Running site: searches for four of our sites across four engines

Google is hiding the number of results for any given search. Google hid this under ‘Tools’ some time ago but now that link no longer works universally. I was able to access it using a vulnerable browser that let everything through, and for this blog, at least, the count is surprisingly poor. Google is so […]

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The journey out

When I was an infant in Kowloon, a neighbourhood girl, Kit, used to come over to play. I suddenly thought about those days in the 1970s earlier today. When we left Hong Kong, we had not expected that our earlier residency application would be granted while we were on holiday in New Zealand. Some of […]

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Granddad’s war stories

On this day of remembrance, some thoughts about my paternal grandfather, the last member of my family to see active service (thank God). Like so many veterans, he did have PTSD after World War II. The eastern theatre took him around China and to Malaya and Singapore. He never talked much about his experiences but […]

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Autocade at 42 million, kicked off Weibo, and random links

The anorak posts about Autocade milestones now appear on Autocade World, and we hit 42 million page views earlier this week. In other news, a pro-China political post saw my Weibo suspended ‘temporarily’, no sign on when this will be lifted. Hence the Weibo logo disappearing from the footer of this blog. It is a […]

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Tariffs won’t make the Big Two great again

2020 Ford Fusion Titanium Hybrid in metallic copper.

From me on Autocade World: President Donald J. Trump has been talking about tariffs for a very long time, even as a businessman back in the ’80s. Back then he lamented that the US was being hard done by Japan, with all the Japanese cars and VCRs that Americans were buying, and yet the reverse […]

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Common-sense economics

I haven’t commented on US politics much lately, primarily because there are others who do it far better. If you want excellent insight without being weighed down in detail, read what Richard Murphy in the UK has to say on, say, US tariffs, or the madness of austerity economics. His blog Funding the Future has […]

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Baidu’s “AI” image enhancement tested: clever, but like a hallucination

Baidu has been offering “AI” enhancement of its images for a while, and yesterday I bit the bullet, created an account, and trialled it. It was a press image that I had in high-res, but Baidu’s image search, strangely, only had a low-res version of it. Could its “AI” turn it into a high-res image? […]

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If you want a slice of the pie, then compete

A very interesting analysis on Crikey by Bernard Keane on the turmoil the occident finds itself in. In the opening paragraphs we find this zinger about what the right wing believes it was to protect the west from. Protecting from whom? Name your favourite other—the Soviet Union. Islam. China. Declining birth rates. Secularism. Immigrants. Globalism. […]

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A new edition of Confucius’ 論語, The Analects

  Our third random paperback is out: 論語 (The Analects), as recorded by the followers of Confucius. After this, we’re likely sticking with our usual Lucire and Autocade brands in our publishing business for the remainder of 2025. The decision to do The Analects came from inspiration from one of my closest friends in London, […]

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Testing the search engines: quickest to index, more site: searches

Who was the quickest at indexing any part of Autocade World?   January 17: Google—probably because I had obtained an SSL certificate January 21: Internet Archive, because of ‘certificate transparency’ [January 30: First public mention by me on Facebook to get our members off there] January 31: Bing February 2: Mojeek   Yandex, Baidu, Brave […]

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