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!
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.
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.
Also, it pollutes our waters with plastic and poison everyone (including turtles, even if they are burning!)
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.
…
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.
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Chick Fil A. Fuck you and your anti-gay, fake Christian bullshit.
Same for Hobby Lobby.
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.
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. ❤️
I’m so incensed at these corporations spouting “Christian values” while they treat their fellow humans like disposable trash. More Christians need to be calling out this bullshit instead of siding with it.
The bad guys win when they wear the mask of belief and turn us against each other, and we say nothing.
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.
A few off of the top of my list by name: Nestle, BP, American Airlines, Comcast, Facebook, Twitter, Scientology, BofA, GM, Perdue Pharma, Monteseno, VW, Pinkertons (Securitas), Hobby Lobby, Chick-fil-A.
Generally what should be common carrier, or for the people, but are normally for profit: ISPs, power co’s, water co’s, Health Insurance, Property Insurance for non-corporate entities.
Any “faith based” organization with a tax exempt status.
Just about every store that sells groceries in person. It was traumatic being a kid trapped in those places for at least 10 hours on both Saturday and Sunday and having to wait until Monday night to sleep. I absolutely love amazon subscribe & save and just never running out of necessities or needing to do any chores on my work days. Adulthood is so much better than glorified prison.
I’m not understanding. You were trapped in grocery stores all weekend as a child, and you weren’t allowed to sleep? How exactly does that work?
The only things a family’s mother cared about was grocery shopping and watching people die on TV. Anything that got in the way of that was a problem.
One of her daughters can drive, and every Saturday and Sunday, she’d drive the whole family to Stop & Shop, Walmart, Target, Costco, another Costco, another Target, an international market, another international market, a Chinese market, an Indian market, Aldi, Lidl, BJ’s Wholesale, and Sam’s Club. These grueling journeys would last 15 hours.
Bringing in the groceries and trying to fill an already overfilled refrigerator with duct tape from last week’s journey took several hours. On Sundays we had to take out trash, which included old meat and produce that family’s mother over-overbought for herself and let rot while blaming the same people she vilified for eating some of. Taking out trash was always a five hour slog, but on Sunday it was a longer slog.
By the time the trash is out and that family’s mother’s groceries are in the fridge and freezer, everyone would need to rush to get ready to go to school or work. I always had to skip a shower on Mondays as me washing myself was seen as a waste of resources and time by everyone in that family as I don’t count as a real human being.
And yes, Monday NIGHT. Not afternoon, night. There were dogs that family’s mother brought home and neglected and skimped out on everything for so she could buy more groceries and watch more rich people pretend to die. We would need to walk them, not in the afternoon, but at night, and we were not allowed to sleep before walking them. She found it funny and would come up with some other excuse for why we needed to wait to sleep.
Same thing happened on Wednesdays but without the grocery shopping. Can’t sleep before walking the dogs or taking out the trash, the latter being started at 1AM and taken out at 6AM.
Childhood is prison. Literally it’s being raised to be clean and healthy, then being bullied and humiliated for doing the right things, then being punished and reprimanded for not doing the thing you were literally bullied and humiliated for doing. Fuck childhood.
I should add that my life was sitting on a short bus for 2 hours, then sitting in the same desk for 7 hours straight, then sitting on the short bus for 2.5 hours to go isolate myself from my original bullies and their mother.
Fucking hell. How are you hanging in there now?
Barely. However I got promoted at work and I train people now so I have that going for me. Taking my life feels like a waste since I did so much to save myself, but I still regret not dying since I now need to live permanently stunted :/
Lemmy: What’s your opinion.
OP: Right here.
Lemmy: FUCK YOU!
I’ve noticed lemmy hates home automation and online shopping, and would rather drive to a store to buy groceries and bring them home to show off how Not Lazy they are. I expected it.
I really cannot enter these stores for more than 10 minutes without feeling like I’m going to vomit or have a panic attack. I only order online pickup or only shop for one item if I ever go in those places, and I can never go to a costco or bj’s ever again without dredging up memories of being trapped in those places and also abused as a kid in a stupid institution masquerading as a school.
Working at a warehouse for 12 hours is no problem since I get a break every 2.5 hours where I can go outside, I get paid overtime, and I’m also not forced to wear a mountain climber jacket in a heated building the whole time while hungry and dehydrated. Oh right and I get to sit every 2.5 hours instead of standing and walking the whole time and I can leave early if I’m feeling sick, have other things I need to deal with, or because I feel like it.
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
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.
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
Apple.
They take advantage of their uncharacteristically loyal customer base unapologetically.
They are no longer innovative they haven’t come out with a new product at least one thats good in decades and the only thing keeping them afloat is the iPhone. Their computers are overpriced trash and aside for those two products they have literally nothing else to offer. Apple TV has no purpose and is completely pointless and the VR headset they make has almost no applications that are useful.
Albeit they make a really good USB c to USB c cable that being said it’s ridiculously overpriced.
I’m not an apple fanboy- in fact I own Android and mostly use windows and Linux. However,
Apple single-handedly pushed the computer market away from x86 processors. Face ID changed the way people use their devices.
Their computers, while no longer use upgradable, still last much longer and have higher overall quality than their competition.
The OS pushes you toward using iCloud, but doesn’t mandate it or advertise everywhere like windows 11.
The HomePod introduced room-equalizing to the masses and sounds way better than it should for the size.
The integration between all their products continues to get better. Using an iPad as a second monitor, local processing rather than cloud, actual E2E encryption, while locked inside their bubble, was developed and released 10 years before it became in vogue.
The list goes on
Yea, no new devices but I think they are pushing tech forward still. Hard to say they aren’t innovating.
I get where you’re coming from, but most of these points don’t actually prove Apple is pushing tech forward in a meaningful way.
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Apple moving away from x86. Sure, switching to ARM-based chips is impressive, but it’s not innovation; it’s adaptation. ARM processors were already gaining traction, and Apple just executed well. They didn’t invent ARM chips, they just used their massive resources to optimize for their closed ecosystem.
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Face ID changed device usage. Did it, though? Biometric authentication wasn’t new when Face ID launched, and plenty of people still prefer fingerprint sensors for speed and convenience. Apple also took years to implement under-display Touch ID, something others had already done.
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Longevity of Apple computers. Their hardware is solid, but at what cost? Non-upgradable, non-repairable, and absurdly expensive. A MacBook lasting longer is irrelevant when a PC can be upgraded for half the cost over the same period. Apple deliberately makes self-repairs difficult, which contradicts the claim of “higher quality.”
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Integration between devices. It’s good, but only if you’re 100% in the Apple ecosystem. Outside of it, their products lose functionality. “Local processing” and “E2E encryption” aren’t Apple innovations—they just market them better. Google and others had secure encryption and local AI processing long before Apple made it a selling point.
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No new devices but still “pushing tech forward”. You can’t claim innovation while admitting they haven’t released new groundbreaking products. Apple refines, but they rarely disrupt anymore. The Vision Pro is a niche luxury toy, not an industry-changing device.
Apple’s business model is to extract as much money as possible from its captive audience while making sure everything outside their walled garden is inconvenient. That’s not innovation thats control.
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Agreed on Meta. I quit Facebook years ago and refused to touch anything owned by them.
Aside from the usual suspects, I really hate Glassdoor.
Their entire business model is to hide crucially useful information unless you give away all, and I mean all, of your data. They are super aggressive in forcing an account with all of your personal information to see salary data. None of the usual ways to fix this work. And recently, they had a massive data breach because they can’t secure the data they stole from their users. I wish this rent seeking company would DIAF.
Tesla by a country mile.
