Agreed! Many people are saying AI isn't really intelligent yet because it can't come up with genuinely new things. Maybe finding a rigorous formulation of QFT / high-energy physics would be a great test for whether they are!
More like 6%, roughly in line with its population share (5.4%). Not sure if that includes air travel, international air travel often isn't included in national statistics. https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/report_2025
Whenever I see those statistics, I always find them very weird. Many of our products are made in China, but those are counted towards China's global emission, not Europe's. It also applies to the need of power generation for delocalized industry or importing food. A country handling a lot of industry will have a very high per-capita emission, but the people living there may actually have very low individual emissions.
If it's not significant, can I have 5% of your net worth?
If the EU mandated that products imported are made in a carbon neutral fashion, then importers of products will pay attention. Unfortunately it means higher prices, and the governments will get voted out of office by people voting for the populists selling the electoral promise of "Make Prices Low Again!"...
I like low prices, but I'm not looking forward to the chaos (political, social, what else) and deaths which I'm guessing will affect me within in the next 10 years.
The chaos is already here for us, the majority who are suffering the higher prices. Why do you think we're voting for the "extremist" parties? It's not because of "Russian propaganda", it's because life for the majority of us, normal Europeans, has become quite dreadful, economically and not only.
You're commenting on a comments thread about the possible desertification of Europe, a conversation we're having in the context of the record hot summer.
The extremist parties offer scapegoats and solutions for the unthinking ("The brown people! Remigration! The elite, except we're getting funded by the elite and we'll protect them and fuck you!"), and sadly there's too many stupid people who can't be spoonfed any concept of "think deeper" that like buying those...
The EU is responsible for a lot more than that once you factor in emissions in other countries producing goods bought by people and businesses in EU countries.
Nothing, fedi is extremely anarchic by design. If you don't like a server you can move to a different one, or start your own. The big Mastodon servers put in a great deal of effort to police what their users can see and interact with (see FediBlock), but it's impossible to shut certain people or groups out of the network entirely. It's a double-edged sword, but it's a net good for the kind of network it was intended to be, which is a hacker's network; it wasn't designed for normies.
Getting them federated properly was pretty tough a while ago (since any spammer could just set one up, there had to be a bar to clear), did that get fixed?
I'm not sure if it ever was that hard but if you follow a bunch of people the network effects will kick in eventually, you can also add relays to pull in posts from other servers if you're impatient. A fresh instance can take some time before the known network starts filling in, especially if you don't know who to follow (or have anyone following you), but fedi is a series of tubes: it only pushes and pulls stuff from places it knows. I didn't have problems federating outgoing messages to my friends' instances when I started, but I wouldn't be surprised if some Mastodon servers use some stupid anti-spam measure that keeps low peer count servers away.
I follow some people who have moved to single-user instances after the instance they were on shut down/etc, and I haven't seen anyone mention any trouble getting federated.
Maybe they're referring to defederation? It's quite common on Mastodon as I understand it, due to disagreements on things like moderation between server operators.
What does it even mean, period? MAGA losers are free to establish a community on Bluesky, the only difference between that and Twitter is that Bluesky isn't built to optimize for ragebait and culture war fighting. But they can still socialize among themselves on Bluesky even if no one else wants anything to do with them.
the problem here is, that a large large group of people do want something "to do with them" (and "them" not just being "maga losers"), but that for NORMAL users that sign up and use bluesky, there are others who choose that they must not socialize with them.
normal people dont understand how they can join specific communities or instances or whatever it is on the specific platform, they want something like "twitter" and then thats where they are, they dont want "some weird twitter instance thats not the main one"
Last time I visited NL many shops (including Albert Heijn) only supported Maestro, so as a foreigner you effectively can't pay with Visa or Mastercard.
Not with Visa/Mastercard credit cards, but Visa/Mastercard debit cards work everywhere. In fact, my current main card is a Visa debit card (not Maestro or V-Pay, it has the same code format as a credit card and a CVC code, which my older Maestro/V-Pay cards didn't have).
This is one of the reasons why Garmin Pay is pretty useless here. Most banks only support it with credit cards and a lot of stores do not take credit card-based contactless payments (with some exceptions like e.g. Jumbo and Decathlon).
The reason is that debit cards have been the standard cards since the beginning. Nowadays more people have a credit card for online shopping outside the country, etc. But when I was young my dad had a credit card and that was fairly exceptional.
