Comment on Why I recommend against Brave.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 month agoSo it’s ok to buy a Tesla nowadays in your opinion? Genuinely curious.
Yes, if it’s the vehicle that fits your needs the best. Elon doesn’t need your money, and with Tesla getting roasted in the media, you can probably pick up a good deal.
That said, I wouldn’t buy a Tesla for other reasons, such as:
- poor manufacturing quality
- poor reliability (the Model 3 is the “best” and it’s just average)
- poor repairability
I do boycott certain products though, first among them is Wal-Mart, but that’s because I find Wal-Mart to be anti-competitive (drives smaller stores out of business) and they contribute to poor working conditions either directly (i.e. their own products) or indirectly (i.e. forcing suppliers to cut costs). I’ve been boycotting them for ~20 years, and honestly haven’t bothered checking if they’ve improved. I also try to avoid buying from Amazon for similar reasons.
Maybe Tesla is similar to those, idk. I personally don’t buy Musk’s products because I find them lacking, and I haven’t needed any more reasons to avoid his products than that.
I literally don’t care about the political views of the CEO/owner of a company. I dislike Chik-Fil-A’s founder, for example, but I like the food there and the workers seem to be treated well, so I shop there. I especially like that they’re closed on Sundays, which guarantees workers get at least one day off. Whether some idiot gets rich from a fraction of the money I spend on a certain product doesn’t bother me, I mostly care that the business is run well and the product is good.
deathbird@mander.xyz 1 month ago
I appreciate your perspective, and I agree that we should probably be more concerned with how the company functions than the personal character of the CEO .
Sam Walton was a hardworking, amiable, humble man by all accounts. And even when he was alive Walmart the company was cutting throats.
At the same time, if a CEO deeply ingrains himself in the political process, I can probably take a pass on his products even if they are marginally better. So these days Musk is doing so much damage to the functioning of the US government that even if Teslas were good I wouldn’t buy one.
The Chikfila guy on the other hand was just donating to a few discriminatory “Christian” charities last I checked but stopped trying to change policy, so…as fast food shops go it’s actually not too bad even if I don’t prefer to eat there.
Starbucks…evil CEO, but preemptively boycotting before the organized shops strike doesn’t help the workers.
Brave…has had too many fuckups for my taste. On the rare occasion that I need a privacy focused Chromium-based browser I just use Chromium with uBlock Origin for the one website I need to visit.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Oh yeah, I absolutely respect the man, I just don’t respect his business choices. There needs to be a balance between cutting costs to bring prices down for customers and providing for your employees.
But why? He doesn’t need your money anymore, and if everyone stopped buying his products and Tesla went bankrupt, he’d still be ridiculously rich.
I get that it’s sending a message, but what does that accomplish? Maybe the board boots him as CEO, but he’ll retain his ownership stake.
I don’t see it. That’s why I focus on company culture, which often survives a change in management. If the culture is busted, I go out of my way go avoid their products.
Starbucks has actually been fantastic, at least in the past, with even part-time employees getting great benefits and pay being very competitive. I don’t know how things are with the CEO changes (Chipotle guy now, right?), so maybe that’s no longer the case.
That said, I don’t go there because I don’t like their products.
Does that still work?
I mostly just need something to test on, since I’m a full stack web dev, and I don’t like having ads everywhere when I need to prettify some JSON or something. Also a fallback on the few pages Firefox doesn’t work on, once in a blue moon.
That’s really it.