In America I was taken to a warehouse called Costco.
At the door, a woman checked my friend's membership card.
At last, I thought. A checkpoint. A travel pass. Finally, this country has proper gate protocol.
Inside, the ceiling was so high that weather felt possible.
They sell mayonnaise in containers I would describe as architectural. Forty-eight eggs at once. Trousers next to televisions next to a kayak.
Old women stood at small stations, handing out free food on toothpicks.
I asked my friend when the festival ends.
He said, "It's Tuesday."
The festival does not end. The festival is the store.
Then he bought me a hot dog and a soda.
It cost one dollar and fifty cents.
I assumed I misheard. I checked the receipt.
One dollar. Fifty cents. The price has not changed since 1985.
I was alive in 1985. Everything I have purchased since then has betrayed me at least once.
Gasoline. Rent. Rice. All of them broke their word.
The hot dog did not.
I asked how this is possible, and I received a story I did not believe until I confirmed it.
The founder, before he stepped down, told the next chief what would happen if he ever raised the price of the hot dog.
He said, and this is recorded history: "If you raise the price, I will kill you."
Scholars believe he was joking.
The price has not moved in forty years.
I leave the conclusion to you.
At the exit, a man checked our receipt and drew one line across it with a highlighter.
A seal. A magistrate's signature, approving safe passage.
I bowed to him slightly.
He said, "Have a good one," which I now understand can refer to a day, a life, or a hot dog, depending on need.
In my country, we honor merchants who keep the same price for generations. There is a shop in Kyoto four hundred years old. We treat it as a national treasure.
Costco is forty years old and sells tires.
Give it time.
Empires fell. Currencies died.
The hot dog holds.
A nation is its promises.
I paid one dollar and fifty cents.
The promise held.
Not a day goes by that I am not reminded of a famous study where men and women were forced to play a card game against an opponent.
Their opponent then either cheated and stole money from the subjects; or cooperated and played fairly.
Afterwards, the men and women were strapped into an FMRI, and watched as their prior opponent received a painful electric shock.
For men, the brain produced an empathic response when the honest opponent was shocked. But it produced no empathy, and in fact showed signs of a pleasure when the cheater was shocked. Their empathy was conditional on how the opponent behaved.
But for women… The brain produced an empathic response for both types of opponents. It didn’t matter if they had been cheated by them prior, they wanted to alleviate everyone’s suffering regardless.
This is their greatest asset, it is the feminine divine. It is the reason why a mother’s love is unconditional.
It’s also the reason why you will be stabbed to death in a Walmart parking lot by a borderline retarded Haitian with 73 prior convictions.
Just in from Windham NH. The meddling state bureaucrats have decided we can't have a swim raft at our town beach because of arbitrary, stupid rules that we never agreed to.
Where are the free staters? Maybe they can take a break from dismantling local zoning to cut some of the miles of endless red tape and over regulations NH is burdened with.
@jeremykauffman
Windham Town Beach: Swim Line Information
Last summer the Recreation Department was notified by NH Marine Patrol that the swim lines at the Windham Town Beach were out too far according to the regulations set by the Department of Safety. According to their rules, “No swim line shall be placed beyond the point of where the depth of the water exceeds 6ft or from a distance from shore that exceeds 50ft, whichever occurs first.”
We received approval to have a swim line variance, which allows us to have the swim line out 100ft. Unfortunately, that is not deep enough for us to have the raft.
Windham Recreation Dept
[email protected]
@jeremykauffman@Mopar I totally agree. Local control. Windham, where I serve as chairman of the Planning Board, is on the front lines of this battle. Good to see you are on our side, Jeremy.
@Osborne4NH Forcing every community in NH to accept top down mandates forcing them to allow data centers is such an odd hill for the GOP to choose to die on.
I love X as a curator of real news and information. It's also like having unlimited free assistants/analysts - experts who devote 10,000 hours+ to my various niche interests.
But the most underrated feature of X isn’t the information; it’s the proximity and access to people - the evolution of opportunities and connections that form on X and then grow into the real world.
And it doesn't exist on any other platform. (LinkedIn is unusable.)
For example, I now run one of the largest high performance compute (HPC) solutions providers outside the US, building NVIDA clusters (H200, B200, B300, GB300, etc.) across Asia and the Middle East.
Data is the new oil.
And it all started with a connection on X.
@jeremykauffman@christopherrufo@Osborne4NH Is he still against local control and working to end the existence of single family zoning? Kind of hard to get past that. "He's great on every issue except wants to end your way of life and make your most valuable asset worthless." Hard pass.
@BartHanson@WSOP The WSOP must have a deal with the credit card companies to have no fees. No way they are eating the fees. But yeah I agree even with the fee it's worth it to use a card and get points vs traveling with a bag of cash.