Is boycotting mars going to make even the slightest difference? Not in a million years.

Claiming boycotts don’t work is as good as claiming voting doesn’t work. It works in numbers.

Not only does mars probably own more companies than you even realise, including many of the alternatives you’re buying thinking you’re avoiding them,

Have a look at this infographic:

I have been boycotting everything in that graphic except “Associated British Foods plc” for the past 15 years because I pay attention and I have collected copious dirt on those companies. They are rotten to the core. I could probably find dirt on ABF if I searched for it specifically, but they are likely the lesser of evils and patronizing the lesser of evils is what ethical consumers do.

but even the products you do buy that are coming from a different company altogether, suffer from the exact same background problems (exploitation, oppression, unsustainability, lobbying).

This is the classic “they’re all evil” excuse for not doing your duty as an ethical consumer in favor of putting price and value above ethics in the interest of № 1. Corpations are not equals in the slightest. If you do a bit of research, you find that the smaller companies are much less frequently involved in wrongdoing. I keep a list of the scandals of these companies and it’s clear which ones do the lion’s share of harm.

There is good reason for the saying “no ethical consumption under capitalism”,

From that article:

“It is now 2018. People have “gone green”, eaten vegan, shopped “fair-trade”, and recycled for years now. Yet the atrocities that spurned the ethical consumption movement continue unabated. ”

Yikes. That author does not know what was abated because he only looks around at what he sees now. So because there are still problems, Olive Pape concludes “boycotting doesn’t work”, instead of realizing that boycotting works in numbers.

I boycott the worst of the worst with no expectation that my drop in the ocean makes a significant difference (just like my drop in the ocean vote makes no significant difference in an election). I do it to ensure that I am not part of the problem.

Stop being a part of the problem and favor the lesser of evils in the marketplace instead of taking the best deal that benefits you personally.

it’s to abolish capitalism because it requires and encourages all of the unethical practices you’re looking to avoid, in order to exist.

That kind of unhinged stance may be accurate, but we don’t live in an abolished capitalism world. Abolition of capitalism is a separate action entirely that’s not mutually exclusive to ethical consumption. You can dream about anarchy all you want but those dreams are actually not “going to make even the slightest difference… Not in a million years.” So in the meantime, please consume ethically.

The fun aspect to this is that some banks have forced customers to use an Android for all their banking ops. So:

① You’re late paying a bill
② Creditor locks your phone
③ You cannot access your bank to make the payment because your phone is locked

Brilliant.

it would be more usable if the left column were locked so you don’t lose it when scrolling horizontally. Same for the top row.

“Email / Phone required for signup” ← these are on two very different levels of intrusiveness.. really needs to split into two rows. And from there, it’s interesting to know whether a phone must be a mobile phone or not. With email, it’s interesting to know if disposable addresses are blocked or not.

Also, for “decentralized network” for #Signal, you simply have “no”. I would change that to “No (Amazon)” to inform people they are feeding Amazon by using Signal.

In fact I suggest also adding a row: “feeds a tech giant” because privacy from tech giants is not the only factor -- some of us trying to live ethically do not want to even feed privacy offending tech giants, such as:

• Amazon
• Microsoft
• Google
• Cloudflare
• Apple
• Facebook

And as someone else pointed out, Delta Chat is missing.

Nonetheless, the complaint was an important factor here.

IMO not enough people complain. I’m ½ tempted to setup a system that mass prints postcards complaining about the countless enshitification of websites.

wtf, why is this a graphical image instead of actual text? It’s like saying fuck the blind users and fuck those who are on measured rate internet connections. Lemmy is broken. Curl -LI falsely gives a content length of zero, so we must decide whether to download an image without knowing its size. Really fucking sucks when it’s a graphic of just text.

from the article:

In short, using Discord for your free software/open source (FOSS) software project is a very bad idea. Free software matters — that’s why you’re writing it, after all. Using Discord partitions your community on either side of a walled garden, with one side that’s willing to use the proprietary Discord client, and one side that isn’t. It sets up users who are passionate about free software — i.e. your most passionate contributors or potential contributors — as second-class citizens.

Interesting to do a “s/Discord/Github/” replace on the above. Same situation yet hardly anyone gives a shit.

So yes, Drew DeVault is right. But he overestimates people’s commitment to free world digital rights principles and consistency thereof.

It’s in the GDPR jurisdiction but Reddit accounts are anonymous AFAIK. IMO the GDPR does not protect anonymous data.

/cc @[email protected]

I must say Paypal shares customer data with over 600 corporations among other scummy things, so I boycott them. I also boycott eBay because the javascript required to use their website port sniffs your LAN and feeds that back to them, apart from other evils.

But most importantly, I’m not necessarily worried that I would personally get burnt by this. But just like my unwillingness to buy an Intel CPU with a management engine (or AMD’s flavor of this), I am unwilling to buy a product that was designed to work against me. I do not want to finance anti-consumer suppliers. ATM I don’t know how to check whether my version of AOS has this “feature”.

(BTW, I’m not the OP; I just linked their post here)

There really needs to be a resource where data subjects can pool their evidence and collaborate on GDPR actions against common data controllers.

If the creditor wants to collect on a debt, there is a court process for that. I’ve used it. It works.

Locking the phone is not repossession. It does nothing other than sabotage the device the consumer may need to actually make the payment. The phone remains in the buyer’s possession and useless to the seller.

Power is also misplaced. What happens when the creditor decides to (illegally) refuse cash payments on the debt? Defaulting is not necessarily the debtor’s fault. This in fact happened to me: Creditor refused my cash payment and dragged me into court for delinquency. Judge ruled in my favor because cash acceptance is an obligation. But this law is being disregarded by creditors all over. If the creditor had the option to sabotage my lifestyle by blocking communication and computing access, it would have been a greater injustice.

#WarOnCash

This has nothing to do with Google.

Google welded anti-consumer logic into the kernel. Of course that’s on Google. Just like Intel started making CPUs with a management engine that can only work against non-corporate consumers, basically saying fuck the individuals’ needs.. putting individuals at unconscionable risk without their knowledge or consent.

Consumers have decisions to make. Is a consumer happy to feed a supplier who sells them something that works against them? Some are. I’m not. Going forward they fail to earn my business because they have too many masters.

You going to ditch Linux because they support remote management too?

Linux is not locked down. Users can remove anything they want from it.

I don’t think a car-free city actually exists. The article mentions Copenhagen:

“[London] has avoided the kind of outright car bans seen elsewhere in Europe, such as in Copenhagen”

I’ve been to Copenhagen. There are cars throughout the city. There are some cycle-only paths that connect to intersections with cars. I cycled along side cars all over the city. Apparently Wired is calling car-reduced cities and cities with small car-free regions a “car-free city”.

Exceptionally, Brussels is a car-free city but for only one day out of the year. And car-free day falls on a Sunday. On that day it becomes illegal to drive a car in the city center without a special pass after showing you have good reason to use a car on that day. But even on that day, the outer region of Brussels is unaffected.

If they want my face that bad they should at least give me a free M&M for it. They need to add a button “push this for a free M&M if you consent to giving us your face”.

The real problem with @[email protected]’s comment was to blame the victim. It may be sensible to blame the victim, but let’s not lose focus on the perp.

Right, so e-mail address together with IP address would then make the e-mail that of an identifiable user under Art.4(1). So the OP needs to find out if an IP address was logged and retained in connection with the email address.

If you don’t control it, you don’t own it.

You might want to crosspost your story to ![email protected]. But if you do that be clever with your phrasing so as to not seem to be asking for advice, but rather for information. E.g. is there any case law for this situation..

(I’m assuming you’re in the UK because other commenters focused on UK law)

You can check it’s installed (stock android) Settings > Apps > All Apps > three dot menu, Show system > search “DeviceLockController”.

Is that just a “feature” of recent AOS versions? AOS 5’s triple dot menu has nothing like “show system”.

Ebikes and electric devices, however, sound to me like something futuristic

There are kits enabling you to convert a muscle bike (push bike) into an e-bike. If you get one with a torque sensor, then it will detect how hard you push on the pedals and drive the motor proportional to that force. So you still must pedal but it amplifies your effort which preserves the natural feel and control of pedaling. It essentially makes the hills go away; a hilly place becomes a flat place.

The GDPR is a not a directive. It’s a regulation. Nontheless, I read that the GDPR was specifically mirrored into UK law with a couple minor modifications.

But to answer @[email protected], AFAIK the #GDPR does not apply in this situation anyway because Reddit accounts are “anonymous”. The GDPR only protects identified people.

/cc @[email protected]