The other thing that’s kinda cool is that you get to see a bunch of people who normally are kinda invisible, but make up a considerable part of your city and life. It’s incredibly fun to see people from all walks of life and backgrounds all having fun together. It makes us all stronger and more unified. It reminds me that we absolutely can do anything when we all work together as a team. Also, about 60% of the crowd there is probably running your city’s IT infrastructure ;)

This seems like a really biased source, the domain is .ir, which is Iran.

I recommend sources that are not state-backed from a warring county.

I don’t think they will. We as a species still suffer from diseases where shit comes into contact with our mouth. If we can’t solve fecal-oral diseases, any bioweapon you deploy will infect your own population. It’s why we terminated our bioweapons program. It’s about as discerning as chemical warfare. :P

On a related note, I’d fucking love bidets with dryers to be mandatory at all farms, hospitals, food handling facilities, markets, and restaurants. It would minimize the impact of fecal-oral diseases, especially with improper handwashing and food handling (eg, not wearing gloves).

The Persian empire was pretty big, until Alexander the Great (Greece) kicked their asses. This area has had empires rise and fall for millennia. Iran was the dominant power (and sometime colonizer) western Asia for 12 centuries.

I highly doubt anything will ever bring it peace, it’s the middle east, nuclear proliferation is a terrible idea. And that goes for anyone, any country.

https://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/persia/explore.html

It’s like car valet, but they take your bike and store it in a secure location and hand you a slip of paper with a number on it. A person or two guards the secure location. Usually they are pop-ups at major bike junctions for things like university games, major sporting events, big festivals, bike-focused events and ribbon cutting events.

However, cities like Vancouver BC have seasonal ones that run all summer in shopping areas like Granville Island. They essentially prevent bike theft entirely.

Our city is fairly dense, so unfortunately there’s no room to build extra parking or even new roads. We have been forced to get creative, but the benefit is that a lot more people are using bikes and rail now that the city core has bike lanes that can get you just about anywhere. The latest development is that women and children are starting to bike in our city, which is a promising sign for safety (North American city).

Our city is still struggling to marry up mass transit with last mile transit such as bikes, ebikes and other PEVs. The buses and trains are starting to get bike racks that can accommodate modern bikes, but it’s still difficult to find bike lockers or bike valet services downtown, and it’s still too easy to get your bike nicked.

Just do what we do here, and have like, six parking spots at a beach, and ticket anyone who parks illegally. It encourages bike and bus use :)

Pestilence, TACO Don and the Ketamine Kid. Just waiting on the fourth horseman. This is shaping up to be an amazing year. :p

We need to send them down there, the leaders need to see things firsthand in the screwworm swamps.

Actually, there are! (Though it’s classified as invasive in many places, so they really have to be carefully kept.)

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20241203-the-people-growing-their-own-sustainable-toilet-paper-plant

In the western US and Canada, thimbleberry leaves can also be used.

They are both great in theory, but in practice, you defoliate the plants too quickly, and you are still putting extra material down pipes. The best, least damaging solution are bidets, since they just use water, and don’t require trees or plants to be cut down and pulped.

Oh, we definitely do. People commit huge crimes like flushing huge amounts of clothing down the line, which totally fucks up the pumps that move sewage up hills and over into bigger infrastructure. Many places used to have incinerators in the lines, but some people freak out that it’s bad for the environment (as if putting biosolid shit into landfills isn’t worse, which generates tons of methane). At least the incinerators used to burn up foreign objects and could run off the grease in shit and greywater alone.

Your average bidet will usually have a built-in dryer if you buy name brands. Heated water, heated dryer. It saves a remarkable amount of money on TP too. It actually paid itself off after about four years of shitting. And your ass is incredibly clean afterwards, which is a blessing in hot and humid summers for reasons I won’t elaborate on prior to getting a bidet, lol.

The Toto bidets have these features for about $335, iirc. You can usually find them at Costco. Amazon sometimes has them too.

Most people only use toilet paper, which is way worse. Bidets get you almost as clean as a shower, but I expect everyone is washing their ass with soap and water at least once per day in the shower.

Bidets these days have heated, oscillating water and blow dryers with hot air.

Yes, they have little doors and always retract back up after use. They also do an automatic bleed before and after each use to wash them off. There is also a manual bleed and clean option so the wand can be cleaned by hand (though they stay remarkably clean. The wonders of Japanese engineering).

I don’t trust Trump to execute it properly, tbh.

Honestly though, anti-missile shields are something we (humanity) needs. Any moron these days can throw it all away in a suicidal instant, now that Putin started a new war and now we have a bunch of smaller wars all over.

But DART showed the promise of orbital defenses, and I’d rather we have some semblance of countermeasures against large meteors, which this is a step towards doing. (Still, climate change is the existential threat that the entire world should be focusing on)

Yeah, weather is shifting a lot. Methane is really bad to build as any leaks (and they do leak) release gas that accelerates climate change way faster than carbon. Nuclear is a reliable source for a long time. I suspect that many of the world’s hydro dams will become less useful as things deteriorate. Perhaps some can be replaced by geothermal, or solar/wind/battery, but for places that are in geographically disadvantaged locations, nuclear is a great option.

Nuclear helps when you have a very bad drought and very little wind for a long time. Bad doldrums, or perhaps big fires changing wind patterns during a hot summer. Certain parts of the world may need to rethink certain forms of power generation as the climate begins to change at an accelerated pace. Our reservoirs and dams in western Canada and the western US are already below historic averages, and we’ve used hydro for decades and decades.

Nuclear is a very consistent, base load source. Expensive, but very reliable, and most importantly, cleaner and safer than coal or methane (“natural gas”) generators in the event you need to meet extraordinary demand all of a sudden.

Wars. Lots and lots of wars.

You reminded me of Gunship- Fly For Your Life (great music and incredible visuals)

https://youtu.be/Jv1ZN8c4_Gs