Organic strawberries, fund the Sequioas, that shade the data center bunker, (passive haus / closed loops,) to +💧 to aquifer, and ⚡️ to grid.
A Billion Dollars of Apparently Wholesome Food
### a story
B. had a simple plan, which was the first sign of trouble.
He would end world hunger, and he would get rich doing it, and he would pay every tax he owed along the way. He had read that the last man who tried to end hunger for free was cited for operating a food service without a permit, and B. did not intend to be cited. He intended to be *compliant.* This, he would discover, is the most dangerous ambition a generous man can hold. The criminals were processed in an afternoon. The compliant were processed forever.
He began, as all empires do, at the kitchen table, since he couldn't afford a garage or millions in loans from alumni family and freinds for the traditional "bootstrap" path.
"So we're making burritos," the roommate said.
"No. We can't make the burritos." B. had come to love this part. If they had to build a kitchen first, they would die in the building of it. But a man could *buy* a burrito already made, already inspected, already warm, and that man could start tomorrow. "The wall was never the wall," he said. "The wall is the door."
"Then I'll help you hand them out."
And here B. had to go slowly, because he loved this man and was about to say a thing that sounded like an injury.
"I can't pay you."
"You don't have any money."
"That isn't the reason. Even with money I can't pay you. The moment I pay you to help me give food away, you are an employee, and then there are wages and forms and an entire apparatus built precisely to prevent the thing we are trying to do. And you can't *volunteer,* because we are a business and not a church. And we can't *trade* for it, because the state taxes a handshake at fair market value." He had checked all of this. He had checked it twice. "There is no legal word," he said, "for my friend who showed up."
The roommate waited. He was good at waiting.
"So you'll own one percent of the company. A real piece. You'll ride the good days and eat the bad ones, same as me — it's the only shape the law will let two friends pour themselves into. And the pay—" B. stopped. "Until there's money, I can't pay you to come. *You'll* have to pay *me.* I'll teach you meditation on the bicycles, and you'll pay me by the minute, and I'll report every cent, and I'll carry a few honest dollars into the Social Security Administration on my way to handing a burrito to a man under the overpass. That is the only form this is permitted to take. The helper has to buy a ticket."
The roommate considered it. He capped the lavender and set it down to steep.
"So to help you feed the hungry, I pay you for therapy."
"Yes."
"And *that's* legal."
"That," said B., "is the *only* part that's legal."
The roommate laughed, and picked the jar back up, and said, "I'm in. Invoice me." And B., who did not yet understand that this was not the strange part but the *template,* invoiced him, and felt the arrow of the money turn around and point backward, the way it always would from now on, the instant the work turned kind.
## Postscript: The Solution
He had been looking at it from the wrong end the whole time.
The corridor was never lying. You cannot give a thing away; you can only sell it; you must get rich first. He had treated this as the wall. It was the door — it had always been the door — and it had a handle he'd refused to turn, because turning it felt like surrender.
You could not sell *nothing.* He'd learned that at the cost of a billion dollars and a dime. But there was one thing adjacent to nothing — a thing with zero cost and infinite supply, a thing no auditor could call a donation because it was so plainly, gloriously a *product* — and that thing was **first.**
He would not sell food. He would not sell mercy. He would sell *position in line.*
And it worked.
That was the horror the success could not outrun — because a thing that works gets copied, and the copy does not inherit the soul.
Somewhere, someone ran the same engine — the zero-cost product, the tiered line, the billion small payments — and noticed the thing B. had been too kind to notice: that *first* is a weak product, because eventually everyone arrives, the line empties, and the revenue ends. The strong product is not *first.* It is *above.* You do not sell a man his way out of the line. You sell him the man beneath him. You do not sell the end of scarcity — you sell its careful, permanent maintenance, a floor to stand on only because someone else *is* the floor.
The planet is fracked and we are all gonna die.
Try a strawberry from the garden.