Ikea Shanghai to elderly, lonely Chinese people: buy something or get out

That is so depressing, on so many levels.

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Yeah, fight the power(less)!

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True. Admittedly that business is officially a non-profit mostly-tax-exempt Swedish charity, though.

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But it would pretty much just kill hipsters.

On second thought, let’s go ahead anyway.

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“charity” for what?

Here’s an awful picture I took of the Shanghai IKEA.

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Ever hear of the one-child policy and its effect on the shape of families?

Respecting elders seems to have more to do with culture and tradition. Policy is often having mandates shoved down your throat and being told it’s good for you and that really, you like it. That policy dog don’t hunt too good for the most part. Tradition and culture usually evolve over time and sometimes for good reasons…of course it’s my responsibility as an elder to have earned any respect I hope to get. That one child thing was rightly doomed from the start.

So, whaddya want they should do, live in a nursing home that’s run like a business?

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1800 - 1,000,000,000
1927 - 2,000,000,000
1980 - 4,000,000,000
2000 - 6,000,000,000
2016 - 7+ Billion people

The elephant in the room regarding hunger, pollution, global warming, all lead back to population. Less people, less pollution, less people, less resource use, less people, fewer cars, cows, factories, and everything else. More people, more elderly, longer life spans, more elderly, and less resources for them.

Nothing about the expansion of population has added to our respect or better treatment of the elderly. The expansion of population has everything to do with how we are depleting and polluting the earth, how much competition there is for resources.

A one-child mandate perhaps doesn’t work, but if we had any sense we’d do it voluntarily for several generations.

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It’s a cafeteria. Not a restaurant.

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yeah. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8x98KFcMJeo

Chinese folks sure are good at lounging around anywhere. I’m reminded of this part of a “Donny Does” video from Shanghai Disneyland.

People are good at lounging around. In specific areas that reduces their chance of heatstroke. We do, after all, have this special organ encased in a thick layer of bone that we can’t let get too hot or else we get seizures and die. It’s a pretty smart organ that’s good at protecting itself.

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Don’t the seniors know that that’s what McDonald’s are for?

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McDonalds has an interior designed to be nauseating and unpleasant. The color choices and acoustics and sightlines and presence of children prove it. They want people buying their food-like substance, eating as fast as possible, then getting out. They’re so good at it, some people rather order at the drive-thru, collect their food, park in the lot and eat in the car.

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I really love how the language on BB has changed over the years. Where is the time of at least attempting to be unbiased. To show some kind of journalistic acumen. By the time you get to the middle of the first sentence, the author painted Ikea as the bad guy here. Why? And how exactly are they the bad guys here? I stopped reading BB about 2 years ago and returned to it a year later. I stopped because I did not have time and most of the stuff written here is in no way relevant for me and mine. I returned, because I found out I was missing the style of BB. It is still missing for me…

Let me be more clear: It’s very challenging to provide care for the elderly when the elderly outnumber their offspring. Some elderly people in China I imagine are doing just fine, but the ones who lost their child, for instance, might not be faring very well.

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Except for the fact that without expansion of population, there is no portion of the population that could be considered relatively ‘elderly’ and they would have only their peers to take care of each other.

A real problem for teenagers and older, retired folks.

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