We're going to start to have a critical mass of people there with or without the hotel.

You would just assume that Costa Rica would be 10 times more expensive than Nicaragua. In most instances, it is.

We didn't really find them because at that time, the civil war had just come to an end. There were issues over title and property ownership, but we felt a need to get involved and help people there.

We are increasingly optimistic that outside pressure might encourage Pier 1's management and board to undertake a more aggressive turnaround effort. This could ignite a fundamental rebound and better stock price at Pier 1.

The social dimension of reticence and nonacknowledgment is most developed in forms of politeness and deference. We don't want to tell people what we think of them, and we don't want to hear from them what they think of us, though we are happy to surmise their thoughts and feelings, and to have them surmise ours, at least up to a point. We don't, if we are reasonable, worry too much what they may say about us behind our backs, just as we often say things about a third party that we wouldn't say to his face. Since everyone participates in these practices, they aren't, or shouldn't be, deceptive. Deception is another matter, and sometimes we have reason to object to it, though sometimes we have no business knowing the truth, even about how someone really feels about us.

The problem is one of opposition between subjective and objective points of view. There is a tendency to seek an objective account of everything before admitting its reality. But often what appears to a more subjective point of view cannot be accounted for in this way. So either the objective conception of the world is incomplete, or the subjective involves illusions that should be rejected.