2k16 what's the worst enormous tech company?

I could live without any of them. Apple would be the greatest loss for us.

A crippling dependency on Facebook for socializing sounds like it would be a salient feature of my personal Hell.

I get a lot out of it for better and worse.

Facebook has become Fark.com, except with stories submitted by my step-dad and my ex-girlfriends.

Trying to figure out if Amazon were to actually disappear how much money we would end up saving

just relocated home from work and left my iPhone SE plug there. i figured, nbd, i will just use the USB-C plug that powers my MacBook Pro, since this is Apple's brilliant the all-chords-in-one solution. for some fucking reason it is a different fucking chord. to the naked eye it looks exactly the same but it must be fraction of a millimeter too small or something. why the fuck would they do this. what the fuck.

Amazon disappearing would probably be the biggest net positive for me, personally, and for society as a whole. I don't think it would even take that long to retrain people away from same-day delivery of bullshit you don't really need.

i love Amazon for finding/selling books alone. tracking down books without would be a huge pain unless there was an equally huge online retailer for books i am currently unaware of.

lol i was gonna recommend abebooks but i forgot that amazon owns them now (and has for almost a decade?!?)

lol seriously? I just bought a book from them for the first time and has this idea of them as some small bookstore

The bestis obviously ISIS. They're even better at the internet than Google is iirc.

http://a64.tinypic.com/6getmg.jpg

there's so much synergy going on there i just shit my pants

it's like a synergy meganova

Woot!
Deals and
Shenanigans

see I use Amazon for everything but books now; if Amazon went away I would never be able to buy housewares b/c I'd have to leave the house or something

I'd be fine if Google went away

I've never bought anything from amazon other than books and video games - which i now generally get from the library and don't really bother with anymore respectively - and would never think to do so

I thought video games came from the App Store and Steam

Don't buy stuff from Amazon but it's a tremendously useful bibliographic research tool for books published over the last 20+ years

does instagram sell information derived from user photos to advertisers?
it seems like such an obvious evil moneymaker that i assume they must do it, or are planning to soon.

couldn't they just use photo recognition on all your photos to identify the places you tend to go, what kind of clothes your friends wear, where you go on vacation, the kinds of objects that interest you, plus whatever text or location data you voluntarily supply when you post? the introduction of the stories seems tailor-made to provide you with incentives to put together a daily summary of all the cool places you went or saw. if you post a story you'll gradually start sliding over to the right, but you can add another clip onto your story to get bumped back to the top of the queue, and do this 10 times a day if you want. i'm already accustomed to certain people in my feed following this practice. every hour or so their story lengthens and pops up at the top again. these persistent story tellers seem like the ideal instagram users for advertising purposes, and they're dedicated as fuck to the process, to boot!

i guess it's common knowledge

https://digiday.com/media/facebooks-new-image-recognition-technology-data-windfall-advertisers/

all consumer tech companies with the not inconsequential exception of Apple will sell information derived from the stuff you feed them directly to advertisers; this should be unacceptable on so many levels

all these *gestures at poll* consumer tech companies I guess I mean

i bought a new graphics card via amazon on Sunday evening and it arrived the very next morning, even though it was Memorial Day. it was very impressive.

pinboard is the only good tech company

https://blog.pinboard.in/2017/06/pinboard_acquires_delicious

"Science sold it to Delicious Media in 2016, and last month Delicious Media sold it to me.

Do not attempt to compete with Pinboard."

Is this some passive aggressive shit or am I not in on the joke here?

it's a joke

The joke is he doesn't attempt to compete with anybody? Pinboard is basically maciej (and I assume some administrators he hires to keep things up while he travels the globe)

I assume the sale price was a round of beers and a dozen donuts

what is "a bookmarking site" and how is it any better than the built-in bookmarks feature available in every browser since at least Netscape Navigator days

Bookmarks on a bookmarking site aren't stored locally

The joke is that at one point Delicious was many, many times larger and with more exposure/"mind share"/whatever than Pinboard, so maciej probably heard some variation on "Uh, you probably don't want to attempt to compete with Delicious" like a million times. So, like, the irony is, well, you know...

Never thought of nuns as activist investors but I am glad they are sticking it to Alphabet. pic.twitter.com/Px1q8oLdTt

— Evgeny Morozov (@evgenymorozov) June 5, 2017

Google begins beta testing "feudalism" pic.twitter.com/koRSlUHRLU

— WFLS (@leemkuilschu) June 14, 2017

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DCYGmY-XgAAqumF.jpg

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-16/amazon-to-acquire-whole-foods-in-13-7-billion-bet-on-groceries?cmpid=socialflow-twitter-business&utm_content=business&utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social

that settles it

Mark Zuckerberg meeting truckers in Iowa looks like a movie about an alien who slowly learns to feel pic.twitter.com/9if4vUpq4V

— Zach Schonfeld (@zzzzaaaacccchhh) June 24, 2017

he does have a reptilian humanoid shapeshifter quality doesn't he

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/7xpgvx/amazons-is-trying-to-control-the-underlying-infrastructure-of-our-economy

was trying to find the right text/paragraph that summarizes it but every other paragraph was just O_O

maybe this

Last year, Amazon captured nearly $1 of every $2 Americans spent online. As recently as 2015, most people looking to buy something online started at a search engine. Today, a majority go straight to Amazon.

but once they buy whole foods the monopoly will feel real

don't worry, the trump administration is on this

voted amazon in the poll. i'm worried that my friends who work at whole foods will have worse working conditions and compensation as a result of the buyout. i've been boycotting AMZ mostly because of how they treat their fulfillment center employees, and was thinking that the WF acquisition would make the boycott impossible. but maybe i can cut way back on shopping at WF and spend more time at local health food stores.

probably hard to cut out WF altogether as it's the closest supermarket to where i live. anyway i'm not sure but i suspect jeff bezos might be the antichrist and we haven't seen his final form.

i can usually get everything i need at trader joe's and the korean or japanese market

i'll pick up a couple things at whole foods but i can avoid it, though after surgery i've been going there just about everyday out of convenience. luckily that'll stop come friday

trader joe's will never come to hawaii :(( we do have nice japanese markets though

yeah, you know i probably could live without WF easier than i was thinking

do people not shop at 'regular' supermarkets anymore

In the naaaaame of love (between a man and a woman)
What more in the name of love? (between a married man and a woman)
In the name of love (between a man and a woman)
What more in the name of love? (and only a man and woman)

oops, wrong thread

I've never set foot in a Whole Foods or Trader Joe's. My brother is a manager at the nearest WF though.

fwiw i shop at the good ol regular supermarket two doors down from WF every chance i get, but i'm a sucker for a few things over at whole paycheck. the bulk and meats departments in particular have been draws for me, and my friend gerald is a cheesemonger there so i usually get some expensive but really delicious cheese from him