Monday, December 21, 2009


Happy "Holidays" From Google



If you use GMail, you probably got this message recently:


Happy Holidays from Google

Hello,

As we near the end of the year, we wanted to take a moment to thank you for the time, energy, commitment, and trust you've shared with us in 2009.

With sharing in mind, this year we've decided to do something a little different. We hope you'll find it fits the spirit of the holiday season.

We're looking forward to working with you to build lasting success in 2010.

Happy Holidays,
Your Google Team


While on the surface it seems like a nice gesture, wouldn't it be nice if these big companies actually put some thought into what they wrote?

The use of terms or "codewords" like "Happy Holidays" or "holiday season" is meant to be all inclusive of the various winter holidays celebrated by different religions or cultural groups, without singling out any one of them in particular. It's primarily meant to include minorities that celebrate Kwanzaa and Hanukkah.

But this letter was sent on December 21, after Hanukkah was already completed two days earlier. If they really wanted to be all inclusive, perhaps they should have sent it the first week in December, instead of waiting till soon after Hanukkah was over, portraying Antisemitism.

All these "codewords" used are actually born out of "Political Correctness", a practice designed to discriminate against your average white male, while not actually caring about the minorities you're trying to protect. Isn't it nice to see another big company show that they aim for Political Correctness, yet show they couldn't care less about those minorities?

On a similar note, a friend of mine tells me that he recently applied for a job at Google, and they sent him a form asking him to specify his Race on it. Wonder why?

8 comments:

Unknown said...

I LOVE YOUR BLOG keep blogging!

Xavier said...

There is apparently no ways to post a general comment on the blog, so I had to pick the last entry.
I found the articles about sound quite interesting and was considering to read a few others. But I cannot read your blog in the normal style, the text/background colors are way too hard on my eyes.

I doubt it will change, so I at least found a good workaround in firefox : view -> page style -> no style.
Not perfect as I also lose all the formatting, but better than nothing and my eyes are no longer bleeding.
I was wondering if anyone else had this problem or if it was just me.

insane coder said...

Xavier, I can change the colors if I knew there was a better combination to use.

Nothing with a light background though, I can't read those.

You're the 3rd person to say they had a problem reading it.

Xavier said...

I have 0 knowledge and experience about colors, readability and web design, but I tried to do some slight css tweaks, trying the minimum changes that would make it more readable to me.

I did some research and took inspiration from several sources, including this one :
http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200608/light_text_on_dark_background_vs_readability/

I think what helped most is to decrease brightness of text colors and increasing text space.

I also decreased background brightness to keep contrast similar, and I changed font to sans, which I seem to prefer.

Here is the result. I presented it to 3-4 people and they all found my version more readable :
http://omploader.org/vM2VlaA

user-stylesheet.css / userContent.css
* {
background-color: #0C141A;
color: #ADCC8F;

line-height: 1.5;
letter-spacing : +0.4mm;
font-family:sans-serif;
}

What do you think ?

Raynulds said...

Haha, yeah I guess Google are pretty antisemitic what with being founded by two Jewish guys. Nice one Nach.

Monika said...

Thanks for provide great informatic and looking beautiful blog, really nice required information & the things i never imagined and i would request, wright more blog and blog post like that for us. Thanks you once agian

Birth certificate in delhi
Birth certificate in ghaziabad
Birth certificate in gurgaon
Birth certificate in noida
How to get birth certificate in ghaziabad
how to get birth certificate in delhi
birth certificate agent in delhi
how to download birth certificate
birth certificate in greater noida
birth certificate agent in delhi
Birth certificate delhi

Easy Loan Mart said...

Hi...
Google today wished happy holidays with an animated doodle. Google started posting the Doodles for 'Happy Holidays 2019' on Monday.
You are also read more Apply Free Housing Loan

Peter said...

I have so many plans for these holidays. I have been waiting for this time for a long while. Now it's time to avail derma rollers for more information.