And yet the French have a decent rail system, paid family leave, paid sick leave, a social safety net, 99% literacy, a younger retirement age, higher life expectancy, and so on
10 years
5x All-Star
2x All-NBA Second Team
2024 ECF MVP, Finals MVP, Champ
7 will be in the rafters. 💚
From the bottom of our hearts, thank you for everything Jaylen Brown.
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.
@ff3dprinters I ordered a 3D printer from you, but it's been stuck at a warehouse with a shipping label that hasn't been picked up for over a week. It's been taking several days for customer service to respond to my claim, and they are ignoring it. Please help.
The number that should terrify every Western automaker is 1,500 kW.
BYD's Flash Charging pushes 1,500 kilowatts into a car battery. The fastest charger you can find in the US today maxes out at 350 kW. ChargePoint is bragging about rolling out 600 kW chargers sometime in 2026. BYD is already at 2.5x that. Deployed. 5,000 stations live. 20,000 planned by December.
The car in this video, the Song Ultra, starts at $22,000. Five minutes of charging gets you 250 miles of range. The fastest-charging EV you can buy in America is the Lucid Gravity at 400 kW, and it starts at $80,000.
So BYD is charging 4x faster at one-quarter the price. And Geely just beat them last week with a 4-minute charge. The Chinese automakers aren't competing with each other on range or styling anymore. They're in a charging speed war that Western companies haven't even entered.
BMW's response was literally "pursuing quick charging forces other compromises." That's the "640K ought to be enough for anybody" of the EV era.
Hey @AlaskaAir you dropped the ball and couldn’t get us to Tokyo on the flights we booked months ago. We scrambled to find an airline who could, last minute, at a cost of 10K one way. Now we’re in Tokyo and find out you cancelled our return flight because we missed the flight out here (because you held us on the tarmac for 4 hours and we watched our flight depart without us). Now the hold times to reach a customer service agent are consistently 8+ hours. How does someone reach a human at your company?