The Yahoo article could help explain some of the economics behind it.
chuckadams 2 hours ago [-]
I wonder how many suburban housewives in the 60's combated loneliness through TupperWare® Parties?
no_time 1 hours ago [-]
How neat. I'd buy some Actimel too if a sharply dressed lady would show up at my door instead of a suicidal looking grocery delivery guy who carves the local word for "tip" in the elevator every time he doesn't get any.
zabzonk 33 minutes ago [-]
Well, I'd go for a sharply dressed lady too, but ... what I get is very cheerful Tesco drivers in hiviz, who unpack my groceries and stash the chilled stuff in my fridge. It's a great (UK) service, and they quite often ask if they can do anything else for me (I'm bed-bound) like make a cup of tea. Cannot recommend them highly enough.
_delirium 4 hours ago [-]
The article didn't answer my main question, which is how the economics work. How does it add up to have high-touch home delivery of $5 yogurt packages?
VLM 4 hours ago [-]
400 yen for a ten pack is more like $2.50 than $5
Typical markup in the USA is 100% from wholesaler to retail. Running brick and mortar is very expensive. So if Walgreens were selling this, the wholesale price would be $1.25. I think it reasonable to expect the Yakult Ladies are pulling in the same $1.25 per package that walgreens gets.
The key, I think, is "Most of them are self-employed". Its a gig economy idea. You have to eat. If you're walking home from the store anyway (or kids school or on the way home from work or whatever), you may as well deliver packages for $1.25 each on the way home. You're walking home anyway, you may as well make free money on the walk.
The article says this has been running since 1963 though. The program would’ve been running through the post-war period of economic growth, as well as during the lost decades.
Yakult ladies aren’t classified as full-time employees, but kojin jigyo usha (roughly “sole proprietors”), essentially making them owners of bicycle-sized franchises. They purchase product from Yakult and make a profit based on what they can sell. Yakult says the average earnings of a Yakult lady are roughly $682 USD a month, compared to an average of $1,774 per month for Japanese women broadly. In Yahoo Answers forums, Yakult ladies claim wildly different profits: Some say they work only three hours a day and make more than the company average. Others claim to work far more, selling roughly $2,700 worth of product in a month to take home about $600, roughly a 22 percent cut.
...
As I left the Yakult center, my baby clamoring for her nap, I felt oddly disillusioned — not by the women themselves, or even the no-nonsense manager, but by the corporate trappings of their work. Before I looked into it, I had swallowed the lighthearted, easy glow of Yakult’s promotional videos, which recalled my own experience when I was a kid. I would like to believe selling probiotic milk drinks is just an aside to Yakult ladies’ main mission of maternal care in the community. In the fluorescent lighting of the Yakult center, I saw their labor.
alwa 20 minutes ago [-]
Thank you for sharing that literary and well-observed piece of writing. It is evocative and contemplative, a timely counterpart to TFA, and it is indeed excellent. I’d second your suggestion to others.
hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm 2 hours ago [-]
I'm so glad I visit different countries to see what they are actually like so I don't get brainwashed into thinking GDP is anywhere near of good measure as people think it is.
It’s not that GDP is a poor measure, just that it is isolated as the only measure most policy is based on improving rather than being one metric in a portfolio of related metrics that balance technological progress, accumulation of wealth, and human thriving.
As Gary Stephenson rightly points out the culture of Economics in modern practice is not one of open query and scientific skepticism, but of proselytizing. More akin to a religion than a science.
BurningFrog 29 minutes ago [-]
GDP just measures the average wealth of a society, on the assumption that production equals consumption. Wealth is unambiguously good, but of course it fails at measuring the full extent of human flourishing.
My take on Economists is that they keep desperately trying to make people understand that prices are set by supply vs demand dynamics, while society keeps refusing to understand it.
lysace 2 hours ago [-]
Ah, yes, as you've figured out, the secret is that a lower GDP is actually better than a higher GDP. When Japan did (really) well economically, it was a literal hell to live in.
/s
hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm 1 hours ago [-]
Guys look I used /s and like to be snarky. Updoots to the left.
Edit: guy has now edited his comment like 5 times as a response.
lysace 1 hours ago [-]
What is your answer to the question?
(Edit: "How does it add up to have high-touch home delivery of $5 yogurt packages?")
50 minutes ago [-]
Dylan16807 28 minutes ago [-]
I don't see a question.
If you're asking about what's better than looking up GDP, they already said visiting the countries.
trollbridge 4 hours ago [-]
It's very effective if you have just a few of these, but are able to get lots of press from doing so that causes many other consumers to go and buy yourself through normal grocery outlets.
MagicMoonlight 4 hours ago [-]
They don’t have just a few, they have 81,000 people doing it.
Aaargh20318 3 hours ago [-]
Every time I read an article about people trying to solve the 'loneliness epidemic' I can't help but wonder if we're not trying to solve the wrong problem.
Maybe the solution should not be sought in trying to increase social connections but in eliminating our need for social contact. This dependence on other humans has always felt like a flaw to me.
Note that I'm not saying that human contact is bad, just that our pathological dependency on it is.
kelipso 3 hours ago [-]
This is the kind of detached from humanity viewpoint that I come to hacker news for. Keep it up.
swed420 2 hours ago [-]
I mean, the first part of their comment got my hopes up:
> Every time I read an article about people trying to solve the 'loneliness epidemic' I can't help but wonder if we're not trying to solve the wrong problem.
But then I realized we differed on what the root problem/solution were.
What economic/social forces are making it so that the elderly get their emotional needs met through gig workers instead of their own families?
Another point the article doesn't mention is the emotional toll this likely has on the workers. Having once worked a role where I regularly helped the elderly and got to know the same individuals over some years, it was a constant churn of disappointment when they'd inevitably die.
fsckboy 3 hours ago [-]
>Every time I read an article about people trying to solve the 'loneliness epidemic...
you're reading the title wrong, they aren't "trying to solve the loneliness epidemic," they are trying to sell yogurt at a profit. In so doing, their sales force is ameliorating some of the loneliness their clients feel as a side effect. You could say that they are monetizing loneliness if that's the reason people are buying their products, for the visits and not for the yogurt.
Aaargh20318 3 hours ago [-]
Exactly. This need to be social is being used against us. Not just to sell yoghurt, it’s weaponized by the social media networks to manipulate entire countries.
jatari 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, how do we optimize social interaction out of our lives, maybe we can all live in VR with simulated girlfriends and never have to interact with another human again.
the_af 2 hours ago [-]
End goal: Asimov's Solaria, where everything is done by robots and the mere thought of breathing the same air as another human becomes repulsive.
onlyrealcuzzo 3 hours ago [-]
Then, like, what's the point of even being a human instead of a robot?
jatari 3 hours ago [-]
Nothing wrong with being a robot.
MattGaiser 3 hours ago [-]
You would be free to decide, instead of having it being biologically required that you socialize.
Aaargh20318 3 hours ago [-]
To learn, to create, to grow? None of these things necessarily involve other humans.
TaupeRanger 2 hours ago [-]
Absolutely wrong, of course. At the risk of engaging with apparent rage bait: social interaction is one type of human yearning. So are learning, creating, and growing. Each of them requires other humans. Learning requires studying the knowledge created by other humans. Creating requires materials and methods created by other humans. Growing requires learning, so by extension, other humans.
Tepix 3 hours ago [-]
But why if no-one is around to see it, admire it, comment on it, use it?
Towaway69 2 hours ago [-]
If a human lives and no one noticed that human, did that human really live or have a life?
The framing of human sociality as a flaw to be eliminated invites the dangerous notion that we can—or should—simply re-engineer ourselves. However, the ambitious project of "rewiring" human nature to eliminate our spontaneous connections and dependencies is not a path to liberation, but the ultimate goal of totalitarianism and oppressive social engineering.
Hannah Arendt explicitly notes that the true aim of totalitarian ideologies is not merely to change political structures, but to achieve "the transformation of human nature itself". When regimes seek total domination over a population, human spontaneity and the unpredictable nature of our social relationships become the greatest obstacles.
To achieve total control, these systems attempt to fabricate a new kind of human species. Arendt observes that concentration camps functioned literally as "laboratories" to test these changes in human nature. The objective was to eliminate human spontaneity and transform the human personality into a mere "thing," reducing individuals to a predictable "bundle of reactions". Arendt compares the success of this psychological rewiring to Pavlov’s dog, noting that conditioning a creature to abandon its natural, spontaneous instincts creates a "perverted animal".
James C. Scott traces a similar impulse in "high-modernist" ideology, which champions the "mastery of nature (including human nature)" through the rational, scientific design of social order. This kind of extreme social engineering requires stripping people of their distinctive personalities, histories, and organic community ties, treating them instead as abstract, interchangeable "generic subjects".
When human beings are placed in environments designed to severely restrict their organic social interactions and enforce rigid functional control, they suffer. Such environments foster a kind of "institutional neurosis" characterized by apathy, withdrawal, and a loss of initiative.
Paulo Freire similarly observes that the drive to completely control people—to "in-animate" them and transform them from living beings into inanimate "things"—is the essence of oppression. He argues that attempting to turn men and women into "automatons" directly negates our fundamental "ontological vocation to be more fully human".
If we were to successfully "rewire" ourselves to no longer need others, we would be executing the very project that authoritarian regimes have historically attempted through terror and indoctrination.
Our "flawed" social dependency and spontaneous need for one another are exactly what guarantee our freedom. To engineer that vulnerability out of the human psyche would not solve the problem of loneliness; it would simply reduce us to isolated, predictable mechanisms, destroying our humanity in the process.
sa-code 3 hours ago [-]
What’s there to live for otherwise? Can you flesh this idea out more?
Aaargh20318 3 hours ago [-]
There are plenty of things to live for, but that’s not even the point. There is a difference between choosing to be social and having to be social because you will get depressed if you aren’t.
I think this need for social interaction is harmful. We did see this in action during the COVID pandemic. So many people who weren’t able to abide by a short lockdown. Lives were lost due to our pathological need for social interaction.
Imagine how many communicable deceases we could eliminate by simply having a 3 month lockdown every other year.
aliher1911 2 hours ago [-]
So is food. If we switch to IV feeding you can also avoid many harms food and drink brings. We can do a soylent green as a stopgap.
charlie0 3 hours ago [-]
You don't go far enough, every flu season should be lockdown and social distancing protocol should be followed on pain of death.
kakacik 2 hours ago [-]
You live for others? As in remove those others and you lose whole purpose of life? I am not trying to be rude, seems like retirement homes house plenty of such people but it doesn't make sense for younger folks... although this is hardly a choice, is it. But - I believe one can work on this and move themselves quite a bit if wanted.
My 2 cents - mountains and nature and activities in them are always beautiful, as in it doesn't get boring or mundane, not for anybody I know. Working out on oneself, experiencing various adventures, backpacking around the world, sports, adrenaline/risky activities that make you feel alive, seeing cultures and history and food... those are done for oneself and they are absolutely 100% fulfilling that no career could ever deliver.
Saying above as one such person, and also father of 2 amazing kids (and a pretty decent wife to complement) whom I love more than anything. But I don't live for them despite doing various hard sacrifices for them, I live for me and do those things for me, to be happy, content, recharged, better father and husband and when looking back at my life being fine with various choices made.
MattGaiser 3 hours ago [-]
It would be up to you. These people who are lonely otherwise have lives.
neilv 3 hours ago [-]
Techbros are thinking: "Don't eliminate their need! They need a subscription AI app!"
qingcharles 3 hours ago [-]
Daily AI conversations for seniors: (there are a few of these products...)
Not everybody is wired in same way. Some have 'pathological' need, some see it as beneficial but optional item. Same folks definitely don't enjoy loud parties or bars full of strangers yelling on each other, and find a bit of lonely time healing/recharging.
I am one such person, and there are others. I consider it a personality strength, although of course it comes with side effects. Minority but not tiny.
throwaway613746 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
kalterdev 3 hours ago [-]
> The thinking child is not antisocial (he is, in fact, the only type of child fit for social relationships). When he develops his first values and conscious convictions, particularly as he approaches adolescence, he feels an intense desire to share them with a friend who would understand him; if frustrated, he feels an acute sense of loneliness. (Loneliness is specifically the experience of this type of child—or adult; it is the experience of those who have something to offer. The emotion that drives conformists to "belong," is not loneliness, but fear—the fear of intellectual independence and responsibility. The thinking child seeks equals; the conformist seeks protectors.)
Yakult is a Japanese company? I always assumed from the name it came from mainland Europe somewhere. They did a Häagen-Dazs on me. Especially as the Japanese often come up with Western names like this that aren't even spellable in kana.
pan69 34 minutes ago [-]
> Yakult (ヤクルト, Yakuruto) is a Japanese sweetened probiotic milk beverage fermented with the bacteria strain Lacticaseibacillus casei Shirota. It is sold by Yakult Honsha based in Tokyo.
The plaid trim on the official uniform definitely gives it a Scottish aesthetic.
haunter 4 hours ago [-]
This is an ad
4 hours ago [-]
cubefox 4 hours ago [-]
I thought the BBC was state funded and didn't have to rely on undisclosed sponsorships.
rounce 3 hours ago [-]
The BBC is not state funded, it's a public broadcaster primarily funded by the general public, via the (admittedly outdated) TV licence fee system. Although the media output for the UK is non-commercial, it does have commercial operations and interactions though and they are mostly centred around the content produced for overseas consumption. As this post is on the .com domain where the international content exists (and which runs ads), I presume it is part of the paid content side of things.
cubefox 3 hours ago [-]
> The BBC is not state funded, it's a public broadcaster primarily funded by the general public, via the (admittedly outdated) TV licence fee system.
If the fee is mandatory, it works similar to a tax, in which case it would be more correct than incorrect to say the BBC is state funded.
layer8 2 hours ago [-]
Public broadcasting is usually only partially publicly funded, and also funds itself with ads and content licensing. And one normally speaks of public funding in that context, not of state funding. There is furthermore an important difference between public broadcasting and state media, where for the latter it may be more common to use the term state-funded.
tacet 55 minutes ago [-]
To add, public broadcaster often is collective (state) funded, but it is supposed to be independed from state.
How much media can or rather may diverge from state opinion depends country to country.
cubefox 56 minutes ago [-]
Public funding means essentially the same as state funding, just the connotation is more positive.
2 hours ago [-]
nephihaha 3 hours ago [-]
The BBC is a state broadcaster which claims to be autonomous, but that doesn't apply when it comes to foreign policy or the royal family.
ViktorRay 11 minutes ago [-]
This isn’t true. The content of the BBC is independent of the UK government. Even for the royal family and for foreign policy.
I am not British so I could be wrong however. If you have evidence that the BBC lacks autonomy when it comes to foreign policy or to the royal family please share it with the rest of us.
wizzwizz4 3 hours ago [-]
Correct. The .co.uk version has this disclaimer:
> This website is produced by BBC Global News Ltd, a commercial company that is part of BBC Studios, owned by the BBC (and just the BBC). No money from the licence fee was used to create this website. The money we make from it is re-invested to help fund the BBC’s international journalism.
umanwizard 3 hours ago [-]
> The BBC is not state funded, it's a public broadcaster primarily funded by the general public, via the (admittedly outdated) TV licence fee system.
How is that different from being state-funded? Everything state-funded is paid for by the general public, through taxes. That's part of what being a state is: an organization that forces people to pay taxes and directs them to various programs.
Are you claiming that the TV license fee isn't a tax? It's money that the state makes you pay so that it can fund something.
rounce 2 hours ago [-]
The state doesn't make me pay it because I don't watch live broadcast TV, therefore I don't have to pay it. It's not a general tax it's a hypothecated tax and is administered by the BBC not the UK government.
Furthermore the state isn't in charge of administering it anyway, it's a civil matter brought about by the BBC (or rather the company which is subcontracted to enforce licencing). The BBC has the authority to do this based on the Royal Charter that governs it, that doesn't make it "state funded" or a "state broadcaster".
umanwizard 2 hours ago [-]
> The state doesn't make me pay it because I don't watch live broadcast TV, therefore I don't have to pay it.
There are plenty of taxes that only some people have to pay, for example, the fee to register a car.
> Furthermore the state isn't in charge of administering it anyway, it's a civil matter brought about by the BBC (or rather the company which is subcontracted to enforce licencing). The BBC has the authority to do this based on the Royal Charter that governs it
I'm trouble understanding how this doesn't make it part of the state? It is a 100% state-owned entity to which the state has granted (in a "Royal Charter") the ability to collect taxes... the distinction you're trying to draw seems meaningless to me.
Sure there may be two separate entities, one called "The UK Government" and one called "The BBC" where neither is part of the other, but structurally I don't see how you can claim that they're not both part of "the State" in general.
nephihaha 3 hours ago [-]
The state has changed it from a criminal offence to a civil one. They also have to apply for a warrant to enter a home which takes time is legally difficult.
The enforcers work for neither the BBC nor the government but are subcontracted out.
cjs_ac 3 hours ago [-]
From the footer:
> This website is produced by BBC Global News Ltd, a commercial company that is part of BBC Studios, owned by the BBC (and just the BBC). No money from the licence fee was used to create this website. The money we make from it is re-invested to help fund the BBC’s international journalism.
RenThraysk 3 hours ago [-]
In the UK, the bbc.com link redirects to bbc.co.uk and the notification footer auto closes before even have a chance to read it.
And if it is an ad, doesn't the FTC require it to be labelled as such?
rounce 3 hours ago [-]
Why would the US FTC have any jurisdiction?
RenThraysk 3 hours ago [-]
Because of US audience.
There was a case where UK based influencer got into FTC trouble for the CSGO Lotto gambling site. He was promoting it without disclosing he had a stake in the site.
rounce 2 hours ago [-]
CSGOLotto Inc. was registered in the US.
Nursie 3 hours ago [-]
BBC.com is a commercial service aimed at people outside of the UK
MagicMoonlight 4 hours ago [-]
They probably aren’t even getting paid for it, they’re just falling for shill posts for free.
cubefox 3 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure which would be worse.
nephihaha 4 hours ago [-]
From the BBC no less. We were just discussing how uncommercial they are.
paganel 1 hours ago [-]
Sometimes news like this is upvoted, because it involves Japan, towards each a lot of Western techies have an unhealthy obsession on, but the moment when those techies are advised to not use the self-service thing at the super-market they start going bananas.
ronnier 20 minutes ago [-]
I also find it odd that there’s daily top ranked Japan related articles on HN.
pipeline_peak 1 hours ago [-]
“The yoghurt delivery women combatting loneliness in Minnesota”
HN’s interest in this article is so “thing vs Japanese thing”
jokoon 3 hours ago [-]
English is not my main language but this title confuses me
xandrius 1 hours ago [-]
Yoghurt delivery women is the subject of the sentence and it's about women who deliver yoghurts.
ekianjo 3 hours ago [-]
Is this a PR piece, with product placement clearly front and center?
alephnerd 4 hours ago [-]
This seems to be a submarine article - all the images and quotes seem to be directly sourced from Yakult Honsha's strategic comms department.
Edit: yep, appears Yakult has just kicked off an ad campaign putting Yakult Ladies front and center [0]
Japanese have lactose intolerance, almost universally.
They don't eat yogurt or dairy in general.
gramie 3 hours ago [-]
The annual consumption of ice cream in Japan was 6.7 litres per person in 2021 (compared to 10 litres/person in Canada and 20 litres/person in the U.S.). For all dairy, Japanese people each ate 94 kg in 2022.
They eat less dairy, but hardly none. I have heard people say that a scoop of ice cream or a glass of milk each day is not a problem, but more can be. Intolerance also seems to increase with age, so younger people can consume more dairy.
A 1975 study in Japan puts intolerance (unable to drink 200ml of milk comfortably) at 19% of the population. I would suspect that massive exposure over the past 50 years has lowered that percentage significantly.
socalgal2 2 hours ago [-]
A video on how it’s possible for lactose intolerant peoples to still eat lots of dairy.
So does Thailand but we also have Yakult ladies here, they just sell the drinks though.
tokai 3 hours ago [-]
How come Yakult is a nearly 100 years old Japanese company?
Most yogurt cultures reduces lactose content of the milk base during fermentation. Some cultures like the one Yakult uses supports increased lactose digestion in humans. At the same time lactose intolerance is not binary but a spectrum.
umanwizard 3 hours ago [-]
The first line is true, the second line is false.
Lactose intolerance is not absolute.
2 hours ago [-]
Rendered at 19:34:05 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Surprisingly enough, I just looked the scheme up for this comment, and it's still active:
- https://yakult.com.sg/yakult-lady-agent/
- https://sg.news.yahoo.com/memory-makers-singapores-first-yak...
The Yahoo article could help explain some of the economics behind it.
Typical markup in the USA is 100% from wholesaler to retail. Running brick and mortar is very expensive. So if Walgreens were selling this, the wholesale price would be $1.25. I think it reasonable to expect the Yakult Ladies are pulling in the same $1.25 per package that walgreens gets.
The key, I think, is "Most of them are self-employed". Its a gig economy idea. You have to eat. If you're walking home from the store anyway (or kids school or on the way home from work or whatever), you may as well deliver packages for $1.25 each on the way home. You're walking home anyway, you may as well make free money on the walk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decades
It also mentions that it was done to drive sales.
Yakult ladies aren’t classified as full-time employees, but kojin jigyo usha (roughly “sole proprietors”), essentially making them owners of bicycle-sized franchises. They purchase product from Yakult and make a profit based on what they can sell. Yakult says the average earnings of a Yakult lady are roughly $682 USD a month, compared to an average of $1,774 per month for Japanese women broadly. In Yahoo Answers forums, Yakult ladies claim wildly different profits: Some say they work only three hours a day and make more than the company average. Others claim to work far more, selling roughly $2,700 worth of product in a month to take home about $600, roughly a 22 percent cut.
...
As I left the Yakult center, my baby clamoring for her nap, I felt oddly disillusioned — not by the women themselves, or even the no-nonsense manager, but by the corporate trappings of their work. Before I looked into it, I had swallowed the lighthearted, easy glow of Yakult’s promotional videos, which recalled my own experience when I was a kid. I would like to believe selling probiotic milk drinks is just an aside to Yakult ladies’ main mission of maternal care in the community. In the fluorescent lighting of the Yakult center, I saw their labor.
It’s not that GDP is a poor measure, just that it is isolated as the only measure most policy is based on improving rather than being one metric in a portfolio of related metrics that balance technological progress, accumulation of wealth, and human thriving.
As Gary Stephenson rightly points out the culture of Economics in modern practice is not one of open query and scientific skepticism, but of proselytizing. More akin to a religion than a science.
My take on Economists is that they keep desperately trying to make people understand that prices are set by supply vs demand dynamics, while society keeps refusing to understand it.
/s
Edit: guy has now edited his comment like 5 times as a response.
(Edit: "How does it add up to have high-touch home delivery of $5 yogurt packages?")
If you're asking about what's better than looking up GDP, they already said visiting the countries.
Maybe the solution should not be sought in trying to increase social connections but in eliminating our need for social contact. This dependence on other humans has always felt like a flaw to me.
Note that I'm not saying that human contact is bad, just that our pathological dependency on it is.
> Every time I read an article about people trying to solve the 'loneliness epidemic' I can't help but wonder if we're not trying to solve the wrong problem.
But then I realized we differed on what the root problem/solution were.
What economic/social forces are making it so that the elderly get their emotional needs met through gig workers instead of their own families?
Another point the article doesn't mention is the emotional toll this likely has on the workers. Having once worked a role where I regularly helped the elderly and got to know the same individuals over some years, it was a constant churn of disappointment when they'd inevitably die.
you're reading the title wrong, they aren't "trying to solve the loneliness epidemic," they are trying to sell yogurt at a profit. In so doing, their sales force is ameliorating some of the loneliness their clients feel as a side effect. You could say that they are monetizing loneliness if that's the reason people are buying their products, for the visits and not for the yogurt.
Much like a soundless tree in the forest.
Hannah Arendt explicitly notes that the true aim of totalitarian ideologies is not merely to change political structures, but to achieve "the transformation of human nature itself". When regimes seek total domination over a population, human spontaneity and the unpredictable nature of our social relationships become the greatest obstacles.
To achieve total control, these systems attempt to fabricate a new kind of human species. Arendt observes that concentration camps functioned literally as "laboratories" to test these changes in human nature. The objective was to eliminate human spontaneity and transform the human personality into a mere "thing," reducing individuals to a predictable "bundle of reactions". Arendt compares the success of this psychological rewiring to Pavlov’s dog, noting that conditioning a creature to abandon its natural, spontaneous instincts creates a "perverted animal".
James C. Scott traces a similar impulse in "high-modernist" ideology, which champions the "mastery of nature (including human nature)" through the rational, scientific design of social order. This kind of extreme social engineering requires stripping people of their distinctive personalities, histories, and organic community ties, treating them instead as abstract, interchangeable "generic subjects".
When human beings are placed in environments designed to severely restrict their organic social interactions and enforce rigid functional control, they suffer. Such environments foster a kind of "institutional neurosis" characterized by apathy, withdrawal, and a loss of initiative.
Paulo Freire similarly observes that the drive to completely control people—to "in-animate" them and transform them from living beings into inanimate "things"—is the essence of oppression. He argues that attempting to turn men and women into "automatons" directly negates our fundamental "ontological vocation to be more fully human".
If we were to successfully "rewire" ourselves to no longer need others, we would be executing the very project that authoritarian regimes have historically attempted through terror and indoctrination.
Our "flawed" social dependency and spontaneous need for one another are exactly what guarantee our freedom. To engineer that vulnerability out of the human psyche would not solve the problem of loneliness; it would simply reduce us to isolated, predictable mechanisms, destroying our humanity in the process.
I think this need for social interaction is harmful. We did see this in action during the COVID pandemic. So many people who weren’t able to abide by a short lockdown. Lives were lost due to our pathological need for social interaction.
Imagine how many communicable deceases we could eliminate by simply having a 3 month lockdown every other year.
My 2 cents - mountains and nature and activities in them are always beautiful, as in it doesn't get boring or mundane, not for anybody I know. Working out on oneself, experiencing various adventures, backpacking around the world, sports, adrenaline/risky activities that make you feel alive, seeing cultures and history and food... those are done for oneself and they are absolutely 100% fulfilling that no career could ever deliver.
Saying above as one such person, and also father of 2 amazing kids (and a pretty decent wife to complement) whom I love more than anything. But I don't live for them despite doing various hard sacrifices for them, I live for me and do those things for me, to be happy, content, recharged, better father and husband and when looking back at my life being fine with various choices made.
https://intouch.family/en
I am one such person, and there are others. I consider it a personality strength, although of course it comes with side effects. Minority but not tiny.
https://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/loneliness.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakult
If the fee is mandatory, it works similar to a tax, in which case it would be more correct than incorrect to say the BBC is state funded.
How much media can or rather may diverge from state opinion depends country to country.
I am not British so I could be wrong however. If you have evidence that the BBC lacks autonomy when it comes to foreign policy or to the royal family please share it with the rest of us.
> This website is produced by BBC Global News Ltd, a commercial company that is part of BBC Studios, owned by the BBC (and just the BBC). No money from the licence fee was used to create this website. The money we make from it is re-invested to help fund the BBC’s international journalism.
How is that different from being state-funded? Everything state-funded is paid for by the general public, through taxes. That's part of what being a state is: an organization that forces people to pay taxes and directs them to various programs.
Are you claiming that the TV license fee isn't a tax? It's money that the state makes you pay so that it can fund something.
Furthermore the state isn't in charge of administering it anyway, it's a civil matter brought about by the BBC (or rather the company which is subcontracted to enforce licencing). The BBC has the authority to do this based on the Royal Charter that governs it, that doesn't make it "state funded" or a "state broadcaster".
There are plenty of taxes that only some people have to pay, for example, the fee to register a car.
> Furthermore the state isn't in charge of administering it anyway, it's a civil matter brought about by the BBC (or rather the company which is subcontracted to enforce licencing). The BBC has the authority to do this based on the Royal Charter that governs it
I'm trouble understanding how this doesn't make it part of the state? It is a 100% state-owned entity to which the state has granted (in a "Royal Charter") the ability to collect taxes... the distinction you're trying to draw seems meaningless to me.
Sure there may be two separate entities, one called "The UK Government" and one called "The BBC" where neither is part of the other, but structurally I don't see how you can claim that they're not both part of "the State" in general.
The enforcers work for neither the BBC nor the government but are subcontracted out.
> This website is produced by BBC Global News Ltd, a commercial company that is part of BBC Studios, owned by the BBC (and just the BBC). No money from the licence fee was used to create this website. The money we make from it is re-invested to help fund the BBC’s international journalism.
And if it is an ad, doesn't the FTC require it to be labelled as such?
There was a case where UK based influencer got into FTC trouble for the CSGO Lotto gambling site. He was promoting it without disclosing he had a stake in the site.
HN’s interest in this article is so “thing vs Japanese thing”
Edit: yep, appears Yakult has just kicked off an ad campaign putting Yakult Ladies front and center [0]
[0] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=u8HNY7Ta4dA
They don't eat yogurt or dairy in general.
They eat less dairy, but hardly none. I have heard people say that a scoop of ice cream or a glass of milk each day is not a problem, but more can be. Intolerance also seems to increase with age, so younger people can consume more dairy.
A 1975 study in Japan puts intolerance (unable to drink 200ml of milk comfortably) at 19% of the population. I would suspect that massive exposure over the past 50 years has lowered that percentage significantly.
Case in video: Chinese and milk tea
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=At_WjGosTNM
Most yogurt cultures reduces lactose content of the milk base during fermentation. Some cultures like the one Yakult uses supports increased lactose digestion in humans. At the same time lactose intolerance is not binary but a spectrum.
Lactose intolerance is not absolute.