Untitled

DID THE JOURNAL FACTORY FUCKING EXPLODE???

you said it yourself: you're looking to vent it LITERALLY ANYWHERE

so vent it somewhere private. or at least not literally aimed AT another person, a total stranger at that

Like, this reblogger sounds so insanely self centered in their reblog. notice how both options focus on how being rude would affect THEM. "B has no consequences for me so it's perfectly fine to do"

Pronouns

An accent

As someone who has had to actively unlearn things from the benign and kind of funny to the truly harmful, I can say that most times my immediate response is "I'm sorry. I didn't realise that was bigoted." Then I go home and spend 7-12 business months unpacking what I've just learned, how it was woven into my life, and how I'm going to reframe my identity given that taking out that one thing has caused a whole lot of stuff I thought I knew to shift sideways.

Then AFTER I've finished unpacking and reorganising my brain I still need to actively police my thoughts and interactions in light of the new knowledge. Particularly with language where something that was not fraught when I was young has moved on and now has implications that I had no idea even existed. (Tranny anyone? depending on your generation and location it could mean anything from "bloke likes wearing lingerie with his wife" through "drag" to "transgender" and could be anything from affectionate to violently homophobic)

I am trying and I do actively attempt to not be a dickhead but I'm in my 40s and have a LOT of unlearning still to do. At least 3 times per year I get smacked in the face with a thing that "everyone should know" but I don't because I'm simply not interacting with this particular group of people regularly.

The No1 response across all ages, genders, areas and abilities? Not having to share the road. That's it. Off road cycle/foot paths or some sort of actual barrier between the road and the cyclist.

Cycling_Strategy_Refresh_Draft_11022022.pdf

That is fucking wild! From the recessionary low of the early 80s, the median American household has indeed seen a roughly 40% increase in real incomes -- a bit less starting from the prior peak -- but more than half of that happened within the last ten years. (Also interesting to see that the median asian household got twice as big a bump from the last ten years specifically, and that the median white and black households were farther apart in 2024 than at any other point on the series.)

Of course the issue with household data is that there are a lot more two-income households than there used to be. Unfortunately, person-level data is only available for people who worked full-time the whole year, which obviously hides this effect. Even allowing for that and the understatement it implies, though, I found this chart striking:

Not as rosy a picture! Of course, the benefits have been uneven in other ways, as well -- increases in equity, welfare, and safety, decreases in job security and independence; food and merchandise are down and housing and fuel are up; there's less socialized housing and infrastructure but more socialized healthcare. The limitation of the median American is that it's a specific person, but not the same person every year.

Uhm, I wanted to look up stats on median US individual or household net worth since 1980 as well, but it's abjectly impossible -- if anyone else wants to have a try, go for it! I can foresee complications in the sense that it's even worse for individual data, it obfuscates how much of people's wealth is tied up in their home, and it's likely to be much more extremely correlated with age.

It is true that LGBTQIA+ rights have largely improved. But they have not improved everywhere, for everyone, in every country. In some cases, things have gotten worse.

It is true that racism has decreased. Again, not for everyone and in some cases it has increased.

It is true that extreme poverty (usually defined as 2USD/EUR or similar per person per day) has PLUMMETED! The headline tonight could have been "100,000 fewer people in extreme poverty today!" and it would be true! Apart from a few months during covid it would have been true every day since around 1995. But we still have extreme poverty. And wealth inequality is still very evident.

Life expectancy is up - but not for everyone.

Health is up - but not for everyone.

Access to education is up - but not for everyone.

Deaths due to conflict are down - that doesn't matter if you live in a warzone.

The world IS getting better. Slowly, in fits and starts, and sometimes it's two steps forward, one step back. But we are seeing progress worldwide in almost every metric. We have a lot of work to do but it is getting better.

THE 17 GOALS | Sustainable Development

My Hero the late great Hans Rosling compared it to a premature baby in an incubator. it is true that the baby is still very sick and is not out of danger. But the baby's pulse is better than yesterday, and so is their breathing, and digestion. Bad and Better are both true.

If we always focus on the deficits we lose track of not only the progress that we have made but of what worked and what didn't and what we need to do more of.

I have switched to using Startpage.com and vastly prefer it. for one thing, instead of displaying an "AI summary" at the top of the search results (unless you turn it off, yes I know), it displays the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, with link, whenever it finds one that's relevant.

also a waaayyyyy better sense of design than duckduckgo

Search Engines

Infinity Search is an alternative search engine with a special focus on privacy

DuckDuckGo is a popular search engine for those who value their privacy and are put off by the thought of their every query being tracked and logged. Uses bangs, ![site] for in-page search (sells your data to microsoft and draws from fucking bing)

WolframAlpha is a privately owned search engine that allows you to “compute expert-level answers using Wolfram’s breakthrough algorithms, knowledgebase, and AI technology.” A data search engine.

Boardreader is a search engine for forums and message boards. It allows you to search forums and then filter down results by date and language.

Based in France, Qwant is a privacy-based search engine that won’t record your searches or use your personal details for advertising. Uses “&” as a bang search.

Another privacy-based search engine is Search Encrypt, which uses local encryption to ensure that users’ identifiable information cannot be tracked. Metasearch across multiple engines. 

Offering unbiased results from several sources, SearX is a metasearch engine that aims to present a free, decentralized view of the internet. Can be self-hosted. 

Gibiru’s tagline is “Unfiltered private search” and that’s exactly what it offers. Requires AnonymoX Firefox add-on for privacy. 

Disconnect allows you to conduct anonymous searches through a search engine of your choice.

Swisscows provides fully encrypted searches to protect your privacy and security. Built-in violence/porn filter cannot be overridden. 

MetaGer offers “Privacy Protected Search & Find” through its anonymised search. A plugin will allow it to be made a default.

Gigablast is a private search engine that indexes millions of websites and servers real-time information without tracking your data, keeping you hidden from marketers and spammers. Variety of filtration and refinement options for searching. 

Oscobo is a search engine that protects your privacy while you search the web. By not using any third-party tools or scripts, your data is protected from hacking and misuse. Has a Chrome extension to allow use in toolbar. 

https://search.marginalia.nu/ an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed. Use old-school searching rather than query-based for the best results. 

https://www.mojeek.com/ 

https://wiby.me/ - It’s goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites. 

https://4get.ca/ it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesn’t have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think it’s the best for research, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can.

https://www.searchenginemap.com/ for more on how search engines relate to each other.

https://yep.com/ is a crawler

https://www.etools.ch/ retrieves from Google, Mojeek, Bing, and Yandex, like Searx

https://www.dogpile.com/ 

https://searxng.org/ (next gen Searx)

https://luxxle.com/ - possibly conservative?

https://presearch.com/ - good for academic?

https://kagi.com/smallweb - free/randomised Kagi.

Other Searchers

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.