People who think like you are the reason that not just "mean," but truly harmful and unethical companies prosper. You have agency. You can make decisions for yourself. You can, and should, make the best decisions, even if they make you less convenient, comfortable, or trendy.

My family stopped shopping Amazon altogether several years back, along with Walmart. We do shop at farmer's markets, but we also go to neighborhood markets and co-ops. We buy secondhand clothes (so could you, despite your attempt at a false choice between Amazon and having to make your own clothes, which is just silly). We buy used cars so that local dealers profit, without directly supporting manufacturers whose choices we dislike. And so on.

It isn't convenient or trendy. We don't care. We save a ton of money this way. And we find that we generally don't support people and practices we find objectionable. We're probably indirectly supporting some amount of evil, but we're affirmatively doing all we can to minimize our participation in it.

You could too, if you wanted to. Or, you can keep pretending you're powerless to be an agent for change, and you'll find that your prophecy comes true. But I dare you to do better.

If a jukebox has tap-to-pay or accepts bills, I play songs. If it requires an app download to play music? Hard pass.

They throw all sorts of B.S. sales tactics at you even if you're not. I work for a small consulting & software development house in St. Louis, and when I actually look at my spam folder I see everything from the passive-aggressive ("Hey, is there someone else I should be talking to at your company? Clearly you're not responding to my pitch so now I expect you to do my research for me.") to the faux-pitiful ("I've tried so hard, Mr. Fisher, this is my seventeenth email this week (crying emoji) and I guess now I'm just going to give up on you and not make my sales goals, it's so sad, please just give me five minutes to sell you this overpriced list of leads we scraped from LinkedIn?"

I can't even say I admire the hustle, since it's all automated nowadays.

... is that HostGator still exists in 2025.

Other than SurveyMonkey, whose childish name somehow continues to persist in a professional world, I thought all the [technology_function + name_of_animal] providers had gone the way of the BankruptcyDodo long ago.

I haven't had mod points in about 3 years now, ever since I flamed the mods for posting clickbait. But I would upvote this if I could.

Bookmarked for a future rainy day.

Close. You're thinking of Voyager 6.

There's no excuse for an organization that serves young people to not have more stringent protocols in place to avoid these issues.

As to the "classist and ableist" discussion points, I'm not saying that the "get woke, go broke" mantra applies here ... I'll just mention that the last NaNoWriMo event I bothered going to (near Dallas, TX in 2018) featured a spirited discussion/group therapy session about the pain of being misgendered, which ground the actual writing discussion to a halt. That is when I realized that this organization was no longer for me. The more any organization moves away from the center toward the extremes of ideas and discourse, the less people are going to want to donate to keep it afloat.

This is the kind of content I love, and miss, on Slashdot. Thank you.

Adorable. I bet you think the Railroad is the best Fallout 4 faction, too.

What a wonderful new P.R. spin tactic. We're not destroying a historic icon that could be repurposed as a museum ship - we're preserving its legacy.

Translation: We know we're doing something wasteful, but we can't possibly admit that, so we're gonna pretend really hard it's a good thing!

Only if we keep spending money to support it. Unplug the feeding tube, and the machine dies.

Let's hope my AI avatar is around to see it, and blog about it.