Which industries do you absolutely despise?

[XRay]

What the title says! I am going to rant on internet service providers a bit because I am super annoyed by them right now.

If you are not from America and you did not know, our internet service providers are absolute shit. Even when I was in New York, Time Warner's service was average at best, and I was paying like $80 something per month. Back in Sacramento now, my internet from AT&T is shit, and my friends who are paying for faster speed are not exactly getting better service either. I am just frustrated by the slow download and updates for Heroes. I have to use my mobile data right now because my wifi is absolute trash. Like, I can still watch YouTube fine and I can post here without any issues, but for some dumb fucking reason, downloading stuff from the Play Store is super duper ssssssslllllllooooooowwwwwww. I am not exactly sure how the internet works, but if YouTube is okay, why is the Play Store so damn slow? Both are under Google and it makes no sense to throttle part of Google. And a slow Play Store is assuming a relatively good day where there are no other issues. On a bad day, the most frustrating thing for me is that my internet gets frequently cut off for no reason (my friends have their internet cut off too, but it seems like they do not get cut off as often as me).

I absolutely despise the oligopoly dominating our communications infrastructure (telephone lines, cable, etc.). Comcast, Verizon, and other ISP companies can go to hell too. I do not care about being labelled as a socialist or communist or whatever if it means I can spite them by voting to nationalize their industry and killing their stockholders' portfolios. I want my revenge due to the constant annoyance by their poor service and ineptitude. At the bare minimum, I want to break ISPs' backs and split them apart so we can regulate them like local utility companies. I want current companies in the industry to suffer as much pain as possible. If South Korea can have good internet nationwide, the United States can too.

Right now, the only industry I hate more than our ISP industry is the fashion industry. The short story of it is that I hate being forced to wear uniforms, formal clothes, and casual clothes too, especially during hot weather where it is simply more comfortable to let sweat evaporate off of my bare skin. I guess the fashion industry is not completely to blame for this as the 99% of the world's cultural norm is to wear clothes even if a piece of clothing serves no practical function.

[Ertrick36]

I have basically a socialist ideology, so I hate all of the industries with hyper inflated corporations which inevitably end up abusing their employees and their consumers.

In other words, all of them, lmao.

 

If I had to pick least favorites, probably the fossil fuel industry for driving our planet to the point of it being probably uninhabitable in the next hundred years or so, the telecommunications industry for turning goddamn utilities into a for-profit, price-gouging business, and the agriculture/food industry for turning farming into a horrific, automated process that tortures the ever loving shit out of the animals they process (for the record I'm not vegan and do believe you can ethically raise animals for meat, but corporations clearly don't do that).

I think the games industry deserves an honorable mention.  Not because anything they do is actually harmful to the whole of humanity, but because they manage to implement the scummiest, consumer unfriendly business tactics into their models and it somehow works for them.  The closest thing you'd see to some of the horribly abusive BS from Free-to-Play games is literally just casinos.  Like, that's basically gachas.  And we all gobble it up because cute anime waifus.  Ignore the fact that my profile pic comes from a gacha game, that's irrelevant.

[vanguard333]

18 minutes ago, Ertrick36 said:

I think the games industry deserves an honorable mention.  Not because anything they do is actually harmful to the whole of humanity, but because they manage to implement the scummiest, consumer unfriendly business tactics into their models and it somehow works for them.  The closest thing you'd see to some of the horribly abusive BS from Free-to-Play games is literally just casinos.  Like, that's basically gachas.  And we all gobble it up because cute anime waifus.  Ignore the fact that my profile pic comes from a gacha game, that's irrelevant.

Ah, yes; the games industry. Let's all laugh at an industry, that never learns anything; tee hee hee. (If you don't know the reference, it's a little tune that plays when Zero Punctuation makes a video criticizing a part of the games industry) It's not just consumer-unfriendly practices, but the people who make the games are often also exploited through practices like crunch. 

@XRay Just want to point out that a lot of the issues with cable companies are hardly unique to the US: Canada has to suffer the misery of Rogers and Bell. If it makes you feel better, a number of cities in the States have been implementing their own local internet and cable, though they've been fought heavily by the companies. 

Edited October 8, 2020 by vanguard333

[Ertrick36]

Just now, vanguard333 said:

Ah, yes; the games industry. Let's all laugh at an industry, that never learns anything; tee hee hee. It's not just consumer-unfriendly practices, but the people who make the games are often also exploited through practices like crunch. 

Oh yes, I'm aware of exploitation - that was implicit in my comment about corporations abusing their employees.  Exploitation isn't unique to the games industry, though they definitely have a claim for the most BS excuse for the abuse - that they really are just "letting" their employees work overtime since they're just so "passionate".  Definitely not just taking advantage of people's passions, desperation, and/or possible physical/mental health issues because the folks on the top deck suck at planning things out (and probably shouldn't even be on the top deck in the first place because of this, lmao).

And honestly, if anything the game industry and other corporations probably are too good at learning.  For example, people talk about how EA trying to implement loot boxes in their Star Wars: Battlefront 2 was really dumb and that they walked back on that, but I think if anything it was a calculated measure.  They were testing the waters, and if people said it was taken too far they could walk back on it and suddenly they're the heroes of the story because they got "listened to the criticism" and got rid of the bad feature they implemented in the first place.

If there is something I think is stupid/foolish in the games industry, it's all the directors that want to make their games "movie-like".  It's such a stupid thing to pursue when making a game.  Not because video games can't be "as good" as movies, but simply because it's an entirely different medium.  There is a different appeal, and moreover there are different mechanisms available to a video game than there are available to a movie, mainly in that you are able to interact with things on-screen.  You don't sit and watch a three-hour video game, you play it.  Directors who go for the "movie video game" approach are A) setting the game up to be a disappointing shadow to basically any movie of actual narrative merit, and B) making the game way less interesting than it could be given the tools at your disposal to make it a great experience or even an interesting narrative.

Well, that and the crunch is foolish, as it's directly a result of mismanagement.  But that's what you can expect from pigs that can afford to stick their head in the sand for a year and not suffer any consequences for their inaction.

[Punished Dayni]

36 minutes ago, Ertrick36 said:

I have basically a socialist ideology, so I hate all of the industries with hyper inflated corporations which inevitably end up abusing their employees and their consumers.

In other words, all of them, lmao.

 

If I had to pick least favorites, probably the fossil fuel industry for driving our planet to the point of it being probably uninhabitable in the next hundred years or so, the telecommunications industry for turning goddamn utilities into a for-profit, price-gouging business, and the agriculture/food industry for turning farming into a horrific, automated process that tortures the ever loving shit out of the animals they process (for the record I'm not vegan and do believe you can ethically raise animals for meat, but corporations clearly don't do that).

I think the games industry deserves an honorable mention.  Not because anything they do is actually harmful to the whole of humanity, but because they manage to implement the scummiest, consumer unfriendly business tactics into their models and it somehow works for them.  The closest thing you'd see to some of the horribly abusive BS from Free-to-Play games is literally just casinos.  Like, that's basically gachas.  And we all gobble it up because cute anime waifus.  Ignore the fact that my profile pic comes from a gacha game, that's irrelevant.

I mean, the finance sector disgusts me on principle because it has encouraged the trends of capitalism for most of the last 50 years that have shaped the mess we collectively are in now. It made itself a central part of the world as it stands and it deserves its blame, with how it exacerbated the boom bust and increasingly leaves people destitute with no remorse. Media and an industry is also one that I have a pretty strong ire toward because of how it encourages the messages of the current hegemony within capitalism, can end up influencing the conversation in a manner that doesn't help as much as it should and how polarised political discourse has become based on belief. In the US, I'd also add the security industry that's become a full scale behemoth (From how police and private security teams are armed, deployed and scaled up, never mind how prisons are there.)

Agriculture is one that I have a differing perspective on, seeing as the battery farming is less prominent here. However, besides the abuse or maltreatment of animals or the over exploitation of land that leads to environmental damage of where they hire cheaper labour from elsewhere as a cost saving measure which sees them exploited as well. This has another problem too where it has been used by certain political elements as a vote getter while having no intention of actually solving it because it is profitable and not caring about the consequences of othering these people.

[Sidereal Wraith]

The Stop Sign making industry!

[SoulWeaver]

3 hours ago, Wraith said:

The Stop Sign making industry!

Finally a response that fits the subforum.

I don't think I have any industries I outright despise, though the music industry is definitely trying its best. Owl City aside most music I hear is either crap or heavily angled towards specific mindsets/worldviews, neither of which should be on my radio in my admittedly horribly biased opinion.

[Espurrhoodie]

Do multi-level marketing companies count? The products hot garbage and overpriced (and in the cases of certain dieting MLMs like herbalife, potentially dangerous), you can't make much (if any) money while you work for it, it's exploitive and predatory as fuck, and worst of all, they legally don't qualify as pyramid schemes due to a legal loophole even though they basically are pyramid schemes.

Also I just wanna point out the slight irony in that when I looked up "are multi level marketing companies pyramid schemes" on google one of the sites suggested was from the Michigan AG office even though Amway, one of the biggest MLM companies out there, originated from Michigan.

[X-Naut]

I hate the tobacco industry because I find secondhand smoke insufferable. Not even asthmatic or allergic, it's just shit to breathe, how did smoking ever gain traction to begin with?

[kradeelav]

Advertising.  It's a branch that is effectively the grease on the wheel to most if not all of the industries listed above - can't have a corporation if there's no growth from sales, and where else do sales get their eyes from?

Coming from somebody in the thick of it. Takes one to know one~

[Ottservia]

About 90% of the anime industry because people who are working 600 hours a month should not be paid as little as $10 a day. The anime industry really is a fucking mess. Some of these animators work to the point of throwing up and they can barely afford to feed themselves. Not all studios are like this(See Ufotable and Kyoto Animation) but it is sadly a norm in the industry

[Jotari]

5 hours ago, Ottservia said:

About 90% of the anime industry because people who are working 600 hours a month should not be paid as little as $10 a day. The anime industry really is a fucking mess. Some of these animators work to the point of throwing up and they can barely afford to feed themselves. Not all studios are like this(See Ufotable and Kyoto Animation) but it is sadly a norm in the industry

The norm for Japan in general for a large part.

[Ottservia]

Just now, Jotari said:

The norm for Japan in general for a large part.

But at least the employees of other industries aren’t exempt from minimum wage laws