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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 20th, 2023

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  • They are definitely both pretty terrible, pick your poison I guess. Apple will gouge your eyes out with overpriced hardware and Alphabet (Google) will spy and you and sell your data. I don’t like either, but faced with the choice I’d rather pay more for my phone and avoid Google’s surveillance capitalism empire as much as possible. If you don’t mind advertisements and privacy isn’t important Google is probably a better choice.




  • Better to De-Google sooner rather than later imho and it’s fairly safe to assume corporate greed will continue to send it’s products and services deeper into the abyss. I think using alternatives now will make life easier in the future as Google becomes less useful with each passing day. Also, just using Google gives them access to personal data to harvest and ad revenue. I think we should try to be conscientious consumers whenever possible and use less evil alternatives. I don’t want to support Google’s enshitification of the Internet, censorship, anti-competitive practices, etc…



  • Windows 11 is also much better at collecting personal data with improved analytics and Microsoft spyware running under the hood. Not to mention it’s superiority at serving advertisements and embedding them in nearly every aspect of the UI.

    It’s doubtful that Microsoft shareholders have meetings about how to improve the user experience of their OS. I think they are more concerned with extracting every penny they can designing the most efficient backend to harvest data and push ads, kinda like our friends at Alphabet, Microsoft is trying so desperately to emulate.







  • Sometimes moneygrubbing shareholders do us a favor by steering companies into implementing terrible policies. If Reddit wouldn’t have been so greedy with it’s treatment of third-party app developers most of use wouldn’t be on Lemmy right now. If Microsoft forces Windows users to pay a subscription I think it sends more people away from closed-source garbage and into the arms of the open source community. I’ve enjoyed watching Reddit implode, hopefully I get to watch a similar show from our friends at Microsoft.



  • If the choice is paying unreasonable prices for Apple’s overpriced proprietary nonsense or reducing my yield as another data cow in Alphabet’s surveillance capitalism human farming machine, I begrudgingly pick the former.

    I think it’s safe to assume all corporations publicly traded are equally greedy, regardless of how much their marketing department assures us that they exist for altruism.

    Shareholders don’t by stock to make the world a better place, they invest in the companies sending the largest dividend checks. Apple and Alphabet are equally covetous of our money (money and data for Alphabet), but I trust the old business model of selling hardware more than giving up my data forever to be used for anything in the future.

    GrapheneOS is my true preference currently for personal use and it feels good to leave a corporation in favor of a community, much like my switch from Reddit to Lemmy. As the techie in my family and friend group I’m still going to have to recommend iOS to most people since using GrapheneOS as a daily driver is a big ask for my grandmother.





  • Thanks for the civil tone of your reply, I have to agree that even if corporate personhood was abolished the oligarchs would just find another way to control the political system keeping rigged to favor their interests. Lobbying in the US started during the Civil War from what I understand, this lad to the creation of a Military Industrial Complex that continues to lobby US lawmakers into conflicts motivated by greed and not diplomatic interests. If you don’t believe me, please listen to the warning from President Eisenhower in his farewell address.

    Do you think it’s in the people’s best interest to keep the current corporate structure in tact and legislate lobbying reforms instead?


  • It’s certainly “practical” for shareholders with controlling interests in these publicly traded companies, but very impractical for everyone else.

    The word corporation may have existed before the 14th Amendment, but the legal definition was entirely different. The word “Country” was also used to describe the state a person was from in the 19th century, if asked about one’s country, one would would reply with the name of their state of residence. The meaning over a word can change entirely in a couple generations.

    What criticism of capitalism is more relevant than the abomination of corporate personhood? Toss a few more right-wing Supreme Court rulings into the mix like Citizen’s United giving corporations the ability to spend unlimited and unregulated money lobbying (buying) the legislative system and you have a nation in decline with a failing economic system.

    Legally only citizens are allowed to lobby congress, if corporations were no longer considered people, then real people would have more access to power than their corporate overlords.