When I posted about Autocade Year of Cars 2025 on Vivaldi Social, a chap in Germany, who clearly disliked cars, had a go at me. I pointed out that there were probably more EVs covered in the book than petrol- and diesel-powered cars, but the cynical chap wasn’t having any of it. There should be […]
Tag: Germany
Getting out of fascism: what history tells the US
US writer Chris Armitage has a piece on Medium, with two titles depending on where you look: ‘We live in a fascist nation. What now?’ and ‘I researched every Democratic attempt to stop fascism in history. The success rate after fascists were elected was 0%’. The key takeaway: ‘Once fascists win power democratically, they have […]
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January 2025 site: tests on occidental search engines: Bing recovers
After running my latest round of search engine site: tests, I think we can safely say that Bing has recovered in terms of its index size, and it’s no longer down where Alltheweb was in 2002. It actually has tens of millions of results for Microsoft’s own domain, and not a few lakh. This is, […]
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We’ll all soon know luxury Chinese car brands
I noted in the new Autocade Year of Cars that the French faltered in China because the Chinese marques no longer need them, especially when they are churning out superior product. They have no use for French cachet, especially as the brands edge upmarket. You’ve got the HIMA collective from Huawei, all with luxury marques, […]
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Using once-legitimate sites to host SEO spam
The web is full of bollocks these days, thanks to Google rewarding junk. Here’s The European Business Review, which looks like a legit publication. Not that you can tell from its website: As their latest print cover is on “AI”, then maybe it is only fitting that their website is stuffed […]
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Testing occidental search engines on site: again: Mojeek, Bing more normal
It was about time I had a look at the occidental search engines again, using a site:jackyan.com search to see how they fared. The previous test for this site was in May 2023. I knew Google was still terrible, and I knew Bing had improved since the days of having 10 results for the domain. […]
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For the sake of our city, it’s important to take the opportunities to move forward
The late 1990s were a heady time here in Aotearoa. The web—pre-Google, pre-monopolies—was indeed the great leveller: anyone with the right skills could create something online that competed at a global level. Aotearoa, which had for years felt a little backward in time—TV shows would arrive here two to three years after they aired in […]
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Copyright trolling: another fishy mob to block
After four months, we received another notice from Copytrack—it must be our 14th. As usual, I went back through our digital files and sent them our licence info. But this time, I got rather fed up, since we’ve successfully proved our position 100 per cent of the time, and I think we should be whitelisted. […]
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You never know where your interests will take you
A seven-year-old needs to figure this out: what would the Ford Escort Popular Plus be priced at if were assembled in Aotearoa? Amanda and I were chatting about prodigies. Some young people are amazing, doing uni classes at intermediate or high-school age, or playing piano like Mozart, and while not all of us have […]
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Who leads when the house of cards falls?
Scott Burchill makes a good analysis in Pearls and Irritations on how the US is ‘a rogue state’ and becoming a pariah (alongside Israel) over recent events in Gaza, and how its influence is waning. It’s hard to argue with a lot of his points; certainly here, with the exception of some politicians who either […]