It's amazing how Trump, a man who has never had a single successful business in his life, has been successful in intimidating much more successful businesses.
I will be damned if he does not go down in history as the most accomplished conman in history. Forget about the people who invented the Brooklyn Bridge scam (ever heard the expression 'if you believe that I have a bridge to sell you'? That's where it came from) or the guy who sold the Effel Tower, or Ponzi, or whatever. Trump demolishes all other conmen in how he managed to time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time again fool so many people into giving him their money for his failed ideas, but also told them to eat shit all the way and told them to kiss his ass harder next time he comes along to demand money for more failed businesses.
In that end he is remarkably competent. The only thing he is good at.
I don't think it's Trump at all. Who did Musk have suddenly contact with before veering far right? Who had several meetings with Trump in his first term that no-one was allowed to record? And who is waging a cyberwar of misinformation and propaganda right out of "Foundation of Geopolitics" since at least 2014?
It's Putin. Trump is just the smokescreen. He tries to achieve globally what he did in Russia, aligning all oligarchs under himself with the promise of even more obscene riches. And with the US the first domino has fallen for good. Next he will try to destroy the EU (Brexit was only the trial run).
At this point, only China might put him in check and they will only do it if it helps their own plans of global domination (they seem to prefer a soft approach for now). A truly united EU might also help, but I don't have a lot of hope for that.
I think he was unexpectedly successful in winning the 2016 election.
I also think that by mid 2017 "his" administration had built up collection of "advisors" who have been increasingly calling the shots since then. They give him "on brand" scripts to read, but he's not personally orchestrating much of anything.
Oh yeah, by all means, stop using all Google related services, then realize that about 50% of web services for banking, agriculture, logistics, infrastructure, telecommunications, research and development, industry, transportation, healthcare and energy are hosted on GCP
“Oh but my service is hosted on AWS/AZURE”
Yeah and what do you think is the fallback in case of DRP?
Which is a long way to say that Google exists as a prime failure of the government's onus to regulate businesses. Google should never have been allowed to creep its tentacles into so many facets of life.
Just as with most technology, the Feds have been turning a blind eye, and pocketing cash while tech robber barons privatized existence.
I agree with the sentiment, but GCP typically isn't the fail over. Most people will start with AWS and fail over to Azure, or start with Azure and just fail into nothing.
To stop using Google you would need to find every app that used Firebase and ignore them, that would be one of the hardest parts. You couldn't use GitLab or other SaaS tools that work out of GCP. You'd likely need to just get offline to avoid their ads.
AWS is the professional one. Azure has Microsoft power. GCP tends to be less well through of. Alibaba isn't far behind GCP. Even a fistful of smaller providers will collectively have double the users/revenue or more It is usually 30% for AWS, 20% Azure and 10% GCP these days.
Not to say GCP is bad, I like BigQuery as much as the next guy, but alluding that it's the fail over or fallback for professional companies is not accurate.
This is nothing new for Google, compliance with local laws...
As a business, they're respecting the current US administration - probably weighing the likelihood of penalties depending on which side of the US legal system they choose to obey.
See, this assigns a level of human personality to corporations that I don't think we should be doing. It implies there is a "true self" to be revealed, when in reality the "self" of any corporation is entirely plastic and follows what the Excel Sheet tells them will make Line Go Up. Most corporate suits aren't Elon Musk (who is, in fact, a human being, just a terrible one). Most corporate suits are dead inside and haven't had a soul or a human emotion since 1985.
No, they just do whatever they can to appease whoever is in charge, because that is how they make money. They only became "LGBTQ friendly" when that was mainstream-acceptable and government-endorsed. And now that the culture is swinging the other way (more than half of americans wanted this fascist descent, never forget that) and the US is going all in on white supremacy and puritanism, they switch tunes right away. Case in point dia da consciência negra, the Brazilian equivalent of a black-history thing is still labelled on my Brazil-facing Google Calendar, because it's still a government-sponsored and mainstream commemorative date here.
Good luck. I'm also on that process. Just changing email provider is enough work with over 300 accounts using my Gmail address. Don't give up, but be aware it's a lot of work.
I’m so glad I’ve been de-googlifying these past few years. All that’s left is an Adblocked YT and a Gmail account I mostly use to sign up for random shit.
Regarding YouTube, the only real options you have are Peertube (which has little content and a discovery problem) or Odysee (which is fine as long as you don’t look at the comments)
As for E-Mail, due to the recent proton situation the only real option (unless you don’t care about that) is self hosting
I am not fully degoogled by any means (it is really hard when family uses and relies on Google products), but you can always start with your own domain and a private (paid) email service (like fastmail or proton). It's an easy step to take for yourself (but getting everyone you know to start using the new one takes time).
I have a Synology NAS I use for storage, photos, and media. It's easy mode storage l, and comes with a lot of apps you can install to replace ones you might use from Google/apple.
Starting to makes sense. All this anti American crap was happening last time he was president too. I thought the world was going mad, but he was pushing. It was him the whole time.
Yeah, how does it benefit Google to do this? Or benefit the NFL to remove End Racism? Someone had to be sitting in a room and think, "Oh, nice! Now we can finally remove that bullshit and nobody will oppose it."
mailbox.org has been pretty good. you can also sync contacts and calendar using DAVx5 on android. They don't have any official apps. but thunderbird mobile works well.
I mean okay to choice, but why do you care on this? Who gives a shit? As long as they aren't adding national donut day and frivolous shit shit like that.
Some like to keep their calendars clean, which should be their choice. There is already a setting for showing national holidays, they could just expand that