From Big Slushie to Big Dysfunction

Do you know the difference between an FSB and a FUB? Do you even know what I am asking? It is time Big Slushie was exposed.

“If you’ve ever been enthralled by one slushie and disappointed by another, it’s probably because you may be keying into qualities of which you’re not aware: carbonation, expansion, density, flavor intensity. But Big Slushie doesn’t really care whether you understand these differences, because Big Slushie doesn’t care about your needs. It exists to help convenience stores, food chains, and event providers maximize profit margins for impulse purchases, while framing those purchases to you, the slurper, as nostalgic memories of childhood delight. This is a difficult truth, and you may regret your loss of innocence in its pursuit.”

From the Atlantic, ripped from the headlines, The Truth About Slushies Must Come Out

Perhaps because I am a Boomer, I was attracted to my generation’s origin story. We are not the norm.

“In their excellent new review of the literature, Kearney and Phillip B. Levine conclude that today’s falling fertility rates are not a pure economic phenomenon but rather a "broad reordering of adult priorities" toward personal fulfillment and career and away from early marriage and childrearing. I think they’re right. But, again, the greatest enigma is not why young couples today are extending a 200-year trajectory of falling or flatlining fertility, but rather why young people between the 1930s and early 1960s took this trajectory, lit it on fire, and briefly constructed a different family formation norm that deviated from the entire sweep of modern history.”

From the Substack of Derek Thompson, What Caused the 'Baby Boom’? What Would It Take to Have Another?

Why do some cities and states work well, and others are dysfunctional? It is not, as the standard narrative would have you believe, a red vs. blue problem.

“But LA’s dysfunction reveals something deeper about how we’ve come to think about government. The way we talk about public goods is fake: It’s a debate between Republicans, who believe nearly everything should be privatized, and Democrats, who also believe nearly everything should be privatized—except routed through nonprofits, quasi-public agencies, and for-profit subsidiaries of nonprofits. A city that once boldly built a 230-mile-long aqueduct to steal a river now asks itself: Should zoo concessions go to SSA or Aramark?

But LA isn’t alone. Even nominally “public” solutions get laundered through the nonprofit-industrial complex—because nobody, not even socialists, want to actually run things.” [Emphasis added]

From the Free Press, Why Blue States Can’t Have Nice Things

“Back in 2022, Cory Doctorow coined the term ‘enshittification’ to describe a cycle that has played out again and again in the online economy. Entrepreneurs start off making high-minded promises to get new users to try their platforms. But once users, vendors, and advertisers have been locked in—by network effects, insurmountable collective action problems, high switching costs—the tactics change. The platform owners start squeezing their users for everything they can get, even as the platform fills with ever more low-quality slop. Then they start squeezing vendors and advertisers too.”

As it turns out, enshittification, which we are all now familiar with, occurs in other arenas besides social media and apps. It seems the Administration may be trying an enshittification play of their own. From Wired, The Enshittification of American Power