Dear Googles: Stop asking - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/ayk2DF43eF1 <comment><USER3> I was all enthusiastic about G+ for about 5 minutes - until they wouldn't allow my wife to sign up without giving them her phone number, _and proving that it was hers by accepting a call from them_. Just who the fuck do they think they are??

There is no way I could suggest my friends and family sign up to such an intrusive service, so I quickly deleted my own account.

It's an absolutely stunning achievement to create a web-site that's even more offensively intrusive than Facebook. I hope Google are proud.

<comment><USER4> > Just who the fuck do they think they are??

They think they are Google - you know, the guys that made the Internet searchable. I'm pretty sure they know what they are doing.

Call verification is used by many services to establish ownership of an account, and to provide a fallback mechanism that automates the recovery of an account. Google likes to automate the shit out of things. This is no different.

I hear that you are angry about their policies, but I really don't hear _why_ you are angry other than it's 'intrusive'. Are you afraid they are going to do something horrible with your phone number but not your searches? Do you have similar concern and passion for what the NSA has done? Are they related to each other?

<comment><USER5> > Call verification is used by many services to establish ownership of an > account, and to provide a fallback mechanism that automates the recovery of > an account. Google likes to automate the shit out of things. This is no > different.

I've been using the internet for well over a decade now. The number of services I've signed up for must be in the hundreds.

I've never had to verify my identity unless a monetary transaction has been carried out, and then it's to my bank rather than the merchant.

Nothing I get from Google+ needs any confirmation of my real identity.

<comment><USER4> > Nothing I get from Google+ needs any confirmation of my real identity.

Now we're getting to the nut of the real argument.

<comment><USER6> I think the problem comes from the fact of treating Google+ like any other social network like Facebook. Google+ is supposed to be an identity layer for all of Google. The fact that they have status update posting, etc is secondary.

Google would like to assign a face, name and phone number to every Google account. And why is that? For various reasons. A face and a name is very valuable for targeted ads. And a phone number associated with every Google account will help Hangouts. Maybe it will enable sending SMS from the web to any phone and also Voice users can cal from the web from their Google account. Thus, Google achieves their aim of disrupting the carriers and making the phone number irrelevant.

That's just the way I see it anyway.

<comment><USER7> If that's the case, why not be up front about it?

<comment><USER8> Because saying you're the next OpenID won't allow you to be the next social network sensation à la Facebook.

<comment><USER9> Except that OpenID is a distributed protocol, which the Internet should so obviously use for authentication, not FB/G+.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Does Google believe that if they just push a little harder and finish the job, that somehow the people so alienated will be won over?

Or is the pursuit of profit far more important than the perception of the brand overall?

Right now, and for the last year, the brand is being severely tarnished in all of the networks I have, tech and real-life. I don't see them winning on any front. A Pyrrhic victory.

<comment><USER11> I have no idea why people talk about huge corporations like they have hive mind and are in total unity?

Google is now a mega-corp, comprised of thousands competing for finite success outcomes (raises & promos). It is also data driven hence they look at metrics that are considered success like registers over abandonments. Brand tarnish is a long term outcome, therefore it can not be seen in typical a/b testing cycles. Hence it is ignored, or even gamed upon for short term metric gain. This is true for all corps that equate success with short cycle data driven metrics.

<comment><USER12> By all accounts the consolidation and Plusification of Google's services is being driven from the top, by Larry Page specifically.

<comment><USER13> That a bad plan comes from a famous person doesn't make it any less of a bad plan.

In the spirit of Google: +1 for people and +2 for companies now actively moving away from almost all Google properties because they're becoming so unpleasant and/or unproductive to use. I _know_ they're all about being data driven and running empirical tests: that's why the {expletive deleted} page moves around every time I come back and visit something, which is probably the single most annoying thing they've been lately. The very fact that they're running so many tests is materially reducing the value of their services to us.

Ironically, our exodus started with abandoning our business G+ pages, because they have generated so little interest that they aren't even worth a few minutes now and then to update them any more. It appears that literally no-one we care about is actually using Google+.

<comment><USER14> Do you have any proof that significant number of people are moving away from almost all Google properties? This sounds very anecdotal.

<comment><USER13> I'm merely offering an anecdotal view and make no claim otherwise, though FWIW it's a pattern I've now seen with multiple clients who previously had varying levels of Google dependence as well as my own companies and myself personally.

The thing that made me mention it was that so many of the reasons given by so many of the people involved are fundamentally the same. If what I've seen is at all representative, Google are increasingly perceived to be a security/privacy risk (though this is hardly unique among cloud services) and perhaps worse for them, they're not perceived to be a stable long-term bet (too many dropped products, too many unwanted changes happening too fast, nothing special in terms of quality or features, and little support for users).

Some of these factors presumably won't be as damaging to Google in the consumer market, or at least not as quickly, so I don't see their main advertising business dying any time soon. However, to businesses with real money on the line and organisation-wide IT strategies to plan, Google's overall offering looks increasingly unattractive. For example, Google Docs/Drive/Apps have been tried by various groups I know. None is still happy with them, and several have been forced to move at least some of their activities to alternative systems because the Google ones just weren't capable of getting those jobs done. Chrome is another example I've more often heard mentioned between curse words than flattering ones recently. And I already mentioned in another post the horrible experience we had trying to organise some Google Ads.

Google's resilience appears to stem in part from traditional alternatives shooting themselves in the foot by also pushing to cloud-based offerings and therefore immediately running into similar concerns. Even so, Google seem to be getting worse faster than everyone else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The whole phone number thing is an attempt to solve a very hard problem.

Most people have terrrrrrrrrrrible password practices. Absolutely abysmal. And they are keeping extremely sensitive data inside their email as well as using their email address as the key to accessing many other websites and pieces of sensitive data. Think about how screwed you'd be if you lost access to you email address. Now think of how many people DAILY probably loose such access. Phone numbers are an easy, mostly reliable way to identify someone and give them access back to their email address without an investigation and without human intervention.

Plus, let's just get reasonable for one minute here. Google already has your phone number. Ever given it to someone via gmail? Someone else ever given your phone number to one of their friends through gmail? They're just asking for permission to send you a text.

<comment><USER16> You totally miss the point. Its not about how great two factor authentication is. Its about the fact I don't want to use the two factor authentication, I'd rather loose everything.

I'd rather have my "sensitive" data compromised than have some multinational advertising company that has been compromised by every major government on the planet have access to me at any given time.

And its as annoying as having someone stand in your kitchen every morning and say "A bowl of bran Sir, its good for you, best thing to eat Sir, other options are inferior". I hate Bran, I'd rather eat toast, I'd eat fruit, I'd rather wait till lunch time. But that butler person won't go away, he shows up at lunch time, an dinner, and when I just feel like a quick snack down town.

I don't care how much better it is for me, I already know, I just don't want it.

And lastly, if someone steals your phone, with your a mail client on it, it is way easier for identity theft to occur, not harder.

<comment><USER17> >I'd rather have my "sensitive" data compromised than have some multinational marketing company that has been compromised by every major government on the planet have access to me at any given time.

They are far from the same thing, and why do you think it is worse?

<comment><USER16> Because whats on my Google is mildly embarrassing, where as I grew up group of kids from Yugoslavia, where the government forces used information like this to butcher people in the streets, in there homes. I turn not he TV and see it happening in Iraq, and Syria right now.

Its not a future I want this world to have, and we are unfortunately enabling it, as always, with poorly thought through best intentions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Google has become this unwieldily beast that doesn't care how frustrated its users become, because it knows not enough of them will leave to have even the slightest dent in their revenue.

<comment><USER19> In the case of YouTube, I agree. What good alternatives are out there that have even half the content that YouTube has?

<comment><USER20> Vimeo is on par or ahead for artsy original content, but pretty much focuses only on that niche, so there aren't many music videos for popular music, tv show / movie clips, or any of the rest of the stuff you find on YouTube.

<comment><USER21> I would really like to see Vimeo become more popular. Their service is much cleaner and far less annoying. Although the recent discovery of Youtube Feather has me intrigued.

<comment><USER22> They don't permit all sorts of content that YouTube does, which is what holds Vimeo back from broad acceptance as a YouTube replacement.

<comment><USER23> ...but their higher quality standards are also what has allowed them to carve out a niche which youtube can never replace.

<comment><USER22> Sure -- it's a double edged sword, but the point is that Vimeo does not represent a potential YouTube replacement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Listen, and understand. That Google Plus is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you complete your profile.

<comment><USER25> Somehow I feel a bit uncomfortable laughing at this.

If Google ever becomes involved in defense work, with this attitude, we are fucked. Imagine combination of armed drones, Google's self-driving car technology and a vast amount of real time data on everyone everywhere.

Now where did I put that tinfoil hat?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I don't mind the annoyance of Google+ for my personal account. But they really fucked things up when they forced the integration on my Google Apps for Business (terrible name by way -- why not "Google Business Suite"). Now we have clients pissed off because they can't share images in their organization without opening Google+. This HAS to stop.

<comment><USER27> Google is an advertising company. All they really care about is building profiles on users and using it to sell ads. That's why you have a ton of unwanted integration, Chromebooks that can't create user accounts without Google's permission, and a Chrome web browser that default to sending a ton of info to Google.

I still use Google Search but I got rid of my Google account, got rid of the Chromebook, moved my email to Fastmail, and moved to Firefox for browsing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The main issue is Google will only drive a small minority of it's customers/'products being sold' away. If you have a problem with Google's current approach, you may want to consider leaving, not to "stick it to the man" but to not have to deal with their services anymore.

I recently deleted everything on my account (G+ & YT included) and it feels great to be free from the constant harassment. I only have Gmail active now. I'm still looking for a new mail provider but once I have one, my relationship with Google is over as far as I'm concerned.

It really depends on how much you need to use Google's services.

<comment><USER29> For some people it is harder. I deleted my personal Google accounts a while ago. Our school e-mail is Gmail. When we visit Youtube after logging in for Gmail, you have an account, just not a channel. A little box telling you about the updated comment section keeps popping up. There is not a great danger to what they are currently doing, but it is annoying.

<comment><USER25> Your school or company knowing exactly what you're doing on youtube is more than just annoying. It can be extremely harmful.

<comment><USER17> It depends on the school or company though of course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Wow, two years can have a huge impact: [http://i.imgur.com/wbjCmbt.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/wbjCmbt.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER31> It blows my mind how badly Google sucks at "social networks."

</comment><comment><USER32> I gave google my phone number a long time ago when I set up two step authentication. Your account is significantly more secure when you do that. Has never been abused AFAIK.

I think of it as similar to giving identifying information to my credit card company when I'm calling them. (Though citi pissed me off asking me for the _full_ credit card number a few years ago).

</comment><comment><USER3> Relevant: [http://toys.usvsth3m.com/google-plus- simulator/](http://toys.usvsth3m.com/google-plus-simulator/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I posted that link to G+. One person claimed it must be a disgruntled YouTuber, another seriously claimed b3ta must be Microsoft shills. I despair.

<comment><USER33> So, you are surprised about a negative reaction on the social network for (former) Google employees?

<comment><USER34> He didn't say he was surprised. The general lack of basic self-introspection makes me sad, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Its really annoying since you know its a script and it can just keep asking you again and again. Sometimes it asks me my cell number while trying to check my email (even on my paid google apps account!)

Facebook has taken an interesting more sneaky turn recently with their messenger app. Since now they can collect phone numbers without explicitly asking for them.

Once it's given to them just once.. Its with them forever.

<comment><USER36> Yes, it's just a script, but you know that there was a human behind that script. Someone at Google, probably pretty high up, made a _decision_ that they're going to keep pestering you, and making your experience as shitty as possible until you give them what they want.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> No means no. They really ought to figure that out by now.

<comment><USER38> No means not now. If they really didn't want to take no for an answer, they could just merge the accounts without asking the user. Instead, they keep reminding the user with gradually increasing frequency to make sure that the user has all their shit in order before the merge actually happens.

<comment><USER39> Well that's the whole problem - the youtube name dialog options end with "well, we'll ask you later" while the user wants an option "I said 'never' and I mean it".

<comment><USER38> That option is there, it's the x button in the top right corner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> 1\. Google asking me for cellphone number only because I've enabled 2-factor authentication so it does it for every new browser/device.

2\. Regarding chats, I think it's in cookies, so when you change browsers - the whole QA thing repeats.

3\. Google of course wants to know about you more than your mama and spouse combined, but at least some of that pestering experience is due to the fact that Google is prone to employing lousy programmers as much as any other corp.

4\. No one is forced to use Google's free services and be put up with begging for personal information so that implies the freedom to switch to any other provider away from Google.

</comment><comment><USER41> The decision makers, and most people who work at Google probably don't see this problem. They just hand over the information and move on.

It's like the Delta Airlines management team who had a special bus to the airport and a hole in the fence to go straight to their first class seats in their airplanes, or senior Apple employees who (less so now) appeared to never to actually travel outside California and London.

If you don't see a problem you will never fix it. Google and Facebook folks are content with living inside their bubble, while the rest of us get more and more frustrated and use their products less and less.

</comment><comment><USER42> Also please stop asking me to share G+ with my contacts everytime I go to G+.

Nothing makes like a website less than annoying screens I have to click through every time I go there.

</comment><comment><USER43> That personal info must be worth an unholy amount of money for them to blow their once-stellar reputation like this.

</comment><comment><USER44> I complied with everything they ask and they no longer bug me really. But still Google+ is unusable, it constantly uses 40% of my processor just to have that tab open in Chrome/Linux. Facebook runs lovely in comparison.

<comment><USER45> The size of the DOM is one of many complaints I've had with the service. It effectively made me choose between one of two browsers, and limits the number of tabs I can open on the site (for resource exhaustion), though opening new tabs to go to the proper context is the only way to accomplish many tasks.

In all, a long litany of frustrations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Dear Hacker: Stop signing up at Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter and all the other personal data collection services, if you care about your privacy. I'm living a happy life without such accounts, and so can you.

<comment><USER45> As it turns out, the only one of those many services I have an account with was Google, and the one I use most often is pseudonymous.

My clearly stated preference was to _not_ link my pseudonymous identities on G+ and YouTube, as well as not to link either to real-world identifiers. I'd actually posted on the custom URL issue (phone number required) a few weeks back. _That_ identifier then turned out to show up as a reverse-lookup to your G+ account. There are people who know me IRL and have my phone number. I'd prefer they did _not_ identify it with my G+ identity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I am happy Google is pushing lots of annoying questions to remind everyone there is no reason to be logged in to Google to view Youtube videos.

<comment><USER45> There are some videos, generally flagged for violence, which cannot be viewed unless you're identified to the service. A surprising number of breaking news story coverage is unavailable on those grounds.

<comment><USER48> Many of those age-restricted videos can still be embedded, and viewed through the embed url without logging in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I just went to plus.google.com and I had a huge popup asking me to subscribe a bunch of things and enable a bunch of notifications.

Things I've explicitly turned off, because I dont want to be bugged all the time.

The only way to move on was to edit the URL back to what it was before I got redirected.

Google+ is all about coercion. There's really no mistaking about that.

</comment><comment><USER50> Is there a browser plugin or something that can keep google in check? Like separating youtube, gmail and the search into different "sandboxes"? Maybe blocking some of the annoying popups that constantly demand your info? I'm not familiar with such a thing, but it could be kinda nice to have it.

<comment><USER51> Even if you run YouTube, Gmail and search in different incognito windows so that they don't share cookies, they could still figure out that all these requests were coming from the same browser (via browser fingerprinting) at the same IP address.

<comment><USER45> I've been told by a Google engineer (on G+) that IP addresses aren't used for identity purposes. Whether or not they're aggregated at other levels ... would be interesting. I'm not sure whether or not browser fingerprinting is used at all, though I've suggested some reasonably non-invasive ways in which it might be applied for abuse and harassment mitigation, say: hashing fingerprints and storing them with the complainant's account in order to detect sockpuppet attacks.

You couldn't reverse the hash to determine the fingerprint, but if fingerprints matched, you'd have identical hashes. Splitting out different data records might help create probabalistic matches (e.g., n of m hashes match for an identity probability of p).

Tor would of course address IP issues. Privoxy could handle browser fingerprinting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> I wish they were as innovative in their marketing practice as in apps. They seem to replicate whatever Facebook is doing to milk more users for more data. And something Facebook doesn't have to do - frantically coerce people to join Google+ on a massive scale.

I think it's a result of a lesson learned with Buzz. There was a lot of media hype about it, but very little push to the masses (compared to Google+). And, rightly so, it died off. Cause on its own merit, it kind of sucked and got no traction, despite the formidable Google force behind it.

With Google+ - the last hope of the Empire in social media battle - <USER2> goes.

</comment><comment><USER53> This annoys the hell out of me because I know as well as they do that one day I'll misclick one of these fucking things.

</comment><comment><USER54> You can only grow a user base that is engaged with your product _organically_ , not by forcing them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Google Plus - as in, the actual plus.google.com website and app, the Facebook competitor - has basically failed in this regard. The people on it _love_ it! I've been on it since it started. But the people on Buzz loved that too, before Google unceremoniously shot it through the head.

Basically, the existing user base doesn't matter. So they might as well go straight to forcing people onto it, since they failed to lure them onto it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Humans are no longer responsible for such things at google. If you have objections, submit them to the Algorithm, Who already knows what you have to say and doesn't care.

</comment><comment><USER56> Sadly it is a trend, started with companies adding toolbars to software you have to deselect, then they ask you again EVERY update (Adode looking at you amongst others here). Then there is the constant mistargeted adverts, say for a product you already own, analytics at its meh.

Personaly one that has been grinding my gears recently is avast on a pc which constantly keeps popping up a link to read about FB privacy, I don't do Facebook and with that my privacy is alrady covered. yet this pop's up many a time, I use 3G internet upon that PC so suspect every time I get a new IP (often) then the advertising popup for the self promoting article gets flagged up again.

In an age of computers able to remember what we forget or wish to forget it is somewhat annoying to be asked the same question over and over again in the hope you will eventualy say yes too there satisfaction and voiding the upmteen no responses you have said. Yet once you say yes you aint asked again if you would like to say no instead, funny that.

But this is the case with software you can't download, hack about and compile to taste. With that I support this mentality as it will only push people into learning something new. That said if I ever have a problem with a company like google can I ask them umpteen times the same question until I get the answer I want? Only fair in implied contract law perhaps :).

With that the days of software acting like a small kid constantly asking for a bike at for Christmas will be with us for a while longer until the yes and no response have equal value too them. Until then, is it yes yet? is it yes yet? is it yes yet?.....

</comment><comment><USER57> I don't like the "persistence" of Google either, but... if you want to use their package of services (Plus, GMail, others...) the stakes are just going to get higher and higher.

Today, it's a cell phone number for the "benefit" security. Tomorrow, they will ask for a SSN in order to use Gmail.

They offer free services for one reason, and one reason only... and it isn't because they like giving away stuff.

Google is offering "X" service so they can bargain your data out of you, more and more of your data. That, IMO, is the reality of the situation. I would challenge that most people don't understand fully the bargain they are getting.

Google knows most people don't understand this bargain.

Now, that said, do they offer value in the services they provide in exchange for this data? Sure.

If you want that value, they will either:

1\. Get your data, and quit asking for it.

2\. Not get your data, but keep asking for it, as many times as they want, because it's their sandbox.

And here's the kicker in my opinion, millions of people are going to keep signing up for and using their free services, and keep offering their data in exchange for using their services.

The Google world just keeps on turning...

</comment><comment><USER58> Like youtube, they asked you to make you feel like you had a choice. (i may be wrong)

</comment><comment><USER59> Isn't the real point here the relative quality difference between Google's search and the rest of their products?

The search result looks pretty good...

<comment><USER60> Google search has become fuzzier over recent years. When I look for something technical, I almost always have to go back and put quotes around the terms, because Google prefers to display a different search for more common, related terms.

This brings up the Google Interface. I used to be able to use + in front of a term I wanted to be treated literally. Now I have to use quotes, which is 4 keystrokes (including shift) instead of 1 for plus.

Google also has removed my ability to block certain URLs from your search results. Now I cannot avoid the re-linker web sites, and occasionally get suckered into clicking one. That is really irritating.

In spite of this, Google still provides the best search I've seen. I recently compared Google and Bing in an obscure search. Google had 45 hits, Bing 15.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Ah yes, the vocal minority...

</comment><comment><USER62> Gretchen: That is so fetch.

Regina: Gretchen, stop trying to make 'fetch' happen. It's not going to happen

</comment><comment><USER63> I am really worried about being forced to log into google to use chrome these days.. there is a "skip for now" button. I hate this we-know-whats-best-for you approach..

</comment><comment><USER64> Im thinking about writing a FireFox extension that substitutes the word Google with Panopticon on all of their web properties as a reminder to use their tools less frequently.

<comment><USER9> I panopticoned multiple times, but never figured out the reference you made. Care to elaborate?

<comment><USER64> I'm referring to the following definition on Panopticon:

>The Panopticon is a type of institutional building designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century. The concept of the design is to allow a watchman to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) inmates of an institution without them being able to tell whether they are being watched or not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Dear Google,

Thank you for all the free services you have delivered over the years. Please do not listen to all those complaining about stuff they get for free. As free as they were to sign up, they also have a choice to opt-out at any moment.

They blindly agreed to the Terms of Service which warned them, yet now complain as if they are entitled to anything.

 _Look at them and laugh_

</comment><comment><USER66> I am asked for a phone number most times that I actually log into mail (which isn't all that often since I just sleep the computer). Youtube is a travesty, though.

After the recent upgrade, it did ask twice to turn on Talk for SMS messaging. I said no both times and it hasn't asked me since.

</comment><comment><USER67> My wish for Google is different. I want it to keep interfering how I like to consume its services. I want them to keep needling me. And everyone else. This is the surest path to a competitor with a better value proposition.

</comment><comment><USER68> Dear user, stop using google.

<comment><AUTHOR> A lot of the problem is reneging on previous privacy/data segregation policies. That is an entirely legitimate complaint.

There's also the question of to what extent you can opt out in the modern world. Got a mobile phone, pretty much essential to work or life these days? Your life is now beholden to Google or Apple. So yeah, people damn well do have a right to complain, and "just don't use it" is a fatuous thing to say.

Useful reading from a real-life example: [https://plus.google.com/u/0/115668950429167517685/posts/JcPQ...](https://plus.google.com/u/0/115668950429167517685/posts/JcPQuXzXTgU)

<comment><USER69> Google or Apple?

Funny. Do you really think they're same? A company making money by SELLING PRIVACY, and a company making money by SELLING HARDWARE?

A company exists to make money. And all what they do is decided to make money. Which one would really have interest to take your privacy? Apple? That really doesn't help them to make money. They even tried, but failed. They're really suck at making money from privacy, and it degraded reputation of their product.

If you really think Apple is selling your privacy, tell me what's the REASON. How will they make money from it rather than losing their money.

Google? See what's happening now.

Why do some people always want to tie Google with Apple? Which makes money from completely different sources. The money source defines how the company behave. If you really know that fact, you really can't say that stupid tie up.

Your life is beholden by Google, not Apple. Someday maybe Apple does that - which is very unlikely happen, but not now. And the day will come after whole existing privacy sells - such as Google - are dead, so Apple dominate whole the market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> OP here.

First off: thanks for the visibility. I've been railing about this pretty much since G+ started (originally with nymwars) and Google just seems to continue not getting it. Mega thanks to David for getting this on the queue and everyone who upvoted. For something which was just a throwaway post (as I said: I was looking for one of my own earlier instances and stumbled across a whole trove), this had legs.

The HN moral: sometimes your best work is the stuff that takes little effort, thought it helps to hit the Zeitgeist wave just right.

I ... don't _dislike_ Google, though the company's made itself vastly harder to like, and for me personally, its brand equity has been tremendously hurt by my experience to its corporate goals and motives surrounding G+, pretty much from the start. My history with the company goes back further -- I was using its search during beta in 1998/1999, and the reason was simple: it made things easier for me, and performed useful tasks, far better than anyone else at the time.

For a long time I saw Google bashing as almost entirely a Microsoft phenomenon, but I've got to say that's no longer the case. I'm absolutely no friend of Redmond's, and have watched events there over the past few months with no small amount of schadenfreude. There's no question that Microsoft continues to bash Google (sometimes effectively, often pretty cluelessly). It's very clear to me that there's a pretty solid and consistent backlash not just from techies, but as the G+ search I ran made clear, from ordinary people sick of intrusive questions.

I could wax on about privacy, and people who could be endangered or put in harm's way or find their lives ruined or what if Stalinist Nazi Cthulu buys Google... and all of that's entirely valid, but it's besides the point. Even if none of that applies, and you prefer _not_ to have your personal data aggregated, if you say "no", the meaning is simple: "no". Stop asking. Don't go ahead and do it anyway. Don't put buttons where they're likely to get hit accidentally, or confusing dialogs, or interstitials, or anything else.

Because it's about respect.

But even if none of the factors above apply, the simple fact that I've and many, many others have made amply clear that no, we don't wish to provide this information, no, we don't wish to link our various associated identities, and no, we don't want to be part of your "identity network", means that Google (and, to be fair, a great many other companies and entities) are going OUT OF THEIR WAY TO EXPLICITLY DISRESPECT THAT PREFERENCE.

And that Google, very, very clearly, no longer respects me, or any of its users, based on far too many of its actions. Where Google used to make a decent coin offering incidental ads on top of a useful services, it's ... lost its way.

The data aggregation is one part of it. "No" means "No". It's a really simple message.

Somewhat ironically, I'd recently kicked off a G+ Community (private and invite only, sorry, I've actually transferred ownership to others as well) to discuss an anti-harassment policy following a long and detailed discussion:

[https://plus.google.com/108316670838828910396/posts/9gMF3qyq...](https://plus.google.com/108316670838828910396/posts/9gMF3qyqpbK)

Google's own inability to play by similar rules is ... interesting.

I'd also been reviewing some older posts, mine and other people's, as well as many of the YouTube top contributor responses (Reggie, Jonathan Paula, and others). Three points that kept getting made again and again were:

1\. Google's interfaces make tons of work for users. It's sort of the anti- Perl: they make easy things hard (and tedious), and hard things impossible. Responding to YouTube comments, muting or blocking users, flagging spam, setting volume controls, managing Circles, checking on blocked / muted users, and on and on. In particular the fact that _to take care of a problem here and now_ you've got to _go somewhere else within the site to deal with it._ The lack of concurrent controls is ... maddening.

2\. There was no direct control over things. Google apparently are trying to handle everything "behind the scenes" through machine intelligence. And far too often doing an absolutely miserable job of it, especially where some very basic controls (dismiss post, time-out a user, comment moderation tools for posts) would help tremendously. I've seen some suggestions that earlier iterations (Wave or Buzz) are considered to have failed in part because their interfaces were too complex, but if anything G+ suffers from too _few_ controls. And one sign of an oversimplified interface is that people start devising conventions to get around limitations. This happens on G+ in spades.

3\. Noise controls. People's streams are absolutely out of control. I'd noted starting in March or thereabouts that I was finding Notifications and Search far more useful than my Stream. In a discussion of the +1 automatic share issue, Lauren Weinstein's guests similarly noted that they were using their Streams less and less:

[https://plus.google.com/events/c0sddcekptbf047pb3if23rfvjc](https://plus.google.com/events/c0sddcekptbf047pb3if23rfvjc)

In particular, Robert Scoble (the old noisemaker hisself) has ranted repeatedly and epicly on the lack of proper noise controls on G+, from pretty much day 1. This is from about a year in, but few of the points have been addressed:

[https://plus.google.com/111091089527727420853/posts/9mA8XCdu...](https://plus.google.com/111091089527727420853/posts/9mA8XCdu3qA)

When I go to a site such as Hacker News or Reddit, I typically _look at the front page first_ to see what's been selected. Because, well, it's been selected. G+ Streams and Communities don't do that. I turn to them, if at all, _after_ going through Notifications or explicitly searching for things. I recently suggested G+ fix "What's Hot" by simply renaming it "What's Rot".

Who really nailed it for me though was Homer Slated's comment on this issue at G+ (NB: it's a touch piquant):

[https://plus.google.com/102946757503830834230/posts/Mim3MwZT...](https://plus.google.com/102946757503830834230/posts/Mim3MwZTrXc)

In a comment he writes, that when receiving a Notification from Google:

 _[W]hat Google is doing is, essentially, telling me that it 's found a word in the dictionary that I might be interested in, that it's seven letters long and contains the letter "g", but rather than just telling me what the word is, or even linking directly to it, it simply links me to a dictionary, then expects me to spend hours trawling through that dictionary just to finds that word...._

 _It helps to understand that Google is not a search company, or a social networking outfit, or an email provider ... it 's an advertising company, and therefore everything it does is oriented toward the principle of "promotion"...._

 _While I have no doubt that Google has highly sophisticated search algorithms working behind the scenes, the results that you and I are actually presented with, and the mechanisms for obtaining those results, are skewed toward "buzz", not accuracy or relevance._

 _In other words, if Google were a news organisation, it wouldn 't be reporting the news, it would be fabricating it, then tailoring that work of fiction to appeal to (what it believes is) your "general" interests._

 _If there was a single word that could concisely sum up Google, it would be "vague". Google is deliberately vague, it's notifications are vague, the way it handles articles and comments is vague, its search results are vague ... and by no accident. Google is deliberately vague because it wants to steer you away from what's actually relevant to you, and what actually interests you, to those things it wants you to become interested in._

In a G+ post I discussed lies. The common one is the lie of commission: I tell you something that's not true, a fabrication. Another, slightly more nuanced, is the lie of _omission_ \-- neglecting to inform you of a material fact. You'll find it especially referenced in business contracts, particularly real- estate and M&A concerning adverse conditions. A third type is what I've called a "lie of diversion". It's generally not a truth or a non-truth itself, but its purpose is to _obscure_ truth, meaning, and relevance. It's at the heart of much of what's wrong (IMO) with "viral media" and messages -- little non- facts floating around in little non-informational nuggets, clogging up your cognitive circuits. And processing all that non-information _takes a lot of effort_.

[https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/5zrCkbzR...](https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/5zrCkbzRqrB)

The biggest problem with G+ I was consistently running into was simply the non-relevance of what it was presenting me. And that's a change fundamentally due, I suspect, to its reliance on advertising and the culture this brings.

Google thought it could ride the advertising tiger when it opted to go that way early in its career. And for a time it did. But in a long and storied career of riding tigers, I've learned two things: ultimately the tiger is in control, and dismounting is the hardest part.

The lack of respect is why I feel that Google's corporate culture is fundamentally broken. Whether it's a rotten core or a rotten head I don't know. I absolutely don't question that there are some very well-meaning people working for Google, especially within the engineering staff. Possibly high on the org chart. But enough people, in enough positions of power, and I strongly suspect Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, and Vic Gundotra as being part of that group, either don't get it, are actively pursuing personal data aggregation, or, and this actually frightens me more: have been persuaded that it's in their best interest to follow this path via a deal they cannot refuse.

Frankly, none of those possibilities does much to give me any level of faith in the company. Or in any centrally-organized personal data-gathering effort.

</comment><comment><USER70> If you register a new account, verifying by mobile is mandatory now :(

<comment><AUTHOR> Really? I just created a new G+ name and it only wanted a captcha. (It also created a GMail for me, though I didn't ask for one.) That was from my home IP, which has one other GMail user; I'll experiment from other places.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> The answer is pretty simple: the Google+ deciders don't get social. They think very differently from their users and they refused to listen for past 2-3 years.

</comment><comment><USER72> To upload all the pictures I click automatically to Google's server. What's up with that? Stop, asking.

</comment><comment><USER73> Facebook does the exact same thing. They want your interests so that they can show you ads.

<comment><USER69> We're not taking about Facebook.

And Facebook does same thing doesn't justify anything. It just means they're same. Also Facebook has a lot better configurable personal policy.

Anyway, that's awesome finally we have two options. If we can make them compete, we will get the service in cheaper price - with less personal information. Currently Facebook looks obvious winner in this field, because users don't even realize they're offering stuffs to Facebook, and Google has big resist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> Next step, forcing Android users to have G+ accounts.

</comment><comment><USER75> This.

And stop asking if I want to download the youtube app every time I go to youtube.com in mobile safari (It is the pop-up banner of this generation.) That goes for all you clever scripting savvy marketers, I fucking despise you.

</comment><comment><USER76> True. It is beyond sickening. Recently it forced me to upgrade to Google + when i try to login to gmail. Upgrade?

That was the only choice in the whole page. I have to close the browser session and come back again. I really dont know what to do. Got sucked in. there is no way around. Soon i will get the courage to move out.

<comment><USER77> > Got sucked in. there is no way around.

I know the following will not win me too many friends, but there is a way to around this, and that is to stop using their products. They are a commercial entity and making money for the company and shareholders is one of their "prime objectives". Due to that, unfortunately they have to push into areas which generate revenue for them.

The services are not free, you pay for them with your compliance and personal information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> So you get the worlds best and most powerful email inbox - for free - and the small price you pay is to be continually asked for PII and very subtle upsells on using additional, also free, services.

I don't know but that sounds pretty fair to me.</comment>


Amplituhedron - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amplituhedron <comment><USER2> Glad you posted this but that article is a bit user-hostile even for math wikipedia. The relevant paper is relatively approachable if you're a mathematical tourist. [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.2007.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.2007.pdf)

<comment><USER3> The hand-drawn figures are a nice touch.

<comment><USER4> Nima's slides are also always a treat. The hand-drawn pictures are always spare, elegant, and crystal-clear.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Quanta magazine article from 2013 [https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists- discover-geometry-...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-discover- geometry-underlying-particle-physics-20130917/)

</comment><comment><USER6> > _In planar N = 4 supersymmetric Yang–Mills theory, also equivalent to the > perturbative topological B model string theory in twistor space, an > amplituhedron is defined as a mathematical space known as the positive > Grassmannian._

Can I use a turbo-encabulator to create amplituhedrons?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turboencabulator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turboencabulator)

As an aside, I work at a company that encourages people to summarize their mission in 3 words. Mine is "malleable logarithmic casings".

</comment><comment> ajay-d I need the 3 brown 1 blue video to understand this one

</comment><comment><USER7> I started this Wikipedia article! Cool to see it here, but why now?

<comment><USER8> I tried my hand at editing it, but was definitely lost at the question that it's not that hard to understand geometrically what the idea is, but how it relates to physics means doing a lot more work. So hard to strike the balance. Why would one care about a rectangular matrix all of whose maximal minors are positive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> What a coincidence (!/?) I'm reading Brian Clegg's book Quantum Age and just heard about this for the first time yesterday.

</comment><comment><USER10> Through substitution of a theoretical geometric object into infinite dimensional space computations are greatly simplified, as Riemann hypothesis provides sufficient rules to deal with infinite series of natural numbers.</comment>


These 'cookies' aren't tasty; you're left hungry for privacy. - <AUTHOR> http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2010-08-09-editorial09_ST_N.htm?loc=interstitialskip

<comment><USER2> I really recommend using a web browser that can not only show you exactly what's being stored, but allow you to filter it out using expressions, or filter it "in" on a per-site basis.

OmniWeb (now free on the Mac) has one of the best interfaces for cookies I've ever seen, especially the site-specific part. I was absolutely amazed by just how much crap a single web page visit was attempting to store on my machine: not only from the current site, but for MANY other domains that I did not explicitly visit. And I wonder why sites load slowly on my phone...

I remember when I discovered how sites were using Flash a few years ago, and I was infuriated. I dug up the Flash settings manager [1] (not exactly an easy task, and NOT obvious), and reset the thing to store zero bytes on my computer.

[1] [http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplay...](http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager07.html)</comment>


The Pentagon Is Investigating the Ashley Madison Leak - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/the-pentagon-is-investigating-the-ashley-madison-leak-1725413061

<comment><AUTHOR> This is quite serious for the service members who used the site. I had a friend in Federal prison who was doing 20 years for adultery in the Army.

<comment><USER2> Wow. Did he bang the base commander's wife? Adultery is vaguely against military law (Article 134), but that stinks of vindictiveness. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Code_of_Military_Justi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Code_of_Military_Justice#Punitive_articles)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm, he probably had been prosecuted for some other things. I just accepted his story at face value as I had a torrid affair when I was in the Air Force, and I remember it being so incredibly exciting because of the trouble we could get in. She was also a servicemember who was married.</comment></comment></comment>


Doctorow: Scribd introduces copyright filter - <AUTHOR> http://www.boingboing.net/2007/12/08/scribd-introduces-co.html

<comment><USER2> ROT-13. When that fails, XOR with a key posted in the text. Effective automated censorship is NP-complete.</comment>


TalentSpring Launches Competitive Job Hunting - <AUTHOR> http://www.rev2.org/2007/05/21/talentspring-launches-competitive-job-hunting/ <comment><USER2> I wonder what the "social influence" factor would do to the perceived value of applicants' resumes. I'm not convinced it would lead to better hires.

Here's a study on the effect of social influence on music preferences:

<http://www.iserp.columbia.edu/publications/press_releases/musiclab.html>

The researchers found that, while quality songs (as determined by market share and rank by the independent participants) do better on average, songs of any quality can experience a wide range of outcomes. "The 'best' songs never do very badly, and the 'worst' songs never do extremely well, but almost any other result is possible," they said. A song in the top 5 in terms of quality had only a 50% chance of finishing in the top 5 of success.</comment>


Fear Materialized: Border Agents Demand Social Media Data from Americans - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/01/fear-materialized-border-agents-demand-social-media-data-americans <comment><USER2> Imagine the suck of commuting across a border for work every day. If you hired real detectives doing real law enforcement, you could catch real criminals. Waste less money on ineffective, invasive and time consuming bad guy catching.

There's real murders and robberies not being solved due to lack of funds. Funds that could exist if they weren't wasted on the tsa, and whatever they call violating your rights at the border.

If it is legal to search the digital contents of all the people crossing, why isn't it also legal to search all the digital content crossing, without people, through the fiber cables internationally? Wiretaps for all.</comment>


No training required: Exploring random encoders for sentence classification - <AUTHOR> https://code.fb.com/ml-applications/random-encoders/ <comment><USER2> Interesting paper. I'd like to know how this compares with even more naive methods like simple summation. If this method is an application of Cover's theorem it should handily beat summation or any other simple method that places the sentence embedding in the same dimension as the word embeddings.

<comment><USER3> From the "related work" section of the paper:

 _The nowadays surprisingly poor performance of the models in Hill et al. (2016) can at least partly be explained because 1) they use poorer (older) word embeddings; and 2) FastSent sentence representations are of the same dimensionality as the input word embeddings, while they are compared in the same table to much higher-dimensional representations._

See also figure 1 for the increase in performance across tasks when the embedding dimension is increased.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How does SentEval work? As I understand it, it trains a model on top of the sentence embeddings for almost all tasks. Could the baseline BOE be worse because its 300 dimensional input will give the model fewer trainable parameters compared to the 4096 dimensions of all other embeddings?

</comment><comment><USER5> Love it. Especially the echo state network trick. I wonder how much of BERT/ELMO performance is simply due to them having a such a high dimensionality. Not that there is anything wrong with that, just makes a tad less practical for some applications.

</comment><comment><USER6> "A strong, novel baseline for sentence embeddings that requires no training whatsoever."</comment>


How the Epidemic of Drug Overdose Deaths Ripples Across America - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/01/07/us/drug-overdose-deaths-in-the-us.html <comment><USER3> We share a lot in common with our neighbours to the south and it seems that the drug overdose epidemic has been happening in Canada as well. With some very alarming rates of increase due to Fentanyl overdoses. In the province of Alberta, Fentanyl detected deaths have risen from six in 2011 to 120 in 2014.[1] Other provinces are showing double and higher rates of increases.

If you were to look at Alberta alone there is a correlation to the collapse in oil prices, since it's an oil and gas producing economy, and increased overdoses. But Fentanyl is just this monster of a drug 80 times as powerful as morphine that is being laced into so many other drugs and sold to unsuspecting customers as OxyContin or laced into it. As a response to the epidemic the government is fast tracking Naloxone to become a non prescription drug since it reverses the effects of an opioid overdose within minutes.[2] I don't remember where I read that first responders (Paramedics, EMS) will be carrying Naloxone to administer it during responses.

1.[http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british- columbia/fentany...](http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british- columbia/fentanyl-related-deaths-soar-across-canada-report- says/article25920303/) 2.[http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/government- to-f...](http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/government-to-fast- tract-availability-of-overdose-reversing-drug/article28196221/)

<comment><USER4> This really hits home to me as one of my best friends and one of the most brilliant people I have ever met died 6 months ago from a fentanyl overdose alone in a motel room. I met him in the #django channel on irc about 10 years ago when I was learning python an django and we ultimately later became great friends and he came to live with me in California for a time and did consulting work. He was always way ahead of the curve with technology - <USER2> knew about technologies, platforms, and architectures before anyone else I ever knew would know about them. He also suffered from the disease of addiction and ultimately his life ended all by himself in a motel room in Texas after taking a bad batch of fentanyl. It was a complete and total waste and if pisses me off more than words can describe. He could have been working at Google but instead all he got was a short obituary in some small town in Texas. His death has motivated me in many ways in my personal life and in my professional life and I really hope that we as a society can figure out a way to prevent other people like him from losing their life at such a young age and having such a horrific ripple effect through their friends and family that is a total preventable waste. It sucks :/

<comment><USER5> Society knows how. We've figured it out. Unfortunately, government is a giant roadblock to getting it done at the moment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Has anyone come across coverage of the heroin epidemic as it relates to the growth of heroin production in Afghanistan since the arrival of US forces? Seems like no one is connecting these dots and I'm curious why? Not to imply there is a conspiracy theory at all, it may just be that I'm more "fascinated" by that relationship than the average reader?

<comment><USER7> Afghanistan hasn't been a significant source of US heroin in decades. The majority of heroin in the US is either from Mexico or Colombia these days. Source: [http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2015/09/24/pellets...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2015/09/24/pellets- planes-and-the-new-frontier/).

No question Afghanistan is a huge opium producer, it's just that the majority of that product ends up in Europe, not in the US. PDF source: [https://www.unodc.org/documents/wdr2014/Statistics/Opium_Her...](https://www.unodc.org/documents/wdr2014/Statistics/Opium_Heroin_cultivation_production_eradication.pdf)

<comment><USER8> I parsed the implications of the original statement as one of deployed troops picking up the habit rather than increasing the home front supply. Do you happen to have any stats about heroin abuse among Afghan vets?

<comment><USER7> The only thing I could really find is here: [http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/military/story/2012-04-2...](http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/military/story/2012-04-21/afghanistan- soldier-drug-use/54450906/1)

Long story short, the Army investigated 56 soldiers in Afghanistan between 2010 and 2011 for using / dealing.

As for the bigger question, the military really is a subset of society. Veterans end up using the same things the rest of society does to escape their problems.

Combine that with relatively easy access to pain meds and you get the same sad story we're dealing with everywhere else. Here's more info on that angle: [https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/06/30/us-half-million-drug- dep...](https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/06/30/us-half-million-drug-dependent- veterans)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> They shut down the pill mills and the pain clinics, which were the one reliable source of safe opiates, and now people are dying left and right. Go figure.

<comment><USER7> Except, of course, that people were also overdosing "left and right" due to the pill mills and illegitimate pain clinics...

Edit for source: [http://www.jhsph.edu/news/news-releases/2015/pill-mill- crack...](http://www.jhsph.edu/news/news-releases/2015/pill-mill-crackdown- linked-to-fewer-painkiller-overdose-deaths-in-florida.html)

<comment><USER9> Interesting, "researchers also found substantially fewer deaths in Florida from overdoses involving either prescription painkillers or heroin during 2011 and 2012"

Thanks for the article.

"with less access to prescription painkillers, fewer people may be developing an addiction"

So we are seeing less people getting hooked on opiates. This is of course a good thing. But I still worry about those who got hooked in "the good old days" and now no longer have access to opiates in standardized doses.

<comment><USER10> > So we are seeing less people getting hooked on opiates. This is of course a > good thing.

Not necessarily. You want people in pain to be able to access opiates. And some of those are going to die from them. So the ideal number of people dying probably isn't zero.

<comment><USER7> Ideally the number IS zero. :)

The realistic number on the other hand will probably be higher, as you identify.

I'd also argue there's a difference between being 'hooked' on opiates and using them regularly for legitimate pain management.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I only have my one anecdote in response to this story, which does not translate into data I know. I'm from one of the counties in western NC where overdose deaths have gone from 4-8 in 100K to 20+ in 100K. I graduated from high school in 2001 so I have grown up with the rise of drug use in my home county and surrounding areas and the people affected are people that I've known all my life. I no longer live in NC and, in fact, haven't lived in the area since I was 16 (went to a live-in magnet high school and then went elsewhere for college + career).

2001- my graduating class goes off into the world, half to college, maybe 1/4 to trade school, the rest go to join a family business or into an apprenticeship into a trade. A few go into the military. A few have no idea what to do and get low-level jobs wherever they can find them.

Pre-2008- The economy is booming, people who've gone to college are either 3 years post graduating, establishing themselves in their young careers, or just graduating from grad school, or for those that have entered a trade they've worked long enough to start having some standing in their chosen line of work.

2008-2010 economy explodes. Layoffs, bankruptcies, consolidations, offshoring. Immensely decreased consumer spending hits trades particularly hard- welders, mechanics, electricians, construction workers- all take massive hits to their profits. Business is scarce. People who've graduated from college and who are establishing their careers get laid off and have to move back into the county because that's where their safety net is- grandma and grandpa can take care of the kids while they hunt for work or work a low-paying job because that's all they can get. Military service men and women get done with their tour and come back to _nothing_ \- no job prospects, community college has closed, trade schools have closed, the factories where their fathers and mothers worked have all outsourced to 3rd world countries and closed.

In my rural county suddenly there's way more idle middle to late 20-somethings with no job and no prospects. No jobs to be found, no money to move. What I saw among the people I know/knew is that it only took a few people trying meth before it was like a powder keg going off- idle hands are the Devil's plathings, after all. People I went to high school with no hope for the future were doing meth because it was 3 minutes of bliss in stark contrast to the whirlpool of suck their lives had become. Grandma and grandpa were taking it because they couldn't afford painkillers. Teenagers were taking it because they were shithead teenagers and it was more accessible than pot. The "smarter" of the people I knew were cooking it because it was the only way they knew to make money. Once the door was open to meth then "fancier" stuff like painkillers started coming in and it was a way to feel like you were "better than" everyone else you knew who was doing meth. Oh yeah you were a drug addict, but at least your pills had a brand name. Enough meth labs blow up and the more enterprising of drug distributors can come in and sell addicts anything and everything they want, so if heroin is cheap enough that's what gets sold.

This article is written from a scholarly point of view and has a lot of conjecture but I definitely don't think they had any boots on the ground to make the conclusions that they did, particularly with regards to saying the epidemic in Appalachia is a result of on the job injuries. _There are no jobs to get injured on anymore_.

[Edit] I also absolutely agree with onetwotree's comment downthread, this is another ENORMOUS contributor to increased and sustained drug use in my tiny county: _" Recovery is hard in tiny communities. All your friends are doing drugs, there are maybe 2 or 3 12-step meetings a week, no outpatient programs that you can attend while working, no sober living facilities, and treatment involves a trip to the big city."_ Also worth mentioning is that often those 12-step meetings are held in the basement of a church, which in my hometown means it's either your church which your whole family goes to and you grew up in (pretty damn hard to walk in there and admit to being an addict) or your friend's church that his whole family goes to and he grew up in- in both cases it's impossible to be anonymous.

<comment><USER12> I don't mean to detract from your anecdote but the Florida and the CDC clearly sees a link in overprescription of pain killers and the death rate. The root cause is the way we are handling opiates in general which changed in 2001 and the prioritization of "comfort" of the patient when they are in pain.

Anecdotal, I've been in pain, multiple times in my life, where Doctors were literally confused by the fact I wasn't taking pain medication and immediate would prescribe opiates without a second thought. A couple even made comments [one Doctor who used to treat soldiers assumed it was a macho thing and told me I was being silly, just take the drugs].

The main reason I don't take pain killers is I've got medical allergies so I reserve the handful of things I can take for emergencies but they'll casually try to suggest/prescribe them for trivial things.

> People I went to high school with no hope for the future were doing meth > because it was 3 minutes of bliss in stark contrast to the whirlpool of suck > their lives had become.

Yeah, but would you agree they would turn to drinking if they wouldn't/couldn't do illegal drugs?

[http://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2014/p0701-opioid- painkill...](http://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2014/p0701-opioid- painkiller.html)

> Health care providers in the highest prescribing state, Alabama, wrote > almost three times as many of these prescriptions per person as those in the > lowest prescribing state, Hawaii. Most of the highest prescribing states > were in the South. Previous research has shown that regional variation in > use of prescriptions cannot be explained by the underlying health status of > the population.

> The Vital Signs report also contains a study highlighting the success of > Florida in reversing prescription drug overdose trends. Results showed that > after statewide legislative and enforcement actions in 2010 and 2011, the > death rate from prescription drug overdose decreased 23 percent between 2010 > and 2012. Florida officials had taken these actions in response to a 28 > percent increase in the drug overdose death rate over the preceding years > (2006-2010).

> Declines in death rates in Florida for specific prescription painkillers > (oxycodone, methadone, and hydrocodone) and sedatives paralleled declines in > prescribing rates for those drugs. This report was based on Florida Medical > Examiners Commission data from 2006 to 2012 and IMS Health National > Prescription Audit data from 2008 to 2012.

They do the same with antibiotics:

[http://www.cbsnews.com/news/doctors-urged-to-stop- prescribin...](http://www.cbsnews.com/news/doctors-urged-to-stop-prescribing- antibiotics-for-colds-and-flu/)

> Despite years of warnings, doctors still overprescribe antibiotics for acute > respiratory infections even though most are caused by viruses that those > drugs cannot help. The consequences are serious: overuse of antibiotics is > fueling the rise of drug-resistant superbugs, and patients can suffer > significant side effects from drugs they don't really need.

[http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/who-is- responsibl...](http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/who-is-responsible- for-the-pain-pill-epidemic)

> The Joint Commission, which accredits health facilities, issued pain- > management standards in 2001 that instructed hospitals to measure pain—you > may be familiar with the smiling-to-crying faces scale—and to prioritize its > treatment. Elizabeth Zhani, a spokeswoman for the Joint Commission, told me > that their standards "were based upon both the emerging and compelling > science of that time, and upon the consensus of a broad array of > professionals." Yet Purdue, according to a report issued by the U. S. > Government Accountability Office, helped fund a "pain-management educational > program" organized by the Joint Commission; a related agreement allowed > Purdue to disseminate educational materials on pain management, and this, in > the words of the report, "may have facilitated its access to hospitals to > promote OxyContin."

> In a policy drafted by several people with ties to narcotics makers, > including Haddox, the Federation of State Medical Boards called on the > boards to punish doctors for inadequately treating pain, according to the > Wall Street Journal. The Federation also reportedly accepted money from > pharmaceutical firms to produce and distribute narcotics-prescribing > guidelines. In an e-mail, the Federation maintained: "[Our] most recent > policy reflects the considerable body of research and experience accrued > since our last series of formal policies related to opioid prescribing and > addiction were adopted in 2004. Our latest guidelines, adopted this year, > acknowledge that evidence for the risk associated with opioids has surged, > while evidence for the benefits of opioids for long-term use has remained > controversial and insufficient."

> In 2007, Purdue Pharma and three of its top executives pleaded guilty to > criminal charges that they had misled the F.D.A., clinicians, and patients > about the risks of OxyContin addiction and abuse by aggressively marketing > the drug to providers and patients as a safe alternative to short-acting > narcotics. (Doctors had been taught that because OxyContin was time- > released, it wouldn't cause a high that would lead to addiction.)

<comment><USER11> _"...overprescription of pain killers"_ Yup, definitely a problem. Not so much in my county that I saw, but definitely a problem. And then the people who have them prescribed to them are selling them to get money because they have none. Another anecdote- I did a brief stint as an in-home healthcare aide in college and the sweet old lady I took care of who was in the 1st stages of dementia sold her painkillers to her neighbor at $3 a pill "Because he says he will get them to people who can't afford to go to the doctor, poor dears." Also, if you're able-bodied and out of work, you're definitely not able to afford to go to the doctor or pay for prescription painkillers.

 _"...they would turn to drinking if they wouldn't/couldn't do illegal drugs?"_ Probably/definitely not. There's one ABC store in my entire county (population 50K now, closer to 25K in 2001) and again, really hard to be anonymous with your drinking when you went to high school with everyone who works at the ABC store and it's where everyone in the entire county goes to get their booze so chances are you'll see your brother in law and your best friend's grandmother and your ex-girlfriend's uncle while you're in there. Drugs can be done in the shadows and hidden way more effectively than booze.

RE: overprescription: I have no idea why this is a thing. Profit margins on painkillers mean salespeople give under the table kickbacks to underpaid rural doctors in return for more prescriptions? Aging population on Medicaid becomes only cash cow for rural doctors after so many people lose their jobs (and health insurance) so they have to start prescribing more pills that they know Medicaid will pay for? Lack of doctor education leads to overprescription because they don't know any better? It's a big unknown, and not addressed in the article at all.

<comment><USER13> For over-prescription, there's also the issue that if you don't prescribe opiates to people that ask for them, they will find another doctor who will.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What conditions pushes a drug addict to overdose? Do they all reach that point at some point or what? Is this illegal drugs or regulated ones?

<comment><USER15> Varying potency. Dealers putting in fentanyl or stronger opiates to intentionally cause an overdose as marketing hype for their product (very common). Misjudging the dose of a known product. Tolerance. Using too much after some time stopped. Mixing opiates with other substances. I'm sure there are many more.

 __If you 're using street opiates, it's going to happen at some point, guaranteed. __I 've yet to meet an opiate addict who has never overdosed and I doubt I ever will. Sticking to prescription opiates helps, but even then people overdose often.

<comment><USER16> I never overdosed in a year of heroin use, then again I wasn't an IV user.

<comment><USER14> Can I ask why you use heroin?

<comment><USER16> I don't use heroin any more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Naloxone and clean needles should be available cheaply and over the counter, no questions asked. People who help overdose victims shouldn't be charged with drug possession. Until those things happen, I have no doubt overdoses will continue to needlessly kill people while our idiot politicians stand idly by wondering what they can do because they're too fucking stupid to implement the tried and true, tested solutions for fear of looking bad. This isn't a news story about anything else than the failure of government to implement very simple solutions (as most stories about problems in the US). Instead, these idiots keep working on filling up more jails. After all, jailing people for everyday activities is the American way.

</comment><comment><USER17> Recommended reading if this interests you: Dreamland tells the story of intersecting prescription pill and heroin use in America.

[http://www.samquinones.com/books/dreamland/](http://www.samquinones.com/books/dreamland/)

<comment><USER18> It's maddening.

Prescription opiate use has gotten so bad that Big Pharma is now heavily advertising an anti-constipation pill for all these addicts, with the most ridiculous commercial I've ever seen: a woman walks around town with her opioid "bff" that happens to have muscles.

[https://i.imgur.com/NMn59EC.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/NMn59EC.jpg)

Seriously, if this _alone_ doesn't spell doom for your country and its health care system, I'm not sure what does.

<comment><USER19> What is the name of this anti-constipation drug and do you have a link to the commercial?

<comment><USER20> I'm guessing it's Relistor? It was recently approved for constipation caused by opioids.

To be honest, opioid constipation is a huge problem. It's a great drug to have.

<comment><USER21> I think for chronic constipation, you can also use this Digestic by Mimonis which is very good in treating constipation problem. I have been save from my long battle of constipation that is why I can say it has been proven by mine to be effective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The maps on this page aren't similar to a standard population map, so that's good in a way.

Has heroin simply taken the marketshare away from meth?

[https://xkcd.com/1138/](https://xkcd.com/1138/)

<comment><USER23> "Good" as in "good data presentation". Not "good" as in "good that heroin use is growing proportionately across the American populace", I presume.

Any "rate of change" graphic should control for the issue that xkcd mentions.

<comment><USER24> It does control for that - the rates are per hundred thousand people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Living in NYC. What can I do tonite? 63 plays, 22 gallery openings, 18 meetups, 23 movies. 31,245 restaurants to choose from.

Northern New Hampshire: What are we going to do tonite? Nothing. Absolutely nothing going on.

Lets do some heroin.

Cool. It's all we got.

WTF.

<comment><USER26> An old friend of mine who grew up in Middletown, Ohio said there was "nothing to do but drugs and church." He also said there was a surprising amount of double-dipping in those things, wrecking a few stereotypes.

<comment><USER27> I grew up in an area like that. One of my goals if I ever get wealthy is to simply open up something cheap and fun to do in small towns to combat this. Like rock climbing gyms for $30 a month. Or small indoor water parks.

I wouldn't even care if that chain of businesses made much money, I'd consider it a public service.

<comment><USER28> How much do you think VR and Oculus Rift will impact the experience of growing up in a small town? A kid will be able to experience much of the world, no matter where they are.

I hope it has a positive impact; I don't see how it couldn't.

<comment><USER27> The internet has already been a massive boon to fighting boredom in general, sure. If you are highly literate (~15%) it's difficult to be bored when all of the world's knowledge is at your fingertips. Even if you aren't highly literate, there are still X-box games. ;) And you're right, VR will just help even more.

That being said, I do see some issues with our youth habitually living in gaming ecosystems rather than in the real world. For instance, a couple studies lately have noted empathetic behavior sharply dropping among millennials, [1] which I would think comes from spending far less time interacting face-to-face with anyone during their formative years -- their emotional attachments are probably not as strongly imprinted when staring at a screen all the time.

Internet and VR are still a huge net win imo. Real-life, positive social outlets are crucial as well though.

[1] [http://www.ipearlab.org/media/publications/Changes_in_Dispos...](http://www.ipearlab.org/media/publications/Changes_in_Dispositional_Empathy_- _Sara_Konrath.pdf)

<comment><USER29> I empathize and care more about my online friends than _anyone_ I know in real life - including _most_ of my intermediate family. While I could be the exception to the norm, the people with whom I interact seem to be similar. Of course, we could all be exceptions to the norm...

The study you linked does mention other causes which seem more likely than device use:

 _> As discussed previously, narcissism, which is negatively correlated with empathy, has been rising in American college students over a similar time period (Twenge et al., 2008). _

The current college generation are extreme narcissists. To a _disgusting_ degree. Even terrible tragedies (such as the terrorist attacks in France) are met with "how can I make this about _me_?" attitudes. A brief browse through Twitter shows this isn't an _uncommon_ thing.

I have no data on whether or not narcissism may or may not be correlated with internet/electronic devices. (I haven't bothered to search this statement, so if a study shows up on the first page of Google results - didn't bother looking! :) )

Either way - I look forward to habitually living in a gaming ecosystem rather than the real world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Interesting that Chicago is so underrepresented in those charts. I wonder why.

<comment><USER31> The drugs come from Chicago, but majority of the OD happens in the western suburbs of Chicago; mainly DuPage county.

[http://wgntv.com/2013/11/19/heroine-epidemic-plaguing- dupage...](http://wgntv.com/2013/11/19/heroine-epidemic-plaguing-dupage- county/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Has the legalization of cannabis made a difference in the number of overdoses? I don't have access to the numbers, but it would be an interesting question to ask from a public health perspective, if easy access to cannabis reduces OD deaths from more powerful drugs.

Edited: I mean, if access to cannabis reduces the incidents of ODing from _other_, harder drugs like heroin or fentanyl or meth.

<comment><USER33> No one has died directly of cannibus intoxication in Colorado yet. A couple have people have gone paranoid and committed suicide. And there a several ER room visits for emotional distress or catatonia every week. About of fifth of DUI convictions are now for cannabis. I presume there is a proportional fracton of drunk driving deaths.

<comment><USER32> No, I meant if the legalization of cannabis has had an affect on the OD deaths from _other_ drugs like heroin and fentanyl, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> It strikes me how this article uses the language of an "epidemic," as if this is a disease that happens randomly to people. It's not. These drug users are deliberately chose to inject a substance into their body, knowing full well that this is a totally unregulated illegal industry, and there is a high risk of addiction, overdose, impurities and death.

They teach kids in school that drugs are bad. Maybe they need to make the education more horrifying, with pictures and videos of people showing in gruesome detail how their minds and bodies have been permanently damaged, or the cold corpses of dead addicts. Maybe they need to better explain the nature of statistical risk, telling you that even if you're fine the first, second, and third time, the fourth, fifth, or hundredth time can still kill you.

Why are people so dumb?

<comment><USER35> Brains are machines, and drugs damage them in such a way that the damage accelerates.

If you think you are not driven by your own reward system, or that you are above it, you are laughably mistaken. By and large, you will do what your reward system tells you to, and your reserves to defy it are limited and finite.

Be happy that yours is intact and _mostly_ tells you to do things that are good for you (which itself is only by the grace of millions of years of random variation and selection on your ancestors, who more or less knew nothing of the potent drugs that exist in our habitat today), because once that system is damaged, you cannot simply will it to become fixed.

Moreover, it looks like the Appalachian outbreak is due to patients falling into addiction as a result of _established medical care_ , and simply falling through the cracks-- or perhaps even having dangerous addiction-risky treatments foisted on them by a drug industry overstating the safety or necessity of its products.

Have a little sympathy. If the rates shown here continue, you may one day find yourself among the affected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> What they should do is sell heroin legally along with cigarettes and alcohol, and that way people won't overdose as much because they'd know exactly how much to use.

<comment><USER37> That might help to some extent, but people still overdose with prescription opioids, which are much more uniform in strength.

An effective dose, especially for someone with high tolerance, often just isn't that far from a lethal one.

Supervised injection sites, with medical professionals equipped with naloxone would help, at least for people willing to use them.

<comment><USER10> > people still overdose with prescription opioids

It's relatively rare though that someone accidentally fatally ODs on a prescription opioid other than fentanyl and that's the only drug in their system. (Especially since in the U.S. it's very difficult to buy prescription opioids without acetaminophen, promethazine, etc.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Interestingly high rate of OD deaths in a county on the Hawaiian island of Molokai. Access is pretty restricted and the whole island has a population of less than 10,000.

<comment><USER39> Recovery is hard in tiny communities. All your friends are doing drugs, there are maybe 2 or 3 12-step meetings a week, no outpatient programs that you can attend while working, no sober living facilities, and treatment involves a trip to the big city.

Contrast this with a modest sized city like my home of Madison, WI, where there are two rehabs in town, the land of a thousand rehabs is just across the state line, hundreds of meetings a week, and there is a thriving sober living community. Small town folks make up the majority of the recovering heroin addicts I meet here. They all took the quick trip up the road to Madison for rehab, moved into sober living in town, and stayed for the recovery community.

Perhaps that's more difficult on an isolated island community?

If you think it's too hard to get the dope there, you haven't met an addict in need...

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Yep, the new face of heroin is white and affluent. While I'm all for the evidence based, treatment focused approach to addiction that this has brought about, isn't it a little telling that we only switched from punishment to treatment when white people started shooting dope?

<comment><USER40> >Yep, the new face of heroin is white and affluent.

Have another look at the maps. It's white and poor.

<comment><USER41> And that is not a coincidence. People take heroin as a palliative for bleak life prospects. After a few decades of globalization life sucks for rural poor whites in much the same way it sucked for inner city blacks in the 70's.

<comment><USER42> If not globalization, it would have been automation or something else. They were just in general underprepared for a changing economy.

<comment><USER41> Or maybe they have been mercilessly trampled underfoot by a corporatist political system on a well funded and organized campaign to crush organized labor, prevent national health insurance, and remove support systems for the working class. There's nothing inevitable about this.

<comment><USER43> What's inevitable is that they were going to lose. Life is a struggle of all against all. For some people to win, others have to lose.

<comment><USER44> In no way is it _nearly_ as settled as your sweeping generalization suggests. Pareto-efficient outcomes exist for so many things, why should they not for society?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ph.D.s Ditch the Lab - <AUTHOR> http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=521323

<comment><USER2> In spite of all the downsides, the PhD programs do offer a lot to non-US students who want to gain legal entry into the United States. This can be the first step in the long path to a green card, which is worth a great deal of money.

The equation changes for US citizens and permanent residents, because the green card and/or legal right to reside in the US isn't part of the equation. Residency + a 35K/yr post-doc is a lot more appealing if you don't already have the residency.

It would be interesting to see what would happen if foreign scholars were directly awarded a 10 year residency visa and a spot on the green card list upon arrival in the US, independent of whether they remained in the Ph.D program. In other words, what would happen if the US said "you're obviously smart enough to make the best use of your own life - welcome to America, and feel free to follow your own path in life."

I wouldn't be surprised if the drop-out rate increased dramatically, since the foreign students would now be free to join startups or pursue other degree paths.

</comment><comment><USER3> Amen.

Universities won't stop over-training until the financial incentives for them to do so are destroyed. For starters, I'd love to see the post-doc and graduate student salary base raised to livable levels. Most scientific research is conducted by people who can barely afford their rent, and it isn't right.

</comment><comment><USER4> Yeah seriously. The media are always saying we're not training enough scientists & engineers. The fact is, we're training too many!

<comment><USER5> A hard science education is a great preparation for a ton of intellectual jobs. I think this exodus from academia shows that the modern world "industry" now offers problems just as complicated as solving Schrodinger's equation.

<comment><USER3> A PhD is "great preparation" for non-research jobs the way that a sledgehammer is a "great tool" for pounding nails.

<comment><USER5> That's not what I said. I said _outside of academia_ which you switched to _non-research_. There's plenty of research done outside, from Boeing air tunnels to biotechnology to (some) computer technology startups.

Plus, there are definitely some non-research jobs for which it's useful. Financial markets. Programming. While I wouldn't recommend doing a Ph.D. to become a better programmer, having done a minimum of research gives a different perspective on some problems.

<comment><USER3> The vast majority of jobs outside of academia are non-research. Moreover, the few corporate research jobs tend to be just as competitively sought as faculty positions, because the positions are so few relative to the supply of PhD- trained applicants.

Maybe it's because I'm too recently out of the system, but I think it was a nearly complete waste of time. Whatever skills I gained while doing my PhD, I would have gained working in industry for the same period of time -- and today I would be extremely well-connected (and far less poor). I'm proud of finishing, and there were certainly intangible benefits (mostly related to being surrounded by coeds for so many years). From a practical perspective, however, it was a terrible decision.

<comment><USER5> I dropped out of grad school for the reasons you mentioned, so I won't argue with you there. Best of luck finding a job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I struggle with this issue every day (just selected a postdoc.) There are tons of smart, educated, hard working, passionate scientists. Why is that? I think because we just plain like it. Low pay sucks. But, most of us probably would not work in a coal mine for $80K.

So, working in a coal mine "isn't right." Being a postdoc is just not ideal.

<comment><USER3> The vast majority of the post-docs and grad students that I know _hate_ the lifestyle, but have irrational hopes for success. They'd never put up with the hours and the low pay, if they could internalize the odds of failure.

Anyway, I wouldn't be so flippant about coal mining: miners get paid about the same as post-docs ($40k, usually in cheap parts of the country; google it) for well-regulated 40-hour weeks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's not just the academic job market -- all of Western civilization is a pyramid scheme.

<comment><USER8> it goes a little further than that. All life forms are part of a grand pyramid scheme that keeps them alive for humans' benefit.</comment></comment>


A Brief History: 35 Years of Open Source Software - <AUTHOR> http://vospe.com/2010/09/22/a-brief-history-35-years-of-open-source-software/

<comment><USER2> Oh? Where did "free" get lost?

</comment><comment><USER3> Great, a post about open source which requires proprietary software (flash) to view it⸮ Why not just link to a PDF file with slides?

<comment><USER4> PDF and rough MP3 recording up here: <http://people.debian.org/~francois/nzcs/>

The video should be available from <http://www.innovation.org.nz> at some point.

<comment><USER3> Thank you!</comment></comment></comment>


The bare necessities - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/daily/chartgallery/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11693372&fsrc=RSS <comment><USER2> Anybody know what the deal is with Japan?

I've heard that basic necessities are expensive there, but I'm having trouble getting my brain around the idea that Japan is the only developed nation in the world that doesn't fall into the >25% category.

<comment><USER3> I had the exact same question when I went to Japan.

Apparently, the way the Japanese government works, the rural districts are overly represented in the Diet, with each rural district having the same clout as an urban district, like the U.S. Senate. In other words, for political parties, it is much more favorable to court the rural vote than the urban one. Thus, almost all political parties want the support of the farmers and so promise lots of subsidies and protection from foreign competition. The farmer's associations perpetuate this cycle, because they drop support for political parties if they are not getting their demands.

This results in some ridiculous prices for food staples. When I was in Japan three years ago, I remember that the cheapest 5kg bag of rice was about $20. The only plant that I could afford to eat regularly was cabbage, because fruits like peaches and plums were about $10 each and were usually given as gifts instead of regularly eaten as snacks or dessert.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Countries which are surprisingly green: Venezuela (some kind of crazy government subsidy scheme, perhaps?) and Thailand.

Countries which are surprisingly yellow: Japan, as mentioned earlier.

Countries which are surprisingly orange: Argentina. I don't know much about it, but I was under the impression it was relatively prosperous by South American standards, and had lots of agriculture.

No big surprises in the red ones, for me.

</comment><comment><USER5> Does fuel include transportation? I assume it includes utilities, and repair of heating devices.

Because with those assumptions I'm spending more like 60% of my income on those things, in the US. Perhaps I'm not buying enough of the other stuff.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's really nice to know that I could tighten my belt so much more.</comment>