And time, goes by so slowly. And time can do so much.

Good. Fast. Cheap. Pick two.

That’s the golden rule for a lot of industries, and fast food is no exception. For my entire life, it’s been well known that this is not good food – in the sense that most people realize it’s unhealthy, processed, junk. So, these places basically have to deliver on the fast and cheap part.

Now, they’ve pretty much all given up on being cheap. Most of them are as expensive, or nearly as expensive, as a sit down restaurant with a server who comes to your table.

And based on nearly every fast food experience I’ve had in the past 5 or so years (which honestly isn’t much), I don’t even think they’re really delivering on the promise of fast, compared to a typical sit down place of similar caliber food.

So, then when the working class, the bread and butter of the fast food industry, is getting economically squeezed to the brink, I suppose this isn’t exactly all that surprising of an outcome. Fast food was for those nights when people were too busy working all day to prepare a meal for dinner, for a bite to each on your lunch hour when you forgot to pack something, or a quick stop while you’re on a road trip. But think about how many people are out of work now (don’t let the official unemployment numbers fool you). They aren’t traveling, away from home during lunch, and they have way more time and much less money so dinner prep at home it is. And people who are gainfully employed with money to spare, they’re going to non-fast food places because the food is better quality, about the same price, and usually just as fast or faster.

So where’s that leave “fast” food? It’s time to return to the core tenants (cheap & fast) or these places will likely continue to see declines.

The relatively new rural hospital that’s saved the lives of people in my family and offered others the ability to spend their final day(s) / hour(s) of life close to home is on the chopping block. I just found out this morning that it may be closing, specifically cited as being due to medicaid cuts.

As far as I am aware, the next closest hospitals are going to add another 20 - 30 minutes or so to an ambulance ride for people in that area.

I think about the “widow maker” heart attack or the aftermath of the car accident that shouldn’t have been survivable, and I wonder if those situations would have turned out differently if it took 20 extra minutes before starting surgery / treatment.

I also think about the ambulance rides that insurance increasingly considers “out of network” and thus people are on the hook for 100% of the cost. Those often charge by the mile. One way or another, things are going to be even more expensive for those folks.

Okay, but have you seen the price of rotisserie chickens lately? I’m not made of money.

We all love to hate on Walmart, but in my part of the world, it’s got the closest implementation to what I consider acceptable self-checkouts.

The biggest quality of life feature is that they don’t use the the weight sensors in the bagging area. You can use the hand scanner to scan every item in your cart sans weighted produce, as fast as your body will allow.

On the flip side, most of the chain grocery stores in my area have the bagging area scanners that need constant overrides, use AI cameras that lock up after every third item and require an override each time, slow machines that seem to have to compute the pi to the 10 sextillionth digit after each item is scanned before it will be ready for you to place it in the bagging area, and things of that nature. Those suck for sure.

The sad part is, this image is still noticeably better quality than most of the stuff that ends up on those “confusing perspective” and similar type communities where there’s supposedly something hidden or confusing going on but actually it’d be perfectly recognizable and not confusing at all if the photo weren’t compressed all to hell and back multiple times using shitty settings.

My experience has been starkly different from Sterile_Techniques and I’m also living in what might be termed as “the middle of Ya’ll Quaeda” USA. So, it’s interesting to hear that there’s such a big difference in opinion / understanding on this topic.

For sure, 20 - 25 years ago it seemed like almost nobody had heard of it, and whenever someone said they were allergic to meat because of a tick bite, there was a lot of skepticism and denial.

However, these days, pretty much everybody knows someone who has this allergy, and that’s no exaggeration. Even the most backwoods, anti-science, do my own thing, fuck your feelings kind of people are telling others to check themselves for ticks and/or taking steps to keep ticks off them because they’re aware of all the risks from tick bites. Now, they might be claiming that it’s government bio-warfare, related to 5G and/or covid, or some other unnecessarily contrarian bullshit, but they do take it seriously from what I’ve experienced.

Also, the good news is (or bad news I guess depending on your perspective) is that a lot of people seem to experience improvement of symptoms in time, so it’s not necessarily a permanent thing for everybody. I don’t know if it’s just that some people continue to test the limits and end up inadvertently putting themselves through exposure therapy or if the immune response itself just naturally wanes over time, but several people I know who’ve had this for 5 - 10+ years say they can usually get away with a small amount of mammal meat, like maybe a hotdog now and then at a minimum, even though a small bite would have caused them a lot of trouble when they first developed the allergy.

Not to get too serious, given the topic and the community I’m in, but…

There’s a saying along the lines of “You can’t reason someone out of a position they did not reason themselves into.” And the overwhelming majority of the time, it’s completely true.

Ridiculous as it sounds, there are large numbers of people out there who believe that being gay is a choice. These people legitimately feel like any recognition and representation of homosexuality risks turning people gay.

You can spend all the time you want asking them when they chose to be straight and logically explaining things to them, it almost certainly will not matter.

Almost literally, the moment Trump was sworn in as president, the same exact folks who spent the prior 8 months of their lives blaming Biden for the high cost of eggs suddenly had an epiphany that the president does not directly control the price of eggs. And then when the president DID specifically and directly affect the price of groceries as a result of tariffs, those same people suddenly insist that grocery prices are based on complex and rapidly changing global socioeconomic phenomenon that cannot be predicted nor controlled and besides this is still Biden’s economy because it was so broken that Trump hasn’t been able to fix it yet (even though he promised to have it all sorted out in a timeline of days).

They live in a separate reality, void of fact and logic, and I honestly have not figured out a way to reason with that. As wiser folks have said much more eloquently than I could, you cannot reason people out of something they did not reason themselves into.

Same here, I’m in the Southeastern USA. Monarchs are one of those species I pay attention to, and this spring we had a bumper crop around here. I’ve never seen so many of the caterpillars and adults in the past 10 years or so I’ve made an effort to look.

Granted, that’s also true for the handful of other butterfly and moth species I keep tabs on, they’re all having a really good year this year it seems. Luna moths, several different swallowtail species, Gulf fritillary, regal moths, hummingbird butterflies. About the only thing that I’ve seen less of this year are the giant hummingbird hawk moths.

But these things do tend to ebb and flow. One year certain “bugs” are everywhere, the next year they’re hardly seen. And with the monarch lifecycle being what it is, one good year like this one, even if it’s good in more than one region, isn’t a guarantee of long term success.

Unfortunately, I’m certain I’ll end up watching this due to circumstances beyond my control. But in my defense, watching it will ultimately spare me from having to watch Another Sandler Movie Part Two, so overall it’s a price I’m willing to pay. The things I do to keep the peace.

What about people who wear solid color t-shirts that have long-ass slogans on them which are super specific and seemingly only apply to a single person on the entire face of the Earth often written in a variety of fonts and font-sizes and including bizarre details about their lives like the t-shirt that was given to me by my same-sex lover on the second Saturday in June of 2021 to celebrate the fact that I managed to clear an entire thornless blackberry bush of berries that we used to make the most delicious blackberry cobbler from that very same evening?

Looking forward to reading this and the comments.

Having said that and assuming my interpretation of the headline is correct and that the headline is factually correct, my response is DUUUUUUUHUH HUH HUH HUH.

Because DUH HUH HUH HUH HUH.

Don’t you fucking dare speak ill of my Martha. I will hunt you down and force you to eat honey braised turnips from Martha’s website until you agree that her shit’s the bomb

I was the kid whose creating writing assignments over the years triggered more than one parent-teacher conference.

But in all fairness, I absolutely loved horror movies and my parents let me watch pretty much whatever scary movies I wanted regardless of the violence and sexual content. And I turned out okay, I guess, depending on who you ask and relatively speaking. I mean, I have relatives around the same age who are already dead due to their bad decisions in life, so I’m just saying who cares if an 8 year old writes a story about crocodile-like aliens that eat their meals ass first.

To be honest, I’m just looking forward to the massive tax savings and ridiculously lowered tax bill I’m one billion percent sure is going to materialize in 2026 from all the DOGE savings we’ve attained. Totally holding my breath on that one. Do cremated remains even pay taxes? Who the fuck am I kidding, this is the USA, of course they do.

… and nobody is there to poop on it, does it even bear repeating at all?

Yeah, I just commented before I saw yours. Taco Bell has declined the most, by far, of the fast food places I’ve eaten at in the past 5 or so years.

I gotta give their corporate overloads credit – it’s kind of impressive that they figured out so many ways to make trash tier food so much worse, charge triple or more for it, and still remain in business.

If that’s a Taco Bell 5-layer burrito, I don’t remember them being 29 cents (grew up poor, we rarely ate out). But by the time I was out on my own as an adult, I could get two 5-layer burritos and a drink for around $3 - $4 USD and some change. It was enough food to sustain me for a day if it came down to it.

But yes, these days the 5-layers are more like dried out 3-layer mini-burrito abominations that cost $3 or $4 a piece. They are pretty much nothing like the large succulent many layered dollar / value menu beasts of the past.

I guess if typing up this post is considered yelling and web hosting is basically all cloud-based these days and I’m an old man by 2025 standards, then yes, I am indeed an old man yelling at clouds. But mostly I’m an old man avoiding Taco Bell now that it’s completely ruined its brand.

I thought so to, but according to the article, this started happening months ago, but now the scope is expanding. Per the article, China and Hong Kong exemptions ended a while back, but now exemptions for other nations will be ending if I understood it correctly.