Lemdro.id

1 point

6 months ago

I can’t force people to do the things I think they should. Noone can. People draw inspiration from all sorts of things. Like you right now seem inspired to protect China from racist western policies.

I dont pretend to speak for my country, or its government, but I can do two things:

Walk the walk, if you believe something then follow it. Examples: de-googling, disengaging with social media, following a vegan lifestyle, research companies before giving them your money.
Talking about all of this stuff in public places. With my family, coworkers, or here on Lemmy, anything we say has the potential to inspire someone to change. You never know what will be the thing that triggers change, but for all the things I listed above I had someone share that information with me in a public forum, which caused me to change.

I’m sure we can argue the efficacy of this strategy all day, and even some of the examples you gave like Amazon are no longer the behemoth they used to be.

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MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world

[ - ]

1 point

6 months ago

After coming back from a break, I realised I might have leaned too hard into “protecting Chinese companies”. I will say this right now for everyone reading: I have no love for the nationality of said companies. I don’t care if Aliexpress or a clone of theirs was Chinese, Korean, Brazilian, Swiss, Russian, Iranian, Australian or Japanese (incidentally I spend time on buyee.jp because the cheap deals on CDs sometimes). What I care about is providing competition to the bigger mammoths here. If I find a USB adapter for a quarter of the price with free shipping and refunds from a Chinese shop with a decent reputation (Aliexpress, Banggood, TaoBao and now TEMU), I’ll take it. I hope this forces big American retailers to maybe give better, fairer prices to their customers.

I’m not quite convinced that Amazon is no longer the giant with worms as we knew it. Can you explain?

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[ - ]

1 point

6 months ago

I don’t have a lot of inner details about amazon but I do know that they have peaked already as far as retail goes. I don’t know when, I just know its happened already.

Amazon is no longer any of the following:

The cheapest deal
Filled with reliable reviews
Filled with trustworthy companies

And on top of that, their product search page is to the point where not even the advertisers are having a good time. The end users (buyers) stopped having a useful interface a while before that.

Its easier now for me to avoid amazon simply because they aren’t the best deal by nearly any metric any more.

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MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world

[ - ]

1 point

6 months ago

I see. Well, my point still stands; we’re choosing amongst shit anyway

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[ - ]

1 point

6 months ago

True, most global brands are garbage, but I do see a lot of stuff locally thats sprung up to fill interesting niches. I still think the community of people who say “fuck big business, and fuck endless greed” is a growing bunch so I’m hopeful.

It helps for me to watch what the generations after me are doing, and they are doing a fine job fighting for progress in my opinion.

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MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world

[ - ]

1 point

6 months ago

I don’t see much of a “fuck corporate greed” around me. And there are some things are much better overseas, like cheap IOT gizmos. Purchasing a cheap relay is much easier from the bigger brands on Aliexpress than from a local manufacturer

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[ - ]

1 point

6 months ago

Yeah I think probably me saying “big business” is overly broad.

I almost always use that to mean big companies that use their size unfairly in the marketplace, and I’m not just talking about how production of scale works.

I do think that we need to really open up the global market, this competition by country is sort of ridiculous, but I’m not going to pretend I understand it all enough to prescribe a solution.

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