You may not realize it, but these two stories have a common thread. Let me explain.

In the first story here we have another version of what "crunching numbers," just to get more numbers, can do for your profit potential; especially if you can crunch new debt into an old institutional framework, work every end you can on fees and interest charges, because you also own the companies that can do that for your new target; and then you just cost it into bankruptcy so that you can cash in, perhaps one last time, on some newly cheapened real estate.

That this might also crunch out of existence a whole community of working people, and the larger community they helped support in more ways than just providing objects to consume, in wake of it all, hardly matters to the people who benefit from this sort of thing.

In the other story you have the fear that simply crunching numbers to organize them better, and to make it easier for people to find, and use stuff, in meaningful ways, in all of the numbers, because they do represent things beyond mere count, after all: pictures. thoughts, new expressions of old problems, new understandings of old expressions of problems that still exist. We call it art. We call it science. We call it poetry, and whatall else; because in that you have the fear that not enough money is being made (even though tracking clicks has given you a great data lead in doing web advertising, in the first place). And so the demand goes out to try and crunch out more numbers by cramming in more of the stuff that the click bait artists of the "social media" sites thrive on; the habit forming, selfy-indulgent, and over manipulated, chitter-chatter, of excessively shared, properly branded, and actively purchasing, personal lives. And you end up with something that seems ever more to be nothing anybody wants.

And so another community, of sorts, gets crunched out of existence. A community of people who put some really good content (working every bit as hard as I have to do it I imagine) into Google+ (via copying things over from Google Blogs, or not, as I did). I started using it, and wanted to continue to do so, precisely for that reason (and also because Google used to be a name you could count on for stuff that just worked). Mind you, I will still be able to post what I need to post from Google Blogs, but that doesn't come across nearly as meaningfully as when you see my stuff from the "plus.google.com/+JeffVale address." To me it really was more of public speaking place. Like a virtual public square to put up something of a "booth" and "soap box," all rolled into one, to shout out what you thought was beautiful, or enchanting, or funny, or illuminating, or just very important, or whatever else. Perhaps even some criticism of your own company when it forgets itself.

It ought to break everybody's heart, to not only see another user community (with me included, because, nieve as this may be, having a trust broken hurts) treated so badly, but also the dedicated employees of a company that started out promising a lot more than just making more money than even a deity could imagine; as well as a company I think a lot of us used to depend on, at least when things started taking off with desktops, for not only finding hard to find stuff, in a newly growing, "wonder world," they created stuff that worked. But now it seems you have to be cold, and uncaring, to protect yourself from being used-hurt again. And more of that is the pitty, I can assure you.

In any case, though, so what if a crazy guy in another "social media" site is making a bit more than you? You fear you might get swallowed whole by a suddenly much bigger fish?

Maybe. Just maybe, mind you. It might be time to seriously consider that the system that presents you with all of these various contradictions, and examples of outright, outrageous immorality; maybe that system just isn't working properly any more. And that it isn't because it can't; because how could it when it wasn't designed to handle what we are now capable of doing to ourselves, the planet, and pretty much every ideal, and good notion, we've ever aspired to. The people who tried using Google+ in good faith, as well as the workers of Google, deserve better than this. It is too bad that the senior manage there doesn't see that.

But then, "deserving" has got nothing to do with it now, does it. In the end, a lot of it boils down to "you get what you believe you deserve to demand." What, exactly, do you believe you deserve to demand? Are you sure you are being fully informed as to all of your choices?

Better wake up and make up your mind while you still can.