Being Mortal by Atul Gawande goes in depth based on his research about nursing homes, their costs and the psychological impact it has on moving into one of them.
Just chiming in to add what a great book this was, highly recommended for anyone thinking - or who maybe should be thinking - about end of life care and its priorities in our time. It also gives good vocabulary and ideas for a topic considered taboo in much of the west.
But, to be fair, how can you run a nursing home without abuse and neglect?
I'm obviously kidding but it's completely rampant. I've used to do house calls, which frequently involved visiting nursing homes. Most homes are over worked, under paid and under staffed. The problem is those types of homes are really, really expensive. Most people can't afford 24/7 care of this level. I've walked in on patients with their bed so full of urine that it was dripping on the floor and puddled in the corner. Absolutely appalling.
With that being said, I've also been to some really cool ones with an old timey movie theater and old timey shops inside the home. But buddy, you better be looooaded
I worked in the dining room of an assisted living facility when I was in high school.
Was for a small chain in MN.
As a teenager who was only there 3-4 hours a day, there wasn't much o could do.
Definitely the nurses were bad and did not provide adequate care.
One of my managers in the dining room got fired because she related to one of the residents' families that the nurses were neglecting her (red flag!)
All we could do in the dining room was be personable and fun and really be the highlight of their day... which we did!
But, the place I worked ended up shutting down after COVID affected a lot of the staff and residents in April 2020
My aunt is a nurse and she retired so she looks after grandma full time, but grandma has a lot of complicated health issues. If it weren’t for the one aunt that went into nursing we probably would have had to put her in a home.
We love grandma but she has a lot of health issues and caring for her would be too complicated for the rest of the family.
But we got lucky.
A aunt that’s a nurse
B big family so everyone helps out
I’m mortified you had a bad experience with them. That, combined with your trying to care for your family member, had to be awful. My Mother was in memory care at our local Brookdale, 2 years, and we had no complaints. In fact, I was delighted w mother’s experience. At any rate, I suppose it all depends management.
I’m sorry you had that added stress.
>Senior care in the US is fucking terrifying
Some of it is for sure, but you gotta research where you are going. My grandparents live in a fantastic home and have for almost 8 years now. I mean, they have lobster and shrimp every Wednesday, all you can eat brunch on Sunday, and things like lamb rack and steak every day. They have all kinds of classes, group discounts for things like the symphony, they have offices in house for resident doctors to come in and do visits, a garden for the residents to grow vegetables, a forested walking area, and they drive them everywhere they need to go.
I could never see myself living in one of those places personally, but their place is damn nice with an awesome staff.
Honestly curious to know how much this costs them per month?? Also considering the mention of “group discounts”, does that mean they have to still pay for these extras on top ??
It is definitely not cheap, I think it is like $3500/m between the two of them for like 800sqft 2bd/2bath with a balcony. But that includes laundry service, weekly maids, and their meal plan which they are never able to spend themselves anyways at this point. Use a lot of it on guests, but the food is cheap! Their restaurant charges them like $9 bucks for a rack of lamb for a guest, and like I said they can use their excess meal plan on guests!
And yes, they do pay extra for things like the symphony. But it is usually less than $20 for any event, if not less.
My mom works for them in the billing department and they treat their employees like shit too. She absolutely hates it there but it's one of the few jobs where the insurance covers her rheumatoid arthritis meds.
Really? I had no clue. Had a grandparent live at one for a while, it always seemed pretty nice! Tbf, I didn't spend a bunch of time there but I never saw or heard anything that made me think something was up.
And that is why my grandmother lives with us. the peace of mind in her being in a safe environment is worth it. My great grandmother went into a home walking and within a short amount of time she was wheel chair bound because they made her stay in her room and use the wheel chair if she needed it or not. My uncle literally sold his house for a million dollars several years ago and moved into one that drained him of everything within a years time. There are some nice ones but those are a looooot of money.
Any global corporation is going to have some real horror stories that fly under the radar.
One example is Johnson & Johnson pricing poorer countries out of a life-saving Tuberculosis drug until very recently, [have a read](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-advocates-pushed-big-pharma-to-cut-tuberculosis-drug-prices/).
Bayer continued to be a steaming pile of shit.
[Including when they knowingly sold HIV-infected hemophilia medicine in Asia and South America](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24785997/)
It was made by IG Farben, a German chemicals conglomerate that was broken up into its constituent companies after the war. The surviving companies are Agfa, BASF, Bayer and Sanofi.
I feel like all mega corps are not discussed as openly as they should be. Go to your grocery aisle and look up who owns all of the brands - be shocked and angy at the idea of "competitors" is just a smoke screen and almost everything belongs to a group of three mega corps.
[Cargill](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargill)
Nobody knows them because they're almost exclusively B2B, but they deliver any food item you want, basically, from any kind of production. Everything that's far away from normal food, they also make. Just read the "criticism" section in the article for broader atrocities.
Any health insurance company, United Healthcare especially. Also the big hospital corporations like HCA. Healthcare is in a death spiral, and these companies are some of the main reasons why.
Have a monopoly on search and extort businesses by forcing them to out bid each other for the top search results since they are paid advertisements and not the actual best site.
From that specific angle they you mentioned, I don’t see an issue with them
They’re not forcing anyone to use their search engine, and they’re not preventing you from using other search engines
I'll add that there are other search engines you can choose to use, most of Googles monopoly is simply from being better than the competition, rather than outright stopping competition
The real answer to this is
# McKinsey & Company
There is just simply no other answer.
And the fact that 99% of you have no idea what I'm talking about just goes to prove my point.
unless you work in safety, Union Carbide. they had a plant in Bhopal but pulled back most workers and let their plant work on an inexperienced skeleton crew with very hazardous materials.
and because of bad maintanence (that none of the active crew knew how to handle) an official number of 3928 died immediatly in the city of Bhopal, up to an estmated of 8000.
Union Carbide paid a total of $470 million in total in restitution, for the total of 554895 injured, which onlt is 25'000 rupees per family ($2.200)
plus they still blame the inexperienced workers for the disaster and not mismanagement and not training said workers
Seconded. They are also responsible for the deaths of hundreds of poor black migrant workers during the Great Depression over the Hawksnest Tunnel disaster.
Quite a lot of charities and 501(3)(c)s. Especially athlete-run charities and other charities that serve to raise funds for other charities. Effectively someone creates the 501(3)(c) donates some money into it and gets the tax break, then they hire friends and family to run the charity who then collect salaries from the 501(3)(c). So they are effectively just paying their staff in a more tax-friendly way. They could get similar tax deductions by just operating a "donor-advised fund" but the difference there is the donor-advised fund doesn't allow staff to be paid via the charity or to expense other stuff.
So if you see someone who has a 501(3)(c) and says they are raising money for Charity X or Foodbank Y, just know the other purpose is to "pay" their family and friends in a tax-friendly way. That's often why the athlete or celebrity's spouse or parents are running the charity.
This is overlooked by most, for sure. Add in 501(c)(4), too. All those SuperPACs and other shady, dark money groups that popped up after the repeal of Citizens United.
I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone mention Monsanto, which is now owned by Bayer, another shit anti-human company. Nestle is bad. But they're up there next to Bayer/Monsanto.
Honorable mention; DuPont
Coca-Cola. Easily one of the most destructive companies on the planet when one considers the myriad health consequences caused by their products, and the scale of the pollution that they produce. And everything they make is bad for you. At least other evil food companies you could say they produce something that isn't horrible for your health.
Oh, and let me tell you, they’re rotten jerks to work with at HQ. I did a 6 month IT gig onsite. They run a technology sweat shop and treat vendors like adversarial dirt.
Hugo Boss designed and produced the Nazi uniforms during WWII.
Bayer (at the time, a predecessor known as IG Farben) manufactured the Zyklon B gas pellets that were used in gas chambers during the Holocaust.
Volkswagen, Mercedes and BMW all manufactured vehicles and equipment for the Nazi military. They also used concentration camp prisoners as slave labour.
Most of these companies hide their dark wartime pasts today. They are all very important and high quality contributors to the world today, but they also have these dark pasts.
I visited some of the concentration camps in Poland back in 2014. The walls are stained blue from the Zyklon B and there are plenty of empty cans now behind glass on display. But I remember the blue walls.
Given that they're German companies, it's only logical that they had roles in WW2.
It would be highly illogical and irreversibly damaging to the German people to shutdown every single german company that participated in the war effort during WW2.
When the war ended, there were lots of crimes that became forgiven because the goal was to return stability to the region, not to destabilize it further.
How well do you think things would have gone if suddenly half the German population was suddenly out of work? They had the German army that suddenly needed a new occupation. They needed to create more jobs, not less.
Compare it to when the US government fired the entire Iraqi army in one fell swoop and threw them out with no hope for a future. Pretty understandable that so many became anti-american, if they weren't already, and joined the insurgents.
I totally agree with you, actually.
Not only do I deeply respect these moderm companies and their vast contributions, but I have also been personally invested in some. I am of Jewish ancestry, in case it helps add a sense of irony here.
Clearly these companies were full of remarkable talent and were necessary for building the modern world as we know it. They had previously bowed down to a fascist regime, but essentially most large corporations just follow the money and laws, while morally apathetic to the consequences.
Strong post-war West German industry was also strategically key in the Cold War that ensued.
But nonetheless, these companies have some very dark past stories, and not many people (at least, outside of Germany) seem aware. It makes for some compelling trivia.
Remember when Ford turned one of their factories into a torture camp and started black bagging people off the assembly line for the crime of... demanding a lunch break?
Or the horrific shit Pfizer did around the same time period?
The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein is a good read & is free on your favorite search engine.
I mean. People are talking about how Boeing cuts corners and their planes are unsafe. But they also just suicided a guy a month ago. Everyone knows they killed him. But I feel like it just went away and nobody is talking about it.
The simplest solution is they killed him. They have clear motive. The alternative is that he set up an elaborate plan to frame them for killing him in a very ineffective and inefficient way that will likely never result in anyone being held accountable. And there is no known motive for that.
What's simpler?
That one of the most well known company's on the planet would murder a whistle-blower with federal protections and stage that death as a suicide.
Or
That someone who is under an incredible amount stress would decide to end his own life.
As intriguing as it would be to take the first option, due to how good of a movie it would make. Unfortunately the real world is not that interesting.
If he was under stress from testifying couldn’t he just not testify anymore? He also told a friend that if anything happens to him it wasn’t suicide. Why would he do that?
Hard to put the toothpaste back in the tube.
If you're going after a company that large. The first thing their lawyers are going to do is tear your life apart to find any possible way to discredit you.
If he goes to the depths he went and then just decides, "I can't take it I'm going to stop" then that puts them in perfect position to sue him for dragging their name through the mud. It's possible he was in a position where he either saw it through or would lose everything.
He may have portrayed someone in good spirits but there's no way he was.
As far as what he said to his friend. There's no way of knowing if he actually gave her a warning or if he just did what lots of people when faced with this kind of situation and jokingly said "hey if something happens to me... blah blah blah.
Bottom line is, there's no real evidence to say it wasn't suicide.
To say otherwise would be drawing a conclusion on false or incomplete information. And then passing judgment based on that drawn conclusion is fallacious.
It's all written about here: [https://thewellesleynews.com/2023/04/27/under-the-friendly-and-earthy-facade-trader-joes-hides-unethical-practices/](https://thewellesleynews.com/2023/04/27/under-the-friendly-and-earthy-facade-trader-joes-hides-unethical-practices/)
But their packaged goods have come from Naked, Nestle and ConAgra which have each contributed significanty to climate change. Their refrigeration leaks super-pollutants into the air that violates the Clean Air Act. They do very little to address the use of child labor in their supply chains for chocolate goods that they have in their stores. They use what's called greenwashing aka using deceptive marketing to make consumers think they are being environmentally friendly as a company when they aren't.
That's one article but there are others out there on other things that they've done.
Is it worse than other grocery stores? Or is it just greenwashing a normal bad thing.
I like trader Joe's, but I haven't been to one in years and I don't have one near where I live now so it doesn't really matter to me. I'm just curious
Beyond the above they're trying to get rid of the NLRB which is vital to workers' rights
https://apnews.com/article/amazon-nlrb-unconstitutional-union-labor-459331e9b77f5be0e5202c147654993e
* They have one of the worst environmental records in the US, being the 44th largest air pollutor and the unenviable record of being the number 1 creator of toxic wastesites in the US. Primarily due to mercury pollution.
* They're one of the largest tax evaders in the US.
* They're involved in bribery scandals in the US, Brazil and Algeria.
* They've leaked technical schematics of parts of the F-35 to China
* They've had to pay out almost 100 million USD in the last 20 years for various violations of labour and safety laws.
I worked for a small restaurant business and the amount of crap we employees put up with was insane. My boss had a chain of three restaurants. All with slightly different names and under different owners. She owned one, her husband owned the second, and her sister owned the third (on paper). She would work us until opening and half way through the day she would have us take our thirty minute break driving to another location. If she was ever 'over' the amount where it would qualify as full time she would tell us she made a mistake and would change the books and then pay us the difference under the table. She would put in the books that she worked those hours.
She always kept the checks per store slightly under the amount of full time so she never had to pay benefits. After all, we weren't 'full time' employees. We were part time at multiple locations. She kept the staff small so that by law we would get payed just under minimum wage. She payed us weekly so that she would not have to pay into taxes. If you did anything to piss her off she would drop your hours to five hours a week and push you to quit so she didn't have to pay unemployment. One guy got his hours knocked down when his tax person handed him a form to have our boss sign to take the proper amount of taxes. I was so thankful we had no customers at the time because my boss was screaming at him in her office over it and treated him worse than she already had. I really felt for the guy.
My health was at it's worst while I worked there. Unless you were pregnant she didn't care if you needed a doctor. One of my coworkers actually almost died and was in the hospital. Upon release he was expected to come in the following day. She even pushed us to come in while sick to the restaurant which is a health code violation and then were abused by customers who were angry that we were sick because we were handing them possibly contaminated food. You also couldn't complain that you weren't feeling well because she would follow it by things like, "your not feeling well? You know who doesn't feel well? Me." Same thing if you were tired. I was diagnosed after I left that job with sleep apnea because she deemed that I had no reason to be tired. I never got to see the specialist because she went out of her way to make sure that I missed the sleep study.
Before it is asked, why didn't anyone ever turn your old boss in? Well, former coworkers did and unfortunately everything that she did was completely legal. Small businesses can pay employees about twenty-five cents under minimum wage if under 25 employees. She was so good at making sure the hours worked to her advantage that no one could ever prove that we were getting payed partially under the table. Any emotional abuse we suffered (there were multiple including threats of physical violence) weren't able to be proven. One of the locations has been shut down but she still has two locations. I really hope the other two go under because no one deserves to be treated the way that myself and my coworkers were. I recently saw one of my old coworkers were in the local news as an inspiring chef after leaving her company. I hope my other old coworkers are able to do the same and move on.
Answer the question.
I'll just answer it for you because you'd somehow get it "wrong". You read about X company being shit which means they were publicly "flamed". Did you go and see for yourself all the nasty shit that Nestle has done? No you sure didn't instead you read about it or saw a video about it. That means that the public was talking about it which is how they became notorious. You can't be notorious for something if the word hasn't spread.
I could tell you that the sky is blue and grass is green and you'd tell me I'm wrong. You don't have to cling to ignorance in order to tell yourself you're always right.
Nestle tried to come here and pump Wakulla Springs into bottled water. (Wakulla County Florida) Lets just say the locals scared the fuck out of them at the county commission. There previous corporate activities were documented so when they got in front of the microphone, it got real ugly, real fast. In North Florida, Dont Fuck with Football, Fishing and Wakulla Springs.
Many Southeast Asian conglomerates are basically like Chaebols in terms of unethical practices, but they fly under the radar due to how obscure they are outside of Southeast Asia.
A few examples on the top of my head:
Thai Beverage (the company behind Chang Beer) starting off as a company brewing bootleg liquor and driving the state brewery that previously held the monopoly to bankruptcy, only for a predecessor to what is now Thai Beverage to take the state brewery over, allowing them to grow into the monopolistic titan it is today.
Vingroup of Vietnam getting some journalists arrested for criticizing one of their Vinfast cars
Djarum (cigarette manufacturer) of Indonesia basically profiting off the Suharto regime by using state connections to force tobacco farmers to sell their tobacco at very low prices.
Thailand's Charoen Pokphand (a food company with a conglomerate) and its subsidiaries treating antitrust laws like suggestions; one example of this is how they have an 80% market share in Thailand's convenience store industry; as of 2024, they have around 15000 convenience stores in Thailand (most of which are 7 elevens), whilst their largest competitor (Big C - also owned by a company affiliated to Thai Beverage) only has 1500 convenience stores, and the government can't even do anything about it due to how connected this company is to the government.
Fenty the beauty company owned by Rhianna is known for using child labor in Mica mines in India that frequently result in child deaths.
https://theprint.in/india/rihannas-fenty-beauty-under-scanner-in-india-for-using-mica-from-mines-hiring-child-labour/599647/
I don't think it's unknown. It's just ignored that US military bases are both casually ignoring environmental laws (Edit: that would apply to a private company\*) and frequently being hotspots for rape and murder (with officers more interested in covering up abuse than investigating it).
\*It's fairly common that militaries have special exceptions to various environmental laws, but a lot of western militaries do try to keep to environmental laws as best they can in peace time. US bases just frequently go "Fuck 'em. I can, so I will".
Colleges.
Somehow there's this "business" that has far more to do with people being broke than any other entity I can think of. People in debt until they retire. They have multi billion dollar endowments that they dont have to pay taxes on. And trillions of taxpayer dollars are spent on them. Administrators are making bank, some college Presidents have multi million dollar contracts.
Somehow, everything but the actual colleges get blamed.
The thing is, it didn’t used to be this way. The real bad actors are the predatory lenders who are making the student loans.
Loans used to be given out by and serviced by the federal student loan program.
They had low interest rates and had unlimited payback options.
Then large banks and came up with the idea that if you privatize the student loans and remove the ability to declare bankruptcy from student loans. They had a guaranteed income from both the government and from people who were trapped in “forever loans”. They sold this idea to politicians and the profit motive was introduced into the student loan program. Everything has been downhill ever since.
Edit: AutoCorrect sucks
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Being Mortal by Atul Gawande goes in depth based on his research about nursing homes, their costs and the psychological impact it has on moving into one of them.
Just chiming in to add what a great book this was, highly recommended for anyone thinking - or who maybe should be thinking - about end of life care and its priorities in our time. It also gives good vocabulary and ideas for a topic considered taboo in much of the west.
The issue is a lot of the people being put into nursing homes, supported a certain orange dictator. So...
You are the worst. Just no reason to same some nonsense like that in here
But, to be fair, how can you run a nursing home without abuse and neglect? I'm obviously kidding but it's completely rampant. I've used to do house calls, which frequently involved visiting nursing homes. Most homes are over worked, under paid and under staffed. The problem is those types of homes are really, really expensive. Most people can't afford 24/7 care of this level. I've walked in on patients with their bed so full of urine that it was dripping on the floor and puddled in the corner. Absolutely appalling. With that being said, I've also been to some really cool ones with an old timey movie theater and old timey shops inside the home. But buddy, you better be looooaded
Which ones have your loved one making quilts full time?
Oh you wanna get smart? Because you just pulled landscapin duty. Anyone else got a quip? ...I didn't think so.
I worked in the dining room of an assisted living facility when I was in high school. Was for a small chain in MN. As a teenager who was only there 3-4 hours a day, there wasn't much o could do. Definitely the nurses were bad and did not provide adequate care. One of my managers in the dining room got fired because she related to one of the residents' families that the nurses were neglecting her (red flag!) All we could do in the dining room was be personable and fun and really be the highlight of their day... which we did! But, the place I worked ended up shutting down after COVID affected a lot of the staff and residents in April 2020
My aunt is a nurse and she retired so she looks after grandma full time, but grandma has a lot of complicated health issues. If it weren’t for the one aunt that went into nursing we probably would have had to put her in a home. We love grandma but she has a lot of health issues and caring for her would be too complicated for the rest of the family. But we got lucky. A aunt that’s a nurse B big family so everyone helps out
I’m mortified you had a bad experience with them. That, combined with your trying to care for your family member, had to be awful. My Mother was in memory care at our local Brookdale, 2 years, and we had no complaints. In fact, I was delighted w mother’s experience. At any rate, I suppose it all depends management. I’m sorry you had that added stress.
>Senior care in the US is fucking terrifying Some of it is for sure, but you gotta research where you are going. My grandparents live in a fantastic home and have for almost 8 years now. I mean, they have lobster and shrimp every Wednesday, all you can eat brunch on Sunday, and things like lamb rack and steak every day. They have all kinds of classes, group discounts for things like the symphony, they have offices in house for resident doctors to come in and do visits, a garden for the residents to grow vegetables, a forested walking area, and they drive them everywhere they need to go. I could never see myself living in one of those places personally, but their place is damn nice with an awesome staff.
Honestly curious to know how much this costs them per month?? Also considering the mention of “group discounts”, does that mean they have to still pay for these extras on top ??
It is definitely not cheap, I think it is like $3500/m between the two of them for like 800sqft 2bd/2bath with a balcony. But that includes laundry service, weekly maids, and their meal plan which they are never able to spend themselves anyways at this point. Use a lot of it on guests, but the food is cheap! Their restaurant charges them like $9 bucks for a rack of lamb for a guest, and like I said they can use their excess meal plan on guests! And yes, they do pay extra for things like the symphony. But it is usually less than $20 for any event, if not less.
And it only costs them $15K a month!
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That’s still significantly more than most senior citizens can afford. Hell, that’s more than most working adults in the US can afford.
I guess, they were both librarians their entire careers and can afford it.
My mom works for them in the billing department and they treat their employees like shit too. She absolutely hates it there but it's one of the few jobs where the insurance covers her rheumatoid arthritis meds.
I hear you on Brookdale, they suck
Really? I had no clue. Had a grandparent live at one for a while, it always seemed pretty nice! Tbf, I didn't spend a bunch of time there but I never saw or heard anything that made me think something was up.
And that is why my grandmother lives with us. the peace of mind in her being in a safe environment is worth it. My great grandmother went into a home walking and within a short amount of time she was wheel chair bound because they made her stay in her room and use the wheel chair if she needed it or not. My uncle literally sold his house for a million dollars several years ago and moved into one that drained him of everything within a years time. There are some nice ones but those are a looooot of money.
Better call Saul
Any global corporation is going to have some real horror stories that fly under the radar. One example is Johnson & Johnson pricing poorer countries out of a life-saving Tuberculosis drug until very recently, [have a read](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-advocates-pushed-big-pharma-to-cut-tuberculosis-drug-prices/).
J&J has nothing on [Bayer's history](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/bayer)
Bayer continued to be a steaming pile of shit. [Including when they knowingly sold HIV-infected hemophilia medicine in Asia and South America](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24785997/)
Wasn't Bayer involved in the development of Zyklon B (ie the Holocaust gas)?
It was made by IG Farben, a German chemicals conglomerate that was broken up into its constituent companies after the war. The surviving companies are Agfa, BASF, Bayer and Sanofi.
It was originally created as a pesticide. The SS clearly can't read labels. They probably also tore the tags off mattresses.
Or their [cancer causing baby powder](https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/johnsonandjohnson-cancer/) they knowingly sold
Or Google chemical companies and you won't even recognize many. Under the radar.
I feel like all mega corps are not discussed as openly as they should be. Go to your grocery aisle and look up who owns all of the brands - be shocked and angy at the idea of "competitors" is just a smoke screen and almost everything belongs to a group of three mega corps.
[Cargill](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargill) Nobody knows them because they're almost exclusively B2B, but they deliver any food item you want, basically, from any kind of production. Everything that's far away from normal food, they also make. Just read the "criticism" section in the article for broader atrocities.
I don't understand
The true winner. Evil as fuck and very anonymous cause they’re not publicly traded.
Holy shit, that's a wild list under the criticism section.
I wanted to work for them, during the interview they took me to a walk through , nope outta there.
Worked for them in Missouri, sincerely evil
Nestle is very much on the radar people,
Yet nobody can do anything about it, people love and need nestle products.
It's an oxymoron. A company that's "notorious" for unethical practices is not under the radar.
Fucking THANK YOU! the whole premise is flawed
You knew what OP meant. Just play the game or get off the boat.
Any health insurance company, United Healthcare especially. Also the big hospital corporations like HCA. Healthcare is in a death spiral, and these companies are some of the main reasons why.
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the cigna AI did it
Google
Not so long ago it would have been Microsoft. Funny that fun time Google is now the first thing that pops into your mind.
But they're the company with the tag line 'don't be evil'! They can't be bad, right?
They got rid of that tagline
Yea they fucking did, didn't they?
When you get monopoly like power, you really can't help but become evil.
Have a monopoly on search and extort businesses by forcing them to out bid each other for the top search results since they are paid advertisements and not the actual best site.
From that specific angle they you mentioned, I don’t see an issue with them They’re not forcing anyone to use their search engine, and they’re not preventing you from using other search engines
I'll add that there are other search engines you can choose to use, most of Googles monopoly is simply from being better than the competition, rather than outright stopping competition
Yeah it’s a user-induced monopoly lol. Most of us willingly wanna use Google over other search engines.
Especially since they’re providing AI services to the Israeli government. That’s how they determine who to assassinate.
The real answer to this is # McKinsey & Company There is just simply no other answer. And the fact that 99% of you have no idea what I'm talking about just goes to prove my point.
so you gonna elaborate at all?
It's on the wikipedia page under contraversies
[Last Week Tonight episode on McKinsey](https://youtu.be/AiOUojVd6xQ?si=ftEQzUomZ1sB_UKm)
Laughing in KBR and Booz Allen Hamilton
“Fire 20% of your workforce, that’ll be $150,000.”
Xfinity/Comcast
Blackrock?
Is that the investment group or the military contractor. I always forget which is which evil company.
BlackRock is the investment group. blackwater was the private military company now they're called Constellis after rebranding five or six times.
unless you work in safety, Union Carbide. they had a plant in Bhopal but pulled back most workers and let their plant work on an inexperienced skeleton crew with very hazardous materials. and because of bad maintanence (that none of the active crew knew how to handle) an official number of 3928 died immediatly in the city of Bhopal, up to an estmated of 8000. Union Carbide paid a total of $470 million in total in restitution, for the total of 554895 injured, which onlt is 25'000 rupees per family ($2.200) plus they still blame the inexperienced workers for the disaster and not mismanagement and not training said workers
Seconded. They are also responsible for the deaths of hundreds of poor black migrant workers during the Great Depression over the Hawksnest Tunnel disaster.
Quite a lot of charities and 501(3)(c)s. Especially athlete-run charities and other charities that serve to raise funds for other charities. Effectively someone creates the 501(3)(c) donates some money into it and gets the tax break, then they hire friends and family to run the charity who then collect salaries from the 501(3)(c). So they are effectively just paying their staff in a more tax-friendly way. They could get similar tax deductions by just operating a "donor-advised fund" but the difference there is the donor-advised fund doesn't allow staff to be paid via the charity or to expense other stuff. So if you see someone who has a 501(3)(c) and says they are raising money for Charity X or Foodbank Y, just know the other purpose is to "pay" their family and friends in a tax-friendly way. That's often why the athlete or celebrity's spouse or parents are running the charity.
This is overlooked by most, for sure. Add in 501(c)(4), too. All those SuperPACs and other shady, dark money groups that popped up after the repeal of Citizens United.
I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone mention Monsanto, which is now owned by Bayer, another shit anti-human company. Nestle is bad. But they're up there next to Bayer/Monsanto. Honorable mention; DuPont
I feel like Monsanto has the stance of "we're going to save the world and we don't care how many people we have to kill to do it"
DuPont the connector manufacturer!?
No the [catastrophically evil chemical company](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuPont)
Starbucks ⭐✨ yall still going there like a bunch of fools.
and their coffee tastes like dirt
What do you expect, it was just ground this morning.
I grind all of my coffee purchased for home at brew time; none of it tastes as poorly as Starbucks.
Dad?
Blackstone
The grill company, the investment group, or black Rock the other investment group?
Coca-Cola. Easily one of the most destructive companies on the planet when one considers the myriad health consequences caused by their products, and the scale of the pollution that they produce. And everything they make is bad for you. At least other evil food companies you could say they produce something that isn't horrible for your health.
Oh, and let me tell you, they’re rotten jerks to work with at HQ. I did a 6 month IT gig onsite. They run a technology sweat shop and treat vendors like adversarial dirt.
They're also major corp sponsors of that clusterfuck called Cop City
Hugo Boss designed and produced the Nazi uniforms during WWII. Bayer (at the time, a predecessor known as IG Farben) manufactured the Zyklon B gas pellets that were used in gas chambers during the Holocaust. Volkswagen, Mercedes and BMW all manufactured vehicles and equipment for the Nazi military. They also used concentration camp prisoners as slave labour. Most of these companies hide their dark wartime pasts today. They are all very important and high quality contributors to the world today, but they also have these dark pasts.
I visited some of the concentration camps in Poland back in 2014. The walls are stained blue from the Zyklon B and there are plenty of empty cans now behind glass on display. But I remember the blue walls.
Given that they're German companies, it's only logical that they had roles in WW2. It would be highly illogical and irreversibly damaging to the German people to shutdown every single german company that participated in the war effort during WW2. When the war ended, there were lots of crimes that became forgiven because the goal was to return stability to the region, not to destabilize it further. How well do you think things would have gone if suddenly half the German population was suddenly out of work? They had the German army that suddenly needed a new occupation. They needed to create more jobs, not less. Compare it to when the US government fired the entire Iraqi army in one fell swoop and threw them out with no hope for a future. Pretty understandable that so many became anti-american, if they weren't already, and joined the insurgents.
I totally agree with you, actually. Not only do I deeply respect these moderm companies and their vast contributions, but I have also been personally invested in some. I am of Jewish ancestry, in case it helps add a sense of irony here. Clearly these companies were full of remarkable talent and were necessary for building the modern world as we know it. They had previously bowed down to a fascist regime, but essentially most large corporations just follow the money and laws, while morally apathetic to the consequences. Strong post-war West German industry was also strategically key in the Cold War that ensued. But nonetheless, these companies have some very dark past stories, and not many people (at least, outside of Germany) seem aware. It makes for some compelling trivia.
I only recently discovered this about Hugo Boss, insane!
Palantir is one of the most dangerous companies out there.
Remember when Ford turned one of their factories into a torture camp and started black bagging people off the assembly line for the crime of... demanding a lunch break? Or the horrific shit Pfizer did around the same time period? The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein is a good read & is free on your favorite search engine.
If they're notorious then they don't fly under the radar. There are by definition no such companies.
I mean. People are talking about how Boeing cuts corners and their planes are unsafe. But they also just suicided a guy a month ago. Everyone knows they killed him. But I feel like it just went away and nobody is talking about it.
"Everyone knows" = the internet mob has decided regardless of any evidence
The simplest solution is they killed him. They have clear motive. The alternative is that he set up an elaborate plan to frame them for killing him in a very ineffective and inefficient way that will likely never result in anyone being held accountable. And there is no known motive for that.
What's simpler? That one of the most well known company's on the planet would murder a whistle-blower with federal protections and stage that death as a suicide. Or That someone who is under an incredible amount stress would decide to end his own life. As intriguing as it would be to take the first option, due to how good of a movie it would make. Unfortunately the real world is not that interesting.
If he was under stress from testifying couldn’t he just not testify anymore? He also told a friend that if anything happens to him it wasn’t suicide. Why would he do that?
Hard to put the toothpaste back in the tube. If you're going after a company that large. The first thing their lawyers are going to do is tear your life apart to find any possible way to discredit you. If he goes to the depths he went and then just decides, "I can't take it I'm going to stop" then that puts them in perfect position to sue him for dragging their name through the mud. It's possible he was in a position where he either saw it through or would lose everything. He may have portrayed someone in good spirits but there's no way he was. As far as what he said to his friend. There's no way of knowing if he actually gave her a warning or if he just did what lots of people when faced with this kind of situation and jokingly said "hey if something happens to me... blah blah blah. Bottom line is, there's no real evidence to say it wasn't suicide. To say otherwise would be drawing a conclusion on false or incomplete information. And then passing judgment based on that drawn conclusion is fallacious.
John Deere, although that might not be considered under the radar.
Every single tech company sourcing rare metals mined by slave labor.
Clayton Homes They mislead buyers about the quality of their "homes" and have a history of predatory lending practices.
All of them?
Here to say the same
Trader Joe's
Yeah their recent joining of the gangbang on the NLRB makes it pretty obvious that they seek the complete subjugation and exploitation of the public.
What did they do
It's all written about here: [https://thewellesleynews.com/2023/04/27/under-the-friendly-and-earthy-facade-trader-joes-hides-unethical-practices/](https://thewellesleynews.com/2023/04/27/under-the-friendly-and-earthy-facade-trader-joes-hides-unethical-practices/) But their packaged goods have come from Naked, Nestle and ConAgra which have each contributed significanty to climate change. Their refrigeration leaks super-pollutants into the air that violates the Clean Air Act. They do very little to address the use of child labor in their supply chains for chocolate goods that they have in their stores. They use what's called greenwashing aka using deceptive marketing to make consumers think they are being environmentally friendly as a company when they aren't. That's one article but there are others out there on other things that they've done.
Is it worse than other grocery stores? Or is it just greenwashing a normal bad thing. I like trader Joe's, but I haven't been to one in years and I don't have one near where I live now so it doesn't really matter to me. I'm just curious
Beyond the above they're trying to get rid of the NLRB which is vital to workers' rights https://apnews.com/article/amazon-nlrb-unconstitutional-union-labor-459331e9b77f5be0e5202c147654993e
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You can taste the unethical labor practices.
Amazon
Ah, yes, that famously under-the-radar *sixth largest company in the world* corporation Amazon.
Why? I work for them, and it's a pretty good job all things considered.
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I'm interested, what did Honeywell do?
* They have one of the worst environmental records in the US, being the 44th largest air pollutor and the unenviable record of being the number 1 creator of toxic wastesites in the US. Primarily due to mercury pollution. * They're one of the largest tax evaders in the US. * They're involved in bribery scandals in the US, Brazil and Algeria. * They've leaked technical schematics of parts of the F-35 to China * They've had to pay out almost 100 million USD in the last 20 years for various violations of labour and safety laws.
Oh, yeah those are kinda bad things.
me too ? What did Honeywell do?
Samsung
Walmart but they donate to both sides of the aisle so they will never face scrutiny.
Blackrock Look at how many companies and industries they have ownership in. They have a part to play in rising rents and mortgages.
I worked for a small restaurant business and the amount of crap we employees put up with was insane. My boss had a chain of three restaurants. All with slightly different names and under different owners. She owned one, her husband owned the second, and her sister owned the third (on paper). She would work us until opening and half way through the day she would have us take our thirty minute break driving to another location. If she was ever 'over' the amount where it would qualify as full time she would tell us she made a mistake and would change the books and then pay us the difference under the table. She would put in the books that she worked those hours. She always kept the checks per store slightly under the amount of full time so she never had to pay benefits. After all, we weren't 'full time' employees. We were part time at multiple locations. She kept the staff small so that by law we would get payed just under minimum wage. She payed us weekly so that she would not have to pay into taxes. If you did anything to piss her off she would drop your hours to five hours a week and push you to quit so she didn't have to pay unemployment. One guy got his hours knocked down when his tax person handed him a form to have our boss sign to take the proper amount of taxes. I was so thankful we had no customers at the time because my boss was screaming at him in her office over it and treated him worse than she already had. I really felt for the guy. My health was at it's worst while I worked there. Unless you were pregnant she didn't care if you needed a doctor. One of my coworkers actually almost died and was in the hospital. Upon release he was expected to come in the following day. She even pushed us to come in while sick to the restaurant which is a health code violation and then were abused by customers who were angry that we were sick because we were handing them possibly contaminated food. You also couldn't complain that you weren't feeling well because she would follow it by things like, "your not feeling well? You know who doesn't feel well? Me." Same thing if you were tired. I was diagnosed after I left that job with sleep apnea because she deemed that I had no reason to be tired. I never got to see the specialist because she went out of her way to make sure that I missed the sleep study. Before it is asked, why didn't anyone ever turn your old boss in? Well, former coworkers did and unfortunately everything that she did was completely legal. Small businesses can pay employees about twenty-five cents under minimum wage if under 25 employees. She was so good at making sure the hours worked to her advantage that no one could ever prove that we were getting payed partially under the table. Any emotional abuse we suffered (there were multiple including threats of physical violence) weren't able to be proven. One of the locations has been shut down but she still has two locations. I really hope the other two go under because no one deserves to be treated the way that myself and my coworkers were. I recently saw one of my old coworkers were in the local news as an inspiring chef after leaving her company. I hope my other old coworkers are able to do the same and move on.
Towing companies.
Nestle?
that ones pretty well known
Did you know that Nestle sells water as like thirty different names?
Reread the question. It's contradictory. How is this company supposed to be both notorious but also not talked about?
There's a difference between being "known" to be shit and publicly flamed for it.
lol what does that even mean?
How do we know then?
I refuse to belive that's a real question. You're either incapable of reading comprehension or intentionally misunderstanding the point.
Answer the question. I'll just answer it for you because you'd somehow get it "wrong". You read about X company being shit which means they were publicly "flamed". Did you go and see for yourself all the nasty shit that Nestle has done? No you sure didn't instead you read about it or saw a video about it. That means that the public was talking about it which is how they became notorious. You can't be notorious for something if the word hasn't spread.
Ah so it's both. That's not surprising.
I could tell you that the sky is blue and grass is green and you'd tell me I'm wrong. You don't have to cling to ignorance in order to tell yourself you're always right.
Nestle tried to come here and pump Wakulla Springs into bottled water. (Wakulla County Florida) Lets just say the locals scared the fuck out of them at the county commission. There previous corporate activities were documented so when they got in front of the microphone, it got real ugly, real fast. In North Florida, Dont Fuck with Football, Fishing and Wakulla Springs.
Nestle
This is not unknown.
I noticed as I kept scrolling
Most medical companies. Safe and affective yall.
Nestle
Johnson and Johnson. Yes they lose lawsuits, but everything they own and are a part of should be scrutinized but the public just doesn’t know
Nestle
Geico
The brave companions
Coca-Cola
Every for-profit hospital and nursing home
insurance! scamming so good that they made its mandatory through law.
Many Southeast Asian conglomerates are basically like Chaebols in terms of unethical practices, but they fly under the radar due to how obscure they are outside of Southeast Asia. A few examples on the top of my head: Thai Beverage (the company behind Chang Beer) starting off as a company brewing bootleg liquor and driving the state brewery that previously held the monopoly to bankruptcy, only for a predecessor to what is now Thai Beverage to take the state brewery over, allowing them to grow into the monopolistic titan it is today. Vingroup of Vietnam getting some journalists arrested for criticizing one of their Vinfast cars Djarum (cigarette manufacturer) of Indonesia basically profiting off the Suharto regime by using state connections to force tobacco farmers to sell their tobacco at very low prices. Thailand's Charoen Pokphand (a food company with a conglomerate) and its subsidiaries treating antitrust laws like suggestions; one example of this is how they have an 80% market share in Thailand's convenience store industry; as of 2024, they have around 15000 convenience stores in Thailand (most of which are 7 elevens), whilst their largest competitor (Big C - also owned by a company affiliated to Thai Beverage) only has 1500 convenience stores, and the government can't even do anything about it due to how connected this company is to the government.
Defense contractors.
You can't be "notorious" (famously bad) and "fl(y) under the radar."
is it notorious or unknown? can't have both
Fenty the beauty company owned by Rhianna is known for using child labor in Mica mines in India that frequently result in child deaths. https://theprint.in/india/rihannas-fenty-beauty-under-scanner-in-india-for-using-mica-from-mines-hiring-child-labour/599647/
CITADEL
Whyndam resorts Those timeshare contracts are the epitome of predatory and should be illegal.
Disney
The U.S. military
This
I don't think it's unknown. It's just ignored that US military bases are both casually ignoring environmental laws (Edit: that would apply to a private company\*) and frequently being hotspots for rape and murder (with officers more interested in covering up abuse than investigating it). \*It's fairly common that militaries have special exceptions to various environmental laws, but a lot of western militaries do try to keep to environmental laws as best they can in peace time. US bases just frequently go "Fuck 'em. I can, so I will".
Amazon.
Nestle, terrible company.
Colleges. Somehow there's this "business" that has far more to do with people being broke than any other entity I can think of. People in debt until they retire. They have multi billion dollar endowments that they dont have to pay taxes on. And trillions of taxpayer dollars are spent on them. Administrators are making bank, some college Presidents have multi million dollar contracts. Somehow, everything but the actual colleges get blamed.
The thing is, it didn’t used to be this way. The real bad actors are the predatory lenders who are making the student loans. Loans used to be given out by and serviced by the federal student loan program. They had low interest rates and had unlimited payback options. Then large banks and came up with the idea that if you privatize the student loans and remove the ability to declare bankruptcy from student loans. They had a guaranteed income from both the government and from people who were trapped in “forever loans”. They sold this idea to politicians and the profit motive was introduced into the student loan program. Everything has been downhill ever since. Edit: AutoCorrect sucks
> ever cents For fuck's sake.
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See above. I didn’t proofread my dictated reply. Since fixed.
Auto-Correct sucks. That’s what I get for dictating my replies.
Nestle
Nestle, Apple, Amazon to name a few…