USA. A Mexican restaurant. We had not yet ordered anything, and the food was already arriving.
Chips. Salsa. Unrequested. Free.
I stopped the waiter. "We have not earned these."
"They just come with the table, man."
They come with the TABLE. In my land, hospitality is a debt. Every gift creates an obligation, weighed carefully, returned in the proper season with interest of feeling. Here, the gift arrives before you have even proven you can pay for dinner.
This is not an appetizer. This is a declaration: we trust you. Eat.
I ate with the gravity the moment deserved. And then — I must report this calmly — the basket emptied, and a new one appeared.
"Did we…?"
"Refill," the waiter said. "It's bottomless."
Bottomless. They have wells of salsa. The supply lines of this nation are beyond anything my ancestors imagined.
My friend warned me. "Don't fill up on chips, dude."
Too late. I had accepted three baskets. Honor demanded each one be finished — an unfinished gift is an insult. By the time my actual food arrived, I was a ruined man.
I was not hungry. I was not comfortable. I had been defeated by a courtesy.
Generosity that arrives before the request cannot be repaid. It can only be survived.
I know the rule now. I have made my peace with the basket. One basket. Two at the most.
Who am I deceiving. There is no number of baskets I would refuse. The trust of a nation is in that salsa, and I intend to honor all of it.
The richest guy on Earth SHOULD be the guy making cutting edge cars and rockets instead of dudes who sell purses and perfumes or dudes who run investment firms or dudes who made Facebook.
a guy makes a non liquid trillion dollars literally with environmentalist technology and furthering human space exploration, while providing the free-est speech platform on the planet, and wifi everywhere and the biggest fucking losers you know are big mad
The City of Chicago does not have a balanced budget. Cook County does not have a balanced budget. The State of Illinois does not have a balanced budget.
It’s crazy how much this state lies.
@JakeMarsh18@oregonfootball Fun (maybe) fact about those media seats Jake man - Chip Kelly famously dislikes media and thus had the chairs designed to sit at a very uncomfortable angle so they would leave him alone faster. Go ducks!
The co-founder of a nonprofit owns a second home worth $49 million.
The total purchase value of Sam Altman’s SIX residences is $124 million.
Sam has used OpenAI to enrich himself through self-dealing, the opposite of OpenAI’s founding mission.