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Dopamine Fracking

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Re: Dopamine Fracking

#391

Post by Stefan-H »

raincole wrote: post #49

> The Strawberry Example Is this really the best example the author could come up with? If you want fresh strawberries, you can just go to a supermarket and buy them. In many places you can get a few pounds per for less than the money you earn in one hour . It's pretty much a heaven compared to pre-industrial days. But I guess the analogy of fracking is pretty spot on, just in a way the author didn't realize -- the c…

My issue with the strawberry example is different than yours - the items the author listed that we miss out on ("The texture, the juiciness, the complexity of the flavor, the imperfections, the joy of finding a particularly good one, the cosmic horror of eating a wormy one, the nostalgia of having your grandma's strawberry jam with dozens of individually unique strawberries in it.") amount to little of objective value. I would argue the greatest value that eating a real strawberry as opposed to a fake strawberry product provided was this very article. Where else has "memory of texture and flavor combinations" been brought to bear? I can agree that there is virtue in having tasty and interesting things to eat, but I don't see how missing out on a specific combination is all that terrible.

Re: Dopamine Fracking

#392

Post by neutronicus »

PeterStuer wrote: post #28
hattmall wrote: post #25

This has been happening in the real world for far longer. It's basically the experience of many modern cities, or even worse suburbs. Starbucks / Chipotle / Orange Theory / Target / Generic Brewery / Lime Scooter / Waymo / Subscribe N Save So much of modern life has been comodified to optimize for things that aren't necessarily what's inline with the users interests and certainly don't do anything for cultural robust…

I think a significant contributer to franchize style commoditized homogenization is modern anxiety. Millenials especially seem near exclusively drawn to the 'predictable' and curated 'peer approved' nature of recognizable 'safe' brand signals.

That's definitely the case for my wife.

She lives in terror of being grossed out or impatient, or our children complaining. Her favorite places are ones where she didn't have to wait, never wondered whether we'd been forgotten, where parking was easy, where our son ate the food, where the food didn't gross her out, where the finishes look new/spotless, and something about the atmosphere of the place set her mind at ease about no one paying attention to our children's behavior.

Chains are very good at ticking these boxes. Independent places always seem to have slow service, or a dirty bathroom, or a dingy finish, or poorly-separated seating so that she feels like our son is bothering other patrons, or no kids' menu, or no parking lot, or just manage to put her off in some way. "Feel dirty". "Feel sketchy".

I really don't know if it's the chicken or the egg. Is it because chains are familiar? Or is it because it takes a corporate arm to understand the existential necessity of "not putting off high-achieving white women" and to do the market research it takes to actually achieve that aim? IDK

Re: Dopamine Fracking

#393

Post by fauchletenerum »

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #340
ghurtado wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem of 8yr olds watching too much YouTube is definitely not one for YouTube to fix. We're quickly getting to a point where all parenting is delegated to people and institutions that have nothing to do with raising children. And then we complain that our kids are not being raised properly. We don't even know who to blame for this any more.

I'd like to agree but practically there are difficulties enforcing it. Anecdotally I know of some parents having a battle with their local school because their kids have been watching this sort of crap in kindergarten. Fundamentally it seems like building products designed to target children with harmful content, or content that substitutes for educational material, should not be accepted by society. So yes parents a…

> Anecdotally I know of some parents having a battle with their local school because their kids have been watching this sort of crap in kindergarten.

I'm imagining a scene from Idiocracy where a kindergarten teacher is the person whose job it is to press play on Youtube videos

Re: Dopamine Fracking

#394

Post by neutronicus »

Gigachad wrote: post #184
raverbashing wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree But then, once I got to certain McD locations, and got a (very) disappointing experience, then it's hard to come back to the brand. (it might have changed, I think this was over 10 yrs ago) but still

At least in Australia pretty much all the chain places like McDonalds/subway etc suck so bad it’s incredible they are still in business. They aren’t even winning on price.

In the US I have noticed a huge quality gap between chain locations in the suburbs (pretty good) and in the city (abominable).

I don't think this is true in "glamor" cities, but in Baltimore where I live every Chipotle location is known to be terrible. Hostile employees, menu items constantly out of stock, orders wrong. People who patronize and love suburban locations are shocked.

I'm not sure if the independent restaurants are siphoning off all the decent employees (especially the managers who you'd think would try and make sure there's enough product to meet demand), or if it's just that much more difficult to get delivery trucks to city locations, or if corporate just wants to close the city locations and doesn't mind setting them up to fail, or what.

But it's stark.

That's not even getting into McDonald's or KFC which are legitimately ratchet in the city and pretty wholesome out in the burbs.

Re: Dopamine Fracking

#395

Post by foldr »

SauntSolaire wrote: post #385
foldr wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’ve long complained that communists refuse to specify the details of how a communist society will work, or why it would be good. Did capitalists do this in any comprehensive or satisfactory way prior to the advent of capitalism? I’m not a communist, but this seems like a fairly weak criticism.

The advent of communism was sufficiently long ago that it I'm not sure your critique applies.

I'm not sure why that's relevant. My point is that it's never really possible to provide a detailed plan for a complete changing of the social order. While it might be nice in theory to have such a thing, it's not clear that it's really a reasonable thing to ask for.

Re: Dopamine Fracking

#396

Post by dredmorbius »

hattmall wrote: post #25

This has been happening in the real world for far longer. It's basically the experience of many modern cities, or even worse suburbs. Starbucks / Chipotle / Orange Theory / Target / Generic Brewery / Lime Scooter / Waymo / Subscribe N Save So much of modern life has been comodified to optimize for things that aren't necessarily what's inline with the users interests and certainly don't do anything for cultural robust…

That's a trend which has been emerging for a long time. Henry Miller's The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1945) is an early take, this is a theme of John Steinbeck's Travels With Charley (1962), though Steinbeck was taking pains to avoid the then-brand-new Interstate Highway System. Two decades later, Least Heat Moon's Blue Highways chronicles a similar trip.

Growth of both suburbs (Levittown, 1947, Interstate Highway System (1956), shopping mall (1950s/60s), and fast food franchises (McDonalds, bought out by Ray Kroc in 1961, Kentucky Fried Chicken, now KFC, 1952), greatly accelerated the trend especially in the 1960s and 1970s, aided by mass-market television advertising.

Homogenisation of US culture, shopping mall / strip mall / franchise culture were all pretty well developed by the 1980s / early 1990s. The specific franchises have been changing (Starbucks does date to the early 1970s, but really boomed during the 1990s, Target is similar, most of your other examples are post-2010). I recall complaints of travelling, often well outside the US, only to be faced with the same mix of stores, restaurants, brands, and products one would find within a typical US city or suburb, already by the 1990s.

I'm not saying that this isn't bad. Just that it's been going on for a long time.

Re: Dopamine Fracking

#397

Post by brikym »

chownie wrote: post #216
almogo wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the corporate berries are really so bad, the invisible hand will push the company in the direction of society's aggregate wallet vote. Sounds like most people are fine with them. Outside of truly autocratic systems, sounds like these berries are WAI.

Other possibilities: * The people are not fine with bad strawberries but have no other choices available * The people are not fine with bad strawberries but can't afford better choices * The people are not fine with bad strawberries but they don't know good strawberries * The people are not fine with bad strawberries but they're cheap enough to ship and sell that there's no economic case for good strawberries, so no…

The market is too busy working two jobs to afford living standards previously afforded by one income. Convenience and distribution is king now.

Re: Dopamine Fracking

#398

Post by bobbylarrybobby »

hammock wrote: post #236
fireflash38 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maple syrup is a big one. I can count on one hand the number of times I've been to even fancy breakfast restaurants and had real maple syrup. Cracker barrel used to, decades ago now. It's all garbage corn syrup now. I'd rather not have syrup at all than that cloying, thick, gross stuff.

At a restaurant it’s hard because people use way too much and it’s expensive stuff. A solution could be tiny packaged packets of it, the way they do with butter (in part for much the same reason)

I was very dismayed to find that the single serve maple syrup packets that I thought existed are instead just more corn syrup, which cost 21¢ per 1.4oz packet, or 15¢/oz. Meanwhile a jug of maple syrup is 56¢/oz and single serve packets seem to be a bit more than a dollar per ounce.

Re: Dopamine Fracking

#399

Post by chownie »

senordevnyc wrote: post #341
JohnBooty wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people are not fine with bad strawberries but they don't know good strawberries You most definitely get this phenomenon with tomatoes. There’s little demand for actually good tomatoes, because most people don’t even know what a good tomato tastes like at this point. This applies to countless things, but tomatoes are a prime example because they deteriorate so quickly once picked relative to other fruits I guess.…

I see people constantly make this argument, and honestly I think it’s BS. I grew up eating tomatoes from my grandparents garden, and I’ve lived and traveled all over the world. I’ve grown tomatoes, bought them from roadside farmer stands, bought them at grocery stores, and had them in everything from hole in the wall restaurants in developing countries to Michelin three star restaurants on multiple different continen…

Isn't the point that we don't grow the good varieties any longer because they don't survive freight? It doesn't matter if you bought the tomato seeds from Harrods and grew them in your lush orchard if they're the same lineage bred for shipping hardiness over all else.

Re: Dopamine Fracking

#400

Post by sifar »

tdb7893 wrote: post #381
ghurtado wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem of 8yr olds watching too much YouTube is definitely not one for YouTube to fix. We're quickly getting to a point where all parenting is delegated to people and institutions that have nothing to do with raising children. And then we complain that our kids are not being raised properly. We don't even know who to blame for this any more.

At that age I could watch TV or play video games without strict parental supervision (I had older brothers and would often play with them while my mom cooked or whatever). I was lucky because while I did watch some age inappropriate media (I watched Gundam Wing on Toonami when I was 7) I was really lucky that none of these things were trying to addict me to them in the same way media often does now. I don't think the…

>> trying to balance autonomy with managing the exploitative nature of modern technology makes me anxious to have kids

This is a legitimate concern and the anxiety is understandable. I think that would make you a much better parent than many. Most often, parents use these as crutches, so as a parent one has to set ground rules (for ourselves) and enforce them.

No tablets/phone access for entertainment till 6-7 yrs - there is simply no reason for this. No unsupervised access till 10-12 yrs.

Use game console like the switch instead of mobile games. Curate stuff for them. Mostly be involved in how they use technology, discuss with them what it is and what effect it can have in a way they can relate too.

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