That stuff's not even the most pressing problem with YouTube's content censorship. The larger issue is that content that directly crosses the CCP's party line, keeps getting flagged in all kinds of objectively counterfactual ways. Nobody with more than a couple hundred subscribers can talk about the history or culture of Tibet, for example, without running afoul of this.

Eh. The people who actually like Google's horrible AI-generated garbage, were already using Google anyway. No change there.

Whereas, I have entirely *stopped* using Google's main site, and my usage of Wikipedia has increased, because I'm now using it (plus the browser's in-page search feature) for quick lookup of things that, six months ago, I could more quickly find on Google, but now I can't. Other things I find using ddg or startpage, and still others I now have to resort to older, pre-internet methods, like manually punching a bunch of individually-looked-up numbers into spreadsheets in order to calculate what I actually want to know, like it's 1992, because nobody who still indexes most of the internet, can figure out how to do decent relevancy ranking.

I do still use some of Google's other sites, e.g., Google Maps. Though who knows how long that will continue to be useful, given the direction the company is heading.

Well, like I said, appearance isn't the most important thing; in the movies, Herbie doesn't even always have his standard paint job. Sometimes he's (visually) just a plain VW bug. It's what he does, that's important.

I'm sure it has nothing to do with the fact that most houses these days don't have peeling lead paint, like basically all of them did in the seventies.

In literary terms, Herbie is absolutely a character, but I'm not sure why anybody would set about to make real-world replica versions of him. All of his distinctive characteristics (that make him different from an ordinary, non-sapient Volkswagon Beetle, a model of car that was chosen for the films specifically because it was extremely common), are either so cartoonish as to be impractical to replicate in a real car (like the ability to be sawed completely in half and continue to operate as normal) or concern the car's behavior, rather than its physical characteristics. (And it's not enough to make the car drive itself. You have to make it have consistently smarter ideas about where to drive, than the person behind the wheel; and it has to go markedly faster than any other car in its immediate vicinity.) Several of the movies do feature a version of Herbie with some distinctive markings painted on (particularly, the number 53 in a circle), but these markings (and his paint job in general) are not consistent across all the movies and so really cannot be regarded as a core aspect of Herbie's identity. When he's an old secondhand car with a standard-but-weathered paint job, he's still very much Herbie.

The issue is that people are chucking the small coins (pennies, nickels, dimes) into jars and drawers and whatnot, figuring "I'll get around to taking them to the bank someday", but their value is so small that said getting around to it is never a very high priority. Jar's full? Start another. So the quantity of out-of-circulation coins keeps growing, and the treasury has to keep minting more of the things, and it's not worth it.

Pennies also get used in those penny-masher things at tourist attractions, stamping them with the name of the site to make cheap souvenirs. (Not one-cent cheap; the masher machine takes multiple quarters. But it's still cheaper than anything in the gift shop.) If the penny is discontinued, the tourist sites can "solve" this "problem" by adding a vending machine that sells blanks, perhaps for fifty cents apiece or, if they're really smart, three for a dollar (which would encourage people to put more quarters into the masher machine, because it's probably not worth it to save the extra blanks for next year's vacation, for most people).

The European coin set has its own problems. Not least, needing a larger number of register drawers, which means the drawers either have to be abnormally large (and thus incompatible with every model of cash register on the market), or else the drawer slots are uncomfortably small for reaching into with an adult human hand. (American cash register drawers generally have either five or six full-length slots for bills and/or checks and/or coupons, and the same number of shorter bins, in front of them, for coins, only four of which actually get used regularly in practice, because the fifty-cent and one-dollar coins are treated like collector's items; hardly anybody circulates them.)

Honestly, at this point, I would be on board with discontinuing production of all coins except the quarter.

You can argue about the $1 coin, but if you're arguing that it's better (as an actual circulating piece of currency) than the $1 bill, you're getting massively outvoted in America. People pretty consistently chuck the one-dollar coins in drawers rather than carrying them around and spending them, because they're not as convenient as bills. If quarter-dollar notes existed, people would probably prefer those over the corresponding coins, as well.

And to think, I've been using a wooden spoon this whole time.

The city of Chicago did it with shovels.

Kind of calls to mind that old (possibly apocryphal) story about NASA spending millions of dollars for ballpoint pens that work in zero gravity, and the Russians just using pencils. Except, you know, turned around backwards.

In general, it's good to have some options.

Currently, BSD is my backup plan if anything seriously unfortunate happens to Devuan. Which, there are two major potential points of failure there: the upstream distro, and Devuan itself.

There's also the artificial person in _Aliens_ whom Riley doesn't trust at first, due to her experience in the previous film, but he turns out to be a good person.

I have learned to be very deeply sceptical, of statements like that about China, specifically. People tend to take information from the CCP's official state-run media, at face value, and repeat it as if there were any chance at all of its actually being accurate.

If the government of Venezuela or Iran or North Korea makes press-release-type grandiose positive claims, everyone just assumes they are lying. But none of those regimes blatantly lie anywhere near as often as the CCP, and yet lots of morons ("people" if you want to be diplomatic) keep accepting Chinese government statements as fact, no matter how many times they get caught lying about every single thing ever.

So my question is, where did Carbon Brief (whoever they are) get their data on Chinese emissions? Because if they got it from official Chinese government sources, as almost everyone seems to want to do, then it's basically guaranteed to be a big steaming heap of lies. I want to see a paper trail that shows they got the data from a source that did some kind of actual measurement or calculation, independently, a source that _didn't_ ultimately just accept whatever the Chinese government said about the matter.

If possible, I'm even more cynical than usual about this particular claim, because we know for certain that China was still building new coal-fired power plants last year.

Yes, because no kid has ever set a math book on fire. Especially not in fifth grade, round about the middle of March.

What?

Yeah, I gave up on Google a few months ago.

The problem I'm having, is finding a substitute that's worth beans.

Wikipedia is great for certain kinds of things, but it's not a general-purpose solution, as much as we might want it to be.

I've looked for other search engines, but they all suck like it's 1997.

Do *not* talk to me about Bing, or anything powered by its index (e.g., DDG). I don't want to spend five minutes crafting my search terms and then comb through twenty pages of results, just to find one little piece of information.

I want Google back. I mean, not the Google that exists now, that's useless. I mean I want the old Google, the one that still actually indexed the web and was good at relevancy ranking. I want that.

I think I might have to start mass-memorizing information again, like back when I was still in school. Or else give up on actually knowing things.