4chan

We blocked out the sun to stop the machine uprising

these are grim times

Kinda missing the bigger picture

Yes, however, that wasn't the point.

The dead plants were the lucky ones.

I hardly think fast food is the devil you should be focusing on while your country burns

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.

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.

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.

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

From my perspective, zoomers are most of the people talking about it. We remember the '00s.

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.

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.

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.