You make claims. Release the books, and people can then verify what you say. If you do not release the books, it is only natural for many people to suspect something wrong.
This is an excellent question! Maybe the CEO was out of sync with the founder and spoke too soon? Maybe that is what pushed the founder to make this change in order to block any future CEO from making similar statements?
Of course. The reason IKEA was structured as it was, is to pay very little tax. Sadly this rational and admirable way of running the company has now gone out the window and the current ownership is way more woke than during the golden era. But now they are big enough to do what they want, so it doesn't really matter that much.
not sure how being directly responsible for illegal wood-cutting in eastern europe, worsening quality, higher prices, low wages and treating your employees like cattle is woke. were you bothered by them pink-washing themselves with rainbow flags?
in other words i'm always surprised about people choosing "wokeness" as criticism when there are things way more impactful and worse to actually care about.
> pay very little tax [...] rational and admirable
okay. i get the rational part, from a business perspective. still dislike that it's being done, but who am i. admirable? are you libertarian by any chance? (genuine question, i can't imagine how one can find tax evasion admirable if they're not wealthy or businessman-first-human-second themselves.)
What's the problem? If I enjoy some show, material or text, if it brings me value or a brief moment of happiness, I could care less if it was made by an AI or a human.
This racism against AI-generated stuff has to stop. If not, we'll have a butlerian jihad on our hands that will set back prosperity, development and science for decades, perhaps centuries.
People mention the artists... ohh, boohoo... either do it on your free time, improve your performance and selling skills or move to another job.
It's not my job to slave away only so that artists can day dream and produce stuff that no one cares about.
I think we need to start separating such concepts like entertainment from the ones of enjoyment, fascination, function, interest, satisfaction, beauty and the sublime a bit more. Art theory literally has books on these things, as they all fall under the topic of aesthetics. Do you really enjoy a frozen pizza from the oven at home in the same way as a freshly made pizza from an authentic pizza oven?
I always care about the processes involved, especially if any human work is involved, from all its accuracies to its errors. For me, interesting things happen while we balance our understandings with a certain amount of holism and a certain amount of reductionism. Putting it on either side of the scale, like your holistic statements, is just pure ideology, and that doesn't hold any merit in reality and is honestly just bland, repetitive and boring.
> Do you really enjoy a frozen pizza from the oven at home in the same way as a freshly made pizza from an authentic pizza oven?
Yes absolutely. I even measure them on the same scale and sometimes the frozen pizza wins.
I’ve literally got an authentic wood brining pizza oven at home and it can cook some great pizza, but that doesn’t mean its output is somehow in an untouchable category it’s just food. Further, with access to the real thing novelty goes away and it needs to sand on its own.
This is the way! Just because shitty and privacy invading and infatile services and tools exist, does not mean you have to use them.
Self-host, program in C or what ever you find sexy, and enjoy.
If you work for Evilcorp, perhaps consider joining a smaller company and settle for a lower salary in return for being treated like a human and not like a cog in a machine?
Seems like a trivial realization written about many decades ago. Join the church of instrumentalism, and just live with it as a fact of daily life. Focus on your predictions and mental models of the world, hone them, and that's about it.
This is the way! It is frightening how eagerly parents want to give up freedom for everyone, in return for not having to care about their offspring and the illusion of 100% safety.
I think the authoritarian trend accelerated during corona. Our western political nobility got a real taste for power, and they have not been able to free themselves from that afrodisiac ever since. Therefore chat control, 1, 2, 3, and when that didn't go as planned... lo and behold... age verification, and that of course needs control over vpn, and encryption, and there we go... chat control slipped in through the back door.
Soon we can no longer criticize china if this keeps up.
I think parents are raising the alarm about nefarious social media practices (ie recommendation algorithms that actively do harm) and those services are in turn pushing these controls in order to deflect responsibility away from themselves.
There’s an alternate view that parents are very much in support of centralized policy. When policy is left up to individual families — little Johnny X has an iPhone but little Timmy Y doesn’t — the creep towards everyone having a phone begins. When, instead, the school board bans phones it’s much easier for the conservative majority of parents to hold the line.
Banning phones at school has nothing to do with freedom to use phones. You are not restrained in your freedom because using you smartphone while driving is forbidden.
Kids go to school to learn, not to watch modern cable shopping network (aka Tiktok/Instagram).
Did you ever heard a parent asking for this in the real world? Parents who care either don't give smartphones, or dumbed-down ones that they can control.
Asking for less tech at school is not an authoritarian move, but rather a point of view about how schools should work.
If you asked me, I think that parents should throw away their TVs and minimize screen time at home, both for them and the kids. However I won't ask this to be enforced by the State - if anything, it will make my kids more competitive against the cartoons-infused ones of the other parents.
> It is frightening how eagerly parents want to give up freedom for everyone,
It's not like parents have much of a choice. When you gotta work 2 jobs to barely make rent and groceries, you need some sort of "safe space" to pawn your children off to.
I’m all for helping people in the situations that aren’t of their own creation, so using the excuse “what are they supposed to do” doesn’t really fit for me? The first option is to use a condom if they are in a bad financial situation. It’s been amazing how every time I’ve used one, I haven’t had a child.
When did we stop making people responsible for their choices? I’m not against assistance, I’m against the idea that it is my responsibility to give up rights and freedoms because <insert person> made poor personal choices and now society is once again a surrogate to yet another child of irresponsible parents. If you aren’t able to parent, don’t have children. Don’t care what your situation is that rule stays the same.
And of course, someone will jump in with “but maybe” and “what if the situation changed”. Again…I’m not against helping parents who fall on hard times to get back on their feet — society SHOULD be there to help with assistance and programs, even help with getting your kids watched. And all of that exists. I’m against expecting every individual of society to not only help bear the costs, fund and administrate these programs, provide countless charities, etc…
But now the suggestions is also somehow that we are required to be the surrogate parent to every one of their offspring by giving up our rights to create an entire society of a padded playground?
No, I think that’s the line for me.
Parents can give up all their own rights they want and live in their padded kingdoms, but that ends at your doorstep when you walk out to the space you share with every other person…including digitally. You can build the physical and virtual walls around your padded kingdom as high and thick as you want to keep your children shielded from the world.
>The first option is to use a condom if they are in a bad financial situation. It’s been amazing how every time I’ve used one, I haven’t had a child.
That's what they've been doing in unprecedented numbers. Which via demographic collapse is going to cause an even worse crisis, economic, social, political, and more, further down the line.
Good. If people can’t afford their own livelihood, then they probably shouldn’t have them. If they can and choose not to, arguments could be made about why someone would rather they make a different decision. But if “we need poor children in a welfare system or I can’t live my comfortable life” is what someone would think is the answer, there is something desperately wrong with the people who would think it.
Being poor and not being able to afford your OWN responsibilities at your income are two different things. I grew up poor, so yea, you can f off with your own ivory tower inventions while you go read what I actually said about how we SHOULD provide safety nets.
It’s incredible how idiots think living beyond your means at any income and then adding children is a good thing. If you can’t care for yourself then you can’t care for others. Not being able to afford your own needs is not caring for yourself, so no, shocker, you shouldn’t add an additional person BY CHOICE to that situation. People who would advocate that they SHOULD are seriously messed up in the head.
"Being able to parent" is something you don't know about before you have your first child, and each child increases exponentially the difficulty. You can manage ok the first one and be overwhelmed when the second one is born.
Also not everyone is a trust fund kid that works at a FAANG: people get sick, lose jobs, divorce, change homes, and so on.
I'm really happy that you found the perfect antifragile optimum in your life, but this kind of "vae victis" thinking will only make parents more miserable and decrease birth rates.
love that not having kids when you can’t actually afford your own existence at that time is a hot take that no one could know in advance that they shouldn’t do. Also love that I SPECIFICALLY called out your argument, almost like you couldn’t even finish reading before needing to get in your super well thought response. That’s sarcasm, figured I’d make sure it was clear since the reading thing is up in the air.
I think that you should try to have kids (plural) before trying to make grand and contemptuous theories about parents.
All of the people who say you should have kids if $X... will be quite happy in their old days to have the other irresponsible parents' children to wipe their ass and bring them food in the fridge. I really hope that public pensions get scrapped for this exact reason.
I think that you should try to have kids (plural) before trying to make grand and contemptuous theories about parents.
All of the people who say you should have kids if $X... will be quite happy in their old days to have the other irresponsible parents' children to wipe their ass and bring them food in the fridge.
Inconvenient? My life is super convenient. No stress, deep thinking and deep work, super focus and concentration.
What I would find inconvenient is to be like the smartphone zombies around me, adicted to their phones, restlessly doomscrolling with dead eyes, feeling empty inside.
Print some stuff from time to time or arguing my way through tickets offices is a small price to pay for not being enslaved to the IT-machine.
reply