Don’t know about getting money back, but it is something of a coop. My link includes a recommendation to vote “withhold” in the current election, why they recommend the action, and how to do so.

REI. Just another corporation in a “Good Guy” costume. https://www.ourrei.com/2025-rei-board-elections

Union busting, problematic supply chains, pulling PPE from staff. Hell, officially supporting Trump’s pick for Secretary of the Interior because I guess they can’t help themselves.

I try to spend consciously and it’s fucking depressing. The list of companies I avoid grows and grows and grows. If it isn’t some antisocial billionaires throwing their weight around trying to get more money or change the world to better fit their vision with complete and utter disregard for normal people, it’s pressure from the millionaires to increase share value so they can try to get their turn.

The need to increase profit, or more recently increase the rate of growth (the line that shows how fast the line goes up has been discovered so now that line needs to go up), has ruined everything.

If the company isn’t completely, directly captured by these antisocial forces they are indirectly captured by the environment that is dominated by those same forces. Monopolies, anticompetitive business practices, hostile takeovers, vulture capitalists, ladder pulling, or just people strapped for cash that just buy whatever is cheaper regardless of the human cost involved.

Now everyone else is being squeezed and struggle to live a decent life or find dignity. Those responsible for this environment just use those struggling people. They’ll redirect them to squeezing each other - scams, pyramid schemes, MLMs. They’ll keep us fighting amongst ourselves - blame immigrants, minorities, DEI.

Now “AI” is continuing to get hyped and pushed even if it sucks at its job and demands insane amount of energy. It’s way cheaper than people, or at least the cost is easier to pass on to others and it might be even cheaper eventually… so everyone is investing in it.

From an American perspective, it’s just so much and I feel like things are only getting worse and fast.

My mother’s life insurance policies, many of which she’s had for decades, are actually bleeding her dry with premium increases. I’m hoping seeing an accountant can convince her to drop at least some of them. She’s so obsessed with “leaving me something” when she dies that she’s going into debt to pay for it…

Edit: Don’t get me wrong, I’m not looking to get anything from her and I’ve told her so repeatedly.

The only time precedent ever matters to conservatives is if it works in their favor.

No, before anyone says it, it is not smart to stoop to their level

While it’s a bit disappointing, I understand that one perspective is that it is a defensive move. I don’t think it is unreasonable to assume that Trump is going to abuse his power and weaponize the Justice Dept to extract everything he can, politically, from the resulting show.

I don’t know whether or not Biden would have done the exact same thing if it was a more reasonable Republican administration coming in. That would be far more telling. It might have been that Biden was making a show of it with the assumption that he’d be overseeing and influencing it all as president and if that weren’t the case he’d be abusing his authority to spare his son.

Yes, it’s frustrating because of the message it send but frankly, I don’t think it’ll cause much trouble. Everyone who’d see it as an admission of the guilt of the “Biden crime family” wasn’t going to change their mind, even if Hunter was publicly drawn and quartered by the Biden administration. Those folks would immediately move the goal post - “Yeah, whatever, but what about…” or just insist Hunter’s death was fake and it was all sham.

You don’t even need bribery. You can just throw money at something and make things happen.

If you think something is true, you can pay the world to prioritize things as if it were true.

If you think vaccines cause autism and you are rich, you can create massive “education” campaigns and the like to convince people its true. You can buy ads telling people its true. You can amass an enormous following of people who believe you and change policy without bribery.

Why do ordinary people seem so unprotected against these shady practices

Assuming you are in the USA, it’s fundamentally because our politics is fueled by private money. The “haves” spend lots of money to make rules that protect and enrich themselves at the expense of the “have nots”. The rich get richer, and the rest of us get a larger share of the burden.

The rich then spend more of their money convincing everyone else that some minority group of their fellow “have nots” are to blame and let us fight amongst ourselves. They starve us but leave us with just enough left to lose so that the price of doing something about it is too high (quitting, losing health insurance, getting arrested at a protest, etc) for most of us to bear.

how can we change this?

Get money out of politics. Get the public to stop blaming their fellow have nots and demand change from the haves.

How does one person even start to address these issues?

Have empathy for and help your neighbors if you can, especially when they take the risks required to push for actual change. Talk to people. Organize. Support/start unions or a mutual aid organization. Go to local government meetings and make your voice heard. Run for local office.

Its easy for a small group of wealthy organizations to tilt specific elections or politics in their favor. It’s much harder them to do that in 1,000+ small communities across the nation.

It was not advertised as a game-pass like catalog when I was cancelling my preorder. I literally cancelled because it wasn’t that. It was Destiny and 4k 60Hz with TBD games coming in later months.

I only had a gaming computer and a Shield TV so Stadia would have been pointless for me unless it was in the living room with a controller and some interesting games.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the race of the band director did place a part, but I’m pissed at what happened either way.

By some more nuances definitions I’ve heard it may be technically true that the black cops weren’t racist. However, it is possible to treat someone poorly because of the color of their skin even if it matches your own. Maybe the cops consider themselves “one of the good ones”, maybe they just believe that they are able to power trip a little harder against certain races because it’s more socially acceptable, or maybe they don’t want to stand out against their white peers and just do what they do.

I honestly didn’t watch the video either though - maybe a black cop was the first to escalate it so the last hypothetical isn’t a strong one. I’ve just seen enough videos like that this week and don’t want to get more upset by watching one more.

After committing to several Google services only to have them shut down I wasn’t willing to risk it again.

Did they refund the subscription fee? If I knew they’d refund it all, I might not have cancelled my pro preorder.

I was willing to potentially be let down again but once I heard you had to buy almost all your own games (again, if you already own them) to play them on the service I cancelled. I was aware that they’d give you Destiny (a game I have zero interest in, especially with a controller) for free. I didn’t seem worth sinking money into the service.

Or people could just be upset that cops of any color feel justified in using tasers when civilians don’t comply with unusual, unnecessary requests. I don’t care what color the band director is or what color the cops are. I’m continually disgusted at how many videos there are of cops losing their shit when a civilian doesn’t immediately respond “how high?”.