You should be boycotting these companies already because they support extreme right politics by their ALEC membership:
- FedEx
- UPS
- Motorola
- Anheuser Busch
- American Express
- Bose
- Chevron
- Marlboro
- Sony
- Texaco
- Boeing (fly on Airbus instead, see how to boycott Boeing)
You should be boycotting Amazon for many reasons.
If you oppose private prisons, then you already boycott these banks:
- #BankOfAmerica (#BofA)
- #FifthThird
- #JPMorgan #Chase
- #PNC Bank
- #Suntrust
- #USBank (#USBancorp)
- #WellsFargo
Don’t think they are out of reach to Europe – many European small banks that you assume are ethical actually outsource their investments to JP Morgan. Also, BofA uses different branding outside the US.
If you like transparency with food labeling, then you endorse labeling of #GMO food, in which case you boycott companies that lobbied against GMO labeling. There are hundreds of companies that fucked us over, but these are the top ten financers of anti-labeling lobby:
- PepsiCo
- Nestlé
- General Mills
- Coca-Cola
- ConAgra
- Campbell Soup
- The Hershey Company
- J.M. Smucker
- Kellogg
- Mondelez
Some of those mushroom into many brands. See the attached infographic.
It’s already nearly unsurmountable to boycott just the shitty detrimental corporations. I mean, how many people can boycott Microsoft? That means not emailing your government because chances are they use MS Outlook mail servers. As someone who boycotts all these companies and many more (Procter and Gamble, Unilever, etc), it’s a lifestyle change. Half the items in a European grocery store are from the US.
The only relatively non-evil corp from the US I can think of is Starbucks. I wouldn’t fixate on that. Focus on the shitty corps and it’s already more than most people can handle.
Why tf do you think Starbucks is a “non-evil” corporation?
Because it’s relative when boycotting. Why did you omit relative from your quote? Their competitor is Nestlé. Nestlé uses child slave labor, fights GMO-labeling, argues that water access is not a human right, among copious other shit, while the biggest dirt on Starbucks is tax avoidance in the Netherlands and serving milk from GMO-fed cows. Starbucks is one of the most ethical corporations of its size in the US.
Technically Nestlé is Swiss but nonetheless they are one of the worst, up there with Bayer-Monsanto and DuPont.
And exploiting workers, interfering in unionization, selling trash products, and much much more. Starbucks is definitely not better than all the others. In fact, all of big corp is evil.
Bit vague. I’ve heard nothing significant along those lines.
Maybe some one-offs, but if that’s something you care much about, focus on ALEC members. Starbucks never was an ALEC member but most large corps in the US were at one point. ALEC is a centralised heavy hitter in union busting. It is the anti-union machinery in the US that any corporation against unions joins. It’s the main reason FedEx and UPS joined ALEC.
It’s overpriced for what you get, which is why I don’t buy from Starbucks. Not as a boycott but that’s just the market working like normal. If you get bad value for the money, you walk. If we were talking about goods that you don’t consume in 10 minutes, sure I boycott shit like designed obsolescence.
Why not list it? It’s better to list it because you have a better chance of getting support for the boycott.
I searched my files and found some more dirt on Starbucks I didn’t know about:
I’ve found that not many food items in my local shops are american, most of them are in fact European already. Especially if you buy the low price brands/the stores own brands. It’s very simple and affordable to deal with. However, the switch to linux instead of windows, has been proven to be more difficult for me. I haven’t done it yet. I have flashed the drive and tested, but not committed. This is, however, something I really want to do. Due to ethical reasons. However, I’m finding the discussion to move more business to Europe encouraging. To have european alternatives to credit cards and so forth. It is good that Europe is finally taking action. We do need to have the discussion about electricity and oil and gas though. If we choose to switch over to more EV’s we will need to produce more electricity, quickly. There are fast and easy green ways to do this. And we need to push for this. Boycotting little ol’ companies is a fart in the ocean of what we actually import. So I’d say, take it with a grain of salt. Do what you can. But have the real discussions. We are boycotting to send a message. But eventually we will have to think about the real issues, just like Europe should’ve done many years ago.
Don’t get distracted.
I think its a bit silly to think of a boycott in terms of things other people use. So don’t run exchange for you private mail server and sure you can petition your government not to use microsoft but you are not falling to boycott microsoft because document you made in libre office and attached to an email you sent on your linux mahine was recieved by an exchange server.
Of course it’s a failure to boycott. Every time you send email to a Microsoft recipient, you feed profitable data to the MS ad surveillance machine. You also open the door to give the recipient an email address so when they reply you effectively facilitate more food to MS to the extent that you have no control over. And worse, you also signal to the recipient that their email setup works… that it serves them and rewards their choice.
If you boycott MS effectively, then you use snail mail (absent other channels). You feed nothing to MS and block your recipient from using you to feed MS more. You also give badly needed help to the postal service. Look what happened to Denmark. They lost the option to boycott MS. Those people will soon be entirely disempowered, forced to support whatever tech giant naive recipients choose.
Microsoft loves it that you think you can simply avoid running some of their binary code and work under the illusion that you are not supporting MS.
As a person in the tech space, let me give you my opinion on all of this.
It’s not, because YOU are the one boycotting and not the other user. If you can convince everyone to ditch GMail, Microsoft Outlook, AOL, Yahoo or others, then yeah, you guys are boycotting well. But if the end user of something YOU sent doesn’t boycott, they have no reason to change their client and it is not a failed boycott. Because even if one user boycotts, it is still better if no one boycotted.
The end user would be inconveniencing themselves by communicating with you, because you decided to use something else and force them to use that same thing with you. Imagine this, you use Email Client 1 but the user you sent the email to, uses Corporate Mail 1. Are you going to tell the user that in order to communicate with you they should completely ditch Corporate Mail 1 and use Email Client 1? Don’t you think that is being an inconvenience?
This almost makes me think of some Vegan, animal rights activists, which will tell you how terrible you are for eating meat.
Also, unfortunately, Microsoft and Apple are the industry standards for when it comes to Personal Computing and Workstations.
Imagine using snail mail in the digital age to send important documents that need to be signed by tomorrow. Do you realize just how much time and money would take to send a letter from, say, Poland to France?
Not a chance, especially not for critical things.
Using something like Proton would definitely help make things more secure AND less money for the U.S, but how many people do you know that use Proton Mail? 2? 5? 10?
Fact of the matter is, some companies are unavoidable, especially in the workplace.
Don’t inconvenience your colleagues by forcing them to use a different client than what they are used to already. Or, if you want to introduce a new provider, introduce it slowly. Give people the time they need to let it settle in better.
I will also say something that was said here earlier, this way of thinking is incredibly “purist” and too much “perfectionism”
Don’t let “perfect” get in the way of “Good”
People are already struggling to boycott US companies, let alone this purist version you have here.
Also, forgot to add…
If you want to avoid Microsoft and Google, good luck with that because a vast majority of search engines use either Microsoft’s Bing API or Google’s API.
And in order to make a search engine that is not tied with Google or Microsoft, it has to be self-hosted, self-coded and completely self-reliant.
That’s an easy one. For the past several years, this was the absolute best:
ombrelo.im5wixghmfmt7gf7wb4xrgdm6byx2gj26zn47da6nwo7xvybgxnqryid.onion
That service scraped from Google and Bing thus did not finance them. It also filtered out Cloudflare resuits. It’s gone now, but there are countless other instances which do not use the MS or Google API (which feeds them). Most searx instances scrape the results, which ultimately costs MS and Google.
No you are not. As long as you feed Microsoft, you are not boycotting. It’s the opposite of boycotting.
It’s a fail because whatever you transmit to an MS user feeds MS with marketing data.
A conversation between two people with MS as an evesdropper is not a boycott. It’s two people feeding MS and helping MS profit.
And? Of course it’s an inconvenience. Boycotts are inherently inconvenient. If you prioritize convenience, that’s not activism and you’re not boycotting. You’re just doing what the normal market is designed for – exploiting your addiction to convenience. I suggest reading Tyranny of Convenience by Tim Wu.
Yikes. You have been brainwashed. They push proprietary conventions. Calling their tech “standards” is the kind of boot licking they love you to do.
Again, you need to drop this bizarre idea that a boycott is convenient. Protests that fail to disrupt fail to be effective. If I get a complaint about an analog letter, I could not be happier. That’s the perfect opportunity to describe the problem to whoever complains.
Why did you wait until the last minute? That’s your fuckup.
Not in the slightest. MS still sees the full payload of PM msgs. Unless you use a shared key with the MS recipient, in which case MS gets the metadata. With most transactions you’ll have a hard time getting the other side to deal with a password. Try getting a bank to note down a password for such emails and see if they go along with it.
You do you. Don’t tell people what to do.
In a workplace specifically, you likely have a mandate to use the tools of the org. That’s not really an interesting scenario because politics in the workplace is not generally tolerated by bosses.
You don’t have “good”. If you are feeding MS, that’s not good. It’s not boycotting. You have perfect getting in the way of “bad”, and rightfully so.
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Hypocricy at its finest!
I don’t think you are upholding your own standards. If you were, you would have just isolated yourself completely from everywhere.
But I don’t have time to argue with someone who has the same thinking as a stereotypical Vegan lol.
Go ahead am live in your fantasy land where you think boycotting means that everyone you ever send an email to is failing to boycott.
A friend said it best “If you and your friend have been dumping trash on the road and you say ‘I’m gonna quit that’ but he say he will continue. Isn’t it better that at least one of you stopped?”
Your whole idea of boycotts are twisted completely.
Also, FYI, educate yourself first. Proton is not an MS product, you donut.
Again, as a person mentioned here:
To the other commenters reading this:
Do what you can reasonably do. Going for this perfectionist bullshit is only going to make you want to quit boycotting U.S products and the cycle will start anew.
I’m telling you HOW to boycott as clearly you don’t grasp it. To claim to boycott a company while feeding them is a lie (to the extent that it’s not ignorance- which is what I am addressing considering when the conversation started you thought you could boycott MS while feeding them).
You are on your own to work out whether or not to boycott. That comes down to where MS stands w.r.t your values. You do you.
That would fail to support the good businesses who compete with the baddies. You’ve misunderstood my position if you think removing support from competitors of my adversaries upholds my standards. Relatively ethical competitors of the baddies are my friendlies.
You need to take your own advice here. Obviously you don’t know how Protonmail works. You only get out of the box crypto if the other person also uses Protonmail, you fool. When you send email to an MS user (yes, from Protonmail) without obtaining their pubkey and or shared key, MS sees the payload. In fact, MS sees just as much as if you sent the msg from gmail. You really have no clue how encryption (symmetric and asymmetric) works. It is not some kind of magic where everyone you contact from PM has encryption.
I am taking my own advice, lol.
Just because you are stuck in your “purist” ways, doesn’t mean that everyone else is going to follow in your footsteps.
I don’t email anyone who uses Gmail or MS Outlook, but if I had to send a reply to and from my work email, to a company which likely uses Gmail, tf am I gonna do?
Shiver me timbers, I’ll send a single email through a corpo-slop server. Oh no… Anyway.
You genuinely have some of THE WORST takes I have seen on here so far. “Starbucks isn’t as evil” “Lidl sucks because they support Israel”
Again, I’m all for boycotting shitty corporations, but if you believe that sending a single email to a company WHO YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT SERVICES THEY USE is stupid.
If you have a phone, best get rid of that, because your local phone provider and U.S Satellites know where you are! They hear all your conversations and see all the SMS messages! God forbid you use your phone to sign up for anything, they can see the code you get from the service. God forbid you use a bank card, because those are owned by either Visa or MasterCard, American corporations. Best get rid of those as well, mate.
In fact, get rid of everything and go live in the woods. Perhaps you’ll learn something about life or something.
I will no longer perpetuate this conversation further as it is entirely useless. I don’t want anyone telling me that I “live in a lie”
We all do, you just don’t understand or realize it.