I’m tired boss……
Just when you think you find good companies to support they end up being run by shitbags.
Ok, where to next for my VPN needs?
I highly doubt you’ll find any company composed solely of people that support ideologies you agree with. I know that sounds flippant and dismissive but ultimately we should support the best options we have. Or I guess you can roll your own solution and trust that you have the skills to stay ahead of the opposition.
You don’t have to agree with the chef in politics to enjoy their food.
Acting like that zealously would make you quickly run out of options if you actually talked to most chefs.
There’s a difference between a chef having an opinion and a high-ranking decision maker having an opinion and the money to amplify it.
If the chef thinks he shouldn’t have to make food for immigrants, that’s too bad. He’ll have to do his job anyway. If the CEO thinks his establishment shouldn’t serve immigrants and donates to politicians that promise to let him segregate his diner, that might actually have an impact far greater than the chef’s opinion.
And contributing money to shitbags allows them to keep funding terrible values. See Musk.
True but the only thing these fuckers understand the minus to their wallet.
Saying he ‘made a donation’ is downplaying his role. It makes it sound like he’s just some guy doing what everyone else does to participate in politics…
The 2025 donation accounted for 72% of the party’s total income last year. … According to data collected by DonationWatch, 2025 was the most lucrative year in the party’s history, netting a total of 5.58 million SEK. For comparison, the party received just 202,000 SEK in total donations throughout 2024.
Just the annual interest on his donation is more that all of their other donations for the entire year combined.
He didn’t just make a donation, he is practically their sole source of financing.
5,58 million SEK is around 600 thousand dollars. 202 thousand SEK is slightly more than 20 thousand dollars.
Oh shit, that has got to be the poorest political party I’ve heard of 🤣
Bankrupt morally and financially 🤷♂️
It seems quite small indeed
Private wealth is a mistake
Mullvad co-CEO Fredrik Strömberg confirmed that neither Mullvad VPN AB, its parent company Amagicom AB, nor its sister company Tillitis AB played any role in supporting the political party.
It doesn’t matter if the company itself was directly involved or not, the money came from the company, and from its’ customers.
yeah it’s like saying Elon is only a piece of shit on his free time so it’s okay
edit:
pissof shitI’m not taking side here, but to be fair, Elon Musk is a shitty person doing shitty things both professionally and private. Mullvad VPN is at least only doing good things!
With that said. I have stopped using Mullvad VPN for now. We’ll see how this all plays out.
gonna get downvoted to hell here but making EVs and charging infrastructure is a good thing. also rooftop solar and batteries.
still, fuck nazi elon.
edit: this isn’t even about “credit” for developing the tech or whatever. even if we all agree this stuff was going to happen with or without elon, the Tesla business is still putting these products on the market. That is good, just like Mullvad and VPN. They didn’t invent VPN or anything, they are just one (good) provider.
I mean, to be fair, it was the engineers and founders who have done a lot of the work. They deserve the credit for making good products. Not Elon. He just profits off of them and the labor of the engineers.
Yeah but it’s not exactly the south African doing those things, if anything they are doing them despite him.
The only issue with Tesla is that the quality of their cars is mediocre at best, while you’re paying premium, and that Tesla is the most childish and obstinate company to work with.
We have something called Råd & Rön’s Blacklist, which is respected Swedish consumer magazine’s list of products to avoid. Tesla is one of the brands that’s listed there. Partly because of the poor quality of the cars and partly because they don’t follow the rulings from the National Board for Consumer Complaints here in Sweden.
And they don’t give a **** about insurance companies either. If something happens to your Tesla, you’re on your own buying a new one yourself. You can forget about getting any sort of help from Tesla.
I stopped reading what you wrote after your first sentence. There are so many other issues than that with Tesla, what dimension are you from?
The cars since 2020 have been decent quality. What you are paying for is an EV with good range and good power. Tesla definitely pushed the U.S. ev adoption ahead by a number of years.
I’m curious about how that board works - is it a judicial system that other car manufacturers follow? What kind of rulings have they made against Tesla? I found that Tesla follows their own warranty quite well, and after that I don’t think any a car manufacturers will fix stuff for free.
And what support do you expect to get regarding insurance? You can buy a bew car like anyone, can’t you?The cars since 2020 have been decent quality. What you are paying for is an EV with good range and good power. Tesla definitely pushed the U.S. ev adoption ahead by a number of years.
I guess everything is relative. Tesla is still a crappy car in terms of quality here, with tons of unresolved issues with faulty cars that Tesla refused to help their customers with.
I’m curious about how that board works - is it a judicial system that other car manufacturers follow?
Råd & Rönis is an independent, non-profit consumer magazine owned by the Swedish Consumer Agency. Their funding comes from subscriptions and government grants (no advertising and no corporate money). They test products, expose bad companies and protect consumers. Their “Black List” (Svarta Listan) is highly influential, and being on it can destroy sales completely.
Customers can file a complaint at The National Board for Consumer Disputes (ARN), a government-run arbitration(?) service. Their decisions are not legally binding, but companies that ignore them get publicly shamed (and often blacklisted by Råd & Rön). Tesla has ignored basically every single case. Any remotely serious company here in Sweden comply with ARN. We take ARN very seriously here.
What kind of rulings have they made against Tesla?
Our law is equal for everyone. We don’t care if you’re some local dude selling hotdogs or Elon Musk selling Teslas.
I found that Tesla follows their own warranty quite well […]
That’s the issue. Their warranty basically means that they ignore you and will fuck you over, even if the issue is their own fault. People have ended up with repair costs close to what a new car costs, and even if it’s Teslas fault, they refuse to do shit.
[…] and after that I don’t think any a car manufacturers will fix stuff for free.
Of course they have to, if the issue is their own fault.
Sounds like a good system. But I guess it only works if people pay attention to the blacklist so it’s a good threat since it’s not enforceable. I haven’t heard of Tesla not honoring drivetrain issues under warranty here in Canada. They wouldn’t do a second windshield replacement on my wife’s T3 because what they said was evidence of a rock chip, but that was kinda fair.
Rooftop solar is definitely not something Musk can take any credit for.
EVs maybe, but charging infrastructure that he made proprietary rather than using the open standard is not especially worthy of praise.
Musk hasn’t done any of those things. People who are actually smart did them and then he pretended to do them.
I mean yeah, obviously. But Musk is very obviously excellent at marketing, and there’s an argument to be made that it was thanks to his marketing that Tesla became as popular as it did, and that that helped pull up the EV market more broadly.
Marketing from marketers that he hired. He did fuck all.
Not even EVs. The work was getting done by researchers improving electric motors and batteries. As soon as the technology was viable Elon jumped on it and marketed himself as the person behind it all. Same goes for PayPal which he stole credit for, rockets that people already worked decades on, tunnels that are just bad metros, and machine learning (AI) that people were already doing since the 70’s and only recently had breakthroughs because of the increased ability to feed it data en masse.
The only credit he should get is having the power and charisma to capitalize on the work of others. He’s a Thomas Edison and not a Nikola Tesla.
Calling him Thomas Edison is giving him far too much credit. Edison may have been a self aggrandizing asshole, but he also did have a few accomplishments to his name. Musk is a glorified venture capitalist, only instead of just taking a chunk of the profits he buys the whole company so he can steal credit for the company’s achievements. Elon Musk has never created a single thing in his life. He has in fact been a net negative as every company he has ever been involved with would have been better off without Musk’s “help”.
Elon Musk didn’t do any of that though. Engineers did.
Elon is just a propaganda machine (see his “in 4 or 5 years we’ll have datacenters in space” bullshit, or all the other things that he promised but it didn’t happen), a shame so many people fall for it.
It is very unfortunate that ev’s and elon are linked in any way, he is not positive marketing.
He didnt make shit. He saw there was opportunity and ran with it, now that he has it sustainabikity is nowhere close to his goals.
The solar tiles suck The battery is a whitelabelled product The boring company was strategic interference to stop public infrastructure development.
Those things were happening before him and continue DESPITE him. If you get downvoted it’s because you insinuated he had anything to do with that.
Yes, but I do not give Musk credit for recognizing a good thing and then taking it from Tesla’s founders.
An issue for those of us in the southern hemisphere, where mullvad is the only decent choice… but one of their founders is clearly not decent.
Mullvad VPN is popularizing crypto
because the buyer pays transaction fees and there is no risk of chargeback so their costs are inherently lower if you pay that way?
They are? How?
They’re offering discounts for paying with monero
Monero is anonymous, so it makes sense.
It’s still crypto, with all the downsides of crypto.
Oh! You mean crypto currencies, not crypto. I was confused there for a bit. :D
So you believe that customers of a company should have a say how the staff uses their wages?
You have that backwards. Customers of a company get to decide whether or not they want to give that company their money for any reason they fucking please
I’d also argue that no one would care if this were some mid-level manager making a donation. This is the owner of a company, not “staff.”
I believe consumers have an ethical obligation to exercise their right to discontinue business with a company when its owners do something unethical.
Co-founder. Very large contribution. Very unsavoury political party.
Legally? No.
Morally? Yes. Customers give their say as to whether or not they want to give their money to some specific company every single time they engage in a business transaction. There is also nothing wrong with telling others to make the same consideration.
Morally? Yes.
How do you figure? I’d argue the opposite and state morally it’s quite litterally nobody’s business what any private person spends their money on. Especially when you’re talking about people outside the c-suite.
It’s also the only thing that is remotely managable. Otherwise, where does that crap start and end?
We are talking about some nationalist populists now (and more than “a donation”), but what about a membership of a more moderate political party? Or say your customer base for any reason is in large part Vegan, should you tell your employee’s to stop buying meat? Should they stop taking money from the non-vegan customers? How is anyone going to navigate this?
Are you contending unless otherwise specified, people should be mandated to continue spending money with companies?
I’m allowed to do business or not do business with any company for any reason I like. Cofounder funding a political party with one of their goals being to brutalize immigrants? No thanks. Contractor wearing a company shirt was rude to me on the elevator? I’ll check the competition. Maybe I just don’t like the color of their logo?
I’m allowed to define my morals and what I would consider violating those morals would be with monetary support and no half baked slippery slope argument is going to change that.
What exactly is the allowed reasons for doing or not doing business with people?
Are you contending unless otherwise specified, people should be mandated to continue spending money with companies?
No. I’m just of the opinion that I’m in no way obliged to disclose to you what I spend my money on, just because I work somewhere you spend money on.
What exactly is the allowed reasons for doing or not doing business with people?
Anything, including having no reason at all, obviously.
The co-founder publicly stated he made the donation on social media. What made him obliged to disclose this? He seems rather proud of it, in fact.
As a result, people feel they may have a moral obligation to not funnel money to him. Your stance also doesn;t really line up with your examples like
Or say your customer base for any reason is in large part Vegan, should you tell your employee’s to stop buying meat? Should they stop taking money from the non-vegan customers? How is anyone going to navigate this?
You don’t mention the specific problem you have with this, which would be mandated disclosure. By your own words, this is perfectly fine since people can chose the reasons “Anything, including having no reason at all, obviously.” to not do business with someone so I’m not sure why it’s a slippery slope to you.
No. I’m just of the opinion that I’m in no way obliged to disclose to you what I spend my money on, just because I work somewhere you spend money on.
That’s not what you said though. I don’t think anyone is arguing that employees of a company are obligated to disclose their spending habits, that would just be ludicrous. However, if that information was available or if the company itself made donations/purchases it’s perfectly reasonable as a customer to decide not to support that kind of behavior by continuing to do business with that company.
Just as one example Chick-fil-A is rather famously anti-lgbtq and regularly donates part of their profits to anti-lgbtq organizations. As a consumer it’s entirely reasonable and moral to refuse to do business with them in order to reduce the money being funnelled to morally repugnant organizations.
That’s not what you said though.
Where do you feel I’ve deviated from this point exactly?
Keep in mind that this is the question at the top of this particular thread we are responding to:
So you believe that customers of a company should have a say how the staff uses their wages?
To which loke responded, among other things:
Morally? Yes.
To which I responded what you then replied to.
I’m not quite sure where you see space for interpretation, but I feel i’ve been pretty solid with my point.
On one hand, no, they shouldn’t, on the other hand they’re free to voice their opinion and choose a different service if this is the breaking point.
Problem is, it’s hard to find a good VPN service that doesn’t fuck with alt right chuds and isn’t US based.
Try being in the southern hemisphere and trying to achieve those goals… servers are scarcer here.
Time for me to reassess ivpn, and airvpn I guess
I’m not at the point where this outweighs the reasons I picked mullvad yet. And the other cofounder’s statement does at least give me hope that it might work itself out in a way I can accept before my current term is finished.
That being said, I’m not sure I can give money to the company when someone is profiting from that money and spending part of it on a political organization that expressly espouses a stance I believe to be harmful and dangerous. And it isn’t like you can pirate a VPN, so it differs significantly from when actors or musicians do stupid shit.
That being said, I also don’t think that using mullvad would be something other people would be obligated to avoid just because the CEO donated to a small and shitty political party. By itself, it isn’t something so bad that it’s possible to point to a customer and do more than inform them of the donation and maybe give them links to see for themselves that it’s a shitty party. Or, at least that it’s a party with some really shitty platforms.
But the guy needs to show a major shift in how he donates before I’ll renew.
He didn’t just donate though, he basically funded it single handed. A quick read about the party suggests that the person in charge is seriously unhinged.
He needs to be bought out of mullvad.
Just a rich person trying to get proto fascist powers. Yeah you wait a bit, but I won’t and I hope it’s the end of his company and career.
Good company though, very rare.
It’s no longer good if the money made from said company are used this way. It was good until last week or so.
Hey, so long as you don’t use X, any Meta product, Google, or Amazon, (or any Musk-infected garbage, obvs), or Protonmail then sure, cancel Mullvad and trash talk the guy silly.
However. I very much doubt that’s the case.
If it’s not the case, that means this is performative. a.k.a. Bullshit.
I hope Mullvad buys him out, distances themselves as far as possible. But they are far from the only tech company with some right wing cunt mixed up with them. If you’re gonna be pure you gotta go full-stack FOSS and a lot of us aren’t there yet. So let’s not pretend like all of us are.
This is a bad attitude. It’s like saying being vegetarian is performative if you aren’t full vegan. And for the record, I use Mullvad (for now), I don’t use any of the other services you mentioned, and I am vegan ;)
This is not an all or nothing situation, people can criticise this for what it is, even if they’re using any of the products/companies mentioned by you. Navigating a tech-fascist ecosystem is difficult and every criticism here is valid and important.
(Not using any of the aforementioned products/companies btw)
Loving the “hey, man, you’re completely wrong! But yes i agree” replies
And all you mfers were on about Andy Yen making a single tweet glazing Gail Slater.
Turns out lots of people can be shitty at once.
It also wasent a single tweet. It was tweets/comments plural, with him also talking about how the GOP was immune from the influence of big tech (ultra mega LOL) and would take them to task (a stunningly, knee slappingly stupid statement), that the GOP was the new “party of the little guy (holy fucking shit was that tone deaf),” then him using right wing phrasing and talking points to defend himself before finally defaulting to the same defense as Mullvad just did. “We are a political company that should not say political things, I.e. we have shitty political opinions that will cost us money once people find out about them so we will shut up now.”
The proton CEO has not once apologized or said he was wrong about the Trump admin, even after they fired Gail Slater in the first year, the person he praised in his first effusive tweet about how great the incoming Trump admin was.
Hilarious, isn’t it?
Neither right or left but mostly not left. Bunch of fuckers.
How can you try to defend VPN usage and privacy if you need to collect data to identify migrants or descendants of migrants to strip their citizenship and deport them? It’s not like we don’t have examples of fascists using technology to profile and identify their targets: nazi Germany and IBM, Israël and Azure, or the DOGE that siphonated as much data as they could…
that’s the infuriating thing about all this. with Mullvad all you are to them is an account number. that’s it. no email, no name, no address, nothing. you go to the site and they give you an account number and that’s that. hell you can pay for the damn thing in cash.
So then the co-founder donates to a political party, with users money, that likely wants to do what you just said. How can I support that? my Mullvad subscription ends in like 2 hours today, i’m no renewing. And NOW I gotta spend the day finding a decent non-US based vpn. fantastic.
I saw people in another thread say AirVPN might be an ok replacement.
But yeah, I really like how much Mullvad doesn’t seem to even want my data, and the ID number system is great. I’m not aware of any other VPNs that currently do that.
I’ll take the moment to plug icedrive and icevpn. They have been good to me.
Do they offer wireguard or openvpn configs? They don’t list a Linux client on their website, so I’m not sure if I can use them at all.
You dont need the client. They have the config . openvpn, I think
Its a bit annoying but it works. I wish they had a client tho cuz to change country you have to go log in the web portal for Linux desktops. Mobile devices it has an app that works fine
Örebro is certainly an interesting party. Forked off of the very leftist “Left Party”, it’s a mix of Marxism, Populism, Swedish Nationalism, Anti-Corruption, Anti-Establishment and Eco-Socialism. Part of the Nordic Green Left Alliance.
Pretty much all over the place, at least on paper.
I don’t know, it sounds to me like the kind of party Lemmy should enjoy.
Fascists coopting the language of socialism is as old as fascism. That people continue to fall for it amazes me.
Sort of a national socialist party, one might say?
Or else enjoy finding dirt on, and discussing them.
Do you people actually know anything about this party or are you just getting your panties in a twist over a nothingburger?
I could say that any party in the Swedish government is controversial, does that mean you are going to boycott everything Swedish now?
i do.
Party is run partly by an ex narc cop that got
firedbought out for being a far-right assacab
Also there was an article written by a seemingly reputable outlet, so yeah I’ll choose to believe them. And there’s also the fact that the CEO denied nothing. You would think he would clarify the party’s stance once the backlash started coming, if everyone were wrong.
I’m not Swedish. I’m not in a country nearby whose effected by them. Their politics has nothing to do with me. I don’t know the culture or issues there.
I don’t live in most countries, that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t care, or that developments in them will not affect me. Read about the party, if you have no problem with them, you are the problem.
Yeah, but it seems you can read. Closing your eyes won’t make this go away.
And why did we need to know this? You can remedy your ignorance by reading up on it.
I’m not Swedish, but I don’t have to be to take offence to racism being promoted in their country.
Also, people act like other political groups aren’t looking at how these things develop as guides on how to implement then in their own country
He donated to a party that’s basically a mini version of Trump.
