How to remove google from your life (and why that’s nearly impossible)

Harry Guinness is a photography expert and writer with nearly a decade of experience. His work has been published in newspapers like The New York Times and on a variety of other websites, from Lifehacker to Popular Science and Medium’s OneZero. Read more.

The #DeleteFacebook campaign is a pretty clear call to action, but most people saying they want to delete their account never do. Why? Because Facebook is really hard to get rid of. If you want to rid yourself of Facebook, I’m going to tell you how, but you probably won’t do it.

How to Delete Your Facebook Account

Deleting your Facebook account is technically simple. Head to the account deletion page, click the “Delete My Account” button, enter your password and a captcha, and boom, it’s done.

Okay, not quite. There’s a 14 day cooling down period where you can log into your account and stop the deletion process. Don’t log in for two weeks and it’s gone for real. All your account data will be deleted from Facebook’s servers (although it can take up to 90 days to be fully removed) so it’s probably a good idea to grab a backup first.

But deleting Facebook is really only one part of getting rid of Facebook. The hardest bit is replacing the things you actually use Facebook for.

Keeping Up to Date With Friends and Family

During Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony before the US Senate, he repeatedly denied that Facebook was a monopoly. He couldn’t, however, name a single largest competitor. While Instagram (a Facebook property), Twitter (the mad ramblings of people who shouldn’t be let near keyboards), and Snapchat (a digital playground for teens that Facebook is slowly strangling to death) are all technically social networks, they don’t fill the same roll.

Sure, some people might announce their engagement or new baby on Instagram, but they’re much more likely to do it on Facebook. It’s how I told my extended circle of friends that my granny had died—it was the simplest way to reach them all.

There is nothing out there right now that replaces this, short of just ringing around all your friends and family and asking them, “What’s up?” I travel for most of the year, so Facebook is how I keep tabs on what’s going on at home. It’s just not realistic to keep in constant contact with other people leading their own lives 3000 miles away.

And yes, it’s true that things like Google+ still exist, but for a social network to be useful, the people with whom you want to communicate need to participate. And most of them aren’t going to switch to using something else just because you want to delete Facebook from your life.

Now don’t get me wrong, Facebook’s News Feed is far from perfect. In fact, their algorithm is pretty broken—though you can make it less annoying. The thing is, for most people, the positives outweigh the negatives.

Oh, and good luck remembering birthdays.

Messaging Your Friends and Family

Facebook Messenger is an incredibly popular messaging service. It—alongside WhatsApp (another Facebook-owned service)—are how billions of people communicate every day. Huge numbers of my friends don’t have any other contact details for me, not even my email address.

While your situation might not be quite as extreme, there’s a good chance that some of the people you communicate with almost exclusively use Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp.

iMessage is a great alternative if everyone you’re chatting with has an iPhone, but SMS is a pretty poor option. Those texts can also get quite expensive if you’re sending them internationally.

There are other messaging apps like Telegram, but good luck getting your entire family to sign up.

Managing Teams and Clubs

Facebook Groups have become the de facto way for a lot of teams, clubs, and societies to interact with their members. Since everyone has Facebook, why would they not use it?

Again, there are alternatives like Teamer and Teamstuff, but the problem is getting people to use them. Having a Teamer account doesn’t do you much good if everyone else is organizing things in a Facebook Group. If you’re the one responsible for setting things up, you might be able to force it. But if you’re joining an existing club, all I can do is wish you good luck in your foolish endeavors to convert them.

An Easy and Secure Way to Log In

Passwords suck. Breaches of large companies are an increasingly regular event and, because people are absolutely terrible about using the same passwords for multiple services, those passwords often can be used to log in to other accounts. We’re big fans of password managers here at How-To Geek, but they can be awkward to get started with.

The Log In With Facebook button is a great way to instantly have a more secure account on a website. When 150 million MyFitnessPal login details were leaked last month, the people who had logged in with Facebook were much better protected.

You could set up a private Facebook account with only the barest of your personal details—or possibly an anonymous Twitter account—but that defeats the purpose of getting rid of Facebook. They can still track your activity around the web if you’re logged in to your account.

Shouting Into the Void

This one’s a bit petty, but it’s absolutely true. Sometimes when you’ve had a terrible day (or an amazing day) you just want to tell everyone you can. It’s as cathartic as it is narcissistic. I’ve been using Facebook’s On This Day to purge some of the more embarrassing instances from my past but I can’t pretend I didn’t feel better for posting them at the time.

Plus, call Likes “fake internet points” all you like, but when something happens, they are still a tangible reminder that people you know and like have seen it, and care enough to show you that they care.

Maybe you’re so big on privacy that you’ve never posted a single thing on Facebook, but I doubt it. And I highly doubt you’ve never posted a comment you thought was witty or a picture you were proud of, and then checked back 20 mins later to see how many likes it had. It’s okay, it’s only human.

Everyone loves to hate Facebook, but very few people actually go without. Feel free to delete it, but good luck putting up with all the nagging from your friends and family to rejoin. And if you do go, remember that it’s tradition to post a long Facebook post announcing it. It doesn’t count if you don’t. And it’s not nearly as funny when you come back.

Mahesh Makvana is a freelance tech writer who specializes in writing how-to guides. He has been writing tech tutorials for over a decade now. He’s written for some of the prominent tech sites including MakeUseOf, MakeTechEasier, and Online Tech Tips. Read more.

Google Chrome doesn’t require a Google account to function. If you want to remove one or all Google accounts from Chrome, you can do so and still continue to use the browser. We’ll show you how to do that on desktop and mobile.

Note: When you remove your Google account from Chrome, the browser stops syncing and saving your browsing data to your account. This means you won’t be able to access that data from other devices, so keep that in mind while removing the account.

Unlink a Google Account From Chrome on Desktop

To delink your Google account from Chrome on your desktop, first, open Chrome and click your profile icon in the top-right corner.

In the profile menu that opens, next to “Other Profiles,” click the gear icon.

You’ll see a user switcher window. Here, find the profile in which the Google account you want to delete is located.

In that profile’s top-right corner, click the three dots and choose “Delete.”

Chrome will display a warning saying that your browser data will be deleted if you logged out of your account. Continue by clicking “Delete.”

And your Google account is now delinked from your Chrome browser. Your browser data won’t sync with your account anymore, and that’s it.

Disconnect a Google Account From Chrome on Android

To remove your Google account from Chrome for Android, first, launch the Chrome app on your phone.

In Chrome’s top-right corner, tap your profile icon.

You’ll see the “Settings” page. Here, tap your Google account.

On your account page, at the bottom, tap “Sign Out and Turn Off Sync.”

Choose “Continue” in the prompt.

Tip: To delete your current browsing data from the Chrome app, then enable the “Also Clear Your Chrome Data From This Device” option.

Sign Out of a Google Account on Chrome on iPhone and iPad

To sign out of your Google account from Chrome on an iPhone or iPad, first, launch Chrome on your phone.

In Chrome’s top-right corner, tap your profile icon.

On the “Settings” page that opens, choose your Google account.

On the account page, tap “Sign Out.”

A prompt will pop up from the bottom of your phone’s screen. If you’d like to retain your Google account’s browsing data in the browser, then in the prompt, select “Keep Data.” Otherwise, tap “Clear Data.”

If you’re trying to de-Google your life, there are a few other ways as well to be less reliant on the big G.

We’ll walk you through how to delete the information Google collects about you, from what you search to your location.

As an Associate Writer on the How-To team at CNET, Dale believes tech is meant for the masses. It’s his goal to make even the most complex gadgets and apps accessible to everyone. He has an MFA in writing and always answers the phone when family calls with tech questions.

Google may be collecting far more personal data and information than you might realize. Every search you perform and every YouTube video you watch, Google is keeping tabs on you. Google Maps even logs everywhere you go , the route you use to get there and how long you stay, no matter if you have an iPhone or an Android. It can be eye-opening and possibly a little unsettling looking into everything Google knows about you.

Google’s tracking has caught the attention of attorneys general from Indiana, Texas, Washington state and Washington, DC. They allege the search giant makes it “nearly impossible” for people to stop their location from being tracked and accuse the company of deceiving users and invading their privacy. As a result, the attorneys general are suing Google over its use of location data .

Since 2019, Google has made changes to how your location data is collected and the options you have in controlling it. This includes autodelete controls, which allow people to automatically delete their location data on a rolling basis, and an incognito mode in Google Maps, which lets people browse and get directions without Google saving that information.

We’re going to cut through all the clutter and show you how to access the private data Google has on you, as well as how to delete some or all of it. Then we’re going to help you find the right balance between your privacy and the Google services you rely on by choosing settings that limit Google’s access to your information without impairing your experience.

More Tech Tips

• Is Google tracking you? Find out here
• Can you really stop Google from tracking you? Here’s what we know
• Hide where you’re going in Google Maps to keep your navigation history a secret

Find out what private information Google considers ‘public’

Chances are, Google knows your name, your face, your birthday, your gender, other email addresses you use, your password and phone number. Some of this is listed as public information (not your password, of course). Here’s how to see what Google shares with the world about you.

1. Open a browser window and navigate to your Google Account page.

2. Type your Google username (with or without “@gmail.com”).

3. From the menu bar, choose Personal info and review the information. You can change or delete your photo, name, birthday, gender, password, other email addresses and phone number.

4. If you’d like to see what information of yours is available publicly, scroll to the bottom and select Go to About me.

5. On this page, each line is labeled with either a people icon (visible to anyone), office building icon (visible only to your organization) or lock icon (visible only to you). Select an item to choose whether to make it public, semipublic or private. There’s currently no way to make your account totally private.

Google has adapted its privacy control dashboard for mobile devices as well as desktop browsers.

Take a look at Google’s record of your online activity

If you want to see the motherlode of data Google has on you, follow these steps to find it, review it, delete it or set it to automatically delete after a period of time.

If your goal is to exert more control over your data but you still want Google services like search and Google Maps to personalize your results, we recommend setting your data to autodelete after three months. Otherwise, feel free to delete all your data and set Google to stop tracking you. For most of the day-to-day things you do with Google you won’t even notice the difference.

1. Sign in to your Google Account and choose Data & Privacy from the navigation bar.

2. To see a list of all your activity that Google has logged, scroll to History Settings and select Web & App Activity. This is where all your Google searches, YouTube viewing history, Google Assistant commands and other interactions with Google apps and services get recorded.

3. To turn it completely off, move the toggle to the off position. But beware — changing this setting will most likely make any Google Assistant devices you use, including Google Home and Google Nest smart speakers and displays, virtually unusable.

4. If you want Google to stop tracking just your Chrome browser history and activity from sites you sign in to with your Google account, uncheck the first box. If you don’t want Google to keep audio recordings of your interactions with Google Assistant, uncheck the second box. Otherwise, move on to Step 5.

5. To set Google to automatically delete this kind of data either never or every three or 18 months, select Auto-delete and pick the time frame you feel most comfortable with. Google will immediately delete any current data older than the time frame you specify. For example, if you choose three months, any information older than three months will be deleted right away.

6. Once you choose an Auto-delete setting, a pop-up will appear and ask you to confirm. Select Delete or Confirm.

7. Next, select Manage Activity. This page displays all the information Google has collected on you from the activities mentioned in the previous steps, arranged by date, all the way back to the day you created your account or the last time you purged this list.

8. To delete specific days, select the trash can icon to the right of the day, then choose Got it. To get more specific details or to delete individual items, select the three stacked dots icon beside the item then choose either Details or Delete.

9. If you’d rather delete part or all of your history manually, select the three stacked dots icon to the right of the search bar at the top of the page and choose Delete activity by, then choose either Last hour, Last day, All time or Custom range.

10. To make sure your new settings took, head back to Manage Activity and make sure whatever’s there only goes back the three or 18 months you selected.

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Ever notice how Google always seems to know exactly what you’re looking for? It’s no coincidence. Google knows what you’re interested in, what you search for, where you go and much, much more about who you are. How? Because of all the data you share.

With every search, click, message and request, you’re feeding Google more information. The same goes for videos you watch on YouTube, the info you add to your Google profile or the questions you ask Google Assistant. Tap or click here to see how you can delete everything you’ve ever said to Google.

As scary as this might seem, data collection is par for the course for major tech companies. But there is a silver lining: You can delete almost everything you’ve shared with Google and get at least some of your privacy back. Here’s how.

1. Search and destroy

Google uses your search history to build a detailed profile about you that it can share with advertisers. This personalizes the ads and content you see. It’s also part of the reason why data is such a big business. Tap or click here to see how much money your data can sell for online. You’ll be shocked.

If you want to start removing your information from Google, your search history is where to begin. Here’s how you can clear your search history and activity:

Your daily dose of tech smarts

Learn the tech tips and tricks only the pros know.

1. Go to myaccount.google.com and log in. Alternatively, go to google.com while logged in and click the circle icon in the upper right-hand corner with your image or initials inside. Then click Manage your Google Account.
2. Click on Manage your data & personalization, located under Privacy & Personalization.
3. Under the Activity controls panel, you will see checkmarks next to Web & App activity tracking, Location History and YouTube History. Click each one to adjust your settings. You can toggle them off to stop further tracking.
4. Below Activity controls, click on My Activity under Activity and timeline.
5. On the menu that appears in the left sidebar, click Delete activity by. Select how far back you would like to delete your history in the pop-up menu. Click Delete to confirm.

Once you’ve followed these steps, not only will your search history be gone, but you’ll also have disabled tracking through apps, location history and YouTube views.

2. Read my lips: ‘No data storage!’

Do you use Google Assistant? It’s a handy way to set reminders, get quick answers and much more. But know this: Google also keeps tabs on those interactions with Google Assistant to improve its AI and personalize your account. If you’re creeped out by this, you can delete those recordings.

1. Open your Google Account page.
2. From the left navigation panel, click on Data & personalization.
3. In the Activity controls panel, click on Web & App Activity, followed by Manage Activity. From this page, you’ll see a list of your past activity — and items with the microphone icon indicate a recording.
4. Next to the items you want to delete, select the three-dot icon and then Delete.

INSIDE SCOOP: Last year, Google was called out, along with a handful of other tech companies, for using user recordings for research purposes. Tap or click to catch up if you missed it.

3. Ad blocking

Personalized ads might sound good on paper (cool, things you actually want!), but you may find it disturbing to see ads on other websites for the exact things you searched for moments ago. It’s all part of how Google’s ad system works, but you can opt out if you don’t like it.

Here’s how to turn off ad personalization:

1. Open your Google Account settings again.
2. From the left-hand panel, click on Data & personalization.
3. From the Ad personalization panel, click Go to ad settings.
4. Click the switch next to Ad personalization is ON. You should now see Ad personalization is OFF.

You can also turn off ad personalization for your browser by installing Google’s Interest-Based Ads Opt-Out extension to your Chrome browser.

Once you’ve turned off personalized ads, Google won’t be able to use your personal data to serve you advertisements. Don’t expect them to disappear, though. Ads will still be targeted with information like your location (if you left the location option on above) or based on the site you’re browsing.

4. Ancient history

If you use Google’s web browser, Chrome, you’re also giving the company access to your web history. This is a bridge further than simply sharing your search history. If you’re performing a privacy checkup on the rest of your Google Account, remove your Chrome browsing data, too.

1. To get started, click the three-dot menu.
2. Hover over History and click on History at the top of the menu that appears on the left.
3. Click Clear browsing data and select your date range for deletion.

From here, you can choose to delete your history, cookies and cache. Select the time range you want to wipe, from the past 24 hours to as early as the beginning of your browsing activity.

5. Worth a thousand words

Google Photos is easy to use, offers tons of free storage and makes it simple to keep your pictures in the cloud. But some of the features it uses to make things easy to find may feel like a privacy invasion to you.

Namely, Google scans your photos using facial recognition to sort your content into albums. It can also determine the locations you’ve been to by scanning for landmarks in the background.

If you aren’t comfortable with that, you can say goodbye and store your photos locally or using another product.

If you want to save your photos locally, you’ll need some kind of external drive with enough room to hold everything. Alternatively, you can rely on a secure cloud storage system that won’t compromise your data.

For this, we recommend our sponsor, IDrive. Not only does IDrive use state-of-the-art encryption technology to protect your private photos from hackers, but it also makes it easy to upload your photos directly from your phone using the IDrive mobile app.

Once that’s done, you can remove all your pictures and videos from your Google account:

1. Open the Google Photos app on your smartphone. Click your initials or photo in the top right corner. Choose Photo Settings, followed by Backup & sync. Disable this by hitting the on/off toggle.
2. Now, open the Google Photos website on your computer and sign in with your Google account.
3. Select all the photos you want to delete. Then, click the bin icon in the top right-hand corner. Make sure you’re only deleting photos that you’ve backed up elsewhere so you don’t end up losing anything important.

E veryone knows that picking up a second language grows more difficult with age. And in a new study, scientists have pinpointed the age at which your chances of reaching total fluency plummet: 10.

The study, published in the journal Cognition, found that it’s “nearly impossible” for language learners to reach native-level fluency if they start learning a second tongue after age 10 — though that doesn’t seem to be because language skills go downhill at this age. “It turns out you’re still learning fast,” says study co-author Joshua Hartshorne, an assistant professor of psychology at Boston College. “It’s just that you run out of time, because your ability to learn starts dropping at around 17 or 18 years old.” Those who start a few years after age 10 may still become quite good at a language, the paper notes, but are unlikely to reach total fluency.

Why the drop in learning ability happens at the threshold of adulthood is still unclear, Hartshorne says. Possible explanations could include changes in brain plasticity, lifestyle changes related to entering the workforce or college or an unwillingness to learn new things — potentially while looking foolish in the process — that mounts with age.

Though that may seem discouraging — age 10 is far in the past for many hopeful language learners — it was heartening for scientists to learn that the critical period for language acquisition might be considerably longer than they previously thought. Some scientists believed that the brief window closes shortly after birth, while others stretched it only to early adolescence. When compared to those estimates, 17 or 18 — when language learning ability starts to drop off — seems relatively old.

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The study used a unique method to reach that new finding. To compile the large and diverse group of people required for a language acquisition study, the researchers created a user-friendly grammar quiz intended to go viral. The 10-minute quiz, called “Which English?,” hooked people by guessing their native language, dialect and home country based on their responses to English grammar questions. At the end of the quiz, people were asked about their actual native language, if and when they had learned any others and where they had lived.

The gimmick worked. The quiz was shared more than 300,000 times on Facebook, hit the front page of Reddit and reached trending status on 4chan. Almost 670,000 people took it, giving the researchers huge amounts of data from native- and non-native English speakers of all ages, some of whom spoke other languages and some of whom didn’t. Analyzing participants’ responses and mistakes allowed them to draw unusually precise conclusions about language learning. (Hartshorne is currently spearheading other online language experiments, which are open to anyone.)

In addition to insights about the critical period, Hartshorne says the quiz results clearly showed that students fared better when they learned a new language by immersion, rather than simply in the classroom. Though he acknowledges it’s easier said than done, “you’d be better off moving to a country as an adult and trying to learn a language than taking it all throughout school.”

If uprooting your life isn’t an option, Hartshorne recommends mimicking an immersive environment as much as possible — that is, finding ways to have actual conversations with native speakers, rather than trying to pick up your skills from books. If you can do so, it’s perfectly possible to become conversationally proficient, if not completely fluent, even as an adult, he says.

That should be encouraging for those well beyond their elementary school years, Hartshorne says. The adult brain seems to be better at learning than researchers previously thought—even if it’s unlikely that you’ll become fluent at a language you learn later in life.

“We’re finding that you don’t start to see lack of plasticity until late adolescence, early adulthood, mid-adulthood,” Hartshorne says. “As a scientist, it’s always fun when there’s undiscovered country, but it also reminds us to be careful about the things that we don’t know. It makes me wonder, what other things do we not know about?”

Around moderate exercise intensity, we tend to burn fat at the highest rate. When we exercise near or above VO2 max, we burn almost no fat.

Why can’t we achieve high levels of fat oxidation near but below VO2 max pace?

Based on my understanding, fat can’t be used anaerobically. What makes high intensity exercise anaerobic when it hasn’t exceeded VO2 max yet?

1 Answer 1

The reason why it’s hard to burn fat during high intensity exercise is that it’s a slow and inefficient process of getting energy to the muscles. Your body will switch to using glycogen aerobically and/or anaerobically.

The infamous “fat-burning zone” concept is highly misleading. It’s true that we don’t burn a lot of fat during high intensity exercise, but we do burn a lot of calories (in the form of glycogen) that will be replenished later by increased metabolic activity, effectively burning the equivalent amount of fat. Since high intensity exercise burns more calories, at the end of the day, it burns more fat too. But there’s a downside to that: you’ll feel much more exhausted. The idea behind doing easy to moderate physical activities for weight loss is that if you’re getting most of your energy from fat during the exercise, you won’t feel as tired during the rest of the day, because your glycogen stores are intact and there’s no need for muscle recovery.

Any gardener that has had the displeasure of having bindweed in their garden knows how frustrating and infuriating these weeds can be. Controlling bindweed can be difficult, but it can be done if you are willing to take the time. Below, we have listed some different ways for how to control bindweed.

Identifying Bindweed

Before you can get rid of bindweed, you need to make sure that the weed you have is bindweed. Bindweed (Convolvulus) is often called wild morning glory because it looks like morning glory. Bindweed is a climbing vine. Normally, the first signs that you have bindweed will be thin thread-like vines that wrap themselves tightly around plants or other upward objects.

Eventually, the bindweed vines will grow leaves, which are shaped much like an arrowhead. After the leaves appear, the bindweed vine will start growing flowers. Bindweed flowers are trumpet-shaped and will be either white or pink.

How to Control Bindweed

Part of why it is so hard to get rid of bindweed is that it has a large and hardy root system. Single attempts to remove bindweed roots will not be successful. When controlling bindweed, the first thing to remember is that you will need to make several attempts of the bindweed control method you choose several times before you can successfully kill bindweed.

Organic and Chemical Approaches for Bindweed Control

Both boiling water (organic) and non-selective herbicides (chemical) can be used to get rid of bindweed. Both of these options can kill any plant where applied. These methods are ideal for areas where bindweed is growing but there are no other plants you wish to save. These would be areas like driveway cracks, empty vegetable beds, and vacant lots.

To use boiling water to kill bindweed, simply boil some water and pour it on the bindweed. If possible, pour the boiling water about 2 to 3 feet (61-91 cm.) beyond where the bindweed is growing so that you can get as much of the roots as possible.

If you are using an herbicide, apply it heavily to the bindweed plant and re-apply every time the plant reappears and reaches 12 inches (31 cm.) in length.

Repeated Pruning to Kill Bindweed

Another popular method for controlling bindweed is to prune the vines back to the ground repeatedly, whenever they appear. Take a pair of scissors or shears and snip the bindweed vine off at ground level. Watch the location carefully and cut the vine back again when it appears.

This method forces the bindweed plant to use up its energy reservoirs in its roots, which will eventually kill it.

Controlling Bindweed with Aggressive Plantings

For as stubborn as bindweed can be, it has a very hard time competing with other aggressive plants. Often, bindweed can be found in poor soil where few other plants can grow. Improving the soil and adding plants that spread densely will force the bindweed out of the bed.

If you have bindweed in your lawn, dethatch the lawn and apply fertilizer to help your lawn grow more compactly, which then makes it far more difficult for bindweed to grow.

Note: Chemical control should only be used as a last resort, as organic approaches are more environmentally friendly.

Here are some key privacy protection measures you can take to delete your ex from your digital life.

Rae Hodge is a senior editor at CNET, leading its coverage of privacy and cybersecurity tools. She’s a data-driven investigative journalist on the software and services team, reviewing VPNs, password managers, antivirus software, anti-surveillance methods and ethics in tech. Prior to joining CNET in 2019, Rae spent nearly a decade covering politics and protests for the AP, NPR, the BBC and other local and international outlets.

This article discusses domestic violence. CNET would like to remind readers that browsing histories, including this story, can be monitored and are impossible to completely clear. If you need help, please call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233.

From GPS tracking to account security, managing technology after a dangerous breakup can be a scary and frustrating exercise in digital survival. Genuine stalkerware needs to be handled carefully if you’re concerned that gaining digital independence from an abusive person could anger them and endanger you further. Even if you haven’t found stalkerware on your phone or computer, you should consider taking the following steps to improve your personal safety if you are concerned an abusive ex may have access to your online life.

We urge caution here. There could be risks associated with revoking an abusive person’s access to your accounts and devices. You should consult with domestic violence services if you think you’re in danger. In their digital safety checklist, the Coalition Against Stalkerware advises caution when removing suspected stalkerware.

“If you delete stalkerware, whoever installed it would know that it’s been disabled. So it’s important to understand that before taking any action, and to have a safety plan ready. One of the points of this plan may be: contact organizations working with victims of domestic violence,” the coalition writes.

Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity policy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, helps people who are concerned a partner or ex might be accessing their data. “The good news when it comes to account security is, we have things that we can tell people to do,” she said at a presentation on her work in January.

Also be aware that anyone with access to your web history could later be able to see that you’ve viewed this page, so consider clearing your internet history before logging off. If you need a hand, check out our explainer on how to delete your Google history.

Disable GPS tracking

If you share a joint phone account with your ex, you’ll need to talk with your service provider about removing your ex from the account or, at the very least, ensuring your ex doesn’t have access to network-provided location tracking services such as those available with the AT&T FamilyMap service.

The service only works for mobile phone lines on the same billing account or that have the Secure Family Companion app installed and paired with the parent device, according to a spokesperson from AT&T.

“Any device that is part of the group receives a monthly reminder text message that they have the service, which includes the parent device phone number,” the spokesperson said. “Uninstalling the companion app and turning off location sharing on their device would prevent their location from appearing in the parent app.”

The Find My app (formerly Find My Friends) from Apple can also be used to stalk family members. If you have this app installed, you might want to uninstall or disable it to prevent location data from getting out further. If you set up Family Sharing and use Location Sharing, your family members automatically appear in the People tab.

To see people with whom you are sharing your location, go to the People tab in Find My. When someone shares their location with you, you can choose to share your location back or not.

There are two ways to stop sharing your location. You can stop sharing with everyone by turning off Share My Location in the Me tab. Or you can stop sharing your location with a particular person by selecting Stop Sharing My Location in the People tab.

If you stop sharing your location in Find My, the person won’t receive a notification, but they won’t be able to see you on their list of friends. If you re-enable sharing, they get a notification that you’ve started sharing your location with them.

Notably, if you delete an iMessage conversation you’ve had with someone who you’ve also shared your location with, iMessage will also prompt you with a dialogue box asking if you would like to stop sharing your location.

I read a theorem which states that: If there exists a polynomial time approximation algorithm for solving the Maximum Clique problem (or the Maximum Independent Set problem) for any constant performance ratio r, then NP = P.

But I never understood the reasoning behind this!!

1 Answer 1

In fact, something stronger is true: if you can approximate maximum clique within $n^$ for some $\epsilon > 0$ then P=NP. This is because for every $\epsilon > 0$ there is a polytime reduction $f_\epsilon$ that takes an instance $\varphi$ of SAT and returns an instance $(G,cn)$ of maximum clique such that:

1. If $\varphi$ is satisfiable then $G$ has a $cn$-clique.
2. If $\varphi$ is not satisfiable then $G$ has no $cn^$-clique.

If you could approximate maximum clique within $n^$ you would be able to distinguish the two cases (exercise), and so to decide whether $\varphi$ is satisfiable or not.

The reduction uses the PCP theorem as a first ingredient. Given the PCP theorem it is not hard to give a similar reduction with a constant gap, and with some effort to give a reduction with a gap of $n^\epsilon$ for some $\epsilon > 0$. The reduction claimed above, which has a gap of $n^$ for every $\epsilon>0$, is much harder. See lecture notes of Guruswami and O’Donnell for the constant gap, and lecture notes of Scheideler for the $n^\epsilon$ gap.

Welcome to Ask Clark, a column designed to answer your financial questions, by money expert Clark Howard.

How Do I Get My Social Security Number Off the Dark Web?

Ingrid from Connecticut asks: “I was notified by Discover that my Social Security number was found on the dark web. I’m freaking out. What should I do?

“My credit has been frozen, so I know that’s good. I’ve not created an account on SocialSecurity.gov, as of yet, but now I’m afraid of my credit to do so.”

Clark’s Take on What You Should Do if Your Social Security Number Is on the Dark Web

Clark says this is a big issue that affects an untold number of people. He says, when he’s out and about, people keep asking him about the notices they’ve been getting from Discover about the dark web.

Clark describes the dark web as “basically message boards and discussion boards where people buy and sell information on other people for purposes of identity theft or applying for credit or buying things as if they’re someone else..”

The dark web is also a haven for cybercrime communities, according to this cybersecurity guidebook from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The Dark Web: How To Protect Yourself

We never like to use the word “impossible,” but unlike information found on Google and other indexed search engines, data on the dark web is nearly impossible to remove.

With that said, if you happen to find your Social Security number on the dark web, here are some steps you can take.

Don’t Panic

It’s important that you don’t freak out just because you find out that your information is on the dark web, Clark says.

“At this point, you take the Equifax data breach that affected two-thirds of American adults, whose Social Security numbers are out in the marketplace, and various other breaches that have happened, particularly those in medical environments, and you’ll probably find that most of us are somewhere on the dark web,” Clark says.

“Just know you have a lot of company. Almost all of us are probably on the dark web at this point with our Social Security numbers there.”

Freeze Your Credit

Clark is a big proponent of freezing your credit, which will prevent anyone from opening a credit account in your name. Clark commended the listener for having already frozen her credit.

Create a Social Security Account Online

Clark says relatively few people have created a Social Security account online, but doing so makes sense. Note that you’ll have to thaw your credit in order to do it. Once it’s set up, remember to freeze your credit again.

“As far as having a mySocialSecurity account, If you were to temporarily thaw your credit files, set up a My Social Security account, that would be a good idea because you want to monitor to make sure that your work credits are being posted properly each year, because that’s the only way you can make sure you get the Social Security benefit you’re supposed to receive later,” Clark says.

Go to the Social Security Administration’s official website, to create an account.

To hear Clark’s full take on this question, listen to the segment:

Do you have a question for Clark? Use this form to ask him! And remember that you can listen to the Clark Howard Podcast at any time here.

If you have a question but don’t want it included in the podcast, contact Clark’s Consumer Action Center for free money help.

As lawmakers debate whether Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon are monopolies, a reporter recalls her attempt to avoid interacting with the companies.

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The chief executives of Amazon, Facebook, Google and Apple were called before a House antitrust committee this week, ostensibly to answer questions about whether they have too much power and whether that hurts consumers.

The tech bosses, who appeared via videoconference, fended off questions about being “cyber barons,” saying they have plenty of competition and that consumers have other options for the services they offer.

But do they? Last year, in an effort to understand just how dependent we are on these companies, I did an experiment for the tech news site Gizmodo to see how hard it would be to remove them from my life.

To do that wasn’t easy. From my years writing about digital privacy, I knew these companies were in the background of many of our online interactions. I worked with a technologist named Dhruv Mehrotra, who designed a custom tool for me, a virtual private network that kept my devices from sending data to or receiving data from the tech giants by blocking the millions of internet addresses the companies controlled.

Then I blocked Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple and Microsoft, one by one — and then all at once — over six weeks. Amazon and Google were the hardest companies to avoid by far.

Cutting Amazon from my life meant losing access to any site hosted by Amazon Web Services, the internet’s largest cloud provider. Many apps and a large portion of the internet use Amazon’s servers to host their digital content, and much of the digital world became inaccessible when I said goodbye to Amazon, including the Amazon Prime Video competitor Netflix.

Amazon was difficult to avoid in the real world as well. When I ordered a phone holder for my car from eBay, it arrived in Amazon’s signature packaging, because the seller used “Fulfillment by Amazon,” paying the company to store and ship his product.

When I blocked Google, the entire internet slowed down for me, because almost every site I visited was using Google to supply its fonts, run its ads, track its users, or determine if its users were humans or bots. While blocking Google, I couldn’t sign into the data storage service Dropbox because the site thought I wasn’t a real person. Uber and Lyft stopped working for me, because they were both dependent on Google Maps for navigating the world. I discovered that Google Maps had a de facto monopoly on online maps. Even Google’s longtime critic Yelp used it to tell computer users where businesses could be found.

I came to think of Amazon and Google as the providers of the very infrastructure of the internet, so embedded in the architecture of the digital world that even their competitors had to rely on their services.

Facebook, Apple and Microsoft came with their own challenges. While Facebook was less debilitating to block, I missed Instagram (which Facebook owns) terribly, and I stopped getting news from my social circle, like the birth of a good friend’s child. “I just assume that if I post something on Facebook, everyone will know about it,” she told me when I called her weeks later to congratulate her. I tried out an alternative called Mastodon, but a social network devoid of any of your friends isn’t much fun.

Apple was hard to leave because I had two Apple computers and an iPhone, so I wound up getting some radical new hardware in order to keep accessing the internet and making phone calls.

Apple and Google’s Android software have a duopoly on the smartphone market. Wanting to avoid both companies, I wound up getting a dumb phone — a Nokia 3310 on which I had to relearn the fine art of texting on numerical phone keys — and a laptop with a Linux operating system from a company called Purism that is trying to create “an ethical computing environment,” namely by helping its users avoid the tech giants.

Yes, there are alternatives for products and services offered by the tech giants, but they are harder to find and to use.

Microsoft, which is not in the antitrust hot seat this time around but knows what it feels like, was easy to block on the consumer level. As my colleague Steve Lohr notes, Microsoft is “mainly a supplier of technology to business customers” these days.

But like Amazon, Microsoft has a cloud service, and so a few sites went dark for me, as did two Microsoft-owned services I used frequently, LinkedIn and Skype. Not being able to use tech giant-owned services I love was a hazard of this experiment: As The Wall Street Journal noted, the tech giants have bought more than 400 companies and start-ups over the last decade.

Critics of the big tech companies are often told, “If you don’t like the company, don’t use its products.” My takeaway from the experiment was that it’s not possible to do that. It’s not just the products and services branded with the big tech giant’s name. It’s that these companies control a thicket of more obscure products and services that are hard to untangle from tools we rely on for everything we do, from work to getting from point A to point B.

Many people called what I did “digital veganism.” Digital vegans are deliberative about the hardware and software they use and the data they consume and share, because information is power, and increasingly a handful of companies seem to have it all.

There were two very different types of reaction to the story. Some people said that it proved just how essential these companies are to the American economy and how useful they are to consumers, meaning regulators shouldn’t interfere with them. Others, like Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York and ex officio member of the House’s antitrust committee, said at the time that the experiment was proof of their monopolistic power.

“By virtue of controlling essential infrastructure, these companies appear to have the ability to control access to markets,” Mr. Nadler said. “In some basic ways, the problem is not unlike what we faced 130 years ago, when railroads transformed American life — both enabling farmers and producers to access new markets, but also creating a key chokehold that the railroad monopolies could exploit.”

If I were still blocking the tech giants today, I wouldn’t have been able to watch this week’s antitrust hearing online. C-SPAN streamed it live via YouTube, which Google owns.

After the experiment was over, though, I went back to using the companies’ services again, because as it demonstrated, I didn’t really have any other choice.

A lot of us have run into storage issues on our Gmail account. Here’s how you can fix it.

A lot of us have run into storage issues on our Gmail account. There have been times we have received a notification stating the storage of Gmail account is full and mails need to be deleted in order to receive new ones. Google provides users with a total of 15GB storage for free, this is the storage for Drive files, emails, WhatsApp backups, among others. If you have an Android phone, filling the 15GB is very easy.

Google forums are filled with queries related to storage full issues and two answers get repeated a lot. First, to purchase additional cloud storage from Google at Rs 130 per month for 100GB, and the second is to clean up some space to accommodate new mails.

To buy additional storage you will need to select the amount of storage you want and add your credit card details to make the purchase. After doing this once, Google will set up a recurring payment from your account and you will get additional space until you decide to end the subscription. However, to add new data or receive new emails you will have to clear up the storage and bring the amount of space your account uses to below 15GB.

There are three ways in which you can free up space on your Google account: Delete files by size in Google Drive, Delete mails, Google Photos.

Folks on this forum tipped me off to a thistle I had in my garden, and I’ve been treating that at least weekly for the past several months. So I figured I’d turn to y’all for help again.

I’ve noticed a new weed, mostly distinguished by it’s super sharp thorns. I was nearly unable to touch the stems of these weeds even with sheet metal gloves. They are growing tall, and are so solidly in the ground I ended up snipping them near the root because most of them I couldn’t pull. Flowers appear to be white in color.

Perhaps it’s possible that these are thistle too, but they are VERY different from the other, much more abundant thistle I have in my beds.

It’s mid July here in the DC suburbs of Southern Maryland.

4 Answers 4

Looking at your photos, one of the plants is displaying a group of white flowers and what appears to be a round green fruit. Along with the leaf morphology and sharp spines, it looks like it is a plant commonly referred to as “horse nettle” (Solanum carolinense). It is a poisonous/toxic weed member of the tomato family – Solanaceae. It is a North American native species.

You also mention difficulty pulling them up. In addition to fruit/seed, this species of plant propagates by a spreading penetrating rhizome that is difficult to extract from the ground. Two links below give more information.

I’m not sure what it is, other than to say it appears to be a berrying plant similar to others in the Rubus genus (blackberry and so on), but because I don’t recognise it, I wouldn’t advise eating any berries because for all I know, they might be toxic. Likely a berry or the seeds from it have been dropped by birds, and that’s how it got there.

Like most plants in the genus, they rapidly put down long roots which become deep and woody over time – this is an occasion to get out your long handled full sized garden fork and dig out the root before it gets any bigger. Pulling it by hand without digging won’t be successful, and cutting it down will encourage bigger and more widespread roots to form, with several new stems arising from them. Any invading seedlings like these should be dug out as soon as you notice them – where there’s one, there may well be more over time.

There’s a lot of problems with simple motivation:

Motivation is fleeting

Motivation comes and goes however it wants. It might not last to the end of the week, end of the day, or even the end of blog post you just read. It’s fleeting.

Motivation is situational

Motivation is based on your current situation. How do you feel? If you don’t feel like doing it, then you’re off the hook. You don’t have to do it – because you don’t feel like it!

But then you don’t do it and you just feel worse and more stuck than ever.

Motivation is everywhere.

Everywhere you go, you see people trying to get motivated to do something, to make a change. They’ll go read something, watch something or attend a conference and come away “motivated.” But that only leaves them “motivated”, it doesn’t move them to action.

“I’m motivated to do this”. “I’m motivated to do that”. Stop being motivated and just do it already! You don’t need more motivation – you need discipline.

See discipline is a whole different animal.

Discipline is Consistent

The consistency of discipline is what makes it discipline. You go out and do it, day after day.

Discipline Is Habitual

Discipline doesn’t just “happen.” It’s intentional and it’s repeated. Every. Single. Day.

Discipline Is Rare

Discipline doesn’t sound like fun, but it’s how you see results.

Motivation is the start, but if it’s not solidified into a discipline, it usually fades away into regret pretty quickly once you realize you never acted on it.

How To Be More Disciplined

Get Rid Of Your Excuses

Create Routines

Don’t leave it to chance. When you discipline yourself, it’s like programming as a robot. There’s no more emotion involved. It’s simply “if this…then that.”

That’s why a plan of attack is so crucial. You don’t have to decide what you want to do every single day when you wake up. You don’t have 100 different decisions points. You decide once to follow the plan and then wake up every morning and reference said plan.

You’ve already decided you’re going to do it. You don’t have to decide anymore, you just have to do it..

Decide if it’s Worth It

Of course, making that initial decision will be tough.

Ask yourself, how bad do you want it? You will have to sacrifice something at some point. If you want it bad enough, it’ll be worth it. If you decide that it is worth it, then…

Invest In It

Literally. Money has a way of routing your priorities. Want to look at where you spend most of your time? Look to where you’re spending most of your money. There’s probably a correlation.

Get yourself personally invested in whatever you want to do. Make NOT achieving what you want painful.

When I was beginning my six pack challenge, I told Vic I’d give $500 to the absolute worst person I could imagine – my arch-nemesis.

Sure enough, I woke up every morning thinking about how pissed I’d be if I had to give Steve $500.

After the first two weeks, I had enough momentum that I didn’t even need that as motivation anymore, but the first few weeks you can be sure that that investment was enough to make sure I made my disciplines a priority.

Invest in your goal. Make a bet, hire a trainer, but invest it in a way that actually means something to you and will help route your priorities in the way you want to.

Keep Going

When you really, really, really want to give up, don’t stop. Keep going. Discipline doesn’t depend on your feelings. It happens whether or not you “feel” like it.

When you think you are done, you’re only 40% of what your body is capable of doing. That’s just the limit that we put on ourselves. – David Goggins

Get A Lobotomy

Remove your brain from your equation. Your mind sucks. It will tell you all of the things you’re not capable of doing because it wants to protect itself. It wants to play it safe. It wants to be comfortable.

Meanwhile, your body will sit there and not say anything to the contrary even though it knows it can run triathlons, marathons, climb mountains, and get a six pack if you just give it the chance.

Do a manual override. Tell your brain to shut up and just go do it anyways. Turn your brain off.

When you brain tells you it’s impossible, tell your brain,

That’s nice, I’m going to do it anyways.

Yes, this might mean that you’ll end up getting into arguments with yourself. Do it anyways.

Get Your Shoes On, Get Out The Door

If nothing else, put your shoes on, get out the door.

Your room/house/cubicle/wherever is the ultimate bastion of safety. If you stay there, you’ll never want to leave.

Just get started. Figure everything else out on the way. Getting out the door is half the battle.

You don’t need more inspiration. You don’t need more motivation. You need more discipline and you need to start now.

If you want to kill your excuses, and get disciplined while finally getting in shape, Impossible Abs can help.

Norton 360. Комплексная защита устройств, в которую входят антивирусные программы, Password Manager, резервное копирование в облаке для ПК ‡‡, 4 и многое другое. Все в одном решении.

Бренд Norton является составляющей NortonLifeLock Inc.

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  • How Google uses location information
  • How Google uses credit card numbers for payments
  • How Google Voice works
  • Google Product Privacy Guide
  • How Google retains data we collect
    • How Google anonymizes data
• FAQ

Privacy & Terms

• Technologies
• Advertising
• How Google uses cookies
• How Google uses pattern recognition
• How Google uses location information
• How Google uses credit card numbers for payments
• How Google Voice works
• Google Product Privacy Guide
• How Google retains data we collect
  • How Google anonymizes data

We collect data as you use Google services. What we collect, why we collect it, and how you can manage your information are described in our Privacy Policy. This retention policy describes why we hold onto different types of data for different periods of time.

Some data you can delete whenever you like, some data is deleted automatically, and some data we retain for longer periods of time when necessary. When you delete data, we follow a deletion policy to make sure that your data is safely and completely removed from our servers or retained only in anonymized form. How Google anonymizes data

Information retained until you remove it

We offer a range of services that allow you to correct or delete data stored in your Google Account. For example, you can:

We’ll keep this data in your Google Account until you choose to remove it. And if you use our services without signing in to a Google Account, we also offer you the ability to delete some information linked to what you use to access our services, like a device, browser or app.

Data that expires after a specific period of time

In some cases, rather than provide a way to delete data, we store it for a predetermined period of time. For each type of data, we set retention timeframes based on the reason for its collection. For example, to ensure that our services display properly on many different types of devices, we may retain browser width and height for up to 9 months. We also take steps to anonymize certain data within set time periods. For example, we anonymize advertising data in server logs by removing part of the IP address after 9 months and cookie information after 18 months.

Information retained until your Google Account is deleted

We keep some data for the life of your Google Account if it’s useful for helping us understand how users interact with our features and how we can improve our services. For example, after you delete a specific Google search from My Activity, we might keep information about how often you search for things, but not what you searched for. When you delete your Google Account, the information about how often you search for things is also removed.

Information retained for extended time periods for limited purposes

Sometimes business and legal requirements oblige us to retain certain information, for specific purposes, for an extended period of time. For example, when Google processes a payment for you, or when you make a payment to Google, we’ll retain this data for longer periods of time as required for tax or accounting purposes. Reasons we might retain some data for longer periods of time include:

Enabling safe and complete deletion

When you delete data in your Google account, we immediately start the process of removing it from the product and our systems. First, we aim to immediately remove it from view and the data may no longer be used to personalize your Google experience. For example, if you delete a video you watched from your My Activity dashboard, YouTube will immediately stop showing your watch progress for that video.

We then begin a process designed to safely and completely delete the data from our storage systems. Safe deletion is important to protect our users and customers from accidental data loss. Complete deletion of data from our servers is equally important for users’ peace of mind. This process generally takes around 2 months from the time of deletion. This often includes up to a month-long recovery period in case the data was removed unintentionally.

Each Google storage system from which data gets deleted has its own detailed process for safe and complete deletion. This might involve repeated passes through the system to confirm all data has been deleted, or brief delays to allow for recovery from mistakes. As a result, deletion could sometimes take longer when extra time is needed to safely and completely delete the data.

Our services also use encrypted backup storage as another layer of protection to help recover from potential disasters. Data can remain on these systems for up to 6 months.

As with any deletion process, things like routine maintenance, unexpected outages, bugs, or failures in our protocols may cause delays in the processes and timeframes defined in this article. We maintain systems designed to detect and remediate such issues.

Security, fraud & abuse prevention

Description

To protect you, other people, and Google from fraud, abuse, and unauthorized access.

Scenarios

For example, when Google suspects someone is committing ad fraud.

Financial record-keeping

Description

When Google is a party to a financial transaction, including when Google processes your payment or when you make a payment to Google. Lengthy retention of this information is often required for purposes such as accounting, dispute resolution and compliance with tax, escheatment, anti-money laundering, and other financial regulations.

Scenarios

For example, when you purchase apps from the Play Store or products from the Google Store.

Complying with legal or regulatory requirements

Description

To meet any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request, or is required to enforce applicable Terms of Service, including investigation of potential violations.

Scenarios

For example, if Google receives a lawful subpoena.

Ensuring the continuity of our services

Description

To ensure continuity of service for you and other users.

Scenarios

For example, when you share information with other users (such as when you have sent an email to someone else), deleting it from your Google Account will not eliminate copies maintained by the recipients.

Direct communications with Google

Description

If you have directly communicated with Google, through a customer support channel, feedback form, or a bug report, Google may retain reasonable records of those communications.

Scenarios

For example, when you send feedback within a Google app like GMail or Drive.

Autonomous systems might eventually require regulation, but experts say no single policy can govern all artificial intelligence.

Dan is a writer, reporter, and producer. He is currently a reporter for at CBS News and was previously a Senior Writer for TechRepublic.

Artificial intelligence is ubiquitous. Mobile maps route us through traffic, algorithms can now pilot automobiles, virtual assistants help us smoothly toggle between work and life, and smart code is adept at surfacing our next our new favorite song.

But AI could prove dangerous, too. Tesla CEO Elon Musk once warned that biased, unmonitored and unregulated AI could be the “greatest risk we face as a civilization.” Instead, AI experts are concerned that automated systems are likely to absorb bias from human programmers. And when bias is coded into the algorithms that power AI it will be nearly impossible to remove.

Examples of AI bias are copious: In July 2015 the Google Photos AI system labeled black people as gorillas; in March 2018 CNET reported that Amazon and Google’s smart devices appear to have trouble understanding accents; in October, 2018 Amazon scuttled an AI-powered job recruitment tool that appeared to discriminate against women; in May, 2019 a report from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) found that AI personal assistants can reinforce harmful gender stereotypes.

To better understand how AI might be governed, and how to prevent human bias from altering the automated systems we rely on every day, CNET spoke with Salesforce AI experts Kathy Baxter and Richard Socher in San Francisco. Regulating the technology might be challenging, and the process will require nuance, said Baxter.

The industry is working to develop “trusted AI that is responsible, that it is mindful, and safeguards human rights,” she said. “That we make sure [the process] does not infringe on those human rights. It also needs to be transparent. It has to be able to explain to the end user what is it doing, and give them the opportunity to make informed choices with it.”

Salesforce and other tech firms, Baxter said, are developing cross-industry guidance on the criteria for data used in AI data models. “We will show the factors that are used in a model like age, race, gender. And we’re going to raise a flag if you’re using one of those protected data categories.”

How are we to behave toward one another? Morality is a social phenomenon. Think about this. If a person is alone on some deserted island would anything that person did be moral or immoral? That person may do things that increase or decrease the chance for survival or rescue but would those acts be moral or immoral? Most of what we are concerned with in Ethics is related to the situation in which humans are living with others. Humans are social animals. Society contributes to making humans what they are. For humans there arises the question of how are humans to behave toward one another.

What are the rules to be? How are we to learn of them? Why do we need them?

WHY BE MORAL?

Consider what the world would be like if there were no traffic rules at all. Would people be able to travel by automobiles, buses and other vehicles on the roadways if there were no traffic regulations? The answer should be obvious to all rational members of the human species. Without basic rules, no matter how much some would like to avoid them or break them, there would be chaos. The fact that some people break the rules is quite clearly and obviously not sufficient to do away with the rules. The rules are needed for transportation to take place.

Why are moral rules needed? For example, why do humans need rules about keeping promises, telling the truth and private property? This answer should be fairly obvious. Without such rules people would not be able to live amongst other humans. People could not make plans, could not leave their belongings behind them wherever they went. We would not know who to trust and what to expect from others. Civilized, social life would not be possible. So, the question is :

Why should humans care about being moral?

REASONS : There are several answers.

Sociological: Without morality social life is nearly impossible.

Psychological:

People care about what others think of them. Reputation and social censure

Some people care about doing the right thing. Conscience

Theological : Some people care about what will happen after death, to their soul or spirit. For many religions there is an afterlife that involves a person’s being rewarded or punished for what they have done.

So, that is out of the way. We know that we should be moral and so should others and without some sense of morality it would be very difficult if not impossible for large numbers of humans to be living with one another. Now to the questions that deal with the rules of morality and all the rules which govern human behavior. First, some terms need to be clarified.

Mores – customs and rules of conduct

Etiquette – rules of conduct concerning matters of relatively minor importance but which do contribute to the quality of life. Violations of such rules may bring social censure. Etiquette deals with rules concerning dress and table manners and deal with politeness. Violations would bring denunciations for being, RUDE or CRUDE or GROSS. Friendships would not likely break up over violations of these rules as they would for violating rules of morality, e.g., lies and broken promises! These rules are not just “made up by a bunch of old British broads” as one student once volunteered in class. But they are made up by people to encourage a better life. In each society there are authorities on these matters and there are collections of such rules. Many books are sold each year to prospective brides who want to observe the proper rules of decorum and etiquette. There are newspapers that have regular features with questions and answers concerning these matters.

Etiquette deals with matters such as when do you place the napkin on your lap when you sit at a dining table? How long do you wait on HOLD on a telephone call with someone with call waiting? Should you use a cell phone at the dining table? Should you have a beeper on or a cell phone on in class? In a movie theatre?

(check on the answers to these questions-Hint-There are books on etiquette and now you can also surf the internet – the answers are out there!)

Morality – rules of right conduct concerning matters of greater importance. Violations of such can bring disturbance to individual conscience and social sanctions.

Law- rules which are enforced by society. Violations may bring a loss of or reduction in freedom and possessions.

So we have many rules and guidelines in relation to our behavior. In Ethics the focus is on the moral rules governing behavior. What principles are to serve as the basis for those rules?

Proceed to the next section of the chapter by clicking here>> section.

M ars is a lousy place to try to live—what with the paralyzing cold, the blistering radiation and the thin carbon dioxide atmosphere. That hasn’t stopped us from looking for life on Mars or from hoping to live there ourselves one day. The Red Planet was once a watery world like ours, after all, with oceans and seas and rushing river valleys. Microbial life that got started in those days could, scientists theorize, still be holding on in pockets today.

That theory may well be a good one, but the odds just got a lot slimmer. According to a new study in Scientific Reports, the Martian soil itself may be toxic to bacteria. Any microorganisms that could have emerged in the past would be poisoned to death today.

When the Viking 1 and 2 spacecraft landed on Mars in 1976, they detected what appeared to be perchlorates in the Martian soil, and three subsequent spacecraft, including the Curiosity rover, which is still hard at work on the Red Planet, confirmed that finding. A highly oxidized form of chlorine, perchlorates can serve as an energy source for bacteria—a simple food that helps them live off the land. What’s more, like common salts, perchlorates lower the melting point of water, allowing it to exist in life-friendly liquid form. The problem is, perchlorates can also be toxic to bacteria, depending on the presence of ultraviolet radiation—which, unfortunately, bathes Mars continuously.

To determine whether the compound is a good thing or a bad thing for life, postgraduate student Jennifer Wadsworth and professor Charles Cockell, both of the University of Edinburgh’s School of Physics and Astronomy, decided to create a little bit of Mars in the lab to see if a type of common Earthly bacterium—Bacillus subtilis—survived. Wadsworth and Cockell first steeped the bacteria in a watery solution of magnesium perchlorate, the type most commonly found on Mars, and in roughly the same concentrations. They then exposed it to ultraviolet radiation in the same general wavelength as that which bathes Mars. The standard they used to measure how the bacteria fared was as generous as it could possibly be: viability was considered anything more than zero surviving cells.

Even that low bar, however, was impossible to clear on the simulated Mars. The irradiated cells in the perchlorate solution were completely sterilized within 30 seconds. Radiated cells without the perchlorate did better, but not meaningfully so: it took just 60 seconds for the colony to be wiped out.

Actual cells on the actual Mars, however, might have an edge, because liquid water does not pool on the surface. To approximate Mars more closely, the researchers next deposited the cells within simulated rocks—actually silicate disks—in a dry perchlorate environment. Those cells fared better when they were hit with radiation, with the number of surviving bacteria falling 9.1 fold—bad, but better than the 100% wipeout. Cells bathed in radiation without the perchlorate experienced just a two-fold fall-off. There is nothing chemically protective about the silica, the researchers believe; it’s simply that it’s harder for the radiation to penetrate the solid disks.

Overall however, Wadsworth and Cockell wrote, “the surface of Mars is lethal to vegetative cells and renders much of the surface and near-surface regions uninhabitable.”

But “much” of the surface isn’t all of the surface, and there are a few things that work in the bacteria’s favor. For starters, there’s the cold. The investigators initially conducted their experiment at a comfortable 77° F (25° C), a temperature at which the bacteria succumbed fast. But when they dropped it to just over 39° F (4° C), the bacterial loss was reduced tenfold. Peak surface temperatures on Mars can reach nearly 76° F (22° C), but average temperature across the planet is a vastly colder -67° F (-55° C).

Somewhere between the too-warm temperature at which the perchlorate would be deadly and the too-cold point where bacteria would freeze to death anyway, there should be a comfort zone. Other variables, such as the concentration of perchlorate—which is not consistent everywhere on Mars—and protection that subsurface bacteria would have from ultraviolet radiation might also allow for pockets of life.

If there was any upside to the findings, it was in the type of cells Wadsworth and Cockell used in their study. Bacillus subtilis are among the commonest Earthly bacteria that can contaminate spacecraft before they leave the ground. The fear has always been that if they survived the interplanetary trip, the cells could contaminate Mars too, perhaps outcompeting native organisms. The fact that Mars is so unfriendly to at least this one type of life is very good news. The fact that it could be similarly hostile to all life is decidedly less so.

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That Parmesan cheese is actually wood, that honey has corn syrup, and the cake is a lie. There’s no guarantee the food you’re buying at the store is what it says it is, so keep an eye out for these usual suspects if you don’t want to waste your money on fake, inferior products.

The distribution and selling of counterfeit foods is officially known as economically motivated adulteration (EMA), a subcategory of food fraud. EMA can be anything from altering the weight of the product by adding a lower quality ingredient to tampering with the product’s label. Diluting fruit juice with water, adding chemicals to boost the protein content of a food, and changing the expiration dates on meat labels are all good examples. These acts are illegal, of course, and potential health concerns, but the issue is widespread and hard for the government to control. In fact, according to the U.S. Pharmacopeial Convention (USP), an estimated 7% of products in grocery stores nationwide contain fraudulent ingredients. Here are the most common offenders.

Parmesan Cheese

If you pay premium prices for decent Parmesan cheese, you’d think that’s exactly what you’d get. But the FDA has been cracking down on fraudulent Parmesan cheese for years now. In multiple instances, the FDA has found companies shilling “100% real” Parmesan with fillers like wood pulp, cellulose, and super cheap cheddar. In fact, an FDA analysis suggests there’s no actual Parmesan cheese in the Market Pantry brand 100% grated Parmesan Cheese sold at Target. The same goes for the Always Save and Best Choice brands of 100% Grated Parmesan Cheese sold in 30 different states, which mostly contain mozzarella, white cheddar, and cellulose.

If you want the real deal, Liz Thorpe , author of The Murray’s Cheese Handbook and The Cheese Chronicles , recommends you buy a wedge of cheese from a whole wheel with the words “Parmigiano-Reggiano” on the rind:

Parmigiano-Reggiano is a legally protected designation of origin that’s used in Europe only for Italian cheese. The beauty of this cheese is that you can always know that you’re getting the real thing because the name ‘Parmigiano-Reggiano’ is burned onto its rind in an unmistakable dotted pattern.

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That means hitting up the deli at the supermarket or going to a specialty shop, then grating or shredding the cheese yourself. Also, take note of the price. Parmesan is expensive because it takes a lot of time and a lot of milk to make. If it’s super cheap, that’s a red flag. That goes for everything on this list. If it looks too good to be true, it probably is.

Olive Oil

Olive oil is tampered with in a lot of ways so distributors can make money. As Tom Mueller at The New Yorker explains , fraudsters will dilute olive oil with cheaper oils like vegetable oil, mislabel the olive oil as extra-virgin when it’s not, or lie about the oil’s origin, saying the oil was made in Italy when it’s really a mixed batch of oils from all over the Mediterranean. Major Sergio Tirro of the Italian Carabinieri, and one of the top food fraud investigators in Europe, demonstrated how easy it is to fake olive oil for 60 Minutes . A little sunflower oil, a few drops of chlorophyll, and a dash of beta-carotene is it all it takes to make a passable fake. In fact, Mueller estimates that as much as 75% of the olive oil in the U.S. is adulterated or mislabeled, and a two-part study from the UC Davis Olive Center suggests that 73% of samples from the five top-selling imported “extra virgin” olive oil brands in the U.S.—Bertolli, Carapelli, Colavita, Star, Pompeian—failed to meet International Olive Council standards.

Fortunately, there are a few things you can do when you’re shopping for olive oil. First, look for a harvest date on the label . Bottles of olive oil without harvest dates may be fraudulent or from extremely old batches that distributors are trying to unload. Second, look for a seal of approval from the local or regional authority where it was bottled. This type of certification proves the oil is from where it says, and that the product isn’t a mish-mash of different oils. Just because a bottle of olive oil has an Italian flag on it, doesn’t mean it was made there . Also, as Guy Campanile explains on 60 Minutes, check to see if the city of origin is mentioned in addition to the country. You can easily check to see if that area is known for its olive oil production with a Google search. Lastly, check the label for the olive oil’s cultivars , or type of olives that were used. If they don’t list them on the bottle, that doesn’t bode well for the quality of olive oil inside.

What to Look for When Buying Olive Oil

Provided you prepare your own food. ever, you’ve got a bottle of olive oil in the pantry—it’s one

Spices

As explained in the video above from ABC news , the USP found that imported spices like saffron, black pepper, and paprika are commonly cut with cheap fillers. Saffron is incredibly expensive, so fraudsters will often mix in dried safflowers, dyed onions, and turmeric to boost their profits. And because almost all saffron is imported to the U.S. , it’s harder to regulate what might be in it. Ground black pepper has been mixed with ground papaya seeds, buckwheat flower, and black pepper plant stems . And paprika imported from Hungary has been cut with white pepper, curuma, and even brick powder in the past .

The most effective way to avoid the fake stuff is by buying spices whole. Look for whole peppercorns, saffron threads, and whole dried paprika peppers , then grind them yourself. Don’t worry, grinding whole spices into common measurements isn’t as hard as it sounds. One teaspoon of whole peppercorns equals one and a half teaspoons ground, saffron can be used whole or ground to taste, and a batch of fresh ground paprika peppers can last you around eight months . Just make sure you skip the questionable pre-packaged stuff at the dollar store and shop with local dealers or online sellers who specialize in bulk spices .

This Cheat Sheet Lists the Shelf Life of Common Spices

Spices don’t last forever, and fresher is better. If you have a few spices you don’t use all that…

By default, campaigns on Google and Bing automatically show dynamic ad extensions. Quick fixes on how you could remove or manage them.

It’s three a.m. You’re uneasy, but you don’t really know why. You’ve recently audited your accounts, you’re on top of your routine maintenance, and you’re actively testing ways to increase efficiency and grow your account.

You’ve done your due diligence, so why the nagging feeling that something’s wrong? Since you can’t sleep, you decide to check up on your ads in the wild and run a live search to put yourself at ease. That’s when it hits you. Your ads are showing with extensions you didn’t specify. Even worse, some of them don’t even really make sense.

What are these, and where did they come from?

By default, campaigns on Google and Bing are automatically eligible to show dynamic extensions, ranging from site links, callouts, structured snippets, call extensions, and app extensions. Additionally, Bing offers “Dynamic Ad Enhancements” which are anything from dynamically generated ad description texts to badges highlighting promos and deals.

The content of these extensions is based on your landing pages, ad copy, information from your domain, your Google My Business profile, and third-parties in the case of reviews and seller ratings. The exact logic Google and Bing Ads use to determine when automated extensions show is a closely held secret, as is the content of those extensions themselves. Only performance metrics associated with the type of extension is viewable in each interface.

Depending on how your site is indexed and crawled by each platform, wildly different data is available to populate these extensions. That could lead to showing outdated information or content from irrelevant pages with your ad. Seeing an extension driving particularly strong performance without being able to see what that extension actually is is incredibly frustrating, but seeing an irrelevant or outdated addition to your ads on a live search is even worse. Even more so if your client happens across one before you do.

While each platform is heavily invested in improving overall user experience and improving ad experiences, automated extensions are far from perfect. Further, SEM managers frequently need to maintain control over ad messaging for legal compliance and client needs. Some examples would be adherence to branding guidelines, highlighting specific events and promotions, and using particular approved language. These make automated extensions a non-starter regardless of performance.

Measuring the impact of extensions

Both Google and Bing warn against the potential negative performance impact of opting out of automated extensions. If your account doesn’t have specific branding or compliance requirements, you should gauge automated extension performance against your existing extensions before opting out of anything. There will be clear winners and losers in every account. As automated extensions are frequently changing, their performance is likely to ebb and flow. Hopefully, dynamic extensions that don’t resonate with users get weeded out of the mix by the ad platforms.

When you find something that works, it’s nice to be able to build on it. Similarly, if you find something doesn’t work, it’s a great time to stop doing that. Unfortunately, both ad systems seem determined to make certain extensions work, even when their performance doesn’t merit keeping them around. And, since both the underpinning logic behind automated extensions serving as well as the content of those extensions is a mystery, it can be difficult, if not impossible, to get a good handle on what exactly is driving those decisions.

To quantify the impact extensions have on your account in Google, analyze ad performance segmented by click type to determine which part of an ad unit users are interacting with. To determine how individual extensions perform on the ad level, segment your data with This Extension vs Other. In Bing, there are multiple ad extension reports available within the Reports tab just not directly in the interface.

How do I get rid of these?

To manage your dynamic extensions in the Google Ads interface, click into the “Ads & Extensions” tab, and then click into the “Advanced Options” menu on the far right-hand side of the screen.

What if I told you that most people could cut out a huge chunk of health problems just by eliminating two groups of food? Well, you can.

Cutting out these two food groups can help regulate your hormone levels, make it easier to lose weight, improve gut health, normalize blood sugar levels & even improve allergies. If you take a look at food groups through the lens of the 80/20 Principle, these two foods would be the 20% of foods that cause 80% of the problems in most people’s diets.

So what are they? Well here are the two foods you should stop eating – yesterday preferably. Here we go.

Dairy

Table of Contents

What Standard Nutrition Advice Would Have You Believe:

“It’s great for you! It’s got calcium! But be careful of that fatty, whole milk. Better drink either skim or 1%, just to be safe – and try to forget that 1% tastes like water. I mean it has to be good for you right? Besides thousands of terrible milk mustaches & “got milk” campaigns can’t be wrong – can they?”

Why Dairy Is Actually Terrible For You

Dairy has different levels of bad, but particularly low-fat, 1% and skim milk are highly insullogenic – that means they cause your insulin levels to spike and causes your body to stop burning fat. And don’t get me started on the fact that it’s nearly impossible to find chocolate milk without HFCS and corn starch in it. Really, corn starch in your milk? When’s the last time you said “yum” to corn starch? Toss in the fact that a huge portion of the population is lactose intolerant and the links to cancer that milk is known for and the picture isn’t looking too pretty.

If you’re going to have dairy, make it either fermented (cheese, whey protein, grassfed butter, or yogurt – without a ton of a sugar). Sure, ice cream is delicious but there’s really no need for a daily shellacking of dairy in your diet.

Grains

Standard Nutrition Advice:

You need grains more than you need oxygen – they’re that important! Why else would we need 6-11 servings a day? I mean, just look at this chart!

“They help with digestion & give you fiber! Not to mention, it’s completely UNREALISTIC to actually cut out ALL grains from your diet. I’m Italian, I can’t live without grains – we’re not animals, you know?”

Why Grains Are Terrible For You

Grains are actually pretty unnecessary. They contain gluten, lectins and phytates that make minerals unavailable to your body & create situations prime for obesity.

Oh, and that’s just the start. It can lead to leaky gut, weight gain and even cause type 2 diabetes. That’s before we get into how these simple carbohydrates affect your blood sugar & insulin levels and cause you to store fat instead of burning it and using it for fuel. Whether you’re into paleo or not, when you look at grains (and wheat especially), there’s a ton of really, really good reasons not to eat them.

Despite all of this, 6-11 servings of grains was common nutritional advice from the government up until 2011!

The truth is, for most people, there’s really very little reason to include many (or any) grains in their diet on a regular basis and once you try it, they’re not so “impossible” to cut out of your diet either. If you need a substantial amounts of carbohydrates (endurance athletes or power lifters come to mind), you can get them from vegetables & squashes that give you the energy sources you need without the added side effects of feces in your blood stream & type 2 diabetes (sounds like a good tradeoff to me).

Note: It’s funny that somehow both of these have made it into a standard american breakfast of cereal with milk – which is the absolute worst time to do this as the morning is your body’s prime time to burn fat and both of these “foods” bring that process to a screeching halt. Do yourself a favor & choose eggs & bacon for your morning breakfast instead.

80/20 your diet and take out these two foods from your diet. You might be surprised at the results.

Want to clean up your diet? Start with these two foods & cut out dairy & grains. Notice how you feel and see what happens.

Assuming you have your strong passwords in place and your two-factor authentication set up, you think your accounts are now safe? Think again. There’s much more to be done.

You might think your Social Security or bank account numbers are the most sensitive digits in your life. Nowadays, hackers can do far more damage with little effort using just your cell phone number. But unlike your Social Security number, you’re far less likely to keep your cell phone number a secret — otherwise nobody can contact you!

Whether you’re an AT&T, Verizon, Sprint or T-Mobile customer, every cell phone number can be a target for hackers. And it takes remarkably little effort to wreak havoc to your online life.

Why you need to protect your phone number

Your cell phone number is a single point of failure.

Think about it. You use your cell phone number all the time. You use it when you sign up to sites and services, and sometimes you’ll use it to log into an app or a game on your phone. Your phone number can be used to reset your account if you forget your password. And, you use it for two-factor authentication to securely login to your accounts.

If someone steals your phone number, they become you — for all intents and purposes. With your phone number, a hacker can start hijacking your accounts one by one by having a password reset sent to your phone. They can trick automated systems — like your bank — into thinking they’re you when you call customer service. And worse, they can use your hijacked number to break into your work email and documents — potentially exposing your employer up to data theft.

Just think of every site and service that has your phone number. That’s why you need to protect your phone number.

How do hackers steal cell phone numbers?

It’s easier than you might think. Phone numbers can be found anywhere – thanks in part to so many data breaches.

Often, hackers will find the cell phone number of their target floating around the internet (or from a phone bill in the garbage), and call up their carrier impersonating the customer. With a few simple questions answered — often little more than where a person lives or their date of birth, they ask the customer service representative to “port out” the phone number to a different carrier or a SIM card.

That’s it. As soon as the “port out” completes, the phone number activates on an attacker’s SIM card, and the hacker can send and receive messages and make calls as if they were the person they just hacked.

In most cases, the only sign that it happened is if the victim suddenly loses cell service for no apparent reason.

From there, it’s as simple as initiating password resets on accounts associated with that phone number. Facebook, Gmail, Twitter — and more. A hacker can use your hijacked phone number to steal all of your cryptocurrency, take over your vanity Instagram username or maliciously delete all of your data.

You can read what happened to TechCrunch’s own John Biggs when his phone number was hijacked.

In the worst cases, it can be difficult or impossible to get your phone number back — let alone the accounts that get broken into. Your best bet is to make sure it never happens in the first place.

What you can do to protect your phone number

Just like you can apply two-factor authentication to your online accounts, you can add a secondary security code to your cell phone account, too.

You can either call up customer services or do it online. (Many feel more reassured by calling up and talking to someone.) You can ask customer service, for example, to set a secondary password on your account to ensure that only you — the account holder — can make any changes to the account or port out your number.

Every carrier handles secondary security codes differently. You may be limited in your password, passcode or passphrase, but try to make it more than four to six digits. And make sure you keep a backup of the code!

For the major carriers:

• AT&T has a guide on how to set up extra security on your account.
• T-Mobile allows you to set up a customer passcode.
• Verizon explains how you can add a PIN to your account.
• Sprint also lets you add an account PIN for greater security.

If your carrier isn’t listed, you might want to check if they employ a similar secondary security code to your account to prevent any abuse. And if they don’t, maybe you should port out your cell phone number to a carrier that does.

When Gmail showed up in 2004 with its overwhelmingly generous 1GB of free space for everyone, we never thought we’d have to delete an email again—but even though that free space is now 15 times what it once was, email is more burdensome than ever.

It’s not really the available space that’s the problem in Gmail; it’s the sheer number of unread, unnecessary, and unsolicited emails clogging up the archives. Checking the inbox becomes depressing, running a useful search becomes nearly impossible, and systems of labels that once made sense have long since been abandoned.

It’s time to cut your losses, so here’s how you can start again from the beginning, and do better next time.

Deleting messages

The first step is to delete everything in your Gmail account. Now, we can’t be held responsible if you erase a message you later realize you actually needed to hang on to, so proceed at your own risk—if you want to make a backup of your emails first, use Google’s comprehensive export tool to get your emails out—though that’s really just delaying the inevitable and necessary purge.

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You can also forward the most useful messages out to another account (your starred messages and emails to and from the most important people in your life might be good places to check) or use Gmail’s POP/IMAP features to get your emails downloaded to a desktop client for safe keeping—Google has full instructions as to how to enable and use them here and here .

As for deleting all your messages, well that’s actually scarily simple: Go to the All Mail page , place a tick in the selection box to the top left, and when you see the Select all. message at the top, click it. Then click the trashcan icon at the top of the message list and in a few seconds all of your Gmail history will be gone.

Well, gone to the Trash folder anyway. If you don’t want to wait around for messages to auto-expire, you can go to the Trash and click Empty Trash now and then OK. You might want to visit the Spam folder as well, just to make sure absolutely everything’s gone. With any luck, you might experience a minute or two of peace before your inbox starts filling up again.

Erasing contacts

Gmail’s eagerness to make it simple for you to email your contacts is helpful sometimes, but it creates an unsightly mess in your contacts list if you’re not careful. People you only ever emailed once ten years ago can suddenly show up as contacts on your Android phone for no reason (we’ve seen it happen). For the most comprehensive email detox, you want to get rid of your contacts as well.

This is trickier to do, because as we’ve mentioned, your contacts sync across multiple Google services, like Android. Ideally we want to trim down any useless email addresses while keeping the important ones and without deleting anyone’s phone number along the way, and Google doesn’t really make this particularly easy to do.

A good place to start from the Contacts page is the Other Contacts category under the More heading—people that might pop up as suggestions when you’re typing out email addresses, but who you haven’t specifically added as contacts. As with emails, you can use the checkboxes on the left to select people, then click More (the three dots) and Delete contacts. You can also do some tidying by checking the Duplicates tab and seeing if any contacts can be merged.

If you have an Android phone, you’ve got another approach to try—open the Google Contacts app, tap Suggestions from the main menu, and you should get an option to remove junk contacts Google has spotted. After that it’s probably worth a manual purge through your main contacts list—be ruthless—and if you want to stop contacts from being automatically added in the future, go to the General tab of your Gmail settings and choose I’ll add contacts myself under the Create contacts for auto-complete heading.

Starting again

With a fresh new inbox and purged contact list to enjoy, it’s time to think about making sure your Gmail account never gets clogged up again. Being careful about who has your email address is a good start, though admittedly it might be too late for that—starting again with a new Google account is an option, and you can always get messages from your old account forwarded if you want (look under Forwarding and POP/IMAP in the Gmail settings screen).

As we’ve mentioned before , dots don’t make a difference in Gmail addresses, so emails sent to [email protected] and [email protected] go to the same inbox. Insert a dot into your address whenever you sign up for less important apps and services, and you can filter messages from all these places (e.g. emails sent to [email protected] rather than [email protected])—tell Gmail to mark them as read and archive or delete them immediately for a less busy inbox.

Another idea is to regularly trash all your emails once they’re more than a few months old. Type “older_than:1y” in the Gmail search box to find messages sent more than a year ago, for example, or “older_than:6m” to change the time frame to six months. These emails can then be selected and deleted, but if you’re worried about getting rid of something important, add “is:unimportant” to your search.

“No problem is insurmountable. With a little courage, teamwork, and determination, a person can do anything.”

Some problems seem far too overwhelming to solve. When you’re buried in debt or trying to bounce back from a huge error in judgment, it can feel like there’s no way out.

I remember when I first learned about my fibroids last year. Since I didn’t have health insurance at the time, I feared I wouldn’t be able to afford treatment, and I was tempted to beat myself up for allowing myself to be uninsured.

On top of that, I worried about my health. I wondered: Why did I develop those growths in the first place? What if they grew uncomfortably large before I was able to remove them? And what if I had other undiagnosed conditions?

Overpowered as I was with fears and regrets, it felt nearly impossible to identify a solution. But there was one—and it was far simpler than I realized at first.

As soon as I focused and stopped getting caught up in “should haves” and “what ifs,” I started researching insurance plans and found one for people with pre-existing conditions.

Of course, that was only the first step. I needed to find a good doctor, pick the best treatment, and find the money to pay for my part of the surgery. But it was all doable.

It may have taken several months, but eventually, I made my way to the other side of that challenge.

Now, three months post-surgery, I’m healthier and more energized. And though I know my fibroids can grow back at any time, regardless of what I do, I’m prepared to handle that if and when it happens.

I know that if the problem comes back, I can overcome it.

When we’re knee-deep in the messiness of an obstacle, it can feel like there’s no way around it. There isn’t—if we aren’t open to discovering it. We can only create and follow a plan if we believe it’s possible.

If your current challenge seems insurmountable, it might help you to step back and try to see things differently.

These questions may help you change your thinking about this problem and discover the action steps to solve it.

Taking Responsibility

When you acknowledge and accept a problem, and take responsibility for it, you then have the power to solve it. Start by asking yourself:

1. Did you play any part in creating this problem?

2. Are you doing anything now that might be making things worse?

3. Does a part of you want to hold onto the problem, maybe because it feels familiar or because there’s some pay off in keeping things as they are?

4. Are you waiting for someone else to step in and fix things for you?

5. Are you blaming someone else in a way that limits the action you can take?

Putting Things in Perspective

Are you overwhelmed because this seems like the worst thing that ever happened to you? Take a time out and ask yourself:

6. On a scale of one to ten—ten being the biggest hardship you’ve ever faced in your life—where does this problem fall?

7. Will this issue be relevant to you in one year? One month? One week?

8. Think about the major areas of your life—work, family, and hobbies, for example. How many areas does this one problem impact?

9. How much of your stress comes from the problem itself, and how much of it has to do with how (and how often) you’re thinking about it?

10. If the worst that could possibly happen happened, could you get through it, and maybe even benefit in some way?

Addressing Your Emotions

Hard to focus because you’re freaking out? Step back, take a deep breath, and ask yourself:

11. If you’re getting caught up in “what if” scenarios, can you remember other times when you imagined all the horrible things that could happen and none of them did?

12. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, can you break the problem into smaller, more manageable parts?

13. If you’re feeling defeated, can you see this is a test of your strength and impress yourself by rising to the occasion?

14. If you’re feeling guilty, can you express your remorse and begin forgiving yourself—and if not, what would it take to do that?

15. Can you make some time for deep breathing, meditation, or yoga to create some mental stillness?

Realizing It’s Not Insurmountable

It might be hard right now to see how you will get past this, but first you have to believe you can. Not sure? Ask yourself:

16. Have you successfully addressed similar problems in the past?

17. Have other people overcome similar challenges, and can you learn anything about what they did?

18. If a friend came to you with this problem, would you reassure that person that he or she could get past this, and how would you envision that happening?

19. Could you do this if you had help? Who can you ask for help?

20. Can you visualize yourself getting through this (realistically, not through magical thinking)? If you can visualize it, you can do it!

Working Toward a Solution

If you’ve taken responsibility for your problem, put things in perspective, tamed your emotional response, and recognized you can get through this, now it’s time to make that happen. Start by asking yourself:

21. If you accepted your fear and acted in spite of it, what would that entail?

22. When you create stillness and listen to your gut instinct, what do you learn?

23. What are your three strongest coping skills (creativity, strength, and resourcefulness, for example), and how can use them in this situation?

24. If other people have given you advice, what part of it resonates with you and why?

25. If you stopped making excuses and started taking action, what’s the first thing you would do?

You’ll notice the first four sets of questions all pertain to internal obstacles. That’s because so much of problem solving has to do with getting our own way.

The solutions aren’t always simple, but they become a lot simpler when we focus, take it step by step, and make a conscious effort to stay calm.

What problem’s been stressing you, and what can you do today to change how you think about it and respond to it?

About Lori Deschene

Lori Deschene is the founder of Tiny Buddha. She’s also the author of Tiny Buddha’s Gratitude Journal, Tiny Buddha’s Worry Journal, and other books and co-founder of Recreate Your Life Story, an online course that helps you let go of the past and live a life you love. For daily wisdom, join the Tiny Buddha list here. You can also follow Tiny Buddha on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.