You forget the power of money. I live near the Apple Spaceship, where they have the city of Cupertino completely cowed and afraid to even ask a question about their stupid plans. An entire useful east-west artery (Pruneridge) was permanently taken out of service for that.

It's so cute when you assume that Santa Barbara is going to say No to this.

> A building meant to house 4500 students, with only two entrances?

I would think that, you being a former firefighter, you’d know that exits (for regular use and, even more so, emergency exits) are not the same thing as (are generally a superset of) entrances.

The plans for the building [0] show 10 escape stairs with dedicated exits (including the four which also have doors onto the two main entrance lobbies for regular use) and dozens of additional first-floor exit doors.

> One of those details would be the presence of a sprinkler system. IF local building codes require sprinklers in dormitories

State building codes in California have for new construction for more than 30 years (heck, California has, for a decade, required them for new single family homes, too.)

If the resigning architect could have plausibly raised the argument “this building will either get everyone killed in a fire or never be allowed by the fire marshal to be occupied because it flagrantly breaks the most basic fire code requirements”, they probably would have led with that rather than fuzzy social and psychological concerns.

[0] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Gb5DVYUPyNj2JYla5B_dL4-Ke-j...

Yes, I've already addressed that point multiple times in this discussion. Emergency exits are a factor, but not a be-all / end-all.

State building codes in California have for new construction for more than 30 years (heck, California has, for a decade, required them for new single family homes, too.)

Thanks for sharing. I'm not a California resident, so I'm less familiar with the particulars of their regulations out there.

As far as I know, building codes do require sprinklers in new residences just judging based on the 2010s era complexes around campus. I had assumed this was standard everywhere now, but maybe not. The place I live in now is from the 60s iirc and so of course does not have any. Interestingly, the entire buildings fire panel and smoke heads seem to have been retrofitted rather recently, but the old continuous bells are still in use with no strobes. Surprisingly, many residents do not seem to understand the significance of not having sprinkler protection and do not evacuate with any urgency, if at all.

Interestingly enough, I believe at least some of that was in direct response to the UNC Phi Gamma Delta fire back in 1996.

https://www.wunc.org/news/2021-05-12/unc-chapel-hill-phi-gam...

and do not evacuate with any urgency, if at all.

Yeah, there's an unfortunate "thing" about automatic fire alarms - the "boy who cried wolf" effect. Many automatic alarms go off a LOT and more often than not the reason is either a straight up fault in the system, or at best, a "real, but non fire" reason like smoke from cooking. I listen in on Chapel Hill FD dispatch a lot and I can tell you, CHFD goes to the various dorms around campus all the freaking time for alarm activations, and rarely is the cause any kind of actual active fire. So people get conditioned to treat those alarms as "nothing-burger". It's unfortunate.

What I can say with some confidence is that sprinklers are widely required in commercial buildings, and I think it's safe to say that's fairly widespread across the US. But even there, I wouldn't say the requirement is totally ubiquitous.

Getting into residential structures is where it gets murkier. For single family homes, I think something like 46 states don't require sprinklers for new construction. For multi-family, and things like dorms, I'm less clear on the details of what is / isn't required around various parts of the country.

Also, just to add on here, a number of states have adopted statewide rules prohibiting local codes from requiring sprinklers for new single-family homes.

TBH, I just wish there were stricter rules for smoke detectors and equipment in garages. I feel like this is a big gap with the current rules, at least in my state.

Do people not realize that in California we build residential buildings that are MANY MANY stories tall.

The LACK of operable windows in a bedroom is generally a REQUIREMENT on a skyscraper / residential condo tower for safety reasons. They worry about kids falling out etc.

The safety plans involve other measures - including much better building codes around fire control (ie, sprinklers). Fire hardened emergency exists (ie, these students may be moving out of historic all wood tinderboxes if my old CA school is any indication).

> The safety plans involve other measures - including much better building codes around fire control

We could all see at Grenfell Tower in London how well that worked.

Can you explain more on this point? Because tall buildings not having windows that open because children might fall out of them sounds completely ridiculous to me. Some of the Soviet commie blocks were 16 storeys tall and obviously the windows can be opened.

What are the other reasons why this restriction would be in place? I'm genuinely curious.

One issue is that for tall buildings a fair bit of thought goes into things like aerodynamics of overall building, ventilation / HVAC control, and internal pressures.

A tall building has an issue with its core / utilities usually, the taller the go generally the worse the ratio of non-livable space to livable. So things that mess with for example HVAC efficiency may be seen as a negative.

If everyone opens a window on one side of a building, over building surface areas and wind speeds at heights, you can get pretty crazy pressure issues. You can also get aero issues. You an also run into HVAC issues (ie, volume of air from 3 open large windows on the 40th floor may overwhelm HVAC system capacity).

Let me ask you, you are building a skyscraper to rent.

If you allow folks to open their windows and the wind blows something out that kills someone on the street - who will be sued? If someone drops something out (trying to put a plant in window or stick a telescope out) and kills someone - who pays. If someone falls out that window, who will be sued (see a cruise line that had a stupid idiot hold a kid through the window and drop them).

Other issues are around maintenance and weather proofing etc etc. Again, environment at height can often be harsh, and now you may have to have someone on side of building to replace a window or related mechanisms. Easy in a house at ground level, a pain at height.

BTW - I like windows that open and would NOT live in a tall res condo. My key point was that all the folks talking about how window exists are required - it's so weird seeing people speak with such certainty on something so easily disprovable.

I think up to 30 floors or so and older places it was common for windows to open (they were also built differently, more open space / daylighting / shallower footprints (ie, H shape buildings vs full block buildings).

The Soviet system was not exactly known for its fidelity to safety of its citizens.

Even with emergency exits, there are a lot of interior areas that will quickly be blocked off from any exit if a fire breaks out in the wrong place.

The whole interior are will also fill with smoke really quickly.

[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/spokanerising/status/145392774727...

Most of what you said was already addressed

I think this is a good discussion though, as maybe it exposes some members of the public-at-large to some thoughts on fire-safety that they haven't considered deeply before. If so, that's a win in my book.

Dismissing someone who isn’t a fire code expert who is making claims about fire safety is just fine to me.

If we were discussing how to safely fight fires, then by all means defer to the firefighter.

To be pedantic, that may be the case for this specific building, as CA may be a state that simply adopted the relevant NFPA model code wholesale and with no changes; but it's not a true statement in the most general sense, as not all localities adopt the various NFPA codes verbatim (or at all).

That's not a statement of support for the building just that it isn't why this architect found issue.

> Because the doors to the stairwells and exits were locked – a common practice at the time to prevent workers from taking unauthorized breaks and to reduce theft – many of the workers could not escape from the burning building and jumped from the high windows.

> Various historians have also ascribed the exit doors being locked to management's wanting to keep out union organizers due to management's anti-union bias. The foreman who held the stairway door key had already escaped by another route.

> Within three minutes, the Greene Street stairway became unusable in both directions. Terrified employees crowded onto the single exterior fire escape – which city officials had allowed Asch to erect instead of the required third staircase

> The toxic smoke, heat, and the resulting human rush toward the main exit killed 100; 230 were injured and another 132 escaped uninjured.

> By this time, the nightclub's fire alarm had activated, and although there were four possible exits, most people headed for the front door through which they had entered. The ensuing crowd crush in the narrow hallway leading to that exit quickly blocked the exit completely and resulted in numerous deaths and injuries among the patrons and staff.

> Twenty-five workers were killed and 55 injured in the fire, trapped behind locked fire doors.

> The majority of those who escaped unharmed were workers in the front of the building who left through the unlocked main entrance,

It seems clear that two entrances/exists are not enough, even if there is numerous of extra emergency exists. People will, in panic, return to the point they came from, even if emergency exists are highlighted.

Your quote is from a fire in 1911. This is no longer at all common practice, and would get the university in serious trouble during regular inspections.

So yeah, maybe one of the quotes is less strong, but the sentiment still stands, that fire exists are not a replacement for main exists, as people tend to go back to where they came from, instead of seeking new exists.

Reported the "locked" status to the local fire inspector, the panic bars were unlocked the next day.

So it is not just in 1911 that folks with the key to the lock get the bright idea to lock a door that is meant to serve as an emergency exit in the event of a fire or other emergency.

https://brnensky.denik.cz/zpravy_region/zemrele-kolegy-uctil...

I pass that monument quite often...

We don't know yet how many (if any) of those things will apply to Munger Hall. I have reached out to SBFire to ask some of these questions, and hope to hear back from them.

Signage, lighting, and periodic drill requirements exist (among other reasons) so that people will be aware of emergency exits.

Drill requirements in particular are utter jokes. Nobody pays any attention to them.

Not every response is intended to be an argument.

> Drill requirements in particular are utter jokes. Nobody pays any attention to them.

Every public entity I’ve been involved with enough to know how they address them has, private entities are more varied.

----

> SBFire:

> Hi, I have a question I hope you can help me with. I

> stumbled across an article about the proposed UCSB "Munger

> Hall" on an Internet forum that I frequent.

> https://www.independent.com/2021/10/28/architect-resigns-in-...

> As a former firefighter myself, I got some serious bad

> vibes from the way this building was described. I made a

> comment about my concerns which sparked (no pun intended)

> a lot of discussion about fire safety, building codes,

> etc.

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29038356

> As it happens, the original article was somewhat light on

> details about the fire safety aspects of the building. So

> I wanted to reach out to you and simply ask "From an SB

> Fire perspective, has this building design been reviewed,

> and - if so - are there any outstanding concerns from a

> fire/life safety viewpoint?"

> I'm particularly interested in knowing if there are any

> concerns around the number of entrances / egress points,

> the proposal for interior bedrooms with no windows, and

> whether or not this structure would be sprinklered.

> Thank you kindly!

https://codes.iccsafe.org/content/CFC2019P4/chapter-10-means...

Read the section on "[BE] 1004.2Cumulative occupant loads."

For more than just reasons if fire in my opinion. I'm surprised nobody has said the word gun yet. Are they going to be scanning people and checking their backpacks art he door? That sure would make it feel more like a prison.

Where I went to school we got lots of strong opinions from outsiders. But some of the "worst" dorms were the most popular for reasons that are not always obvious to outsiders.

And yes, some students like to live close to others. UCSB may be doing double and triple bunking in rooms (my school did 4 to a room for a while, when the "crappy" new space opened it was first choice in the housing lottery).

Folks talking about sharing a bathroom meaning that people will be pooping out of windows are idiots who either went to some elite school where you are waited on by butlers. It would not be uncommon for a hall with 15 rooms to have two bathrooms.

Other things that offended folks that students gave no craps about. We had some coed bathrooms, was never an issue. I'm sure now they are called gender neutral.

Santa Barbara has strict anti-gun laws already. CA has a lot of anti-gun laws already. The UCSB system has anti gun laws already.

Santa Barbara issues something like 50 permits a DECADE for concealed carry. It's a "may" issue jurisdiction, and they don't issue.

And if metal detectors are implemented, I'm not sure students will care. They already exist for large sporting events and other areas of concern, so if there was a concern you'd want fewer main entrances so you could staff them.

Bigger issue is normally non-students in student housing, so security can be good in terms of setup. This means the newer buildings often do things like keycard access to suites only for suite holders, and some even do keycards for your room separate from suite, again, all logged and tracked. I visited a friend at a school where I had to sign in my car with a guard, had to be escorted to their room by a front desk staffer etc. That's extreme - no way UC is going that (this was a small elite place).

The major student issues in terms of safety are stranger access to dorms / bathrooms at night, theft issues (bikes / bags etc), and nuisance issues (noise, weed smoke, parties etc).

How the fuck was this project compliant with local fire code?

I don't even understand how this was seriously considered in the first place. Apparently the project has a $1.5B pricetag and this old coot is tossing in a seventh of that? WTF.

UCSB employs 10k people in a town of 90k. This is a $1.5 billion project that the University is desperate to have. It seems totally plausible to me that they could find a compliant inspector and/or get a variance for the building.

Whether or not it's actually safe, you can bet that the companies making millions off this will have a plausible story about safety. With lots of documents and presentations and software models. What's a small-town fire safety inspector got to put against that?

Land grant universities!

> his blueprints be followed exactly.

No sane architect would have come up with this abomination, hence why the sane architect who is the main subject of this article has just resigned.

Thanks for reaching out to us. While the Munger Hall is not our review responsibility, we are working very closely with the UCSB Fire Marshal in his review. We have a great working relationship with the Fire Marshal. We have had numerous meetings on this project and the Fire Marshal is open and willing to suggestions when it come to fire and life safety issues. We will continue to meet on this project and it is our hope that all fire and life safety issues will be addressed. I am available if you have any further questions or concern. You can also reach out the University Fire Marshal.

So, not a lot of detail (I expected that) but it is interesting that they do seem to allude to there indeed being fire safety issues which need to be addressed.

But... if the design really was done by an amateur architect who probably has little or no background specifically related to fire/life safety issues vis-a-vis building design, and it truly hasn't been modified from his design... I don't know. I'll just say "color me skeptical" for now.

If I'm ultimately proven wrong, then I would actually be very happy. I'd much rather suffer the indignity of having to admit I was wrong about something on HN, than watch a news report detailing hundreds of student deaths on campus.

My alma mater had to go back and redo a building based on fire marshal concerns.

I would hope not. The article describes this as a "proposal" and I'm not sure how far along they are with it. Maybe they haven't even gotten as far as submitting a design for fire safety inspection yet. Or maybe they have, got feedback, and made adjustments in response, and the article above glossed over that. It's hard to say based only on what we know from TFA at the moment.

That's by way of a reddit post about the dorm that I stumbled across trying to find the answer to whether there were fire code concerns with the project.

To begin with, the Unified Building Code states that every bedroom is required to have at least one window opening to the exterior of the dwelling, not an adjoining room. The purpose of this requirement is threefold:

A bedroom must have a direct source of outside light, provided by a window that is at least 10% as large as the floor area of the room.

* A bedroom must have a direct source of outside ventilation, consisting of an opening window at least 5% as large as the floor area.

* Every bedroom must have a means of fire escape, directly to the exterior of the building, by way of a door or window that opens. Fire escapes to adjoining rooms are not acceptable. In the advent of a fire, that second room could conceivably be filled with smoke or engulfed in flames at the moment when escape becomes imperative. The only permitted means of escape is to the outside.*

Honestly... I think this is very much a taste thing. Is it so weird that I don't think this looks so bad at all? Yeah, yeah, no windows. But dense housing means lots of local goodies in the same building. These 4500 kids in their sardine rooms will have multiple food options, probably several gyms, rec rooms, libraries, etc... all "down the hall".

I spent a lot of time in college trudging to stuff through the snow (though to be fair not a lot of snow at UCSB). Physical access to amenities means more than I think suburban detached garage owners tend to remember.

There are quite frequently things that one might intuitively expect to be in the regs, that aren't. Requirements for sprinklers, for example. As surprising as it may seem, there are still lots of places where sprinklers are not required in many buildings.

I don't know the situation in Santa Barbara, but I did email their fire department earlier with an inquiry about this topic. Hoping to hear something back.

Just looking at the proposed floorplan, in an emergency it would be a nightmare to get out. 7 kids trying to get out that one door with a giant table in the way while likely panicking? It screams deathtrap.

https://www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/601/fire-p...

Kidding aside... given the size of the bedrooms, I get the impression that the students aren't meant to spend much time there aside from whatever amount of sleep college students are getting these days. The rest of their time would probably be spent in common areas that actually do have sunlight. Recalling my personal experience in college, where most of my time was already spent in common areas anyways, I don't see the lack of bedroom windows as that huge a problem.

This particular dorm design also seems to allow for more privacy than a traditional dorm does.

Yes, having shared bedrooms was particularly bad for my sleep. Not sure it's a good trade for a window though.

Honestly, this looks like a low security prison to me. Small cells and a day room for activities and socializing.

It is my sad duty to inform you of a four foot

Restriction on humanoid height

I hear the directors of Genetic Control have been buying all the

Properties that have recently been sold, taking risks oh so bold

It's said now that people will be shorter in height

They can fit twice as many in the same building site

(They say it's alright)"

(From "Get'em off my property", Genesis, Foxtrot, 1972)

No better way to get kids prepared for what comes ahead in their adulthood, huh?

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film)

94% of the residents won't have windows. Can you list any of these apartments that have that characteristic?

Surely building codes should mandate structural flaws and sinking foundations be fixed immediately.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/collapsed-miami-condo-had-...

Your comment is not making any point but your of lack of understanding.

A citizen doesn't care about challenges in construction or software or food contamination, it is our professional responsibility not to be negligent in our work.

Just an FYI it's unlikely an architect designed those foundations - there were probably engineers who tested the soil and gave its properties to a designing engineer who designed the foundation and both of those things are going to be tempered by what was common engineering practice at the time, and if the unstable soil situation was known about. My understanding is this situation is common in the area due to building practice at the time.

However I can comment on the culture of negligence - and I think it's getting worse.

Of course in every job, there is constant pressure from management to cut corners, junior colleagues or peers that mess up, deadlines to meet. It is very easy to say to avoid inspecting troubled areas, to say 'I've done my job' and avoid headache. Often it is not in anyone's job description to police this. The 'client' is typically none the wiser, and when problems arise 10 years down the line, often they can't be traced to anyone personally. The fact that we've replaced entire careers with gig economy, and people stay in one job less and companies now invest less in training that ever in the past 40 years means that there is even less accountability and more opportunity for mistakes.

Cases of unpredictable 'something bad happened' are extremely rare. Soviet government was warned that reactors used in Chernobyl were dangerous, Tepco was warned that sea wall protecting Fukushima was inadequate, Robert Lund warned that Nasa should not launch Space Shuttle Challenger, residents of Grenfell Tower warned about fire safety before they burned alive, same goes goes for Bhopal disaster, subprime loans and 2008, 737 Max and every other major event. It is also extremely rare that the consequences of these decision ever catch up with the top brass. Hence we have culture of negligence.

If said homeowner is trying to 'score points' by pointing out things they don't themselves understand, then they don't deserve any sort of benefit of the doubt.

>However I can comment on the culture of negligence - and I think it's getting worse.

I don't think we're talking about the same thing.

The hell kind of attitude is this? Someone goes through the effort of doing research to wrap their head around something with which many people don't even bother to acknowledge, and challenge you with a question that you as the professional are reasonably expected to be able to answer, and that's your response?

I hope you never work with me. We would not get along at all.

Not to mention that housing like this makes breeding grounds for the flu and other contagious illnesses. It's poorly timed given we're still battling Covid-19 worldwide.

Designing 100 year buildings around our current hysterical reaction to covid is just silly. Covid is over, time to move on.

History will harshly judge our reaction to covid and we will hopefully never repeat this awful public health policy again. The idea that we should be designing building with covid in mind is just a symptom of how much parts of society has lost the plot.

There is a reason though that I specifically called out all contagious illnesses. I can tell you that I got colds and the flu much more often in college than I do even in an open office. What's more, is students don't get sick days or time to catch up after an illness except in the most serious cases. I don't think it's illogical to think students (and their parents) don't want a dorm hotbed for contagions.

We don't know whether or not a community focused living design would help or hurt in this regard.

The covid/contagion question is interesting, because we DO know that designing for contagion safety is seemly inherently at odds with designing for social/emotional safety.

I think there's no clearly superior solution here, which tells me that building both types of systems would at least help further our understanding of the issues.

You are assuming a lot about whether the safety designs exist, or are adequate.

Uh, yes. Because there are laws governing how we can construct buildings in a safe way, and on the whole (c.f. the number of deaths in building fires over time) they work well. So I trust them.

As far as the putative logic flaw, I don't see it. Everything is a tradeoff, even "because money". Saving money on the dorm means lower tuition, more scholarships, more facilities elsewhere, maybe a few new endowed professorships, etc...

All this just to save $200/1500 (13%)? You can get a better discount than that at any retailer.

This is false statement. The architectural design was provided by Van Tilburg, Banvard, & Soderberg, AIA.

Did the university believe it couldn't otherwise house 4500 students for a billion dollars? Were there considerations involved other than student housing?

Presumably, they didn't say "Hi, Charlie Munger, please draw up a building for us on a napkin."

It's in fact a barb that Munger is a non-practicing architect, and apparently ruffled feathers with the professional architect on the committee.

Which, from working with some prima donna architects, I am both unsurprised and unsympathetic about.

Building engineers ensure everything is to code. Architects fret about whether it looks and feels right.

Some architects are good at making livable spaces, but an architecture degree doesn't guarantee that, and a lack of one doesn't preclude it.

The idea that architects don't worry about building code is absolutely incorrect on a project of any scale.

Prima donna "starchitects" worry less, but that's because they've hired other architects to handle it.

The norms of architecture that mandate e.g. windows for living spaces are here being violated so extremely someone's stepping down over it. This is therefore not an average project.

Concern seems reasonable.

In an ordinary apartment building, if you build it stupid, people won't want to live there. Then the landlord won't want to build it that way to begin with and if some fool does it anyway there will be a profit incentive to knock down the building and do it again.

This is a dorm. At at state school. The normal market forces aren't there. The landlord isn't going to be motivated by losing money. The tenants aren't in an ordinary market because dorms are often subsidized or have unique zoning that allows for lower cost than is legally permissible in other available housing and are likely to be closer to the school than other available housing. So you have to exceed a higher threshold of terrible before people will abandon them.

I can‘t imagine it wouldn‘t be very pleasant, as an example, someone smoking weed inside a dorm next to me without a way to vent it out.

It's difficult to design a large window, that will also open, that also insulates sufficiently to hit modern energy efficiency certifications.

YMMV, but I live in Seattle, where there has been a residential boom with plenty of towers, and I have never seen a residential apartment with non-functional windows. Every room will have at least one that can open (though for efficiency reasons they're usually casement windows, which are annoying in their own right)

This is just squeezing the undergrads to feed the rest of the machine more efficiently.

We're trying to save people that trust the system too much. Let me know if you know any people like that.

This is getting toward conspiracy theory territory. It's... a building code. Yes. Yes, I tend to trust building codes that have been keeping all of us safe in our homes and offices for the better part of a century. If building codes don't work, then where are the disasters in all the other buildings? You're saying that every other building in the USA in the 20th century "just happened" to be built safely, despite a thousand year history of terrible urban fires, and that regulation had nothing to do with it?

This isn’t some theoretical, conspiracy-laden issue. It’s an actual problem.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grenfell_Tower_fire

Yes! And by whom was it reviewed? And what happened when they reviewed it? I'm guessing the answers are "government regulators", and "they made sure it was fixed". And now it's being fixed.

You're literally citing the fact that safety regulation worked correctly as evidence... that it doesn't? Without the regulators you'd still be living in a deathtrap!

The safety regulation did not work because of the 71 people that died in Grenfell. What would you say if you lived there yourself "ah thats just bad luck for me"? what would you say if you lived there yourself and were one of the people that was reporting to the regulators about the problems in advance "I trust this system, I'm glad this system is based purely on trust, trust works so well, all should trust building codes because they are CODES, I like codes, they are infallible, its so cool that people exist to review the codes as well. This happens so rare due to the codes and not from simply being an uncommon occurrence that challenges building standard."

I don't really understand what your perspective here is to be honest. Not being wrong?

I think you misunderstood the poster - 100 people burned alive because the regulators were asleep at the wheel. That tragic disaster is the only reason his building was checked for adequacy, and it failed, along with thousands of others.

Right now there are thousands of buildings which were built and sold in breach of fire regulation, and the apartment owners are being saddled with 100% of the bill even when they own 25% of the apartment. In some cases the cost of repair exceeds the value of the property.

Building codes are state and municipal level laws. There is no harmonization. There are varying degrees of compliance based on competency, actual corruption conspiracies, and budget all of which changes decade over decade, building by building.

Many other regulations and individual behaviors have helped keep people safe. The way electronics work, the way people are educated, the public service announcements, the response times, and sometimes the building materials. Some things have actually become more flammable over the years.

Regarding building codes, 98 people just died in a literal building collapse in the Miami area. Your standard, if I understand correctly, is "that was just 1, where are the city wide Chicago fires", when the counterpoint is that this collapse prompted reviews of many properties and many more structural issues have been found in just that one municipality that threaten hundreds and thousands of people.

You shouldn't trust this process. You should root for the process to work decently since the probability of a disaster is low - this is the only area we agree! the incidents aren't happening! - but you should know that this is all luck. Continual luck in a system that barely works.

Large, multi-fatality fires are less common now, but they do still occur. I'd argue that we can always aspire to get better with regards to fire safety.

Money is really important, probably the single most important constraint for state universities.

Something's happening here that's more than just the money.

It's Mr. Burns hanging a "you're here forever" sign, or Kanye West ranting about his napkin design for the iPlane in the Oval Office while dropping a few "motherfucker"s.