Thinking of dumping most of my ADRs.

[touchring]

Have been slowly trimming counter by counter, now left with Buffett bank stocks, thinking of dumping all of them.

I think the entire stock market is riding on the tech 2.0 bubble which does not appear to be sustainable to me.

I own an Apple iPhone 6s for like 3 years? Just changed the battery, if it could work for another 3 years, I won't change my phone.

I don't use social media except Linkedin, even that I've cut down on using it after hitting the number of connections I thought I need. Nowadays I don't even use the app more than once every 2 weeks or so.

At the end of the day, I find that I only need the following:

1. Search engine
2. Community/Hobby Forums
3. Estore like ebay or Amazon to buy stuff.
4. BBC/ZH.
5. Phone that can call/send email/surf website and send messages

The rest are basically not essential, mostly games in my opinion. Even cryptos are more like games to me than investment.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Thinking of dumping most of my ADRs.

Have been slowly trimming counter by counter, now left with Buffett bank stocks, thinking of dumping all of them.

I think the entire stock market is riding on the tech 2.0 bubble which does not appear to be sustainable to me.

I own an Apple iPhone 6s for like 3 years? Just changed the battery, if it could work for another 3 years, I won't change my phone.

I don't use social media except Linkedin, even that I've cut down on using it after hitting the number of connections I thought I need. Nowadays I don't even use the app more than once every 2 weeks or so.

At the end of the day, I find that I only need the following:

1. Search engine
2. Community/Hobby Forums
3. Estore like ebay or Amazon to buy stuff.
4. BBC/ZH.
5. Phone that can call/send email/surf website and send messages

The rest are basically not essential, mostly games in my opinion. Even cryptos are more like games to me than investment.

This might be an aside, but I've been thinking for a while and I'm just about at the point of getting google and amazon out of my life. Amazon's pretty easy. It's just convenient for a couple of things, I can get substitutes. Google I find to be tougher. It's a search engine, e-mail client, cloud storage, map software, news aggregator, office suite, phone's operating system, calendar, etc. etc. I use google drive and google docs and sheets for a lot of collaborative work projects, so I'd need to migrate over to an alternative, and it would be a bit of a headache. Really, ditching the gmail and the search engine might be hardest.

I don't know, anyone have suggestions as to good product replacements? It's not even just privacy or anything like that. Although the amount of data google is keeping on me at this point is not good in my estimation. It's that their service has gotten much worse. They used to increase the free storage across their platforms every year, which is what got me using their stuff in the first place (the 1GB free e-mail space in 2004). Since 2013 or something like that, they stopped at 15GB. Now for the last 5 years, they've just been waiting for people to hit the wall to charge them monthly fees. Meanwhile, their "AI" and "Machine Learning" increasingly piss me off. I do not like computers doing things I didn't tell them to. That's why I hated clippy the paper clip.

Now, if I google the baseball scores while logged in, google starts pushing score updates to my phone for every single game--which really sucks if I was planning on catching up with highlights later and didn't want to know who won. If I have a contact with someone and Google knows his/her birthday, that's automatically a calendar notification--nice sometimes, annoying others--often I go, "Which Kate is it and why is Google making me aware of this?" Then holidays. It thinks I want a push notification for every holiday. You get the idea. Book a flight, and you bet it will push at least 10 warnings and updates at your phone. And yes, you can turn this stuff off. But I didn't ask anyone to turn it on in the first place. And the auto-filtering they started doing with e-mails gets me in trouble for losing them (I very nearly lost a 3-year contract bid because it pushed the award e-mail to my spam folder). Then it just pushes me news it figures I'm interested in based on my search history. And here's the thing--it's not going to start going less of that stuff. Only more. I don't feel like blindly being led around by the nose by some shitty algorithm based on the stupid shit I might type into a search bar. So I'm at the point where I finally think the costs are outweighing the benefits--for me at least.

Here's what I was thinking as far as migrating away from Google goes, but I'm hoping for advice from people who use them as to whether this makes sense or not:
________________________-

Search: Duck Duck Go (Not as great as google search, but it will do most times--I'll probalby end up back for google books and google scholar, though, unless somebody knows a good alternative there)

Email/cloud storage: Yahoo/Dropbox (I'm not thrilled with this. Their security breaches suck. But they do offer a terabyte of storage, which is a whole lot more than Google's 15GB. I'd be happy to hear alternatives)

Phone OS: LineageOS (I'll see how it works, if it's about as easy as Ubuntu, it will probably be a good way out--only worried about how it will deal with carrier software and updates, etc).

Docs/Sheets: Microsoft? Zoho? (I'm not sold, I'll probably end up with one of those two, unless somebody knows a better option)

Play: MicroG (this seems good)

Alerts: Talkwalker

Calendar: Fruux (should be fine)

Maps: Herewego (Not sure if there's anything better out there)

Browser: Opera (I already made this move a while ago, and it's much snappier and better than Chrome)

Translator: Bing (I've been using this already too. It's quite good, and works with voice)

Scholar: MS Academic Search (I know, it feels like trading one devil for another now, but this is pretty good too; base-search is the only other I know of, and it's good for some things, not as much for others)

Books: Haithi Trust (might be the best option, but it's a bit clunky)

[jk]

Re: Thinking of dumping most of my ADRs.

stop using google calendar. that's where all your notifications originate, right? and i don't understand where it's pushing, e.g. baseball scores. is that the google app and/or newsfeed? just don't use those.

i use gmail, google search, google maps, android, chrome and don't get any of the things you've described.

i use ny times, reuters and occasionally bloomberg for news [though since the last election i've looked at foxnews at least once a day as a corrective to ny times bias].

i use feedly to monitor certain websites/blogs and set up some google alerts on e.g. certain authors.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Thinking of dumping most of my ADRs.

stop using google calendar. that's where all your notifications originate, right? and i don't understand where it's pushing, e.g. baseball scores. is that the google app and/or newsfeed? just don't use those.

i use gmail, google search, google maps, android, chrome and don't get any of the things you've described.

i use ny times, reuters and occasionally bloomberg for news [though since the last election i've looked at foxnews at least once a day as a corrective to ny times bias].

i use feedly to monitor certain websites/blogs and set up some google alerts on e.g. certain authors.

Are you on Android 8 yet (Oreo)? If not, that may explain the difference. It's neither the app or the newsfeed. The OS pushes score notifications like SMS messages. I'm sure there's a way to turn it off. It's just the principal of the sucker doing it. It updates from 7 to 8, then you get the google suite back whether you asked for it or not, including the google app (because android 8 uses it for the default time/weather/calendar stuff, at least on my phone), and the gmail app (which I do use anyways) and the maps app (because that's the default map application), and chrome (because that's the default browser).

They've become too presumptuous for me. I'm getting more services I don't want, fewer services I do want, more monopolized bundles whether I want them or not, and increasing pressure points where they want to extract monthly recurring fees, and basically zero customer service (you can tweet or email into the wind, but they don't care at all). I want off this merry-go-round at this point, that's all.

[jk]

Re: Thinking of dumping most of my ADRs.

i'm using a galaxy note 4 - i love being able to swap in a spare battery and it does all i want. it runs marshmallow, so i'm not familiar with the wonders of oreo.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Thinking of dumping most of my ADRs.

I mean, don't get me wrong. I'm using a moto z play, and it does what I want. For years I was one of the people telling everyone to switch to GMail and use google services. They were the best. I'm starting to realize that I don't have as many nice things to say about their products anymore, and several others have caught up. The stuff they track has gotten out of hand to me as well. They've always been tracking, but much, much more now than people realize.

Check this stuff out if you haven't (first, sign into your google account / gmail in your browser if you're not signed in already). You can turn most of this stuff off, but most people don't (again, the default to opt-in is not behavior I appreciate):

1. Click here to see Google's marketing profile of you. They sell this to people.
2. Click here to see Google's location data on you. God knows what they do with this. But they know where you've been, where you go, which places you frequent, etc.
3. Click here to see Google's saved search history on you. They know what, where, and when you type something into that bar, and they never forget.
4. Click here to see Google's saved info about you from other google apps. They know not just your saved contacts, but they build contact profiles of everyone you've ever called or e-mailed and calculate them down to conversations. They recall your browsing history and the books you read. The photos you've taken, sent, or received. Devices you've owned, used, or logged into. Every e-mail you've made, every call you've made, all your voicemails. Every youtube video you've ever watched. Every credit card number you've type into a site on the chrome browser and all the transaction info. All sorts of stuff.
5. Click here to see your youtube search history. They save that separately.
6. Click here to see 3rd Party apps you may have given permission to access any of the above.
7. Click here to download a .zip file of their full data report on you. It can take a few days and be gigabytes large.

I mean, you probably assume that they know all this about you and don't worry about it. But it seems to me they're increasingly shifting to automated (AI) methods of using it to put certain information in front of you and manipulate users' behavior. And that's fine if you're aware of it and into it, I guess. Probably most people aren't so aware. And at any event, I'm at a point where I want to try to avoid them for a while.

[jk]

Re: Thinking of dumping most of my ADRs.

wow- the location data is so granular. i almost never have gps on [saving battery] but obviously they're picking up data from what cells i'm in. they even have an airport where i had a connection once, they have a 15 minute [!] interval at a car place where i picked up a car repair, a 7 minute [!] stop at a highway plaza where i bought gas.

i just disabled location tracking and some other "services", though of course i have no idea if that's like pushing the "close doors" button on most elevators. it's positively creepy the specificity of data, and it is clear that we've got the basis for a turnkey dictatorship/thought control state. i guess the chinese are proceeding with a logical next step with their social rating initiative.

[DSpencer]

Re: Thinking of dumping most of my ADRs.

Have been slowly trimming counter by counter, now left with Buffett bank stocks, thinking of dumping all of them.

I think the entire stock market is riding on the tech 2.0 bubble which does not appear to be sustainable to me.

I own an Apple iPhone 6s for like 3 years? Just changed the battery, if it could work for another 3 years, I won't change my phone.

I don't use social media except Linkedin, even that I've cut down on using it after hitting the number of connections I thought I need. Nowadays I don't even use the app more than once every 2 weeks or so.

At the end of the day, I find that I only need the following:

1. Search engine
2. Community/Hobby Forums
3. Estore like ebay or Amazon to buy stuff.
4. BBC/ZH.
5. Phone that can call/send email/surf website and send messages

The rest are basically not essential, mostly games in my opinion. Even cryptos are more like games to me than investment.

Are you making the assumption that if you don't use these products/services, then nobody else does either?

[dcarrigg]

Re: Thinking of dumping most of my ADRs.

Obviously this would be an amazing tool for law enforcement. Or just for bribery and blackmail. Wonder what Johnny Politician typed into the search bar the same day he went to the sex shop and made a purchase with his Visa card? If he has an Android phone, Google knows. Otherwise, Apple probably does. But in all honesty I'm a bit less concerned about that at this stage in my life.

More concerned that I'll start getting pushed sports scores and short exciting clips just as I drive or walk by a pub I'm known to catch a game at. A little nudge to just duck in. Maybe my news feed will start pushing up stories about pizza around 6pm on a day of the week I was known to be ordering it in the past, but haven't done recently for diet or whatever reason. Maybe I'll get more Dunkin Ads the month I'm most consistently making coffee at home and avoiding it in the afternoon. My real fear is that they know my habbits, and they have a real financial incentive to nudge me into them.

Oh, but PS, if you are ever charged with a serious crime, I'd be very careful not to lie about any of those things anyways. I'm certain that they'll happily hand over all that data if handed a warrant.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Thinking of dumping most of my ADRs.

The other thing that bothers me is I've noticed some "creepy things" happening for lack of a better term.

First time I noticed it, I was watching an episode of The Jinx on HBO through the Roku app on the smart TV. I went to search for Robert Durst on the phone, got 3 letters in, and it suggested his full name as an autocomplete. Now there are a lot of Robs out there. So how did it know I wanted that one? Started playing around with other names from the program, and places etc. It was trying to autocomplete all of them. At that point I was pretty certain it knew what I was watching. Now, there's a few ways maybe it figured that out. It's on the same router. Roku app and my google account are probably connected through the youtube app on the Roku at least, so maybe Roku and Google share data. I also put the Roku app on the phone to act as a remote control one day the damned thing went missing, and so maybe the phone is putting 2 and 2 together that way. There's an outside chance any one of the mic'd devices could be listening from time to time and have picked up what was playing on the television, although that's much less likely because the processing power required should matter and I've never had it happen when watching something sent through a cable box rather than off smart TV / streaming devices.

I honestly don't know exactly how the phone knew what I was watching, but it clearly seemed to. And the fact I don't know what's happening is actually kind of what bothers me. I can think of 20 ways that the google search bar would have live access to know what I'm watching and autocomplete the search field accordingly, and whichever method it's using, I know that I never asked it to start doing it. This sort of thing has happened a few times since. So I'm pretty sure that somewhere there's a Google record of what I've watched. This has only started happening in the few months to a year, insofar as I can tell. Like I said, it's not one thing that has me looking to migrate away for a while and see how it goes. It's just a lot of little things adding up to a direction I'm not totally comfortable with anymore. I'm already letting them know more about me than probably a lot of family members know and letting them use and sell that data and advertise to me for free in exchange for access to their services. If they want me to pay them monthly subscriptions on top of that, the deal's starting to feel more and more lopsided in terms of the value I perceive that I give away vs. the value I perceive that I get.

[touchring]

Re: Thinking of dumping most of my ADRs.

Are you making the assumption that if you don't use these products/services, then nobody else does either?

No, I'm sure a lot of people are using these services, just as a lot of people are still burning fossil fuel mining "bitcoins" and a million other digital coins. Bitmain is worth like $10 billion for selling "mining kits".

The point I'm trying to put through is a lot of the newer services and products we consume today are not essentials, more like fashion/fads.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Thinking of dumping most of my ADRs.

+1

[jk]

Re: Thinking of dumping most of my ADRs.

fyi

How I Fully Quit Google (And You Can, Too)

[touchring]

Re: Thinking of dumping most of my ADRs.

At the moment, everyone is starting to say that because the DJ is holding up better than the SSE, America is winning the trade war. If I were Xi, I would think I'll need to do something that will make the DJ fall. What do you guys think?

[DSpencer]

Re: Thinking of dumping most of my ADRs.

At the moment, everyone is starting to say that because the DJ is holding up better than the SSE, America is winning the trade war. If I were Xi, I would think I'll need to do something that will make the DJ fall. What do you guys think?

Can China "win" a trade war with the US? What can Xi do that doesn't risk hurting his own economy worse?