What brands do you avoid at all cost? I don’t keep up with the news all that much, and many of the reasons to avoid something don’t make it there anyway. So I’m asking here to make a big list of things to avoid. It could be anything from bad security practices to really frustrating packaging. Working as a cashier myself, I definitely know there are plenty of brands I avoid purely on the basis that their product is a pain to stock.
On the flip side, what’s the alternative? If you avoid Pepsi, for example, what do you turn to instead?
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Most of Nestlé, of Lactalis…
Oh yeah fuck Nestle.
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As greedy as you think they might have been, without them, a lot of smaller bands would have just washed up. People work really hard to make music, shouldn’t they get paid for it?
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Streaming services didn’t exist when this court case happened. Many artists were already suing Napster, but weren’t famous enough to get publicity. Someone released an unfinished edit of “I disappear” which is what triggered Metallica to get involved. Dr Dre also jumped into the suit but I’ve never heard anyone talk about boycotting his music or the music he produced.
I’m a big privacy and FOSS advocate so my list is kinda long, but the main ones are:
-> Google (I use GrapheneOS)
-> TikTok
-> Tesla (too much data collection)
-> Microsoft (self explanatory, however for some things I need to keep an w10 LTSC VM configured)
-> Adobe (same reasons as Michaelsoft)
-> OpenAI (same reasons as Michaelsoft, but I do use it inside a vm in no-account mode for some work related things)
-> Uber (oh man that app is digital herpes)
-> Spotify
-> Facebook/Meta
-> Dropbox
-> Whatsapp
Starbucks. Union busting. Support of Israeli government committing genocide. Bad takes on race and gender. And they burn their beans to shit.
Fair enough. I’ve never been, don’t much like coffee, and I can’t say I ever plan to go there. They don’t sound like the most pleasant of places to relax in.
Even if you like coffee, they make absolute shit coffee. Go to a local coffee place instead. I like my Vietnamese coffee, so any Vietnamese coffee place will give me much better cup.
i wish the vietnamese places here did sugar free. every time i ask, they act like i grew a new eye right in front of them; but sugar might as well be poison for a diabetic old fart like me.
The defining feature of Vietnamese coffee is sweetened, condensed milk. Personally I don’t think I’ve seen sugar-free condensed milk. Not sure how you could make it.
Personally I don’t think I’ve seen sugar-free condensed milk. Not sure how you could make it. it’s everywhere except vietnamese coffee places.
Oh, the starbucks “thing” isn’t even coffee. You’re not losing anything by not going.
Obligatory: fuck Nestle
Fair enough. They’re so big I need an app just to keep track of if something’s made by them or not.
Which app? Is it on f-droid?
Sorry, I wasn’t very clear with my reply. I haven’t actually found an app that does this kind of thing very well, just yet. My reply was more in the line of “I wish I had an app to do this, because searching the internet takes forever”.
Some brief searching came up nowhere when I went looking a few hours ago. I did find two apps on Google Play that seemed like they might work, but both had their own blend of issues, and neither was on f-droid, unfortunately. They were “No Thanks” and “Boycott X”, if you want to try them out.
I used to use one called “buycott”, but it seems like that was abandoned years ago.
Honestly… Google Play… someone re-gifted my son a $20 Google Play card a few years ago, and I tried to buy something for him and realised the card was about 2weeks out of date, and after about 10 back and forwards with support, they wouldn’t honour it… a trillion dollar company. I get it, but their cold indifference just seemed mean
I thought it was illegal basically everywhere to have gift cards go out of date? Scumbags.
They didn’t become a trillion dollar company by being nice. No mega Corp earns their billions by being an honorable company
Ugh god… Tech brands, off the top of my head:
- Asus (Scammers)
- Lenovo (Fuck lenovobios, bad hardware quality past 2010 or so)
- Sager (Scammed me by selling a laptop with too high power draw that resulted in crashes)
- Microsoft (Mega spyware corp, bad software, worst OS on the planet)
- Apple (Likely spyware corp, Bad locked down devices, anti right to repair, overpriced)
- Google (Biggest Baddest spyware company, monopoly on many platforms)
- Nvidia (Extremely hostile to open source, will likely never work on OpenBSD unless Nvidia seriously changes their stance; even then there’s so much bad faith at this point I wouldn’t trust them)
- Meta/Facebook (Mega spyware corp, zuck is a lizard)
- Tesla (Loudest most-punchable most-hatable fascist at the helm, employees caught spying on users through interior cams)
- All major phone manufacturers (Android sucks, iOS sucks harder)
- Pine64 (Charging circuit is software controlled for some insane reason, supports Manjaro)
- All major smart TVs (spyware, always-on microphones, locked down OS with ad-ridden clients)
Okay companies:
- Valve (Still hosts a shitty DRM platform, but it’s the best one; only listing because the Steam Deck is awesome)
- Framework (Pro user repair, good hardware, no complaints; look forward to RISC-V board)
A colleague of mine bought a framework and is always complaining about it. Says he wish he’d got a thinkpad again.
must miss the clit
We call it the nipple, but I know what you mean.
So, uh, how do you live in modern society?
Framework laptop with OpenBSD for prod, Steam Deck for gaming, Pinephone with pmOS for phone stuff (even though I put Pine64 on the bad list, if I could buy again I would have tried the Fairphone or other pmOS compatible device instead); self host everything possible (mail, git (got), gitweb (gotweb), http, ipsec vpn) on a cheap VPS running OpenBSD. It’s comfy.
Why openBSD though?
Good documentation, good in-house servers, correctness, secure defaults.
Fair enough, what’s software/hardware support like in general?
https://www.openbsd.org/plat.html
All the x86 hardware I’ve tried at least boots. Suspend/other acpi stuff can be a problem, as well as wireless card support. Intel devices are the best supported at the moment by iw*(4) drivers.
Framework sounds great in theory, but it’s hard to justify nearly double the cost compared to a Lenovo T-series.
Let me give you a complaint for Framework: apparently they were having a hard time releasing bios updates in a timely manner (as in, they were over a year late iirc) which pissed a lot of people off.a
Tesla (Loudest most-punchable most-hatable fascist at the helm, employees caught spying on users through interior cams)
Cars less reliable than ICE, despite having a fraction of the parts. Absolutely proprietary and probably going to start enshittifying over the air at some point. Still some degree of expense-adding hype.
Pine64 is not one I expected to see dissed on Lemmy. I can’t say I’m impressed with the one I bought, though, and it has some kind of electrical issue that would be a pain to fix. It’s too bad, I love the concept of OS phone hardware.
Pine64 is definitely tenuously on the list, I simply can’t recommend a device thats status as a bomb depends on what kernel you put on it (and theo forbid an attacker manages to get access to the circuit).
Cemusa, they buy all the fucking cement in my country which is corrupt and has no ability to tarrif it or anything then sell it back to us at extremely high prices so my country, which is the Saudi Arabia of cement, is filled with half built buildings because no one can afford fucking cement. Fuck American corporations
For sure: fuck them, but this sounds more like a government corruption issue, laws should be in place to prevent businesses doing scummy monopolistic shit like this.
We are right next to the United States and they operate their military on the border and own all the politicians and businesses in Mexico. This is like telling an abusive wife it is her fault for not standing up for herself.
Isn’t it owned by Cemex which is a Mexican company?
All of the Cemex board members are American institutional investors. Cemex operates as a mafia here for the profit of American oligarchs. Cemusa was the old name of a parent company which was folded into Cemex, I’m old.
TikTok and Kaspersky.
Why Kaspersky?
Security software from a Russian company. It was recently banned in the US due to its national security concerns.
Oh you really haven’t heard??
Tesla, Red Bull, Believe Music, Microsoft, Samsung, so many more I can’t think of right now
Nestle.
Coca-Cola, Apple, Samsung, HP.
My alternatives are none (water & coffee only), Android (OnePlus specifically for phones), LG/Toshiba for consumer electronics, Brother for printers and Dell or Lenovo for laptops.
Edit: Oh yeah and Tesla, not only because of Musk, I simply don’t want to drive a tablet on wheels. I’m going for low-tech cars only. Some barebones Kia, Hyundai or Dacia.
Most fashion clothing brands.
The additional expenditure rarely maps to better quality.
And if they make watches too, don’t buy those. They are always the cheapest watches with a name stamped on.
Same here regarding fashion brands, except for Duluth Trading for clothing and Ariat and Hoka for shoes. When working out in the elements and walking on concrete all day, I find the extra expense for those brands are worth it for me.
Yeah, pretty much anything luxury. I make a point to buy knockoffs if I need the same class of product, because I know I’m paying a premium for intangible marketing bullshit otherwise.
Less than half of them are legit. You want to buy $15 pants 10 times or buy $70 pants once. Budget says $70 is a luxury. So we keep at it. It’s expensive to be poor.
No, I meant “luxury brands”. Buying something slightly better quality but not flashy doesn’t count. Nobody is impressed I’m wearing GAP instead of Walmart.
Amazon: I avoid them because of worker abuse and union busting. While prime shipping is convenient, planning around not having it comes pretty naturally. Just plan as if it’s not an option at all. This does require good internet search skills to find sites that sell what you’re looking for, but I can’t express how worth it the work is to get better quality products.
Starbucks: I avoid them because of union busting. I make most of my coffee and tea at home, it’s cheaper and better anyway. Otherwise, I go to a local cafe. My area has a lot of them, but even if yours doesn’t, try asking around.
Tesla
