I said this twenty years ago and was laughed at.

Now it has become inevitable. I don’t like having the last laugh about something so horrible.

In the eternal quest to remove all useful features and just have a blank map, Google removes one of the most useful features from Google Maps.

I jest, that isn’t the actual goal.

The actual intent is even worse, because it’s all about the ad income. The more Google can control and direct your searches, the more they can make on ads. That is what this change is all about – them deciding what they want you to find, not allowing you to find what you actually searched for.

Google has been and will be corrupted by this insidious and largely-unconscious (at an individual worker level in Google) drive to remove features that allow the user freedom, because user freedom means ads sell for less.

You’d have spent $3,054.82 in 1991 to buy all the stuff in this ad that you can now do with your phone. That amount is roughly equivalent to about $5,100 in 2012 dollars.

When economists who are of the old mode claim that there have been no productivity increases since 1980 or whenever — which seems to happen a great deal as they use very old-fashioned and incorrect definitions of productivity — I point to something like this as a glaring counterexample.

It’s not quite as applicable perhaps as other examples that could be used, but it is more obvious. It’s apparentness helps to drive the point home.