Asklemmy

The fact that the entertainment industry has weaned entire generations with a way to access popular works, or events such as sports and concerts - and then started to privatize them, first with cable, then with subscription services, and each of them with higher costs and more draconian controls than the last. It feels as if the concept of "popular culture" was manufactured to hook us into paying larger amounts of money to the entertainment industry.

I have at least 4 companies on my banned list, but the ones that come up most often are...

• Starbucks - I like good coffee. They just can't seem to deliver and just focus on mass appeal to overly sweet milk drinks. No thanks. Good coffee doesn't deserve that.
• Blizzard/Activision - They need to clean house. Horrible treatment of people inside. The games they produce aren't good even that good. I refuse to play their stuff as popular as it might be.
• Disney - I don't think they produce anything really valuable. Their marketing is amazing but I don't like what they have given us. I honestly want nothing to do with Marvel or Star Wars and dislike the direction they have gone with those franchises.
• Wizards of the Coast - all their game products are clearly cash grabs. Building in expiration so customers have to buy more is awful. I do not play Magic the Gathering and never will. I have also grown to dislike Dungeons and Dragons. It's not even that great and there are so many better, more interesting games to play.

That's just a few of my old man rants.

"Only you"? More like all of us, or at least most.

Once bitten twice shy, basically.

I've ranted about it before, but I'll do it again: dubiously-free "drops" in numerous online games that expect some expenditure of time and attention to some Twitch streamers. I get suspicious from the start about anything "free" and the cultural expectation is always "it isn't a big deal, why not get the free thing?" Which to me just seems insidious and creepy because of the unspoken intentions and point of the "free" part.

It doesn't help that I find streamers obnoxious in general, but the expectation to have that noise in the background just long enough to get the dubiously free thing is really offputting.

Negative real interest rates.

Growth of lynch law and political statements, primarily based on religious/moral motives.

In my opinion, you have to do anything as long as you're not hurting the freedom of other people.

But no, taboos exist for some reason. In my country, LGBT is a taboo, even though they're not hurting anybody. Moe/loli are also taboo for some reason, even though they're not harming anyone, in contrast to gore which gets its place on most movies. Alcohol & weed is a different beast, I guess, it causes a hard-addiction and damages people's minds. We're getting sensitive about small things and get completely ignorant about what is really killing people and nature painfully, like social inequality/injustice, lack of education, healthcare, etc.

Alienation is also a problem, it's been here since the 19th century, just that now it gets a boost 'If you're not on social media, then you don't exist'. Every public event is a public relations event now as well. It's damn important to get a checkbox that we attended a f...ing meeting. Attendance and formal presence becomes more important than social interaction, knowledge and problem solving.

EDIT: I'd like to clarify that sexual abuse of people under the age of consent or sexual abuse of adults who didn't explicitly consent in any means equals to torture, which is against the other's person's will and it breaks the freedom of abused person and it shall be forbidden. Note that people under the age of consent cannot consent because they are not responsible for themselves and cannot make such choice. My point is that moe (including loli and shota, which can look disturbing) are stigmatized and did not deserve an attribution to obscenity or sexual abuse material. This stigma shall be broken.

Regarding your example, I recently got a robot vacumm cleaner and I made sure it came with a traditional IR remote, because I know the manunfacturer's Android app won't always be available and it's already unreliable.