To quote Christopher Nolan: “You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”

I hear there's a janitor using the handle of one of the original paddles as a mop handle.

It's only there because it wasn't inventoried and so not lost in the purge.

"The United Nations is a transparently antisemitic organisation" - Google Co Founder

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/07/08/sergey-...

Not just out of touch, but downright psychopathic in my opinion. I used to greatly admire Larry Page. He seemed like a really smart, driven, level-headed guy. When the news came out that he was basically fine with AI wiping out humanity, as it would just be the natural evolution of intelligence, and to fight against that would be "speciesist", all I good think was "what a psycho".

And I really don't think I'm exaggerating Page's opinion on this, though I'm happy to be corrected if I'm wrong.

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Not only that, but the only area he's authorised to name is a stretch of the US coastline and its EEZ.

He has no authority to name international bodies of water - i.e the large part in the centre where Google should be writing "Gulf of Mexico" because that's its name.

But he does have the ability to cause trouble for the giant corporations based in his country that serve map images to most of the rest of the world. The giant corporations also see that he grants favours for fealty. So it's actually the unofficial power he has that's the problem, rather than what's within his legal remit.

> "In the situation with the Gulf, it's unambiguously true that the "primary, common, local" name used in the US"

And that's my point. It depends on how "primary" or "common" is defined, the article has no definition of it. Who gets to decide that, Google?

The easy (and predictable) cop-out is to follow a governments definition of what is "the expected primary and common name", and then show that name in brackets.

The only restriction this "definition" seems to set is that your country needs to be adjacent to the landmark to define its name, so "a ruler" cannot decide to rename e.g. Australia unless he is either "the ruler" of Australia or of a country adjacent to it.

And we're back to square one.

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EDIT: Yes, I also read this sentence: "By saying "common", we mean to include names which are in widespread daily use, rather than giving immediate recognition to any arbitrary governmental re-naming.".

The question remains how to quantify "widespread daily use".

It creates room to justify against an immediate change of a name, but doesn't define when this criteria is reached.

And from all I see, all this doesn't seem to matter anyway, because a new local naming will anyway be added in brackets (see Gulf of Mexico). What am I missing?

> whose authority to make that "official" only extends to a single branch of a single level of government.

Yes, and Google has huge contracts with the government, meaning they must adhere to their rules if they want to keep those contracts.

The moment the president of the US renamed those bodies of water, it became commonly used in all sort of publications since then. It fits their description, no matter how silly.

That pi bill never became law.

What do you want to see when streets get renamed to Martin Luther King Jr Blvd? Or renamed away from Caesar Chavez? How long do you wait for the "common name" to take precedence?

I don't know... I tend to agree with you (especially in this case), but I can also see cases where that's actually not what I'd expect. My hometown has a square that everyone knows as the "tribunal square" (which used to be its official name), but that's not been its official name in decades and about 30% of people don't even know the current official name, yet I would expect a map to refer to it by its current official name and not "tribunal square".

Maybe not quite the same as in this case, the entity who names the square actually owns the square, which isn't the case in the gulf of mexico naming situation. But there is some grey area I think.

>Do you think Google should serve customers or politicians?

Why not ask the question this way.

Do you think Google should serve people with money in their hand or a gun to their head?

That's why I wrote official. If the US as a country and as an institution change the name of a place, it is neither the problem nor the role of google to decide if it is good or not. I would not be happy if my president decided to rename the united kingdom to the îles normandes (normandy isles), but I do think that once official google should change the name