Who’s Yellen now? (This song was actually commissioned by APM’s Marketplace when Janet Yellen became Secretary of the Treasury, but feels appropriate now.)

Not a surprise, but still somehow crushing. It’s a loss for us all.

Put a fraction of that in wind, solar, or forced geothermal, and you’d get a real benefit. But the fossil fuel industry demands a fig leaf to cover its naked greed, so here we are.

But really it’s just stealing with extra steps.

Accurate.

yahoo

Nowadays, I don’t know that they could, but more than a decade ago they still had enough mail and search users to be somewhat relevant, and Marissa Meyer had just taken over after she left Google. There was a real thought that Yahoo! could so something new. It obviously didn’t pan out, but for a hot minute, people really talked about Yahoo!

What sort of stuff do you like? Maybe some folks can make some good recommendations to jump-start a more interesting experience.

Recommendations and boosts from other users are how I’ve discovered interesting people there, and at this point, my feed feels just as full as my old twitter feed.

If you like news, a lot of breaking news is happening on Mastodon much more accurately and faster than on Twitter. There are a LOT of publications on there now, here are a few off the top of my head:

• Polygon (@polygon@mastodon.social)
• The Conversation (@TheConversation@newsie.social)
• The Intercept (@theintercept@jouna.host)
• Voice of America (@VOANews@mastodon.social)
• Ars Technica (@arstechnica@mastodon.social)
• Semafor (@Semafor@flipboard.com)
• Kotaku (@Kotaku@flipboard.com)
• The Christian Science Monitor (@csmonitor@flipboard.com)
• Fast Company (@FastCompany@flipboard.com)
• The 19th (@19thnews@flipboard.com)
• Vox (@Vox@flipboard.com)

There are a lot more local news sources too, so depending on where you live, you can probably follow news for your specific area. The account @FediFollows@social.growyourown.services regularly bundles up follow suggestions for different regions, interests, and topics. If you go that account and search for a hashtag (i.e., #texas) you’ll get a lot of active and high-quality local accounts to follow.

Like, two owners ago. Wordpress took Tumblr off Verizon’s hands for $3 million USD, ~six years after Yahoo! bought it for $1.1 billion.

This is even more impressive when you realize that in some regions of the country, power companies are adding zero renewables. TVA, the biggest power provider in the country, is all-in on natural gas, allegedly because its board members get incentives from natural gas providers and refuse to expand predicted demand with solar, wind, or forced geothermal.

then you see how easy it is to open up a car with a traditional lock using one of those shims

True. As far as I can tell, most competent thieves can get in most cars, and it’s trivially easy to break the window out anyway with small tools. I’m not even sure of car alarms deter thieves anymore. The real deterrence is the interlock that prevents them from taking anymore than your stereo or loose change, and the interlock/transponder doesn’t require a fob.

I liked this bit about Rob Johnson near the end, that he “has just the right mix of passion and affability to nudge labels in the right direction.” I think that’s a very effective combination. I’m sure it doesn’t hurt that the labels can make some money in the process.

Another thing that sucks are the fobs…

I really don’t like those either. I guess it’s okay to give people the option, I know that it’s handy to unlock the car from a distance if you’re loading kids or pets in the car. But give me a simple key/transponder if I just want to have a key on a keychain.

Also, I keep seeing more reports about those wireless unlock and remote start fobs being relatively easy to spoof, and the whole system seems comically insecure and fragile.

If you look at Kroger’s acquisition of Fred Meyer or Harris Teeter grocery stores, they massively consolidated market power in big swaths of North America, and the stores that Kroger was forced to spin off by regulators soon failed, and the profitable ones were gobbled up by Kroger anyway.

. . . this time.

Phil Williams, the investigative reporter in this article, is an absolute treasure in Tennessee. This dude has broken open more corruption, fraud, conspiracies, government waste, etc. in his career than I can even list. As an elected official or business owner, the sight of Phil Williams with his microphone and camera crew is the thing you fear the most, but he’s very measured and patient.

TL;dr: support your local journalism!

¿Porque no los dos?

our Search Choices might be of use here

Thanks, I think that’s a valuable option! It’s probably not what I was looking for. As I understand it, the “bang” use is just a way to use the search on a specific webpage, and is just a nice little hack to speed up searches on commonly used websites (i.e., Wikipedia, YouTube, BBC, etc.) I can probably get used to going straight to those sites, but it was a feature that got me using DDG at first and broke my reliance on Google.

Mojeek

Thanks for the rec, I’ll give Mojeek a try for a while. So far the results seem better than Brave (which I didn’t seriously consider using regularly anyway) but I miss the bang options (!w, !yt, etc.) that DDG has.

And in a swing state, too. It’s almost as if he’s motivated by personal ego rather than strategy. /s