The judge was appointed by Clinton, so they've been in their role for decades now. It seems unlikely that someone who has served that long in her position would rule based on making the child in the White House happy.
> It seems unlikely that someone who has served that long in her position would rule based on making the child in the White House happy.
The US is a corporatocracy. It's apparently a lot easier for Americans to convince themselves that the current administration is corrupt and end there than it is to acknowledge that the entire system has been corrupted and it won't change once the administration changes.
The current administration is in a class of its own regarding corruption -- it is the principle driver of everything they do. The nazi stuff is just bonus for them.
At the turn of the century (yikes!) Clinton reconfigured the DNC to serve the corporations rather than labor. I left the party after that but am compelled to vote blue as the least worst option. Partisan politics allows capture of the government by creating a duopoly of power.
You are correct, but it's largely our first-past-the-post voting system that forces only TWO political parties on us. Voting reform is necessary to help make other parties/candidates electable.
You can change the details of the numbers game that is played every 4 years, but that won't solve the structural issues. I live in France, in any given election we have between 10 and 15 candidates from as many parties. Yet, we're still ruled by corporate interests.
The media makes sure to qualify any candidate threatening the interests of capital as a "dangerous extremist", while "pro-business" candidates receive the lion share of donations for their campaigns. And there are many other guardrails in place to ensure nothing impedes the slow erosion of our infrastructure and public services under the strains of austerity in profit of the few.
All true, but at least in France those in power who commit serious corruption might go to actual jail; there's no way a US current or former president would face what Sarkozy did
Sarkozy got like 4 days in jail total, for taking money from an actual terrorist, and then helping them (among other heinous acts). And the entire media circus was behind him during this "ordeal", complaining about how unjust and unfair it was for this piece of shit to face any justice.
It's not quite as bad as in the US yet, but it's getting there. Media is consolidating in fewer and fewer hands, populists are getting bolder and more shameless, the left is demonized, etc. Same disease, same symptoms, same outcomes.
but Trump tried to overturn an election, not only got zero jail time but got re-elected and SCOTUS issued him a "do whatever you want while president" card, and so now what would have been a "huge corruption scandal" in the past is just routine
Reread the second paragraph of my previous comment. It's a process, of which the US are further along. But eventually, the entire west will go that path.
I get your point. In the US at least there's less of a paradox of choice.
The key problem is that most people don't want to pay attention to any of it because it's either depressing or just not within there range of interests. Add to that the fact that most people vote based on their emotions and those are stupid simple to manipulate on the Right: anger at immigrants and "others" works all the time.
Democracy is the least worst option, but FFS, it would be nice if the electorate were actually properly informed when they vote.
Edit: I kind of contradicted myself on the "choice" thing, but this is effectively like herding cats.
Broadcast media is boomer stuff (disclaimer: I am technically a boomer). I expect its relevance to fade. That said, the failure to prevent media aggregation (e.g., Sinclair et al) is also a betrayal to the people.
As a boomer, I recognize the value of having constrained media choices: it was a unifying factor albeit at the price of milquetoast and "establishment" programming. Everything has a price...
The fairness doctrine should have been employed when Rush Limbaugh started his hate speech career that aimed to literally demonize half the population.
You too are correct, it was a "get it out there" comment.
My armchair assessment of the the electoral trap we're in:
* first-past-the-post voting
* dark money (money is not speech, it is power)
* campaign finance reform (current model is legalized bribery)
* eliminate the electoral college (popular vote for president)
yeah, it's just that the current administration has a level of "banana republic" style corruption and corporate-dealing/bribing that makes Clinton look like Mother Teresa
It is in fact true that the Trump administration is corrupt on a significantly different level than any prior administration. It is harmful to paper over this.
To the contrary, the entire DOJ understands that FAANG and the three-letter-agencies are one revolving door. Any judge that attempts to defang Google's data collection may well run afoul of the American surveillance system, which this administration will fight tooth and nail to defend.
Not very different from how federal protectionism keeps Apple's App Store centralized despite trillions of dollars in ostensible market damage. Anyone trying to loosen America's grip on software distribution is crossing an ugly national security line that we're all too ashamed to admit exists.
100% glad someone states the obvious. Sometimes here people think these tech companies are on truly altruistic missions on making “the world a better place!!1” or truly making an impact by being an IC in their role and having access to perks which, have largely been taken away as the market matures to data collection and surveillance.
If you want to have some fun, go on LinkedIn and see how many former military people, proud of their service, boast how they are at x or y tech company in director esque roles.
Then bookmark them and see the pages disappear in the future. Boy I’m glad it’s legally 100% ok to scrap LinkedIn data because it truly is a revolving door.
You're not beholden to make any effort to understand me or anyone else, that's a given.
Here is what an LLM thinks about what you've done:
> The “we” is doing a lot of rhetorical work: it turns what could have been stated as “the U.S. government doesn't openly admit this” into the much broader and more dramatic “we Americans are collectively unwilling to admit it.”
I hope that helps. Or is the LLM also nitpicking and failing to understand your 'perfectly clarifying' remarks? Feel free to copy paste and ask an LLM yourself, all I did was ask it 'who is the 'we' referring to?' and copy pasted original parent and your reply.
Google employees tens of thousands of people. The US intelligence apparatus employees hundreds of thousands of people. In all of that, over eight years, there are 251 people who moved between the two, and because of that absolute rounding error, the entire federal government is beholden to them?
Since you are making the accusation that this is a real conspiracy: statistically, how many people should have rotated between these two giant employers over an 8 year span? The answer isn't zero.
Also, this makes the "data" even more pointless:
"between Google or related firms, and the federal government, national political campaigns and Congress during President Obama’s time in office"
"were appointed to federal advisory boards."
Do you know how many of those boards exist? There are tons of them. I've known a couple of people who have served on them. They're incredibly boring and deal with things like "What accessibility standards should federal government websites support?". Of course you would want people from Google on that type of board.
> 251 individuals in such detected instances just in google. And that report is 10 years old, I'd bet it's 10x that by now.
"Detected instances"
It's so secret that I can name one of them off the top of my head: Matt Cutts. Is he part of this vast conspiracy too?
What conspiracy mate? It's not so deep, I was curious if what he said was a lie due to the downvotes and found nice evidence for it. You don't find it convincing it's your choice, but the dude didn't pull it out of his ass.
You think that giant employers being protected, especially when they align themselves with government interests of the day, is a conspiracy? Do you also think that suggesting economic producer interests are a high priority is a conspiracy? Or that corporations with contracts to the government are generally compliant with governmental requests?
RCS is google's foothold. It forces everyone to share with google and currently, there is no carrier option for RCS. You have to pick google or apple or go without.
Then why is the DOJ bringing the anti-trust cases in the first place? You think it's all one big conspiracy with the judges so they can save face with consumers?
This litigation was initiated under the Biden admin and not withdrawn by Trump.
Because winning an anti-trust case sets a much larger precedent than having no case at all. Closing the case can block repeat litigation on the same grounds.
If you were Meta, for example, you would much rather be investigated by a corrupt administration than gamble on a future administration being nice. You might even make political donations to this end, and curry favor with the politicians to steer into the outcome you want. Like how Apple was able to escalate foreign App Store litigation to a presidential flamewar, all because Tim Cook bet on the right political cards. We see the same partisan cake-cutting with AI firms, as a way to punish Anthropic for not kissing ass hard enough.
The natural response to a grassroots demand for regulation is to invest your money against it. If Microsoft could avoid a breakup, why can't Google? Why not Apple? What if they're all for sale, like the Catholic Church selling indulgences?
This case against Google was initiated under Biden, and generally celebrated at the time. For your theory to be correct you need to explain how the DOJ brought a deliberately flawed case or weakened it at some point. I haven't read anyone suggesting anything like that.
The DOJ isn't part of the Judiciary branch, it's part of the Executive.
> FAANG and the three-letter-agencies are one revolving door
Most of the NSA is active duty service members and former military. Did you mean other three letter agencies, excluding the most powerful one dealing with surveillance?
> Any judge that attempts to interfere with Google's data collection may well run afoul of the American surveillance system
The judge in this case put the final nail into Trumps slush fund. But now she's doing his bidding. Is that what you're claiming?
Not everything is a conspiracy. You don't have some special insight into this.
Given the sentence immediately following the revolving door metaphor, I think it was clumsily being used for data, not personnel. Especially because it's true for obvious reasons.
> The judge in this case put the final nail into Trumps slush fund. But now she's doing his bidding. Is that what you're claiming?
No, they're clearly claiming it's a non-partisan thing and the sitting president is irrelevant, as are the specifics of the virtue signalling happening. Yes, even though they qualified themselves with "this administration". Do you think that the Clintons aren't friends with the state department surveillance abomination or the nastiest parts of government writ large? That Bill or Hillary wouldn't fight tooth and nail to protect this terrible thing that's been wrought? Replace the context with some virtue signal about NATO intervention in Serbia 27 years ago, nothing changes. Partisan politics is for yokels.
> These days all three branches march lock step in their jackboots
Which is why the Judicial branch has been ruling against the Executive branch again and again? I don't understand what evidence you think you have to the contrary, other than vibes?
> The judge in this case put the final nail into Trumps slush fund.
That's a very different, partisan effort. It's not bipartisan like the Patriot Act was, or domestic surveillance in-general.
> Not everything is a conspiracy. You don't have some special insight into this.
Not everything is as it seems. You can't meaningfully prove that the NSA sat on their hands in the 13 interceding years since Snowden. There's no evidence that US interventionism is on the straight-and-narrow now, you're wishcasting and calling it truth.
> You can't meaningfully prove that the NSA sat on their hands in the 13 interceding years since Snowden.
I mean, you're correct? It's impossible to prove a negative.
> There's no evidence that US interventionism is on the straight-and-narrow now, you're wishcasting and calling it truth.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and all that. You're the ones making the extraordinary claims. The burden of proof is on you, not the people pointing out the flaws in these claims.
i would argue, the NSA not being up to some bullshit is more unlikely, and thus has the burden of proof on it, to assume otherwise is to ignore history and basic incentives these orgs have.
Citation needed. The idea that somehow my mum can't even find the space bar on her keyboard and yet is competent enough to go through several warning screens to install a custom .apk is just laughable.
The internet is full of scams. If you desensitize someone to that reality, then you better disable Safari access, iMessage, calls and FaceTime for their own good.
Indeed, it would be a good idea for iOS to have a mode for the elderly that is almost exactly like that (similar to child mode, and for similar reasons).
Also worth a shoutout is the fact that Google also got off scott free for their main monopoly case (the "will they have to sell Chrome?" headlines from a while back). I won't pretend to have even a vague idea of why exactly both rulings (sentencings?) came down so leniently, but it does seem even more unlikely that any sort of executive branch interference was at play.
Clinton was a neoliberal. Not an expert, but I thought for a long time the vision of anti-trust being democracy-preserving (or at least preventing corporations from being able to compete with the government for power) was replaced by a view "consumer harm" was the only concern of anti-trust law. Basically focusing on pricing competition.
Read more about SCOTUS justice Robert Bork who ushered in the modern anti-trust viewpoint.
> Bork argues that the original intent of antitrust laws as well as economic efficiency makes consumer welfare and the protection of competition, rather than competitors, the only goals of antitrust law.
Isnt that updated by some national database and google just pulls that data? Apparently Apple Maps will also get it in a few days, since they get the data from them as well.
Yes. We had the same comments about Gulf of America.
Edit: I don't know that there's an actual database served up by the US Gov, but governments control the naming of these things within their own jurisdictions. All of the big mapping products have the ability to serve up different names based on where you're viewing from.
> Per Secretarial Order 3453, Lake Ontario has been renamed to Lake America. The basemaps for GNIS are in the process of being updated to reflect this name change.
We can do that for ourselves, but it's a lot harder for the operator of a massive maps platform, based from its inception on the use of the federally controlled GNIS, to just call things what they want, or even what most of their users want things to be called.
For once I'm posting about this in a forum where I can reasonably expect that most users will understand the technical difficulties that would arise if Google wanted to avoid using the new names.
The average person seems to believe that Google can change the toponyms back to Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario as easily as taking down a road sign and nailing up a different one.
It would be nice if Maps would prefer data from government DBs that have localized versions of foreign place name data (e.g., Germany's BKG) when available.
It makes perfect sense that govs control names within their jurisdiction - I am eyerolling at both the name change and the reaction.
I am curious though - is it convention to leave the data as is, or is it illegal to modify it?
Regardless, itll just be changed back in 2 years; as long as I can type "lake ontario" and get directed to Lake Ontario, I do not care at all what the gov database calls it currently.
>I am curious though - is it convention to leave the data as is, or is it illegal to modify it?
Given the First Amendment, it's in no way illegal for individuals or corporations to use whatever place names they want. But if yout maps platform is essentially wedded to a government database and is designed entirely around the use of that database, using different place names is much, much more difficult.
The president is the government as far as assigning or altering place names is concerned, but only for names not established by an act of Congress. That's why Trump was able to change the name of Denali back to Mount McKinkley; he was simply reversing an Obama-era executive order. But he couldn't rename Denali National Park because that was established by Congress.
Well, because I expect this to last for two years. Nobody likes it except for birthday boy and his sycophants. All of the signs around Lake Ontario still say the name; same goes for the people that live by it.
Google should override it but I don’t expect them to, because theyre selfish and suck. Only thing to do is win elections.
I have been wondering this as well. I cannot imagine having this be autoupdated without review from a centralized database is a good idea. This is a process that needs to be frangible and have some friction in it.
In this day and age, GPS mapping tools have major implications for societal function, safety, economics, national security, healthcare, etc. I'm struggling to think of an industry where a sudden absence/subtle changes of named GPS mapping data would not have an effect.
If everyone relied on the same data base which could push changes to the map in the pocket of every resident of a nation that would be the first thing I would think to hack. Probably easier than actually jamming or spoofing GPS/GNSS over a huge area.
There are thousands of small street changes across the country each day. New subdivisions, road expansions, lane changes, new traffic lights. Of course the vast majority should be auto-updated without manual review, what would a person add to the process? The public database is the system of record in the first place.
Seems like something that should be user-configurable (like DNS servers). While the recent annoying renamings have drawn attention to the issue, landmark names have basically always been political.
To all the people pissed about the "Lake America" stuff: why in the actual fuck do you want Google of all organizations to be arbiter of geographical info, instead of federal institutions that are (at least nominally) operated under democratic principles?
Don't you understand the horror of what you're suggesting: "I want Google to impose it's own personal value judgments over the government's."
Yes, I think it's incredibly stupid, 3rd grader childlike to call this "Lake America". But the problem is not Google, the problem is the ass hats we (collectively, even if not you/me personally) voted for. The problem is especially with our Congressional reps who have just neutered themselves in service to this stupidity. And I get it, our federal institutions have definitely showed their frailty lately, but I can't fathom then why people think the proper solution is to give more decision-making authority to Google.
I do wonder how many people that criticize the renaming, were criticizing Obama when he rename Mt McKinley. What are the principles here? Or is it just names I like vs names I don't like.
I think "avoid naming things after people without a deep personal connection to the thing being named" and "prefer established names used by locals" are pretty good principles to follow.
> The Koyukon people who inhabit the area around the mountain have referred to the peak as "Denali" for centuries. In 1896, a gold prospector named it "Mount McKinley" in support of then presidential candidate William McKinley, who later became the 25th president.
Tons of people complained about the renaming of Mt McKinley for the same reason people complain about "Lake America" now. It has nothing to do with the names and everything to do with the reasons for the renaming.
The principal is it's OK if a democrat does it. For example:
It's OK to rename something named after a Republican president who was shot (Mt Mckinley).
It's not OK to rename or change something about a Democratic president who was shot (ie. The Kennedy Center).
Man, give me an effing break, do you honestly believe that is the correct analogy?
As another commenter said, Obama was reverting a previous name change - he didn't change the name to "Mt. Obama and McKinley" and paint the whole thing gold.
Democracy works best as a diffuse institution and is more than just voting. People are supposed to have rights and power themselves and I want them to try to make things better (whether I agree with them or not) and "corporations" are just groups of people. Needing to just go with the government, especially on something so clearly within their rights, is counter to the ideals of the system.
I can understand Google somewhat here (if I was running a business I wouldn't be happy wading into a political issue like this) but the idea that they are above criticism for just falling in line still doesn't resonate with me.
Corporations being only "groups of people" is kind of wishful thinking. They are one cog in a large machinery that is steered by a few very rich people.
Corporations should not be absolved of criticism. But at the same time it makes little sense to put a hamster in hamster wheel and then blame him for running.
Corporatism works best when people as citizens and civic agents are preoccupied and sort of diffuse, not organized for anything substantial, just busy with their work, hobbies, and local councils. Then the workers go to work every day, some of the lobbying the government, to undermine democracy.
Just a group of people. And some of them are paid to influence the government. But the citizens? They are just diffuse. Sometimes they vote...
Yeah it's meaningless to fight. Except not really. If the powers that be are corrupt we can simply keep calling it Lake Ontario across the board, and use the difference to find who is or isn't on my side on that issue.
The only people calling it Gulf of America or Lake America are hardcore MAGATs in my social circle. Even former Trump voters in my social circle are annoyed and not using the new names. So it's an effective way to figure out who is or isn't going along with the Administration today.
> If the powers that be are corrupt we can simply keep calling it Lake Ontario
This is the same logic that the right wing used when they disagreed with Obama on some issues, so they blocked his Supreme Court nominations just because anything Obama does must be bad.
Sounds like your social circle is in denial. There are certainly plenty of things Trump, buffoon and graft-a-holic he is, has done that are corrupt. Renaming bodies of water doesn't look like one of them. (Obviously, because he would have renamed it after a donor, or at least after himself.)
I mean, sure, we can all call anything whatever. I can call New Mexico "Best Mexico" or call Washington, DC "Bad Washington" and that's my right. But pretending that there aren't official names for things because we don't like the current guy seems immature. It's clearly within the authority of the government. Talk like this makes me think that people want to just live in a reality defined exclusively by party politics where we just pretend every law or policy made by The Bad Party doesn't exist, rather than try to win elections so we can shape the one actual reality.
The President doesn't have an ability to officially change the names of these locations.
They have the ability to change name services in some database somewhere. But it's not actually an official name change.
So all this hand wringing about official names or whatever ignores the reality of the situation. This is just another temper tantrum by Trump that we reasonable people can ignore.
The easiest way to do that is to just say Gulf of Mexico.
> They have the ability to change name services in some database somewhere. But it's not actually an official name change.
Is it Congress who officially holds that power, then? And are you saying that if Congressional Republicans passed a bill renaming whatever, and Trump signed it, you'd then acknowlege it? Given how vanishingly little they accomplish in Congress already, I'm not sure we'd be better off distracting them from their semiannual debt ceiling/budget hostage situation in order to debate these inconsequential things.
I’m not sure either is “how names are established”.
This is a pretty mushy area, philosophically. Is a name what you think something is called (I think our planet is called “Bloop”, but nobody cares) what a lot of people think something is called (“Indian” in reference to indigenous Americans is a famous example of that going poorly, as are many racist epithets), or what an official body says it should be called (“Palestine”, “New Zealand”, and “Taiwan” have entered the chat)?
I don’t think popular usage is any more “truly authoritative” for a name than other sources.
They didn't do anything special for "Lake America". Google's long standing maps policy is to show people the names that their government says they have. As soon as that name showed up in the US government's database it showed up for people in the US on Google Maps.
In Canada it shows up as "Lake Ontario" because that's what their government says it is. In the rest of the world it gets both names because the two governments whose territories it is in call it two different names.
As much as I love when people pretend Trump is the first government official to ever rename something, there is no evidence this had any impact on the court's decision.
