Is IKEA the World’s Largest Charity? | Hacker News Reader

Is IKEA the World’s Largest Charity?

mentalfloss.com

18 pointsrobg8 comments

This seems to be a summary with fluff and bad jokes. Here is the actual article:

http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=...

Edit: apologies if I mispreresented mentalfloss.com. They did not add jokes -- they merely rephrased the same joke that kicks off the Economist article.

I agree with you. This seems to be a complete ripoff of the Economist article. http://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=184934

I bet we'll see more of this sort of "paraplagiarism" on the web. You could get a lot of traffic by finding old Economist articles about comparatively evergreen topics and paraphrasing them in a more sensationalist way. The average reddit/digg upvoter would never know. Does Mentalfloss often do this?

Most of the articles on mainstream tech news sites like CNet and the Register are already rephrased press releases or summaries of articles written by actual journalists. Why should we expect bloggers to behave any better?

For example, check out this article that doesn't even bother to hide the fact that it was completely copied from EE Times: http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2008/04/28/will-the-fe... Why not just link to the original? Oh yeah, pageviews.

cf. http://publishing2.com/2008/05/04/the-declining-value-of-red...

I'm in total agreement with you and pg. If they had linked to the original, I would have instead. Thanks for tracking it down.

Charity, probably not. Incredibly complex tax reduction plan, sure.

I feel dissatisfied that the conclusion of this article doesn't answer the question of whether IKEA is on the up-and-up or if they are simply doing the whole Tax shelter thing. Now I really want to know.

The key of the tax strategy is still how they manage to get to the money without it being considered profit or salary, and all the article says about it is it's a "convoluted multi-national system of ownership". Still an interesting read.

That's a brilliant tax shelter - good for them.

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