Same here - my Mazda MX5 is 20 years old, I've had it for 16 of those years, and our other car (bought 9 years ago) is 14 yrs old. I never sell or part exchange my old cars, just drive them till they fail the MOT, then get another second-hand one.
The phrase "Don't be evil" is coming to mind for some strange reason
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Dude Google's privacy-invasion practices are identical in every relevant way to Facebook's, and both of them passed up "classic" Microsoft in the evil department a decade ago. To begin with, as an actual business Google is first and foremost an personal-data mining-and-brokering, ad-selling, and ad delivery company, and as a result literally every single online, software, and hardware product or service they produce or offer is designed first and foremost to serve or enable those primary goals, which makes it fundamentally more "evil" than a company whose business model is making and selling software for its own sake no matter how market-dominant they get. But, I realize that might be just a matter of opinion.
Data mining is the least of Facebook's sins. Their crooked secret advertising scheme was key to Trump's elections, and their "real name" policy may have gotten people killed. Meanwhile Microsoft basically created the virus epidemic in the '90s by merging Internet Explorer and the desktop in a criminal scheme to avoid complying with their agreement with the Justice Department.
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Google played just as much of a role in Trump's election as Facebook did. To begin with their search engine is notoriously manipulatable and has been famously and frequently exploited by right-wing extremists in the past; but more importantly, Google's YouTube has served a far more vital role in recruiting and radicalizing alt-righters of all stripes. While Facebook's tools allowed alt-right groups and propaganda outlets to identify, reach out to, and network with Facebook users who their data collection had showed to already be right-leaning, YouTube has actually built legions of brand new white nationalist/supremacists, misogynists, homophobes, and other types of scum out of people who had started out as blank slates, due to its "suggestion" algorithms gradually feeding more politicized and more extreme content over time to people who started out simply watching neutral stuff like video game let's plays and anime news vlogs. YouTube was the primary nexus for the growth of GamerGate; it allows alt-righters to push propaganda lectures to all viewers in the guise of "advertisements" for a fake university; and its lip-service attempts at gaining control of rampant Nazi-use have actually been harmful because Google have allowed themselves to be successfully lobbied into demonetizing LGBT-positive content as "inappropriate" right alongside the white-nationalist material, in the interests of "fairness". And that's not even getting into the whole multi-faceted child exploitation problem that YouTube has created, which Google has all but declared they don't even know how to fix and has instead been surreptitiously trying to rally its users against US government regulators for noticing. There are people actually demanding that COPPA protections for children be weakened in deferrence to YouTube's ad monetization practices right now, thanks to Google actively trying to manipulate that conversation for its own benefit.
Corporations stealing ideas from other corporations twenty years ago certainly isn't defensible; but it utterly pales in comparison to what we're dealing with today which is the monetization of people's personal lives and thoughts. Never in the highest heights (or lowest lows, if you fancy) of Microsoft's monopolistic software-selling practices did it ever have the intrusive, violative, damaging, and inextricable reach into the minutest, most granular details of people's personal and private lives that Google and Facebook have striven for and achieved. Nobody can blame a Windows PC monopoly or Microsoft Office for allowing an election to be hijacked; no product of Microsoft's has been exploited as a tool of large-scale directed social manipulation. They don't have the tools or the reach; Microsoft was late to the social-media game and failed every time they tried to get into it.
I never brought up Amazon. Their horrendous exploitation of low-wage labor puts them in a different category, comparable more to say Walmart than to tech companies like Google. As a data-mining operation Amazon is the same thing as Google and Facebook, with the only real exception being that Amazon exploits the data all by itself to deliver its own ads, whereas Google and Facebook sell the data on the open market for third-parties to buy and use to target their ads.
Google doesn't allow you to create youtube videos that can only be seen by specific advretising groups. We *still* don't know where Facebook's targeted ads go to because people who are likely to report them weren't targeted. Facebook was intentionally creating their secret campaigns and keeping them secret was an actual marketing point. That's evil by intent.
Again, intent matters. Microsoft was knowingly and intentionally doing evil. Being abused by third parties is not intentional evil.
No, I did. I also brought up Facebook.
Yes, Walmart is another. Add it to the list.
Again, that's the least evil aspect here. Evil is not just outcome, it's intent.
You don't need to spend so much time trying to prove Facebook is malignant; neither one of us disputes that. The point of contention is Google.
Google is not JUST "being abused by third parties". Google made money on Gamergate and YouTube Nazis, which is why they refused to do anything about the problem (because "speech") until the public got together and brought the sponsors into it (i.e. "adpocalypse"). And the "refusing to do anything" was actually that - intentional refusal, not just neglect or logistical inability. Google established very narrow criteria for what counted as "bad enough" for a video to be removed and selectively enforced them, and as a result hate-group promotional propaganda, directed harassment campaigns against individuals, and misinformation campaigns were allowed to flourish while Google watched and let the advertiser money roll in. Like Facebook, Google had a financial incentive to willingly allow themselves to "be abused by third parties" and not do anything about the situation. That is certainly intentional evil.
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