And this is why it now costs $50 to take my family to Micky Ds.
The lighting changed drastically in 2025
We blocked out the sun to stop the machine uprising
these are grim times
Peak America to make the point with a fast food franchise.
I’m ok with not marketing addictive junk food to children
Kinda missing the bigger picture
Yes, however, that wasn’t the point.
It is the point. It’s the point every time this gets brought up. If the only thing that brought you joy as a child was a multibillion dollar hamburger franchise that made its profits on the back of childhood obesity, then you should be glad it is going downhill.
Seriously, “oh nos! McFatty’s doesn’t look like a kid vomited up a box of crayons anymore!! What is the world coming to???” isn’t a compelling argument to anyone who has realized that there is more to life than shitty cheeseburgers. I don’t care that McDonalds changed its color palette to gray because I do not care about McDonalds, other than hoping their entire business model collapses.
Are things worse now today than they were before? In some ways, yes! Show me an example of that! Show me a beautiful river full of trash now, or a local coffee shop that went under, or literally anything other than McDonalds.
Lol even the plants look dead
The dead plants were the lucky ones.
Can we please not glorify the commercialization of america. Clowns selling calories to children has done nothing good for this country. I hope all commercialized businesses die in a greyed out abandoned lot.
I hardly think fast food is the devil you should be focusing on while your country burns
You dont even fucking know then.
The problems in america stem directly from corporate greed. We are a society not a factory. We need to use the factory to better society. Americans think they need to use society to better the factory. This inverted thinking is a disease.
Came to say this. McDonald is not a great allegory on the downfall of the US. The style just changed from colorful cartoon aimed at children to stylish minimalism to attract centrists. The product it’s selling stays the same. It has always been fake. You just grew up.
He didn’t glorify anything.
Yeah, in a lot of ways, it feels like the great recession never truly ended in the sense that people had recovered from it; it feels more like people just got used to it. In the oughts, a lot of the pretenses of cold war capitalism got dropped in favor of a whole hearted embrace of the shallowest (ostensibly; I’m going against my nature and giving Friedman the benefit of the doubt here) possible reading of the Friedman doctrine. Everything turned to “how much cash can we scrape out of this for the investors?” Play places? Cool aesthetics? Fuck you, we need to maximize the resale value of our real estate, shut up, you’ll eat our bullshit anyway. Minimum wage hikes? No way! Your burgers will cost $20! Oh, well, I mean, that’s going to happen anyway, but at least you guys didn’t get raises lmao. You want a truck that just works? Eat shit, idiot, pay us $100,000 for a lifted mini-van in a masculinity-protecting trenchcoat. Need somewhere to stay? Great news, we’re going to do nothing to improve the apartment and increase your rent $200/year. Or you could just choose to afford a half million dollar home; the free market is all about choice, after all. Want health insurance? Cool, that’ll be half of your income, your boss gets to the carrier for you because it’s a free market system all about the freedom of choice, and we’re going to personally throw sand in your eyes if you ever actually try to use it. At least you can
go swim in the public pool or go enjoy your city’s fine taxpayer funded servicesnope those all got cut permanently in the recession, and now that money’s going to paying out for cops fucking up instead.Play places? Cool aesthetics? Fuck you, we need to maximize the resale value of our real estate, shut up, you’ll eat our bullshit anyway.
I really have to push back if you are describing McD’s previous aesthetic as “cool”. That shit hurt my eyes and my soul.
The removal of play places was due to a number of reasons, not least of which were regulations barring how much fast food restaurants could advertise to kids. Without being able to target children as effectively, McD’s changed strategies to appeal to adults more. More comfortable seating rather than hard plastic benches; dim, relaxing lighting rather than bright colors; fewer ball pits full of shit, drool, and vomit. It became more of a neutral place where an adult on lunch break with some coworkers could get a hamburger without feeling like a pedo or expecting to be assaulted by the screams of uncontrolled children.
I feel like 9/11 was the inflection point. The great recession was just another symptom of the problem. Banks can’t get overwhelmed by underwater mortgages if people aren’t underwater in the first place.
Going by the presented graphs, something happened in 1960.
I don’t know the root cause but that’s about when the events of Confessions of an Economic Hitman started.
You could be right about that. I was going to say that they caused the problem with subprime lending, but I think that subprime lending would probably never have been attractive enough to not laugh the guy out of the room what proposed it if most people weren’t already in a bad financial position with low economic mobility.
The economy objectively never did actually recover from 2008, in terms of returning to the previous growth pattern/trajectory.
Japan’s economy had more or less been in the same situation since the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997.
They call this state of their economy ‘the lost decades’. Growth never returned to the previous levels, and has been either stagnant or modest since, requiring massive active management from the government to keep everything from totally breaking.
… Sound familiar?
We have also been in our own lost decades, we just have about one less such lost decade than Japan.
In both cases, the only way to keep things going is to keep financializing more and more of the economy… but this results in an increasing wealth concentration gap and more volatility in financial markets.
The cure isn’t really a cure, its a stopgap to prevent essentially a near total reset… but the stopgap itself is also harmful if you get addicted to it, and don’t come up with a better solution.
The better solution is in fact to do that near total reset, and also set up something analogous to, or actually, a UBI.
But the only way you can do that is if you expropriate the capital owners.
So, the boom bust cycle of capitalism continues, until it breaks so hard that either everyone is basically dead (cough climate change cough)… or you have some kind of massive popular revolution.
There are some folks who want to accelerate the total reset and maybe create a UBI. Those are the Dark Enlightment folks (sometimes Dark MAGA), and they are called neoreactionary accelerationist. The intentional destruction of the US gov is the acceleration of the reset that you mention. These are a bit different from the Heritage Foundation and mostly tech bros. They are considered far right, but I’m far left and can’t help but see a lot of truth in some of what they say. I’ve had the same opinion you have for 20 years now, that it would be better to just let this all fall so we can hurry up and rebuild our economy into something that is not a plane with locked engines falling straight out of the sky. I totally know what you mean.
Yep yep yep.
Except… for those folks, UBI is basically viewed the way a promised feature is in a highly scalable app.
That is to say, entirely optional, subject to terms and conditions, subject to market conditions… likely just a marketing gimmick that only a few naive truely believers think was ever really seriously on the table.
What they actually want is technofeudalism.
Ironically, I would basically describe myself politically as an Anarchist.
But… I am actually entirely terrified by the idea of just suddenly collapsing the entire economy without very, very solid plans in place for the transition, and the future.
If done poorly…literally billions could die, or be made into slaves.
I am all for detaching yourself from the capitalist death machine as much as possible, setting up alternate systems, mutual aid, co-ops, etc…
But if you just pull the legs out of the entire economy all at oncr and let it freefall… that’ll be the layman’s idea of anarchy: total fucking mad max / fallout style chaos.
20 years ago, we might have been able to do something like collapse neoliberalism entirely… you know, back around when Seattle rioted againt the WTO.
Its too late now, it would be way, way way too hard to just pivot suddenly back to much less global trade and more autarkic societies.
Farming alone is a nightmare to try to imagine that for.
On the other hand, climate change will basically cause that same economic near total collapse in most places within 20 years, by my reading of projected future impacts.
So uh yeah, we’re just fucked, unless we somehow have a massive revolution and also a very competently executed plan to transition the economy off oil … and that scenario is nearly impossibly unlikely.
you’re spot on with the “lost decades” and other stuff.
i just want to mention you forgot one thing, that there’s an extra option for the future: spaceflight. space is infinite, and as such, infinite growth is possible. not on earth though. it’s science fiction today, but every new technology was science fiction at some point.
space is infinite, and as such, infinite growth is possible
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A finite portion of the universe is within our cosmological horizon. The universe is in fact not infinite.
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The speed of light (the speed of causality) places hard limits on over what distances economies can operate on an interstellar scale.
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Interstellar travel is not a solution to population growth and resource depletion, as it costs orders of magnitude more energy to ship someone across interstellar distances than to keep them alive for millennia at absurd comfort levels.
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You can keep your economy localized and instead go out and grab resources from distant Suns, but that has real diminishing returns. And if you cram too much matter in too small a volume of space, you cook your civilization in its own waste heat or collapse it into a black hole.
Space travel, especially interstellar space travel, is not a cheat code to infinite resources. Colonizing distant stars is more like throwing seeds into the wind than it is extending your own civilization by settling the next valley over. When you start an interstellar colony, you’re founding a new civilization, and ultimately a new species, not building an extension to your own. The speed of causality demands this.
Sure, you can hand waive these concerns away by speculating about faster than light travel. But at that point, you might as well be arguing that we’ll solve all our resource problems by building a perpetual motion machine. If you can build one, you can build the other.
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WoodScientist already hit a bunch of relevant points, to which I’ll add:
Spaceflight requires immense amounts of money and capital.
So… it’ll only ever be meaningfully done by either nationstates or megacorps, likely both in collab, and likely necessarily is part of the MIC in a very major way.
That means that without massive societal/political/governance reform… you end up with Weyland-Yutani, but with the quality control of Boeing and SpaceX.
Not ideal, arguably guaranteed to be so massively long run inefficient, and dependant on an extreme wealth imbalanced underlying economy/society… that it ends up functionally destroying Earth via climate change / nuclear apocalypse, and if any spaceborne humanity remains… they’re the Enclave from Fallout, basically.
The cost reduction for business needs to come into consumers. People don’t actually need to earn more money to have more money. They can have more money by spending less.
In starting to think the solution is some big government intervention. The easiest thing is Land value tax which is happening in some countries but it’s really enough.
The next solution would be forced purchase of land (bureaucracy needs to improved here) and then market driven bidding for manufacturing high density housing. The thing is the government doesnt need to aim to make a profit here. The loss of the building process can be gained back by taxes in growth in the economy elsewhere.
Energy and food are looking like they will get cheap soon with renewables and precision fermentation and lab grown meat. But taking land that has been horded by the rich, building high density and building railways will need government intervention.
I’m starting to think the solution is some big government intervention.
In general, I agree, but this would require actually competent planning and policies… which is fundamentally impossible in a political system where money buys off the vast majority of representatives.
To fix that, you have to have ranked choice voting, abolish Citizens United, ban private money in political campaigns, make it only funded out of a commone government pool… stuff like that.
The easiest thing is Land value tax which is happening in some countries but it’s not (sic?) really enough.
I agree, that’s part of a solution.
The next solution would be forced purchase of land (bureaucracy needs to improved here) …
Again, agree, Emminent Domain exists and forms a foundation that could be expanded on.
…and then market driven bidding for manufacturing high density housing. The thing is the government doesnt need to aim to make a profit here. The loss of the building process can be gained back by taxes in growth in the economy elsewhere.
You seem to have similar ideas as to what I’ve outlined in older comments:
My conception of how to solve the housing crisis… well for starters, massive zoning law reforms + earlier mentioned expansion of Emminent Domain.
Then… institute a progressive, continuous, not tiered, tax on rentals. Houses, condos, apartments, whatever. Index it by some equation around AMI and an equivalent Area Median Rent.
As a private rental rate goes higher and higher away from Area Median Rent, the landlord is charged a larger and larger tax.
The money from this tax goes into a massive city level fund that is only to be used for constructing, maintaining, and otherwise purchasing and then converting housing units that are run entirely not for profit.
These housing units are available to people/families below AMI… generally, go along with a framework of being whatever % under AMI as paying a lower total rent.
Start with prioritizing transitioning the poorest into these affordable units.
Private
renterslandlords (EDIT: derp) will have to balance cost pass through with having an actual reality check on the actual number of people willing to spend more for luxury units.Functionally, this achieves a very similar effect as rent control, but with less downsides, and acts as a stabilizing factor in the city’s rental prices.
Luxury units can still exist, but … less of them, or less extravagant ones, and its a much more direct way of the wealthy subsidizing the poor and thus closing the wealth/income gap.
And hey, if a wealthy person wants to live in a spartan place and avoid the luxury tax?
Nothing stops them from doing this.
In totality, it isn’t totally state directed, it isn’t totally free market, its much more hybrid, and … oh boo hoo, the private landlords have a smaller profit margin, cry me a river and drown yourselves in it landlords, Adam Smith himself hated all of you a century (two centuries?) before Marx was even born…
…oh and this also incentivizes making new constructions that have reliable, basic, working features, and cutting out all the fake luxury bullshit that is used to justify a much higher rent, when in reality, it isn’t necesssary and or nobody uses it.
Stop putting co working office spaces and gyms and dog parks and rooftop bbqs in every single new multi family highrise… all that shit isn’t properly maintained from basically day one, and is basically unusable by year two, three, four anyway.
(side note: the entire … its either BLS or FRED methodology for estimating rent ewuivalent home values based on ‘what if you tried to rent out your home right now’ is a farce, toss it out, start over)
Energy and food are looking like they will get cheap soon with renewables and precision fermentation and lab grown meat. But taking land that has been horded by the rich, building high density and building railways will need government intervention.
I’m pressing X to doubt on much of this.
Renewable energy? Absolutely possible, if done properly… but thats a whole other discussion, and you’d basically have to Luigi the boards of every major oil company, possibly multiple times, before that would even maybe be politically possible, due to aformentioned massive money in politics corruption problem.
…
Lab grown meat? I dunno, seems like thats still a ways away from being comparably edible and cost effective.
Embrace the bugs.
Make cockroach or cricket paste into patties. Not too different from our current pink sludge paradigm, but is astoundingly more cost effective.
…
And yes, of course, all of this needs to go along with massive investments in public transit infrastructure.
Do so by either tolling every major roadway in and out of a city, make the suburbs scream… or just tap into the GPS that is now literally built into every modern car.
Tax people per mile driven in a high traffic, congested zone.
Make having a slog commute so expensive that people actually realize " oh wait …i AM the traffic " and tell them to start taking a bus or light rail or subway… and of course use those taxed driving funds to make public transit as close to free as possible.
… That’d all be the scale that you’d need to do to actually generate the money to do this, but I have no clue how to make this politically palatable in many areas.
Americans are terminally car brained addicts who can’t quit the lifestyle, even though its killing them, the planet, and the economy in the medium/long run.
I actually believe that, though this is what you’d need to do to avoid infrastructure and economic collapse… at this point, outside of a few major cities… Americans are too angry and stupid to do it, and will just prefer to slowly kill their way of life by continuing to demand it ‘just work’, no matter how you explain that its unworkable.
Shallowest of Friedman doctrine? I’d argue that this was their goal all along. “greed is good”
But, really, capitalism always finds ways to milk more value for the capitalist out of an industry. It’s the whole enshitification thing. There may be periods at first where the excess value is spread around to incentivize various stakeholder adoption. But, once the competition is dead, the capitalist will milk as much profit for himself unless other stakeholders can defend their share through unions, regulation, or healthy competition.
This is my own personal conjecture so take it as you will:
Profits, incomes, and disposable incomes across the board are lower for those not in or above the multi millionaire class. People, businesses, and just general society spent more money on aesthetics 30 years ago. People had more time, money, and energy to utilize designers, artists, and talent. Nowadays it just feels like everything from architecture, to cars, to public infrastructure is just barebones utilitarian. Like, when was the last time you saw a new marble statue go up? When was the last time you saw a new building made in the same style as the city halls/state houses of 100 years ago? When was the last time you saw public art that was intricate and had form over function? When was the last time you saw huge sweeping infrastructure upgrades like third spaces, burying power lines, pedestrian paths, or underground tunnels?
In 150 years, people will look back at this time period and say we were all miserable and poor and couldn’t afford anything outside of necessitation.
Pole here. I love how it goes against what I see here. We were under communist rule for a long time - you know, utilitarianism over all, gray being almost the only acceptable color…although we did have a lot of green spaces. These were fun.
What I am seeing as time progresses is that bleak building style going away and even commie blocks gaining colors. Sadly, some of the green spaces get cut for parking lots…but that’s sadly obvious, back then people simply didn’t have cars so parking spaces weren’t really that big of a thing. Like, what, there was 0,1 parking space per unit? xD
So it’s funny that bleak and bad communist vibes USA propagandised so much against is now slowly coming to america, while leaving countries which were under USSR tyranny. xD
Companies in the US have merged and merged, becoming ever larger. Most industries are dominated by 2 or 3 companies. And private equity firms own a staggering portion of the economy. As these companies become larger and larger, they start behaving more and more like Soviet central planners. Cheap efficiency at all cost. Standardization in all things. Minimum viable product.
As these companies become larger and larger, they start behaving more and more like Soviet central planners.
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. We’ve become a centralized economy through weak monopoly enforcement.
Combine that with everyone $500k poorer because the billionaires acquired it. A recipe for depressed, anxious, angry, feed-addicted rats in a cage.
Counter - take: this is the natural outcome of Americans’ obsession with simplicity. If you mock every design with character and try to reduce visual noise at all costs you end up with these
I think zoomers are extremely aware of it because we won’t stop telling them about it.
From my perspective, zoomers are most of the people talking about it. We remember the '00s.
“Welcome to McDonald’s! What can I get for you today?”
“You are in McDonald’s: CONSUME AND LEAVE.”
I get the point they’re trying to make but McDonald’s is not a good example.
Whats changed for them is tastes and perceptions of fast foods. Marketing fast food at kids has becoming socially less acceptable, and McDonalds has pivoted towards competing with Starbucks and the like as more of an adult friendly food venue. They’ve pushed the coffee and cafe menu concept, and the pivot to a more adult style for the main restaurants partly started in the UK where it drove sales up when they refurbed restaurants and changed the menus, and also from longer term experience in Australia where the McCafe style subsidiary coffee shops continue to grow faster than the main business.
Of course kids are still important to them and they do the happy meal etc, but if you’re out getting a coffee and a bagel as a 30 or 40 year old would you go into the McDonald’s on the left or the right?
The early story of McDonald’s is one of the great American tragedies. The food used to be excellent fresh-cooked hamburgers, real milkshakes, all this real food and available cheap and fast because they were well-organized. There’s a reason it got popular on a historic scale and started making a basically unlimited amount of money. Then, Ray Kroc pulled an Elon Musk on the (original) founders who had invented it all, hijacked the whole thing and took it over, and ruined the food to save money. Not satisfied with having fucked over the McDonald brothers, he then sued them for using their own name and then successfully drove them out of business from even having the single hamburger stand serving real food – now with a different name – that was all they had wanted to have in the first place.
It’s like everything good and bad about America, all wrapped up in one heart-rending little anecdote. Look up the whole story if you want to get upset.
Mark Knopfler had a good song about that - Boom Like That
Competition? Send 'em south
They’re gonna drown? Put a hose in their mouth.
Do not pass go, go straight to hell
I smell that meathook smell…
Can’t say who was worse, Ray Krok or Jack Welch, but we’re definitely still feeling the consequences of their deeds. And whomever lead Walmart into ruining commerce. Everyone hates Amazon, but Walmart started it all.
Good job. Yeah. It’s so fucked up. People just don’t want to know how the sausage is made. They always want to be in a dream state.
if you’re out getting a coffee and a bagel as a 30 or 40 year old would you go into the McDonald’s on the left or the right?
I’m 35. I’d take whimsy and fun over the “trendy bank” look.
They just need an adult ball pit
What’s the difference to a kids’ ball pit? A special corner for having existential dread?
A sign, mostly. Adults aren’t usually allowed
Bigger. Deeper.
But not harder? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
No offense, but McDonald’s is not a good example for your scenario.
if you’re out getting a coffee and a bagel as a 30 or 40 year old[…]
I do, and I am! And if I want a decent bagel and cup of coffee, McDonald’s will literally be the very last place I consider. (Well, most days it’s a breakfast burrito, but the point stands) McDonald’s is one of the greatest examples of enshittification because they pay their employees shit, they’re as expensive as a nearby restaurant where they prepare your meal from scratch by a chef, and the quality is terrible.
Yup, fast food has become quite expensive to the point that a local snack joint will have better quality and make you full for less. Still, people go to fast food places. I believe it is the comfort of the known, of not having to think about whether a place is sanitary or which of the scary middle eastern shawarma guys has good value for money and which will sell you microwaved shit. People don’t like to think
Thant’s funny. Here in Canada. People prefer McDonalds over Tim Hortons. Tim’s used to be OUR go to place for coffee.
They just want to charge more for adults.
That’s funny.
Capitalism in a nutshell. Profits gotta go up, and that means scrapping shit that don’t make money
Correction: Scrapping shit that doesn’t make the maximum possible amount of money.
Is it bad that I like the design on the right more ._.
Because it better captures your ongoing despair?
I like clean, functional design and I think the new design aligns more with what I like.
Same – at least in some contexts. Bauhaus, Commie blocks, all those were never meant to be perfect, they were meant to house as many people with basic comfort as possible. Many of the palaces of the past were made using resources that could have housed the poor.
On the other hand, fuck McD and fuck corporate soul-less-ness.
Not really bad. It’s functional and pragmatic design, but visual design is also a statement of sorts. Kinda like the empire in Star Wars, all business, 100% order, no fun
No. In some ways, I do. Like the design on the right. I think it’s more about the context, like McDonald’s pandered to children by actually creating a fun environment. Now, their environment is set up like an industrial prison, where nothing means anything, but just the corporate projection. It’s like the lowest common denominator. Like it was always going to end up like this. It’s just about overpowering and consolidating and destroying small business so the only thing that’s left is the brick building where you get your gruel.
No, they just forgot their place in the fast food chain. They were the cheap go to place for food. It was cheap and quick and you could feed a family for around 20 bucks when you didn’t feel like making dinner.
No, McDonalds tried to postition themselves as a more adult upscale fast food place, which could have worked is they had bothered to upgrade the actual food they were making. Instead they just increased prices to reflect the new paradigm.
And we all know how that worked out.
Ironically, the building on the right is not from forgetting their place in the fast food chain. Rather, it’s from remembering and embracing their real place in the chain. McDonalds isn’t a fast food company; it’s a real estate company. That’s where their real money is made. They build restaurants in high traffic areas with growing economies. They make some money from food sales, but the real long-term profits are from value of the land and the market value of the building.
The reason that all restaurants have become so bland and boring is that in the drive to pursue efficiency above all else, fast food companies have started optimizing their buildings for resale value. A building with really distinctive architecture - like an old Pizza Hut - doesn’t have good resale value. You either keep using it as a Pizza Hut, or you rent it out for a greatly reduced rent.
A McDonalds that is just a big bland box has more book value than a McDonalds that has a play place. Very few potential renters want a play place or the architecture to accommodate one. If McDonalds needs to close one of their restaurants and rent out or sell the old building, one without a play place will hold its value better.
McDonalds is a real estate company, not a burger company. That’s finally shown up in their actual architectural design.
Pretty bad yeah
At least the modern design doesn’t prey on children.
It’s way better
Keep in mind that the super colorful one was the location for the Dallas zoo, so all the animals were actually thematic.
Ah, that makes more sense.
They stopped calling it a depression because it became the default
Explaining society and economics to an American: “Burger is bad. Burger represents everything. Everything is bad.”
But did you know America’s first fast food I’ve heard was the hot dog.
