I know some people are boycotting US businesses during the current administration, but the same mindset has ripple effects here in the EU. In other words: stay vigilant!
Corporations are not our friend. They love money above all. And they constently need to make more money. And. And more. How much money is enough? More.
As “woke” has died in the U.S., the spiritual guide of the western world (🤮), companies are fast to follow their lead.
Honestly it is quite bizarre that despite everything people still believe capitalism can save us, when it is evident that it can only kill us and while it is at it will take most life on earth with it.
Time to wake the fuck up and kill capitalism.
Capitalism was a failed experiment that should have ended in the 1920s but it served certain people well to keep it going, so they popped it up, rather than letting it die. So now we have this stupid hybrid system where it’s capitalism, but only until capitalism fails. Then suddenly it’s socialism time, but only for businesses, until they feel like they can cope again.
Exactly. It’s not capitalism, it’s crony capitalism that sucks. Big business and government in cooperation is bad for us all. Truly free markets will still produce dickhead corporations, but competition allows good businesses to compete and give consumers better options.
Idc, doc, capitalism in general necessitates cronyism – because capitalism dictates that profit goes before people.
Which has time and time again shown to be a dick to people.
Maybe. But like democracy being a terrible system, it’s still better than the alternatives.
Eh, I feel like horizontal decentralised planning would work better, where people tell what their needs are and the day-to-day administration (which is tasked with exclusively doing that task, and cannot increase its power) then does so.
For example, take a small town somewhere. It has no bus stops, schools, or such.
Under capitalism, flight would continue; the doctor leaves, and even the grocery store too; and we get a ghost town eventually.
Under central planning or a mixed-market economy, the flight would mostly be halted. But this comes at the cost of a lack of input and choice. It is up to the central committees whether the town can continue to exist, or not.
Under decentralised planning such as in anarchocommunism, however, people give their direct input to what they need, and in return the administration must act accordingly. Thus a bus stop might be built; a school, and so on.
It’s megacorporations that rule law and decide, we are since years back in a hyper capitalist suicid extinction event. Those who do the bidding of any megacorp today are cells of a demonic post human entity and wish upon humanity death. Surely somehow we can wake people back, land on Earth again, travel and eat without carbon dioxide so that the taiga can avoid being set ablaze in a few years and our doom sealed to forever. We have to stop avoiding the speciecide class war culture that decides fantastic and impossible idioms that you must follow, like eat milk and meat to grow or that you must give up your values to a hypnosis machine or several, or maybe if only you give the firm more than the required wake hours so that you can buy a fucking insane metal monstrosity to travel inside that weighs several tonnes, because it is safer apparently to accelerate a several ton air conditioning human payload missile to hundreds of kilometers per hour and then measure how many second that took as the variable that should stimulated your geniala slightly more, than to travel together with strangers coated in god knows what pathogens? We cannot help but form a mass psychosis ever since media trained zealots are allowed to serve children corporate propaganda on a regular basis. No lobbyists that serve nature, or humanity are allowed in the death chambers high command. Only the most vile homicide designers on the planet are psycopathic and dominant enough to work actively on the slaughter of our entire species yet nobody rise from the sofa to stop them as if that was the plan all along; to just lobotomize the cattle so the machine gets it easier with the grinding of swaths of human collectives, cultures being unmade and live on as bonemeal for the ultimate end of their offspring, no say in life or death equal.
I agree. I think our biggest fuck up is thinking we own the place and do whatever without any consequences. Disgusting.
And I think a big part of the problem is the psychology of group behaviour compared to individual behaviour. We can be far less moral in groups, by compartmentalising morality onto “someone else” in the group. I’m not sure that any other system can help us address that aspect of group psychology.
Humans being social animals surely does play a big factor into controlling us, thats for sure.
While this is true of public companies privately held companies have more flexibility.
If the Kristiansens wanted to they could direct the firm to be more inclusive. In this case it’s not “the company” making the choice, it’s the Kristiansen family and you can point directly to their need for money.
Not buying from companies that bow to MAGA racism.
Also, I’m still waiting for bricks made from recycled plastic rather than new oil.
I am not trying to invalidate your comment, but saying that is like trying to boycott goods and services from China.
I haven’t heard of China having DEI programs, so I doubt MAGA racism is part of US-China trade talks.
Fucking cowards.
Accenture is an Irish consultancy firm that did the same.
Is it actually an Irish company, or just one of those Irish companies in the same way Apple is an Irish company?
It’s a global conglomerate
You’re right: https://diversity.com/post/accenture-dei-rollback-2025
It’s a similar timeline too (~2025). I honestly think it’s very pathetic of them to stoop so low for the “Yankee dollar” (or any other trade relationship).
Really Denmark?
Give it a couple more years and they’ll be making Noah’s Ark and Golgotha play sets. Oligarchs have no shame about virtue signaling to whoever holds the brass ring.
Noah’s Ark
I think that would be cool.
I’d prefer a Marx revolution set.
Enough of skin tone mini figures, make everyone yellow again.
Even though I have reservations about US-style DEI initiatives (I’d much prefer France’s way of not recording ethnicity, race, religion etc), I do find Trump admin’s policies to be beyond absurd and stupid of just nuking everything.
The good news though is that fascists typically shoot themselves on the foot and end up destroying themselves because their decisions are based on emotions. There is quite literally neither rhyme nor reason. If one reads into Nazi and fascist policies and institutions, they don’t make any sense whatsoever. Nazi Germany was actually on the brink of self-made bankruptcy by excessive overspending, until Hitler declared war to delay the inevitable by plundering the resources of Europe. Eventually, American fascism will just end up eating itself.
The problem with France s approach (as I understand it) is that by not recording ethnicity data, employers have free rein to discriminate if the persons background becomes known to them during the hiring process. Discrimination is rife because of this and they lack sufficient data and regulations to tackle it.
Studies have been carried out which send crafted resumes of different ethnicities to employers to assess callback rates. https://www.povertyactionlab.org/evaluation/discrimination-hiring-and-anonymous-cvs-france-cv-anonymes
I hope you’re right about US fascism. But while the U.S. President is an impulsive man child, his puppeteers are a lot smarter and more committed. We also have greater wealth inequality compared to WWII giving these guys a bigger advantage this time.
It might be more difficult to dismantle US fascism because it is oligarchic technofascism, than old school fascism. However, if there is one thing that is proven, is that eventually people rise up. Time and time again, those who come to power become too corrupt to be palatable. This has been observed since Plato’s time.
I’m not certain having data on people’s ethnicity is helping at all with discrimination on hiring.
There is very strict laws in France against discrimination as well. The problem isn’t that there isn’t ethnic data, the problem is that it’s really hard to prove that a candidate was rejected because of their ethnicity.
I’d be happy to be proven wrong though.
it’s really hard to prove that a candidate was rejected because of their ethnicity
Same in Finland at least to some extent. Statistics and published tests show that you’re less likely to get even an interview if you have a foregin sounding name but of course the official reason is always something ‘acceptable’. And when hiring people the reason can be whatever, “not good fit for our team”, “other applicants had better suited skill set”, “not enough experience in X” and so on. All perfectly good reasons to pick someone else in theory and in practise it’s impossible to prove any racism on selection.
Obviously not everyone does this and any of those can be a real reason to pick someone else even without any racism (intended or not), but it’s still common enough to be statistically meaningful.
Exactly. All that the stats do in this case is show what everyone knows: There is a racism problem in hiring.
It doesn’t help prove anything in a court of law, and the multitude of otherwise valid excuses to hide racism make it almost impossible to prove that the true reason is racism.
One issue is, while there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, many won’t be able to reach it.
Other is that DEI also includes education material for HR, and in my country (Hungary), where it’s frowned upon by the state, often ableist and racist pieces of shits manage to get there. Someone acts a bit like an autistic person? They probably only got there where they are thanks to their mom sleeping with teachers and such, otherwise they likely have some severe intellectual disability and cant even count to ten. Someone has a darker skin? First they’re dumb, second they steal. And any counter to it is bad, because it’s a human right to have an opinion on something, even if it’s wrong, and even if said people act out on that wrong opinion. If they’re cishet white christian men with an able body that’s all. Everyone else have to follow those opinions, even if they’re wrong, because those men built “western civilization”.
Buy Cobi, they’re a company from Poland producing their bricks in Poland. And they have tanks.
There’s 2 things in this world that I hate. Intolerance for other people and the Danes.
The Dutch. The Danes have enough having to speak Danish, no need to pile on them!
But we’re talking about Lego, which is from Denmark. Correcting the quote is at expanse of the joke/relevance.
Fair enough!
Why does Thorfinn speak in broken English while Sasappis doesn’t? Neither encountered it in their lifetimes, and both have been exposed to it for hundreds of years now.
You can spend 200 years listening to a language, but if you don’t try to understand it you never will
Mm, good point. Thorfinn’s not the brightest bulb, despite his power.
Also some people no matter how intelligent just can’t fully grasp a new language. They can become functionally fluent but never academically perfect
God I love Austin Powers.
Took me a minute
As a Dane who’s also a big fan of Thorfinn, I am vexed. VEXED, I tell you!
(Also, amused that the viking and the hippie are dating, given my username 😁)
Don’t talk with your mouth full!
removes potato from mouth, starts speaking the failed attempt at Danish known as Norwegian
Lol… Kamelåså
Not cool, Voyager translator script. Not cool. 🤦😄
I can hear this image.
😂
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It’s a sort of anti Brussels effect, I suppose: When fascism has infected the US, it starts spreading everywhere else, too.
While I’m 100% in favor of diversity and inclusion, I think there was a bit of a fever over it in corporate land over the last several years. I also don’t think it actually amounted to a whole lot. I’m not one of those people who got sick of hearing about it, or complained about it, but I’m also not sorry to see most of it go. It doesn’t mean discrimination is back on the menu. It’s hard to describe how much performative crap was happening. Just doing cartwheels to show how inclusive we are. We literally had sensitivity training that told us to stop using the phrase “long time no see,” because some might construe it as a mocking imitation of a Native American stereotype speech. I mean seriously, you can’t tell me it’s either THAT or FASCISM with nothing between.
My response to this is always…Putin really needs to die
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More astroturfed than homemade, but yeah. I mean Hitler cited Ford as an inspiration and gave him an award in 1940 something. It’s been gross for a long time.
pootin Thinks otherwise.
While the US always had fascists, they have been embolstered by Russian propaganda, and people who aren’t fascists have been brainwashed into thinking it isn’t worse than using pronouns.
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After which someone worse will take his place and continue the same shit
What Russia needs is a fucking revolution full 1917 style where they murder the shit out of all oligarchs and setup a functional democracy
You think the bolsheviks should try again?
Maybe the second time it’ll work?
No. like I said, Russia needs to become an actual representative democracy. Nobody needs one extremist dictatorship replaced by another
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“and then it got worse”
This isn’t going anywhere. Climate change will make sure of that.
In the context of power and money, absolutely. Although the fascism is being generated beyond the US too: fossil fuel companies are considered to be the main proponents of disinformation to destroy social cohesion against minorities, for example.
Everyone needs to remember regardless where they are based out of a multinational corporation is just that multinational. So they will do what they have to do to curry favor with a powerful government for corporate kick backs.
Plus regardless of how wrong it is the the people of the United States told the world what they want when the majority elected these clowns not only by the electrical college but also the popular vote. So companies are going to respond to what they perceive is what their markets want.
I hate it as much as the next human with even a little empathy but it’s how the world works right now. Just like with countries, companies don’t have morals they have interests. So there is no good or bad companies only whats in their interest at the moment.
It could be currying favor with Trump. However I also think a lot of companies were only doing this inclusion stuff in the first place behavior it was fashionable or assumed to be a good thing. With that removed, they’re just dropping the pretense.
The electrical college is truly a shocking way to run a country in the 21st century.
Good place to study electrical engineering though.
Didn’t John Goodman run that program at Greendale?
So there is no good or bad companies only whats in their interest at the moment.
That’s absolutely not true. Just because a company doesn’t “have morals” doesn’t mean a company isn’t immoral. No different than a psychopath not having morals, but us as society being able to judge them for that. You, as a consumer, have a choice on companies you interact with (somewhat, of course). Companies generally seek profit, so yes, capitalism is at fault it the core. But there are companies like:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LifeStraw
vs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_(drinkware_company)
Which one is more ethical?
These companies could have broken ties:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_collaboration_with_Nazi_Germany
That being said there’s currently a pretty strong rise globally in support for nationalism / fascism / racism / anti-science / religious domination of government and media / genocide. So even companies that seem more local can immediately change their culture to adopt to a shift in power, belief, etc.
Just because interests align with the wellbeing of the public doesnt make a company moral. You back a few years ago and Tesla started by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning to push Electric cars and battery tech and thus would get us off fossil fuels. We all for the most part think of that as a good thing and look at them now.
The problem is companies by design eventually get big enough that the people in them don’t truly care of the mission of the company. Most people do what they need to do to keep their job and when you have enough people doing that in the micro where they dont see it as immoral, but it adds up at the maco to some really immoral stuff.
Grand. That means this thing will probably be a real product within a decade. 😩
Another company that doesn’t need to, cow-towing to the cowardly cunt in the White House. Or is it the kitsch Gold House now?
Omg 😂😂😂 ive been calling it the gold leaf house recently
This sucks, my daughter just got into Lego. I guess it’s just another evil company I’ll be boycotting.
If my daughter wants more Lego, I’ll just buy it second hand
If my daughter wants more Lego, I’ll just buy it second hand
That’s where most of the sets my kids had came from.
It’s a durable product that is easy to clean. Buying used is very low risk.
Good news: their patent expired, and offbrand lego now fits on Lego, at a third of the price.
The official bricks have a better feel than any of the off-brand versions I’ve encountered, though. Every other brand is usually too tight, or sometimes too loose. Lego spent a lot of time perfecting the clasping power, and it shows.
When have you last tried? The competition has changed immensely during the last couple of years, and there are brands now that have it dialed in just as well as Lego. I highly recommend checking out Lumibricks or Pantasy, those are best in class at the moment, and actually better than Lego in many ways, imo. Or maybe Cada, if you’re more into the Technic side of things
OK, I haven’t tried those. I am currently building the Pikachu from Mega Bloks with my young children, and they are having a noticeably harder time putting the pieces together than with similar complexity Lego sets. That being said, I love the design of the set, and the assembly instructions are arguably at least as good as Lego.
I don’t have any experience with Mega/Mattel stuff so far, so can’t really compare those. From what I hear, the quality of pieces is okay, but not on the same level as Lego and gobricks (the manufacturer that provides the bricks for both Lumibricks and Pantasy, among others).
If you actually want to give them a shot, just make sure you get relatively recent-ish sets (released within the last 2 years or so), as especially Lumibricks has very rapidly been refining the quality of their set designs, instructions etc, and gobricks pieces from before that time also tend to have quite strong clutch power which they’ve softened up by now. It’s really cool to see how quickly things are improving at the high end currently
Do those companies have DEI policies, or are we just indirectly dinging Lego for having had one in the first place?
Lego as a brand does imo substantially benefit from positive associations such as heritage, sentimentality, and other positive attributes. Otherwise how would they be able to demand such premium prices.
So I would see it less as them being “dinged” for this action, but more as them losing some of those privileges. Something they are not inherently entitled to.
I have a hard time reading this thread as anything other than suggestions for boycotting Lego based on them having removed their DEI policy, while suggesting alternatives which never had one.
And they still deserve credit for having invented the concept and designed the bulk of the bricks. I don’t see how that changes at all based on whether they have a DEI policy. They obviously should lose any benefit from having a better DEI policy, since they no longer have one, but that doesn’t change anything else.
As always with debates on the internet nuances get lost and things get painted more black and white.
And they still deserve credit for having invented the concept and designed the bulk of the bricks.
No idea if the other comment that they stole it is true, but looking at the wealth of the owner family I’d say they got more than enough credit. They are set for many generations to come. At some point ideas have to become common good for others to also build upon.
Someone did invent stackable blocks with four round pegs on them, but saying Lego stole the entire concept is like saying whoever invented the wheel stole the concept because they didn’t invent the circle. You have to allow for iterative design to some extent.
To your second point, you are right that they have got “enough credit”, considering that the patent is expired. This is how patents work: In exchange for sharing your idea with the world so it can be iterated upon, you get to keep exclusive rights to use it (which you can optionally license to others) for a limited time. So the patents expiring is literally the system saying they got their due.
That being said, they still can get brownie points in public opinion for coming up with all this, and the competition has done very little iteration on the concept as far as I can tell, beyond making cool designs with existing brick designs. But considering that the competition so far has mostly been playing catch-up, this may change. Also, considering the vastness and versatility of existing brick designs, there wasn’t much to iterate upon, so maybe set design is really where we’re going to see most of the movement.
It’s basically down to “name brand vs generics” now with the patent expired, and some people will prefer name brand stuff.
It’s like this: if someone says ‘I won’t ever stab you’ and then later rescinds that statement, are you going to trust them more or less than someone who didn’t announce their stance on potentially stabbing you?
Yeah, I’d go with the other party, too.
I get your point, although I’m not sure that’s a good example. I’d be very wary of anyone promising not to stab me out of the blue :-)
That being said, I’d be very surprised if Lego isn’t still doing largely the same things they did before, except they’re no longer publishing what they’re doing. For the Danish part of their operations I’m guessing most of it is mandated by local law anyway.
*stole the original concept
I get mine from weird Chinese sites, soooo…
Care to share some of these offbrand 1/3 the price lego brands?
Dunno bout cheap ones but BlueBrixx is good quality
What about the other colors, though?
Well use your imagination
Bluebrixx is definitely around that 1/3 of lego prices. They are hit or miss though when it comes to quality as they use different brick suppliers for different sets, and it’s not always easy to know what you’re getting beforehand.
Here is a list: http://brick4.com/brand/list/
And here is a textual breakdown of some of the better-known brands (warning: Reddit link).
We should push to add lego piracy to the piracy megathread.
Cheap deals and 3d print models
My recommendation is Lumibricks or Pantasy. They’re not quite 1/3 of the price of Lego, more around 1/2 on average I think, but both offer the best brick quality that you’re going to get from any company at the moment (they use the same supplier, gobricks). They’re also both offering exclusively original designs, so no copied sets or anything like that, and doing a lot of stuff setting them apart from Lego. Lumibricks has light kits integrated seamlessly into every set and goes hard on printed pieces, no stickers anywhere. Pantasy likes using lots of metallic painted pieces, bigger custom molded pieces, and has a few interesting IPs.
If you’re into Technic, there’s also CaDa, and if you want very accurate display models you could look into Cobi. The later is a polish company that designs and produces entirely in Europe, in contrast to any other brand out there, but that also comes with a price tag that’s pretty similar to Lego at this point.
for technic there’s CaDa
Anything “Lego” sold on aliexpress.
Bad news, their patent expired and they in turn, trademarked the bricks. They sue everyone under trademark now, instead of patent infringement.
I bought a bunch of minifigs off Amazon sold as “cake toppers” to escape notice.
This isn’t a great look, but calling Lego “evil” is a bit of a stretch. This was one report that has no bearing on how they run their company or how they interact with their customers.
They still support and promote diversity in their products, which is where it matters.
No, it’s not. Lego has been bullying local distributors of other brick systems (e. g. CADA) by issuing patent claims, knowing very very well that those claims are false and the patents have expired long ago.
However, customs has to hold and store the shipping containers until the court settles, and they charge for it. A lot. This forces small shops (down to your local mom&pop toy store) to pay for customs storage fees, for weeks, sometimes months. These costs are high enough to force small shops out of business, mind you.
Along with the declining quality of the sets and the increasing cost, Lego is very well a shitty company.
The high cost is an issue, but I don’t know what you’re talking about with declining quality. It’s still fantastic quality.
You might have a point. It’s only one document that they decided not to mention DEI related words in dispite using it 7 times in the same document the previous year.
However, I’ve been on the fence about even buying Lego for my daughter. The fact is that they sell a product entirely made from plastic, it doesn’t matter that they use paper bags now to contain their plastic. This is the modern day equivalent of buying your children toys made with asbestos or lead. These products make our children and planet less healthy in ways we aren’t fully sure yet.
Maybe they aren’t evil. But they also seem to be far from innocent.
I think I’ll still stick to buying second hand if at all.
The plastic used to make Lego is a byproduct of fossil fuels. It won’t stop being added to the environment until we get off of fossil fuels. It’s not like Lego is digging up oil just to make toys.
They’re also actively searching for renewable plastic alternatives. Like, it’s a huge initiative for them.
In the meantime they just recently started a recycling program where they buy back old bricks, with the stated purpose being their concern for what happens to the plastic when it’s no longer being used.
If you’re looking for a toy company that’s conscientious about their impact on the environment, you’d have a hard time finding better than Lego.
I’d agree “evil” might be hyperbolic, but it’s not like Legos are made out of bamboo or aluminum, either.
There are also great alternatives for LEGO compatible toy sets. Some of them are even higher quality than LEGO.
What are the alternatives?
I haven’t built a lot of non LEGO sets but the Pantasy set I recently built was phenomenal. It was the retro computer I got as a gift.
Which ones? Mega Bloks make really nice designs, but the Lego bricks feel better to build with.
I haven’t built a lot of non LEGO sets but the Pantasy set I recently built was phenomenal. It was the retro computer I got as a gift.
Some of them are even higher quality than LEGO.
Like such as?
Pantasy for instance.
