200,000
That’s how many employees Google has, and all of them are being allowed to work from home until July 2021.
Must be nice...or a real nightmare, depending on your perspective...and whether you have kids at home or not.
The latter is the game-changer for many...the one that’s pushing them to move out of California - where Google is headquartered - to all four corners of the country, including Montana.
Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter are all the same - massive amounts of workers that can now work from home, many of whom are deciding that home will now be in a state other than California or Washington.
Amazon is another one. They have plans to spend $1.4 billion to open up satellite offices in six different US cities. Uber and Apple are doing the same, with Texas being their destination. We all know that Tesla is moving out of California completely for Texas.
And it’s not Covid.
Record numbers of people were leaving California, New York and Illinois in droves before the pandemic - three of the largest shithole states to live in, with terrible governors and one-party rule for decades.
This is what happens when Democrats rule unchallenged. We’ve seen it clearly in Missoula, another blue city that’s massively in debt and desperately looking for any, any way to get out of it.
But I digress.
This was supposed to be a conversation about Google.
My, that company’s been good to me!
I’ve written two books directly related to Google’s search platform - here and here - as well as three other books that deal with how your website can react to Google and other social networks - here’s one of ‘em.
Oh, and let’s not forget one of my personal favorites, 2014’s Visit My Site, Bitch!
I sold nearly 550 copies of those books when they were ‘hot’ many years ago, making around $1,500 in royalties in the process.
Yes, Google’s been good to me...but it’s time to end our current relationship.
It really does come down to the way Google is censoring information with its search results.
- Here’s an article from the UK explaining how Google is censoring what Americans see in regard to the Great Barrington Declaration;
- Ted Cruz recently lambasted the tech company for censoring and manipulating what people are seeing so that Democrats get more votes than Republicans;
- Doctors touting hydroxychloroquine were censored not only by Google this summer, but Facebook and Twitter as well.
It’s important to remember that YouTube is owned by Google, and gets a huge amount of traffic just by itself.
You might remember how YouTube censored certain doctors earlier this year that questioned the logic of the Covid lockdowns and the idea that there were no natural cures.
Luckily, I’m not big into watching videos so rarely visit YouTube. My young son, however, watches it all day.
A quick aside - child neglect is probably a bigger problem than child abuse...and sending kids to their room all day to state at their screens is a form of neglect, big time.
But let’s continue...
All in all, I’m going to stop using Google.
I’ve already begun to use Bing, which I find gives me adequate information on whatever subject I’m looking for.
Yeah...trading one big tech giant for another. But what am I supposed to do?
- Google, Bing and Yahoo are the largest search engines in the world, followed by Baidu based out of China.
- After that we have Ask.com, AOL, Yandex (Russian) and DuckDuckGo.
It seems that you pretty much have to go through a large corporation to get your information. But then when’s it been any different? Whether it’s some robber baron’s newspaper giving you the headlines, or some tech giant in a hoodie...it’s all corporate, controlled, and in most cases, censored.
A great part of each story is the part you’re not told, for whatever reason.
So I’m going to give Bing a chance, which is easy because I deleted the ‘Google’ bookmark from my browser so can’t click on it anymore.
It’s amazing how something as simple as that ensures you no longer visit!
But really, is this just me trying to be ‘woke’ myself, like someone that decides they’ll no longer shop at the GAP because they disagree with the company’s child labor practices, or refuses to shop Hobby Lobby because of their religious politics?
Maybe it is.
Because really, what difference is that change of mine going to make?
Probably none.
But if we don’t do things on principle, then what’s the point? If we don’t have principles of some sort to fall back on, then who in fact are we as individuals? What is it that we stand for, and why?
Tough questions. Perhaps Google, er...Bing...will have the answer.