I learned about this at university. Wasn’t sure I’d find mention of it online but it’s out there. One of the many examples of corporations extra psychotic behavior in the Global South. IIRC they were keen on getting mothers feeding their babies formula particularly so their breast milk dried up and then they would have no alternative, becoming dependent and stuck in a financial bind.
There are a few inaccuracies and simplifications here. Lactalis is independent from Nestlé, though they have a co-entreprise for dairy. For l’Oréal, it’s a bit disingenuous to link both here because massive companies like that have a lot of mutual participations. And KitKat is manufactured by Hershey’s in the US I think.
That being said, Lactalis is equally shitty so you can avoid it anyway. And the same goes for l’Oréal. I don’t know about Hershey’s but I could bet.
Reminder that as much as I am not a Nestlé fan, he never said that.
He said :
“Water is, of course, the most important raw material we have today in the world. It’s a question of whether we should privatize the normal water supply for the population. And there are two different opinions on the matter. The one opinion, which I think is extreme, is represented by the NGOs, who bang on about declaring water a public right. That means that as a human being you should have a right to water. That’s an extreme solution. The other view says that water is a foodstuff like any other, and like any other foodstuff it should have a market value. Personally, I believe it’s better to give a foodstuff a value so that we’re all aware it has its price, and then that one should take specific measures for the part of the population that has no access to this water, and there are many different possibilities there.”
Also, the whole “raahaahaha Nestlé is evil” was propulsed by Coca-Cola and Pepsico because they hated that a non-US company had rights on water in the US. (Water that they wanted to sell in the first place.) Nestlé is no more evil than any food company that is bigger than your local ethnic market. They just suck like every company. Don’t buy the propaganda and think that you are better from buying that brand rather than that one. Just say “fuck all of them”.
Yes but… you got it. That was in the sense of, I can say fuck you all and take as much water as I want for my pool and to clean my car and it would be OK because I have an inconditional right to it…
Why curate your Steam store when you can allow utter garbage into it that just effectively steals people’s money?
What’s the solution here?
They used to curate everything heavily, but new studios and indies had a tough time getting their games reviewed and added. So they implemented Greenlight, their user-curation platform so users could tell them what they wanted to see. It just became a huge popularity contest, and getting your game on Steam became about how much marketing you could afford to buy. Now, they let anyone with $100 in, and it’s very easy for an indie studio to get their game on Steam, but it’s also easy for all of the garbage to get onto Steam.
What solution would you propose, that both lets legitimate indie studios get their games on Steam, especially studios producing games in less popular / niche genres, and also edges out the objective garbage, while not incurring huge costs on developers or using a bunch of Valve employee time to personally curate every submission?
Edit: For that matter…
Why have a sensible customer service when you can blame customers themselves and offer no refunds, you know, despite the fact the refund wouldn’t be necessary if you curated your store?
Steam’s refund system is one of the most generous, if not the most generous, in the industry. What are your complaints with it? I’m legitimately curious.
Why do anything people are asking for when you can nickle and dime them with dumb shit like trading cards?
I’m not going to defend trading cards, because they’re stupid as hell, but how many have you ever been forced to buy?
Gabe is just as bad as every other CEO. Arguably he’s worse.
You know what Valve hasn’t done? Gone public. It would make them - and Gabe personally - an incredible amount of short-term money, but they haven’t done it, and thank fuck for that, because it’d be the beginning of the end of the PC gaming industry as we know it.
Edit #2: If you’re one of the people downvoting and not commenting, you’re a coward.
Plus, in the age of fighting for the right to repair our devices, the Steam Deck is a breath of fresh air. They could have locked it down with a proprietary OS like the Switch and pretty much every other console, but didn't.
A… game from two decades ago? I appreciate them for keeping the game up for this long, dude. The hats are still in my inventory, and the good matches still to be had. I wouldn’t think Blizzard is a bad company if they had let SC:BW go, or SOE if they said no more everquest. I think being mad about a game that old is demanding something more than even a good company should be expected to provide.
Counter Strike as a franchise is old as well. They keept making new games and most recently moved CS into Source 2. Why can’t they do that to TF2? Oh that’s right, the game makes 0 billons of dollars.
That’s every large chocolate company though. Nestle just said the quiet part out loud. Even the ones that promise to use “ethical chocolate” are either unverifiable in their claims to begin with and/or have been exposed to be outright lying.
There are smaller chocolate brands that do have verifiably ethical chocolate. The big companies do everything they can to crush those chocolatiers specifically. Often they do this by spreading rumors about how ethical chocolate is unverifiable or a lie.
It is tough, because there are so many intermediaries in the business, but it would actually be much easier for the larger corps because they have more resources and better leverage. There are also companies that just lie for profit.
Nestle could, with minimal effort, insist on a functional chain of provenance, and could easily fund all of the enforcement and verification efforts with money that fits into rounding errors on their balance sheet. They won’t, because that helps every chocolate producer avoid supporting slave labor, and eventually it would go away. They want the waters muddy so they can continue to abuse children living in impoverished conditions for profit, while saying “yes, but nobody can verify their chocolate isn’t prepared by child slave laborers.”
Yeah, or well, in theory their formula works, but given the realities of developing countries they knew they were killing babies when they introduced it there.
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