  We review the increasing evidence for the cosmological relevance of the cold
local Hubble flow. New observations, N-body simulations and other theoretical
arguments are discussed, supporting our previous suggestion that the
cosmological vacuum or uniform dark energy can have locally observable
consequencies, especially a lower velocity scatter in DE dominated regions. The
apparent contradiction between the slight dependence of the growth factor on
$\Omega_{\Lambda}$ and the significant influence of dark energy in realistic
N-body calculations is clarified. An interesting new result is that in the
standard $\Lambda$ cosmology, gravitation dominates around a typical matter
fluctuation up to about the correlation length $r_0$, and we tentatively link
this with the high pairwise velocity dispersion on scales up to several Mpc, as
measured from galaxy redshift-space correlations. Locally, the smooth Hubble
flow on similar scales is consistent with N-body simulations including
$\Omega_{\Lambda} \approx 0.7$ and a low density contrast in the Local Volume,
which make it generally vacuum-dominated beyond 1 - 2 Mpc from galaxies and
groups. We introduce a useful way to view the Hubble flow in terms of "zero
gravity" spheres aound galaxies: e.g. a set of non-intersecting spheres,
observed to be expanding, actually participates in accelerating expansion. The
observed insensitiveness of the local velocity dispersion to galaxy mass is
explained as an effect of the vacuum, too.
