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.

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.

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.

Everything Elon touches

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

Tesla by a country mile.

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

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?

Nestlé

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

Same for Hobby Lobby.

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

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.

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!

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.