USA. A restaurant. I could not finish my meal, and I bowed my head in shame.
Then they handed me a box, and I nearly wept.
The plate had been enormous. I am a samurai; I do not surrender to food. But this was a siege, and halfway through I knew I could not win. I set down my fork. In my country, to leave food on the plate is to insult the rice, the farmer, the cook, and your own ancestors, roughly in that order. So I sat there, quietly making peace with my dishonor.
Then the waitress smiled and said the most beautiful sentence I have heard here.
"You want a box for that?"
A box. To take it. Home.
I went still.
"You would save it?" I asked.
"Yeah, of course. It's still good."
It's still good. Three words my grandmother said to me a thousand times, across an ocean, in another language, over a bowl I was not allowed to leave.
I had crossed the world expecting to find everything different here. And a stranger in an apron had just handed me my grandmother's exact heart, in a small paper container, without knowing she had done anything at all.
I took the box. I held it like a newborn. I bowed to her, to the cook, and to the half a sandwich within, which would now live to see another day.
That night I ate it by a window, slowly, the way you eat something that was nearly lost. It was, if anything, better the second time. Everything saved is.
So now I order too much on purpose. Not from greed. From faith. Because I have learned that here, the same as home, a meal does not end when you are full.
It ends when the box is empty.
And the box is never empty the same day.
Which means a good meal can last forever,
as long as someone, anyone, still believes it is too good to waste.
@RtrnSanity I like Spencer’s style. He just says “hey, that’s not good. let’s fix that”—instead of “MSM is lying to you! Where is Hunter’s Laptop? It’s all rigged.”
I really don’t care about the Political Crusades.
I just want the homeless people off the sidewalk.
Democrats are the party of criminal justice reform, lenient drug policy, and compassionate sentencing...
...until it no longer is beneficial to their partisan interests, in which case they become unprincipled Republicans.
"The thing breaking America isn’t a person, a party or a conspiracy. It’s a self-perpetuating system, built over decades by well-meaning people making individually rational decisions that added up to something no one would build on purpose."
Math professors at UC schools want to teach students who are ready for college courses. That means calculus, and not middle school remediation. As it turns out, middle school math should be taught in middle school, and high school math should be taught in high school. The UC system doesn’t exist to do the job California’s K-12 system was supposed to do.
Dear Europeans:
Yes, we understand that central air is hard to build into old homes. Yes, we also understand that your windows are a bit different.
But here's the part that confuses us.
Why do you have to buy window A/C designed for American windows?
Why can't Europeans, living in Europe, design A/C units to fit European windows, for other Europeans, who live in Europe?
Yes, Willis Haviland Carrier was an American, but he solved this problem in 1902. You have had over one hundred years to adapt his work to a slightly different aperture.
Do you not build things anymore? Are there some regulations preventing you? Will your neighbors just relentlessly shame you for having air conditioning?
Seriously, unsarcastically, what the hell is the obstacle, here?
two things americans will never be right about: units of measurements and dating format
the japanese logic of YYYY-MM-DD is obviously superior and MM-DD-YYYY is simply retarded
School Board: Richfield (@Richfield280)
When: May 2026
Topic: Budget, Compensatory Revenue
Superindendent Dr. Steven Unowsky criticizes state legislature for failing to adequately fund compensatory education, resulting in a $2 million loss for academic services supporting students in poverty despite a $87,000 hold harmless.
#mnleg
Spencer Pratt is right.
Drug addicts shouldn’t be allowed to camp in public spaces.
Compassion isn’t letting someone you love do whatever they want.
Compassion is incentivizing good choices with positive and negative consequences.
Compassion without consequences is crazy.
Look at all the 🇺🇸 trade that's now happening without the Jones Act in effect.
And the Jones Act fleet is still fully booked. This is all extra shipping, from Americans to Americans, that's happening just because government got out of the way.
@zacharywefel The sad thing here is that the moratorium supports do have a point about groundwater usage that will get buried in layers of incorrect facts. Heavy water usage is common in a lot of industries, if they understood they'd spit out their almond milk latte.
Thomas Sowell on engineers vs intellectuals:
“The engineer is judged by the end product. If he builds a building that collapses, it doesn’t matter how brilliant his idea was—he’s ruined.”
“Conversely, if an intellectual has an idea for rearranging society and that ends in disaster, he pays no price at all.”
@RepAOC This isn't a data center problem.
This is a construction problem.
If they were building a warehouse, or a housing project, would you even have noticed?
You're just jumping on the "cloud computing is scary" bandwagon.
200 years ago you'd have been smashing looms.
A building is a building whether it holds servers or shelving as a logistics warehouse or walk-in coolers as cold storage. Disturbance from construction is the same.
We need to learn how to have real conversations about the actual concerns & stop w/ this Salem witch trial stuff.