But OP doesn't have that rule, because OP clearly loves both the 3D printer (gift from spouse) and whatever old dented thing is being replaced (gift from mother in law).
OP can't pivot to a "no gifts" rule when prior gifts have been well received and did enrich OP's life.
It was just a dominant brand of dishware in the U.S.
Corning, one of the world leaders in glass manufacturing and materials science, figured out how to make thin tempered glass that was lightweight, very durable, resistant to thermal shock, and safe to use in microwaves, dishwashers, and up to medium temperature ovens (350°F/175°C is the manufacturer recommended max). It became the dominant dishware brand in the U.S. as a result, for "everyday" use.
Personally I don't like the heat transfer characteristics (poor insulator which means hot food makes the dish hot to the touch) and don't mind thicker plates/bowls for most situations. But I can see why they became immensely popular, especially for families with kids.
Side note, Corning spun off its consumer products division in 1991, so the company that makes the Gorilla Glass in basically everyone's cell phones is now technically different from the company that made all these kitchen dishes, even if they were once part of the same corporation.
still 150 is a scary amount for most Americans to see just suddenly charged. Even if its temporary.
Think of it as not even being charged. The hold/pre-authorization is just there to make sure that it can charge you that much if it needs to, but it never actually does charge you. It just tells your bank/card issuer that it might want to charge you up to that much.
Hotels and rental cars do this with huge amounts, too, to make sure that they can charge you for the stuff you charge to the room or if you keep a rental car for an extra week. But you don't actually get charged for it until the merchant determines you did use those extra services for those extra charges.
The best selling vehicle model in America is the Ford F-150, with gas tank sizes mostly above 30 gallons (exact size depends on model/options). The second best selling vehicle is the Chevy Silverado, whose gas tank is between 24-28 gallons.
At $3/gallon, that's between $75 and $90 for the typical fill up.
For some vehicles (really large SUVs, premium SUVs that take premium grade gas), I can see $200+ tanks at certain gas prices we've seen in our recent past.
So it makes sense for a gas station to do a pre authorization for $100, maybe $150.
The other thing, too, though, is that the hold/pre-auth doesn't matter if it's a credit card that you just pay at the end of the month. It gets sorted out before your statement balance gets billed to you. It can get annoying if you're using a debit card and your balance is low, but this is just another way that credit cards tend to be better than debit cards if you can handle the responsibility.
Back in like 2008 I was playing the single player campaign for the first COD: Modern Warfare and I almost failed the first mission because I didn't want to kill noncombatants on a boat.
Meanwhile in 2025 that's what our military is doing these days in Venezuelan waters.
Dances with Wolves and The Last Samurai and Avatar are white soldiers who integrate themselves into some "exotic" (that is, non European) culture and slowly adopt their ways and renounce their previous military loyalties. Then they are called upon to take up arms and coordinate tactics against their former side.
Pocahontas as told in the movie is more of a woman who learns to play peacemaker. There's not that much cultural exchange, and nobody switches sides to fight against their former team.
Pocahontas as actually happened, historically, is more the story of a native teenager kidnapped, forcibly converted to Christianity and married off to bear a child, and paraded around England as a novelty, until she died far away from her home at the age of 20, maybe 21.
but the system would account for the lack of inventory loss, so it would become increasingly hard to justify this.
Who would catch this, though?
The question asked is whether a franchise owner could use fake orders to use dirty money and boost clean profits. What does the inventory have to do with anything? The franchise owner doesn't care, because they're the ones doing the money laundering. And McDonald's corporate doesn't care because they still get paid.
It doesn't seem like a particularly efficient method of money laundering, but I am curious to know if this could feasibly be a pipeline for cleaning money in small quantities.
It might make rational sense in zero sum games where there is a winner and loser (or a draw). But the real world is full of examples of less rational people who forgo an improvement in their own situation to worsen someone else's situation, to create negative-sum competitive plays in a world where positive-sum collaboration is actually possible.
aight this scene takes place in Mexico so lemme color grade it very Mexican, but also it's a flashback to the 50's so I'm gonna dial down the color saturation and digitally add some film grain
Dan Flashes Mcdonalds is a very aggressive store. I mean, you walk by a store and you see 50 guys who look just like me fighting over very complicated shirts, you go in. Yes, you do. You go in.
Have you considered that he's been standing with his shoulders rotated forward for most of his life, and that his feeble body falls right into this position, rather than a neutral position where he'd have to expend strength standing up straight with a strong looking torso?
The current difference in apparent gravity between the equator and the poles is about 0.3%.
I think the centrifugal effect squares with angular velocity (plus the bulge of the earth would make the distance from the center of gravity ever so slightly larger), so maybe doubling the rotation speed would bring it up to 1.2%.
So maybe a measureable effect but probably not enough to actually overcome the biological limits on size/mass/weight.
I'd argue that the type of people who make those investment decisions often don't put the proper weight on "destroy the planet" risk when calculating their expected value.
That's obviously false. Any dog owner knows when their dog is begging for help getting something out of reach or being let in/out of a gate, which barks mean "hey someone's at the door" or "squirrel" and which yelps mean pain. Beyond that, growls and body language can communicate quite a bit, too.
It's not traditional leverage but the recent deals being announced where the AI companies are raising money from Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, Google, AMD, Oracle, etc. and paying it back in stock or purchase commitments have a certain circular bootstrappy notion to them. The formulas for the valuations rely on feedback loops that are less stable and might create runaway feedback conditions at the slightest hiccup.
In any highly capital intensive business, you always run the risk that the thing you build is worth less than the cost it took to build it. And when that happens, collapses can happen pretty quickly, as everyone invested in these companies rushes towards the offramp.
I can think of a few catalysts that could trigger that initial realization that the thing made isn't actually worth the cost to build it:
A new model comes out from a competitor that was cheaper to build and almost as good. (Deepseek reminded everyone that this might happen.)
New money stops coming in and the companies building things have to tighten their belts. This could be driven by a failure to monetize as much as previously modeled, so that the value of the company itself is questioned.
Some kind of legal flaw threatens the entire foundation of some expensive models.
Some kind of technical flaw causes one company's flagship model to lose the race against other companies.
Some key personnel are incapacitated in a way that robs the company of its momentum (this almost happened with the board of directors revolt at OpenAI).
Something else I haven't thought of.
But once a hiccup happens, something built on so many self-reinforcing loops is less resilient against the unknown, the chaos of the real world.
But OP doesn't have that rule, because OP clearly loves both the 3D printer (gift from spouse) and whatever old dented thing is being replaced (gift from mother in law).
OP can't pivot to a "no gifts" rule when prior gifts have been well received and did enrich OP's life.