Brontoforumus

I think that even business owners could generally come up with examples where bad publicity is worse.

Especially in the internet age.

I mean, I get the intent of the original aphorism, I just find it holds up a lot worse than your average "truthy aphorism".

There's a sucker born every minute.

Now THAT one you can take to the bank.

Bad publicity is worse than no publicity. There are times when, due to weird other factors, bad publicity can actually improve sales, but it's not like Wal-Mart intentionally talks about how great they are at crushing unions by taking people into back rooms with no cameras and telling them illegal, untrue shit. That saying, in any form, is 100% horseshit.

Also I think it depends immensely on how brobdingnagian your company is. Its actually why I've begun to feel the 'support local' campaign is absolute bullshit. For example, our local mom and pop pizza shop can and does get away with paying its delivery drivers minimum wage with no mileage or wear and tear compensation in ways that national chains never could in the age of social media.

The hell they can't.

OK, perhaps I worded that a bit strongly. Sure they can, but the hit to their brand is something they actually have to consider. Social media and on-line reviews is actually shaking up the service industry quite a bit right now and has been for a few years. Bad on-line reviews or poor social media dealings can and do get your fired at least in my corporation. I guess it does and doesn't depend on your size. Like, Wal-Mart or Pizza Hut have cover of just being fuck huge, but the middle ground, where we're at in the industry (we own 54 locations), is where it makes a difference.

My over all point stands though. I don't think 'support local' makes much sense because local companies are still capitalistic money making machines who can and do fuck over their employees for a profit.

Some are and some aren't. Seems to me that, kinda by definition, a company with a huge national or international presence is likelier to have stepped over some people than a small company with only a half-dozen people in it. (Then again, I just noticed an E-Mail in my inbox from somebody at the last place I worked, which is a timely reminder that yes people in tiny companies can and do take advantage of their workers.)

You also seem to be under the impression that the justification behind supporting local businesses is purely touchy-feely and based on emotion rather than pragmatism. But there are plenty of good reasons to buy locally beyond just a simplistic belief that small companies are good and brobdingnagian ones are bad. One is that a when you buy from local businesses, a much higher percentage of that money gets spent in your community than when you buy from national ones. Another is that if you buy something that was made locally, that means it didn't have to be shipped from somewhere else, and there's less environmental impact. (Not to mention the nontrivial fact that locally-sourced fruits, meats, drinks, etc. tend to be better products than mass-produced ones.) And another is that competition is good for markets, and the brobdingnagian guys don't have any incentive to keep their prices down when all the little guys go away.

By all means, don't give money to people you think are unethical. But I'd rather buy my comics from a guy whose name I know and who's been good to my for the last 15 years than from Amazon or Comixology, I'd rather buy my books from the place where my parents have been taking me since before I could read (and where I got to meet Cory Doctorow a few years ago) than from Amazon or Barnes and Noble, and I'd rather buy my pizza from Nello's than the Papa John's across the street (a company whose owner, remember, spent the last election season bemoaning that he was going to have to spend more money on healthcare for his employees -- so no, I don't really agree with the premise that major pizza chains can't get away with treating their workers poorly). And a few years ago, when the guy at the register at Safeway didn't just card me for my beer but actually wrote my information down in a little book, I decided that was reason enough that I should have gone to Top's. (Speaking of, I just finished a beer from the Lumberyard Brewery which I bought at Top's. Lumberyard isn't exactly local as it's from Flagstaff, but it's the brewery I used to eat and drink at when I was in college. I'm pretty happy to support those guys, and they make a good product -- a product which I admit I enjoy more because I have positive memories associated with it, but that is a value-add, even if it's a totally subjective one.)

Obviously any company of any size can take advantage of its workers, make poor products, or mistreat its customers. And some of those companies still manage to stay in business (due to convenient location, lack of competition, or whatever other reason). That's a fair thing to be mindful of, and a local company isn't always, inherently superior to one with its headquarters in Delaware. But local ownership is one variable among many to consider when choosing where to spend your money, and it's correlated with a lot of other variables.

God, I could go for some nice local peaches... When is the tender fruit season, anyway?

Shucks, they're still growing. Hey, plums are in season, though!

It's a lot easier to care about the local vs. corporate debate if you live in an area which isn't pretty much run by corporations already.

/r/incels just got banned.

Thought that was a containment thread for people feeling sorry for themselves. Did something happen?

Looks like /r/femaleincels/is still up. And being invaded by what I assume to be former /r/incels posters.

Apparently the thread had become a breeding ground for creepers, catfishers and the like posting about their exploits.

NyMag: /pol/'s hottest new Conspiracy Theory of Everything may be breeding new lunatic shooters as we speak

As most terrible things do, this story begins with a post on /pol/, a sub-board of the more-or-less-anonymous, anything-goes website 4chan. Over the last few years, /pol/ — which technically stands for “politically incorrect” — has slowly but surely become a top contender for the ever-coveted title of the most upsetting community online. It’s the sort of place where neo-Nazis and people who believe women shouldn’t have basic human rights used to meet before we started verifying them on Twitter and electing them to public office.

Thousands of Reddit communities go dark to protest company’s controversial new policy

Basically Reddit saw how great Musk's plan to charge for API access was going and thought "We gotta get us some of that."

I've been pretty invested in this, since I've been a daily "RIF is fun" user since 2014. This is an aggravating change that will probably make my overall quality of life improve, because I will be less inclined to waste time on Reddit.

I'm on from time to time, but was happy to see near every subreddit I visit participating.

Also peeping at the Reddit front page (something I very rarely do) today displayed this gem from r/writingprompts:

[WP] It was suspected that after the release of the film "Joker" young anti social men would begin to idolize him, and so far this has turned out to be true. What wasn't expected was that it would be the 1960s Cesar Romero Joker.

A list of dark subreddits by community size can be found on reddark. (mirror?)


Their counter lists 7857 out of 8190 subreddits, or 95.93%.

I honestly don't expect reddit to cave. u/spez (Steve Huffman) said "P.S. old.reddit.com isn’t going anywhere" in his AMA. Reddit has a real trust deficit after the situations with API pricing at large and with Apollo as an acute example, and it's difficult to imagine them leaving old.reddit alone when people inevitably write mobile clients that scrape it or mobile decides too many people are using it + ublock to evade ads and/or tracking data reddit sells to marketers.

Some reddit alternatives being thrown around on the site:
http://kbin.social/
https://tildes.net/
Lemmy

And a list of more potential alternatives.


I can see this pushing more people to Discord, which isn't indexed by search. Also, the 3rd party dev experience there (including massive turnaround times during bot verification + severe undercommunication) frankly did not inspire confidence. It's increasingly where people are, though.