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google_censors

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This prompted me to look up US pedestrian deaths. Some interesting numbers:

"According to the GHSA report, 74 percent of pedestrian fatalities happen at night, and 72 percent of those killed were not crossing at intersections."

"The GHSA report indicated that 15 percent of pedestrians killed each year are hit by a drunk driver, while 34 percent of pedestrians killed are legally drunk themselves."

I'd say we should put in more crosswalks and add lights and reflectors, but I've almost been hit twice by cellphone-distracted drivers in one like that in my neighborhood.

https://www.npr.org/2017/03/30/522085503/2016-saw-a-record-i...

Thanks for the petty insults, it's sadly typical for HNers like you these days. However, I am in California and really wish the government would do more. It's not facetious. I don't expect much from states like Alabama, but blue states with lots of rich democrats need to do so much more. And as for being right-wing, I believe in socialized medicine, stronger environmental laws, higher taxes, and more strict regulation of corporations.

YC China and Qi Lu 8 years ago

It's amazing that a company that Paul Graham co-founded is getting into bed with an authoritarian government notorious for its human rights abuses. To succeed in China you can't go against the government. So is he going to be pushing as hard for political change in China as he is in the US, or will he remain silent as his company reaps the profits?

YC China and Qi Lu 8 years ago

You mean Mercedes, the company that used slave laborers from camps to build vehicles and engines for the Nazis?

I've been backing up everything in my google account and preparing for something just like this. When I first started making sure my backup was complete I realized that I had sent gmail invites out to a few friends. Now I guess I have to tell those same friends that it's time to start preparing for the day that Google decides to wipe out 14 years of their emails.

Apparently the author(s) think that you're safe if people are breaking into your house and stealing your things as long as you're not getting bashed over the head. Such an odd way to look at it. I don't think a lot of people who have had their house broken into feel just as safe afterwards. I do agree with their premise that prison for drug offenses is a terrible idea, but I hate that they lump drugs in with property crime. Property crime is definitely not victimless.

The author of this article claims to have received an award for at least one published medical study, and I think someone should take a serious look at it. If he thinks that this methodology is okay in a study, I can't imagine what would happen if someone used his medical study for anything but laughs.

Well, including data from China for only Tesla is a joke. That would be like saying "we couldn't find any deaths from Ebola in the United States, so we took the ones in Africa and added them in. Wow, look at how many deaths per year from Ebola occurred in the US compared to deaths from the plague in the US!". It makes absolutely no sense.

There's not a single usable competitor to street view considering the coverage and quality. They got that imagery using money from non-maps revenue, while keeping Maps pricing artificially low for years, with the the practical effect of making sure that no one else could compete with them. So you can't switch street view providers if it's integrated into your product, and now you get to suck up an insane price increase. Which makes it in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act here in the United States and I'm sure the EU has even stricter rules on monopolies.

When it comes to Google I just have a lot of issues with the company and didn't have my real login handy when an article about them came up a few days ago. From big issues, like hiring Eric Schmidt and frequent attempts at anti-competitive behavior, to small ones, like prudish censoring of search results and weird customer service (including a six-month delay in getting a response to a simple request for a Maps enterprise quote), I could really just go on and on with the variety of reasons why I don't like Google. I've seen firsthand, at multiple Google locations, an odd attitude that must have permeated from the top. The only people that seemed to be different were a few acquihires who exuded a combination of resignation and pragmatism about their situation.

Edit: If you meant that you wanted more detail about my antitrust complaint, I contacted them via the antitrust email address. They took a while to call back, but not as long as Google took to get me that Maps quote...

If your country has any kind of antitrust or competition regulator then please file a complaint against Google.

Please contact the US Department of Justice and let them know about how the price increase is affecting you in regards to Street View. They seemed to buy into my reasoning that Google has effectively made sure that they won't have any Street View competition by artificially keeping prices low for years. The more people that complain, the sooner the DOJ will probably take action. For European users I recommend complaining to your regulators as well, especially using Street View as your main complaint since there's no real alternatives.

Does anyone know exactly when Google decided to become the pearl-clutching Tipper Gore of search engines? We had a similar problem a long time ago with Google and it seems like it hurt our page rank at the time. There was nothing legislative that would have had any influence at the time, so it has to be coming internally, and from fairly high in the food chain.