I have been part of the Google echo system since Chrome, Google, Gmail and Youtube were brand new. Yesterday I read the linked article from the respectable British newspaper The Guardian. Google is giving away lots of money to climate change deniers, That made it for me. I am leaving Google and that right now.
(At the same time I was thinking about beefing up my internet security)
What do you use instead of the Google ecosystem and are you happy with your decisions?
I am 100% apple fanboy (watch, ipad, iphone and macbook)
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Maybe try other sources than Guardian:) It is a far-left news outlet. Today, everyone who doesnât agree with Greta is automatically a climate change denier. So if you donât want to ruin your countryâs economy and throw hundreds thousands of people into poverty, you are a bad climate change denier. That being said, Google is definitely not a âniceâ company and you should get out of its eco system for your own sake.
There are many options outside of Google and even the Apple eco system. Depends on your type of work etc.
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I log into YouTube to track my videos watched and to access my saved lists, but otherwise Iâm logged out of Google. I also use an extension to reduce webpage calls to Googleâs content delivery network. I donât discount Google still being able to track me, but with periodically changing VPN nodes Iâm pretty sure theyâre tracking me as a user without knowing precisely who I am.
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A cousin of mine works there and is in charge of their green policies and implementation. They are very serious about this as a company and making great progress.
In light of all the âfake newsâ and other reasons why we should not trust blindly what some news outlet claims I urge everyone to take a deep breath and spend some time on a fact checking website or deep web search to see what is going on.
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The age surely contains fake news, as well as mere claims of it when the real news is disliked. To be fair, the claims are substantiated in that more than a dozen organizations which have lobbied against climate change legislation have received contributions from Google. The beneficiaries list is here. The CEI was one of the groups that urged the current administration to abandon the Paris agreement, and even criticized it for not dismantling more environmental rules. Google also sponsored a meeting of SPN, whose members recently created a âclimate pledgeâ website cliaming âour natural environment is getting betterâ and âthere is no climate crisisâ. Google reportedly donated âundisclosed sumsâ to the Cato Institute, a conservative think tank co-founded by Charles Koch which has opposed climate legislation and questions its severity.
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The fairer approach would be to ask whether this is all that they do with their donations. So, as we see âŚ
Climate change is an established scientific fact. Even those people fully on board with this statement are still developing individually their own sense of what constitutes the right approach to take to navigate through the politics of the issue. I must say, the statement you make suggests that you believe, after reading only one article, that Google, a company of many employees, can react faster and more definitively than any one individual person in the company and that their response must at the same time be oriented right on the spot with your metrics, when even your metrics may in fact not reflect the full sense of everyone at Google right now or indeed even be fully justifiable in its own right in the larger scheme of things.
So, jump ship. But, it seems you are jumping because you smell a can of day old fish from the kitchen that has yet to be cleaned out rather than because the ship is sinking with the captain in full denial.
Edit: The above is not to say that some serious response to Google is not warranted, especially in light of the addition from @bowline âŚ
Perhaps, as another analogy, are you cutting off your nose to spite your face on this. Would it not be better to donate your time and money and effort even as vehemently to the counter causes.
â
JJW
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Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc have PACS that support candidates that deny climate change, compare immigrants to rats, etc. Apple does not have a PAC (good thing), but their lobbyists and execs make sure to kiss the ring when a tax cut is involved. None of these companies are clean in that regard⌠but some are worse than others.
For a list of which officials they give money to just follow pinboard on twitter.
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I agree. However how we respond to it is. Denying this fact is its own false narrative.
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JJW
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To be clear I am very pro âclimate changeâ and the urgency what needs to be done.
All I wanted to point out is to be aware of the fact that we have to verify before accepting whatever is told us by some media outlet.
I did do a brief search at first glance it appears that the internet copied and referred to the same article.
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Google spreads the moolah wherever it does them the most good (if only to give them some amount of cover), and the beneficiaries list has groups on the left and right and nonpartisan ones. Itâs just one part of Googleâs strong lobbying efforts: after first starting lobbying in 2003 they became the #2 corporate spender by 2012, and spent $18 million to lobby in 2017. (Facebook spent $11.5 million on lobbying activities that year, Amazon spent $12.8 million, Microsoft spent $8.5 million, and Apple spent $7 million.) And in the face of current congressional investigations into its market power, last month Google hired Republican Sen. Rob Portmanâs top aide to lead its current lobbying efforts. (He replaces Republican former congresswoman Susan Molinari.) Interesting choice, as Portman plays both sidse: he believes climate change is real and needs action ⌠yet got a 0 percent rating in 2017 for environmental votes scored by the League of Conservation Voters. 
Facebook and Twitter have sought cover too, having had secret meetings with conservative groups going back at least a year and continuing to this day. Of course the point isnât political support in aimed one way or another but the egregious choice to specifically support the work of climate science deniers.
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Climate Change is observable. No sane person denies that. The problem is (and the fake news begins) when you talk about the cause of the said change. Some say is natural since climate changed drastically in the past and some say itâs caused by human activity.
It is fair to say that human activity plays a role in climate change, but how big of a role? How much human activity affects climate change? Is it 80%, 60%, 40% or 20%? And the answer is that we donât know. And fact is that scientists donât know it either. They claim they do, but there is no hard science behind it. They just assume that human activity plays a major role, and they cannot quantify it. And if you point this out, you are a climate change denier. It is also good to know that scientists are financially motivated to publish alarming news in order to fund their research.
So we donât know hom much human activity affects climate change. But the politicians are willing to âfight the climateâ with programs like the Paris agreement that will effectively cripple whole industries, many people will lose their jobs and the companies will reflect the new costs on customers. And meanwhile developing countries, not giving a ratâs ass about climate, will fill the gaps. And all that when we donât know if the drastic limitations would even have an effect.
People are more conscious of the climate than ever before a and the environment is actually improving in many places. So the solution is innovation and not drastic and expensive limitations. Just look at cars now and before 10 years. Electric cars are becoming mainstream; every industry tries to be environmentally conscious, and that all is mainly customer driven. If you took just a fraction of the money that the Paris agreement would cost and put into innovation, the effect would be far greater.
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First, there is significant evidence that humans are the largest contributors to increases in CO2 and thus climate change.
But this misses the point of the original post. I donât think OP meant to start a discussion on the validity of their point of view/understanding of climate change and who is funding it. I believe the question was what alternatives to google services are there? They could have just as well said âGoogle sucks at privacy. What alternatives to google are there?â Had they done so, a discussion of what privacy online is would be for a different post.
Here are my thoughts:
DuckDuckGo for search. Reasonably good and you can use !g at the beginning of searches if you think you need to get a google search result. I love ddg. It works great, and I occasionally use !g to verify my results or dig deeper if Iâm too lazy to come up with different search terms.
ProtonMail for email. Secure and private. Not free. I am not 100% sold here. It is less convenient: as far as I can tell, you must use their app on iOS and the web portal on mac. And the app is not all that great (not that the current implementation of Mail.app isnât without its own flaws). For example, you cannot change the behavior of swipe gestures and you cannot work on multiple emails at once (mass archive emails, for example).
Gsuite alternatives. This is the real toughie. Iâve been thinking about this myself: you could use Microsoft 365; iCloud + Pages, Numbers, and Keynote; or GoDaddy + MS365 (or even openoffice.org). It really depends on your needs. I work in an environment where my clients often rely on gdocs and expect me to do the same. This makes leaving gsuite behind nearly impossible for me. But I can change my primary services.
I hope that helps, Bernt_Mansson.
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That is called circumstantial evidence.
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Big ole swing and a miss there, TheMarty.
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It was quite the hit, actually. The article ilustrates my point. No one is able to quantify the extent of effect of human activity (i.e. CO2). How much CO2 must humans get into the atmosphere to increase the global temperature by 0,1 degree Celsius? By how much must we limit the CO2 production to lower the gl. temperature by 0,1? I did not see such numbers. But I saw wishful thinking that if we lover the concentration, climate change will get better. How much better? How fast? Again, no answers.
We are provided with comparison of trends and assumptions. Yet, it is enough for a lot of people who are willing to cripple western economies because of it while we canât say, if those extreme measure will have even an effect, or if the effect will be significant enough.
Oh boy. Shifting the goalposts. (Or should I say strike zone.) This is why I donât argue with blind umpires. Good luck, TheMarty.
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So, this forum started discussing polarizing political issues why?
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Itâs hard to argue when you have only ad hominem arguments at your disposal 
Try harder and maybe your experience in arguments will get better.
Completely agree. The tone of this space has always been one of its highlights and draws; helpful and positive. It makes it enjoyable to visit and learn.
So many other sites have become reactionary chasms of intractable opinion, itâd be a shame to see that here.
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Comparable arguments:
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Allowing an O-ring seal to fly when the outside temperatures are just around its lower rating should be OK because otherwise the cost of extra time in delay to launch is too high. Oops!
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Allowing only one sensor to control the state of the airplane is OK because otherwise the delay to get this plane to market will be increased. Oops!
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Vaping with flavored inserts is to be allowed because otherwise small companies will loose their opportunities to expand their markets. Oops!
You do not dispute that CO2 increases are caused by humans. That is a good thing (because this is where most folks are still stuck). You only counter that we do not yet know well enough how to counteract the changes that we are causing. I think we all can agree to that point. Certainly most of us who agree that climate change is occurring due to increased CO2 and that humans are the cause of the increased CO2 can also agree that we do not know anything about what to do well enough other than that continued inaction will most probably kill off our comfortable lifestyles (if not kill off us) sooner than we currently imagine. The above examples, and many other comparable cases, should teach us this lesson in spades. This is where the discussion is political, meaning (as I pull together a few definitions):
Relating to the ideas or strategies of a particular party or group in the activities associated with the governance of a country or other area, especially the debate or conflict among individuals or parties having or hoping to achieve power.
We are quickly diverging from the MPU theme. Anyone have suggestions where this discussion might be moved?
â
JJW
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