Fuck Google. Google Maps has caved to Trump.
I wonder how residents of Toronto, Canada’s largest city, feel about having their lakefront on Lake America
?
Our president is a stupid child.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Reminds me how Google used to have the most basic, least effort slogan, “Don’t be evil.” But then eventually had to drop it because they repeatedly do evil.
it’s genuinely amazing how much fault they bear for turning the younger generations of boys into nazis. a huge amount of that blame can be placed directly on that corporation’s monetization of engagement.
i accidentally posted as my husband while signed into his account to moderate his comments. 0_o figured that would happen eventually. if it clears moderation, the comment be cubist vowels here was actually me.
MapQuest isn’t falling for Trumpism I put their app on my phone and computer. Screw cowardly Google.
Yeah, was removing stuff after the whole “Gulf of America” debacle. Time to see if I can remove even more Google from my life.
Reginald Selkirk @1: The fact that they thought they should say it out loud should have been a warning to all of us.
When I follow your links to Truth Social, I get the standard Cloudflare “This website uses a security service to protect against malicious bots. This page is displayed while the website verifies you are not a bot” screen. But after it approves me, the “verifying” screen reloads, and it just loops.
Maybe that’s what happens when the malicious bot is on the other side of Cloudflare?
srsly tho this is so fundamentally weak, craven, wrong-hearted, and nasty. if i was thanos snapping corporations i’d take google out first, even before tesla. not just for this one. i’ve written about their abdication of non-evil-doing a few times now.
Your president is a stupid, greedy, venal child. Stating merely that he is a stupid child would be to do a disservice to stupid children everywhere.
Oh dear,
As someone pointed out, the mnemonic for remembering the names of the Great Lakes will have to change from H.O,M.E.S. to S.H.A,M,E.. Yet oddly true to form and in keeping with Trump.
;-)
Oops, I shouldn’t type without my glasses.
For shame Google, for shame. Oh, wait, I forgot…
Supposedly Google still shows “Lake Ontario” for Canadians and both names for people elsewhere in the world. However, I’m in Canada and it shows “Lake Ontario” on my phone but “Lake America” on my tablet.
Canadian response (I’m not sure whether this was a response to bunker baby’s post or if his was a response to this – either way, the Canadian vid wins)
Re: the trade war:
demonflyingfox has a bunch of good ones. Elbows up from shore to shore!
Yeah, it’s still labelled as “Lake Ontario” on Google Maps here in the UK, although if you search for it, it’s listed as “Lake Ontario (Lake America)”.
PZ:
Yeah, permanently stuck in the terrible twos.
nomdeplume @12:
Yeah, you can’t shame people who are shameless. It’s a waste of time.
Just checked on my phone. I got Lake America even though I am currently in Calgary using hotel WiFi.
Why wouldn’t they go along with it? All that matters is money, and toadying up to power is a good way to improve (or at least protect) your finances.
It’s the same thing that leads major hospitals and medical corporations, and major universities, to immediately cave in to Trump’s most unreasonable decrees. (Cf.: “My dinner with Adolf”)
The only pinciple they know is to shmooze up the biggest bullies around.
Google Maps uses the API of the local country’s geographic gazette. In this case, Google Maps uses GNIS for the US, which is the authoritative USGS names database.
https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/maps/gnis-lake-ontario-lake-america-name-change/
Look, I’m Canadian, but also a geographer, and ad hoc naming is madness.
With any sort of luck, the UC Santa Cruz Civil Engineering students will find another–previously unknown–fault and name it “Trump’s Fault”. (Previously some of them discovered three minor faults and named them “My Fault”, “Your Fault” and “McHenry’s Fault”. McHenry was the dean of the college and objected, but the US naming authority upheld the students choice of name as the ones who discovered it.)
It isn’t just Google.
I’m sure Apple will cave too.
I’m surprised that Apple let Google win the race to be the most cluelessly sycophantic, servile mega-tech company in the USA.
Mapquest didn’t cave and said so early on.
Good for them.
Yeah, I can’t say I lost all respect for Google.
That happened years ago.
I would like to get them out of my life as much as possible though.
It isn’t easy. My web browser is Chrome and my cell phone is Android.
Google is a long way down my list of worries. That current polls report 1/3 of “Americans” still approve of this president is of far greater concern.
From “Don’t do evil” to boot-licking in less than a few decades. Then again, what can we expect from capitalism?
@14 Ridana. Cute vids, makes me wanna send a few Emus over in support!
Actually, Google is a subsidiary of Alphabet.
As for why, well, duh: the implicit threat of domestic regulatory and/or political punishment from the White House and of withholding support externally.
(Yes, I know that was a rhetorical question, but still — cost of doing business for $$$)
—
For example, https://www.straitstimes.com/world/europe/trump-says-eu-to-pay-very-big-price-for-google-fine
https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=7/43.588/-80.211
That’s open source.
hey open street map has a cleaner interface than goog’s shit, nice
Google calls it ‘Lake America’ for people using Google in the US, ‘Lake Ontario’ for people in Canada, and ‘Lake Ontario (Lake America)’ for people elsewhere in the world.
OSM has a fairly comprehensive dataset. A query returns (among several other names), the following:
name:en Lake Ontario
official_name:en-US Lake America
This is more “demonstrates Google’s continued sycophantic obsequiousness” than “caving”–“caving” would imply they at least tried to put up some resistance.
This is more “demonstrates Google’s continued sycophantic obsequiousness” than “caving”–“caving” would imply they at least tried to put up some resistance.
Bad Bart, nope. Not one bit. It demonstrates the profit motive.
cf. my #25
No sycophancy. More profit by appeasing him for the nonce than by not so doing, overall.
Pragmatism, that is. Amoral things, corporations.
Problem fixable by changing the region settings on your browser to a country that is not the U.S.
Word has it that this will not work if your browser is Google Chrome. Go figure.
What problem, Samuel?
(If you know enough to change the region, it is pointless changing the region since you already know_
Well, at least your president has now really linked himself to the goose step. :)
I’m going to use MapQuest, too. Why should I rely on Google maps any longer when all they do is needlessly cave into Stupid Idiot’s petty demands?
May have to get rid of all my Google accounts if this keeps up.
“Our president is a stupid child.”
He is, PZ, he is. Anyone who says otherwise is an absolute dumb, lying, idiotic, Trump sympathizer.
“Our president is a stupid child”
.
And, as his final appeal of the lawsuit by the woman he r*ped has just been struck down, your president is an official bona fide sex offender.
BTW Don’t let the fucker get close to any scools. It must be possible for parents in New York to file for some kind of restraining order.
Just checked Apple Maps and it still has “Lake Ontario”…yeah.
birgerjohansson @ #38 — I think we know he’s a bona fide sex offender by his own admission. He admitted walking into the dressing room of the girls at his so-called beauty pageant. He bragged…literally…about his uncontrollable behavior toward women right down to grabbing them by the “pussy”. In my book that’s sexual assault.
Big corporations are all about profit. If there’s no profit in getting into a knock-down drag-out legal fight with Trump they won’t. It isn’t worth it.
The best way to deal with his juvenile renaming EOs is to ignore them. As far as I’m concerned, they’re still the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario – and the Kennedy Center so my answer to Trump and his lickspittle, sycophantic stooges is Golf Foxtrot Yankee 8647
Why doesn’t he just cut to the chase and announce “Planet America”?
Shows as “Lake Ontario” on my laptop (Firefox) and phone (Pixel w/ Google Maps app), but “Lake America” on my tablet (Lenovo w/ Google Maps). Weird.
I’m thinking of what it would take to get Google out of my life as much as I can manage (changing an email address that I’ve been using for like 20 years, and is registered with I don’t know how many websites and services, for one thing), and while I’m at it anything else US-based (the DOJ can subpoena anything on a US-located server, and I’d rather not have fascists sniffing through my life).
Well, fuck: https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/business/international/2026/08/30/metrolinx-hydroone-lcbo-online-maps-display-lake-ontarios-name-as-lake-america/?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-ca
Just another example of how billionaires are intrinsically greedy, destructive aholes that want to destroy what’s left of this world. PISS ON PLUTOCRATS. DO NOT support these obscenely wealthy oligarchs!
Canada punches back in glorious subtle ways. Flew Air Canada last week from east to west coasts on my way home to Seattle. Halfway there I checked the Seattle weather on the seat back computer. It said “Dreary.”
<sarcasm>
But guys, he’s just following in the tradition of Amerigo Vespucci, whose relentless self-promotion following voyages to the “New World” in the decade or so after another Italian led to a satirist’s article suggesting that he’d been so loud about it the area should be named after him. Which, ironically, stuck.
Since the new school year is just beginning, I suggest the following assignment:
Compare and contrast “Mission Accomplished” and “Lake America.” Your essay should be from 700-1200 words, cite only primary sources, and may not use any text produced by “AI” (although you may use AI to discover sources, which you are responsible for reviewing for accuracy).
I read somewhere that Goggle get their data from some other automated system/process, which is where the name change actually took place.
So basically Goggle have automated the process of spineless capitulation to Retrumplitarians. Hopefully, if nothing else, that means spineless capitulation to Retrumplitarians will become just one more job that no one has to pay humans to do anymore.
This is an excellent response to G00GLE’s crap:
https://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyimages/3285.png
I fail to see why Lake Ontario rates the title of “Lake America” when there are at least a few other lakes that could be seen as more unique and special and (given that Trump is using “America” to mean the United States and not the whole of North and South America) entirely contained within the U.S.A. Great Salt Lake and Crater Lake come to mind, as well as other Great Lakes that are larger than Ontario.
Oh, right. Trump thinks “Ontario” is a Canadian name, and Trump is mad at Canada. Sorry, I guess I was overthinking it.
Raging Bee, system at hand is the U.S. Geographic Names Information System (GNIS). The official source.
Google has posted:
Elsewhere, for Canada: Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) / Geographical Names Board of Canada, for the UK the Ordnance Survey (OS), for Oz Geoscience Australia, for Japan the Geospatial Information Authority of Japan (GSI), etc.
@41 No, you misunderstand – he is working towards Planet Trump.
The locution ‘more unique’ has always amused me, feralboy12, due to its oxymoronic nature.
If Trump wants Canada to be the 51st. state, maybe they should take him up on his offer and make a temporary agreement with Democrats.
It’s two new Senators and I don’t know how many house seats.
While we’re at it, what’s the hold-up with Puerto Rico?
This should be a basic campaign plank for any Democrat.
This is dead last in the list of reasons I hate google. They name things according to what the local authority calls it. That’s how it should be. I don’t want a private corporation overruling the elected government; if that was the fashion, Google would be honouring a bunch more genocidal assholes than we currently do in Canada, just to please people who get annoyed at any change.
When the US maybe eventally comes back to its senses it can go back to naming the lake the same way everyone else does.
@49 — The expanation is simple: this is childish tit-for-tat against Doug Ford, premier of Ontario.
Joe Rogan is super-MAGA. But even he is considering the possibility the president has frontal lobe dementia – a condition that does not affect memory, but judgement.
His grandfather suffered from it. “He was still smart, but he couldn’t do decisions”.
It is likely that much of the craziness are intended as distractions, but many are so self-destructive or ridicilous that JR is probably right.