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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • I was on a discussion board for anime figurines and people started posting screenshots of their order checkouts showing tariffs nearly doubling the cost of their order. That caused a conundrum because people started talking politics and that’s not allowed according to the board rules. But what are people supposed to do? Can they talk about increased prices or is that political? Do they just have to pretend prices have skyrocketed for no reason at all? Can they even mention prices are higher than before?

    If you don’t restrict things then you’re allowing discussion of politics. If you do restrict things then you’re preventing normal discussion because of politics. It’s unavoidable.


  • Half as Interesting has a video about low flow toilets. When the US passed the 1992 regulation limiting the amount of water a toilet could use, manufacturers rushed to meet the regulation and their designs were terrible. That’s mostly because the quality tests they had to pass were also out of date. Testing standards eventually updated and by 2003 low flow toilets were flushing better than old models with a fraction of the water. More recent models flush even better.

    So OP’s complaint about low flow toilets hasn’t been true for 22 years.






  • I think it’s a topic that just doesn’t interests most people, especially children. Where I live, solving problems like 10 - x = 4, solve for x is taught to 10 year olds in grade 5. How many 10 year olds would think this is interesting?

    In comparison, grade 5 science teaches cells are the building block of life, energy can exist in forms like electrical and light and can transform between them, and matter has states like solid, liquid, and gas. It’s stuff that ends up being naturally more interesting.





  • There are definitely improvements that can be made in this area. I’m all for requiring transparency about what exactly is being purchased, like the California law that requires informing the purchaser if they are buying ownership or a licence to access, or Steam’s store page requirements to list all DRM, third party accounts, anti-cheat, etc. However, this initiative is vague, doesn’t suggest any actual law changes, and its promoter seems to be more into the idea of data hoarding than consumer protection.

    From the initiative:

    Videogames themselves are unique creative works. Like film, or music, one cannot be simply substituted with another. By destroying them, it represents a creative loss for everyone involved and erases history in ways not possible in other mediums.

    This has nothing to do with consumer protection. He’s even said in a video that he wants the genre of gacha games to end. I play gacha games. Why does he get to prevent me from playing games I like? I thought we were protecting consumers? I feel like this cause is like the PETA organization. It’s definitely a great idea in general, but they’re going about it in an extreme way.


  • The French word for apple is pomme.
    The German word for apple is Apfel.

    The French word for Germany is Allemagne.
    The German word for Germany is Deutschland.

    Asking why all languages don’t call Germany “Deutschland” is the same as asking why all languages don’t call apples “Apfel”.

    Even within the same language, pronunciation changes by regional accent. Which region has the correct accent and which regions are kids taught to pronounce things incorrectly? Languages also change over time. The grammatical rules of English now aren’t the same as they were 100 years ago. Is English more correct now or less correct?

    Language is more like music than it is math.






  • People can’t decide to secede and be sovereign citizens. Why would that change just because it’s now a larger group of people?

    Wyoming has about 600,000 people. What if they all wanted to leave? What if 1,200,000 people in California wanted to leave? That’s twice as many people! Can they leave? What if 70% of a state wants to leave but 30% want to stay? Do the people who want to stay just get dragged out? There’s just no nice clean way for secession to happen. If people want to secede, they unfortunately need to want it enough to fight a civil war.



  • The only one I know of shut down and the admin posted this message:

    I knew Lemmy had its challenges, but I hoped it would evolve for the better. Sadly after 2 years, the culture of censorship through defederation has only grown stronger.

    So they shutdown because they couldn’t federate with any other instances and considered that censorship. A few people in that thread linked to another instance I’ve never heard of as an alternative and that one 404s if you type in the address so I guess they’re all still on reddit and twitter.


  • I think this is it. The court documents were filed literally hours after his arrest. Others were sent to a special prison in Louisiana within 24 hours of arrest that apparently doesn’t need to follow normal laws and then deported not long after that. The government has been arguing that after someone is transferred to the Louisiana prison, normal court procedures don’t apply, causing people’s lawyers to be unable to stop deportation in time. Once someone is deported, the government has been arguing they can’t do anything about getting them back.