Frozen In Time?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

A friend writes:

***

Google Earth street images, which have a timeline feature, have not had any new images of Minneapolis since Summer 2019.   Places where for past years there are numerous dates to choose from, simply have no images later than June of 2019.  Covid prevented cameras from working on the streets ever since the riots ‘mostly peaceful’ protests started?  I just checked Cup Foods at 38th and Chicago: no Saint Floyd Memorial.  No images of boarded up or burned down buildings.  It’s weird how Covid has had such unique and selective symptoms.”

***

Joe Doakes

Weird.

Could be jiggering the algrorithm.

Could be the class inclined to drive Google camera cars is mostly Karens.

Hard to say.

14 thoughts on “Frozen In Time?

  1. I don’t think that those camera cars have been doing anything, anywhere for years. If I look up my address on Google maps, the picture shown if from at least 7 years ago.

  2. Ditto.  Street view of my house hasn’t been updated since 2013.

    It’s not a conspiracy.

  3. Ditto. Last update from before I bought my house in 2013 and a State Trooper owned it. Maybe a good thing seeing the patrol car in the driveway. Google Earth images are up to date however.

  4. I went back to Google Earth and searched for Cup Foods at 38th and Chicago. The satellite view shows a clean intersection, photo from 2019. Same result on Google Maps and also on Instant Street View by Google.

    I can drill down to search specific locations for more recent photos, but the front-facing images are all pre-Covid. Has Google always been inaccurate and I simply failed to notice it? Or are you guys finding a Timeline feature different from the one I’m using?

  5. Accurate to what degree?  What’s your expectation, and is that a proper expectation?  Google integrated street view into maps as what, say a proof of concept, starting more than 10 years ago.  They never had a public facing policy on how they do the pics and when they might update.  It’s a spiff, a freebie.

    Street view of my place taken in Aug 2013 is missing a garden I since dug in front and some other improvements to the house.  Is the pic inaccurate?    

    I mean, cmon Joe.

  6. I’ll put my IT product owner hat on and imagine I own Street View. I say yes, you put updated pics for George Floyd square on the backlog and understand you send a car to shoot new pics when the status of the square is settled permanently. That’s not happened yet (…because the city hasn’t caved on it yet).

  7. I drove through Minneapolis last fall. It is not a good sign when instead of shop doors bearing signs that they support the police, the doors are barricaded, the windows are boarded up, and there are “Saint George” and “We support BLM” posters on the plywood.

  8. When visiting my parents in Raleigh earlier this year, I pulled up Street View of one the hospitals in downtown. It was clear that two images of the ER entrance were taken at different times. Zoom in and the EMERGENCY lighted sign was there. Zoom out, and the only the “soot shadows” of where the lighted sign’s letters were visible.

    I’m inclined to agree with JK that it’s unlikely to be a conspiracy or a deliberate refusal to update the photos, and there could be a safety issue with sending the car to take new photos. My experience with Google is they roll out some whiz-bang feature and then just not maintain it.

  9. I’m trying to work the Timeline feature to find photos newer than 2019, but failing. Has anybody found one? Maybe I’m doing it wrongly.

    Or maybe Google Earth was all part of The Matrix, preserving images of the planet as it was before we were all enslaved to serve our robot overlords?

  10. I’m looking around Kastorville on Google Maps, and even the satellite view is a few years old. There’s a government center that was completed a few years back that still shows up as in progress, and the new Kwik Trip south of town isn’t there. So I’m guessing that this is just Google not allocating money to this.

    That said, I’m guessing a lot of people aren’t sad to see that the devastation around the city isn’t visible.

  11. In the Soviet Union, maps were classified materials. The intent was to prevent ordinary people from being able to travel within, or possibily even escape from, the worker’s paradise.

    In the United States, we have Google Earth 2019.

  12. It’s hard to believe that there was a meeting of high level Google execs where they decided to deep-six the photos of the burnt out parts of Minneapolis. The over reaction to the stupid covid had moved a lot of things to the back burner, like producing building materials, and cancer screening. At least the distilleries and breweries are running 24/7!
    How would the locals around 38th & Chicago react to a drive through by a google car festooned with cameras? Hollywood movies aside, do not ever overestimate the intelligence of street people.

  13. It’s hard to believe there was a meeting of high level FBI execs where they decided to repeatedly lie to the FISA court to spy on the President. It’s hard to believe but we know it happened, a junior lawyer pled guilty to it.

    It’s hard to believe there was a meeting of high level journalists where they created a list of members and decided what stories would be pushed and what content they would have. It’s hard to believe but we know it happened, journo-list existed.

    It’s hard to believe there was a high level meeting of Twitter execs who decided to ban Donald Trump for life; that there was a high level meeting of Coke execs who decided to ask customers be less White; the list goes on and on. It’s not a grand conspiracy in the manner of spy novels, it’s ‘woke’ executives making virtue-signaling decisions using other people’s money.

    Why is it so hard to believe Google might have those sorts of people on board?

  14. I don’t think we can rule out the possibility it’s a directive straight from the Biden administration, Joe. It’s actually probably likely.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.