MangoCats

No, that's the Strait formerly known as Hormuz.

Any cartography company with $2B handy to replace the dataset. They're unlikely to buy it from Google, who is estimated to have already profited $9B from their investment.

People do occasionally travel outside of metro transport coverage.

unhappy that their parking isn’t convenient.

Oh no, not me, I'm perfectly fiiiine walking as far as necessary to get to my apartment from my parking space (says the people who are able to drive home in the middle of the day and park up for the night when everybody else is at work).

It's not just lack of convenience, it's behaviors: double parking, congestion, Oh I'm just going in for a second...

I mean, in an ideal world, this is great.

I think it needs a followup to at least track, possibly tax, residents of apartments which lack parking who also own cars. In small numbers it's no big deal, but it could quickly get out of hand.

King Crimson 1969:

Knowledge is a deadly friend If no one sets the rules The fate of all mankind, I see Is in the hands of fools

...

But I fear tomorrow I'll be crying

Whether you break up Google, Amazon, Meta, SpaceXitter and the rest or not, you've got to have sensible rules, sensibly enforced. We're already crying.

phone networks stop working when the government broke up Ma Bell in 1983? Or did shit get way cheaper and better

Specifically no, because AT&T didn't go away, it just got split up and regulated. Shit got cheaper for sure, not always better.

If Google went away, any of those websites that are not actually a part of Google could just go be hosted elsewhere.

Read a little deeper about how so many websites have Google services entwined into all the pages they serve. There would be a billion+ hours of rework to get Google out of all the non-Google services that are in some way dependent on Google/Alphabet services. Sure, we could rebuild everything to not use Google, but would the other services that grow up in its place be better? They're not likely to be cheaper, and under the current regulatory environment they'd likely develop even deeper invasions of privacy while building out their "modern" Google replacements.

Apple Maps always understands an address I enter correctly (Google Maps does not, sometimes you need to put imaginary spaces in between address characters

That's an interesting perspective. As Android users my wife and I are used to opening maps and asking for a business by name and general description: Green Grocery on Main Street, or Manuel's Mexican in Midtown Melbourne and it just looks up the address for us and maps to it. Same for anyone in our contacts, just ask for them by name and the address takes care of itself - we can put in addresses, but our "iPhone friends" are constantly asking for the street address of things because that's what they have to put in. I guess at least iOS is good at address entry.

Apple Maps has never taken me to the wrong location

Again, we're biased - people who use Google Maps are led directly to our house with no trouble, people who use Apple Maps end up on the next street over looking at our house across a neighbor's fenced yard and calling us for more directions. We didn't have to fix Google Maps to get people arriving at our door, but we were able to tweak the road to look more realistic, Apple has no such user feedback interface, at least not that we could ever access.

switch to a better option. I’ve heard of FOSS maps as well but haven’t tried them out yet.

That's a nice thought. Do you remember the Google Mapping car fleet driving around for 10 years? I think they're still doing scaled back maintenance, but that was a tremendously expensive project which gave them data quality that under-funded FOSS projects just can't even begin to approach. So, there's an interesting question: when we just Fuck Google, do we steal the data they paid to collect? I mean, we could call it AI training, would that make it O.K.?

they’re already gone from my life

Good for you, that is what you personally control. It is very different from "ending Google."

Now, try blocking all Google domains and IP addresses from your routing tables and see how you're loving life. https://gizmodo.com/i-cut-google-out-of-my-life-it-screwed-up-everything-1830565500

there is no argument to say “we’d all be dead already if Monsanto never existed”

No, but you need to be clear: is it Monsanto that never existed, or the whole branch of industrial-scientific pursuit they embody, becasue if Monsanto's tech and similar didn't exist, we'd have significantly lower crop yields, higher food prices, arguably better food, but if population grew to the same levels we have today, we'd all be eating significantly less food - which, arguably, might not be a bad thing - but at some point it becomes uncomfortable, and without Monsanto-like tech we'd be near or over that uncomfortable line here at 8.3B population and climbing.

which is essentially your argument.

In your head. In my head: Fuck these corporations, we don’t need them is flawed. Which slice of the 8.3 billion global population do you wish were never born - can we start with your mom?

nothing special about Monsanto that gives them abilities others don’t have

Well, we can start with that uncomfortable subject you brought up of regulatory capture. If not for Monsanto, Bayer AG and others like them operating with their extensive regulatory capture - other players would have a difficult if not impossible time getting permission to market their products, or even develop them at industrial scale. There's a huge difference between some PhD at a farm-university splicing glow-genes into brussel sprouts and rolling out genetically engineered seed stock at global scale.

When you say: Fuck these corporations, we don’t need them, are you actually saying: we'll just replace them with nearly identical corporations that do nearly identical things? Separating the useful things that the corporations do from the evil isn't a simple whack with a machete, the two sides are deeply entwined.

we were talking about Google. You think the world would end without those chucklefucks?

I don't think it's all that different, whether it's Monsanto or Google, they've been an essential part of the last generation, they have significantly shaped the world we live in, whether you think that's for better or for worse is moot. Chucking them out and starting over without the things that they currently provide is going to do more immediate harm than good. Yeah, they've run amok and they need curtailing, but if you gank Google and their products out of existence, lots of people are going to suffer, and not just the ones that work directly for Google or their trading partners.

What's your "Fuck these corporations, we don’t need them" morning after plan? To build back Google, but this time we really mean they won't be evil? You got a clever approach that will stop their replacements from becoming as bad or worse than what we've already got? U.S. Federal regulations seem like a bad bet lately.

Trev: One day you're a big old whale, next minute, fun food.

Mumble: Someone's gotta stop them.

Barry: Oh, yeah? What's gonna be your approach?

Mumble: If l could just talk to them. Appeal to their better nature.

Barry: Beauty. When that crafty little trick pays off, you be sure to let us know, won't you?

Except when you don't.

I’ve also been the recipient of absolutely no documentation.

Yeah, I took over for a guy who rage quit a year earlier, then his (hire the cheapest guy we can find) replacement basically didn't make any progress so they hired me. First question: where is this undocumented build server that took six years to build, physically? Answer: in this tower case here... Second question: when was it last backed up. Answer: ...turns pale and jogs over to IT.

I've been writing handover documents for my own consumption for the last 12 years at this job. It's good practice for creating procedures for other people to follow when I don't want to do a job (like repeating the procedure 15 times and thoroughly documenting the results then getting a committee of six to sign off on it...)

It also helps when somebody asks me how to do something I haven't looked at in 5-10 years.