Porn icon Annie Sprinkle, who has been in the industry for the past 38 years and has worked in films big and small with costars such as Sharon Miller, Harry Reems and Vanessa Del Rio, remembers the process of shedding her old name for a new porn one and a new persona in 1973. “I didn’t want to use my real name, Ellen Steinberg. That was not sexy,” Sprinkle recalled. “I was lying in bed, I needed new name, and I heard a voice that said, ‘Sprinkle.’ I liked that word because I’ve always liked swimming and I fancied myself a mermaid,” Sprinkle remembers. This porn-name-as-rebirth story is common among the stars who choose to leave their old identities behind and rechristen themselves. The most practical reason for the porn name, however, is to keep family and friends unaware of the porn star’s new line of work, one that would be an unwelcome surprise to many family members.

“My name helped me to totally change who I was, what I didn’t like about myself, and become who I wanted to be. You can change your consciousness by changing your name and you can change other people’s perceptions about you.” For Sprinkle, the name also preceded her onstage reputation. “I didn’t pick my name because I like golden showers, but I came into that. People assumed that I was golden shower girl because I had a name like ‘Sprinkle.’”

But the porn industry, and porn names, have changed drastically since the 1970s. Annie Sprinkle recalls trends in the names of female porn stars through the ’80s, ’90s and 2000s. “The big trend was doing a takeoff on celebrity names like Angelina or Jennifer, but that came in the ’80s and ’90s. Many girls take on celebrity names, funny names, super-explicit names, elegant classy names, or girl-next-door like ‘Sunny Leone.’ But all of these names imply sexual fantasies.”

Today the major names in porn include Jenna Jameson, Alexis Texas, Sunny Leone, Joanna Angel and Lisa Ann. Female porn star names often subtly or not-so-subtly indicate aspects of a performer’s sexuality or physical characteristics, using puns, tongue-in-cheek allusions or direct references to famous porn stars of the past. They can be serious or funny, sultry or playful, original or generic. In the straight and gay porn world, men tend to go for hyper-masculinity. Famous male performers include Nick Manning, Francois Sagat, Jack Lawrence, Lexington Steele, Dale Dabone and Tyler Knight.

The Internet shifted the way adult film stars named themselves. Steven Hirsch, founder and co-chairmen of Vivid, explains that today domain names have serious influence over what an adult film star will choose to be called.  “This is not 20 years ago. These girls have agents and managers and their names are well thought out,” Hirsch explained. “The actresses understand the value of websites, they understand the value of social media, and nowadays they want to own the dot-com equivalent of their name.” The studio rarely if ever intervenes in the process. “In the past we have helped a few of the girls pick their name, but at this point most of the girls that come into the studio are fairly well set on a name before they even meet with us.”

For Arnold Zwicky, a professor of linguistics at Stanford University who writes and blogs about the linguistics of porn, a porn star’s name is a huge part of his or her persona. “[In the case of men] the names will most commonly have a one-syllable first name ending in a consonant and a two syllable, initially accented last name,” said Zwicky. Think Buck Williams or Scott Hardon. “A lot of those first names are chosen to evoke social domains of high masculinity, like cowboys, or they are more directly phallic, like Lance and Rod,” Zwicky explained.

Jack Shamama, a porn writer and producer who has seen many young gay male stars through the process of choosing a name, believes there is a direct correlation between trendy baby names and porn stars’ names. “One of my nieces’ names was a really popular baby name, and two or three years later suddenly all of these porn stars started cropping up with the same name. Afterwards I looked up statistics on the popular babies’ names for that year, and I noticed that a lot of porn stars had mirrored those statistics pretty closely. For gay men, since they are not having children, they take the names that their family members are giving their kids.” Shamama also noticed that gay porn stars tend to reappropriate the names of important people from their past, “someone who they either had a crush on, or someone who has impacted them positively or negatively,” said Shamama. “It can even be the name of a guy who picked on them in school.”

But a porn name is, in the end, just a marketing gimmick — and a successful porn performer needs to be a good, well, performer. As Hirsch puts it, “Ultimately it’s about the girl; how good she is, if she can act, how good the sex is, and how she connects with the audience. It’s less about the name than any of those other things.”

The question of why the money shot has since then, ahem, exploded in popularity is more complicated. The most obvious explanation is one of pure mechanics. “It has to do with the real physiology of orgasm and ejaculation,” says Lisa Jean Moore, author of “Sperm Counts: Overcome by Man’s Most Precious Fluid.” “The way that male orgasm is external, as opposed to female orgasm, which is internal, it sort of lends itself well to cinematic capture.”

In terms of evolutionary biology, the money shot also triggers sexual competition. Ogi Ogas, author of “A Billion Wicked Thoughts,” a book that explores human sexuality through popular porn genres, says, “The penis itself is a sperm competition cue, unconsciously triggering arousal designed to motivate a man to have more vigorous sex with a woman than the man who just finished,” he says, drawing on theories in evolutionary psychology about sexual competition. (For example, one study showed that heterosexual men produced more potent ejaculate when masturbating to images of two men having sex with a woman, compared to porny shots of three women together.) “The sperm might also function as a sperm competition cue in the same manner,” he says.

It’s also simply the case that viewers desire proof that the pleasure they’re seeing performed on-screen is authentic — and in the age of Viagra, an erection itself isn’t convincing enough. “The money shot actually implies that what we are seeing is real,” says Cindy Patton, a professor of sociology, anthropology and women’s studies at Simon Fraser University.

The irony is that such proof actually requires suspension of disbelief, because “the male pornographic film performer must withdraw from any tactile connection with the genitals or mouth of the woman so that the ‘spending’ of his ejaculate is visible,” writes Williams. “Within convention, viewers are asked to believe that the sexual performers within the film want to shift from a tactile to a visual pleasure at the crucial moment of the male’s orgasm.”

In recent years, in a bizarre sleight of … penis, some “pornographic videos, and particularly the cover photographs that entice one to buy, feature partially concealed artificial yet very realistic phalluses that shoot decidedly unrealistic quantities of artificial semen when squeezed,” writes Michael Thomas Carroll in “Popular modernity in America: experience, technology, mythohistory.” He explains, “This desire to provide the ‘evidence’ of male sexual pleasure has given way to ‘natural magic’ and illusory spectatorship.”

Some cultural commentators have paradoxically argued that the money shot is the result of the relative invisibility of the typical female orgasm. “The problem of an equally irrefutable and visible proof of female orgasm, at a physiological level, both leads to the convention whereby male orgasm stands in for female orgasm and to attempts to convey female orgasm by more indirect means,” argues Bill Nichols in “Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary.”

Williams writes in “Hard Core,” “While undeniably spectacular, the money shot is also hopelessly specular; it can only reflect back to the male gaze that purports to want knowledge of the woman’s pleasure the man’s own climax.” She calls the cum shot “a poor substitute for the knowledge of female wonders that the genre as a whole still seeks.”

Some would rather explain this gender divide in terms of sexism. In heterosexual cum-shot porn, Carroll argues, chauvinism is evident in the “domination of the standing male/kneeling woman stance that is one of the most popular forms of this image, but also in the implied degradation of the phallus ‘spitting’ on the woman’s face — that part of the body which is most closely associated with one’s individual dignity and personality.” (It’s worth noting that a similar dom-sub dynamic plays out in gay porn, too.)

In some but not all contexts, Moore sees the money shot as a way of “marking” a partner as “territory or property.” In a paper titled, “Cocktail parties: Fetishizing semen in pornography beyond bukkake,” she and co-author Juliana Weissbein wrote, “The most prominent type of [cum shot] video on X-Tube … was of disembodied males masturbating to ejaculation onto a still photo of a female,” they explain. “The women in these photographs, often difficult to see, are described variously as ex-girfriends or ex-wives, famous models or actresses. Ejaculating onto photos of a specific woman allows the man to claim her as his property.”

Perhaps most important is the impact of AIDs and HIV since that seminal moment in “Deep Throat” four decades ago. “In heterosexual contexts, women have avoided semen for a long time, partially to prevent pregnancy,” as well as various STDs, says Moore. But the AIDS and HIV crisis gave ejaculate an even greater “toxifying, disease-ridden” image. “Semen is something we’ve tried to sanitize and protect ourselves from in a prophylactic sense — we’re covering the body up, or covering the penis up, figuring out ways to avoid contact,” she says.

The funhouse mirror of sexuality often eroticizes that which we most fear and abhor, thus “a fantasy develops about somebody actually wanting [semen], and they want it so badly that they want to drink it and they want to slather it all over their bodies and they want you to wipe it all over their faces,” Moore says. “The messages that are so adverse and make semen to be this abject, disgusting substance have had this other effect of making male spectators want to live out the fantasy that women and men actually want it and are celebrating it.”

Carroll argues that it “is not merely a carnal fantasy; it is also an emotional one — a fantasy of ‘unconditional acceptance’ in which the female” — or male, presumably — “seems to say ‘I exist wholly for you. I will never reject you. You cannot disappoint me.”

ABC’s Terry Moran introduced the segment by warning, “For any parent concerned about what their teen does online, the huge popularity of the young man you’re about to meet may be deeply disturbing.” We’re then introduced to a handful of young women – all well over 18 – who think 25-year-old Deen is totally hot and, like, “the Ryan Gosling of porn.” Then reporter Cecilia Vega announces that the adult business “has now targeted and reached a new demographic: teenage girls.”

That’s right, pornographers are “targeting” your little girls with the help of young porn hunks like Deen and luring them into watching Internet smut! YouPorn must be advertising on Justin Bieber message boards now, I guess? At one point, Vega grills Deen about his teenage fans: “Are you encouraging them in any way to watch your films or read your blog?” It’s not like teenage girls would ever happen across this X-rated material because they want to watch porn — there must be some cute “boy next door” tricking them into it.

It isn’t that parents have no good reason to be concerned about their kids — male or female — using porn as sex-ed. It’s not even that the segment is a total rip-off of Amanda Hess’ piece about Deen and his female teenage fans in GOOD magazine (and it is). My real criticism is that even while reporting on teenage girls who admittedly like porn and seek it out, “Nightline” manages to make it sound like they’re being taken advantage of by porn the predator.

I would embed the video below, except ABC has disabled embedding. Maybe they distrust how their fear-mongering will be received in the the wild west of the Internet. You can find the clip here.

The ordinance comes in response to a campaign spearheaded by Michael Weinstein, head of the San Francisco-based nonprofit AIDS Healthcare Foundation. In the last few years, Weinstein, alongside similarly agenda-driven Shelley Lubben of the Pink Cross Foundation, has aggressively campaigned to mandate the use of condoms in heterosexual adult films, enlisting half a dozen adult performers, boycotting the Marriott Hotel chain for carrying condom-less porn, suing the L.A. Department of Public Health, and staging protests throughout Los Angeles at industry events and at AIM headquarters. Weinstein called AIM a “fig leaf” over the adult industry and backed the lawsuit that led to the organization’s financial insolvency and shutdown last year, which left a vacuum in health and safety protections in the industry. Weinstein seemed to hope that leaving performers without any kind of health protection would force legislators to mandate condom use. If the city of Los Angeles had not passed the ordinance this week Weinstein had a backup plan: Using AHF funds, he had collected 70,889 signatures to put the condom-mandate question to Los Angeles voters in June, a move that would have cost L.A. $4.4 million.

Among performers I know, there is a mix of opinions as to whether they mind actually using condoms on set themselves – a different question than the one of a legislated condom mandate. Some, like Nina Hartley, who is also a sex educator and has training as a nurse, are strongly opposed to using condoms at work, believing that they may actually increase likelihood of STI transmission. Personally, I’m not opposed to using condoms during my shoots – in fact, I already do. I became a condom-only performer in 2010, after eight years of working non-condom. But during my time as a non-condom performer, I never once contracted an STI on set that condoms would have prevented, and truthfully, I’m not sure that condoms actually keep me safer than testing alone. Further, I would never want to work on a set that required condoms in lieu of STI testing. The company I’ve worked for since 2010 is a fetish company, and as such, there is less emphasis on penetration in most of the scenes I shoot – meaning that I worry less about what Nina Hartley oh-so-glamorously calls “friction burn.” AIM founder Sharon Mitchell was also not opposed to condom use in porn; in fact, she may have given Weinstein the idea of targeting the Marriott.

What Mitchell was opposed to, and what I and every other performer I can think of is opposed to, is regulating a condom mandate through city or state government. The most basic reason is that ordinances like the one passed this week will not have the effect of increasing condom usage in straight porn. The adult film industry has only been legal for roughly 30 years. It is still looked down on by many civilians as a shameful business, and the workings of the industry are still, in many ways, shrouded to outsiders – which is a good or bad thing depending on whom you talk to. Many of the people attracted to this industry are still those who don’t care a lot about public opinion or about obeying authorities. In the case of a condom mandate tied to permits, many producers will simply shoot in Los Angeles without a permit. Others will move production outside of the city – to places like Las Vegas, San Francisco or Miami, where some companies are already established. With that in mind, I do have to wonder if moving porn outside of L.A. may be closer to what the City Council is actually after.

What performers like Hartley and I are equally opposed to is being condescended to by hypocritical zealots like Weinstein and Lubben who are obviously motivated by a concern for something other than our health and safety. Who have, in fact, shown a “blatant disregard” for the health and safety of industry workers by making it more difficult for us to use the protections we already have in place when their actions led to the closure of AIM. We’re also opposed to the squandering of AHF resources – resources that could be effectively used to help prevent and treat HIV and AIDS – on a political campaign against an industry whose health and safety regulations are already working. In the decade since AIM began the program of mandatory testing, six performers have tested positive for HIV, and only three of those have shown to be from on-set transmissions. That’s three transmissions during the course of filming tens (or perhaps hundreds) of thousands of scenes. There are no real statistics as to how this compares to transmission rates in the general population. Rather than concrete evidence, Weinstein has used references to AIDS as a scare tactic, leading those who have been affected by the disease, like City Councilman Bill Rosendahl, to believe that a condom mandate would actually have some effect on HIV transmission rates. Condoms, even when used “consistently and correctly,” do not have a 100 percent success rate. Although numbers vary, one study showed condoms to be only 80 percent effective against HIV transmission in couples of different sero-statuses (in which one partner is HIV positive and the other negative). I have a hard time believing that condom mandate, if it is even possible to enforce, is likely to have a higher success rate than testing.

Weinstein has remarked that the L.A. attorney’s office is trying to “thwart” voters’ will, but what stake do Los Angeles voters have in this matter?  I’ve heard too many times the claim that the adult industry is acting irresponsibly by portraying barrier-free sex when – as the argument goes – people of all ages are getting their information about sex from pornography. But the overwhelming majority of porn is fiction, and the world it portrays is one of fantasy.  I have to believe that most people who encounter porn know this.  We don’t generally expect other forms of entertainment to be responsible for disseminating health and safety information. If pornography is in some capacity replacing sex education for people in this country, then mandating condom use is a ludicrously indirect way of addressing that problem.

Industry workers and civilians alike may recognize the implications that government regulation in this arena could have for free speech and privacy, a position articulated by law professor David Groshoff in the Huffington Post earlier this month.

Of course, another reason that performers oppose a condom mandate is that porn with condoms doesn’t sell as well as porn without condoms, and that leads directly to fewer jobs.  After four performers tested positive for HIV in 2004, many of the big L.A. studios tried making condom-only films.  All but a few lost enough money that they went back to shooting non-condom.  In the last five years, porn sales have been deeply reduced by Internet pirating and the proliferation of “amateur porn.”  There are fewer scenes being shot in the valley, and performers are working significantly less.  No one wants to lose more work.  If consumers really want to see adult productions use condoms, then voting for a condom mandate is not the way to make it happen. The only effective way to make condoms standard in adult productions is for consumers to vote with their wallets, by actually buying porn in which condoms are used.

In his new book, “Sex, Bombs and Burgers,” Nowak argues that porn, fast food and the military have completely reshaped modern technology and our relationship to it. He points to inventions like powderized food, which emerged out of the Second World War effort and made restaurant chains like McDonald’s and Dairy Queen possible. He shows how outsourced phone sex lines have helped bring wealth to poor countries, like Guyana. And he explains how pornography helped drive both the home entertainment industry and modern Web technology, like video chat. An entertaining and well-research read, filled with surprising facts, “Sex, Bombs and Burgers” offers a provocative alternate history of 20th-century progress.

Salon spoke with Nowak over the phone from Toronto about the importance of the Second World War, the military roots of the Barbie Doll and why the Roomba is our future.

How would you summarize the broader argument behind the book?

It’s a look at some of the darker instincts that we as a race have: the need to fight, the need to engorge ourselves and the need to reproduce. Despite thousands of years of conscious evolution, we haven’t been able to escape those things. It’s the story of how our negative side has resulted in some of our most positive accomplishments.

So much of the technology you talk about came out of the Second World War. Why was that period so important for innovation?

It was when the military really started spending a lot of money on research. At one point during the war, the U.S. was devoting something like 85 percent of its entire income to military spending. So when you take that kind of effort and those resources and that brainpower and you devote them to one particular thing, the effects are going to be huge and long-lasting, which is why World War II was probably the most important technological event in human history. And the sequel, at least technologically speaking, to that period was the Space Race. I’m of the belief that cancer could be cured if somebody in the United States would dedicate the same kinds of resources in the same amount of time as it did to developing the atom bomb and putting someone on the moon.

What kinds of things came out of the war?

The food innovations that happened during the war paved the way for the rest of the 20th century. The U.S. military had to move large numbers of troops over to other parts of the world and then feed them, so a lot of techniques were created and perfected, from packaging to dehydrating and powderizing foods. Powdered coffee and powdered milk came of age during World War II. These advancements in food processing techniques created the foundation of the food plentifulness in the U.S. and created the opportunity for countries to become global food exporting powers.

Plastics are interesting because they — 60 years later it’s hard for us to think about this — but they really revolutionized the way everything was done because materials were running short in every sense during the war. During the war, there was a lot of emphasis put on creating synthetic materials and chemicals. These plastics were used during the war for things like insulating cables or lining drums or coating bullets. Then, after the war, chemical-makers like Dow started to come up with new uses for these things, which translated into everything from Tupperware to Saran wrap to Teflon to Silly Putty to Barbie dolls.

I was surprised to find out that many of our favorite toys, like Silly Putty and Barbie, had their origins in the military.

Silly Putty was developed as a replacement for rubber because one of the biggest suppliers of rubber before the war was the Pacific Islands, which the Japanese army was busy conquering during the war. Most people believe it was invented by someone working for General Electric named James Wright. He came up with this substance that was rubberlike, but the Army eventually decided not to use it because, if you’re familiar with Silly Putty, it’s not the greatest substance for making tires. After the war, he ended up at this toy store in Connecticut, and they packaged it in plastic eggs and kids ended up loving it. It was capable of doing all sorts of things: You could stretch it and plop it down on a newspaper comic and it would take the ink of the comic. It seems like a silly toy now, no pun intended, but back then it was pretty cool.

And Barbie obviously was a product of Mattel, whose founder was very into space-age stuff. He liked all these new plastics and he liked miniaturizing [things], so he went looking for people who could create toys based on this new technology. He found this guy named Jack Ryan who was an engineer for Raytheon, the missile builder. He worked on missiles for them, but Mattel lured him over with promise of royalties on anything he invented. They found this doll in Germany or Switzerland based on a newspaper cartoon similar to Blondie, except the main character was apparently a bit of a gold digger so there was a lot of sexual innuendo in the cartoon. Jack Ryan basically redesigned the new doll, and used his miniaturization knowledge to create the joints. He created a new plastic molding process for it so it was softer. And it became the bestselling toy in history. He also helped create the Chatty Kathy doll, which was like a Cabbage Patch doll but they had miniature record players inside them that say pull the string and she said stuff like “I love you,” and he also helped design Hot Wheels.

There’s the widespread belief that porn is responsible for the Internet becoming so successful. How true is that?

It’s true to some extent with most communication technologies. The military is the big creator of new technologies, but we also need early adopters. If you create new technology and nobody uses it or uses money to further develop it, it’s not going to go anywhere. That’s the role the porn industry has historically played, as far back as the film cameras that came out of WWII. Those cameras existed before the war, but nobody really used them. When the war happened, all these troops were trained as semi-professional filmmakers. Their job was to film stuff for training videos and newsreels and propaganda. They standardized all these 8 mm and 16 mm cameras so they were small and their parts were interchangeable and they were easy to use. After the war, you had thousands of troops go into civilian life and some decided to get into moviemaking. A few of them made Oscar nominated movies, like Stanley Kramer, while others such as Russ Meyer, who was a cinematographer for George Patton, basically kick-started the porn industry with his soft-core movies. Once this market was established, a lot of competition started to pour into this genre. You got things like film loop booths in peep show outlets, which evolved into VCRs and camcorders and from there to DVDs and of course the Internet.

Porn companies jump on new technologies for a number of reasons: One is to expand their distribution, the other is to get their products to people as easily as possible because they’ve historically been at odds with courts and regulators and that sort of thing, but I think the most interesting reason why porn companies jump on new technologies is that governments and regulators are often hesitant to rule on new technologies because they don’t want to discourage people from investing. So what happens is that porn companies jump on them while they’re enjoying their regulatory holidays.

I had never made the connection between Google video chat and Skype and Internet porn. As you point out, Internet porn pioneered this idea of video chatting.

A lot of people, no matter what you tell them, consider porn’s contribution to technology a myth, and that’s largely because it’s a very private, secretive industry so it’s hard to prove the numbers. I wrote a blog post today trying to assess the financial state of the industry, and it’s impossible to do because of the secrecy, and not just with the porn producers. A lot of mainstream businesses are also in on it — hotel chains, ISPs, search engines, phone providers. They’re all getting a cut of people looking for and watching pornography, but none of these companies disclose that.

Why is technological progress so tied to the military? You write quite a lot about the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency [DARPA], a military program that created a lot of new technology. 

The best way to answer that is to paraphrase Vint Cerf, who is one of the fathers of the Internet. He told me that, for most of its existence, DARPA was an agency that was interested in long-term projects and they invested in a lot of far-out ideas. For example, I saw something today that says they’re working on how to control time warp. These are the kinds of ideas DARPA is willing to fund because they know that sometimes there’s a long-term payoff. The corporate world is increasingly the complete opposite because over the last decade companies have been becoming more and more interested in short-term results.

But DARPA has shrunk significantly from what it used to be, and Obama just cut the Pentagon’s budget. Do you think the source of innovation has shifted away from the military towards the private sphere?

It’s funny because people associate the military-industrial complex subconsciously with the Cold War. In fact, the industry and military have never been closer, and I think it’s been a psychological shift in the way things work in the U.S. Since 9/11, it’s almost become patriotic for companies to work hand-in-hand with the military. So many of Google’s products, for example, come from the military or have been developed on military dollars, like Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Translate. Siri came out of a DARPA program called the Personalized Assistant That Learns. But in some ways, the military is looking to the consumer world a lot more than it used to. You read reports of the military buying a ton of of Android phones and developing a bunch of apps to use for them. There is a lot more borrowing from the consumer world; it’s not as one-directional as it used to be.

That seems like a good thing, that our technology is less dependent on the death of other human beings.

You can actually see the same trend in business. It used to be that the corporate IT department would buy early technology and then it would filter onto the consumer world. Now it’s the reverse. When the iPhone came out, a lot of people who worked for companies said, “I don’t want this jinky monochrome BlackBerry, I want an iPhone.”

You talk about robotics in the book as well. Toyota has tried for a long time to create marketable robots, particularly in the healthcare field, but as you argue in the book, it seems like military robots are the ones most likely to dominate the consumer robotics market.

These Japanese carmakers make really amazing robots, but a lot of it is about show as opposed to function, whereas military robots are the exact opposite. Toyota has really cool robots that can play violins and soccer, but these things cost millions of dollars, and do you really want a robot to play soccer with? I’d rather have a robot that cleans my toilet. That’s where the American-style robots are coming from. One of the bestselling home robots is the Roomba from iRobot, and they’re a company that cut its teeth building explosives disposal robots. The thing is, when you say robot, people think C-3PO or Commander Data from “Star Trek,” but humanoid robots are such a small sliver of overall robotics. Robotic technology is bleeding into everything we see around us so that we don’t even notice. There are cameras now that, if you point them at someone, won’t take a picture until the person smiles. Our houses are also becoming robots — some can adjust their power consumption based on if anybody’s home or not.

As military budgets shrink and the center of global power shifts away from U.S., do you think the importance of military innovation will decrease?

I think the appeal of sex, bombs and burgers are universal. I think they’re going to drive innovation regardless of where you are. It’s happening. China is already the world’s second biggest spender on its military, and it’s going to start reaping the same benefits consumer-wise that the U.S. did. Pornography is technically banned in China and yet, according to the estimates I’ve seen, it’s already the world’s biggest consumer of it. India is the world’s biggest growing market for fast food restaurants. Over a long enough timeline, such places are going to see the same benefits from these negative needs, but, then again, there may be an element of American exceptionalism that nobody else can match.