Yes, let’s divide ourselves up by who shops where.
Do you know why Jeff Bezos and Amazon don’t give a shit that they have such an awful reputation?
It’s because of nonsense like this that pits us against one another instead of organizing for real change.
Amazon is a behemoth. Even if everyone stopped shopping there many of them would still use Amazon every day in the form of AWS, otherwise known as Amazon Web Services .
I propose we all continue to give each other grace and instead focus on getting more Mamdanis at all levels of government everywhere the far right movements are taking off.
As far as I can see, every company eventually becomes evil once it reaches critical mass. It's seemingly impossible to have a non-evil massive company; it's like an inevitable law of society.
Therefore, supporting non-evil businesses requires a constant engagement and dealing with small, inconvenient businesses. As soon as you get comfortable and in a routine, the business becomes profitable and popular, and really gets off the ground; you're done. You must cut all ties with that business and find a new, inconvenient, and small to medium business to trade with.
If we all stopped using AWS and started using something else, eventually it would become the same thing. It's strange and doesn't make much sense to me, though. I think it's a consequence of promoting greed in a currency-based society, but we don't exactly have any other case studies to compare against.
If we all stopped using AWS and started using something else, eventually it would become the same thing.
Eh. The cornerstone of most of these big firms is some amount of government or government-adjacent contracting.
That's what makes them convenient. They adopt uniform integrations. They operate in bulk. They have enormous staff. You're nibbling around the edges of a much bigger and more complex system.
The solution to Amazon isn't to patron some Mom-And-Pop retail frontend (that almost certainly also uses Amazon for shipping). It's to nationalize Amazon and incorporate it into the USPS.
AWS has nothing meaningful to do with USPS or shipping, but I agree it would be interesting if it was nationalized. A nationalized hyperscaler.. interesting
AWS has nothing meaningful to do with USPS or shipping
AWS is the single largest provider of cloud commuting services across the US Public Sector, USPS included.
But I was more referring to the Reverse Flow of Amazon Shipping, which takes heavy advantage of USPS last mile service, because this is the most expensive part of delivery.
A nationalized hyperscaler… interesting
Given the degree to which the state finances these businesses, it's sort of crazy we haven't nationalized them already.
In other words: you are so far into left ideology that you absolutely refuse to use the capitalist tools. Boycott is effective of course but the problem is people interested enough in shits companies do are generally the one on the far left with your mentality.
So those that believe in the effect of "voting with your money" don't use it because, in their ideology, companies are the good guys. And those that don't believe in it don't bother changing because by definition they can't believe it.
Kind of all my far left friends which are now getting rich and investing in etf of very big companies. The same they despise.
If only people could get out of ideology, we could have actual solutions
What a crock of shit! I don’t care if people boycott but I certainly hope they have an understanding of how ineffective that could be.
There needs to be regulatory change. AWS and Azure have an outsized influence on the modern internet and technology sector because of how massive and widespread they are. Roughly 8% of all global internet traffic runs through AWS, Azure and Google Cloud services. You can toss Cloudflare in there too.
What I’m saying is that we need to have our representatives at a political/governmental level actually represent the people and it needs to happen globally.
Look at the improvements driven by regulatory change in the EU and imagine if that regulatory change effectively happened at a global level.
For Amazon specifically look at what Mandan is doing to hold them accountable in New York City.
OP was saying how it's fine to boycott but the real issue is division being sewn. And then you go ahead and try to divide us by misrepresenting what they were saying lol.
Yes sure I prove this point. Is that right that division is the problem though or is the way we act?
I'm all for being friendly and tbh I regret the way I expressed my message on that matter. But we cannot continue to say everybody is doing and fine and only a small group is responsible. If division is what it cost to change the whole population so be it. I only refrain division with relatives and coworkers (except of course those that like engaged didcussion). But division inside a nation or in the world is necessary if we hope to change.
Population that are very very similar in opinion it looks to me are the population we find in authoritarian country, not democracies
I think you might be shocked by just how much people order amazon, regardless of what other places they have to shop.
I'm sure for some people in some locations they have limited options... But around here that's not the case, yet I still see homes that order hundreds of things on amazon every month.
Very rare though for most use. Any item I need to buy I always found a competition. Of course there must be some things people can't find elsewhere but that doesn't justify for most people
Recently I bought a part for a manual tire changer. I bought it from the manufacturer website instead of amazon. It was delivered by amazon in a amazon box. It was three dollars cheaper though.
You don’t need daily deliveries from Amazon. There are plenty of local options for most everything. I’ve driven for Amazon (or rather, a DSP) twice in my life and those are the only jobs I’ve walked out on without notice. You start to realize there are people who order 10-20 packages DAILY. It’s actually fucking insane. To claim you can’t find something you need locally or can’t buy online direct is 10000% a lie if you live in the USA.
I don't get daily delivers from anyone. There is exactly one semi independent grocery store left around here and I go by weekly but they do not carry everything I need so I'm forced to use walmart. I get from amazon what I can't get locally for a decent price. Which is pretty much everything since the local parts stores and such mark their products up one to two hundred percent. The nearest Costco which I am a member is a 90 minute drive away. So don't call me a liar if you don't live where I do. Or do but know I don't give a shit what you have to say.
10-20 packages is high but do you know if they were contractors? Doing some renovation? Maybe own their own company they run out of their home? Im not defending Amazon here I hate how their run and treat employees, but its a systemic problem, Amazons not run differently from any other distribution center or retail job, and ive had several coworks say they miss driving for Amazon over working retail
Secondly yea, local stores exist, they almost never have the things your looking for ontop of insanely high prices. A lot of people I work with cant afford the gas to get to the store, much less paying their premiums. I hate buying things online but I literally cannot afford to shop in person especially when much higher quality items are half the price online. I buy off Ebay or secondhand when I can, and I dont want to support these billionaires, but often reality just doesnt work out
Why don't you look at the rest of my comments to see what happened the last time I did that. Which was less than two weeks ago. I did save three bucks but now I'm being pestered with spam emails and texts from these yahoo's trying to sell me something else.
I'm in very rural Japan. I almost never buy from amazon anymore, but sometimes there is nowhere else without spending the equivalent of hundreds of dollars to get to Tokyo or somewhere and get back. Add 12+ hours of driving if it's something big enough that I need my car (and all highways between us are toll roads). It's been months since I bought anything from them, but it does occasionally happen.
Yep. I live in a very rural northern part of the US. It's the same for me. If I don't use amazon, I have no access to 3/4 of the things most of these people take for granted.
My website renewal was up and I discovered meanwhile that Wix is an Israeli company. Migrating everything and redesigning the website on wordpress was not something I looked forward to but you gotta do what you gotta do.
Good on you. I think the only effective boycotting we have right now is the official BDS boycott list. They great news is everyone on it is pretty demonstrably awful.
For some items there is no longer a choice. Amazon is the only supplier. Sometimes Walmart. It's is amazing how many things we have had to go without over the last year because I refuse to buy from Amazon. I will try to go directly to the manufacturer after finding the item on Amazon but sometimes that isn't possible.
It has had the distinct advantage of cutting my disposable spending, so I guess that is a bonus.
Also not the person you replied to, but I bought something from a private webshop, paid thru that website and was issued a receipt from them, only to receive an amazon box with an amazon shipping label a week later. Sometimes you won't know until you know.
On multiple occasions, I have gone directly to the supplier only to have the products show up in Amazon packaging and delivered by an Amazon driver. Off the top of my head, a robovac from Eufy and athletic shoes from a local shoe store chain. The shoes really fucking pissed me off because I actually went to the physical store so I could "support local", but my feet are an "unusual" size, so I had very few options outside their online stock. And ordered through the in store system, but the shoes were still delivered by Amazon, except I didn't get the easy return options that I would've had if I just ordered from Amazon to begin with.
I work in IT
My job is at some point going to rely on me knowing Amazon web services.
I'd rather put a loaded gun in my mouth and blow my brains all over the roof than deal with anything Amazon.
I have a very personal vendetta against amazon and due to the nature of my job, I've just had to separate work from personal in that nature. As much as it sucked
Seriously though, I feel like AWS obfuscates the idea of "software runs on a remote server" to an unnecessary degree, including terms. (Maybe I am not experienced enough yet, or have not drank the kool-aid)
The only workloads that get value from AWS are hyperscale application delivery and big data computation and research and if you are doing those things you're probably already a shitty business with no ethics. Normal people don't need it and shouldn't use it.
I've been laid off and my alternative was to relocate to [insert place whete there's been recent news stories about controversial land use] and effectively head the logistics for the construction of [insert tech project that has been drawing a lot of figurative and literal fire].
At least Amazon is local seller while Aliexpress and Taobao is 100% from china. If getting stuff cheap is your goal regardless the long term economic impact, go for it.
Edit: on the other hand, Taobao/aliexpress might actually have the thing you want that you can't find in Amazon.
If I had the appropriate reactions to all the shit that goes on, I'd be in the street screaming every day of the week.
Unfortunately, I like having a comfortable shelter, and spend all that time instead working a boring job against compensation.
This sucks.
::: spoiler Attempt at clearing my name
At least I don't have a prime account and don't shop on Amazon (with a few cheat items / years, I gotta admit).
I dropped Windows for Linux last year and frankly no Rugrats .
I left all Meta platforms two years ago. Still haven't recovered socially, even my family often forget to send me invites to gatherings. Worth it still.
I'm trying to cut Google. I've switch to proton mail and give it as my new email nowadays, but fuck me, I don't feel like going through the process of making sure I have everyone my new email, change all my accounts, etc, so I'm taking my time sunsetting it. However I built myself a home server with an old computer, and managed to use Nextcloud+ Memories, replacing my use of Google photo / Drive / calendar.
Also got rid of Netflix and Spotify, using Jellyfin and Navidrome instead.
but fuck me, I don’t feel like going through the process of making sure I have everyone my new email, change all my accounts, etc, so I’m taking my time sunsetting it
Set up your gmail to have a mail forwarding rule, so that any message it receives gets forwarded to your new address. After switching over your more major things, all you need to do is keep an eye out for things that have been forwarded from your old gmail, and switch them over when you notice one. Eventually, very little will be going through your gmail anymore. Even then, it's not a terrible idea to leave it open and still forwarding, just in case someone important tries contacting you there years later. But with this forwarding strategy, you can pretty quickly get it so that 90% of your messages don't go through gmail anymore. While cutting google out of your life completely would be ideal, reducing usage and reducing what they have access to is still a good thing.
actually a good plan. I had resisted setting up forwarding because I felt it was just getting my Gmail emails with more steps, but I guess I stopped thinking after the first step, huh.
So, enlighten me how I can go scream in the street and manage to survive long enough for it to actually matter AND not become a homeless, medication-less wretch. you seem to have it figured out.
Provincial or Federal? Seems like they haven't sent this one to us directly, but I'll take a link to that manual.
(Also, nice way to move the goal post without answering the question. You wouldn't be a hypocrite who preaches what they don't follow themselves, are you?)
You must have missed the ".ca" at the end of my instance then, buddy. Also, isn't that the one that teaches how to do simple sabotage at your place of employment? I don't see how I can help by sabotaging a learning management system used by schools and individual giving seminars, but I guess I'm just lacking in the creativity department.
You'd be surprised about what you can live without. It's just inconvenient to change a couple of habits. And most people won't be inconvenienced to think for a minute about what they actually need and what alternatives they have.
I like to think if a huge amount of people stopped using amazon, meta, google, and Microsoft products we would at least get some power back from billionaire scum.
People can't though. They are fucking addicted and will not change no matter what happens. And ive given up trying to explain why they need to change their ways because they dont listen anyways.
I genuinely believe that if you want to completely distance yourself from all of these companies and completely insulate yourself from their actions, you're just going to have to cancel your internet subscription. Full on local net only. Or just throw yoyr comp in the river.
Or make all tech companies public, but we're not there yet.
Honestly though don't get too caught up in it. It's the same as paper straws, a lot of this is constructed to make you feel like personal consumption has any leverage on any of this when the real consuming powers have nothing to do with us at all. You think Amazon gives a shit about a Prime subscription when AWS is taking a cut of every circular A.I. transaction that's quickly trying to crash the economy into the ground?
Just don't stress youself out about it, and don't judge anyone too harshly. Unless they're a real asshole about it.
Yep I get it. Just like I really try not to waste as much as possible and recycle what I possibly can and all but theres just some shit in plastic you have to throw (like wrapping on vegetables or meat packs etc). I hate doing it but theres no alternatives other than eating a cab of beans every single day for the rest of my life, and I'm not going to do that while the billionaires take jets to epstein island 3 times a day.
Okay good that's totally reasonable. Been running into people who seem dead set on social and mental suicide because they think giving anyone money means you've adopted the entirety of their morals as well. Not great.
Yeah its not worth going to those extremes. Like anyone else I'm selfish. Of course all of us going to live in caves would be far better for the environment but no one is doing that.
Dude I would totally return to subsistence farming and taking a mule drawn cart to town if it meant I got to keep my internet connection and modern plumbing. The only thing keeping me from it now is property value inflation and the speculative housing market.
It's not the 2-day delivery that gets me. Fuck that shit, I can wait. I'm just too damn poor to ignore when something is 10% to 15% cheaper on Amazon than anywhere else I can find it.
(That said, I rarely buy anything at all new. I only do this when it's something I can't find used or make myself.)
There is no ethical consumption under capitalism. And yet, you must consume some just to survive.
Best we can do is minimize consumption. Recycle, reuse, buy used, make it yourself, steal it if you can get away with it. And when all else fails, then buy from the shitty megacorps.
You know I keep telling people this and they get mad at me. I have vices for sure but I don't consume anything that doesn't have either a: the ability to keep me alive for another week or so, or b: is currently part of a web of things that keep me sane and feeling like I cal scrounge some joy out of this life. All of which comes from some dark, questionable feed hopper of capitalism.
People are the same about YouTube. They hate the treatment of creators, the content theft that is rampant and almost encouraged by YouTube, and the colossal mountain of AI slop content-
But they lose their shit when you so much as suggest they stop using it.
I don't lose my shit about it; I just point out the catch 22:
Creators don't want to leave their established bases, and viewers are gonna go where the creators are.
Get some big creators to move somewhere, anywhere, else and their fans will follow and likely cause a domino effect with other creators. Yelling at the viewers ain't gonna help a damn thing. There's basically no content elsewhere. We need to yell at the creators.
Boycotting YouTube outright will not hurt Google nearly as much as it would hurt the creators you are trying to help out.
Nebula is small, it still only has a tiny fraction of the YouTube library, and you have to pay to access it up front.
Also, near non-existent marketing budget. People can't be expected to magically inuit the existence of an alternative platform. At some point, you need to advertise your existence and get your content creators to do the same.
The only creator I've ever heard mention Nebula even once was Abigail Thorn. And even she only talked about it during a couple of projects from years back.
Everyone who is anyone in the indie space just goes with Patreon instead.
If people left YouTube, the creators leave YouTube.
I barely use YouTube at all anymore. But I'm also shelling out north of $50/mo on various artists on Patreon.
I don't really expect other people to follow suit, if they don't have that kind of disposable income.
Incidentally, I also have a subscription to Amazon Prime and HBO Max. The first, because Amazon is functionally the USPS at this point. The second, because I get it free through my ISP.
I'm not going to cancel either one of them, any more than I'm going to give up my car to protest the fossil fuel industry.
Good on ya for supporting content creators, I’ve done this a few times myself a while back (won’t do it anymore), however- nothing will ever change so long as people keep showing YouTube that they’re okay with things as they are by helping bump up their numbers.
Selective activism and cherry-picking isn’t going to move the needle. Strength of conviction, and an adherence to standards will.
nothing will ever change so long as people keep showing YouTube that they’re okay with things
The people "using" YouTube in the economic sense aren't the viewers, they're the advertisers.
Selective activism and cherry-picking isn’t going to move the needle.
Neither is stomping your foot and being mad at the anonymous video consumer or ad firm.
Might as well get angry about people watching the Super Bowl or the next big Marvel Movie.
If you want to advocate for an actual alternative thing, go for it. But just arguing in the negative is hollow, especially when you're arguing with a statistical person rather than an actual audience.
I'm sort of guilty of this. Id love to switch to something else but no where has anything close to the content. I was going to switch to twitch for streaming but that's fucking Amazon as well.
I mean. I just stopped using it. The same as I did with Facebook and Twitter. Boycotting is boycotting. Either one stands on their principles and backs up their beliefs and standards, or they just like saying they do because it makes them look good.
It’s not supposed to be convenient. It’s supposed to be effective. If you use their platform, you support their practices. Period. That’s how it is.
I can’t say how many times I suggested people stop using that shit in comments on posts where people do nothing but whine about how fucking abysmally shitty YouTube is. And when I do- I get;
“But where else can I go to see muh vidyos?!”
Nowhere.
These people need to be introduced to the hard truth and reality of what boycotting really means. Or they need to get off the pot.
I'm doing "elbows up". No money I have knowingly flows to an American company or individual. Period. And I do my due diligence: I try to find the goods that are American but branded locally.
Is it inconvenient? Fuck yes! But you know what's more inconvenient? Funding the economy of the nation that is actively attacking mine.
And another fantastic point! Absolutely well said my friend!
And I’ll add-
Not enough people walk the walk at all anymore. If the endorphins are received, and the clout is favorable enough, all it takes are words, because words are all someone needs nowadays to convince others. All that’s required is to just shout into the void that you hate a thing. Then, just Hoover up the validation of your peers, and you’re free to then continue consuming said thing.
When people grow some balls and lean what strength of conviction is, things will change. But right now, Toutube knows they own these clowns and they don’t have the balls to walk away.
I think you need some education on the matter since a "boycott" by individuals is not putting any real pressure on anyone without the numbers and a plan behind it. That is just the truth. That you don't like it changes nothing.
I highly doubt you are boycotting every single evil corp out there so just like so many you draw the line at your own feet for no reason
Its more important to you to tell everyone how pure YOU are and how stupid they are instead of putting any real effort behind your "boycotting"
I get that its very frustrating watching people throwing money at all these horrible people but the reality is that those horrible people prefere us being mad at each other and you are doing their bidding by playing this game.
We really need to be more pragmatic about this. You can shop at amazon and at the same time support every single regulation against them. We don't have a youtube or amazon problem we have a structural problem and this doesn't go away no matter how much you don't use either of them.
Ask Kentucky bourbon manufacturers how the Canadian boycott of their product is going. Or ask California wineries. Or ask pretty much every major tourist site in the USA how pissing off Canadians has worked out for them. Or ... well, the list is long. I'll let you look it up.
It is the concerted action of millions of individuals drawing a line in the sand that kills these fuckers.
Those examples proof my point though? It was a WHOLE COUNTRY organizing a boycott where even the industry is in in it with a specific goal and easily available alternatives with very little discomfort. Its not all american products either.
So you have a big enough number of people all at once who are pissed of enough that they are willing to join and i remind you not because they morally object what the US does to other peoole but because they threatened war and imposed tarifs hurting them directly a lot very fast. I also highly doubt that this boycott started by canadians shaming each other into boycotting.
Single individuals not using a product and the "organizing" being limited by just telling others they are not living by their principles by using it lacks any real world impact. And i am not even disagreeing that we should consume as ethically as possible i am saying looking at it from a pragmatic point of view that just shaming people is doing nothing objectivly.
For a real world example where moral "boycotting" worked was the Dunnes Store Strike but again it wasn't people shaming others into not buying south african goods it was a whole organisation (the union) directing their workers to not handle it and the punishment of the workers got others to join and put pressure on the governtment to finally stop importing goods from south africa. Without a strong union support and focus on a direct goal this wouldn't have worked at all.
We should talk about real life examples that worked and what they had in common and from there organize stragetic boycotts where there is a goid chance of winning not picking things we personally don't need or want to use and pretending we are morally superior to others who have on principle the same goals we do.
I haven't seen people losing their shit for it, other than the one suggesting it are being absolutely asshole about it. Telling people of an alternative is significantly better than telling them to simply stop using it. If there's a local Amazon competitor you bet people gonna jump ship. Same for yt + ytm.
Yep. More important than where you buy things is how much you buy. Best we can do is just boycott everything. Keep your overall economic participation to a minimum.
Impulse control problems are induced by the societies we live in, especially by marketing. While you are right to refuse to shame those victim of such, which we all are at different degrees, I think the advice to force ourself to reconsider our needs before buying is a good one. Isn't it?
It still exists. Everything I order comes takes days or even weeks to arrive. Just don't pay for express shipping or don't use a service that has a membership.
As a Canadian, I am shopping local where I can, national where I cannot, Europe/UK if it's specialty or China/eBay/Kijiji/other scumbags if it's okay to get used/open-box/junk quality. Basically anywhere but America. It's working pretty well so far. I do miss the convenience of having everything in one place at Amazon, but local suppliers have been outstanding if you go to the effort of finding them.
Apology humbly accepted, and I'm sorry for my part if I sounded a bit defensive (I was). That is such a lovely, non-confrontational response, though, it warms my cold barren heart a little. It is the opposite of what most of the internet's social media has conditioned all of us for, so thank you for making this little corner of the world a little better and nicer place today.
This. Exactly this. With Chinese goods, as with any goods, you get what you pay for. If you're only willing to pay a buck, you get a buck's worth of goods.
When I was a kid, "Made in Japan" was a joke way of saying "low-quality, crappy goods". Of course even when I was a kid the reality was way in advance of popular culture; people were citing a '50s joke in the '70s. Japanese industry had already woken up and was making high quality electronics and mid-quality cars, the latter easily the equal in terms of reliability and durability of the rolling piles of rust that American cars had become by that point. By the '80s American cars were such an embarrassment that my father swore off of them for the rest of his life, buying only Japanese or German from then on, starting by ditching a Chrysler and replacing it with a Nissan at the time. I also lived through the "Made in Taiwan" jokes and "Made in Korea" jokes because people never learn from getting bitten on the ass by their bigotry. (You want a REAL joke? "Made in Germany" was a forced label to protect British subjects from cheap German knock-offs. How well did that age?)
That being said, a lot of the stuff made in China, when you're willing to shell out real dollars instead of dollar store junk, is cheaper than goods of equivalent capability and quality made in the west. It's really hard to beat the sheer scale of industry in China. So not only do you get what you pay for, you get more than what you'd pay for at that price in the west.
Now I can't talk about Chinese bikes because motorcycles aren't really a thing here, so you're not likely to see a lot of stuff in that realm that's comparable. I can talk about electric cars, however. Like how the bare-bones Xiaomi SU7 is priced below a Tesla Model 3 and performs like a mid-range sport car. Oh, also has a longer range than a Model 3 Long Range because of course.
Or how the SU7 Max is a car that can sit in the mid-range Porsche territory for performance for a significantly lower price. It can walk away from a base Porsche Taycan for a fraction of the price, and indeed can keep a Taycan turbo guessing for a much smaller fraction of the price.
And then we get the new SU7 Ultra which needs a fully-kitted Taycan Super Turbo GT to come close to it, and even then it's down to the driver who wins. The SU7 Ultra set a record for the fastest electric executive vehicle around the Nürburgring Nordschleife. For a third the price of the Porsche. It took a special kitting (the Manthey-kitting) of a Taycan STGT to take that record back. The SU7 Ultra was stock. I could buy one right now if I had $88,000 to throw away.
Sports cars not your jam? BYD, without even touching their Denza, Fang Cheng Bao, and Yang Wang specialty sub-brands (premium luxury, professional/personalized, and ultra luxury respectively) has something that will compete successfully with every price point of most western consumer EVs, usually at a lower cost. And if you hit the sub-brands, it's got shit you've never seen before. Like the Yang Wang SUV that can do tank turns and launches a paired drone from a roof enclosure so you can take auto-guided video of your adventures climbing mountains in an overdressed car or whatever.
Cars in general not your jam? How 'bout phones? You know how everybody's going gaga over Apple's new foldable? The iPhone Duo starts at $1,999. Meanwhile, Samsung launched the first mainstream foldable seven years ago in 2019—and yes, it was not very durable. But Chinese phone makers haven't been sitting idle either. Xiaomi, Huawei, Oppo, Honor, and Vivo all have foldables on the market, many of them years ahead of Apple's entry. Most undercut Apple significantly. Huawei, notably, doesn't—it competes at the top end rather than on value. They've been iterating on the hinge and crease problems for years while Apple was still figuring out how to make one fold.
Do I even need to mention drones (and paying 2-3× as much for a lesser drone)? Solar cells? Batteries (BYD and CATL)? Home appliances (Haier/Hisense and Midea)? E-bikes?
Anybody who still holds the "Chinese cheap junk" meme in their head is as ignorant as they are bigoted. You get what you pay for. And in the case of many Chinese goods you get MORE than what you pay for against western prices because of the sheer scale of operations.
Question, does the design of chinese cars come off as sorta well, soulless?
Like by performance metrics and features, CFmoto/QJmotors blows anything similarly priced out of the water, but nothing really feels like a passion project of the engineers, they all look like "just another bike" or a bizarre mix of aesthetics.
I don't really pay attention to chinese electrics, though I've riden in a few.
I like the designs of the firms like Xiaomi, Zeekr, NIO, and others like that better than their western counterparts for the most part. I find it particularly bizarre that a country with five thousand years of sophisticated arts behind it is being called "soulless" by westerners, mind, so I'm probably not in the market to answer your question.
Oddly, I find all of Tesla's offerings "soulless" and devoid of any passion (or sense of quality; they're utter garbage in construction). And I haven't seen an American car of any kind I liked since the late-'60s, early-'70s cars like the GTO or Mustang. I did like '70s and early-'80s BMW aesthetics, but when they moved away from their Bauhaus aesthetic I lost interest. They just started looking like every other car. "Organic". They lost anything resembling an identity and could easily, if you needed glasses but forgot them, be confused with a pedestrian Buick or the like.
Similar things started happening with all the European cars outside of Italy and Britain. Then Britain fell.
I also can't help but notice that "soulless" was thrown at every upstart that came into the western markets. First Japanese cars. Then Korean cars. Now Chinese ones. I'm not saying there's a pattern here. But I'm also not not saying it.
I don't remember Japanese cars ever being called soulless.
I heard of them being called low quality, but the designs were always iconic.
As far as Tesla goes, they are Elon Musk's passion. Its a stupid vision carried out suprisingly competently given the task of adhering to a passionless non-expert's whims.
I find it particularly bizarre that a country with five thousand years of sophisticated arts behind it is being called “soulless” by westerners
I find it bizarre to experience. I basically live there when I'm not in Vietnam or Japan, so its not that I don't want to like them, but none of bikes I've seen have stirred anything in me.
The architecture and urban design I see in public places has more creativity and passion often in the designer's vision amd much moreso in the way they've been able to carry it out than anywhere I've been in America or Japan, but there's often a certain coldness to public spaces, like the space wasn't made for me.
I don’t remember Japanese cars ever being called soulless.
You weren't around in the '70s apparently.
I find it bizarre to experience. I basically live there when I’m not in Vietnam or Japan, so its not that I don’t want to like them, but none of bikes I’ve seen have stirred anything in me.
What I'm reading here is "I don't know the design language, so it's soulless".
Of course I have no meaningful opinion on motorcycles. They're really not a thing here. I see maybe one motorcycle a week. So it could very possibly be that they're not well-designed. But the cars? Sorry. Here I just hard disagree. It's not styled like a western car would be, but that's the design language at work.
Why don't you just transcend the system you're in and create your own existence-illusion complex if you know so much? Just go be your own independent phenomenon in another plane of causality if you don't want what my cowboy bebop boomerang be housing in server flier, y'know?
If I'm not mistaken, the retail thing has real thin margins, and they make all their money on their web services.
Now that I think of it, you could probably figure out what products they take a strategic loss on, and buy a bunch as a form of ironically-consumerist praxis.
Their most profitable business by margin is “advertising” (or sponsored/enshittified search results), and seller fees (which are typically 40-50% of item cost) are a massive profit center too.
They mostly stopped selling loss makers (like heavy liquid beverages) or hiked the prices on them (like after they drove Diapers.com out of business) years ago.
Also people ignore that they are providing services for the sellers themselves, not just the consumers. For some people they just rather you buy their shit off Amazon, because they ship them the bulk goods and forget the consumers exist.
Amazon handles everything and provides a real service to those businesses, even if they're overall the big evil Amazon. They managed to automate the fuck out of the online marketplace so they do that for everyone.
Otherwise you have to make a website, take online orders, process shipments, handle warehousing, process returns... Amazon became the de facto middleman by turning every business into the same day shipping sort of business.
I don't hate them for doing that. But I do think they're a symptom of a bigger disease in America.
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Yes, let’s divide ourselves up by who shops where.
Do you know why Jeff Bezos and Amazon don’t give a shit that they have such an awful reputation?
It’s because of nonsense like this that pits us against one another instead of organizing for real change.
Amazon is a behemoth. Even if everyone stopped shopping there many of them would still use Amazon every day in the form of AWS, otherwise known as Amazon Web Services .
I propose we all continue to give each other grace and instead focus on getting more Mamdanis at all levels of government everywhere the far right movements are taking off.
As far as I can see, every company eventually becomes evil once it reaches critical mass. It's seemingly impossible to have a non-evil massive company; it's like an inevitable law of society.
Therefore, supporting non-evil businesses requires a constant engagement and dealing with small, inconvenient businesses. As soon as you get comfortable and in a routine, the business becomes profitable and popular, and really gets off the ground; you're done. You must cut all ties with that business and find a new, inconvenient, and small to medium business to trade with.
If we all stopped using AWS and started using something else, eventually it would become the same thing. It's strange and doesn't make much sense to me, though. I think it's a consequence of promoting greed in a currency-based society, but we don't exactly have any other case studies to compare against.
Eh. The cornerstone of most of these big firms is some amount of government or government-adjacent contracting.
That's what makes them convenient. They adopt uniform integrations. They operate in bulk. They have enormous staff. You're nibbling around the edges of a much bigger and more complex system.
The solution to Amazon isn't to patron some Mom-And-Pop retail frontend (that almost certainly also uses Amazon for shipping). It's to nationalize Amazon and incorporate it into the USPS.
AWS has nothing meaningful to do with USPS or shipping, but I agree it would be interesting if it was nationalized. A nationalized hyperscaler.. interesting
AWS is the single largest provider of cloud commuting services across the US Public Sector, USPS included.
But I was more referring to the Reverse Flow of Amazon Shipping, which takes heavy advantage of USPS last mile service, because this is the most expensive part of delivery.
Given the degree to which the state finances these businesses, it's sort of crazy we haven't nationalized them already.
The problem is most people don't even know when they are using a service that utilizes AWS.
That choice is being made by unknown executives within companies that may otherwise be benign.
AWS + MSFT Azure + Google Cloud is like 65%+ of all online services. 😐
I feel like that's a low estimate
I wonder if there's a way to block AWS connections at the network or http header level? Might be a cool idea
https://github.com/nickspaargaren/no-amazon
you can do that via dns with something like adguard home or pihole using a no amazon blocklist
the level of breakage is immense, so expect having to check logs and manually ublock domains in some circumstances
(an example i couldn't ignore was ifixit, ymmv)
In other words: you are so far into left ideology that you absolutely refuse to use the capitalist tools. Boycott is effective of course but the problem is people interested enough in shits companies do are generally the one on the far left with your mentality.
So those that believe in the effect of "voting with your money" don't use it because, in their ideology, companies are the good guys. And those that don't believe in it don't bother changing because by definition they can't believe it.
Kind of all my far left friends which are now getting rich and investing in etf of very big companies. The same they despise.
If only people could get out of ideology, we could have actual solutions
What a crock of shit! I don’t care if people boycott but I certainly hope they have an understanding of how ineffective that could be.
There needs to be regulatory change. AWS and Azure have an outsized influence on the modern internet and technology sector because of how massive and widespread they are. Roughly 8% of all global internet traffic runs through AWS, Azure and Google Cloud services. You can toss Cloudflare in there too.
What I’m saying is that we need to have our representatives at a political/governmental level actually represent the people and it needs to happen globally.
Look at the improvements driven by regulatory change in the EU and imagine if that regulatory change effectively happened at a global level.
For Amazon specifically look at what Mandan is doing to hold them accountable in New York City.
Boycotts generally hurt a companies reputation more than their bottom line financially, but when dealing with a company that doesn’t care about their reputation or ones owned by billionaires that also own news media and/or social media platforms, they shape the narrative to their own benefit.
What is your agenda in arguing for boycotts and against regulatory change?
Boycotts can be extremely effective if enough people get on board.
Witness the pain the USA's tourism industry is facing due to the Canadian boycott. Or the US liquor industry due to that same boycott.
Really? Seems more like it’s hurting the industry, which was already in decline, and has led to no actual positive change.
I guess we have different definitions of effective.
OP was saying how it's fine to boycott but the real issue is division being sewn. And then you go ahead and try to divide us by misrepresenting what they were saying lol.
Thanks for proving their point ig
Yes sure I prove this point. Is that right that division is the problem though or is the way we act?
I'm all for being friendly and tbh I regret the way I expressed my message on that matter. But we cannot continue to say everybody is doing and fine and only a small group is responsible. If division is what it cost to change the whole population so be it. I only refrain division with relatives and coworkers (except of course those that like engaged didcussion). But division inside a nation or in the world is necessary if we hope to change.
Population that are very very similar in opinion it looks to me are the population we find in authoritarian country, not democracies
We're so easy to divide I can't even blame them for dividing us..
See evil but have no option that is any less evil.
I think you might be shocked by just how much people order amazon, regardless of what other places they have to shop. I'm sure for some people in some locations they have limited options... But around here that's not the case, yet I still see homes that order hundreds of things on amazon every month.
You must live in the suburbs. Around here everyone paying bills
Very rare though for most use. Any item I need to buy I always found a competition. Of course there must be some things people can't find elsewhere but that doesn't justify for most people
Recently I bought a part for a manual tire changer. I bought it from the manufacturer website instead of amazon. It was delivered by amazon in a amazon box. It was three dollars cheaper though.
You don’t need daily deliveries from Amazon. There are plenty of local options for most everything. I’ve driven for Amazon (or rather, a DSP) twice in my life and those are the only jobs I’ve walked out on without notice. You start to realize there are people who order 10-20 packages DAILY. It’s actually fucking insane. To claim you can’t find something you need locally or can’t buy online direct is 10000% a lie if you live in the USA.
I don't get daily delivers from anyone. There is exactly one semi independent grocery store left around here and I go by weekly but they do not carry everything I need so I'm forced to use walmart. I get from amazon what I can't get locally for a decent price. Which is pretty much everything since the local parts stores and such mark their products up one to two hundred percent. The nearest Costco which I am a member is a 90 minute drive away. So don't call me a liar if you don't live where I do. Or do but know I don't give a shit what you have to say.
10-20 packages is high but do you know if they were contractors? Doing some renovation? Maybe own their own company they run out of their home? Im not defending Amazon here I hate how their run and treat employees, but its a systemic problem, Amazons not run differently from any other distribution center or retail job, and ive had several coworks say they miss driving for Amazon over working retail
Secondly yea, local stores exist, they almost never have the things your looking for ontop of insanely high prices. A lot of people I work with cant afford the gas to get to the store, much less paying their premiums. I hate buying things online but I literally cannot afford to shop in person especially when much higher quality items are half the price online. I buy off Ebay or secondhand when I can, and I dont want to support these billionaires, but often reality just doesnt work out
buying local?
Oh walmart sure if I have to.
You can usually buy things directly from a company's website rather than going through Amazon, if you need to have something shipped.
Why don't you look at the rest of my comments to see what happened the last time I did that. Which was less than two weeks ago. I did save three bucks but now I'm being pestered with spam emails and texts from these yahoo's trying to sell me something else.
Yeah my bad for not reading the rest of the thread.
You're absolutely right to push back. Obviously we should all just give up and capitulate to Amazon because some companies ship through them.
Your absolutely right.
Most people I know just don't think it's evil
I'm in very rural Japan. I almost never buy from amazon anymore, but sometimes there is nowhere else without spending the equivalent of hundreds of dollars to get to Tokyo or somewhere and get back. Add 12+ hours of driving if it's something big enough that I need my car (and all highways between us are toll roads). It's been months since I bought anything from them, but it does occasionally happen.
Don't play into this deviding bullshit. The consumer does not hold enough power just through consumption.
You don't need to explain yourself instead Talk about the structural problems that actually keep these businesses alive.
Yep. I live in a very rural northern part of the US. It's the same for me. If I don't use amazon, I have no access to 3/4 of the things most of these people take for granted.
My website renewal was up and I discovered meanwhile that Wix is an Israeli company. Migrating everything and redesigning the website on wordpress was not something I looked forward to but you gotta do what you gotta do.
Good on you. I think the only effective boycotting we have right now is the official BDS boycott list. They great news is everyone on it is pretty demonstrably awful.
For some items there is no longer a choice. Amazon is the only supplier. Sometimes Walmart. It's is amazing how many things we have had to go without over the last year because I refuse to buy from Amazon. I will try to go directly to the manufacturer after finding the item on Amazon but sometimes that isn't possible. It has had the distinct advantage of cutting my disposable spending, so I guess that is a bonus.
Thankfully I can avoid Amazon and still get everything I want or need in 2-3 days.
Do you have a specific example?
Also not the person you replied to, but I bought something from a private webshop, paid thru that website and was issued a receipt from them, only to receive an amazon box with an amazon shipping label a week later. Sometimes you won't know until you know.
On multiple occasions, I have gone directly to the supplier only to have the products show up in Amazon packaging and delivered by an Amazon driver. Off the top of my head, a robovac from Eufy and athletic shoes from a local shoe store chain. The shoes really fucking pissed me off because I actually went to the physical store so I could "support local", but my feet are an "unusual" size, so I had very few options outside their online stock. And ordered through the in store system, but the shoes were still delivered by Amazon, except I didn't get the easy return options that I would've had if I just ordered from Amazon to begin with.
Some examples?
I work in IT My job is at some point going to rely on me knowing Amazon web services. I'd rather put a loaded gun in my mouth and blow my brains all over the roof than deal with anything Amazon.
I feel the same about Apple and Disney.
I have a very personal vendetta against amazon and due to the nature of my job, I've just had to separate work from personal in that nature. As much as it sucked
AWS: Ass With Shit
Seriously though, I feel like AWS obfuscates the idea of "software runs on a remote server" to an unnecessary degree, including terms. (Maybe I am not experienced enough yet, or have not drank the kool-aid)
The only workloads that get value from AWS are hyperscale application delivery and big data computation and research and if you are doing those things you're probably already a shitty business with no ethics. Normal people don't need it and shouldn't use it.
I've been laid off and my alternative was to relocate to [insert place whete there's been recent news stories about controversial land use] and effectively head the logistics for the construction of [insert tech project that has been drawing a lot of figurative and literal fire].
I decided to look for the bag elsewhere.
Meanwhile most everything on Amazon is on aliexpress for half the price, and Taobao for a quarter of the price.
dry/canned food is usually cheaper and in more variety on Amazon than at local grocery stores, and I lwouldn't trust AliExpress with food
And the EU have blanket taxed everything from there; now I have to buy of Amazon to avoid the taxes.
Which feels like it was the goal of those tariffs.
Europe fucking over its own people at the behest of American corporations?
I'm shocked.
At least Amazon is local seller while Aliexpress and Taobao is 100% from china. If getting stuff cheap is your goal regardless the long term economic impact, go for it.
Edit: on the other hand, Taobao/aliexpress might actually have the thing you want that you can't find in Amazon.
A local seller who did the work of buying it off Alibaba, and making sure Jeff Bezos gets his cut.
I wish everything are that simple.
Get back to your grad, janker
If I had the appropriate reactions to all the shit that goes on, I'd be in the street screaming every day of the week.
Unfortunately, I like having a comfortable shelter, and spend all that time instead working a boring job against compensation.
This sucks.
::: spoiler Attempt at clearing my name At least I don't have a prime account and don't shop on Amazon (with a few cheat items / years, I gotta admit).
I dropped Windows for Linux last year and frankly no Rugrats .
I left all Meta platforms two years ago. Still haven't recovered socially, even my family often forget to send me invites to gatherings. Worth it still.
I'm trying to cut Google. I've switch to proton mail and give it as my new email nowadays, but fuck me, I don't feel like going through the process of making sure I have everyone my new email, change all my accounts, etc, so I'm taking my time sunsetting it. However I built myself a home server with an old computer, and managed to use Nextcloud+ Memories, replacing my use of Google photo / Drive / calendar.
Also got rid of Netflix and Spotify, using Jellyfin and Navidrome instead.
I ain't perfect but I'm trying, people. :::
Set up your gmail to have a mail forwarding rule, so that any message it receives gets forwarded to your new address. After switching over your more major things, all you need to do is keep an eye out for things that have been forwarded from your old gmail, and switch them over when you notice one. Eventually, very little will be going through your gmail anymore. Even then, it's not a terrible idea to leave it open and still forwarding, just in case someone important tries contacting you there years later. But with this forwarding strategy, you can pretty quickly get it so that 90% of your messages don't go through gmail anymore. While cutting google out of your life completely would be ideal, reducing usage and reducing what they have access to is still a good thing.
actually a good plan. I had resisted setting up forwarding because I felt it was just getting my Gmail emails with more steps, but I guess I stopped thinking after the first step, huh.
"I have a mortgage to pay" is the 21st century version of "I was only following orders".
And it will bear as much weight in the Nuremberg Trials Volume 2: Electric Bugaloo.
So, enlighten me how I can go scream in the street and manage to survive long enough for it to actually matter AND not become a homeless, medication-less wretch. you seem to have it figured out.
Cool story bro.
You know it was your government that published the manual on how you can do that, right?
Provincial or Federal? Seems like they haven't sent this one to us directly, but I'll take a link to that manual.
(Also, nice way to move the goal post without answering the question. You wouldn't be a hypocrite who preaches what they don't follow themselves, are you?)
OSS Simple Sabotage Field Manual.
It's been doing the rounds since Don Don turned the White House into an overt criminal enterprise.
You must have missed the ".ca" at the end of my instance then, buddy. Also, isn't that the one that teaches how to do simple sabotage at your place of employment? I don't see how I can help by sabotaging a learning management system used by schools and individual giving seminars, but I guess I'm just lacking in the creativity department.
Yes, I did, sorry. And yes, you seem to be.
Yeah sure dude i am sure you are fighting really well in your fantasyworld where people don't need food and shelter.
Guess I'll just go be homeless and die in the winter then, eh? But at least nobody will blame me in the eventual hypothetical trials.
You'd be surprised about what you can live without. It's just inconvenient to change a couple of habits. And most people won't be inconvenienced to think for a minute about what they actually need and what alternatives they have.
"Guess I'll just go be homeless and die in the winter then, eh? But at least nobody will judge me for scheduling the trains to Auschwitz."
I like to think if a huge amount of people stopped using amazon, meta, google, and Microsoft products we would at least get some power back from billionaire scum.
People can't though. They are fucking addicted and will not change no matter what happens. And ive given up trying to explain why they need to change their ways because they dont listen anyways.
I genuinely believe that if you want to completely distance yourself from all of these companies and completely insulate yourself from their actions, you're just going to have to cancel your internet subscription. Full on local net only. Or just throw yoyr comp in the river.
Or make all tech companies public, but we're not there yet.
Pretty much. But people dont even attempt to try at ALL.
So you've met the median voter.
Honestly though don't get too caught up in it. It's the same as paper straws, a lot of this is constructed to make you feel like personal consumption has any leverage on any of this when the real consuming powers have nothing to do with us at all. You think Amazon gives a shit about a Prime subscription when AWS is taking a cut of every circular A.I. transaction that's quickly trying to crash the economy into the ground?
Just don't stress youself out about it, and don't judge anyone too harshly. Unless they're a real asshole about it.
Yep I get it. Just like I really try not to waste as much as possible and recycle what I possibly can and all but theres just some shit in plastic you have to throw (like wrapping on vegetables or meat packs etc). I hate doing it but theres no alternatives other than eating a cab of beans every single day for the rest of my life, and I'm not going to do that while the billionaires take jets to epstein island 3 times a day.
Okay good that's totally reasonable. Been running into people who seem dead set on social and mental suicide because they think giving anyone money means you've adopted the entirety of their morals as well. Not great.
Yeah its not worth going to those extremes. Like anyone else I'm selfish. Of course all of us going to live in caves would be far better for the environment but no one is doing that.
Dude I would totally return to subsistence farming and taking a mule drawn cart to town if it meant I got to keep my internet connection and modern plumbing. The only thing keeping me from it now is property value inflation and the speculative housing market.
IIRC, most of their revenue these days is from cloud services and not their retail/media.
It's not the 2-day delivery that gets me. Fuck that shit, I can wait. I'm just too damn poor to ignore when something is 10% to 15% cheaper on Amazon than anywhere else I can find it.
(That said, I rarely buy anything at all new. I only do this when it's something I can't find used or make myself.)
For a while there I was just upset when I'd order off a third party/manufacturer's site, they used Amazon to handle sales.
Now everyone's moved to Shopify and that's it's own convo nobody's ready for yet.
I think we're all going to eventually have to come to terms with the fact that any internet use is going to imply complicity.
There is no ethical consumption under capitalism. And yet, you must consume some just to survive.
Best we can do is minimize consumption. Recycle, reuse, buy used, make it yourself, steal it if you can get away with it. And when all else fails, then buy from the shitty megacorps.
You know I keep telling people this and they get mad at me. I have vices for sure but I don't consume anything that doesn't have either a: the ability to keep me alive for another week or so, or b: is currently part of a web of things that keep me sane and feeling like I cal scrounge some joy out of this life. All of which comes from some dark, questionable feed hopper of capitalism.
And every site that's not Amazon charges you a lot for shipping
It's like this with Discord now.
People are the same about YouTube. They hate the treatment of creators, the content theft that is rampant and almost encouraged by YouTube, and the colossal mountain of AI slop content-
But they lose their shit when you so much as suggest they stop using it.
"Stop using Amazon/YouTube, just use <small service without the things you're looking for> instead" is just empty nagging.
No, it’s how change is made. But you do you.
Change is made through infrastructure.
Consumer choice was always a mirage
Change is made through activism and self-advocacy. Companies won’t produce what people don’t consume.
There isn’t going to be an excuse to continue feeding YouTube. We will have to agree to disagree on this.
Change of what?
This thread is full of excuses
It wasn’t before you showed up.
I don't lose my shit about it; I just point out the catch 22:
Creators don't want to leave their established bases, and viewers are gonna go where the creators are.
Get some big creators to move somewhere, anywhere, else and their fans will follow and likely cause a domino effect with other creators. Yelling at the viewers ain't gonna help a damn thing. There's basically no content elsewhere. We need to yell at the creators.
Boycotting YouTube outright will not hurt Google nearly as much as it would hurt the creators you are trying to help out.
A lot of the documentary YouTubers created Nebula and run stuff there and on YouTube.
Nobody (statistically speaking) is moving to Nebula.
People are just too damned lazy.
Nebula is small, it still only has a tiny fraction of the YouTube library, and you have to pay to access it up front.
Also, near non-existent marketing budget. People can't be expected to magically inuit the existence of an alternative platform. At some point, you need to advertise your existence and get your content creators to do the same.
The only creator I've ever heard mention Nebula even once was Abigail Thorn. And even she only talked about it during a couple of projects from years back.
Everyone who is anyone in the indie space just goes with Patreon instead.
If people left YouTube, the creators leave YouTube. That’s how it works. This cyclical Stockholm Syndrome only benefits YouTube.
And, it’s not about hurting them. It’s about not support them. When people learn this, meaningful things happen.
I barely use YouTube at all anymore. But I'm also shelling out north of $50/mo on various artists on Patreon.
I don't really expect other people to follow suit, if they don't have that kind of disposable income.
Incidentally, I also have a subscription to Amazon Prime and HBO Max. The first, because Amazon is functionally the USPS at this point. The second, because I get it free through my ISP.
I'm not going to cancel either one of them, any more than I'm going to give up my car to protest the fossil fuel industry.
Good on ya for supporting content creators, I’ve done this a few times myself a while back (won’t do it anymore), however- nothing will ever change so long as people keep showing YouTube that they’re okay with things as they are by helping bump up their numbers.
Selective activism and cherry-picking isn’t going to move the needle. Strength of conviction, and an adherence to standards will.
The people "using" YouTube in the economic sense aren't the viewers, they're the advertisers.
Neither is stomping your foot and being mad at the anonymous video consumer or ad firm.
Might as well get angry about people watching the Super Bowl or the next big Marvel Movie.
If you want to advocate for an actual alternative thing, go for it. But just arguing in the negative is hollow, especially when you're arguing with a statistical person rather than an actual audience.
Okay “statistical person”. Have a nice day.
I'm sort of guilty of this. Id love to switch to something else but no where has anything close to the content. I was going to switch to twitch for streaming but that's fucking Amazon as well.
I mean. I just stopped using it. The same as I did with Facebook and Twitter. Boycotting is boycotting. Either one stands on their principles and backs up their beliefs and standards, or they just like saying they do because it makes them look good.
It’s not supposed to be convenient. It’s supposed to be effective. If you use their platform, you support their practices. Period. That’s how it is.
I can’t say how many times I suggested people stop using that shit in comments on posts where people do nothing but whine about how fucking abysmally shitty YouTube is. And when I do- I get;
“But where else can I go to see muh vidyos?!”
Nowhere.
These people need to be introduced to the hard truth and reality of what boycotting really means. Or they need to get off the pot.
This right here.
I'm doing "elbows up". No money I have knowingly flows to an American company or individual. Period. And I do my due diligence: I try to find the goods that are American but branded locally.
Is it inconvenient? Fuck yes! But you know what's more inconvenient? Funding the economy of the nation that is actively attacking mine.
And another fantastic point! Absolutely well said my friend!
And I’ll add-
Not enough people walk the walk at all anymore. If the endorphins are received, and the clout is favorable enough, all it takes are words, because words are all someone needs nowadays to convince others. All that’s required is to just shout into the void that you hate a thing. Then, just Hoover up the validation of your peers, and you’re free to then continue consuming said thing.
When people grow some balls and lean what strength of conviction is, things will change. But right now, Toutube knows they own these clowns and they don’t have the balls to walk away.
I think you need some education on the matter since a "boycott" by individuals is not putting any real pressure on anyone without the numbers and a plan behind it. That is just the truth. That you don't like it changes nothing.
I highly doubt you are boycotting every single evil corp out there so just like so many you draw the line at your own feet for no reason
Its more important to you to tell everyone how pure YOU are and how stupid they are instead of putting any real effort behind your "boycotting"
I get that its very frustrating watching people throwing money at all these horrible people but the reality is that those horrible people prefere us being mad at each other and you are doing their bidding by playing this game.
We really need to be more pragmatic about this. You can shop at amazon and at the same time support every single regulation against them. We don't have a youtube or amazon problem we have a structural problem and this doesn't go away no matter how much you don't use either of them.
You don’t know shit about me kid. But I know you like to make a lot of assumptions.
Ask Kentucky bourbon manufacturers how the Canadian boycott of their product is going. Or ask California wineries. Or ask pretty much every major tourist site in the USA how pissing off Canadians has worked out for them. Or ... well, the list is long. I'll let you look it up.
It is the concerted action of millions of individuals drawing a line in the sand that kills these fuckers.
Those examples proof my point though? It was a WHOLE COUNTRY organizing a boycott where even the industry is in in it with a specific goal and easily available alternatives with very little discomfort. Its not all american products either.
So you have a big enough number of people all at once who are pissed of enough that they are willing to join and i remind you not because they morally object what the US does to other peoole but because they threatened war and imposed tarifs hurting them directly a lot very fast. I also highly doubt that this boycott started by canadians shaming each other into boycotting.
Single individuals not using a product and the "organizing" being limited by just telling others they are not living by their principles by using it lacks any real world impact. And i am not even disagreeing that we should consume as ethically as possible i am saying looking at it from a pragmatic point of view that just shaming people is doing nothing objectivly.
For a real world example where moral "boycotting" worked was the Dunnes Store Strike but again it wasn't people shaming others into not buying south african goods it was a whole organisation (the union) directing their workers to not handle it and the punishment of the workers got others to join and put pressure on the governtment to finally stop importing goods from south africa. Without a strong union support and focus on a direct goal this wouldn't have worked at all.
We should talk about real life examples that worked and what they had in common and from there organize stragetic boycotts where there is a goid chance of winning not picking things we personally don't need or want to use and pretending we are morally superior to others who have on principle the same goals we do.
I haven't seen people losing their shit for it, other than the one suggesting it are being absolutely asshole about it. Telling people of an alternative is significantly better than telling them to simply stop using it. If there's a local Amazon competitor you bet people gonna jump ship. Same for yt + ytm.
Y'all could, you know, just stop buying so much crap. Just sayin'.
Maybe learn the difference between "need" and "want"? That's a good place to start.
Yep. More important than where you buy things is how much you buy. Best we can do is just boycott everything. Keep your overall economic participation to a minimum.
And when you must buy, try first to do direct local dealings instead of going through middlemen.
I buy my tea from the people growing it, not from some massive repackager and brander, for example.
It's not always possible, but it's possible more often than people think and you tend to get better stuff at a lower price anyway.
some people have impulse control problems, so that's a very bold thing to say on a brand new account
the solution is almost never to shame people
Impulse control problems are induced by the societies we live in, especially by marketing. While you are right to refuse to shame those victim of such, which we all are at different degrees, I think the advice to force ourself to reconsider our needs before buying is a good one. Isn't it?
that's true, i just wanted to point out that the real evil are the companies that abuse our deficiencies
I miss the days of "allow 6-8 weeks for delivery".
It still exists. Everything I order comes takes days or even weeks to arrive. Just don't pay for express shipping or don't use a service that has a membership.
As a Canadian, I am shopping local where I can, national where I cannot, Europe/UK if it's specialty or China/eBay/Kijiji/other scumbags if it's okay to get used/open-box/junk quality. Basically anywhere but America. It's working pretty well so far. I do miss the convenience of having everything in one place at Amazon, but local suppliers have been outstanding if you go to the effort of finding them.
I love the bigoted equation of China with "junk quality".
As a Canadian, I'm watching to see when Canada wakes the fuck up and understands its WAY behind the times.
If you're just making that point as an aside, I agree with you.
For the record, I did not equate them at all, and I would not intend to. If that's how you read my comment then you're misreading it.
Then I misread it. Apologies.
Apology humbly accepted, and I'm sorry for my part if I sounded a bit defensive (I was). That is such a lovely, non-confrontational response, though, it warms my cold barren heart a little. It is the opposite of what most of the internet's social media has conditioned all of us for, so thank you for making this little corner of the world a little better and nicer place today.
buys the absolute cheapest thing
waow this 200USD lawnmower dressed up like a motorcycle is worse than a 30,000USD Panigale. I guess China only produces junk.
I tried to find a chinese equivalent but the cheapest Panigale is double the price of the most expensive chinese sportsbike, and is only a v2.
The closest to an apples-to-apples comparison at the same price point I could find was a SRK 921 RR vs cbr650r.
This. Exactly this. With Chinese goods, as with any goods, you get what you pay for. If you're only willing to pay a buck, you get a buck's worth of goods.
When I was a kid, "Made in Japan" was a joke way of saying "low-quality, crappy goods". Of course even when I was a kid the reality was way in advance of popular culture; people were citing a '50s joke in the '70s. Japanese industry had already woken up and was making high quality electronics and mid-quality cars, the latter easily the equal in terms of reliability and durability of the rolling piles of rust that American cars had become by that point. By the '80s American cars were such an embarrassment that my father swore off of them for the rest of his life, buying only Japanese or German from then on, starting by ditching a Chrysler and replacing it with a Nissan at the time. I also lived through the "Made in Taiwan" jokes and "Made in Korea" jokes because people never learn from getting bitten on the ass by their bigotry. (You want a REAL joke? "Made in Germany" was a forced label to protect British subjects from cheap German knock-offs. How well did that age?)
That being said, a lot of the stuff made in China, when you're willing to shell out real dollars instead of dollar store junk, is cheaper than goods of equivalent capability and quality made in the west. It's really hard to beat the sheer scale of industry in China. So not only do you get what you pay for, you get more than what you'd pay for at that price in the west.
Now I can't talk about Chinese bikes because motorcycles aren't really a thing here, so you're not likely to see a lot of stuff in that realm that's comparable. I can talk about electric cars, however. Like how the bare-bones Xiaomi SU7 is priced below a Tesla Model 3 and performs like a mid-range sport car. Oh, also has a longer range than a Model 3 Long Range because of course.
Or how the SU7 Max is a car that can sit in the mid-range Porsche territory for performance for a significantly lower price. It can walk away from a base Porsche Taycan for a fraction of the price, and indeed can keep a Taycan turbo guessing for a much smaller fraction of the price.
And then we get the new SU7 Ultra which needs a fully-kitted Taycan Super Turbo GT to come close to it, and even then it's down to the driver who wins. The SU7 Ultra set a record for the fastest electric executive vehicle around the Nürburgring Nordschleife. For a third the price of the Porsche. It took a special kitting (the Manthey-kitting) of a Taycan STGT to take that record back. The SU7 Ultra was stock. I could buy one right now if I had $88,000 to throw away.
Sports cars not your jam? BYD, without even touching their Denza, Fang Cheng Bao, and Yang Wang specialty sub-brands (premium luxury, professional/personalized, and ultra luxury respectively) has something that will compete successfully with every price point of most western consumer EVs, usually at a lower cost. And if you hit the sub-brands, it's got shit you've never seen before. Like the Yang Wang SUV that can do tank turns and launches a paired drone from a roof enclosure so you can take auto-guided video of your adventures climbing mountains in an overdressed car or whatever.
Cars in general not your jam? How 'bout phones? You know how everybody's going gaga over Apple's new foldable? The iPhone Duo starts at $1,999. Meanwhile, Samsung launched the first mainstream foldable seven years ago in 2019—and yes, it was not very durable. But Chinese phone makers haven't been sitting idle either. Xiaomi, Huawei, Oppo, Honor, and Vivo all have foldables on the market, many of them years ahead of Apple's entry. Most undercut Apple significantly. Huawei, notably, doesn't—it competes at the top end rather than on value. They've been iterating on the hinge and crease problems for years while Apple was still figuring out how to make one fold.
Do I even need to mention drones (and paying 2-3× as much for a lesser drone)? Solar cells? Batteries (BYD and CATL)? Home appliances (Haier/Hisense and Midea)? E-bikes?
Anybody who still holds the "Chinese cheap junk" meme in their head is as ignorant as they are bigoted. You get what you pay for. And in the case of many Chinese goods you get MORE than what you pay for against western prices because of the sheer scale of operations.
Question, does the design of chinese cars come off as sorta well, soulless?
Like by performance metrics and features, CFmoto/QJmotors blows anything similarly priced out of the water, but nothing really feels like a passion project of the engineers, they all look like "just another bike" or a bizarre mix of aesthetics.
I don't really pay attention to chinese electrics, though I've riden in a few.
I like the designs of the firms like Xiaomi, Zeekr, NIO, and others like that better than their western counterparts for the most part. I find it particularly bizarre that a country with five thousand years of sophisticated arts behind it is being called "soulless" by westerners, mind, so I'm probably not in the market to answer your question.
Oddly, I find all of Tesla's offerings "soulless" and devoid of any passion (or sense of quality; they're utter garbage in construction). And I haven't seen an American car of any kind I liked since the late-'60s, early-'70s cars like the GTO or Mustang. I did like '70s and early-'80s BMW aesthetics, but when they moved away from their Bauhaus aesthetic I lost interest. They just started looking like every other car. "Organic". They lost anything resembling an identity and could easily, if you needed glasses but forgot them, be confused with a pedestrian Buick or the like.
Similar things started happening with all the European cars outside of Italy and Britain. Then Britain fell.
I also can't help but notice that "soulless" was thrown at every upstart that came into the western markets. First Japanese cars. Then Korean cars. Now Chinese ones. I'm not saying there's a pattern here. But I'm also not not saying it.
I don't remember Japanese cars ever being called soulless.
I heard of them being called low quality, but the designs were always iconic.
As far as Tesla goes, they are Elon Musk's passion. Its a stupid vision carried out suprisingly competently given the task of adhering to a passionless non-expert's whims.
I find it bizarre to experience. I basically live there when I'm not in Vietnam or Japan, so its not that I don't want to like them, but none of bikes I've seen have stirred anything in me.
The architecture and urban design I see in public places has more creativity and passion often in the designer's vision amd much moreso in the way they've been able to carry it out than anywhere I've been in America or Japan, but there's often a certain coldness to public spaces, like the space wasn't made for me.
You weren't around in the '70s apparently.
What I'm reading here is "I don't know the design language, so it's soulless".
Of course I have no meaningful opinion on motorcycles. They're really not a thing here. I see maybe one motorcycle a week. So it could very possibly be that they're not well-designed. But the cars? Sorry. Here I just hard disagree. It's not styled like a western car would be, but that's the design language at work.
Yeah, but the other options are just as responsible and reprehensible. Be it Target, or the Waltons...
Yup, no ethical consumption in capitalism.
Pick and choose your poison. Be sure to cost them money where you can too.
Right on
Gotta cure the disease, not complain about the symptom. Amazon is the disease, the consumer is just the symptom.
Amazon is also a symptom. The actual disease is capitalism, or any socio-economic system that allows individuals to own the means of production.
Why don't you just transcend the system you're in and create your own existence-illusion complex if you know so much? Just go be your own independent phenomenon in another plane of causality if you don't want what my cowboy bebop boomerang be housing in server flier, y'know?
Normalize calling this treason. That's what it is at this point.
If I'm not mistaken, the retail thing has real thin margins, and they make all their money on their web services.
Now that I think of it, you could probably figure out what products they take a strategic loss on, and buy a bunch as a form of ironically-consumerist praxis.
Their most profitable business by margin is “advertising” (or sponsored/enshittified search results), and seller fees (which are typically 40-50% of item cost) are a massive profit center too.
They mostly stopped selling loss makers (like heavy liquid beverages) or hiked the prices on them (like after they drove Diapers.com out of business) years ago.
"Mostly" just sounds like a challenge, tbh
Also people ignore that they are providing services for the sellers themselves, not just the consumers. For some people they just rather you buy their shit off Amazon, because they ship them the bulk goods and forget the consumers exist.
Amazon handles everything and provides a real service to those businesses, even if they're overall the big evil Amazon. They managed to automate the fuck out of the online marketplace so they do that for everyone.
Otherwise you have to make a website, take online orders, process shipments, handle warehousing, process returns... Amazon became the de facto middleman by turning every business into the same day shipping sort of business.
I don't hate them for doing that. But I do think they're a symptom of a bigger disease in America.