Boycotts

Inspired by acquisition of power yesterday by a corrupt tyrant and his possie of xenophobic chronies, people should be reminded that the voting is not over because you can vote in the consumer market every day for the next 4 years. Everyone in the world can participate in this voting process (despite ALEC’s effort to reduce democracy).

ALEC¹ is the extreme right lobby and bill mill. This org writes bills for Congress conservatives to:

• reduce environmental protection and neuter the EPA
• fight immigration, push xenophobia
• proliferate and privatize prisons
• privatize education
• reduce public healthcare
• reduce tax regs (individual & corp)
• neuter the CFPB
• suppress voting (e.g. tightening id rules)
• weaken labor unions
• reduce gun control
• mask corporate tampering in politics

They have a close hand-in-hand relationship with the NRA and they finance republican war chests.

These are some of the well-known ALEC members, all of whome I boycott:

• AmEx (American Express)
• Anheuser Busch
• Boeing ← also rampant safety scandals
• Bose
• Century Link
• Charter Communications
• Chevron ← also caught financing the cloakroom project to hide meetings between republican politicians and corporations; also uses AI from Microsoft to find oil
• Farmers/Foremost
• FedEx ← also known to ship shark fins, hunting trophies, and slave dolphins
• Geico
• LMG (Liberty Mutual/Safeco)
• Marlboro (Philip Morris)
• Motorola ← also equips the Israeli Defense Forces
• Nationwide Insurance
• PNC bank
• Sony ← also caught using GPL code in their DRM code
• State Farm
• Texaco
• TimeWarner (Spectrum)
• UPS

Most of these ALEC members finance ALEC particularly for its anti-union lobby. But it’s a package deal. They finance thw whole of ALEC and all its activity.

There was also a “grab your wallet” project to track all Trump’s assets for boycotting Trump directly, but I don’t know if that’s being updated anymore. There is a link to a google docs spreadsheet (yikes!) but I think it’s a decade old by now.

¹American Legislative Exchange Council

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/880059

And I can’t even imagine it’s an intentional addition, it’s just become part of boiler plate legal documents here in the deep south.

The wiki on anti-BDS laws

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/8862635

“Only because of that official investigation did Canadians learn that ‘over 5 million nonconsenting Canadians’ were scanned into Cadillac Fairview's database”. Wow.

This Wired article is contradictory. The spokesperson says:

“an individual person cannot be identified using the technology in the machines. The technology acts as a motion sensor that detects faces, so the machine knows when to activate the purchasing interface”

I suppose it’s possible that a sloppy developer would name an executable Invenda.Vending.FacialRecognitionApp.exe which merely senses the presence of a face. But it seems like a baldfaced lie when you consider that:

“Invenda sales brochures that promised ‘the machines are capable of sending estimated ages and genders’ of every person who used the machines—without ever requesting consent.”

Boycott Mars

I already boycott Mars because they are a GMA member and they spent ~$500k lobbying against #GMO labeling -- and they have been blackballed for using child slave labor -- and Mars supports Russia. This is another good reason to #boycottMars.

Update

Apparently a LemmyBug replaced the article URL with a picture URL. The article is here:

https://www.wired.com/story/facial-recognition-vending-machine-error-investigation/

The vending machine pic is here:

https://infosec.pub/pictrs/image/2041d717-7cd7-4393-94f3-96aa87817aa7.jpeg

Cloudflare is the most harmful fiefdom amoung our technofeudalist walled gardens. Unlike Facebook, Cloudflare is largely inescapable because over 30% of the web has become restricted access under Cloudflare. Government agencies have started jailing public resources in Cloudflare. In some cases naively obligating people to use websites that they are blocked from, if they find themselves in a demographic that Cloudflare has shut out. People are being denied electronic access to medical information, voting information, credit histories, etc.

People who are not blocked are unwittingly sharing all their sensitive info with an (essentially invisible) tech giant in a country without privacy safeguards.

Even in the Lemmy network, some of us are fucked because the biggest instances (Lemmy World and [ironically named] sh.itjust works) make some content unreachable to those on the more liberated hosts. It’s a centralized walled garden in the middle of our otherwise decentralized network.

In addition to the linked article, there is also:

• Comparison of the human disempowerment severity of 3 walled gardens (Facebook, Google, and Cloudflare)
• Cloudflare has created the largest most rigidly exclusive walled garden in the world