I see we're going from "UI changes, the cause or reason of which we don't know" to "geopolitics" without considering any of the obvious alternative explanations.
If China decides (and no-one is saying that it has) that it no longer recognizes Israel, then it will simply announce that, and not get a private company to make subtle UI changes to reflect a secret policy instead.
Reminds me of the problems with contested borders, which e.g. Yandex runs into because they operate in Western and non-Western jurisdictions. They ended up just removing all national borders from the maps for this reason, which has made the UX worse, especially for international trip planning.
Google (used to?) opts for a different approach where some borders are drawn based on where they geolocated you to.
I'm pretty sure Yandex removed all borders was because the Russian government annexed territory but they hadn't clarified the territory borders that were annexed, so Yandex decided to be on the safe side and remove all borders to avoid this issue.
I mean, depends on use case right? Certainly for travel and navigation purposes I very much want to know when I'm about to leave a country :-). For any economical or political review as well, country birders are extremely relevant data.
There certainly are geology and other scientific endeavours which perhaps don't care too much for countries, but even they probably need them when they interface with regular humans (I.e. This lake is in such and such country, this volcano is about to explode over there, etc)
Tourist endeavors really care about borders for 2 aspects: as barriers, and as places where legal or social rules change. If administrative borders had their powers limited to, say, statistical purposes, and not social obstacles, a tourist would stop caring about them.
Interfacing with humans does not necessarily have to be done along social borders. I'm sure it wasn't that way before the rise of the nation-state. Everyone knows where the Alps are, or where the Great Lakes are. Pretty much every place on Earth is covered by some geographical-not-political area name. Why shouldn't places be referred to in that way? It's harder to politically push for a change in the definition of the Gobi Desert than of an arbitrary administrative unit.
If I'm reading it correctly then, you're aftually advocating for a massive paradigm change in our social and political life, and not for a small UI change in mapping software.
Which I did not pick up from your initial post within this context, but fair enough!:)
I'm actually curious about the UI change in mapping software as well. The current cartography is focused on human-scale things, rather than geological-scale things. It's hard to find a map that gives topography as much space as it gives to roads, even when visiting some mountain ranges. In the lowlands, tourist maps still focus on roads and town names disproportionately more than on the type of environment and natural landmarks.
On a global scale, when the country borders are removed, we find ourselves lost, despite the huge ecological and geological diversity of the place, which makes our - or at least mine - experience as a inhabitant of this amazing place so much poorer. Compare the difficulty of finding the Atacama desert versus Luxembourg. How often do you see a whole-Earth map with the desert marked but not the state?
When you're near a border you typically don't want to get your car ride routed over 2 border crossings just because it's the shortest path. Skipping the borders is definitely not a "better off" situation.
Yandex removing displayed borders doesn't move us in any way closer to borderless world in reality. No country is seriously considering it. It's not a canary for anything - they stopped displaying borders exactly because countries/people care about those a lot.
But it's categorically different. Removing pictures from CVs so that corps are unable to discriminate based on that image still maintains the concept of "employee". Doesn't removing borders effectively remove the concept of "citizen/national"?
The subject of a CV is the human, but the subject of a map is the place. Removal of borders removes the concept of a citizen, but maps are concerned with the concept of an area. Nothing of value is lost. In more practical terms, I have not encountered maps that explicitly mention the concept of a citizen, other than by drawing nation-state borders, or those that are concerned with immigration (but for those, it's a relevant concept).
First, if you remove detail about a person from a CV, that person still has those characteristics.
It's not clear what effect "removing borders from maps" has - if you are suggesting having no borders as in your original comment, or having them, but just removing them from maps.
In the latter case it would be massively inconvenient to not know where borders are, if there are visa issues. Plus, there isn't really an equivalence to "illegally discriminating based on seeing the border". The appearance of a single, otherwise anon individual, versus international agreement on where the borders are seem to be v. different things.
As such, interpreting as the former; "maps are concerned with the concept of an area" - they are as concerned with navigation as anything else, so include roads, and borders plus border stops. "I have not encountered maps that explicitly mention the concept of a citizen" no, but they usually name the country - I mention citizen from the perspective on how it impacts travel; presumably removing borders means there are no territories, and thus no countries; but a country is as much a collection of people (citizens) so both diminish, unless you maintain a territory-less concept of citizenship.
Not clear to me "Nothing of value is lost" - tell me how this would impact, say, Israel? or anywhere bordering Russia. Or are you only taking from the about specific cherry-picked locales?
> "illegally discriminating based on seeing the border"
The problem is closer to: "the presence of pictures on CVs is detrimental to someone due to outside bias", "the presence of borders on maps is detrimental to Yandex due to outside bias". Not quite the same mechanism, but similar in spirit.
> they are as concerned with navigation as anything else
All maps are concerned with an area, some with navigation. A map of the Moon is still interesting to some non-astronauts.
I concede, if you use a map for navigation, a concept of a national border is still relevant. But in other cases, given the variety of possible geographical data, it rarely is.
These border checks are waived, not abolished. In times of crisis, they can (and were, during the Pandemic for example) reinstated. Countries can impose movement restriction for internal regions as well, but these carry a much higher legal overhead.
Also, Schengen borders are transparent only for full EU residents. If your visa and right of abode is restricted to a particular country, the borders are still very relevant.
Even for EU residents, the borders are still relevant as they demarcate places with quite different civil and penal law codes.
That's a big hypothetical. Mapping companies are not the arbiters of where borders exist. Knowledge of where de facto borders are is pretty useful for directions.
A nice fantasy, but something tells me a borderless reality is not in our near term or distant future. Maybe by the time Star Trek is more fact than fiction
You should run for congress... wait, no borders means no countries so no congress. Just a bunch of really powerful people making rules over fiefdoms...
This to me is like saying your a sovereign citizen. The world would be better off if we all shared resources and everyone enjoyed some minimum of quality of life while there still be strong desires from individuals to create. Its a nice idea but not a reality that is possible.
>China is extremely offended by a lot of things done by a lot of countries
Yes, that's bad. Hence, "should be held to the same standard". You may reasonably disagree with that, but as it stands your implication is that the more bad things a country does, the less we should care.
China publishes an official political map each year, which the companies must treat as canon. They also swapped a contested half-Russian island to being fully China. I think it’s a way to assert some politics at a lower volume.
I can’t say for sure this is that, but I can say for sure that there is tremendous political power in cartography and the simplest act of choosing the label levels for placenames. This move has been done countless times before so I wouldn’t be surprised at all if it’s intentional.
The truth is that this was always the case, no change happened. All that happened was that a known anti-china fake news "reporter" associated with the falun gong cult was spreading lies on twitter. See for example here: https://twitter.com/CurtExplores/status/1719334699599122690
it also has little incentive to do so, as it's positioning itself as a possible mediator, one that also does a lot of business with Israel. And remember, the thing that led to the short animosity between China and the Soviet Union (well, one of the things) was that the SU was a country with a mission to spread its system, while China wasn't, and isn't. China seeks to do business with everyone without telling them how to run their affairs, quite unlike the US.
The more likely explanation is that the companies are catering to their custmer base. As in most of the world, there is huge public support to stop the killing of Gazans. Western companies, and companies in Wester-capured neocolonies, can't show support for Gaza. Maybe this is ALibaba testing out if it can. It'll be interesting to see if it lasts, or if it gets changed again in a few days. This should tell you more.
> China seeks to do business with everyone without telling them how to run their affairs, quite unlike the US.
Tell that to the Austrailians and now the Israelis, where China has sent a naval task force. China is building aircraft carriers like nobody's businesss for force remote projection, which is the one thing they're really good at. China has the same desire to project force as the US, they simply lack the means to do so as effectively. Their recent actions in the Gulf is proof enough of that.
Changes in that area, resulting in broken database entries and skipping the country entry/label. People break stuff all the time. Let's see if it stays missing for more than a couple of days...
The obvious alternative explanations?? Like they just randomly and accidentally decided to erase an entire state? Particularly an extremely contested state? Give me a break - you’re really not making a good argument.
Can you show me an example of a UN country being erased from a map during a major event in which others are calling for them to be wiped off the globe?
One of the other nice features of Swiss rental law is "imputed rent", which is rent the government assumes you have collected even if the property is empty, and upon which you are taxed. Discourages keeping properties empty.
It's not even a "crime problem". It's much more often people expecting their class prejudices to be embodied in the built environment, so that working class/poor/immigrant folks - which has nothing to do with crime, I hasten to add - are not defiling their beautiful suburb.
I’ve never been to the US, so I don’t have a good idea of what it is like there, but over here I lived for a couple years in a poorer district of Warsaw, where I would never be able to get good sleep, because there would either be a neighbour screaming out of nowhere in the middle of the night, or a party going on with music on full blast a floor up the whole night. Every night. Police wouldn’t do anything about the noise. It was also commonly accepted to smoke in the stairwell, leaving the cigarette dust on the floor in little dunes. A couple times I found a big pile of crap (once it was literally cow crap size) left in the middle of the first pavement tile at the exit of the building. I moved to a more expensive district. One of the best decisions I made in my life for my mental health. So it’s not a crime problem, but it is a real problem of public order, tidiness, peacefulness etc.
> a real problem of public order, tidiness, peacefulness
Side note: that's part of what I meant by "crime". Usually in the states there are laws or ordinances enforcing such things even if they're not necessarily criminal statutes.
It's possible some of it is simple prejudice. But personally I'd bet the bigger factor is that people don't want drug deals and gunfights happening right outside their house. (How much of that fear is rational vs prejudice, I'm not sure, but I'd bet it's a lot more than "none at all".)
I don't have anything concrete to substantiate this assertion though (no more than you gave anyway), so I guess we'll just agree to disagree on this point...
To be fair, this is how most "advanced" economies operate. It's identical in Australia (although there the consulting companies run the sweatshops directly so they can skim more cream off the top). Same in the UK.
Well, the UK does both. It has both incredible barriers to entry that exclude anyone other than consulting firms whose central skills is dealing with them from participation, and it also has VIP lanes for routing work to your mates.
1) Most of uk.gov is actually designed and built in-house.
2) Germany, as a nation, got to about 1991 and collectively decided "This is nice, let's keep it like this". Even the most technologically progressive regions of Germany still think it's 1997. Elsewhere, it's like the wall never came down.
Honestly, this just reflects the age of the population. Change is more painful when you're old, so stasis becomes more attractive. Usually Germans like the general idea of improvement, but they hate change.
The joke about the Merkel government was that if the French state is founded on the concept of 'Liberté, égalité, fraternité', the German state is founded on 'Stabilität, Stabilität, Stabilität' even in the face of badly needed change.
Fax is a secure channel, apparently, which of course is complete horseshit. It uses the phone network, which is only marginally better than the internet. Many know that email headers can be faked, but not so many know that phone numbers can, too.
Legally I guess this becomes the problem of the party that introduces the intermediate stages. The other party doesn't need to care.
> Even the most technologically progressive regions of Germany still think it's 1997. Elsewhere, it's like the wall never came down.
It is in my opinion a little bit more complicated. The central issue is: many ideas for digitization that other countries or private companies do or have done are very privacy-invading.
Germany had two surveillance states on its soil in the 20th century (of which one ended only a little bit more than 30 years ago). Additionally, lots of German citizens remember the aftermath of the dragnet investigation to fight the RAF in the 80s. So privacy and the possibilities of surveillance are very sensitive topics in the German population.
Additionally, basically every German citizen knows that when data accumulates, politicians will find a reason to use this data to spy on the citizens (prosecution of criminals ... blah blah). Thus there is an insane distrust in the German population in the politicians. Just to give a more recent examples: when the TollCollect system for truck toll was introduced, there were from beginning on concerns that the billing data will become abused. The politicians appeased the citizens that this will never happen. Of course it did happen:
"Rasterfahndung, heimliche Online-Durchsuchung, Datenauswertung der Lkw-Maut - Bundesinnenminister Wolfgang Schäuble und die Unionsfraktion drängen auf zahlreiche Verschärfungen der Sicherheitsgesetze. Die SPD will mitziehen - aber nicht beim Datensammeln zur Verbrechensvorbeugung.
Entsprechende Pläne präsentierten Unionspolitiker nach Informationen des SPIEGEL in einer Koalitionsrunde am vergangenen Donnerstag. Unter anderem sollen dem Bundeskriminalamt die Rasterfahndung und die heimliche Online-Durchsuchung von Privatcomputern erlaubt werden. Außerdem sollen die Daten der Lkw-Maut dabei helfen, Verbrechen aufzuklären."
DeepL translation: "Grid searches, secret online searches, data analysis of truck tolls - Federal Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble and the CDU/CSU parliamentary group are pushing for numerous tightening of security laws. The SPD wants to go along - but not with data collection for crime prevention.
According to SPIEGEL, Union politicians presented plans to this effect at a coalition meeting last Thursday. Among other things, the Federal Criminal Police Office is to be allowed to conduct dragnet searches and secret online searches of private computers. In addition, the data from the truck toll is to help solve crimes."
"Das Computer-Ausspähen wird also kommen. Wieder einmal wird der Gesetzgeber das Grundgesetz einschränken. Es mag nachvollziehbare Gründe dafür geben, wenn es darum geht, Terroristen davon abzuhalten, Hunderte von Menschen zu töten. Aber es braucht wenig prophetische Fähigkeiten, um vorauszusagen, dass es so kommen wird, wie es in der Vergangenheit immer gekommen ist: Erst versprechen die Innenpolitiker und die Sicherheitsbehörden hoch und heilig, das neue scharfe Schwert nur bei den ganz gefährlichen Straftaten und Verbrechern zu benutzen. Doch dann kommen die Drogenhändler, die Kinderschänder, die Betrüger und schließlich die Steuerhinterzieher. Und plötzlich sind auch Onlinedurchsuchungen ein ganz normales Instrument polizeilicher Ermittlungen.
Das war so bei der Kronzeugenregelung, bei der Datenspeicherung zur LKW-Maut und bei der Telefonüberwachung. Die gehört längst zum polizeilichen Alltag und wird von Richtern routinemäßig genehmigt. Auch beim Großen Lauschangriff drängt die Union seit Langem auf eine Ausweitung. Ihr passt es überhaupt nicht, dass die Polizei die Mikrofone ausschalten muss, wenn die belauschten Gespräche privat werden."
DeepL translation:
"So computer spying is coming. Once again, the legislature will restrict the Basic Law. There may be understandable reasons for this if the goal is to prevent terrorists from killing hundreds of people. But it takes little prophetic ability to predict that things will turn out the way they always have in the past: first, domestic politicians and the security authorities promise on high and holy to use the new sharp sword only on the very dangerous crimes and criminals. But then come the drug dealers, the child molesters, the fraudsters and finally the tax evaders. And suddenly online searches are also a normal instrument of police investigations.
This was the case with the leniency program, data storage for truck tolls and telephone surveillance. This has long been part of everyday police life and is routinely approved by judges. The CDU/CSU has also long been pushing for an expansion of the large-scale eavesdropping program. It does not like the fact that the police have to switch off the microphones when the conversations they listen in on become private."
Thus: never trust a politicians: politicians are nearly all fraudsters who belong into a high-security jail instead of a parliament.
In terms of motivation, online services do save the government money on administration costs like manual data entry, costs of returning forms that have been filled out wrong, etc. And every government likes efficiency savings much more than increasing taxes or reducing government services.
In terms of implementation, the government employs a small number of competent people directly - the "Government Digital Service" - who accomplish some projects.
Other IT projects are done by organisations like Accenture, CSC, Atos Origin, Fujitsu and BT. They are generally paid more if the project is late or buggy, with predictable results. But they'll often produce something eventually, if enough money is thrown at them.
The "VIP lanes for routing work to your mates" are more for things like buying overpriced PPE during the pandemic.
What frightens me is comparing the snail-like rate of progress in the post-modern era with the rapid progress during the 20th century, regardless of economic and governmental system. It's like the a hand brake was simply engaged. I get it that people in power want to stall things so that they can skim money for their own purposes, but doesn't anybody else get just bored by the lack of progress?
> but doesn't anybody else get just bored by the lack of progress?
Be the change that you want to happen. Where possible implement it in software with your friends and publish it on the internet. Thus: I am not bored by the lack of progress, instead I am rather overworked by implementing parts of this in my free time after work.
Of course! My comment was not about software since I'm no programmer, but about progress in the general sense. Why don't the people who are involved and take decisions within large civic projects get bored with the slow rate of progress. Like after they've stolen maybe a few millions for themselves and their friends, why not get on with it and actually start working? Is it necessary to stall progress for years and decades just for the joy of stealing? At least when it comes to IT, the rulers have very few means available for them to stall progress in general, so it becomes very obvious when they're doing it within the places they can control.
There’s no real desire within the German civil service to make anything more efficient, partially because it would inevitably result in redundancies, partially because of a general malaise and sense of apathy.
Yes, but where does that malaise and apathy come from? I've certainly seen my share of it, dealing with government and large corporations, but not exclusively there.
You're looking at already developed countries. If you look at digitisation of government services in Russia or virtual currencies and online banking in Nigeria, they will be much better than their first world counterparts.
Australia also has the Digital Transformation Agency[1] to do things in house like the UK does it. I’m not sure how many government IT projects use them though. Some departments also seem to have their own (competent) in house software teams, like the ABS, the DSD (Aussie NSA) and the ATO (aus tax office).
And thank god for that, because there’s also an ungodly number of consultants milking the Australian taxpayers for all we’re worth.
I see it less as an aristocracy (most of which are sidelined and/or laughed at), but instead a highly-evolved technocracy which runs Europe according to their ideal of what the citizens should want, and with a certain fear of democracy based on the occasionally vile things that European democracies have done. There is a definite fear of the people, and a elite consensus that they must be managed for their own good.
It should be noted that no-one was forced to put their money in a VC fund, so when the author is whining about VC's playing with "other people's money", he's ignoring that those "other people" very deliberately put their money there, for VCs to do exactly what they do.
And if not VCs, then how should capital be allocated to innovation? Soviet-style central planning, where a government department decides who gets investment? EU-style grants, where those most skilled in manipulating the grant system get the money?
And fundamentally, if individuals are allowed to own shares in private companies, then there will always be people willing to make speculative investments with their own money - VC is simply a professionalization and formalization of this.
I detect a certain decline in almost all activism: You can spend years fighting any issue, but the other side will have too much money, too much patience, and even if, by some miracle, you eke out a temporary victory, you know that the same forces you oppose will rapidly regroup and launch a whole new assault, and you'll have to start fighting it again from square one.
In addition to that, you have to work harder than every just to live. The energy gets sucked out of you, and it becomes harder than ever to sustain a fight you know you'll be lucky to win. No wonder people burn out, and simply give up. Everyone has their limits.
I think it's something analogous to Jevons' Paradox.
Jevon's Paradox, originally written about the use of coal, noted that as it become more efficient to use a resource, the end result was generally not that less of that resource was used, but in fact more.
I think the same thing has happened in frontend development: Tools which were written to make development easier have not had the effect of making it easier to do frontend development, but have made it possible for outside factors (product managers, customers etc) to demand ever more from frontend devs.
That's it. It's induced demand. Build roads with more capacity, and more cars will appear to use them. Build frameworks with more capabilities, and more tickets will appear to use them.
If China decides (and no-one is saying that it has) that it no longer recognizes Israel, then it will simply announce that, and not get a private company to make subtle UI changes to reflect a secret policy instead.