Ask Lemmy

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.

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.

• We were to construct a separate section for them to keep them segregated from the other tablets, with very noticeable and expensive signage.

• We are not allowed to refer to them as "tablets". Only as "iPads".

• 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.

.............

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.

Nestle - check out some of why https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestl%C3%A9 Its Jame Bond level villainy

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.

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.

Chick Fil A. Fuck you and your anti-gay, fake Christian bullshit.

Same for Hobby Lobby.

Everything Elon touches

Agreed on Meta. I quit Facebook years ago and refused to touch anything owned by them.

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.

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.

All of them. They end up the same, by design.

Tesla by a country mile.

That's a really hard question. I immediately wanna jump out and yell NVIDIA, Apple, Meta, etc. because of their incredibly shitty anti-consumer and predatory practices but then I'm reminded seemingly "good" companies are just as bad if not worse, like Valve making billions by turning children into gambling addicts. So, I guess all of them?

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.

Does gov count as a corporation one can hate?

Raytheon

Nestle. Other big corporations may steal my data and manipulate their users, but nestle deprives people of the basic right of being able to drink.

Hard to top Meta right now. Propaganda enables all the other bullshit from the likes of Nestle, fossil fuel companies, certain car makers, surveillance companies etc., and people don't even get that Facebook and Instagram are even an issue beyond "social media is inherently bad"-sentiments (in contrast to x/twitter, which saw a large exodus recently).

Though if I'm honest, it's not just social media - even "respectable" print and tv publications have been pushing the "brown people are violent criminals"-narrative, which is pretty much entirely a fabrication according to statistics (at least here in Germany).

I'm really starting to dislike Google recently. The amount of things that simply don't work after their Gemini integration has me fuming. I have a pixel tablet I mainly use as a smart hub, Me: "Hey Google, what's the weather like today", Assistant: "I don't know". What do you mean you don't know? That's the one question you ever get asked.

Google switches an old system for something new, releases it half-baked, and never parodies the features.

Any company Elon Musk is the owner of.

Uline, owned by the Unihleins. They contribute millions of dollars to the most extreme republicans in Illinois and other states. They funded Bruce Rauner and Daren Bailey. They were behind fake newspapers being mailed and fearmongering cashless bail.

They are also behind the scheme to have a downstate judge try to hold the governor in contempt over mask mandates.

They also help run "Illinois policy institute"

https://www.wifr.com/2020/08/07/clay-co-judge-orders-gov-pritzker-to-appear-in-court-after-rep-darren-bailey-seeks-contempt-charge/

https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/publisher-cancels-contract-over-controversial-fake-illinois-newspapers/2948599/

Comcast/Xfinity. Installed home security equipment I told them wouldn't work, then once it turned out it didn't, they charged me $1000+ for the equipment that they took back, but somehow misplaced. Two years of calls later, they finally ground me down. It's the one company I refuse to call for my elderly mother when she has trouble with them.

BofA is a close second. Emptied out my little kid's saving account with fees (even though they said it was a free account when we opened it, so we didn't bother checking the statements). Hit us up for multiple overdraft fees, then offered to return only three months' worth of just the fees.

They can all burn in hell.

Nestle. Their future is the dystopian part of evil that we see in movies.

Oh, I have my favorites.

Nestle is up in the list, as is Monsanto.

For years I hated Microsoft with a passion for all the scummy things they did. They killed a lot of good companies and products by shady business practices rather than competing with quality software.

Then there's Nvidia. These bastards will just not play ball with open source, so every gamer kid that somehow decides to try Linux and fails thanks to their shitty drivers end up in reddit screaming "Linux sucks". AMD and Intel are fine to open source their drivers or at least publish the specs so others may do it for them. I suspect the true reason is that there's a lot of benchmark rigging code inside Nvidia's drivers.

Walmart. They're one of the funders of the heritage foundation with Project 2025, they're one of the biggest killers of unions and any worker rights in the US. Walmart remains at the top of the most money by revenue with only Amazon nipping at its heels before Chinese government backed Corps and Saudi Aramco .

It's ran like a cult, crushes any competition in an area and holds entire towns hostage with its buying power. I know I'm discussing things like Amazon and the like, but I grew up in its home town and wish for the company to just burn.

Reddit, ruined forums, I loved checking forums, I wish federation became a thing back then and all the forums interconnected instead of moving or dying due to reddit communities. It bugs me how they went from being a useful hub for the internet, a link aggregator, guide to the web with wiki/comments to a walled garden.

Starbucks. They moved into my neighborhood and put a bunch of small business owners (cafes) out of business including one owned by a very good friend.

Nestle. obvs