I agree. Sacrificing your mental health for your physical health is counterproductive to the goal of whole well-being. Obsession is harmful. Moderation is key.
I think PG is getting at a larger point, which I heavily agree with, that journalists very often use words that imply a lot of "story" that is not supported by "facts". For example, I just went on to the NYTimes Economy section right now, and the second article says "Short of Workers, US Farmers Crave More Immigrants". Crave? Really? Cable news is horrendous about this. They do stuff all the time that's like, "Senator XYZ blasts Trump". Blasts? And that's just headlines. But you see it all the time in subtle lines throughout an article, such as, "Facebook's employees have been raising a stir". Or like, "The new law is leaving homeowners in a lurch". These words have no quantifiable meaning, and typically it seems journalists pick words that have more average "emotional valence" than other words, even if the facts don't quite support that level of emotional valence. And that honestly is the part that annoys me the most about normal journalism.
> I think PG is getting at a larger point, which I heavily agree with, that journalists very often use words that imply a lot of "story" that is not supported by "facts".
And he illustrates this larger point with specific claims that are, themselves, unsupported by facts and constructed around the narrative he is trying to push.
You're not engaging with the actual criticism at all. Nobody is disputing that "embattled" is in the dictionary; instead, he's saying that it's journalism jargon that is not actually used in real life.
No, no, no. pg is claiming that "embattled" is a journalistic euphemism for "guilty as charged". Sure, it's jargon and rarely used in "real life", but it's generally not inaccurate or deliberately misleading.
Someone who is accused yet innocent is still "embattled". Readers assuming guilt is not a problem of fact. It may not even be the journalistic intent.
For that matter, embattled is often used in a context where there's no crime at all involved. A CEO may be embattled because he hasn't been able to turn a company around and the shareholders and board are being restless. In that case, in a sense it's code for on the way out, but only because by the time you get to that point, the handwriting is probably on the wall.
I tried the word "embattled" in Google News. One of the articles that came up was about an embattled tree. Which I'm sure is every bit as guilty as the media suggests.
That, at least, is a response to the actual argument. I disagree: I have never seen a story where "embattled" was used to describe someone the rest of the story led you to believe might be unfairly embattled, and the nice thing about "embattled" is that you do not have to actually prove anything to use it. It's just "I hear lots of people are saying..." dressed up.
PG is blaming journalists for what is certainly an anecdotal interpretation of the word. There's no reason for anyone who knows the meaning of the word "embattled" to believe it's castigating.
The thrust of PG's claim was that journalists use the term as a synonym for "guilty" and in response, a journalist has argued that they actually use it in line with the dictionary definition of "characterised by conflict or controversy". A bit rich to accuse other people of "not engaging with actual criticism" when your reading comprehension falls that far short...
In my experience, journalists use it mostly for people who are likely to be fired shortly, many of whom are not "guilty" of anything other than being in a position of responsibility in an organization, department or team that is perceived as underperforming or being taken over by critics.
I actually would find embattled a bit of an unusual word choice for someone on trial for a crime outside of a broader context. If someone's arrested for murder, we'd call them a suspected murderer or alleged murderer, not someone embattled.
As you say, I associate embattled more with, say, an executive caught up in a scandal or who is likely to be dismissed for poor performance.
"alleged" or "suspected" is actually perhaps a better example of the sort of not-always-correctly-interpreted-by-the-readership journalistic phrase PG intended to highlight, since "alleged" can both mean "this person is [probably going to be] on trial for this offence, so because it's so serious we're respecting the legal process by not asserting they did it even though there's substantial or even blindingly obvious proof" or "we're just reporting something someone once claimed and because it's so open to dispute we have no desire to get sued by making the claim our own"
These shutdowns might hurt Google's brand among the tech-savvy community that uses edge products like Google+ or Chromecast Audio (never even heard of that before today).
But everyone I know still uses Google search and Chrome. Most use Gmail. Schools still give students Chromebooks and teach them Google Docs.
Yes, Google will be fine because they have an insanely favorable business model. However, if you can’t get the early adopters to use your products the late adopters never will. Why? Because the tech savvy early adopters are the ones who figure out new user interfaces and use cases, and transfer that knowledge to the less capable. They show them examples of why to use something and help when they run in to problems. I’m still helping people use Google search and Gmail.
There is nothing wrong with a company testing and shutting down new products. There is a problem when you say this is Google _______ or Facebook _______ and your customers think it is on the same level as your first tier apps. Amazon does it all the time and most users never know it was an Amazon product. Most users don’t even know Instagram is owned by Facebook.
Consider the exhaustive work Microsoft has done for decades to make things backwards compatible, often at the cost of their current product. No one would expect that from Google. They expect things to be killed off arbitrarily when the product isn’t popular enough.
There are options:
Sell the product to another company
Publish the source code with an open license
Or never stamp your name on the product in the first place
I see the "this news only impacts tech people" argument from time to time, but remember that all the non-tech people ask the tech people they know what to use. And tech people are who set up their family's computers, deploy software widely on business networks, etc.
The tech-savvy community was on Google years before the general public, and them leaving Google should set your expectations for what happens with everyone else a few years after that.
"remember that all the non-tech people ask the tech people they know what to use. And tech people are who set up their family's computers, deploy software widely on business networks, etc."
As a techie who has set up and/or fixed many non-techie family & friends' computers and devices, I hear ya. 110%, loud and clear. :-)
However... I wonder how long this will remain true. More and more devices are ready to go out of the box and kids are being taught to use Google products in school.
It's not hard to buy a phone or Chromebook online, log into your Google account and be ready to go.
It's not like the old days when you would have to go to your grandma's house and install a better web browser, antivirus, etc. Most things just work now, for most people.
Another aspect to consider is platform support. Look at Google's newest successful platform, Google Assistant. If developers weren't excitedly writing integrations for it, wouldn't it be dead already, with Alexa in the room? Since many new tech services are built as platforms, developer interest and support also becomes a key requirement.
> However... I wonder how long this will remain true. More and more devices are ready to go out of the box and kids are being taught to use Google products in school.
If the Google products change too much, the curriculum will become so wrong as to be unusable. My school taught me Microsoft Word with outdated versions on outdated computers; but that was OK because the book matched the computers; when you eventually run into a more recent Word, you have to dig around to find where they moved the menus and controls, but the core concepts still work. With Google's tendency to move stuff around willy-nilly, I expect the curriculum to become unusably stale --- once you have the core concepts, you can search them out; but if you're still learning, it's really hard when step a of every step in the process is find where they moved the things you're being taught.
Google will be "fine," but I've stopped investing in Google products and I'm sure a lot of the tech-savvy community feel the same way. This will make it more difficult for them to get new products off the ground in the future.
They make excellent products, but they just don't want to invest in them long enough to gain widespread appeal. Inbox was a killer app. Now that I've experienced what brilliant email looks like, I'm going to keep a look out for a competing clone and will likely switch.
It's a vicious cycle. Fewer people will invest in new products until they know it will be around in the future, but then Google will shut down product that don't gain enough users. This is a cancer that slowly eats away at the company bottom line.
From my point of view, if it's a choice between an ecosystem of tools that Google could kill at their whim and an ecosystem of tools floated and maintained by startup companies that could dry up and die at any time, it's a bit of an illusory choice.
Go for open source tools then. If they are good enough for people to get use out of, they usually stay around. At least I can't think of an example where one disappeared for good.
That's down an axis of "strictly worse than the alternatives." With an open-source ecosystem, I have to set it up and maintain it myself, when it breaks I have to service it by myself (often without a useful community to assist, because my problems are often unique to my special-snowflake configuration), and if I get attacked I'm 100% responsible for digging out of the assault with no recourse or assistance.
None of these are concerns with either Google's online offerings or the offerings of most startups.
This is, arguably, a slippery slope. A lot of companies thought of themselves as too big to fail just to be ditched by customers very quickly. The side effect of being complacent is that things work for you until they don't - aol, myspace and yahoo died, microsoft barely dodged the bullet and apple with google are starting to venture into the danger zone.
The menu on this site is essentially what a website's index page used to be, back in the early days of the WWW. It was, generally, a listing of a website's contents, modeled after the default directory listing that a web server produces.
So this menu felt very normal to me, but it may be off-putting to newer users of the web who are used to contemporary conventions such as slide-out hamburgers (not to be confused with slider hamburgers :-) ).
Best of luck to you! You already have achieved a major milestone: Actually doing something. Lots of people say "Maybe I should do X..." or "If I were to do X, here is how I would do it..." Fewer people actually do the work to launch the business. Even if your business fails (which I hope it doesn't!) you will have succeeded in that you "showed up," you tried and you ran your own business. That is something to be proud of.
Wow! That's so inspiring! Thanks a lot for your inspiring words mate. Actually I have put a lot of project on side many times, this time it ain't happening. A part reason to write the progress is accountability. So that I keep pushing even when I feel like I don't want to.
I wonder how much Google pays PC manufacturers to have Chrome as the default browser. A few years ago I purchased a Lenovo laptop that had Chrome pre-installed as the default. The desktop shortcut label was simply "Internet Browser".
Google easily makes the money back over time. A PC is used for many years over which Google shows those consumers tens of thousands of ads, easily worth more than the unit cost of a default browser deal.
