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.

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.

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.

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.

Amazon. Fuck Amazon and bezos.

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-openers as to what good quality printers and support actually is. Shout-out to Prusa!

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.

Nestle - check out some of why https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestlé Its Jame Bond level villainy

All of them. They end up the same, by design.

BlackRock, KPMG, McKinsey Consulting.

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.

Most hated? PostNL.

Those fuckers just drop your packages wherever the fuck they want.

I’ve had to contact neighbors and search for my packages on the street.

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.

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.

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