The World Cup has turned America into a discovery channel for the rest of the world.
And they are not handling it well.
In the best possible way.
Here is what they are discovering:
Free public restrooms. Europeans pay every time.
Free water at every restaurant. Just appears.
Free refills. Coffee. Sodas. Iced tea. Unlimited.
Free chips and salsa before you even order.
Free warm bread with dinner.
Ice in drinks like civilized people.
Air conditioning everywhere. Not a moral debate. A fact.
Parking lots attached to the actual place you are going.
Drive throughs where the food comes to the car while you sit in it.
Ranch dressing by the gallon.
Tex-Mex that cannot be explained only experienced.
Dental care that actually works.
Buccee’s. There are no words for Buccee’s.
Then they found the grocery stores.
Five of them within one mile.
Each one the size of an aircraft hangar.
Burgers. Steaks. Brisket. Ribs. Pulled pork. Lamb. Veal. Every cut of every animal ever domesticated by human civilization available in one refrigerated aisle at ten in the morning on a Tuesday.
The Germans stood in the meat section for forty five minutes.
In silence.
Processing.
They finally understand why we do not have trains.
We have roads wide enough for the cars we actually drive.
Parking lots the size of small European countries.
Airports in every city worth visiting.
Why would we need trains.
The Germans are taking ranch home by the bottle.
The Dutch found queso and briefly lost the ability to speak.
The Japanese are photographing HEB like it is the Louvre.
The Czechs are weeping in West, Texas.
Welcome to America!
The greatest country on earth.
She forgot her husband at the gas station… and the conversation is hilarious 😭
He calls asking where she is and who she was with and she immediately hits him with, “You don’t trust me or something?” A few seconds later she realizes she actually left him behind and says, “Oh my god, I forgot you at the gas station.”
Safe to say he might have some trust issues for a reason.
Have you ever had a memory lapse like this before?
Property taxes on primary residences are a tax on unrealized gains, and the double standard around it is glaring.
You buy a house for $300k with your after-tax dollars. Years later the market rises and the assessor says it’s now worth $600k. Your tax bill goes up—even though you didn’t sell, didn’t refinance, didn’t pull out a dime of equity. You’re paying higher taxes every single year on “wealth” that exists only on paper. That is the literal definition of taxing unrealized appreciation.
Politicians and pundits scream bloody murder when anyone suggests doing the exact same thing to billionaires’ unrealized stock gains. “It’s unfair! They’ll be forced to sell assets!” Yet the same logic is applied to your family home without a second thought. If the principle is wrong for Elon Musk’s Tesla shares, it’s wrong for grandma’s paid-off house.
The common defense—“It pays for schools and roads”—doesn’t hold up as justification for this specific mechanism. Those services are valuable, but tying their funding to the fluctuating paper value of your home creates a system where success (a nicer neighborhood, inflation, or simple supply and demand) is punished with a higher bill. Once the mortgage is gone, you still don’t truly own it. You’re a tenant with extra paperwork, paying annual rent to the government based on an assessment you don’t control.
This isn’t about hating government services. It’s about honest funding. Tax actual economic activity—consumption via a broad sales tax, realized capital gains, or user fees for specific services. Shift the burden to people who are actively spending or transacting in the economy instead of penalizing ownership itself. Other countries and even some U.S. localities have shown you can fund local government without treating primary homes like perpetual leaseholds from the state.
Ownership should mean ownership. Not “you own it until the county decides your paper equity went up.” Abolish property taxes on primary residences. The current system is a wealth tax dressed up as a service fee, and it’s long past time we called it what it is.
A cashier told me my total was $8.55.
The screen said $8.51 and i pointed at the screen.
She said they round up because of the penny shortage.
I handed her $8.51 exact.
But let’s do the math nobody wants to do.
The average fast food chain serves 1 million customers a day.
Round up 4 cents on every transaction.
That’s $40,000 a day. $14,600,000 a year.
On pennies.
On a shortage that conveniently always rounds up and never down.
These companies post billion dollar profits every quarter.
And they’re skimming your change to pad it further.
This isn’t a penny shortage.
This is a corporate policy disguised as a math problem.
Check your receipt.
Every single time.
Because 4 cents times a million people is not a rounding error.
It’s a business model.