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rcr-anti | on: Amazon’s “digital pacifier” for toddlers
I usually try not to judge, people have family, commitments, gotta put food on the table. But. I genuinely wonder how people working at some of these companies that actively make the world a worse place live with themselves. This is basically, and obviously, child abuse in the implied usage. Someone might make a tablet good for education, but I don't think Amazon is structurally capable of doing it.
sheepscreek | parent | next
A few years ago this would have made the perfect April Fools joke.

(Continue down below for an amusing rant - trigger warning maybe?)

Now it’s just part of insatiable corporate greed and the current sad reality.

I wonder if Zuck lets his girls use Instagram all day long or if Andy would gift his own toddler (if he had another one) this beautiful tablet. Probably not, he’d have a full time nanny to keep the kid busy.

Alas, these folks are the symptoms and the real problem is systemic folks. Companies are chasing targets to please…drumroll…the shareholders. Yes, each one of us holding index funds are also culpable. It’s a SNAFU. We’ve been sucked whole into the system and escape is hard (especially with the newly proposed Dell bank account for kids that can only be used to invest in stocks).

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augment_me | parent | next
Neoliberalism is at a state where moral shaming has very little effect. If you shame someone for trying to build a career or better themselves, you are the problem to a bigger extent than the person doing the previously morally bad thing. People's shame in a neoliberalist society comes from personal failures, such as not working hard enough, eating too much, not looking good enough, etc.
charcircuit | parent | next
Have you considered that they are making the the world better and your process of measuring is flawed.
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pseudohadamard | parent | next
150 years ago, people used to pacify toddlers with "cordial" containing laudanum, better known as opium.

Today we're still doing the same thing, only the drugs hit is being delivered by other means.

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zapataband1 | parent | next
Marx explained how the division of labor alienates people from what they produce, from the act of production itself, from their human nature, and from one another. People are forced to perform mind-numbing, degrading, or *harmful tasks* simply to earn the wages needed to stay alive, reducing human life to a commodity
phyzix5761 | root | parent
Marx was also an adulterer and refused to take responsibility for children he fathered so I don't think he's the best person to listen to in this situation.
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bushbaba | parent | next
If not Amazon, someone else would ship this. At least if you ship it you can make it less shitty
margalabargala | root | parent | next
Right, because it's profitable.

There are lots of wildly profitable enterprises that we regulate or make illegal.

If everyone else is selling boiled orphan elixir, you'd be leaving money on the table not to boil yourself some orphans. But maybe we decide that boiling orphans isn't an industry we want as a society, and legislate consequences for doing so.

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thefourthchime | parent
It's not obviously child abuse. If you go back 100 years old children were abused far more than we possibly could simply by malnutrition, disease, lack of shelter. Giving them something that may or may not harm them is not obviously child abuse.
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