The number of men in the US aged 18-30 reporting no sex in the previous year has almost tripled since 2010 [1]. It seems there are economic or cultural factors at play besides not well-crafting their messages or showering enough.
Forget the media, ask the former Federal Reserve president who literally wrote that "if the goal of monetary policy is to achieve the best long-term economic outcome, then Fed officials should consider how their decisions will affect the political outcome in 2020."
The car thing is another big one. Almost every car, truck, or SUV made in the past few years has a cellular connection, either for tracking purposes or infotainment. A determined attacker could probably just shut down 10-20% of cars in the country, a number which is increasing every year.
If your cities immediately turn into "tribal warzones" when they lose utilities, you've definitely made some governance failures well before the cyberattack.
Reduce wealth inequality through industrial and fiscal policy, don't stuff cities full of millions of culturally distant immigrants (distant from both each other and the existing population), encourage integration and patriotism instead of ethnic sectarianism via education and cultural pressure.
The 1860's are calling and the Irish would like a word. Are you arguing the Irish shouldn't have been allowed in the U.S.? Or that Americans should have been somehow coerced into accepting them? You think the Irish didn't want to be assimilated or you think Americans didn't want to assimilate them?
The 1860s when the Irish in NYC refused to fight for their new country, killing over 100 people and ethnically cleansing most of Manhattan? Or a few years later when two different subgroups of Irish killed another 100 of each other in the same city? These questions re-litigating history are immaterial to the fact that there is always some point at which putting groups next to each other will cause conflict, modulated by things like population density, culture, religion, tribalism vs. individualism, prosperity, etc.
This is just willful, boastful, ignorance, across the board. There are more examples of human cooperation, and there's more evidence that immigration and multiculturalism leads to long term stability, not the opposite. Next, you're going to tell me how the American Civil War had to do with immigration. Relitigating history is not indicated, but for starters you have to know some history.
That's funny, how do you link multiculturalism to a breakdown of society? If anything you want lots of strong societies overlapping so that everyone can find a group that can support them and each other. The "mosaic" concept has worked out fairly well for Canada, and I just can't get behind denying people their communities.
I would love to know the organizers' opinion on whether these various uses of AWS "accelerate oil and gas extraction," i.e. whether they would be allowed on AWS:
-The engineering of drill bits or other equipment that could be used for oil wells, but also for water or geothermal wells
-A business consulting firm running payroll, marketing, or accounting for an oil company
-Personal internet services for offshore oil workers
-Telemetry for drilling or pipeline monitoring equipment
-Geology research by a university that is likely to be used by oil companies
6. Pretty much everything about AMP: forcing sites to conform to a standard they created in order to show up in search, a standard that doesn't let sites control their UX or interactivity (then, just showing Google hosted caches by default instead of being a search engine.)
7. Overzealous GMail spam filters making it hard for anyone new to run email services
8. Google Groups: buying the biggest Usenet archive, breaking features, and embrace-extend-extinguishing it with groups that are on the same interface but don't syndicate to Usenet
9. Buying Meebo to shut it down, buying Softcard to shut it down.
10. Breaking reCAPTCHA for Firefox users, then maybe fixing it a year or two later after causing untold numbers of people to switch to Chrome (possible duplicate of degrading services)
11. Running YouTube at a massive loss for a decade to prevent anyone else from competing in online video
12. Not letting YouTube be run on Amazon devices
13. Bundling / requiring / defaulting Google services on Android phones, the world's dominant phone platform
14. Slowly allowing more ads in search (which has 90+% market share) and reducing their visibility so that people have to pay to have their own website show up when they are searched for
All this being said, my gut is that something with their opaque ad markets is what's really going to stand out in the investigation.
Of the 100,000 or so people that actually give $2,700 to political candidates, I'd think this is their biggest gripe with Google, and likely the issue that is going to cause Google the most problems.
The more interesting thing to me is how quickly goodwill just expires. Google search is among mankind's greatest achievements in the past century, along with the free gifts of quality email, youtube, android, etc. It is an interesting thought experiment of how to keep a brand burnished in the eyes of the public given goodwill decays so rapidly.
Google Search has gotten worse in the past few years in my opinion. It seems biased towards newly published content and content from the top 100 sites or so. Before it felt like you were grepping the internet, but now it feels like you're at an airport newsstand. It will frequently re-write your queries for you if you are searching for uncommon things, and putting it in quotes doesn't always fix it.
Have you seen Google Image search recently? They have updated it such that when you click on an image to select/expand in view, the selection is now presented in the top right hand side of the page. But the selection is not floating with your scrolling - so selecting anything below the fold means you end up scrolling back and forth between the top of the page and your previous position. Honestly not sure why they changed it. Terrible.
I've stopped using Google for searching for various generic terms and instead search nearly everything as site:reddit.com 2019 "search term".
Sometimes I get mildly useful information that stands out from the page after page of pagerank gamed garbage.
Now, searching reddit.com for solutions has other issues (notably using Reddit on iOS via Safari, is, as of 9/2019, almost entirely impossible), but that's where I'm at currently.
The worst is the blog spam that reaches the top of Google's search results.
I don't think it's a coincidence that those poor quality results are given precedence when they also happen to be littered with, and optimized for, Adsense ads.
> ... the issue that is going to cause Google the most problems
I am certainly biased because I seem to see more negative HN Google comments than positive ones. But, I'm starting to wonder if taking money from Google will cause politicians problems in 2020. Will we see candidates bashing each other for being too cozy with Google? Could taking Google money even become a third rail?
Re: #7, I run my own mail server and haven't had issues sending to Gmail addresses (at least that I know of). Having DKIM and SPF working helps Google figure out that yes, my emails are legit. So does running a secure-by-default mail server (OpenSMTPd) and - relatedly - checking spam blacklists / running open relay tests every once in awhile to make sure I haven't been flagged for some reason.
AT&T, on the other hand, is the one that's quite overzealous.
It can also be illegal when VCs do it: "Pricing below your own costs is...a violation of the law [if] it is part of a strategy to eliminate competitors, and when that strategy has a dangerous probability of creating a monopoly for the discounting firm so that it can raise prices far into the future and recoup its losses." [1]
NYT and other legacy newspapers depend on traffic from Facebook and Google to continue existing and are threatened by things like AMP and new media in general. If newspapers demonstrate that they can change public opinion about the tech companies, they have more bargaining power against them.
Perhaps, the NRA has been already declared a domestic terrorist organization by San Francisco. I think everyone wants to avoid TSA agents questioning passengers when the last time they had sexual intercourse was and pulling out a taser and handcuffs if it's too long.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/29/share-ame...