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Why not get right down to it and call it exactly what they want it for?
Gulf of Oil…
It’s my understanding that the executive does not have the authority to unilaterally change official geographic names. As of my writing this, the name “change” has NOT been adopted by the United States government. Congress granted that authority to the US Board of Geographic Names in 1890. Unless accepted by the US BoGN, it changes nothing. I suppose Congress could rename it if they passed a bill that the president signed into law overriding that authority for that specific case, but until they did so, it’s not official.
Here is the link to the US Geographic Names Information system page showing the current official name of the Gulf of Mexico: https://edits.nationalmap.gov/apps/gaz-domestic/public/search/names/558730. Note the list of accepted variant names, which still doesn’t include “Gulf of America”.
Google are saying here that they will only change it on maps if it’s made official by the US Government, which has not happened yet. That’s why they haven’t made any change yet, and won’t unless Trump gets the US BoGN to do his bidding.
Edit: well that didn’t take long. They already made made the change.
Google made an issue of this by officially commenting rather than silently conducting business as usual (which would be changing the name when the govt source does).
They’re trying to have their cake and eat it, I guess? Theoretically this would appease X viewers and Trump (who would move onto the next trending controversy), while stating that they are following usual procedure?
That’s my read on it too. Trying to have it both ways, and not exactly succeeding at it.
This is a good reminder and sanity check. Things this big are rarely easy to change.
Except they’re waiting on bended knees aren’t they? They’ve show who their daddy is by announcing it.
Can’t imagine wanting to work for big tech these days lol. These companies had insane reputation in the 2010s. People thought working for Google was like working in willy wonka’s chocolate factory. They really squandered their brand.
Wildly, people still think that about working at Apple, for now. I do see that changing slowly too though.
“Don’t be evil”
What about we be evil anyway?
i think when they rebranded as alphabet, they repealed that corporate philosophy.
Turns out evil is profitable.
Sadly though this was never going to be avoided, sure they’re leaning hard into conservative cult nonsense, but they were still on a downword optics trajectory. Its impossible not to have this happen in capitalism, it will always be inevitable that enshitifcation happens to milk profit from anywhere it can, and that will always look bad.
Yeah, I’ve been meaning to switch to OpenStreetMaps for a while now and this was the impetus to drop what I was doing and download it immediately. Fuck Google. So sick of this mask off tech plutocracy bullshit.
Edit: I’ve tried it a few times yesterday and today, and I like it. Works with Android Auto in my car, guidance voice isn’t annoying, directions are accurate. Only complaint is I’m not sure how to search up a business and have the app map me to the nearest location. I need to dig deeper and figure out if I just haven’t found it yet.
I would 100% drop GMaps if I could hit the directions button on a Google search and have it bring up OSM instead. Google Maps has been bugged for me for years and the maps app never gets the address from a browser search. I have to search for the business or address in the maps app itself for it to work.
The gulf of mexico vs gulf of america thread on the Open Street Map forum is interesting and worth a read.
https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/gulf-of-america-gulf-of-mexico/124571
The discussion seems to be focused around possibly waiting for one or more governing bodies to rule on the name change, or just going along with it and adding an alternate text for people who would prefer the old one, which I think is way more democratic than anything Trump had in mind when signing this XO.
I certainly prefer this over the blind deference that Google seems to have for an executive order that is functionally just direction to the state department and not legally binding in any way whatsoever.
Well the openstreetmap community aren’t employed by a bunch of hacks perching on a tower of cardboard held together by a failing scheme of duck tape that nobody left after all the layoffs and enshittification knows how to repair, so that makes sense : )
Now US can start claiming islands just like China does with the South Sea
Reminds me a lot of after 9/11 when they tried to change French Fries to Freedom fries. That stuck about as well as water on teflon.
Anytime I hear someone complain about cancel culture I bring up freedom fries.
The Left: its called an Allow List now, you racists! The Right: its called the Gulf of America, you commies!
Jesus, we’re pathetic.
We?
One is propaganda made up by right wing nerds and one is the president of fucking america if you didnt catch how silly you were being right now
Nobody calls it that though. No one who is actually left-wing thought that calling them blacklist / white list was offensive.
Is this another of those things where someone wrote some mild Substack post about “maybe the phrase black list does imply black = bad” that maybe five people read before conservatives decided that it represents the ideological position of all leftists?
I mean if Turkey can just decide to change it’s name and everyone has to respect it (not me Turkey it is), I don’t see why this is different
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Türkiye had historical usage and precedent; “the Gulf of America” does not. Admittedly, Erdoğan was probably motivated by the same base nativist urges. But there’s something substantially different in saying “we want our nation to be called this” versus “we want to rename international territory.”
Yes but thry changed their own name, not the name of some other bit of the world that isn’t anything to do with them.
I’ll keep an eye out for a firefox plugin to change it back.
Does anyone know if Waze will warn you if there is an accident ahead and will redirect you?
You know Google owns Waze right?
Google owns Waze
Ahh boo that’s right
But to answer your question, absolutely. In fact, Waze’s reporting is why Google bought it and added those features to Google Maps.
It’ll warn you but not redirect you.
Time to stop using Google
I cannot believe they bent on this at all. This isn’t the will of the people or a problem we asked to solve it is the asinine rantings of a fucking baby. Why the fuck am I stuck in this timeline holy shit.
I’m trying to work out who this is for. Presumably his fan club will approve, but I don’t think it was something that even they were particularly asking for.
“The Trump administration has passed a resolution saying that Mexico will now be called ‘America South’ and Canada ‘America North’. Google said it will follow the government’s lead in changing the names on it’s maps app.”
well google always displays the locally official names and borders. so just business as usual.
but why does the president of the usa get to decide what places are called? isn’t there a cartography department or something?
Yes. The United States Board on Geographic Names is the group within the Department of the Interior which handles these matters. They are a part of the executive branch. I suspect that you can follow a chain of delegated authorities through that board, up the civil service hierarchy, landing on the desk of the President.
This is an example of the system not accounting for, or being ambivalent about, the election of someone to that office with a fascist ideology.
fair enough. i guess the usa never did a great job ar limiting their presidents power. that way he can extend his reach way further down, than he should…
If all he with his remaining term is just randomly rename stuff, I think we will consider ourselves to have gotten off lightly.
Google; we’re still calling it Twitter you think we’re gonna start calling it Gulf of America just because a doofus says so?
why would that be Google’s concern
