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   mhoye (temporarily spooky) (mhoye@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 25-Sep-2025 06:43:50 JST mhoye (temporarily spooky)

   ok so to explain the phrase "potemkin mcrib"

   https://mastodon.social/@mhoye/115260142350045948

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     mhoye (temporarily spooky) (mhoye@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 25-Sep-2025 06:43:47 JST mhoye (temporarily spooky)

     in reply to

     One of the reasons, maybe the main reason, that I've long argued that high marginal tax rates are a national security question is because, specifically, of this intersection of hypergrowth and hyperreality, this place where market inflatiions can become entirely for its own line-go-up sake.

     A taxation scheme that not only rate-throttles hypergrowth but forces _some durable connection to reality_ in the process is Tier 1 critical social infrastructure for a stable economic democracy.

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     mhoye (temporarily spooky) (mhoye@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 25-Sep-2025 06:43:48 JST mhoye (temporarily spooky)

     in reply to

     "Potemkin Villages" are apocryphal, but: too good a metaphor not to keep to hand.

     "As soon as the barge carrying the Empress and ambassadors arrived, Potemkin's men, dressed as peasants, would populate the village. Once the barge left, the village was disassembled, then rebuilt downstream overnight."

     (aside: Imagine having a story like that completely overshadow your life's work? It's like finding out the Earl of Sandwich invented the appendectomy and nobody cares.)

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potemkin_village

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     mhoye (temporarily spooky) (mhoye@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 25-Sep-2025 06:43:48 JST mhoye (temporarily spooky)

     in reply to

     But that's what I mean about Potemkin McRib - a massive investment in keeping a market afloat, for the sake of appearances, completely divorced from anything you'd call an insight, a customer need, anything. Nobody's even hinting that this is going to solve any problem anyone anywhere has. Facebook's not even trying to make that Double-Amputee-Wii-Sports MMO thing work, whatever that was called. OpenAI's doing... shopping bots?

     This is hot air inflating a bubble.

     It's McRibs being fed to pigs.

     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
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     mhoye (temporarily spooky) (mhoye@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 25-Sep-2025 06:43:49 JST mhoye (temporarily spooky)

     in reply to

     You've heard the (true) idea that McDonalds is not actually a fast food restaurant; it is really a commercial real estate company that by historical coincidence just happens to sell hamburgers.

     https://storeys.com/mcdonalds-canada-commercial-real-estate/

     But McDonalds is so huge that even the "just" in "just sells hamburgers" has a tectonic impact on adjacent markets, and one manifestation of that phenomenon is the McRib.

     "A McRib" is a sandwich.

     "The McRib" is a huge exercise in pork-market arbitrage.

     https://web.archive.org/web/20200303060851/https://www.theawl.com/2011/11/a-conspiracy-of-hogs-the-mcrib-as-arbitrage/

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     mhoye (temporarily spooky) (mhoye@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 25-Sep-2025 06:43:49 JST mhoye (temporarily spooky)

     in reply to

     But at the end of the day - The End Of The Days Of McRib, ominous- McRibs are sold to people who want to buy McRibs. You might question their taste, even their judgment, but they are real people who buy McRibs with their real money.

     Nobody - I mean, I bet it's happened, because somebody's always at the back end of the bell curve of bad ideas, but nobody in any number that matters - is feeding McRibs to pigs.

     Nobody's even hinting that Facebook might have discerned some new customer need here.