> It's just a much more human culture.
I was representing a Soviet UN official busted by the FBI for espionage, and took the Soviet Counsel-General up to see him at the Metropolitan Correctional Center ("MCC") next to the courthouse in Manhattan. The MCC (built in the 70s, I think) is highly automated. You come to gates in tiled empty corridors, put your pass through a slit in the wall under a oneway mirror, the pass is returned, the gates open, and so on. On leaving the MCC we went through a series of such gates, and when we finally got outside the Counsel-General said: "John, at home, at each one of those gates there would have been a guard with a big ring of keys ... the human touch."
john mage