Hello everybody,
What is the company and corporation that is the object of your hate? What did/do they do to get that spot for you?
Mine is Facebook/Meta for their egregious data collection policies, psychological manipulation of its users, and more recently, them not seeding content.
Thanks in advance for your time! Have a good one!
I prefer to focus on things I like. I mean, I hate Facebook too. I have an account because I admin my work page but I don’t use it personally. But what I like are hikes and campfires and driving on terrible almost impassible dirt and rock roads/trails in the mountains.
Turbo tax. Never has there been a more useless organization propped up only by an even more useless law which they, themselves, lobbied to have put in place.
As a hard rule, it’s Nestle, but I fucking despise Elon Musk so much that I refuse to use anything he’s involved with.
Hmmmm tough call.
Whichever pharmaceutical company(s) is hiking the price on insulin. The patent was fucking free, the product costs pennies to produce and distribute. No, 99.97% of the cost cannot be “R&D” for an old, mass produced drug.
Maybe also my old employer, which got laws passed to make them the only possible workers claim comp system in the state, then spun up a side business consulting for companies on how to use coding errors in medical billing to deny healthcare and compensation for people injured in their negligent and hazardous workplaces.
I mean, that is a whole level of evil I couldn’t stoop to on my worst day.
Nestle - check out some of why https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestlé Its Jame Bond level villainy
Its Jame Bond level villainy
Quantum of Solace is about monopolizing a freshwater supply.
There are only two points for me (baby formula, child labor) :o.
Yandex.
In Russia, Yandex is, like, everywhere, and it is a massive evil.
- Search, maps, mail, browser, cloud, and everything else Google offers? Check.
- Music, films? Uh-huh.
- Taxi and food delivery? Gotcha.
- Tickets to anything from a bus or a train to a concert venue? Yes.
- Four marketplaces and one freelance platform? All Yandex.
- Tax processing? Yes!
- Home assistant? Yep.
It’s increasingly hard to avoid, and it is absolutely everywhere. Its use can be mandated by your workplace and in various state institutions, and for the rest, it has acquired so much of everything that going Yandex-free in Russia is one step away from going Amish. It’s way way worse and more incidious than Google could ever hope for.
Everything Elon touches
Apple. But not because of the tech. But because they popularized a very disturbing corporate trend that I feel is a direct contributor to the wealth gap and the current state of affairs vis a vis tech oligarchies.
I touched on it in another thread, and I’ll expand on it here, but in short, Apple was one of the first companies to stop defining their profit margin by real world economic factors like what the market can conceivably bear, and instead by marketing…ie. How high your profit margin can go is determined by how much your advertising can convince people to spend.
Even back when Reagonimics first came around in the 80s, most corporations were still operating with a traditional profit margin calculation. You take the cost of your product to make (that includes labour, research and development, manufacturing, etc…) You determine your growth projection for the year, allowing you to cover all your expenses and reinvest in your company to achieve a modicum of growth and provide a rise to the share price, and you set the products selling price accordingly. (That profit margin traditionally would come to anywhere from 30-50 percent depending on the product.
One of the factors that you look at as a company is what can the market bear? You try to ride a profit balance between what you need to make to continue growth and what your targeting customer base can afford. With the reasonable thinking being that if you over-price, then your customers will just go to the competition.
What Apple figured out is that with enough money invested in advertising and marketing, a corporation can completely override that affordability and just keep upping their profit margin as much as they want so long as they can convince people that it’s worth it. That’s how you end up with a trillion dollar company that not only has the profits to grow their business, but also to start producing fucking television shows with money they found in their sofa.
With enough advertising, affordability no longer matters. Humans will happily skip a mortgage payment, or a trip to grocery store, to contribute to your inflated profit margin if you can convince them that it’s worth it.
How they do that is a combination of traditional advertising and in-store shenanigans. STORY TIME:
When I was working at Staples, we started off selling the ipod. We weren’t allowed to sell the iPad at first, and when we were finally given permission to, it came with conditions.
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We were to construct a separate section for them to keep them segregated from the other tablets, with very noticeable and expensive signage.
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We are not allowed to refer to them as “tablets”. Only as “iPads”.
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We were to begin every tech conversation with “Have you seen our iPads”.
Similar rules came out when we decided we wanted to sell Macbooks. Similar rules.
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Long story short, Apple figured out that if you spend more money in advertising (both traditional and non traditional like in-store display merchandising) than you do on the product itself, people will shoot themselves in the foot to give you their money, whether or not they can afford it. Whether or not they have to skip this months mortgage payment. Whether or not they have food in their fridge. . It doesn’t matter how good Apple products are. What matters is from an Ethics standpoint, Apple said “fuck what the market can handle. If people are stupid enough to pay us a 300% profit margin while they’re on food stamps…that’s their fault. we’re just doing business”
A number of companies have now followed that lead since then, leading to the sharp sharp (disastrous) divide between the billionaire class and the rest of us
And yes, in a lot of ways, it’s just capitalism and personal responsibility. But without that traditional profit margin calculation in place; with the sky’s the limit approach that Apple introduced, the class war is just going to get more and more pronounced.
Apple was my first thought as well. My real answer is Microsoft because their shot pisses me off on a daily basis. But Apple is certainly a contender for being the instigator of a ton of bullshit practices.
Thanks for this really thorough breakdown. It all really does seem to stem from the core idea that they view their clientele as idiot consumer-cattle rather than human users.
Not only do they do that with prices, like you said, the rest of their user experience practices have had devastating ripple effects on society as well.
I was so excited for the idea of “pocket computers”, but the i-garbage phenomenon I think is what super-accelerated our current tech economy of the 6-month-cycle disposable privacy nightmares designed primarily for “content consumption.”
That of course, evolved from their “You’re not allowed to touch it, you’re too stupid.” appliance-like ethos from the very beginning. Special screws, special dongles, special ports, special cables, control, control, control.
Then that got paired with forcing everyone to need an “app” for everything from shopping to government assistance, and here we are, barely a generation later, and nobody has any idea how a computer works anymore.
Nobody on either side of “Millennials” seem to understand how files and folders work, or what the Internet actually is, or how email works, and I blame Apple’s smoke and mirrors for the majority of it, because after their profit margins could be whatever they wanted, like you said, nobody wanted to innovate anymore.
They all had to be Apple.
And since Apple’s profits relied on ignorant and dependent users, everybody’s profits suddenly did.
Apple said "fuck what the market can handle. If people are stupid enough to pay us a 300% profit margin while they’re on food stamps…that’s their fault.
And on this point, it reminds me when I worked at the public library. A father asked my opinion on getting a computer for his young school age daughter. Dude was on a budget, and kids break things.
I suggested that ~$200 could get him a used ThinkPad on eBay. They can handle spills, sometimes drops, last a long time, and so forth. Incredible deal (the market has since seemed to wise up to. ☹️ )
Dude comes back the next week asking how to set up a freaking $2000+ MacBook. Daughter’s like 6 or something.
What the heck, my dude. 95% of Apple’s R&D must go into marketing and mind control.
TL;DR:
Anyway…yeah, It grates on me when people talk about modern computing like keyboards and mice and folder structures are “obsolete” and “only for technical people” because “everyone’s on tablets and phones now” as if that’s a linear progression of technology and we’re just getting old.
It’s a progression of technology heavily manipulated by marketing and propaganda forced as “The Future™” because friggin Apple said so, and everyone else (including Microsoft) feels like they have to follow it to stay relevant to the slobbering ignorant consumer-being customer-base Apple has bred…
If only they cared about building better products rather than untraining decades of computer education so they could play Hungry Hungry Hippos with mind-slaves.
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Chick Fil A. Fuck you and your anti-gay, fake Christian bullshit.
Same for Hobby Lobby.
fake Christian bullshit.
With utmost sincerity, God bless you for making this distinction. People who actually paid attention to Jesus’ words have got your back, friend. ❤️
The bad guys win when they wear the mask of belief and turn us against each other.
Hobby Lobby also has the world’s dumbest inventory system. That is: they don’t have one. They just ring up whatever price is on the product.
It must be a fucking nightmare keeping the place stocked.
Tesla by a country mile.
Agreed on Meta. I quit Facebook years ago and refused to touch anything owned by them.
Everything new I hear about them bothers me, because I know it will eventually affect all of us.
Just picking an example: I really hate their “loss leader” approach to flooding the world with cheap VR headsets, which bullies everyone else out of the market because they don’t have a data-siphoning proprietary ecosystem to make convenient profit from.
VR was getting really exciting until Facebook started screwing with it.
Nestlé
Comcast/Xfinity they only move into markets where they have little competition and don’t properly service folks at the “end of the road” they will give you the run around for years until you bring up signal quality then they cancel your account saying they don’t service your are.
All of them. They end up the same, by design.
Does gov count as a corporation one can hate?
