked one pair of beautiful snakeskin sandals. Their $450 price tag begged to differ, however, and I left them to find another home.

This morning I was walking through Manhattan, head down, checking directions, when I looked up to see a fruit truck selling lychee, two pounds for five bucks, and I had ten bucks in my pocket! Then while buying my bus ticket for later that evening I witnessed the Transbridge teller’s face soften after she had endured a couple unusually rude interactions in front of me as I kept eye contact and thanked her. She called me honey first (delight), baby second (delight), and almost smiled before I turned away. On my way to the Flatiron building there was an aisle of kousa dogwood—looking parched, but still, the prickly knobs of fruit nestled beneath the leaves. A cup of coffee from a well-shaped cup. A fly, its wings hauling all the light in the room, landing on the porcelain handle as if to say, “Notice the precise flare of this handle, as though designed for the romance between the thumb and index finger that holding a cup can be.” Or the peanut butter salty enough. Or the light blue bike the man pushed through the lobby. Or the topknot of the barista. Or the sweet glance of the man in his stylish short pants (well-lotioned ankles gleaming beneath) walking two little dogs. Or the woman stepping in and out of her shoe, her foot curling up and stretching out and curling up.

She entered the lobby a short while later, dressed in her gray overcoat, and we went up to the room. It was desolate, with white furniture, designed for executives or prospective suicides,

When the NSSF fights against legislation designed to prevent mass shootings because it “won’t work and is a violation of rights,” we understand that many people agree with that argument. But that’s not, at all, even a little bit why the organization lobbies so hard. It works hand in hand with the NRA and certain senators, and spends millions of dollars per year for one reason and one reason only: to make more money. And every time a shooting happens, it makes even more money. Yes. For real. When a mass shooting makes national headlines, the gun lobby purposefully stokes up fear and paranoia over proposed new gun laws so that scared citizens get out their checkbooks and buy a new AR-15 (or sporting rifle). So why would the NSSF have any interest in stopping mass shootings? Why would it engage politically and invest in compromise, a reform plan that attempts to make all Americans safer, or any sort of reckoning of the role guns play in gun violence? It won’t. However you feel about guns and their place in America—whether we’re talking about rifles for hunting or assault rifles, or anything in between—it’s undeniable that the gun lobby has refused to acknowledge or entertain any sort of regulation or reform aimed at making us a safer and saner nation. The reason why: because that does not make it more money. A customer base kept terrified at all times that this will be “the last chance before the government bans” whatever gun manufacturers are peddling is much more valuable. A customer base absolutely convinced that the just-about-anyone-can-buy culture we have is politically necessary without seeing that it serves those companies is what they’re after. They have achieved it.

Abstract design is all right—for wall paper or linoleum. But art is the process of evoking pity and terror, which is not abstract at all but very human. What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudo-intellectual masturbation . . . whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce—render emotional-his audience, each time. These laddies who won’t deign to do that—and perhaps can’t—of course lost the public. If they hadn’t lobbied for endless subsidies, they would have starved or been forced to go to work long ago. Because the ordinary bloke will not voluntarily pay for ‘art’ that leaves him unmoved—if he does pay for it, the money has to be conned out of him, by taxes or such.” “You

You should evaluate your organizational design on a regular basis and gather the information that you need to decide without tipping people off to what you plan to do. Once you decide, you should immediately execute the reorg: Don’t leave time for leaks and lobbying.

There were some legal boundaries. By law, tax-exempt charities, which the IRS designates as 501(c)(3)s, must refrain from involvement in lobbying and electoral politics and serve the public rather than their donors’ interests. But such laws are rarely enforced and are subject to flexible interpretation.

As it enters the twenty-first century, the United States is not fundamentally a weak economy, or a decadent society. But it has developed a highly dysfunctional politics. An antiquated and overly rigid political system to begin with—about 225 years old—has been captured by money, special interests, a sensationalist media, and ideological attack groups. The result is ceaseless, virulent debate about trivia—politics as theater—and very little substance, compromise, and action. A “can-do” country is now saddled with a “do-nothing” political process, designed for partisan battle rather than problem solving. By every measure—the growth of special interests, lobbies, pork-barrel spending—the political process has become far more partisan and ineffective over the last three decades.

For the third type of coping strategy, at the societal level, we need to ask how non-state actors (such as communities and nonprofit organizations) will respond to the consequences of the data revolution. We think a wave of civil-society organizations will emerge in the next decade designed to shield connected citizens from their governments and from themselves. Powerful lobbying groups will advocate content and privacy laws. Rights organizations that document repressive surveillance tactics will call for better citizen protection. There

looking for people to design the graphical interface for Apple’s new operating system, Jobs got an email from a young man and invited him in. The applicant was nervous, and the meeting did not go well. Later that day Jobs bumped into him, dejected, sitting in the lobby. The guy asked if he could just show him one of his ideas, so Jobs looked over his shoulder and saw a little demo, using Adobe Director, of a way to fit more icons in the dock at the bottom of a screen. When the guy moved the cursor over the icons crammed into the dock, the cursor mimicked a magnifying glass and made each icon balloon bigger. “I said, ‘My God,’ and hired him on the spot,” Jobs recalled. The feature became a lovable part of Mac OSX, and the designer went on to design such things as inertial scrolling for multi-touch screens (the delightful feature that makes the screen keep gliding for a moment after you’ve finished swiping). Jobs’s experiences at NeXT had matured him, but they had not mellowed him much. He still had no license plate on his Mercedes, and he still parked in the handicapped spaces next to the front door, sometimes straddling two slots. It became a running

It was when Maya showed me the benches at Gallaudet University that I started to glimpse sound—the physical structure of it, the elastic bounce of its travel. My friends who are deaf have always told me that sound also belongs to them—that hearing people are forever getting it wrong to imagine deafness as a “silent world”—but the benches were the thing that made this idea vividly real. They were a feature in the design at the scale of rooms at Gallaudet, alongside a dozen other architectural choices that a hearing person could easily miss. Maya had paused for a moment in our campus tour to point them out, standing in the middle of a big, airy common space lined with windows on three sides, the lobby of a dorm where many students study and socialize, alone or in groups. The benches serve as seating for nearby wood tables, sets that are interspersed with soft fabric chairs arranged 360 degrees around for discussion. “Wood is the best material for this kind of group seating,” she told me, and mimed lightly slapping the wood with her palm. The resonance of wood makes it reverberate when struck. Students sometimes tap or slap nearby surfaces to get one another’s attention or to call a group to order, she said, and materials like concrete or thick plastics tend to absorb the sound rather than scatter it productively.

The world recoiled in horror in 2012 when 20 Connecticut schoolchildren and six adults were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School. . . . The weapon was a Bushmaster AR-15 semiautomatic rifle adapted from its original role as a battlefield weapon. The AR-15, which is designed to inflict maximum casualties with rapid bursts, should never have been available for purchase by civilians (emphasis added).1 —New York Times editorial, March 4, 2016 Assault weapons were banned for 10 years until Congress, in bipartisan obeisance to the gun lobby, let the law lapse in 2004. As a result, gun manufacturers have been allowed to sell all manner of war weaponry to civilians, including the super destructive .50-caliber sniper rifle. . . .(emphasis added)2 —New York Times editorial, December 11, 2015 [James Holmes the Aurora, Colorado Batman Movie Theater Shooter] also bought bulletproof vests and other tactical gear” (emphasis added).3 —New York Times, July 22, 2012 It is hard to debate guns if you don’t know much about the subject. But it is probably not too surprising that gun control advocates who live in New York City know very little about guns. Semi-automatic guns don’t fire “rapid bursts” of bullets. The New York Times might be fearful of .50-caliber sniper rifles, but these bolt-action .50-caliber rifles were never covered by the federal assault weapons ban. “Urban assault vests” may sound like they are bulletproof, but they are made of nylon. These are just a few of the many errors that the New York Times made.4 If it really believes that it has a strong case, it wouldn’t feel the need to constantly hype its claims. What distinguishes the New York Times is that it doesn’t bother running corrections for these errors.

extent, Polly Lear took Fanny Washington’s place: she was a pretty, sociable young woman who became Martha’s closest female companion during the first term, at home or out and about, helping plan her official functions. The Washingtons were delighted with the arrival of Thomas Jefferson, a southern planter of similar background to themselves, albeit a decade younger; if not a close friend, he was someone George had felt an affinity for during the years since the Revolution, writing to him frequently for advice. The tall, lanky redhead rented lodgings on Maiden Lane, close to the other members of the government, and called on the president on Sunday afternoon, March 21. One of Jefferson’s like-minded friends in New York was the Virginian James Madison, so wizened that he looked elderly at forty. Madison was a brilliant parliamentary and political strategist who had been Washington’s closest adviser and confidant in the early days of the presidency, helping design the machinery of government and guiding measures through the House, where he served as a representative. Another of Madison’s friends had been Alexander Hamilton, with whom he had worked so valiantly on The Federalist Papers. But the two had become estranged over the question of the national debt. As secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton was charged with devising a plan to place the nation’s credit on a solid basis at home and abroad. When Hamilton presented his Report on the Public Credit to Congress in January, there was an instant split, roughly geographic, north vs. south. His report called for the assumption of state debts by the nation, the sale of government securities to fund this debt, and the creation of a national bank. Washington had become convinced that Hamilton’s plan would provide a strong economic foundation for the nation, particularly when he thought of the weak, impoverished Congress during the war, many times unable to pay or supply its troops. Madison led the opposition, incensed because he believed that dishonest financiers and city slickers would be the only ones to benefit from the proposal, while poor veterans and farmers would lose out. Throughout the spring, the debate continued. Virtually no other government business got done as Hamilton and his supporters lobbied fiercely for the plan’s passage and Madison and his followers outfoxed them time and again in Congress. Although pretending to be neutral, Jefferson was philosophically and personally in sympathy with Madison. By April, Hamilton’s plan was voted down and seemed to be dead, just as a new debate broke out over the placement of the national capital. Power, prestige, and a huge economic boost would come to the city named as capital. Hamilton and the bulk of New Yorkers and New Englanders

Peñalosa learned when he was a boy that the redistribution of privilege always meets with resistance. But he was not one for compromise. He ordered the removal of thousands of cluttering commercial billboards, and he tore down the fences residents had erected around neighborhood parks. He went to war not just with cars but with anyone who appropriated public space in Bogotá, even if they were poor—in one case forcing thousands of struggling street vendors to remove stalls that had choked off public plazas. The city’s amenities were for everyone. Peñalosa campaigned to turn the city’s grand country club into a public park. Even the dead were targeted: while Mockus had the words “Life Is Sacred” painted on the walls of a cemetery in the central city, Peñalosa attempted to remove the graves so that the living could have more park space. (Both the country club and cemetery initiatives failed.) This aggressive plan created plenty of enemies for him at first. Private bus operators and drivers who were pushed from TransMilenio routes were furious. So were the vendors and hawkers who were swept from popular plazas. But none were as vociferous as the business lobby, who were outraged by the bollards that went up along city sidewalks, effectively killing their free parking. They could not imagine customers arriving by foot, bike, or bus. “He was trying to Satanize cars,” Guillermo Botero, the president of FENALCO, Colombia’s national federation of retailers, told me. “The car is a means of subsistence. It is an indispensable means for people to develop their own lives. If we keep squeezing roads, the city will eventually collapse.” FENALCO

Quoting page 65-66: Race-conscious affirmative action is a familiar term of journalistic convenience. It identifies unambiguously the controversial element of minority preferences in distributing benefits. But it also conflates racially targeted civil rights remedies with affirmative action preferences for groups, such as Hispanics and women, given protected class status irrespective of race. … It includes nonracial as well as racial preferences, and it distinguishes such remedies, available only to officially designated protected classes, from the soft affirmative action … which emphasized special outreach programs for recruiting minorities … within a traditional liberal framework of equal individual rights for all Americans. … The architects of race-conscious affirmative action, Skrentny observes, developed their remedy in the face of public opinion heavily arrayed against it. Unlike most public policy in America, hard affirmative action was originally adopted without the benefit of any organized lobbying by the major interest groups involved. Instead, government bureaucrats, not benefiting interest groups, provided the main impetus. The race-conscious model of hard affirmative action was developed in trial-and-error fashion by a coalition of mostly white, second-tier civil servants in the social service agencies of the presidency… To Skrenty’s core irony, we may add three further ironies, first, the key to political survival for hard affirmative action was persistent support from the Republican Party… Second, the theories of compensatory justice supporting minority preference policies were devised only after the adoption of the policies themselves. Finally, affirmative action preferences which supporters rationalized as necessary to compensate African-Americans for historic discrimination, and which for twenty years were successfully defended in federal courts primarily on those grounds, soon benefited millions of immigrants newly arrived from Latin America and Asia.

After the MTA released its $14.4 billion plan in November 1980, a governor’s aide told Ravitch that Carey was not interested in entertaining a fare hike or a tax package for the MTA. Carey preferred holding down the fare rather than financing a multibillion-dollar capital program. The governor also saw Ravitch’s proposal as a threat to Westway. A coalition of thirty-seven civic and environmental groups had filed suit in federal court to stop the highway project. They wanted the state to take the federal transportation funds designated for the project and use them for transit improvements instead. If Carey admitted that the transit system was underfunded and starved for capital, it would have played into the hands of the Westway opponents.48 Faced with resistance in Albany, Ravitch began a lobbying effort that no state official other than Robert Moses at the height of his powers could have undertaken. He started by pleading with the governor and his staff, explaining that without new sources of revenue he would have to dramatically raise the fare. Then he took his case directly to the public. Rather than minimizing the transit system’s problems, Ravitch made sure that reporters learned about all the delays and breakdowns occurring in MTA facilities. He visited editorial boards and told them, “If you don’t pay attention, the politicians won’t.” He talked to every reporter who called. Unlike his predecessors, he admitted that the MTA’s services, particularly during peak hours, were “deteriorating at an accelerated rate.” The newspapers, he said, were “my shield and my sword.

The IRA’s Black front was by many measures its biggest. “No single group of Americans was targeted by IRA information operatives more than African-Americans,” the Senate Intelligence Committee found in 2019. “By far, race and related issues were the preferred target of the information warfare campaign designed to divide the country.” The IRA’s messages to the black community sometimes lobbied for Stein, but far more often argued for boycotting the election entirely. The voter suppression drive aimed at dozens of cities, especially communities where the killings of black citizens by white police officers created flash points for the Black Lives Matter movement. The Black front made an overwhelming effort to keep African Americans away from the ballot boxes with messages like “Our Votes Don’t Matter,” “Don’t Vote for Hillary Clinton,” and “Don’t Vote at All.” Its “Woke Blacks” Instagram account argued that “a particular hype and hatred for Trump is misleading the people and forcing Blacks to vote Killary. We cannot resort to the lesser of two devils.

The spectacle interested him, interested him deeply, though it came over him that he wasn’t particularly eager for a way of life represented by marble and gilt and feathered hats. No, what seized his innermost attention, what held him there day after day in noon revery, was the sense of a great, elaborate structure, a system of order, a well-planned machine that drew all these people to itself and carried them up and down in iron cages and arranged them in private rooms. He admired the hotel as an invention, an ingenious design, a kind of idea, like a steam boiler or a suspension bridge. But could you say that a bridge or a steam boiler was an idea? In the warm, bright lobby Martin’s thoughts would grow confused, as if he had been falling into a fantastic dream,

The campaign website was funded by Armistead, and he personally authored the content. He was determined that the campaign's values and goals would fit on one page. The website developer, who was experienced with political campaigns, was opposed to this. He lobbied for detailed policy statements and explanations, which was the conventional approach. But Armistead disagreed. The website developer thus learned that day that core principles were more important than thousands of words of speculative verbiage.

And it is not enough that Zionists control America. They have to reshape it to suitthemselves. Virtually every recent case that involves the removal of Christian symbols from society is brought and/or prosecuted by a Jew, usually with a Jewish judge presiding. For the sake of the feelings of 2.5 percent, all the rest of us must yield our cultural heritage. Removing “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance. Taking down plaques of the Ten Commandments. Removing crosses from public venues. Taking Christ out of Christmas, first, then Christmas out of the year-end holidays altogether. Hate laws are singularly Jewish inventions being foisted upon an unsuspecting public, so as to preemptively remove the possibility of criticism of themselves. Often written by the ADL, the organization that lobbies for their adoption, state by state, the laws are designed to stifle dissent and free speech. Even now, the ADL seeks to broaden their sweep to include Holocaust Revisionism, as has occurred in Canada and most of Europe, where people sit in jail for publicly stating true facts about the so-called Holocaust that Jews simply do not want publicized. Now, anti-Semitism is being added to the proscriptions of hate laws in America. It has been forgotten that the first thing the communists did after seizing power in Russia was to make anti-Semitism punishable by death. Before they were done, the Russian Jews ended up killing over 20 million white Christians, don’t forget. American borders are kept wide open to a flood of illegal immigrants, purposely, apparently to dilute the population, thereby making us more easily controlled. Yet, there is a furious struggle to jail those who criticize Jews. Contrast this policy imposed upon America with the extremely closed society of Israel, which is reserved solely for Jews. And consider the money that Israel has cost us, facilitated by their Jewish brethren. It is nothing short of breathtaking. Economist Dr. Thomas R. Stauf-fer estimates the cost of our Middle Eastern policies at over $2.5 trillion, more than the cost of the Vietnam War. Two and a half trillion dollars. Boggles the mind, doesn’t it? Let’s see now, America has a population of 290 million and about 80 million households, so that amounts to $31,250 from your family to Israel.And that doesn’t include some other items which easily could double that figure, says Dr. Stauffer. That brings us to the $64,000 question, which is approximately double the $31,250 figure just cited: Is Israel worth it to you? Or could your family have put that $62,500 taken from it to better use? What is particularly ironic is how much of that money came back from Israel for the purpose of buying off America’s elected representatives.

Companies don't want anyone telling them how to deal with their workers  -- they never have; they never will. Stores don't want anyone telling them how to design their entrances; how many steps they can have (or can't have); how heavy their doors can be. Yet they accept their city's building and fire codes, dictating to them how many people they can have in their restaurants, based on square footage, so that the place will not be a fire hazard. They accept that the city can inspect their electrical wiring to ensure that it "meets code" before they open for business. Yet they chafe if an individual wants an accommodation. Because, it seems, it is seen as "special for the handicapped," most of whom likely don't deserve it. Accommodation is fought doubly hard when it is seen to be a way of letting "the disabled" have a part of what we believe is for "normal" people. Although no access code, anywhere, requires them, automatic doors remain the one thing, besides flat or ramped entrances, that one hears about most from people with mobility problems: they need automatic doors as well as flat entrances. Yet no code, anywhere, includes them; mandating them would be "going too far"; giving the disabled more than they have a right to. A ramp is OK. An automatic door? That isn't reasonable. At least that's what the building lobby says. Few disability rights groups, anywhere, have tried to push for that accommodation. Some wheelchair activists are now pressing for "basic, minimal access" in all new single-family housing, so, they say, they can visit friends and attend gatherings in others' homes. This means at least one flat entrance and a bathroom they can get into. De-medicalization No large grocery or hotel firm, no home-and-garden discount supply center would consider designing an entrance that did not include automatic doors. They are standard in hotels and discount warehouses. Not, of course, for the people who literally can not open doors by themselves  -- for such people are "the disabled": them, not us. Firms that operate hotels, groceries and building supply stores fight regulations that require they accommodate "the disabled." Automatic doors that go in uncomplainingly are meant for us, the fit, the nondisabled, to ensure that we will continue to shop at the grocery or building supply center; to make it easy for us to get our grocery carts out, our lumber dollies to our truck loaded with Sheetrock for the weekend project. So the bellhops can get the luggage in and out of the hotel easily. When it is for "them," it is resisted; when it is for "us," however, it is seen as a design improvement. Same item; different purpose

First, as I will explore in this book, our preferences—the things we buy, the places we choose to live—do not always maximize our happiness in the long run. Second, sprawl, as an urban form, was laid out, massively subsidized, and legally mandated long before anyone actually decided to buy a house there. It is as much the result of zoning, legislation, and lobbying as a crowded city block. It did not occur naturally. It was designed.

Ian Schrager, who remains a trendsetter in the elite sector with his Starck hotels, compares the hotel's spatial layout with a play: the lobby is the prelude, the first act of the hotel's drama, which has its finale in the individual guest rooms.

The most powerful lobbying force in the nation (as measured in sheer dollars spent) is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has mobilized against proposals to raise the corporate tax rate and the minimum wage and has come out against legislation designed to make it easier for workers to organize.

Although a new highway program was politically very contentious, President Eisenhower appointed an advisory committee of executives linked to General Motors, Bechtel engineering, the trucking lobby, and the Teamsters Union (to which truckers belonged) to negotiate the various special interests involved.In 1956 Eisenhower signed the Interstate Highway Act providing for 42,500 miles of a 'National System of Interstate and Defense Highways' across the country at an estimated cost of $27 billion. . . . Journalist Helen Leavitt thought that Congress had been bought and bullied. In her brilliant book Superhighway--Superhoax, she noted that there was no real concern for national defense, since overpasses designed for fourteen-foot vertical clearance were too low to permit the passage of many Army, Navy, and Air Force weapons loaded on transporters, including Atlas missiles. The highway builds had never even consulted the Defense Department.

glass stairs and lobby floors that mean anyone below can see up your skirt,

When I visited Imagineering with Michael, I’d observe him critiquing projects large and small, reviewing everything from storyboards detailing the experience in one of our attractions to the design of a stateroom on a soon-to-be-built cruise ship. He’d hear presentations about upcoming parades, or review the design of the lobby of a new hotel. What struck me, and what was invaluable in my own education, was his ability to see the big picture as well as the granular details at the same time, and consider how one affected the other.

On December 12, 1958, the Greenbrier announced the construction of its new West Virginia Wing, with 22,000 square feet of public meeting space. Another 90,000 square feet were behind the walls for the classified congressional hideout. The hidden facility, surrounded by reinforced concrete walls between three and five feet thick, extended 720 feet into the adjacent mountain—a factor that created the odd sensation that from the resort lobby, one would take an elevator up to enter the bunker. It was not designed to withstand a direct attack, but would protect against nearby blasts and be sealed tight from fallout. When the off-the-books ghost project officially got under way in the spring of 1959, it was known by an appropriate code name: CASPER. Locals

1891, a journalist from the Amrita Bazar Patrika managed to rummage through the wastepaper basket at the office of Viceroy Lord Lansdowne. There he found the fragments of a torn-up letter, which with great enterprise he managed to piece together. The letter contained explosive news, revealing as it did in considerable detail the viceroy’s plans to annex the Hindu Maharaja-ruled Muslim-majority state of Jammu & Kashmir. To the consternation of the British authorities, Amrita Bazar Patrika published the letter on its front page. The cat was out of the bag: the newspaper reached the Maharaja of Kashmir, who promptly protested, set sail for London and vehemently lobbied the authorities there to honour their predecessors’ guarantees of his state’s ‘independent’ status. The Maharaja was successful, and Indian nationalists congratulated the Patrika on having thwarted the colonialists’ imperial designs. Had this exposé not taken place, Kashmir would not have remained a ‘princely state’, free to choose the country, and the terms, of its accession upon Independence in 1947; it would have been a province of British India, subject to being carved up by a careless British pen during Partition. The contours of the ‘Kashmir problem’ would have looked very different today. Nonetheless,

Las complejidades económicas implícitas cuando las agencias reguladoras fijan precios se complican aún más con las complejidades políticas. Las agencias reguladoras, por lo general, se crean después de que activistas políticos inicien investigaciones o campañas de publicidad que convencen a las autoridades de que tienen que establecer una comisión permanente para supervisar y controlar un monopolio, o algún otro grupo de empresas demasiado pequeñas en número como para constituir una amenaza de colusión y comportamiento monopolístico. Sin embargo, cuando la comisión ha sido creada y sus poderes establecidos, los activistas y los medios tienden a perder, con los años, interés, y a prestar atención a otras cosas. Mientras tanto, las empresas reguladas continúan presentando mucho interés por las actividades de la comisión y forman un lobby que presiona al gobierno para que emita reglamentos beneficiosos y designe a miembros de estas comisiones que estén a su favor. El resultado de esos intereses foráneos asimétricos en estas agencias es que las comisiones que se crearon para supervisar a una empresa o industria dada, para el beneficio de los consumidores, por lo general se transforman en agencias que buscan proteger a las empresas reguladas de amenazas provenientes de nuevas empresas con nuevas tecnologías y nuevos métodos de organización.

As the private correspondence and public claims of the men leading this charge make clear, this new ideology was designed to defeat the state power its architects feared most—not the Soviet regime in Moscow, but Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal administration in Washington. With ample funding from major corporations, prominent industrialists, and business lobbies such as the National Association of Manufacturers and the US Chamber of Commerce in the 1930s and 1940s, these new evangelists for free enterprise promoted a vision best characterized as “Christian libertarianism.