three-martini lunch

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How to Be Idle by Tom Hodgkinson

Albert Einstein, Alexander Shulgin, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, call centre, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deskilling, Easter island, financial independence, full employment, Gordon Gekko, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Lao Tzu, liberal capitalism, moral panic, New Urbanism, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, spinning jenny, three-martini lunch, Torches of Freedom, trade route, wage slave, work culture

Who ' s going to spend days hanging out at cafes? It ' s gone. ' And what' s the result of all this coffee-drinking? We ' re all wired. The UK is beginning to resemble the USA where drinking alcohol has been replaced by drinking coffee. So instead of being half cut all afternoon as in the days of the three-martini lunch, businessmen are wound up on caffeine, perspiring, worrying, rushing, shouting at junior staff and developing ulcers. I ' m certain that we will soon discover the appalling effect of this coffee frenzy on the nation ' s physical and mental health. Truly, the coffee culture is inimical to the idler.

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But not so long ago, in London and in New York City those two poles of the work ethic - the leisurely lunch thrived. ' New York is the greatest city in the world for lunch . . . That' s the gregarious time, ' wrote the humorist William Emerson, Jr, in 1 975 in Newsweek. These lunches were seriously booze-soaked, too; the president Gerald Ford in a 1 978 speech said, ' The three-martini lunch is the epitome of American efficiency. Where else can you get an earful, a bellyful and a snootful at the same time? ' And why has such wit and light humour disappeared from presidential discourse? Now if you 've ever had three martinis you ' ll know that the effect is powerful. They are so strong that you practically inhale them.

Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies by Judith Stein

1960s counterculture, accelerated depreciation, activist lawyer, affirmative action, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, centre right, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, desegregation, do well by doing good, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial deregulation, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, intermodal, invisible hand, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Martin Wolf, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, post-industrial society, post-oil, price mechanism, price stability, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Simon Kuznets, strikebreaker, three-martini lunch, trade liberalization, union organizing, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, working poor, Yom Kippur War

Ralph Nader endorsed the revenue-raising measures and opposed the business tax cuts.71 Groups targeted specific parts; for example, the restaurant and hotel industry claimed that thousands of jobs would be lost as a result of ending some of the deductions for business expenses, the so-called three martini lunch. Underlying the whole process was the crisis in Keynesianism. Initially, Carter had introduced a tax reform package that did not intersect with the actual economy. When growth issues entered the tax package, the government hesitated and faltered. No one had faith that this kind of fine tuning could get the job done.

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Streamlining the budget process, a reform enacted several years earlier, was one of his proudest moments. Even if he had been more forceful, new rules had reduced the power of chairs. The first committee votes—to abolish deductions for state and local sales taxes and property taxes—went against the president. Carter’s rhetoric against special interests worked against the three-martini lunch but not against the deduction of local taxes, which middle-class taxpayers had enjoyed. Carter argued that citizens would more than regain their losses in the general rate reduction that was also a part of the package. But not many people believed him. The math for those earning $25,000 to $30,000 a year was not so clear when calculated with the social security increases.

Trend Commandments: Trading for Exceptional Returns by Michael W. Covel

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, business cycle, buy and hold, commodity trading advisor, correlation coefficient, delayed gratification, disinformation, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, family office, full employment, global macro, Jim Simons, Lao Tzu, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, market bubble, market microstructure, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Sharpe ratio, systematic trading, the scientific method, three-martini lunch, transaction costs, tulip mania, upwardly mobile, Y2K, zero-sum game

What did they do exactly? Trend followers made money in many different markets: oil, bonds, currencies, stocks, and commodities—via up and down trends going both long and short. Of course, there was zilch press coverage of their big wins. Academics and their peer-reviewed journals—nope— they were at the three-martini lunch too. Lack of public profile is nothing new—trend following anonymity goes back 50 years. (I probably have the most complete private trend following library available, but very little of it is online or at universities.) The reason trend following performs so well when equity markets perform worst is straightforward: When an event happens, it reinforces a crisis mentality already in place, and trends drive toward a final conclusion—where the really big money is made as fear reaches a zenith, and markets go parabolic.

Bill Marriott: Success Is Never Final--His Life and the Decisions That Built a Hotel Empire by Dale van Atta

Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 747, book value, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate raider, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, financial innovation, Ford Model T, hiring and firing, index card, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, Kintsugi, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, profit motive, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, stock buybacks, three-martini lunch, urban renewal

We are a free enterprise nation, and we must insure that the next generation knows the basics of our capitalist system.” The array of Carter-spawned legislation that directly threatened Marriott and the American economy as a whole had propelled Bill into the political arena. For example, Carter proposed legislation to end the so-called “three-martini lunch” by severely curtailing business tax deductions for meals and entertainment. “The three-martini lunch is so rare that it is basically a myth,” Bill declared to the press. “The average businessman’s lunch is a hamburger and Coke costing $3 or less. The Hotel and Restaurant Association is violently opposed to the legislation, as am I. If it’s enacted, within the first year we’ll have to cut about 2,700 permanent jobs at Marriott.

Big Data at Work: Dispelling the Myths, Uncovering the Opportunities by Thomas H. Davenport

Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, bioinformatics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, cloud computing, commoditize, data acquisition, data science, disruptive innovation, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, intermodal, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, lifelogging, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, New Journalism, recommendation engine, RFID, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, sorting algorithm, statistical model, Tesla Model S, text mining, Thomas Davenport, three-martini lunch

Chapter_03.indd 64 03/12/13 11:28 AM Developing a Big Data Strategy   65 • We’re going to use many more variables and more data to ­compute a real-time offer for our customers. • We’re going to be able to respond much more rapidly to ­contingencies in our environment. Bad answers (at least in strict business terms) include playing more golf, drinking more coffee, or finally having enough time for that three-martini lunch. Developing New Offerings To my mind, the most ambitious thing an organization can do with big data is to employ it in developing new product and service offerings based on data. One of the best at this is LinkedIn, which has used big data and data scientists to develop a broad array of product offerings and features.

How We Got Here: A Slightly Irreverent History of Technology and Markets by Andy Kessler

Albert Einstein, Andy Kessler, animal electricity, automated trading system, bank run, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Bretton Woods, British Empire, buttonwood tree, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Corn Laws, cotton gin, Dennis Ritchie, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Fairchild Semiconductor, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, GPS: selective availability, Grace Hopper, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Multics, packet switching, pneumatic tube, price mechanism, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, proprietary trading, railway mania, RAND corporation, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, systems thinking, three-martini lunch, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, UUNET, Wayback Machine, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

A new style of investing has emerged that is fast and furious, buying and selling baskets of hot chips, if you will. Unlike buying industrial dinosaurs, this style encourages both the formation of risk capital for entrepreneurs, and an exit strategy for venture capitalists that fund entrepreneurs. No three-martini lunches for this crowd. Managers at these funds work at a frenetic pace, always looking for the latest and greatest. They are willing to invest in higher risk businesses, if they think there is fast trading execution and enough liquidity for them to get out if they perceive things might soon get dicey.

Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies by Reid Hoffman, Chris Yeh

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, database schema, DeepMind, Didi Chuxing, discounted cash flows, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, fulfillment center, Future Shock, George Gilder, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, high-speed rail, hockey-stick growth, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, initial coin offering, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, late fees, Lean Startup, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, oil shale / tar sands, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Quicken Loans, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, thinkpad, three-martini lunch, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, web application, winner-take-all economy, work culture , Y Combinator, yellow journalism

Contrast this to the traditional advertising market, in which large clients spend millions of dollars paying advertising agencies to run expensive thirty-second television ads during coveted programming like the Super Bowl broadcast. Google’s system also measures advertising quality; ads targeted at its audience to generate the most paid click-throughs are favored. The net effect is that consumers are shown the most effectively targeted ads, without the overhead of a middleman like Don Draper and his three-martini lunch. Google also increases its own gross margin, because, unlike commercials during a television broadcast, search-based ad space is virtually unlimited and costs Google next to nothing. Although marketplaces, even local ones, have always been a powerful business model, the changes ushered in by the Networked Age have made them potentially more valuable than ever.

The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, cashless society, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, circulation of elites, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Corn Laws, corporate governance, credit crunch, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, disintermediation, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Etonian, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mobile money, Mont Pelerin Society, Nelson Mandela, night-watchman state, Norman Macrae, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, open economy, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, pension reform, pensions crisis, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, profit maximization, public intellectual, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, TED Talk, the long tail, three-martini lunch, too big to fail, total factor productivity, vertical integration, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, zero-sum game

But there is nothing kindergartenish about the company’s success: Google has grown from an inspired hunch of two Stanford students in 1998 to a veritable Googlezilla that controls 80 percent of all searches online, dominates online advertising, and is even promising to revolutionize Sloan’s old business with the driverless car. Only 1 percent of applicants to the company are given a job. They work much longer hours than the GMers of old (who, to Sloan’s disapproval, were not averse to three-martini lunches and leisurely golf games), and to keep them at work, Google provides them with everything they need, from dry cleaners and masseurs to Wi-Fi–equipped company buses. Since Sloan’s day, companies have rethought almost all the great man’s assumptions about management. They have replaced steep hierarchies with fluid networks.

Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked by Adam L. Alter

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bluma Zeigarnik, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Sedaris, death from overwork, drug harm reduction, easy for humans, difficult for computers, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Ian Bogost, IKEA effect, Inbox Zero, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kickstarter, language acquisition, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Oculus Rift, Richard Thaler, Robert Durst, side project, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, three-martini lunch

Routtenberg remembers an experiment that showed the power of the pleasure center: One of the nice things about being a professor is that you can study whatever you like. I wanted to see what would happen if I made the bar-pressing animals drunk. I injected the alcoholic equivalent of a three-martini lunch into several rats, who just fell over. We lifted them up—as you’d drag a drunkard from the bar—and we led them over to the small metal bar. We laid them down so their heads brushed against the bar, which delivered a shock to their brains. In no time, these rats started pressing the bar over and over again.

Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (And How to Take Advantage of It) by William Poundstone

availability heuristic, behavioural economics, book value, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, equal pay for equal work, experimental economics, experimental subject, feminist movement, game design, German hyperinflation, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, index card, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, Linda problem, loss aversion, market bubble, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Nash equilibrium, new economy, no-fly zone, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, Potemkin village, power law, price anchoring, price discrimination, psychological pricing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, RFID, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, rolodex, social intelligence, starchitect, Steve Jobs, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-martini lunch, ultimatum game, working poor

This sometimes led to decisions that appear risky, and other times to choices that were anomalously conservative. There are many counterparts in business. Quoting a price to a potential client is a gamble. It can never be known exactly how much work will be involved, how demanding the client will be, what can go wrong with the job, and what the relevant chances are. A three-martini lunch converts complex problems into deceptively simple ones. Any prices quoted are apt to be “wrong” in the sense of not reflecting all the relevant information. A vendor may lose profitable business by pricing himself too high and saddle himself with ruinous contracts by pricing too low. One bit of singles bar wisdom might help you to remember this rule.

Dark Pools: The Rise of the Machine Traders and the Rigging of the U.S. Stock Market by Scott Patterson

Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, automated trading system, banking crisis, bash_history, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, butterfly effect, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computerized trading, creative destruction, Donald Trump, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Gordon Gekko, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, High speed trading, information security, Jim Simons, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, latency arbitrage, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, market microstructure, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, pattern recognition, payment for order flow, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, prediction markets, quantitative hedge fund, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, seminal paper, Sergey Aleynikov, Small Order Execution System, South China Sea, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stealth mode startup, stochastic process, three-martini lunch, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uptick rule, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

Few people at the time believed computers could play more than a marginal role on Wall Street. Beyond record keeping or putting a quote up on a screen, it seemed to many that computers were little more than a tool to help the experts ply their trade on the phone or face-to-face. It was a people’s business built on three-martini lunches. Levine thought otherwise. He briefly enrolled in the elite electrical engineering program at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. But his freelance career proved too successful, and he quickly dropped out. Levine’s aversion to school had nothing to do with a lack of ambition or ability.

Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business by Ken Auletta

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, content marketing, corporate raider, crossover SUV, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, financial engineering, forensic accounting, Future Shock, Google Glasses, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, NetJets, Network effects, pattern recognition, pets.com, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, éminence grise

The agencies say clients are unwilling to share the risks, so why shouldn’t agencies be rewarded for taking risks? Of course, the issues raised by this controversy were broader than just rebates. Is advertising a relationship business, where accounts are won and lost on the golf course and over three-martini lunches, as had been caricatured for decades? Or is it a creative business, where consumers’ hearts and minds are captured by big, original ideas articulated with aesthetic brilliance, as the doyens of the Creative Revolution claimed? Or is it, increasingly, a science, in which leadership will gravitate to those who can capture and analyze the most data, as Silicon Valley and its digital gurus claim?

Pure Invention: How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World by Matt Alt

4chan, Apollo 11, augmented reality, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, fake news, financial engineering, game design, glass ceiling, global pandemic, haute cuisine, hive mind, late capitalism, lateral thinking, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, period drama, Ponzi scheme, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, three-martini lunch, union organizing, work culture , zero-sum game

No crammed subways for the average American; he drove his own car in to work, perhaps in one of the gloriously chromed real-life inspirations for Kosuge’s tin Cadillac. And when he arrived at his office, he might very well arrive in his office—as in a room of his very own, assuming he’d worked his way through enough three-martini lunches to climb the corporate ladder. For American execs of the day, drinking was something you did on the clock. Japanese salarymen inevitably worked in open floor plans, their motions visible to all, cogs in a bigger machine. While Japanese companies valued aptitude in their employees, they valued the ability to follow the rules even more, as befit a system designed around seniority rather than personal triumphs.

The Death of Cancer: After Fifty Years on the Front Lines of Medicine, a Pioneering Oncologist Reveals Why the War on Cancer Is Winnable--And How We Can Get There by Vincent T. Devita, Jr., M. D., Elizabeth Devita-Raeburn

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, double helix, Frances Oldham Kelsey, mouse model, personalized medicine, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, stem cell, three-martini lunch

We needed basic research, but we also, per the requirement of the National Cancer Act, needed to apply the results of that research to patients as quickly as possible. Rauscher also had a well-known weakness for alcohol. Every day, he and his immediate staff, known around the NIH as “the palace guard,” had a three-martini lunch at the Red Lion Inn on Wisconsin Avenue. Everyone knew that if you wanted to talk serious business, you met with Rauscher in the morning. If you wanted something from him, it was best to see him in the afternoon, when he was always more generous. The palace guardians were mostly close poker-playing friends of his.

Website Optimization by Andrew B. King

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, bounce rate, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, information retrieval, iterative process, Kickstarter, machine readable, medical malpractice, Network effects, OSI model, performance metric, power law, satellite internet, search engine result page, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, semantic web, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social bookmarking, social graph, Steve Jobs, the long tail, three-martini lunch, traumatic brain injury, web application

Those who can code Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) in their sleep and use Twitter to update their Facebook friends about the most viral YouTube videos are not familiar with phrases such as "unique sales proposition," "risk reversal," and "solution selling." They are in need of this book. Those who remember three-martini lunches on Madison Avenue are still uncomfortable with link equity, robots.txt files, and Google analytics page tags. They need this book. Website Optimization brings together the science, the art, and the business of Internet marketing in a complete way—if you'll excuse the expression, in a textbook way.

Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer-And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class by Paul Pierson, Jacob S. Hacker

accounting loophole / creative accounting, active measures, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, business climate, business cycle, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, desegregation, employer provided health coverage, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, income inequality, invisible hand, John Bogle, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Martin Wolf, medical bankruptcy, moral hazard, Nate Silver, new economy, night-watchman state, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Powell Memorandum, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-martini lunch, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, union organizing, very high income, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce

The prime target was Carter’s tax initiative. Carter had campaigned on tax reform, calling the current code “a disgrace to the human race.” His initial proposals were a combination of standard Democratic calls for more progressivity (a hike in the capital gains tax; the elimination of some high-end deductions like the “three-martini lunch”) and a reformist dose of greater simplicity. By the time administration officials were ready to present a plan to Congress in January 1978, they had already scaled back their ambitions. The bill was far less progressive than had been anticipated; while it still included a hike in capital gains taxes, the change was modest and was tempered by various carrots for industry.

User Friendly by Cliff Kuang, Robert Fabricant

A Pattern Language, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bill Atkinson, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive load, computer age, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, data science, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, en.wikipedia.org, fake it until you make it, fake news, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, Google Glasses, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Dyson, John Markoff, Jony Ive, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Norbert Wiener, Paradox of Choice, planned obsolescence, QWERTY keyboard, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, RFID, scientific management, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skinner box, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tacit knowledge, Tesla Model S, three-martini lunch, Tony Fadell, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vannevar Bush, women in the workforce

Designers began to strain against this assumption by the 1970s. One was Patricia Moore, who in 1978 arrived in New York fresh out of college, having landed a design job with Raymond Loewy. Even then, the office seemed like a museum diorama of early corporate man. Moore recalled managers who, when Loewy was out of the office, went out for three-martini lunches and came back too drunk to be productive. In an office filled with female secretaries, Moore was one of the few female designers on the staff. “I remember the chief model maker used to wear a cobbler’s apron and had a stogie in his mouth all day long. He used to spit in his trash can,” said Moore, over dinner in Phoenix, where she’s worked for several years, designing things such as the city’s quietly perfect streetcars.

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World by Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business intelligence, central bank independence, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, Corn Laws, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, COVID-19, creative destruction, critical race theory, David Brooks, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, feminist movement, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, intangible asset, invention of gunpowder, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jim Simons, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-oil, pre–internet, public intellectual, publish or perish, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, sexual politics, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce

Business schools hatched professors who were notable not just for their knowledge of particular businesses but for their ability to produce intellectual models: strategists such as Michael Porter and finance theorists such as Michael Jensen, who tried to bring the rigour of economics to the study of business. They also mass-produced MBAs who had little time for the post-war business establishment, with its clubby culture and three-Martini lunches, and who wanted instead to force American business to sit up and shape up – by pursuing shareholder value if they were disciples of Jensen or by examining the operation of the ‘five forces’ if they were Porterites. The same cult of ‘smarts’ gripped management consultancies. Bruce Henderson, the founder of the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), believed that the company’s only chance of challenging McKinsey lay in out-thinking it rather than out-networking it.

The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture by Brian Dear

air traffic controllers' union, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apple II, Apple Newton, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fairchild Semiconductor, finite state, Future Shock, game design, Hacker News, Howard Rheingold, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, lateral thinking, linear programming, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Palm Treo, Plato's cave, pre–internet, publish or perish, Ralph Nader, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, three-martini lunch, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog

We don’t want corporate salespeople dealing with our users. They come from a different environment….The main market for PLATO is industry. And the Control Data sales force is much more industry oriented than they are education oriented. When these fellows come in with their three-piece suits and they take faculty members out for their three-martini lunch and so on, it doesn’t have the academic feel to it that it needs to have to be successful on the campus.” Another site, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), installed a PLATO system of its own in 1982, and also banned CDC personnel from poking their heads in on campus unless they were there for a specific purpose such as repairing equipment.

Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980 by Rick Perlstein

8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Apollo 13, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 747, Brewster Kahle, business climate, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, death of newspapers, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, equal pay for equal work, facts on the ground, feminist movement, financial deregulation, full employment, global village, Golden Gate Park, guns versus butter model, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index card, indoor plumbing, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, kremlinology, land reform, low interest rates, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, oil shock, open borders, Peoples Temple, Phillips curve, Potemkin village, price stability, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Suez crisis 1956, three-martini lunch, traveling salesman, unemployed young men, union organizing, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, wages for housework, walking around money, War on Poverty, white flight, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, yellow journalism, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

There was, however, a very powerful constituency for tax complexity. They were already hard at work. For instance, the hotel and restaurant lobbies went to ground to fight Carter’s proposal to rein in abuses of the tax code’s allowance for “ordinary and necessary business expenses”—what the press dubbed his war against the “three-martini lunch.” Carter responded, “I don’t care how many martinis anyone has with lunch. But I do care who picks up the check. I don’t think a relatively small minority has some sort of divine rights to have expensive meals, free theater tickets, country club dues, sporting events tickets, paid for by heavier taxes by everybody else.”

…

Michelmore, Tax and Spend: The Welfare State, Tax Politics, and the Limits of American Liberalism (State College: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 128. chairman of Carter’s Board Stein, Pivotal Decade, 193–94. Ways and Means chairman Kuttner, Revolt of the Haves, 246; “Ullman Opposes Plan to Tighten Business Expense-Account Taxes,” NYT, January 19, 1978. Robert Packwood “The Tax Education of Jimmy Carter,” Fortune, January 16, 1978 “three-martini lunch” Kuttner, Revolt of the Haves, 234; Vogel, Fluctuating Fortunes, 174; Virginia Payette column, United Features, May 22, 1978; “Business Or Pleasure?” Lakeland Ledger, June 13, 1978. “how many martinis” “The President’s News Conference,” February 17, 1978, APP. On January 23 George Gallup column, January 23, 1978.

Eastern USA by Lonely Planet

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, glass ceiling, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information trail, interchangeable parts, jitney, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine readable, Mason jar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, the built environment, the High Line, the payments system, three-martini lunch, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Most of all, they love a steaming cup of coffee. After a midmorning snack break, most American workers’ lunch hour affords time enough for just a sandwich, quick burger or hearty salad. While you may spot (rarely) diners drinking a glass of wine or beer with their noontime meal, the days of the ‘three martini lunch’ are long gone. Early in the evening, people settle in to a more substantial weeknight dinner, which, given the workload of so many two-career families, might be takeout or prepackaged dishes. Thanksgiving may be the only holiday (held the last Thursday in November) where most Americans would agree on the menu – roast turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie – but even then appetizers, side dishes and desserts might freestyle into Latino, African or Hawaiian flavors.

USA Travel Guide by Lonely, Planet

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big-box store, bike sharing, Biosphere 2, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, edge city, El Camino Real, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, Golden Gate Park, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information trail, interchangeable parts, intermodal, jitney, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine readable, Mars Rover, Mason jar, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, off grid, off-the-grid, Quicken Loans, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, starchitect, stealth mode startup, stem cell, supervolcano, the built environment, The Chicago School, the High Line, the payments system, three-martini lunch, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

Lunch Usually after a midmorning coffee break, an American worker’s lunch hour affords only a sandwich, quick burger or hearty salad. The formal ‘business lunch’ is more common in big cities like New York, where food is not necessarily as important as the conversation. While you’ll spot diners drinking a beer or a glass of wine with their lunch, long gone are the days when the ‘three martini lunch’ was socially acceptable. It was a phenomenon common enough in the mid-20th century to become a kind of catchphrase for indulgent business lunches, usually written off as a corporate, tax-deductible expense. The classic noontime beverage, in fact, is a far cry from a martini: iced tea (and yes, almost always with unlimited refills).