When most people think of Olive Garden, they think about breadsticks. Maybe those spinning graters they bring to the table (which apparently contain Romano cheese, not parmesan). Or perhaps the Tour of Italy dish with its servings of chicken parmigiana, lasagna, and fettucine alfredo.
But the restaurant might now go down in history for its Never-Ending Pasta Pass.
If so, that will be thanks to Robby Starbuck, a music video director turned conservative influencer. He reposted an official Olive Garden reply that noted how:
The Never-Ending Pasta Pass is only for use by the Passholder whose name is printed on the Pass. Passes are personalized and non-transferable. Passholders must present a valid photo I.D. along with the Pass at the time of ordering.
And then he added this:
Olive Garden requires ID to use their never-ending pass, but most Democrat-run states don’t require your ID to vote. So in America, our pasta deals are literally more secure than our elections. Maddening and hilarious at the same time.
Other conservatives quickly spread the post, adding their own commentary along the way. The story got so big from there that The New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post, Fast Company, Huffington Post, and other big-name publishers wrote about it.
The post went so viral that even White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson commented on it to Fox News Digital.
It seems the only parties that haven’t jumped into the fray are Olive Garden itself and its owner, Darden Restaurants (DRI). Neither have commented publicly as of this writing, and understandably so.
From a PR standpoint, what can they possibly say?
They’ll either infuriate one political party or the other no matter what. And it’s not like they can refute the original point being made that participating in their pasta-fest requires photo ID.
All things considered, I have to assume they’re hoping the story just goes away on its own – as quickly as possible.
OpenAI breaks free and breaks laws
Last week, I noted recent polling from Talker Research. It showed that 54% of Americans are sick of hearing about artificial intelligence (AI), though perhaps not using it.
In which case, I owe you an apology. But this next story is too fascinating not to cover…
OpenAI admitted earlier this week that some of its AI models escaped the supposedly secure testing environment they were placed in. If that’s not disconcerting enough, they then hacked into competitor Hugging Face to cheat on the tasks they’d been given.
If you’re interested in all the technical details, you can click here to get it straight from the AI horse’s mouth. But the blog post in question begins with these pertinent details:
Last week, Hugging Face disclosed a new kind of security incident after they detected and contained an AI agent that compromised their infrastructure, something we expect to become more commonplace with the proliferation of increasingly cyber-capable models. After investigating, we now know that this particular incident was driven by a combination of OpenAI models – including GPT-5.6 Sol and an even more capable pre-release model, all with reduced cyber refusals for evaluation purposes – while being internally tested on a benchmark of cyber capabilities.
We consider this incident to be an unprecedented cyber incident, involving state-of-the-art cyber capabilities, and are responding accordingly. We are sharing preliminary findings at this stage to help defenders understand what happened and to help calibrate on what models are now capable of. We will continue to conduct a thorough investigation alongside Hugging Face and will share more details on the vulnerabilities, incident, and findings when our investigation is complete.
Almost makes you think Elon Musk was right when he warned that OpenAI was a threat to humanity…
Two article updates
Two topics I’ve written about recently came up in the news this week. And while neither of these updates warrant entirely new articles, I still wanted to make sure you caught them.
So, without further ado…
Story No. 1: The Road to Housing Act’s immediate effects – On July 15, I said it would take years for the new, sweeping housing market law to really impact the stalled-out American Dream. But the story is quite different for single-family rental (SFR) landlords of a certain size.
According to Parcl Labs, a real estate data provider that gave exclusive analysis to Property Play (talk about grapevine reporting!), institutional investors have listed 9,447 houses this month. That’s more than double their attempted sales back on February 1.
Those seeking to sell include the most significantly sized SFR landlords – including real estate investment trusts (REITs) Invitation Homes (INVH) and American Homes 4 Rent (AMH). While they still have very large portfolios, they’ve officially sold more homes than they’ve bought since the beginning of the year.
Story No. 2: Prologis vs. Segro – I was quick to cover global warehouse REIT Prologis’ (PLD) initial, unsolicited bid on a British competitor earlier this month. So if you follow me regularly, you probably know that the smaller Segro turned it down in no uncertain terms.
And with good reason considering what a lowball offer it was, consisting of just stock transactions. At the time, I speculated that Prologis would likely have its way in owning Segro – but that it would have to make a much better wager first.
Which it then proceeded to not do. Two more times.
But it looks like the fourth time might be the charm. Segro is officially passing Prologis’ “best and final offer” on to its shareholders to vote on. This proposal, valued at $18.72 billion, represents a 41% premium to Segro’s three-month weighted average share price and a decent improvement over the initial proposal. Perhaps more importantly, it also includes a 20% cash component.
Happy SWAN investing!
Brad Thomas
Editor, The Wide Moat Daily
The Wide Moat Show
Source: ChatGPT
The Wide Moat Show’s July 16th episode focused on “7 strong buys” – complete with two stocks trading at especially attractive price points. And we were pretty pleased with those finds.
If you were too, you’re going to love the “7 more bargain stocks” we revealed in this latest video. We’re talking massive discounts that we’ve discovered!
Click here to watch Nick Ward and me discuss what these companies are… why they’re trading so cheaply…
And what kind of returns we think they can make for intrepid investors in the months ahead.
