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.

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/Nestl%C3%A9 Its Jame Bond level villainy

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.

Nestlé

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.

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.

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.

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

Same for Hobby Lobby.

Everything Elon touches

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.

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).

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.

Unilever for polluting tonnes of plastic waste back in my home country, Indonesia. They can do better with single use plastic but they choose not to, pure greed and evil!

American Greetings. Their corporate headquarters was in Cleveland next door to a thriving drive in theater. It was good cheap entertainment for families in a city full of low income families. AG bought the drive in and demolished it, rebuilding a landscaped corporate park in its place. Ten years later they moved.

Microsoft, because I lived through the 80s and 90s.

Most companies become evil after they grow big. Some companies become big by being evil. Microsoft is the latter.

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.

Itaú, largest private bank in Brazil. Thanks to a 1995 law, all earnings from stock shares' dividends are tax exempt. They're always lobbying and pushing forward legislation to make the rich richer, to the point that they managed to found, together with other bankers, a political party, Novo, who fiercely defend libertarian economic values and sidestep individual liberties.

Second would be Microsoft. They took over the computer world in the 90s and didn't pay for their crimes. All they did was try and pretend nothing bad happened and that they totally wouldn't ever do anything similar again, pinkie promise. Nevermind the office2007 standard never fully working on alternative software, nevermind microsoft teams, pay no mind to them buying out github, nevermind their shit being inside pretty much every government around the world. They hold absurd amounts of power.

Third place goes to all non state owned petrol companies. Thank you for your continuous funding of bogus research against scientific climate facts and, more importantly, in funding assholes the world over to ensure climate change and global warming go full throttle. Fuck you with a hot exhaust pipe.

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

Any company Elon Musk is the owner of.

Nestle and EA.

DuPont, scourge of the Earth.

Incredible no one said it before considering the poisioned the entire world TWO times.

Google. They had such a noble cause and potential - to organize the world's information so that everyone could search it effectively. There was a point I thought of them as the epitome of academia, a huge force in the quest for the advancement of the world.

Now they've become the exact opposite.

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.

Microsoft because their support is trash. And corporations and still yapping about "let's go full cloud".

What a bunch of idiots. I still cant believe how useless the FTC has been at breaking up these monopolies.

I'll throw out a new one: Cricut vinyl cutters.

Machine works just dandy, software is, quite literally, the worst I've worked with in 30 years of IT. The company puts no money into the product, it's clearly only there to blast users with ads and give the machine basic, and hellish, functionality.

Here's the best part! I can't use my cutter unless I connect the software to the internet. It updates daily, yet ads nothing to functionality. Must be updating shit for sale.

Couple of years ago they made headline news by changing the terms so that users could only work on a couple of projects without paying for a subscription. A couple of projects could easily be part of one project. The howls of outrage got them to back off, damage done. I'll replace it with any other brand if that time comes.

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/

Tyson foods. They raise, torture, and kill 40 million animals per week. There's probably no other entity in the history of our planet that's responsible for more total suffering.

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.

Amazon. I'm pretty against workers being treated poorly, and they're frequently the worst without delving into actual slavery.

It's kind of two fold though, because trying to explain to people that letting shit like this fly is encouraging it to happen to you or me just cannot get through to some people. The longer this goes on, the more they push the envelope, the further it spreads. Like they don't know how to function without the single megacorp, and having to suffer a minor inconvenience is just too much.

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.

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.

Youtube, so much right wing content if your not logged in you will see some shorts, and also channels you used to love turned into greedy as people/.

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.

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

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

Microsoft.

And it's almost entirely because of excel.

We have a program that automatically outputs an excel document every month. I then have to go into this document and unfuck all the data that excel decided to turn into dates. There is no way to format the file before the program spits out the excel doc. There is now way to reverse the change and have it go back to the original data correctly.

I have spent countless hours on the phone with Microsoft support and digging around forums trying to make it stop breaking our data, but I have been told by multiple Microsoft support employees that it is impossible.

I did find out that there used to be a beta version of excel back in like 2017 where you could change a setting that forced your excel to leave all day alone until told to do something with it, but they never finished it and it was eventually removed as a setting.

WHY WOULD YOU TAKE AWAY THAT ABILITY MICROSOFT. WHY.

Nobody says Oracle??? It's hard to think of a company with more contempt for its customers.

Right now specifically? I have it out for Pearson. I bought a eTextbook from them that I need for a data structures class because of the bs online assignments. I only need it for a semester, had to pay $120 for a whole year.

The built in Java IDE? Completely busted. Returns the same failed to compile error for every single assignment. I even went and tested it in IntelliJ to make sure it works. It’s not my code. It’s a problem with Pearson’s IDE.

Then, I raise the issue to tech support, only, tech support is just an AI that goes through the usual “Clear Cookies, try a different web browser”. Finally it says it will “raise it higher” since none of those things worked. I’m gonna have to be higher after dealing with this BS. Anyways, right now they’re high up on my personal shit list since they took my money and can’t even deliver a functional product

I have to go by length of time I have hated the company and so the award goes to Electronic Arts. Or Evil Assholes, as I have called them since the 90's. They have destroyed so much of what I loved. 😭

Honestly just try to avoid American companies like the plague. Used to have a couple of Makerbot printers, and the support is some of the worst I've ever experienced. Switching to the European Prusa printers was an eye-opener as to what good quality printers and support actually is. Shout-out to Prusa!