I am taking my own advice, lol.

Just because you are stuck in your “purist” ways, doesn’t mean that everyone else is going to follow in your footsteps.

I don’t email anyone who uses Gmail or MS Outlook, but if I had to send a reply to and from my work email, to a company which likely uses Gmail, tf am I gonna do?

Shiver me timbers, I’ll send a single email through a corpo-slop server. Oh no… Anyway.

You genuinely have some of THE WORST takes I have seen on here so far. “Starbucks isn’t as evil” “Lidl sucks because they support Israel”

Again, I’m all for boycotting shitty corporations, but if you believe that sending a single email to a company WHO YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT SERVICES THEY USE is stupid.

If you have a phone, best get rid of that, because your local phone provider and U.S Satellites know where you are! They hear all your conversations and see all the SMS messages! God forbid you use your phone to sign up for anything, they can see the code you get from the service. God forbid you use a bank card, because those are owned by either Visa or MasterCard, American corporations. Best get rid of those as well, mate.

In fact, get rid of everything and go live in the woods. Perhaps you’ll learn something about life or something.

I will no longer perpetuate this conversation further as it is entirely useless. I don’t want anyone telling me that I “live in a lie”

We all do, you just don’t understand or realize it.

“Don’t tell people what to do”

• is also actively telling people what to do.

Hypocricy at its finest!

I don’t think you are upholding your own standards. If you were, you would have just isolated yourself completely from everywhere.

But I don’t have time to argue with someone who has the same thinking as a stereotypical Vegan lol.

Go ahead am live in your fantasy land where you think boycotting means that everyone you ever send an email to is failing to boycott.

A friend said it best “If you and your friend have been dumping trash on the road and you say ‘I’m gonna quit that’ but he say he will continue. Isn’t it better that at least one of you stopped?”

Your whole idea of boycotts are twisted completely.

Also, FYI, educate yourself first. Proton is not an MS product, you donut.

Again, as a person mentioned here:

“You forgot to put ‘can you pretty please stop boycotting?’ at the end of your talk”

To the other commenters reading this:

Do what you can reasonably do. Going for this perfectionist bullshit is only going to make you want to quit boycotting U.S products and the cycle will start anew.

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Also, forgot to add…

If you want to avoid Microsoft and Google, good luck with that because a vast majority of search engines use either Microsoft’s Bing API or Google’s API.

And in order to make a search engine that is not tied with Google or Microsoft, it has to be self-hosted, self-coded and completely self-reliant.

As a person in the tech space, let me give you my opinion on all of this.

“Of course it’s a failure to boycott. Every time you send email to a Microsoft recipient, you feed profitable data to the MS ad surveillance machine.”

It’s not, because YOU are the one boycotting and not the other user. If you can convince everyone to ditch GMail, Microsoft Outlook, AOL, Yahoo or others, then yeah, you guys are boycotting well. But if the end user of something YOU sent doesn’t boycott, they have no reason to change their client and it is not a failed boycott. Because even if one user boycotts, it is still better if no one boycotted.

The end user would be inconveniencing themselves by communicating with you, because you decided to use something else and force them to use that same thing with you. Imagine this, you use Email Client 1 but the user you sent the email to, uses Corporate Mail 1. Are you going to tell the user that in order to communicate with you they should completely ditch Corporate Mail 1 and use Email Client 1? Don’t you think that is being an inconvenience?

This almost makes me think of some Vegan, animal rights activists, which will tell you how terrible you are for eating meat.

Also, unfortunately, Microsoft and Apple are the industry standards for when it comes to Personal Computing and Workstations.

“If you boycott MS effectively, then you use snail mail (absent other channels). You feed nothing to MS and block your recipient from using you to feed MS more.”

Imagine using snail mail in the digital age to send important documents that need to be signed by tomorrow. Do you realize just how much time and money would take to send a letter from, say, Poland to France?

Not a chance, especially not for critical things.

Using something like Proton would definitely help make things more secure AND less money for the U.S, but how many people do you know that use Proton Mail? 2? 5? 10?

Fact of the matter is, some companies are unavoidable, especially in the workplace.

Don’t inconvenience your colleagues by forcing them to use a different client than what they are used to already. Or, if you want to introduce a new provider, introduce it slowly. Give people the time they need to let it settle in better.

I will also say something that was said here earlier, this way of thinking is incredibly “purist” and too much “perfectionism”

Don’t let “perfect” get in the way of “Good”

People are already struggling to boycott US companies, let alone this purist version you have here.

Well, yeah, that is true. But I just know that Nestle is not American and that gives me some peace because money won’t be going to American pockets. :)

As for the reasons, I totally agree that Nestle products are really bad in their policies and such.

I used to buy S. Pallegrino water but I momentarily stopped because I was under the impression that Nestle is American.

(Because this post is posted in a BoycottUS community and because I have a growing distaste for the US as a whole)

Sorry, forgot that for a moment. I don’t know why and for what reason I thought they were American. Good to know, at least, even if I accidentally buy something owned by them, I know I’m supporting European businesses, rather than American businesses.

“If you cannot find a knock-off Twix or whatever you think you can’t live without, shoplift it.”

So your suggestion is “If you can’t buy it, just steal it bro”

Nice thinking lol.

As for the brands, you have absolutely NO IDEA just how deeply rooted all of these brands are. Especially Coca-Cola and the bunch. Up until today, I learned that Coca-Cola owns a very BIG, bottled water brand where I live. And it is not even listed on your infographic.

“Memory deficit” sorry, mate, but this is just not really a memory issue, there is simply too much brands for one person to keep up. I will be opening up my phone 20 times a day just so I can make sure that I don’t buy from any of those, and yet still accidentally buy from them. I could be at the grocery store tomorrow, buying milk that looks like a local brand but secretly it’s owned by one of the ones listed. Because the European Country I’M from is almost entirely unimportant and therefore the brands in it go unnoticed, so there’s no telling of who’s the real owner of the brands in my local grocery store.

I believe in the boycott and I am sure it is going to work. I have almost given up all of my US company consumption. A few exceptions still exist, obviously, but they are impossible to avoid nowadays.

Boycotting US companies is more than enough for me, and my main goal as of right now. Protesting about terrible companies, while certainly a good thing, and I wish I had the willpower to quit them fully, is not my concern at the moment.

I stopped drinking Sprite, Fanta, Coca-Cola, Mezzo Mix and the water brand Coca-Cola bought, as well as Fuzetea. And if I have a chocolate craving, I just buy from Lidl’s homebrand chocolate or Kinder Chocolate if I really want it.

I’ve stopped relying on U.S big tech as much, mainly: Google, Microsoft, Apple, Scamazon and Facebook. I don’t use (F)Elon Musk’s (e)X and for my music? I listen to it through Spotify for commercial ones and SoundCloud for underground people or straight up buy it from Bandcamp.

I don’t eat cereal or any of the “brand names” anymore. I’m just saying, that fusing two boycotts into one is very difficult unless you are absolutely dedicated, and the average person just does not care enough about either boycott.

Just ask my mom or all of my friends. They’ll tell you that they think it’s stupid OR that they can’t live without XYZ product, which is American.

Sorry for the long rant

So… Basically, what you are saying is just don’t buy anything, ever?

Because it’s damn near impossible to avoid Nestle, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Mondelez and Kelloggs.

Great idea! /s

The only way to abstain from ALL of these is if you buy all the ingredients from the store and make it all yourself, especially if you want chocolate and such!

But for 99% of people, this is not a financially viable option.

Just don’t boycott US companies at this point, they are all entrenched in world markets.