Many cities have already banned cars in their centers. It’s not a “what if”. It’s been done and works. And it takes as long to build those garages as it’d take to build those solar parks. And not like they couldn’t be done at the same time. Like instead of building solar over the car parks, why not spend the time and resources building them over warehouses and apartments?

Well there are above ground parking garages as well…

That’s a false dichotomy. I can choose a third option. Where we place car parking garages (multi-level above or underground) all around ring roads and ban cars from entering city centers. Then we put solar panels on top of most roofs, and in fields for grazing animals.

This obsession with car parks is exclusively American.

I would say let’s maybe not have car parks at all? They suck. We should as a species try to phase out personal cars, first of all. And secondly, until then, underground garages are infinitely better for everyone else.

The contiguous 48 states in the US cover a total of ~8 million square kilometers. Europe covers a total of ~10 million square kilometers. China covers a total of ~9 million square kilometers.

So… yeah…

Oh yeah “we’re evil so we’re gonna house people… to exploit them even harder than the capitalist countries who let their people rot on the streets!”

Dude that is such a lie though. They did fix homelessness.

Post-Soviet countries all still have the highest rates of homeownership in the world. That doesn’t happen with “fake statistics”.

They didn’t arrest you if you were homeless or unemployed. They found you a job.

They arrested you if you refused to work, yes. And that happened mostly around WW2, for obvious reasons. Similar things happened in the UK, Germany, France etc etc etc.

Also most people who used to live in the USSR say it took people months to find a house, not years. It was very bureaucratic yes, but not infinitely more than any large nation. Their main issue was ossification of the government.

And you definitely didn’t need a job to get a house. The USSR sponsored dozens of thousands of students from the third and second world to study in the USSR, with free housing, education, food etc etc.

People were heavily incentivized to study for as long as possible. Aka, not work.

Like bro the apartments were built to house people. How is “ending homelessness” not a part of that?

This view is ridiculous, that the USSR only ever did things for the people because they were secretly evil and actually just wanted to exploit people even harder than the capitalist countries that didn’t do anything for their people.

“Communists could never actually want to help people, they are shifty evil people full of guile!”

Like you say they built the apartments to house workers? Why did they invest so heavily in industry? How did that personally benefit the people in charge? Couldn’t it be that having productive industry is the most major part of having a prosperous society, which allows people to have good fulfilling lives?

It’s getting much better. It’s not perfect yet. It’s not even as good as cities 1. But it’s much better than launch.

The kinda shit I do in cities skylines when I get bored

Yeah I know, I spent some time after that looking for any experience that sounded similar. But I didn’t find any report of any experience exactly like ours…

Nope! We don’t smoke for at least 2h before going to bed, to not mess up our REM sleep.

Me and my girlfriend saw an “UFO”. Not like a spaceship, or a ball of light or anything like that. Something waaay weirder.

This was during the COVID lockdowns. We used to live on the last floor of an old building, with a small balcony next to the roof. I was outside there smoking a cigarette before going to bed. It was night, but not dark. The whole sky was covered in this low thick cloud that kinda looked orange tbh.

I was smoking, looking around. When I saw at a distance what looked like a bunch of black helium balloons tied together floating. It didn’t look like anything at first, so I didn’t call my girlfriend or anything.

But I kept staring at it, as it slowly floated. After a couple of minutes, I noticed it moved really weird. The “balloons” seemed to be shifting around each other, almost “writhing”. It moved closer and closer, while “writhing” in the air. When it was still a bit far, it changed.

The shape went from what seemed like a mass of black writhing balloons to a perfectly uniform sphere. Then from inside of it, a smaller sphere came out. It circled and orbited the bigger sphere. And the two kept floating on closer and closer.

Of course at this moment I ran to call my girlfriend cause I needed someone to confirm I was seeing this and I wasn’t crazy.

When she arrived, they were even closer. I asked her “are you seeing this??” and I could see in her face she was. She was basically speechless through the whole thing.

Eventually the spheres came to be right on top of us, maybe 100 meters up in the air? It was hard to tell tbh. But they stopped. Right on top of us.

Then the bigger sphere started to shift shapes again. And it became A PERSON. Head, shoulders, arms and legs. A freaking person. The smaller sphere stopped orbiting the bigger shape, and also became a person, but smaller.

I didn’t know why but this made me so freaking ecstatic at the time. I started waving at them smiling feeling so happy. The bigger shape WAVED BACK at me.

The two then locked hands and started dancing skipping in a circle. Like they were celebrating or something. I couldn’t believe it, I felt a huge smile on my face from ear to ear.

I looked at my girlfriend to ask “can you believe this? Isn’t this the most amazing thing ever what the fuck?”…. But she was bawling her eyes out. She looked absolutely terrified. In shock, like medical shock.

That broke my ecstatic high right away, and I hugged her and asked if everything was ok. She didn’t really respond much.

I looked back up, and the shapes had stopped dancing. They slumped, looking actually disappointed or sad. The smaller one became a sphere again and started orbiting the bigger one. The bigger one became a sphere again as well. The smaller one went back inside the bigger one. And the shape just started getting smaller and smaller. It actually looked like a hole in the clouds behind them. And I noticed that’s what they looked like in general. Not like a physical black 3D shape. But like a HOLE, pitch black, turning inwards.

I kept staring at that for so long, seeing the “hole” disappear. My girlfriend went back inside.

We talked about it the next day, and we were both a bit hesitant to share too many details to be sure the other saw the same thing, and not “taint” the other’s memories. But we did, and we both did see the same exact things.

When I asked her why she was crying, she said she didn’t know she was. But that she did feel very afraid. But afraid the shapes were going to take me away. I understood that I kinda felt the same. But for some reason it made me ecstatic not sad.

I have no idea what we saw, which is why I say UFO. They were flying, and I have no idea what they were. One thing that kept returning to me over and over is that (I’m not religious at all) they looked a lot like what people used to call demons, specially in pre-Christian times. Creatures of shadow, shapeshifters

But yeah. That’s by far the weirdest experience me or my gf ever had lol

Belgium shows films with TWO subtitle tracks though. Dutch and French. Takes up like half the screen 🫠

No way imagine your boss being an LLM 😭 truly nightmare fuel

He lived most of his adult life in London.

I have a hard time freely forming realistic images in my head. Like if I TRY to picture an apple, I just get the vibes of an apple but no image.

But I did yoga some years ago. We did 15 min of breathing exercises, 45 min of actual physical practice (vinyasa), then 30 min of guided meditation. The whole point of the class was the meditation really, everything before that was preparing to meditate.

Anyways, first time I went, I did the breathing, did the “flows”, then we laid down to meditate. The instructor guided us through this meditation, about being in an open field, and riding a horse, and feeling the wind on your face the horse underneath you, and dude… I could picture it all like it was real life. I could see in full 4k 3D. So much I started to feel like I was there, I could actually feel the wind the horse. See the bright sun. I actually cried a little.

So yeah I think with the right guidance you could probably see in your mind like it was real life.

Literally an entire industry created by the Rockefellers.

Good documentary on this: https://corbettreport.com/rockefeller-medicine-video/

We use oil for medicine because of the oil industry.

Crazy how most medicine is made from oil…

Muslims would say that the view that Jesus is literally God is one of the distortions in the Bible. That idea is actually pretty late, becoming orthodoxy only centuries after Jesus.

And the Old Testament is not recontextualized. It’s just the Torah. The idea that Jesus’ message was fundamentally different from Judaism is also a pretty late development. Something Muslims also say is a distortion of the Bible from the original message of Jesus.

Not a good example at all.

The Old Testament is vital to Christianity first of all.

And to Muslims, Muhammad was clarifying the message of Jesus because it had been obscured by centuries of changes done by “men” and “the church”. The teachings of Muhammad to them are the same as the teachings of Jesus. And of Moses, and Abraham.

They don’t see Mohammad as inherently more worthy than Jesus, or Moses or Abraham. They are all equally prophets. I mean they even see Jesus as more special than Mohammad in many ways cause like I said they believe in the virgin birth. They believe God literally made Jesus in Mary’s womb.

And there are PLENTY of Jesus quotes in the Quran. Like full on teachings of Jesus.