Th3 Core

Verizon launches, yet another, search engine based on Bing.  Oh and it's supposed to be private.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200116/07193943742/verizon-launches-new-private-search-engine-hopes-youve-forgotten-terrible-track-record-privacy.shtml

The problem is that many of Verizon's other promises (like its promise not to use the engine to build detailed profiles on you) requires some significant trust in Verizon

If you are searching for videos you might try  https://www.peteyvid.com/

It's  a privacy respecting meta video search engine.  Searches up to 60 sources including: Youtube, Vimeo, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Internet Archive.   It's kinda handy to see what is available across so many sources with one search.

We've all heard about Mastodon, but there is another trend of social networks built around blogs.  Micro.blog is one and it looks like Pine.blog is another.  There are others too.  Wordpress.com is about half way there with Wordpress Reader, only they don't seem willing to build the other half.

Indieweb.org advocates using Webmentions to comment directly between independent blogs and has developed a suite of Wordpress plugins that let you do that with other similarly equipped blogs.  Drupal also has Indieweb plugins and B2evolution has webmentions built in.

https://micro.blog/
https://pine.blog/
https://indieweb.org/

One of the major lessons of the twentieth century is that representative democracies and social safety nets are insurance policies for the upper classes.

Even late 19th Century.  I was watching a documentary about history of Chicago.  They pointed out an area that had once been all mansions of the uber rich (most mansions now replaced by swanky high rises)  but they indicated the locations of National Guard Armories of the same era which were purposely placed around the mansions to protect them in case of riots or civil uprising.  This back in the late 1800's and early 1900's.

Must be nice.

I keep waiting for Mozilla to bring out their Mark II smart speaker.
https://mycroft.ai/blog/mark-ii-update-december/

When they do I'll ditch Alexa provided I can get news and weather updates out of the Mark II.

>streaming

I do have streaming apps on my iPad.

I'm staying out too.  Why would I want my toaster hooked to Wifi?

Related on cars:

James May compares a Tesla EV to a Toyota Hydrogen Fuel Cell Toyota.  Worth a watch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaIW5CQQ3Zo

Fuel cell cars might have a market here in the US with our longer distances.  The big thing is they are fast to refuel.

The thing with AMC, if you bought a Gremlin in the 1970's with a manual transmission, that manual transmission was a leftover from the Rambler more than a decade earlier.  They seemed to have a huge inventory of parts in the parts bin.  While it was thrifty to keep using stuff on hand, technology marches on and it kept them from keeping up with the imports and the big three US automakers.

I've heard the same criticism of British Leyland.