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!
Apple.
There are worse companies, Google, Facebook, all oil companies, and Nestle, to name a few.
But with the exception of the original iPod with that sweet wheel interface, there’s never been a single thing from Apple that looked appealing to me.
Edit: Oh and Amazon
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.
Your list is great. You need to add the big banks. Privatized profits, socialized losses. Cannot believe congress would bail out the too big to fail and not break them up and prosecute the executives. They need their own Luigis.
Excellent list
Thanks! I, and the only time I wouldn’t be ashamed to admit this, was inspired by Nixon. Its odd though, all of my “enemies” are corporations and not people.
Nobody says Oracle??? It’s hard to think of a company with more contempt for its customers.
Oracle is not really a company. It is the CIA.
TIL, and yet “Of-freaking- course it is” right?? Agh.
Likely also the reason why they wanted TikTok off Google and hosted on Oracle.
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.
Imagine the progress the computer industry could have made without Microsoft killing any every bit of competition. Although sometimes I wonder if Linux wouldn’t have taken off as a reaction.
A cynic might say that we’d then just have a slightly more powerful and even less innovative IBM.
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.
Don’t forget frequently ripping off ideas from small companies that (used to) sell on amazon. A lot of amazon basics is just stuff they ripped off from other people.
Oh I’m sure they’ve got ten thousand shitty business practices we could spend all day criticizing.
British Petroleum and Dutch Royal Shell. BA&E while I’m at it. Military industrial burks.
Also, obligatory Nestlé, Wallmart, Tesco, and Meta.
My special one though is HSBC, because of all the conspiracy Charlie meme inducing reasons.
I can’t think of one I like nowadays.
Nestle - check out some of why https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestlé Its Jame Bond level villainy
There are only two points for me (baby formula, child labor) :o.
Its Jame Bond level villainy
Quantum of Solace is about monopolizing a freshwater supply.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mine has to be Microsoft too because of aggressive bribing they did/do to destroy the chances of many countries and schools using Linux, and how they fragmented the unix ecosystem. Linux has always been a better choice and as soon as it was chosen, Microsoft would give significant bribes to the decision maker stupid enough to not realize that the entire organization is now hostage to pay for support for the end of their life as the os is too much of a garbage to maintain sometimes without secret insider knowledge.
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Nestle and EA.
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.
Thank you, I’ve been wondering if I might want one but now I definitely don’t.
I got a silhouette because of how horrific cricut software is.
Silhouette was my choice if the Cricut craps out. Thanks for the word of mouth!
Get a vinyl cutter from sign warehouse and use Adobe illustrator, pirate CS6 if you have to, it doesnt require a subscription. You’ll be MUCH happier, I did commercial vinyl for years, it’s night and day. Cricut is expensive as fuck compared, and broken as fuck.
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.
There is definitely a way to automate that process. Even if you can’t somehow sanitize the input before Excel reads it as dates, unfucking the data can definitely be reduced to a single button-push. I’ve based my entire career on my ability to do that.
I have had an untold number of coders and Microsoft experts look at this problem. There is nothing that can be done.
Program 1 cannot be changed as the job requires it and it will only automatically spit out into excel. Excel immediately breaks several numbers across the spreadsheet by turning them into dates. Nobody at Microsoft can get the sheets to revert back into the original data correctly. Nothing can be done to preemptively format excel not to fuck the dates.
What do you mean “spit out”? Is it being put into a new open workbook, an existing open workbook, or is it being saved as a file?
And I don’t mean to suggest I know better than the person actually dealing with the situation (I hate when people do that), but if you can do it manually, it can be automated.
The program generates a report for us once a month. It can be generated as an excel file or as another file type which we cannot use. When it generates the excel file it breaks a bunch of numbers that are used often and all throughout our data as excel thinks they are dates. When we try and reverse any of those numbers in all the many ways people have recommended the data never goes back all correctly. So I have to manually replace the data cell by cell afterwards.
We are unable to preemptively format any settings in excel to prevent this from happening.
There once was a beta version of excel that had the exact feature we need (excel leaves all data untouched unless told otherwise), but for some godforsaken reason Microsoft got rid of that setting.
It can be generated as an excel file or as another file type which we cannot use.
This is probably a dumb question, and there’s likely a very good reason why this can’t be done, but can you not generate an Excel file from one of the other formats yourself? E.g. have the program output a CSV and write a python script that parses it into an excel file. That way you might have more control over the generated Excel and maybe be able to do it automatically.
Yep, export to CSV, format as desired, save in Excel format?
Might be annoying to format it but I would guess it is easier than having to change data?He can also use an alternative to excel like OpenOffice or libreoffice, I don’t know why would they would use excel when it causes issues.
Maybe the output to managers needs to be Excel for some reason, e.g. there’s some processing afterwards with another closed tool.
Must be the export into an Excel file that breaks it. By that point, an alternative reader won’t help.
I suggest making a script to fix it, rather than fix it manually. It is very easy to use, so basically program then export to excel then run officescript. Also don’t tell anyone you made a script, tell them you are doing it manually.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/scripts/overview/excel
The data is different every month. It’s not consistent month to month so it can’t be automated in any way.
But you use the same column correct? and the data that is messed up is the same type? Unless the data that is messed up is very hard to detect using a script, it should be possible.
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.
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.
Lost in the Supermarket https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZw23sWlyG0
Great song, I forgot about it so thanks for reminding me it existed
No problem. One of my favorites.
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 :/
Die we all will, so might as well try living… well, fuck that for now, I know high-motivational-speaches do not work when you don’t see much value in living. You managed to get this far, and this is not a small feat, so please take my appreciation I would never be able to train anyone in anything, damn, just not the type of a person. What do you train people to do?
Thanks. I train them to work at Amazon delivery stations, doing the individual tasks they may be assigned to do. The tasks seem intimidating but they’re very very easy lol just physically demanding
Heh. My back started hurting when I thought of moving those weights around. I am no psychiatrist, but hey, now you have one more guy who wants you to live as long as the body can carry you
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. 😭
I remember reading with dread any time EA acquired one of my favourite studios.
RIP
- Westwood
- Bullfrog
- Maxis
- Codemasters
- Bioware
RIP NFL 2K. I never forgot you and I’ll never forgive.
For me it ubisoft. They’ve made some of my favorite series, then completely ruined them.
One day my rocksmith 2014 isn’t going to work because they shut down the servers, and the over a thousand dollars I’ve spent on guitars, songs, cables, and pedals are going to be, well, not useless, but pretty close to it.
