A company which literally manufactures widgets
They probably make funny names for the ambassadors
Common wisdom is that we don't want to "shelter" our children, right? We want to keep them safe, but expose them to the world so that they don't live in a tiny soap bubble of childhood which is later popped by the sharp grass blades of life.
I can't figure out if the Obama daughters are the MOST or LEAST sheltered children in the country - it could really go either way. On the one hand, they are literally surrounded by a protective force who carry weapons to keep them safe and keep them away from harm. A stranger who attempted to hurt them would be detained and possibly killed for trying to do that. On the other hand, they live in the white house and meet world leaders and probably see some crazy top secret stuff accidentally from time to time, and it would be hard to call that sheltered.
Putting aside the subsequent panic
If the moon suddenly exploded one day, would you want to be on the side of the world where the moon was visible while this happened and see it in real time? If you weren't on that side, would you be jealous of those people? You'd get to see the footage of course, but you might regret not having seen the thing happen in real time with your bare eyes. After so many generations of humans not seeing the moon explode, it might be a drag to have been alive but just barely missed seeing the moon explode.
More clever than those velociraptors
There's been a trend in cafés over the last 5-10 years to expand what used to be a single tip jar into a two-jar system where each jar has a label on it and there's some implicit question being asked by the labels. One can "vote" for each answer by leaving a tip in the appropriate jar. There might be a "star trek" jar and a "star wars" jar, for example. There's probably some correlation between how many tattoos the employees of the coffee place have and the likelihood that they have this jar label system.
Because of how rapidly this spread and seems to be sticking around, I think it's reasonable to conclude that this system works and generates more tips by forcing the customer into a situation where they can have an opinion on something, as opposed to merely tipping or not.
There must be one person in one cafe somewhere who thought of this first and instituted it and has watched it spread throughout the land. What a legacy for that person. No one would believe you.
Redefining the nature of ambition
As someone who builds software in an office with other people building software, I regularly imagine other scenarios in which we could be building software. I walked past a barber shop recently which had a big FOR SALE sign in their windows, and I got to thinking about purchasing the barber shop, leaving all the barber shop signage in place, but just putting in some people with laptops making software instead of people with scissors cutting hairs.
It would probably start as amusing when we had to turn away people who wanted haircuts, then maybe get awkward or annoying after a while.
Just trust me it's not that long
Two hundred and fifty years seems like a long time on the scale of your own life, but if you think about how small the changes between generations are, we're not really that far into figuring out what America is. There are families who were here for the revolution, and are only 8-10 generations removed from that. Ok then.