Ordering Pizza In 2021 – Google Style

(sharing humor and a warning about ordering Google Pizza – from Joke Of the Day)

CALLER: Is this Gordon’s Pizza?

GOOGLE:   No sir, it’s Google Pizza.

CALLER: I must have dialed a wrong number.  Sorry.

GOOGLE:  No sir, Google bought Gordon’s Pizza last month.

CALLER: OK.  I would like to order a pizza.

GOOGLE:    Do you want your usual, sir?

CALLER: My usual? You know me?

GOOGLE:  According to our caller ID data sheet, the last 12 times you called you ordered an extra-large pizza with three cheeses, sausage, pepperoni, mushrooms and meatballs on a thick crust.

CALLER: OK! That’s what I want …

GOOGLE:   May I suggest that this time you order a pizza with ricotta, arugula, sun-dried tomatoes, and olives on a whole wheat gluten-free thin crust?

CALLER: What? I detest vegetables!

GOOGLE:   Your cholesterol is not good, sir.

CALLER: How the hell do you know!

GOOGLE:   Well, we cross-referenced your home phone number with your medical records.  We have the result of your blood tests for the last 7 years.

CALLER: Okay, but I do not want your rotten vegetable pizza!  I already take medication for my cholesterol.

GOOGLE:  Excuse me sir, but you have not taken your medication regularly.  According to our database, you only purchased a box of   30 cholesterol tablets once, at Drug RX Network, 4 months ago.

CALLER: I bought more from another drugstore.

GOOGLE:   That doesn’t show on your credit card statement.  

CALLER:     I paid in cash…. I have other sources of cash.

GOOGLE: That doesn’t show on your last tax return unless you bought them using an undeclared income source, which is against the law. But you did not withdraw enough cash according to your bank statement.

CALLER: WHAT THE HELL!

GOOGLE:  I’m sorry, sir, we use such information only with the sole intention of helping you.

CALLER: Enough already!  I’m sick to death of Google, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and all the others.  I’m going to an island without internet, cable TV, where there is no cell phone service and no one to watch me or spy on me.

GOOGLE:      I understand sir, but you need to renew your passport first.  It expired 6   weeks ago.     

Google Continues to Monopolize the Search Business

Apparently the US government is finally getting ready to sue Google for monopolizing online ads. Why is it taking so long? It’s because Google and other large high-technology companies deliver a lot of value-added in products and/or services. Google has been monopolizing the search business for years, and selling ads is how they monetize their search efforts.

Google Cannot Count Website Visitors

Actually, they can count but they cheat. In the early days of our TechnologyBloopers website, we received an email from Google Analytics indicating that we had only 26 visitors during December 2017. But our hosting company Omnis tallied 2523. Why the difference? Might Google have been deliberately counting lower so they could sell us AdWords?

Tech Giants Too Powerful, Need Policing

The famous quote from Lord Acton—“Absolute power corrupts absolutely”—is a good guide to compiling a list of the companies that are likely to need policing. The list is pretty short—Amazon, Facebook, Google (including YouTube), Twitter, and Uber (perhaps). And the effect on humankind (especially children) is pretty severe. Amazon is now so large and powerful that it is in danger of being prosecuted under the antitrust laws.

And Facebook and Google make bags of money from advertisers, and have a continuing series of privacy violations.

Fortunately, a handful of Silicon Valley notables have become activist vigilantes. And they are aiming at kids to use their smartphones for healthy purposes rather than wasting time on useless social apps.

Tech Can Help or Hurt – Part 6: Addiction to Apple, Facebook, Google

Every major new technology brings with it not only fascinating new capabilities, and in the case of electronic technologies also some potentially-dangerous new challenges. So many auto accidents have been caused because drivers were distracted by their gadgets that it has been proposed that those drivers be punished as if they were driving under the influence of alcohol (or other substances). And it isn’t only driving. Focusing on the small screen while walking not only puts one in harm’s way but in cities like Montclair, CA crossing a street while distracted can result in a sizable fine.

Some help is on its way. At its most recent developers conference Apple introduced a feature called Screen Time (to be available in September) that lets users monitor and limit their app use on their iPhones and iPads.

A couple has dedicated themselves to the cause, creating an app called Moment and living in their RV as they travel the USA.

And at the Hearth in Manhattan, diners are encouraged to put their cellphones in picturesque boxes provided at each table.

But isn’t the real villain the pressure to keep users connected so advertisers can continue to shovel advertisements into the users’ brains?

Needless Tech Giants’ Hiring Worsens Silicon Valley Housing Shortages and Traffic Jams

We have twice before posted strong pleas for the giant tech companies—especially Alphabet/Google/YouTube, Apple, and Facebook—to stop expanding their Silicon Valley facilities rather than creating/expanding sizable operations in other cities. They’re mostly software companies, which could be located anyplace with high-speed data transmission capabilities!!! Are these companies afflicted by cases of hubris?

We wonder why all those cities who were campaigning for the Amazon HQ2 aren’t similarly campaigning for expansions of other tech giants.

We also wonder why Silicon Valley communities have not been able to either (1) extract enough money from these companies to compensate the many victims (long commutes, wasted time in traffic jams, inability to find housing, homelessness, etc., or (2) tax the companies so much that it makes it uneconomic to expand there.

Other organizations that are keeping up the good fight include the San Francisco Peninsula Resident Association.

Scammers Delight: “Your version of Bing search is out of date” pop-up

The “Your version of Bing search is out of date” pop-up tries to force installation of Chromium (a public domain version of Google’s Chrome browser) and the Bing browser on its victims. Victims will know immediately of the attack, because it plants itself in the middle of the screen and they will either have to reboot their PCs or (unwisely) click on “OK” Apparently this nasty behavior has been around for some time, at least since December 2012. The scammers have taken advantage of the open-source nature of Chromium to use it as a means to install unwanted “adware” and other unwanted programs. Fortunately, there are ways to remove such programs.

First Privacy Regulation Announcement Timing Was Likely Triggered by Zuckerberg’s Grilling by U.S. Congress

Facebook and other tech giants have been fortunate that they had been essentially unregulated … until now. On April 11 we received an email titled “[Action Required] Important updates on Google Analytics Data Retention and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)” from ‘Google Analytics’ analytics-noreply@google.com that presumably was received by billions of people with gmail email addresses or other Google associations. It alerts all of us of this data protection law affecting users based in the EU (European Union) that will be effective May 25, 2018.

We suspect that the vast majority of Internet-connected individuals had no clue that such a law was in the works, though they could hardly have missed the fact that Mark Zuckerberg was testifying in Washington, DC. Likely this mass email was intentionally timed to coincide with his testifying.

Facebook Is First to Testify, But All Tech Giants Are Liable to be Regulated

We admit to being generally anti- to social networks. In our view they are an unnecessary sugar coating of basic functionality already provided in a range of websites. Our views were included when we originally uploaded our TechnologyBloopers website in August 2014, which included our critical analysis of Facebook’s “Terms of Service”.

Among the tech giants Facebook has recently has become the poster child for taking the notion of “if something is not forbidden by law, then it is allowed”, replacing Google (which did things like copying millions of pages of books in the name of making knowledge available, but violating the copyrights of the authors). This behavior earned a “command performance” for Mark Zuckerberg with congress as the audience.