I woke up super-groggy today, not uncommon when the alarm goes off at 5 a.m. I didn’t have enough time before my workout class to hit Starbucks for a cappuccino with an extra shot, but I did have time to hit the McDonald’s drive-through. Small black coffee, please. It was 5:45 a.m.
Pulled around to the window, where I was asked for 96 cents. “Really?” I said. “That seems low. I’m sure it’s more than that.”
“Well, with the senior discount, that’s what it is,” the window lady said, prompting me to ask how she knew I was a senior, goddamnit. (I didn’t say the goddamnit.) “Do you have cameras back there at the menu board?”
“This early, small black coffee? I just figured,” she said, handing me back a nickel. So really, 95 cents.
This is my life now, I guess. Little encounters with McDonald’s employees.
The class was good, but insanely hot and muggy. The weather is supposed to break tomorrow. And this is the rest of my life, I guess: McDonald’s and the weather.
This blog, too. A story hooked me the other day with its headline.
The Website at the End of the Internet: Reddit is one of the last thriving islands of the old web. Can it survive AI?
The question remains to be answered. Also:
The World Wide Web from which Reddit grew, and for which Huffman expresses so much reverence, has been going through something akin to ecological collapse after being poisoned, then abandoned, by advertisers that have little use for independent websites anymore. At the same time, the rise of generative AI suggests a lot of people are just as happy — if not happier — getting life advice, news, and conversation from a robot that has read a bunch of sub-Reddits as they are chatting with internet strangers themselves.
It gets way more into the weeds of Reddit and the internet than I’m interested in, but the bottom line is the same thing you’ve no doubt read elsewhere, because it’s an old story: Humans are a disappearing feature of the internet, steadily being replaced by bots and AI garbage yammering at one another. If you spend any time at all online, you’ve surely noticed it. If you’ve been online as long as some of us have, well, you really know. It’s easy to remember the early years of everyone being connected; oh, you like this obscure artist or singer/songwriter or movie or hobby TOO? Let’s be friends! Send me an email! I’ll write you back!
No more.
On the other hand, I have become oddly fixated with some Reddit groups — or subreddits, I guess. The amount of time people have to waste online talking about the stupidest shit imaginable is almost awe-inspiring.
Anyway, here you are: Human-powered blather since 2001. Fool that I am.
I would generally have a little more bloggage for you, but the news these days has been so depressing, I feel a little overmatched by it. You know, of course, that Ghislaine Maxwell is cruising toward a commutation or pardon, right? Emil Bove, lying thug, cruising toward a late-term Trump appointment to SCOTUS. Israel is run by thugs, and also liars. Even the coming of pleasant weather will be prefaced by a storm. Earthquake in Russia, tsunamis in the Pacific — it’s just not a good-news kinda week.
But there’s this: David Von Drehle is quitting the WashPost. Here’s his last column. It’s short, elegant and good.
That’s what I got.
FDChief said on July 30, 2025 at 9:54 am
I miss the Blog Era.
There was a lot of crap there, but there’s always a lot of crap in everything, and what was good was GOOD; political stuff like Steve Gilliard’s News Blog. Military sites like Phil Carter’s Intel Dump. You here.
It was literate. It was complex. It was engaged, and engaging. It demanded you think, and was pretty merciless if you didn’t (I still shake my head and cuss at the way people who showed up at Intel Dump with muttonheaded Bush Regime propaganda got flayed. Utterly pantsed. Beheaded)
Now?
That stuff is still there. But holy Hell do you have to sort through piles and piles MORE shit to find it. My issue with AI isn’t so much the babbling idiocy of it – I can ignore that and do – but that inevitably the first half-dozen search results are some sort of AI gibberish you have to scroll through to find anything substantive.
Like so much in the post-Truth Era…it feels like it did before, only slightly smaller. Fussier, poorer, dirtier, more needlessly complicated. And I don’t see how that changes for the better.
Enshittification isn’t just for the internet.
(NB: got a followup comment to this in “Link Review Jail”. Hopefully you can let it loose. Thanks)
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basset said on July 30, 2025 at 11:06 am
Predicted heat index of 107 in Nashville today, down from 113 yesterday but still.
Fifty-some years ago around this date and in these conditions I woulda been detasseling in Greene County, or laying railroad ties on the C&O main line down around Tunnelton and Fort Ritner. Sure couldn’t do that today, or even watch for very long.
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Mark P said on July 30, 2025 at 11:56 am
I still have a blog, but I haven’t posted since last November. That one was titled “Bye bye Five Eyes.” For those who don’t know, Five Eyes is the intelligence-sharing organization of the Anglo world, the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the US. My point was that none of the other countries is likely to share sensitive intelligence information with the US, given Trump’s history with classified information. That was written before Trump took office, and things have only gotten worse since.
Those days seem like a lifetime ago. It’s amazing how quickly the New World Order has completely taken over our (my) consciousness. It seems like this has always been the way it is, and will always be the way it is. Brainworm Bobby is busy killing Americans, and Donald “Cheater” Trump is busy making a fool of himself and a tragic laughingstock of the US. The government is being dismantled, and all that remains will be incompetent loyalists. Well, incompetent, or dedicated to destroying what’s left.
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Dexter Friend said on July 30, 2025 at 1:52 pm
I have been getting senior coffees at McDonald’s for 15 years, now $1. Last year I discovered Burger King’s senior coffee is 59 cents. Caveat: BK coffee is hot piss. For a short while we had a Tim’s across the drive from McD’s, and a small coffee was like $2.49, and the donuts were second-rate to local John’s Son’s Donuts Depot, 2 miles away. Bye-bye Tim Horton’s. Now it’s a Marco’s Pizza, damn fine pizza.
Back to Bove…fucking vampire, yes, Deborah gets that right. Liar, creep, better hang on to his new job because who would hire this ugly fuck in the real work-world? Oh yeah…a morgue. Better have cameras, this monster would fuck a corpse in a minute,.
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Sheryl Prentice said on July 30, 2025 at 2:37 pm
“Enshittification” for the win. It perfectly describes all the endless marketing crap from all the little communication directors of non-profits, public schools and everybody with something to sell.
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susan said on July 30, 2025 at 3:32 pm
Sheryl @5 — Here’s the history of the word/concept “Enshiitification,” coined by Cory Doctorow.
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Brandon said on July 30, 2025 at 4:27 pm
tsunamis in the Pacific
It could have been far worse. The advisory has been called off, but there still might be strong ocean currents. Otherwise, it’s back to normal.
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Jeff Gill said on July 30, 2025 at 6:07 pm
Brandon, thanks for the update.
There is no small coffee at McDonalds, only senior coffee, medium, and large.
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alex said on July 31, 2025 at 6:55 am
Don’t recall if I mentioned it here, but on a recent grocery store visit, a Gen Z guy assisted me with an alcohol purchase at the self-checkout. He didn’t take my ID. He just swiped his badge to open a touch screen and pressed an option that said “obviously over age 50.” Then he thought better of it and said “Omigod, I’m so sorry you had to see this.”
Speaking of enshittification, I keep getting texts from all sorts of unfamiliar Dem fund-raisers who are obviously scammers who figured out that I supported Dems in the last election. Yesterday I got one that said “We are just a few thousand votes shy of blocking Trump from getting the Nobel Prize. Please help.”
Krugman had a great piece a few days ago about enshittification: https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-general-theory-of-enshittification?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=277517&post_id=169092636&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=43a8hi&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
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Alan Stamm said on July 31, 2025 at 7:45 am
Thanks for the gift link to David Von Drehle’s exit essay. “. . . the privilege of gratifying my curiosity in exchange for a paycheck” is a good distillation of journalism’s lure, at least back in flush times.
And laginappe is a treat for the ear.
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Jeff Gill said on July 31, 2025 at 8:11 am
I hope y’all will forgive an Xwitter link, but I can’t find this anywhere else. Sally Jenkins’ farewell message to her coworkers is great journalism in its own right; she’s leaving for The Atlantic.
https://x.com/BenMullin/status/1950602766046330904
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Dave said on July 31, 2025 at 1:00 pm
I kept getting texts from the Hamilton County (IN) Repugs. I finally responded with a strongly worded text about what I think of them and the cretin in the White House and then put STOP at the end of it. Haven’t received any more.
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Dexter Friend said on July 31, 2025 at 1:57 pm
I just remembered that a senior coffee at McDonald’s in 2000 was 29 cents. I have actually been getting cheap coffee there for 25 years, not 15 years.
I always have my first coffee at home, and daughter Vanessa gifted me a huge box of Keurig pods from Black Rifle Coffee Company, which I had never heard of. They are also a big merch outfit, looks look a lot of faux patriotic shit to me. The coffee is super-strong. I quickly learned to brew a large cup and mix it with a little decaf to offset the uncomfortable feeling I get when dosed with a caffeine bomb.
I am throwing in a shout about Folger’s K-pods. Really perfect for my taste anyway.
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jim said on July 31, 2025 at 3:51 pm
Propublica documents ICE crap:https://projects.propublica.org/trump-ice-smashed-windows-deportation-arrests/
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Scout said on July 31, 2025 at 4:07 pm
We recently replaced our old, dead Keurig style coffee maker (it was a Mueller) with a new Keurig from Costco that included a milk frother. I use Estilo espresso pods to make a shot, then stir in some honey, some lavender syrup and frothed barista oat milk. It is so damn good we haven’t stopped for lattes at a coffee shop since we bought it. Fabulous lattes at a fraction of the cost.
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Sherri said on July 31, 2025 at 8:04 pm
Shoutout to Greysteel Strength and Conditioning, a barbell gym catering to folks who qualify for the McDonald’s senior coffee!
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/26/well/move/greysteel-powerlifting-senior-gym.html?unlocked_article_code=1.a08.Ot5d.33QXt8kKMb8t&smid=url-share
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Mark P said on July 31, 2025 at 9:19 pm
I might have missed it earlier, but I am reading that starting in 2026 original Medicare will be testing prior authorization for certain procedures in six states, including Ohio. They are going to be using that great and potent elixir that will cure all that ails you, AI, to help speed things along. I have some friends in Colorado with Medicare Advantage plans, and their biggest complaint is prior authorization requirements. I assume this latest is one of the early steps towards privatizing Medicare by forcing everyone into Medicare Advantage plans. Thanks Mehmet. I wonder how far gone we will be by January 2029, and whether we will be able to get back to where we were.
I keep expecting to see a giant, blazing eye atop a pillar of smoke and fire, and dark clouds covering all of DC.
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