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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 11th, 2023

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  • Or maybe the income for politicians should be on-par with any other civil servant. Post workers, trash collection truck drivers, state court clerks, natural park management, it’s all civil services.

    They argue that being a politician requires having tons of connections and being a “people-person,” but that’s only because they’ve made it that way over the past 50 or so years. There’s nothing about being a politician that is so essentially different than any other way to serve a government or to help a government serve its people.


  • With more context it makes sense. It isn’t just smartphone batteries, but lots of consumer electronics. Phones, tablets, cameras, ebikes/scooters/cars. And other parts of the legislation are focused on battery recycling targets for long-term sustainability.

    From another article on the resolution:

    All electric vehicle and rechargeable industrial batteries above 2kWh will need to have a compulsory carbon footprint declaration, label, and digital passport.

    The parliament also passed new targets for collecting waste and recovering materials from old batteries.

    They’re targeting batteries (first) because they use so much lithium and other relatively rare metals, and having so many batteries up in landfills is not only terrible pollution when they leech into water and stuff, but it’s just not compatible with our current and foreseeable dependence on lithium battery tech.



  • The most bizarre line of reasoning, to me, is the argument that “Montanans can’t be blamed for changing the climate”, since their contributions aren’t big enough. The only logical extensions of this is that nobody anywhere is responsible for climate change, since you could look closely enough and say that “this part of the city doesn’t have too many dirty, polluting factories” or “well there’s still this part of the rainforest that hasn’t been cut down yet, so this district is carbon-neutral.” No individual person is emitting so much carbon to change the global climate, so nobody has to change their behavior, everything is fine.

    Montana called the ruling “absurd,” but it’s so much more absurd to take a stance like “it’s okay if we keep polluting, it’s a global issue” as if they aren’t currently or will never be affected by climate change. And then then what balls to mock the judge as if this ruling is just for 15 minutes of fame, as if they wouldn’t get some kickbacks or preferential treatment from various dirty industries if they had won…

    I sometimes find it so difficult to comprehend the mindset of people making these sorts of anti-climate-activism arguments. Do they think they’re separate from the issue, that they’re just so special? Is it even still possible to pretend there isn’t an issue? It all gives off the same antisocial vibes as roommates who leave a pile of dirty plates in the sink and deny they made a mess. But they even get in the way of the nicer roommate who would go out of their way to clean up someone else’s mess so could be nicer for everyone…


  • As other comments have pointed out, Firefox doesn’t necessarily support the necessary APIs that Discord is using for this. I have the same issue where neither Firefox don’t support the in-browser MIDI API, so I need to have Chrom(ium) for a webapp that lets me configure some MIDI hardware that the manufacturer provides zero computer interface for.

    I’d like to use Firefox for everything, but there will always be some edge cases like this as long as there are APIs or other features that it doesn’t yet support. Of course not to say that securely implementing every new API is trivial, but that’s just how it is right now




  • I’ve been getting into Doppelkopf! It’s a trick-taking game with tons of rules and variations on those rules and a kinda weird ordering for the trump cards, but it’s quite fun. My favorite thing opposed to other trick-taking games is that you start each round but don’t necessarily know who of the other 3 players is on your team. So each round can end up requiring a different strategy!

    It’s pretty complex, but my gf’s mom has been teaching the two of us and her sister, so it’s a bit less overwhelming. Tons of people in my department play at university, so I’ll finally be able to drop in and play a few rounds with them as study breaks :D


  • I dug up my old 3DS in the past weeks, installed some custom firmware to play my backups of DS/3DS/GBA games. A bit of Zelda Minish Cap, some Metroid Fusion… But mostly I find myself playing various Pokemon ROM hacks lol.

    I’ve been getting into “Pokemon Elite Redux”, which is a difficulty/challenge game centered around each Pokemon having up to 4 abilities at the same time in battle. And there’s tons of new abilities that make each pokemon uniquely useful. It’s certainly challenging, even on the lowest difficulty. It’s happened to me several times that I have to get together a whole new team to beat a single trainer. But, there’s zero grinding involved, and there’s SO many quality-of-life changes that it’s super easy to get a whole new team squared up in just a few minutes. That makes it really easy to jump in for a few minutes when I can, without feeling like I’m wasting my time