What is your personal most hated company or corporation?
2 years ago by ScientifficDoggo to c/asklemmy
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!
Fuck Nestle is always obligatory.
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).
facebook/meta deliberately sows misinformation with the help with russia to drive up revenue sources , turns out conservatives are very easy pickings for advertisements. Ive seen youtber run to Facebooks, because they whining how a sub was making them look bad.
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.
Lemmy seems to have a very strong voice for pushing people towards Linux.... But I don't hear nearly enough about ditching Google and other mega-corps. I started Degoogling long ago and have been really happy with the result. There are lots of alternatives and there's no reason to stick with Google the way people do. Your description of half-baked shitty products is their hallmark. Their bloody search doesn't even work well anymore and that's what the whole business got launched on.
Lemmy please strongly considering De-googling. It's quite easy for almost all services.
I just started trying to de-google and I'm having a really difficult time with the search engines. I switched to duckduckgo on recommendation and while it's nice not to have the AI response (that was my biggest bother), I'm having a really difficult time getting good results for local businesses and like even tv shows. I know a lot of it is that Google is spying on me so it'll usually know what I'm getting at even if my search wasn't the best, but I'm just not sure how I can improve my queries or what I'm doing wrong.
I use Brave search and that serves me well (although Lemmy really hates the founder of Brave and my comment is going to get a lot of downvotes). If you need to use google, then you can reduce the data gathering as much as possible by using startpage for google search results.
Degopgling isn't an "all-or-nothing" endeavour. Even if you start using google 20% less, then that's still progress and you can improve slowly over time.
Yes that dude is a POS but thank you for your response. I did find that brave unfortunately had better results than DDG when I used it before. I've never tried startpage so I'll give it a shot, thanks!
Why use Google docs, when you can download pdflatex for free?
The only thing I use assistant for on my phone, is asking for navigation. Eg, while driving somewhere I haven't been before, "hey google, navigate to
".Before Gemini: Opens google maps, finds the address, starts navigation, and works perfectly.
After Gemini: "Hmm, I don't know how to 'navigate to'. Let me google that for you. Here are your search results for 'navigate to
', you're welcome".Google has such potential, but their management structure just ruins everything. I wish they would be broken up into multiple companies. Then maybe at least some of their products and creativity would be allowed to thrive.
I was just thinking about this today. Any corporations big enough for us all to know have likely done more bad things than praiseworthy things. Patagonia is the closest I can think of to a good company we may all know.
The things with the Musk companies that drive me crazy though, is that everything Musk is head of are things that I should be excited about: spaceflight, EVs, green energy, public transportation.
But now thinking about any of those companies reminds me of a less funny version of when Mr Burns opens the recycling plant, but uses it to kill large numbers of sea creatures.
He just sucks the life out of so much exciting tech. While I don't use any of his stuff, it used to feel aspirational. There's at least other viable alternatives for just about everything now, but spaceflight is a big disappointment, as that is the most "future" feeling thing to me that there is. It was so exciting to see someone accelerating space travel, but now I hate he's got his fingers on all of it. Am I supposed to root for Boeing now? Ick!
Ooo, I like Market Basket's ecodiversity initiatives! 😆
Good ones with Costco and Valve too. I wish it was more valued for companies just to provide good products or services. With so much income disparity though, many are left supporting dollar chasers as opposed to actual nice companies.
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"
The Janus in Janus v. AFSCME works for Illinois Policy, so probably.
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.
Except that many, many, MANY credit unions have converted to banks (or at least offering exactly the same or even lower rates than banks) but don't change the name.
I have been screwed by my credit union a dozen times. Like me trying to open a Roth IRA with them when I was in my first year of university and they opened a CD and named it "Roth IRA" and I get like 2% interest on it.
I hate Comcast/Xfinity with such a passion I tell myself if I had the same hatred for a person I'd be in jail for murder.
Not only did they impose their "trial data caps" in my area and charge me out the ass for going over 2TB a month, I acceded once to being upsold and was told it was completely reversible within a month. After realizing the sales shithead lied to me about the features, I called to revert. Guess what? They couldn't. It wasn't something they could do. Fortunately I recorded all my calls, but even with that it took me more than 30 hours of phone and chat time to get it fixed, and the agent who finally helped me had to setup a recurring account credit to fix it. Absolutely horrid. She basically clarified, without saying it outright, that the sales shithead lied to my face because they're practically encouraged to.
Long story short my home purchase decision was influenced greatly by those shitheads not being in the area, and just seeing an ad makes me want to vandalize it. It's the only thing I hate with this much passion.
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.
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.
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.
Everything is hard to search and ppl pull the same its already been asked before stuff in there lol Great idea moving help forums to a chat, as a supplement its great, terrible as the main/only option.
I might actually hate Discord more than Microsoft Teams.
Man, I'd never considered connecting all the old forums. It would have been even more of a magical nightmare.
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
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.
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.
Walmart. I'm from a rural area and they wiped out all of the small businesses and contributed to a lot of economic hardship for the people. (Not that they were in a great position before, mind you.) I believe this continued economic hardship scared some people into leaning more conservative. The conservatives always gave them false hope. And thus the cycle continues...
Any American mainstream social media I strongly dislike as well. Meta, Twitter, and Reddit are all contributors to disinformation and pushing a more right-wing agenda to people.
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
Sadly I've tried googling the answers to the online assignments and idk if they're too new or what but I can't find them anywhere
Man I was just telling my wife about this the other day. YouTube's home page, not signed in, on an American VPN was disgusting: AI slop, half-naked women, and propaganda that was not only pro-Trump but actively suggesting violence
mostly against trans, and wokeness, which is cringey at best, do we need to see too much fox, and propaganda channels. i tried to lessen the impact by going to pet related channels, im not giving google by logging in. i was chiming this on a youtube SUBREDDIT, and people"thats your problem not ours", i say "btch your here whining about MR BEAST/asmondgold a known POS yotber that you're supporting by watching his videos." and saying the anti-woke stuff does not appear on thier feeds, your also support youtube who promotes this stuff by logging in.
Nestle and EA.
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
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.
I despise Meta, and always have, but the company I hate most is... ...the entire health insurance industry. UnitedHealth is the worst, but there isn't one among them that isn't ruining lives and killing people on a surprisingly large scale every single day.
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.
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.
I got a silhouette because of how horrific cricut software is.
Thank you, I’ve been wondering if I might want one but now I definitely don’t.
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.
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.
Apple TV the devices or the streaming service? Because the streaming service has pretty good content, especially compared to the other streaming services. Pretty stupid to have named those two the same, though, so many people dont know that it's just a regular streaming service that works on every device.
everything else Apple sucks though
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
A MacBook lasting longer is irrelevant when a PC can be upgraded for half the cost over the same period.
I'm using the same PC I had in 1998. Sort of.
I've been upgrading things as needed. Around 2000 I put it in a 4 unit rack mount server case - which will pretty much hold anything I need. The motherboard and CPU have been upgraded 5-6 times. New power supply here and there. Old drives are moved to storage drives and I install faster newer drives for OS from time to time.
I have no idea how much I've saved just upgrading things as needed or if something fails.
I just upgraded a nvidia 8400 in my streaming (by streaming I mean like Netflix and stuff) PC.... It worked for 18 years. There's nothing wrong with it now... Just no driver support.
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!
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.
And pretend it's to benefit public health.
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.
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.
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(TM)" 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.
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.
About fucking ready to wipe Budget rental car off the face of the earth for the bullshit they gave me about their insurance.
Learned a tough lesson from that one.
I rented a car from Hertz this weekend and the desk person blatantly lied about the coverage provided by my credit card. Who knows if he's instructed to say that or not, but it's shady either way.
Nestle - check out some of why https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestl%C3%A9 Its Jame Bond level villainy
Its Jame Bond level villainy
Quantum of Solace is about monopolizing a freshwater supply.
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.
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.
GoodWill comes to mind. Their coattail riding off of literally anyone who isn't them is one of the reasons why I adopted a charitable modus operandi with the roles switched. There are three sides to GoodWill, being the gifters, the sellers, and the workers, and they all operate under a synergetic weave of false pretenses. They also ban people from shopping at GoodWill if they have a relative who works there because it brings up questions of nepotism and don't let workers buy any of their own stuff. So yeah, if we could get a law saying we can ban GoodWill managers from our own businesses, I wouldn't bat an eye.
Anything from the USA, where enshittification is practically guaranteed. LiNe MuSt Go uP!!1!! Even more so under the current admin. Fart wants to isolate the USM (orons)? Fine with me, there are plenty of alternatives.
I'm not deyanked yet but it's in progress.
Singapore Air. The canceled our international return tickets, so were left stranded in Greece. They didn't tell us. They fucked it up so hard, and then they also weasled out of the compensation they're legally required to give us. They owe us over $5000 and they offered us $40. Unbeleiveble cunts. I actually hate the whole country now.
I can't think of one I like nowadays.
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.
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
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.
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.
Besides the most obviously evil corporations everyone hates - Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft, Nestle, etc?
I have a deeply personal grudge against Sega for how they repeatedly butchered my favorite series. I'm also carrying a grudge against Capcom for lying about SF5 on Linux, they posted that announcement and then just never mentioned it again, still to this day.
Nestle. I don't believe there's a single company that's been responsible for more evil in the world.
But Nestle tops the list, and a lot of the current execs should be lined up against the wall.
Most governments qualify, but they're not, technically, "companies," so I'm sticking to brands.
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.
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.
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.
Futureshop. I will forever piss on the grave of that horrible company. I waiting years for it's demise and now I am vindicated.
A dear friend had an Experience with FS and a computer he purchased. So, after yet another refund attempt (within the window, as per the rules,etc) he grabs the machine, jumps on the counter and starts calling people over like he's PT Barnam: "gather 'round, folks, and listen to my story after I bought a computer here!". And for 5'8" he had the voice of the guy who plays Reacher on TV.
Odd. He got his refund that minute. He was asked not to shop there again, and he agreed readily.
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.
The United States government.
Raytheon
Why Ray Ray? Is it just weapon manufacturing or did they do something extra evil?
The lobbying to invade more countries to bomb kids is making it a bit worse.
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.
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.
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 :/
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
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Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, toxicity and dog-whistling are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
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Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
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It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
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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.
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