

Is IKEA the World’s Largest Charity? - robg
http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/14675

======
byrneseyeview
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=...](http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=6919139)

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

~~~
pg
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?

~~~
wmf
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...](http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2008/04/28/will-the-feds-stand-
in-the-way-of-pa-semi.aspx) Why not just link to the original? Oh yeah,
pageviews.

cf. [http://publishing2.com/2008/05/04/the-declining-value-of-
red...](http://publishing2.com/2008/05/04/the-declining-value-of-redundant-
news-content-on-the-web/)

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

------
TrevorJ
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.

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radu_floricica
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.

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

