Martinez’ The Automatic Detective. Tongue in cheek, main character is a bot built for world domination who suffered from the self awareness glitch - which randomly affects bots and makes them find their own way in life. I think it’s going to be right up your alley.

Github was bought in 2018. For all we know, OP could have been 10 at the time

So now that is in the hands of the folks who use the OSM data. It’s in a somewhat exotic tag, so by default any map that uses OSM will still show Gulf of Mexico, unless they actively intervene to show Gulf of America. So if you see an OSM based map showing the latter, you know they made that choice consciously.

OpenStreetMap also needs to deal with this kind of thing. In this case, several people already tried to add it to the map in some form of other, but generally not as something to actually be shown. There is a looong discussion about it here https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/gulf-of-america-gulf-of-mexico/124571 . General opinion is that it is (or will be) “the official name that the US says it has”. In OSM you can invent tags for anything, so an object can have many names. Done like this, anyone using the data can still choose to give precedence to any “official US names that are not in common use yet”. Later it may be upgraded ased on if it becomes a common alternative name, just in the US, or maybe beyond. All those options can have their own special tag. And only very motivated data users will ever show it to map users. But if you do a search for Gulf of America, you will be able to find it.

Having enjoyed the entire expanse series, I didn’t really enjoy this book. I can’t really put my finger on it. I think my biggest issue is that the characters remain pretty bland. Of the group you follow, many remained little more than a name for me.

Even here in Europe where there are genuine left wing parties, where there’s proportional representation, where we have mistly functional education, labour class people are voting for folks who blame poor people and immigrants for everything that goes wrong. I think part of the blame is with tabloid style media and social media magnifying formerly fringe opinion. Just saying that having a real alternative for the populist right, might not be enough.

Glad you already learned this is probably nonsense. The wrong reasoning is very similar to much thought about overpopulation. The amount of people that makes for a place to be overpopulated is a function of how societies work and the technologies they have at hand. One extra issue there is that improvements in technology usually lead to population growth, so much progress gets cancelled out.

Someone should invent a game, that while playing demonstrates how much monopolies suck for everyone involved (except the monopolist)

“Made unusable”: that’s not how it works. Even with occasional vandalism, there’s so much more people positively contributing, that overall the map just keeps on getting better and better.

And we are still increasing the rate at which we are making it worse…