• Poor infrastructure in many of these communities, and no way to get to larger towns and cities without a car. So you’re stuck with crappy chain stores and terrible quality food, harming your health. And it’s boring, because it can’t support many kinds of entertainment.

• Smaller communities tend to skew towards conservatives, and there’s little way to escape from it (due to the distances and the lack of high speed rail). So expect more religiosity, more discrimination, and politicians that are even shittier than the average.

And Canadian and Australian firefighters have less of an incentive to help out this time, given err recent events.

It doesn’t actually matter. It should have been a landslide in favour of Harris, and if there was cheating it would have just reduced her margin of victory.

The fact it was close enough to work (if it occurred) is an indictment of a significant proportion of the population.

And you’d think a self-perceived business genius would be able to significantly increase the value of said purchase, not lose billions.

I think there is some postprocessing but yeah it uses Bing. I simply meant that SearXG uses its results (and Bing too for that matter). So it’s layers all the way down.

I’ll add that it’s a meta-search engine rather than something that does the actual searching itself. That’s still useful, but you’re limited by the quality of the upstream search engines (including google, duckduckgo, qwant, etc).

The gain from self-hosting is that you have more control over the results, and can do things like redirect social media sites to privacy friendly alternatives, and create your own bangs (or even add your own custom search engines).

Probably not a massive privacy gain though, although if you host the instance behind a privacy VPN queries won’t be associated with your IP at least.

Imagine being such a miserable human being that you hold a grudge for 30 years over an unsuccessful business deal.

The Cigarette Century goes into an aspect of this, and how easily the public were manipulated into consuming cigarettes en masse. And the echoes of the same tactics that are used today.