Look at Mr. Fatcat over here eating out while we’re on the verge of a recession.

Damn corporate shrinkflating Charlie’s head on us.

Every time I go south I wonder how people down there are still alive. Between the sweet tea, biscuits and gravy, pork cracklings, boudin, and kolaches, I feel like I have to take a nap whenever I eat a meal.

Can’t get that sweet sweet ad revenue if your content isn’t 100% in line with advertising expectations. God forbid there are any deviants on a site that positioned itself as weird and quirky for the first decade of its existence.

Yeah, I don’t think there’s a restaurant on Alberta that doesn’t have at least a little of this aesthetic.

That said, Pine State is worth the asking price and I’ll kill on that hill.

In a capitalist hellscape, any amount of damage is damaged beyond all hope because everyone is completely interchangeable, and ultimately, disposable.

So, y’know, you’re not wrong.

At the time?

“Correction, we have three potato.”

• Politburo

It’s a very efficient system.

They’re efficient at maximizing profits for shareholders, usually at the dire expense of literally everyone else.

Among the bushes.

Anytime people start talking about supply and demand, I can't help but think of the lines from The Grapes of Wrath:

The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains…

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

Amazing how in eight decades and some change, that sentiment has not budged an inch. The only real difference is, in addition to the food wasted and the dumpsters locked to keep out the homeless, they're dumping shit like Funko Pops in the millions. All this plastic tat that's literally killing the planet, that nobody in their right mind would want in a million years if the sickness of capitalism didn't tell them it was precious.

It's a nice fantasy, but I'm sure some sites would actually collapse. I'd prefer it and I think it would be more realistic if there were legislation capping the amount and formats of advertising that could be displayed on a webpage or over a certain period of time to an IP address. No more double ads before every video and every ten minutes within - it's currently getting to be as bad as cable TV used to be, and I don't know what hosting user-created content costs these days but I'm sure it's cheaper than what cable companies had to pay to buy content from studios for broadcast and then actually broadcast it.