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Re:New App Lets You Boycott Koch Brothers, Monsanto And More by bilbo0s on Wednesday May 15, 2013 @02:12AM (#5710467)
heh...

It's funny... the UX person in me was thinking it would be easier just to take a picture of your shopping cart and have it highlight the items you shouldn't purchase. Just based on packaging. Then I thought ... hey ... an even better idea would be to hold the phone up in front of the shelves and have all of the offending items X'd out.

Then I thought ... man ... all of this would be a LOT easier if Google Glass had a better camera! Maybe Apple will make a better pair of glasses and in the not too distant future we can just walk up the aisles and have all the products we wouldn't want to support X'd out for us.

Point is... in the future you will most likely not have to scan the bar code. The software will just put X'es over all of the products that are "bad" by some definition set by you. That would be a pretty interesting use of something like Glass I think.

Re:New App Lets You Boycott Koch Brothers, Monsanto And More by davidw on Wednesday May 15, 2013 @04:10AM (#5710761)
Maybe you could also have it do face recognition and tie that in with sentiment analysis of people's twitter, facebook and Google+ feeds so that you can be cold and aloof or just plain avoid people with "bad" viewpoints.
Re:New App Lets You Boycott Koch Brothers, Monsanto And More by pi18n on Wednesday May 15, 2013 @04:23AM (#5710793)
I'd like a red X over people that discuss, say, the political opinions of celebrities.

Also I think avoiding products if you disagree with the company owners is laudable and I don't really get why you are responding with such snark.

Re:New App Lets You Boycott Koch Brothers, Monsanto And More by davidw on Wednesday May 15, 2013 @04:36AM (#5710831)
To me, it seems too tribal and "total warfare"ish. Remembering and boycotting a few things... sure, although generally that doesn't have much effect. But tagging all products that have some association with people who don't fit your world view seems scary and close-minded to me.
Re:New App Lets You Boycott Koch Brothers, Monsanto And More by pi18n on Wednesday May 15, 2013 @04:44AM (#5710849)
Ah. I agree with your first point, it's ineffectual. But my hope would be that an app can help people boycott more effectively (who would guess that bottled waters are sold by Coke and Pepsi?) and have a greater total effect.

I don't think it would be like excluding all the products that don't fit my world view, but excluding all the products from actors whom I think are doing severe damage to the environments and legislatures of the world's nations.

Re:New App Lets You Boycott Koch Brothers, Monsanto And More by yareally on Wednesday May 15, 2013 @06:22AM (#5711062)
> (who would guess that bottled waters are sold by Coke and Pepsi?)

Maybe it's a bit of a reach, but the Coke/Pepsi vending machines here have water in them and that was how I figured out each company also had their own brand of bottled water they also sold (Aquafina for Pepsi and Desani for Coke).

Re:New App Lets You Boycott Koch Brothers, Monsanto And More by VLM on Wednesday May 15, 2013 @08:33AM (#5711516)
If you research it you'll find both are bottled filtered tap water. For awhile I tried figuring out where they were bottled, mostly unsuccessfully. The holy grail would have been finding competing plants in the same city bottling the same municipal tap water, but I was unsuccessful. Not all corporate bottling plants bottle all products at every plant, I couldn't figure out which of my coke products came from the nearest syrup plant in Chicago or bottling plant in Quincy although it seems all Pepsi products are reminiscent of the proverbial "thousand mile salad" and come from the sand states (or what we in the center of the country call fly over, because we fly over those states on our international vacations which we can easily afford because we don't live on the coasts)
Re:New App Lets You Boycott Koch Brothers, Monsanto And More by yareally on Wednesday May 15, 2013 @08:55AM (#5711608)
Oh yeah, I think at least one of them says it's tap water in the fine print on the bottle (or did). Pretty funny though.

Not water, but oddly, Dr. Pepper is bottled by Pespi here. In other parts of the United States, Coke or 7up bottles it.

Re:New App Lets You Boycott Koch Brothers, Monsanto And More by snowwrestler on Wednesday May 15, 2013 @12:30PM (#5713074)
Disagree with the owners on what? David Koch supports the Cato Institute, NOVA on PBS, and the American Museum of Natural History in New York. What if I disagree with libertarians but I like science? Should I buy or not buy some Dixie cups?

I agree that it's good for people to support companies they believe in, but that takes introspection and investigation. This app promotes neither.