61–70 of 90 posts
I get why people want Apple and Google to push back but ultimately there isn’t any logical approach for them to operate that isn’t “name things as the relevant governmental bodies name them”. Otherwise what source of truth is there? The responsibility here is with a spineless government. An executive order is not a law and a congress that did its job would quickly contract these kind of mad king declarations.
They'll get their 15 minutes, but there's no _there_ there. They're owned by System1, a bottom-of-the-barrel advertising company where 1990s web brands go to die (Metacrawler? Startpage.com?? Dogpile?!?!). Their maps are OpenStreetMaps maps. People think they have their back (because OSM is showing Lake Ontario), but it's just marketing.
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> No, they show what the respective government datasets contain Which matches popular usage in the respective countries. Your example is a non sequitir for explaining why matching popular usage can't possibly work. For the popular usage of major geographical features to change is extremely rare, so I am skeptical that it's a huge amount of work to keep up with changes in popular usage. People made maps before they ha…
My point isn’t so much that it would be impossible to do, more that it’s giving more power to the tech giants to define things however they wish (given they get to define “popular”). In this instance that would be a good thing but as a precedent I’m a lot less sure.
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Or we could not bend the knee to a single old man throwing a tantrum.
The same people throwing a tantrum about the inconsequential naming of a lake are now throwing a shit-fit after they discovered their newly beloved MapQuest doesn't show their preferred borders for Palestine, so I'm quite enjoying this play out.
Dictators make spurious announcements in order to see who obeys and who doesn't, and then punish those who didn't, in order to further their own grip on power.
Whether the dictator does this one time, or a million times, each time matters. Each time you obey the dictator, other people see you obeying the dictator, which is you handing your credibility to the dictator. It entrenches them further. See The Power of the Powerless for how it played out in the Soviet Union: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_the_Powerless#Hav...
> Havel uses the example of a greengrocer who displays in his shop the sign Workers of the world, unite! Since failure to display the sign could be seen as disloyalty, he displays it and the sign becomes not a symbol of his enthusiasm for the regime, but a symbol of both his submission to it and humiliation by it.
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as opposed to a top of the barrel advertising company like Google
There is significant differences in advertising. The things at the bottom of the barrel in advertising are often literally malware.
So… Google, then?
It's not like it hasn't been repeatedly documented that malware is pushed through Google Ads and other properties.
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Ironicly this is what my agent does today on my behalf because regular search has become so bad
Unfortunately at the other end of that websearch is a bunch of slop, your agent can't save you from it.
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My point isn’t so much that it would be impossible to do, more that it’s giving more power to the tech giants to define things however they wish (given they get to define “popular”). In this instance that would be a good thing but as a precedent I’m a lot less sure.
This is a power they already have. Google could ignore this change just as MapQuest has done. They are not legally compelled to follow government naming conventions, and I think it would be a clear first amendment violation to attempt to compel them to do so.
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Weird, one could say that about the person who insisted on this useless change in the first place...
Yea like naming Army street to Chavez and all the other hundreds of renamings of American place names over the last couple of decades… like we should be up in arms by now we just can’t contend with so much overwhelming change! Or reaming stadiums (which get updated on maps) for sponsorships, renaming towns for sponsorships… we have a never ending stream of renamings to be mad at and wave our ineffectual fists at.