 |
|
|
|||||
Bitwarden is one of the more likable tech companies. It offers a great password manager for free, charges modestly for its paid version, and has mostly stayed in its lane with its focus on security products. So it’s disappointing that it isn’t being more transparent about the first price hike in its 10-year history. Bitwarden’s Premium version now costs $20 per year, up from $10 per year previously. But instead of announcing the change directly, the company buried the news in a blog post about new features, such as more attachment storage and alerts about weak passwords. Meanwhile, Bitwarden isn’t rushing to let customers know about the increase. Theyll only get an email about the price hike (or, as Bitwarden calls it, “updated pricing”) 15 days before their next renewal. Those emails don’t spell out the actual yearly price, either. Instead, Bitwarden follows the SaaS industry scourge of listing a monthly price for an annual subscription, further obscuring the actual price. The company doesn’t offer a monthly subscription, yet it’s telling customers that they’ll pay “$1.65/month, billed annually.” (Existing customers are getting a onetime discount, at $15 for their next year.) The extra $10 per year doesn’t bother me much. I’ve been a happy paying Bitwarden customer for a couple of years now, and I find value in Premium features like two-factor authentication code storage, password hygiene checks, and Emergency Access, which will let my wife access my vault if something happens to me. Proton Pass Plus and 1Password are the only other paid password managers I’ve considered, and they’re both nearly twice the price, at $36 per year. But the way Bitwarden announced the price hike gives me pause. Like a lot of Bitwarden users, I switched over from LastPass in 2021. At the time, LastPass had started limiting free users to a single device type, which meant no more syncing passwords between a phone and a computer. Bitwarden had no such restrictions, and moving my passwords over was easier than I expected. As its founder, Kyle Spearrin, later told me, LastPass’s various blunders (including a major security breach in 2023) helped drive a lot of new business to Bitwarden over the years. The company has since grown from Spearrin alone to roughly 200 employees, with a business model that largely revolves around enterprise customers. When Bitwarden has raised moneyan undisclosed Series A in 2019, then a $100 million round in 2022it has been to satisfy business demands such as security certifications or to invest in workplace features like developer API key management. Individual users, meanwhile, have served as a funnel for the more lucrative enterprise business, with CEO Michael Crandell calling it a “virtuous circle” between the two. Those who get Bitwarden from their work get lifetime access to its Premium plan for families, even when they change jobs. Why, then, is Bitwarden sneakily announcing a price hike for individuals instead of owning it? Is the consumer side so fragile that Bitwarden can’t stand behind the value of a $20 annual subscription? Is the consumer-to-business funnel not working the way it used to? Is it a sign that Bitwarden has lost touch with the community that helped build it up in the first place? I don’t know, but I’m not alone in thinking this way. Here’s a sampling of comments from Bitwarden’s Reddit thread about the news: “This is disappointing not because of the price increase itself, but because of how it was handled and communicated.” “These premium ‘enhancements’ don’t really seem worth the extra $10 a year. Just be honest with us and say it’s for rising costs.” “Thing is, I don’t mind the increase (it was bound to happen sooner rather than later) so much as the way it’s being handled.” “A price increase had long been overdue, but still not so abruptly and not under the guise of adding marketing features nobody needs.” The company said via email that its vision of helping individuals and companies manage sensitive information has not changed. I hope this is just a marketing blunder, and not anything bigger to worry about.
Category:
E-Commerce
Eat this, not that. This one food will cure everything. That food is poison. Cut this food out. Try this diet. Dont eat at these times. Eat this food and youll lose weight. With societys obsession with food, health, and weight, statements like these are all over social media, gyms, and even healthcare offices. But do you need to follow rules like these to be healthy? Most often the answer is no, because health and nutrition is much more complex and nuanced than a simple list of what to eat and what to avoid. Despite this, rules about health and nutrition are so common because of diet culturea morality imposed by society that sees falling outside the arbitrary ideal of thinness as a personal failure. Diet culture and the people promoting it expect you to pursue or maintain thinness at all times. Diet culture norms have led to a multibillion-dollar industry promoting diets that each come with their own set of rules, with each claiming its the only way to be healthy or lose weight. When access to nutrition information is at an all-time high online, people are often left digging through conflicting information when trying to figure out what to eat or what a healthy diet look likes. As a registered dietitian specializing in eating disorders, the majority of my clients have been, and continue to be, harmed by diet culture. They wrestle with guilt and shame around food, and their health is often negatively affected by rigid rules about nutrition. Rather than improving health, research has shown that diet culture increases your risk of unhealthy behaviors, including yo-yo dieting, weight cycling, and eating disorders. If the solution to health isnt following the rules of diet culture, what is the answer? I believe an all-foods-fit approach to nutrition can offer an antidote. What is “all foods fit”? “All foods fit” may sound like eat whatever you want, whenever you want, but that is an oversimplification of this approach to nutrition. Rather, this model is based on the idea that all foods can fit into a healthy diet by balancing food and nutrition in a way that promotes health. It does this by enabling flexibility in your diet through listening to internal body cues to decide what and when to eat instead of following external rules. All foods fit allows for nuance to exist in health and nutrition. Diet culture is black and whitefoods are either good or bad. But nutrition and health are much more complex. For starters, many factors beyond diet affect health: exercise, sleep, stress, mental health, socioeconomic status, access to food, and healthcare, to name a few. Similarly, while general guidelines around nutrition are available, everyone has individual needs based on their preferences, health status, access to food, daily schedule, cooking skills, and more. The flexibility of all foods fit can help you make empowered food choices based on your health goals, tastes, exercise habits, and life circumstances. All foods fit in action A common pushback to the all-foods-fit approach is that you cant be healthy if you are eating unhealthy foods, and giving yourself permission to eat all foods means youll primarily eat the bad ones. However, research shows that removing the morality around food can actually lead to healthier food choices by decreasing stress related to food decisions. This reduces the risk of disordered eating, resulting in improved physical health. To see what an all-foods-fit approach might look like, imagine youre attending a social event where the food options are pizza, a veggie and dip tray, and cookies. According to the diet youre following, pizza, cookies, and dips are all bad foods to avoid. You grab some of the veggies to eat, but are still hungry. Youre starving toward the end of the event, but the only food left is cookies. You plan on eating only one, but feel so hungry and guilty that you end up eating a lot of cookies and feel out of control. You feel sick when you go home and promise yourself to do better tomorrow. But this binge-restrict cycle will continue. Now imagine attending the same social event, but you dont label foods as good or bad. From experience, you know you often feel hungry and unwell after eating pizza by itself. You also know that fiber, which can be found in vegetables, is helpful for gut health and can make you feel more satisfied after meals. So you balance your plate with a couple slices of pizza and a handful of veggies and dip. You feel pretty satisfied after that meal and dont feel the need to eat a cookie. Toward the end of the event, you grab a cookie because you enjoy the taste and eat most of it before feeling satisfied. You save the rest of the cookie for later. Rather than following strict rules and restrictions that can lead to cycles of guilt and shame, an all-foods-fit approach can lead to more sustainable, healthy habits where stress and disruptions to routine dont wreak havoc on your overall diet. How to get started with an all-foods-fit approach It can be incredibly hard to divest from diet culture and adopt an all-foods-fit approach to nutrition and health. Here are some tips to help you get started. Remove any moral labels on food. Instead of good or bad, or healthy or unhealthy, think about the name of the food or the nutritional components it has. For example, chicken is high in protein, broccoli is a source of fiber, and ice cream is a dessert. Neutral labels can help determine what food choices make sense for you in the moment and reduce any guilt or shame around food. Focus on your internal cueshunger, fullness, satisfaction, and how food makes you physically feel. Becoming attuned to your body can help you regulate food choices and determine what eating pattern makes you feel your best. Eat consistently. When you arent eating regularly, it can be hard to feel in control around food. Your hunger can become more intense, and your body less sensitive to fullness hormones. Implement an eating schedule that spaces food regularly throughout the day, filling any prolonged gaps between meals with a snack. Reintrduce foods you previously restricted. Start small with foods that feel less scary or with a small amount of a food youre anxious about. This could look like adding a piece of chocolate to lunch most days, or trying out a bagel for one breakfast. By intentionally adding these foods back into your diet, you can build trust with yourself that you wont feel out of control around these foods. Check in with yourself before eating. Ask yourself, how hungry am I? What sounds good right now? How long until I can eat again? And sometimes, more support is needed. This can be especially true if youre experiencing disordered eating habits or have an eating disorder. Consider working with a dietitian to help challenge nutrition misinformation and heal your relationship to food. Charlotte Carlson is the director of the Kendall Reagan Nutrition Center at Colorado State University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Category:
E-Commerce
There is a deeply unsettling paradox in how aging women are represented today. The louder the discourse on inclusion and diversity becomes, the fewer women we see who actually look like women over 45. Women who age normallywho live in their bodies, with their features, their lines, their visible agehave almost vanished from public view. When women in their 50s or 60s do gain visibility, it is often with a body and a face that belong to the strange category of Forever 35: perfectly smooth, ageless, suspended in time. This is not a trivial aesthetic issue, for it has major consequences for work, careers, and power. When women disappear from view as they age, they lose access to role models at exactly the moment when careers are supposed to stretch and evolve. If you are expected to work for 50 years but can only see the first 20 years of that life representedin leadership, in organizations, in the mediathen most of your working life remains unimaginable. There is no shared script for what professional authority, ambition, or success look like at 60. When women in their 50s or 60s are made visible, it is often on the condition that they look 10 or 20 years younger. As a result, women in their 60s are effectively invisiblepresent only if their age is erased. This narrows ambition, encourages self-censorship, and makes later-life leadership or reinvention seem abnormal rather than expected. It quietly redistributes power away from aging women by making long careers harder to imagine, claim, and inhabit. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/PhotoLVitaud-169.jpg","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/PhotoLVitaud-11.jpg","eyebrow":"","headline":"\u003Cstrong\u003ESubscribe to Laetitia@Work\u003C\/strong\u003E","dek":"Women power the worlds productivity its time we talked more about it. Explore a woman-centered take on work, from hidden discrimination to cultural myths about aging and care. Dont miss the next issue subscribe to Laetitia@Work.","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"Learn More","ctaUrl":"http:\/\/laetitiaatwork.substack.com","theme":{"bg":"#2b2d30","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#3b3f46","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91472264,"imageMobileId":91472265,"shareable":false,"slug":""}} Theres no point in blaming the women Let us be absolutely clear: This is not about condemning womens individual choices. Gray hair or dyed hair. Injections or not. Surgery or not. Filters or not. To suggest that women are responsible for their own invisibility because they give in to beauty standards would be both unjust and profoundly naive. We do what we can with the constraints and possibilities we have. We do what we can with the contradictory injunctions we receive. The problem is not that women try to look younger. Thats perfectly understandable. The problem is that older women are either not there or only tolerated if they do not look old. As a result, the normal faces of aging womento borrow the central idea of a brilliant newsletter by author Caroline Criado Perezhave almost disappeared from our visual landscape. This disappearance is anything but accidental.It reflects the demographic structure of power in which men are allowed to age as they move up the ladder, while women in the workspace are expected to remain in their placesubmissive, at the bottom of the hierarchy, there to please the eye, whatever their job and position. A double disappearance: organizations and media Sociologists have long documented the progressive invisibilization of women in U.S. organizations, and the numbers tell a familiar story. In Fortune 500 companies, women now make up roughly 30% of executive leadership roles, but this progress is uneven and heavily skewed toward younger cohorts. Women over 50and especially over 60are dramatically underrepresented at the highest levels of visible power, despite decades of accumulated experience. This organizational invisibility mirrors what happens in the media. Research by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media consistently shows that women are both underrepresented and age-erased on both the big and small screen. Women over 50 account for a small fraction of speaking roles, even though they represent more than a third of the U.S. adult population. As women age, they quite literally vanish from movies, television, and advertising. And when they are allowed to reappear, it is often on the condition that their age be visually erased. Across film, TV, and ads, female bodies are toleratedeven in leadership or expert rolesonly if they are filtered, smoothed, lifted, and polished. We want women leaders, but not their wrinkles of concentration nor the visible marks of 25 years of work. When aging becomes a defect to be corrected Criado Perez describes how she started collecting images of actresses whose faces have not been artificially rejuvenatedEmma Thompson, Keira Knightley, Kate Winsletbecause encountering a female face over 35 that looks real has become a rare event. Seeing such faces should be familiar and banal. On-screen, its exceptional. Thus, we have lost our collective visual memory of what women in their 40s, 50s, or 60s actually look like. Perfectly normal featureslines of expression, changes in skin texture, saggingare now perceived as signs of neglect and personal failure. The traits of a normal age have been reframed as flaws. New generative AI tools are making this visual amnesia even worse. Ask an image generator to show you a 50-year-old woman, and you will usually get either a smoothed, poreless face that could be 35or a woman who looks closer to 70. The technology merely reproduces and amplifies the biases of the image databases it is trained on. AI does not show us women of 50; it shows us what the internet imagines they should look like. It is just as pervasive in corporate stock photography, in recruitment materials, and in the visual representations of the business world more broadly. The world of work, as it is depicted today, is populated by smooth, vaguely thirtysomething faces, where age is either erased or reduced to a stereotype. Women in their 50s or 60s are largely absentexcept when they are used to illustrate end-of-career narratives, mentorship, or decline. The enduring double standard of aging This brings us back to a concept articulated more than 50 years ago by Susan Sontag: the double standard of aging. Male aging is associated with added valueauthority, gravitas, experience, powerwhile female aging is framed as decline. Nothing fundamental has changed. After 45, women are expected either to fade into the background or to invest enormous energy into looking younger, but never to sho visible signs of aging without consequence. Many describe a feeling of literal disappearance, what French journalist Sophie Dancourt has memorably called the convent syndrome: an unspoken injunction to withdraw from public life once youth, fertility, and sexualized visibility are presumed to be over. This logic is brutally familiar in the entertainment industry, where womens careers are still shaped by narrow and unforgiving norms of desirability. Aging men are cast as mentors, leaders, or lovers; aging women are quietly written out, unless they conform to increasingly unrealistic beauty standards. The result is not only professional marginalization, but also a cultural message that equates womens worth with youthand treats aging as a problem to be managed rather than a reality to be lived. That is precisely what makes the sketch Last Fuckable Day, from Inside Amy Schumer, so powerful. Schumer unexpectedly runs into her show-business heroesTina Fey, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Patricia Arquettewho are celebrating a darkly comic milestone: the age at which women are deemed no longer desirable or castable. Made 10 years ago, the sketch does not feel dated at all. It turns ageist erasure into a sharp piece of feminist satireone that feels even more relevant today than when it first aired. Why this matters so much at work The absence of older female role models is extremely costly. First, it deprives younger women of projection. How can you imagine a long, evolving career when most, if not all, visible success stories stop at 40? In a world where working lives are getting longer, this lack of role models is deeply destabilizing.Second, it reinforces discrimination. When women over 45 are rarely seen in leadership, those who succeed are perceived as exceptions rather than as the norm. This fuels stereotypes about atypical careers and legitimizes bad decisions in hiring, promotion, and training. Third, it creates collective anxiety around aging. When the only acceptable image of professional success is youth, aging becomes something to fear. This anxiety affects all womennot just those who are already older.Finally, organizations lose out. Women over 45 represent a massive pool of experience, skills, and leadership potential. Treating them as obsolete is economically irrational. Its about diversity Calling for more older female role models does not mean prescribing how women should age. There should be no new rulewhether to go gray or not, to reject aesthetic medicine or embrace it. The aim is not to replace one norm with another, but to leave room for choice. What we desperately need is more diversity of the ways of aging. Wrinkled faces and smooth ones. Gray hair and dyed hair. Bodies that show time in different ways. Making this diversity visible expands what is socially imaginable. Every woman who chooseswhen she can, when she wantsto show her real, aging face widens the spectrum of the visible. She sends a simple but powerful message: I am here. I am aging in my own way. And I matter. In doing so, she not only challenges stereotypes todayshe also helps shape the images, datasets, and representations that will train the technologies and imaginations of tomorrow. Older female role models at work are not a niche demand. They are a condition for fairer careers, healthier organizations, and a society that can finally accept womens lives in their full lengthnot just in their youth. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/PhotoLVitaud-169.jpg","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/PhotoLVitaud-11.jpg","eyebrow":"","headline":"\u003Cstrong\u003ESubscribe to Laetitia@Work\u003C\/strong\u003E","dek":"Women power the worlds productivity its time we talked more about it. Explore a woman-centered take on work, from hidden discrimination to cultural myths about aging and care. Dont miss the next issue subscribe to Laetitia@Work.","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"Learn More","ctaUrl":"http:\/\/laetitiaatwork.substack.com","theme":{"bg":"#2b2d30","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#3b3f46","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91472264,"imageMobileId":91472265,"shareable":false,"slug":""}}
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||