The curious thing about US crime statistics is that we only count crimes against the state. We never count crimes committed by the state.
I would argue that US Crime has been sharply on the rise, from within the organs of the government itself (and its corporate affiliates).
Sharp Decline
rimshot
You could make this graph about pretty much any crime-news coverage over the last 40 years. “If It Bleeds Then It Leads” has become western media orthodoxy.
If they can keep the oil flowing, more power to them. Cuba needs a strong ally right now.
USMCA in shambles
A lot of what Trump wanted Greenland for was already available to him had he asked nicely (and not had a reputation as a nazi freak). I’m sure he’ll chalk up “using NATO for its intended purpose as it was originally designed” as some kind of negotiation triumph. The better question might be what the rest of Europe plans to do in anticipation of his next flip-flop and reckless power grab.
Currently, Trump’s team is drawing up plans to issue asylum claims to British Jews, on the grounds that they are a persecuted minority within the country and need special protection within the US. As the hysteria around anti-semitism in England crests, one has to wonder what his next move will be.
:-/
You can definitely mine a bit of gold out of that pile of turds. But you could also go to the library and receive a much higher ratio of signal to noise.
I would sooner download a tire fire.
They are so understaffed these days that they are no longer fast anymore.
The food itself is pre-prepared and re-heated on the spot. Go when there’s not a rush on and you can get your food in minutes. Go during rush hour and you’ll still be in and out much faster than at a sit-down establishment (that’s also inevitably understaffed).
They’ve got people addicted to 7,000 times the amount of recommended daily sugar, fat, and salt content.
I’ve heard this line and I think there’s an element of truth to it. Food really does taste differently if you’ve been eating the high salt/sugar junk for an extended period.
But you can get junk food anywhere. You don’t need McD’s to make it for you. Gas stations have soda fountains. Grocery stores have microwaved meals full of preservatives and sweeteners. You can just make yourself a hamburger at home, it doesn’t have to come from a store.
It just takes time, a certain degree of skill, and a kitchen with functional appliances that you’re going to need to clean up after you’re done. McD’s just goes in the trash afterwards. Far faster to buy a burger than cook one.
Historically, it was one of the cheaper items on the menu. In college (20 years ago) I could get a large fries for under $1. Back in the 80s/90s they were practically free. Like, loose-change free.
Also one of the tastier meal items given that they went so fast you could safely assume they’d be fresh, why the sandwich options could be sitting in the warmer for half an hour or longer depending on the speed of business.
I don’t get the point of fast food chains anymore.
It’s all in the name. You can get through a fast-food drive through in about 5-10 minutes. Dining in and cooking tends to take thirty min to an hour.
With 15€ i can go to an actual restaurant, why would I go to a fast food place?
Because you’re fighting traffic on your way home to feed your spouse and kids.
Every country becomes Argentina. Or maybe Texas
What starts in Gaza demolishes the world
If you seriously think the internet is better now than 08 ish, well I dont agree.
I think it’s heavily predicated on what you’re using the Internet for. In the business world, we’ve improved system redundancy, backup/recovery, and transfer speeds by leaps and bounds.
Back in 2008, I was in my car driving to Dallas to escape Hurricane Ike, with a trunk full of server hardware needed to keep our business running. Datacenter proliferation has fully eliminated the need to do anything like that again.
We have significantly more high speed broadband. We have superior wireless connectivity. HTML5 is much better than it’s predecessors. We’ve modernized APIs and broadly adopted JSON for transmission. The hardware is so much better, from phones to routers to raspberry pis for self-hosting.
I get you don’t like the current content of big Web 2.0 publishers. But you’re really missing the forest for a few big ugly trees
In 2008 you could do a web search and have relevant real results
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bombing
Google had (mostly) solved this problem by 2007. I couldn’t name another search engine that could claim the same.
But the process of Spamdexing has been an ongoing war of the websites since the nineties. Google never fully solved it, they just did a better job than most up until the big executive shift in 2018.
The spam site takeover of your search results in the modern day is as much a consequence of modernization in Spamdexing as it is any search engine’s own failures. None of those AI content mill sites existed to index 20 years ago
Hey now. China’s been churning out much higher quality merch of late. And the American Tech Giants have been increasingly wrapped up in US trade war politics. So a lot of this shit now comes from the Philippines, India, and Bangladesh.
Amazon’s going through the same enshitification cycle as Sears and JC Penny did a decade ago.
It’s not a question of “Will people stop using Amazon?” but “Will people start using <X>” where X is better than Amazon. Solve for X.
I mean, if you’ve got an REI in your neighborhood, that can be handy. But even they still get their merch from somewhere that isn’t the storefront or even the city. There really isn’t a “buy local” option for textiles in a material sense, unless you really know where to look.
The internet was so good in 08. You searched for stuff, found exactly what you needed, and were done.
Shit was bad in 2008, too. The degree to which drop shippers had consolidated down to one mega-wholesaler rather than a dozen crappy fly-by-nights hadn’t happened yet. You got a dozen different flavors of crap rather than just one. But it was still crap.
Poor kids today will never know anything other than ad ridden bot corponet.
Under an Amazon keyword search, sure. You can still find good quality products outside of Amazon. You can even find it inside Amazon if you know what you’re looking for.
The difference between 2008 and 2025 is primarily that Amazon’s algorithmic tools have degraded to the state of Yahoo or Sears.
Less crime before Brexit, too. It appears crime peaked during Brexit. Definitely something to think about.