Word: frac
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...That discomfort is exactly what the agencies count on. The idea of using costumed collectors dates back to the 1980s, when a company, the Cobrador del Frac (or Tuxedo Collector), began sending out agents dressed in black ties and driving cars emblazoned with the company logo. Others followed suit, in ever more extravagant getups, all of them banking on the debtor's sense of shame to motivate repayment. "Personal honor, your public image, is still very important in Spain," says José Romero of the Zorro Collectors. "If one of our agents shows up at an apartment, everyone...
...Apparently the tactics work. The Cobrador del Frac now has 400 employees across Spain. Its commercial director, Juan Carlos Granda, says it has a 63% success rate. And with the percentage of people who default on loans skyrocketing in Spain - it reached 3.8% in January, compared with 0.95% the year before - the number of creditors who look to its services is growing. "Thanks to the [financial] crisis, we've seen about a 20% increase in business in the past year," Granda says...
...platform cities give way to clustered yurts. There are lots of these heady innovations in "Archilab: New Experiments in Architecture, Art and the City," the highly entertaining exhibition now at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, where it runs through March 13. Organized jointly by the Mori and the FRAC Centre Collection in Orl?ans, France, it brings together more than a half-century of attempts to utterly rethink what a building or even a city might look like...
...resounding phrases sounded gloriously libertarian four years ago. But by last week French President Fracçois Mitterrand must surely have regretted the words he spoke as an opposition leader in 1979. In an effort to help cure an increasingly ailing economy, his government had laid a heavy official hand on one of the most hallowed of French traditions, the vacation...
...regulations were closely scrutinized at the Food Research and Action Center, a Washington-based public interest law firm and consumer watchdog that got much of its money from the first federal agency abolished by Reagan, the Community Services Administration. Workers at FRAC wasted no time preparing the first meal to the new specifications. The paltry elementary school menu: 1½ oz. of hamburger (instead of 2 oz.), one slice of white bread (rather than 1½), six French fries, nine grapes, and a 6-oz. (not 8-oz.) glass of milk. The story was picked up by TV news...