Thomas

“When it comes to a large, complex agency like ours, the public pretty much forms its views on the basis of what the media reports, even more than what the facts may be.

Here the union had a decided advantage.”
― Joel Klein

“Anyone who visits Aalsmeer will be struck at first by the absurdity of the arrangement. Why go to all the trouble to put something as perishable as a daisy on an airplane, fly it to another country so it can sit on the auction floor, and then put it back on a plane and fly it to its final destination? ... [I]t seemed obvious that an Internet-based system would simplify things. Sure, the flowers would still need to come together in some kind of distribution center...but the actual bidding and ordering wouldn't have to happen in the same building where the flowers are.
...
When I asked one importer this question, he just shrugged and said, 'Why are there still brokers on Wall Street?”
― Amy Stewart, Flower Confidential: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful in the Business of Flowers

“When police arrested a New York bus driver for running down a schoolgirl in a crosswalk… the New York Daily News decried what it saw as mistreatment of one of the city’s bus drivers. The head of the transit union protested this enforcement of the city’s new Right of Way Law as “outrageous, illogical and anti-worker” while branding the head of a city street safety advocacy group “a progressive intellectual jackass.” The same union previously launched a work slowdown when another bus driver faced sanctions for killing a seventy-eight-year-old woman in a crosswalk in December 2014. All this occurred because police sought to enforce _misdemeanor_ charges in cases of pedestrians who were run over in crosswalks where they had the clear right of way.”
― Edward Humes, Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation

“There is an old saying: "If appearance and essence were the same thing, there would be no need for science”
― Michio Kaku, The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind