Author: William Lise

I am a long-term (50-plus years) resident of Japan, and former electrical engineer, and I have been translating and interpreting for over four decades here in Japan.

Free email comes with a cost, and it’s more than data scraping.

There are numerous videos going around that warn of the not-surprising reality that Google is, as a default, scanning all your gmail content to train AI. The videos tell you how to turn that default setting off.

That’s fine, but a better solution that provides advantages other than just freedom from data scraping is not to use Gmail at all.

I have a Gmail account, but I never use it for email exchanges. I only send email using addresses associated with my own domain and use gmail just for subscriptions to newsletters and the like.

While it appears that billions of people use Gmail, it is not professional looking and shows that you didn’t care enough to pay just a little bit of money to get a real email address. This is particularly significant for people using email for business.

Gmail screams cheap and not seriously committed. People need to discard the ideas that everything that is useful must be free.

Formulaic LinkedIn Handwaving

Are people coached to make formulaic LinkedIn videos?

Many I’m shown by the Microsoft algorithm feature individuals holding a tiny microphone in one hand and wildly waving their other hand in every which direction, while they breathlessly spurt a message laced with every business buzzword you can imagine and some that no one can imagine or understand.

Their message will “land” (can we please ban that word?) and it will be a very soft landing, because there usually is not much hard content in it, but rather mostly an apparent desperate belief in the “LinkedIn success” fantasy.