exocrinous

https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=Australian+Santa

I am also a not American

Well the thing is, the budget is that small. Otherwise why would there be a five year waitlist for government housing? You're talking like a budget that could house everyone but only in boring housing is small. But the current budget, there's no way it can house everyone in any conditions at all. Every extra apartment we can build is another person off the street or out of the homeless shelters. That's the scale we're talking about here. There is no extra, there is no slack, and there's nothing we could possibly do to stretch the budget enough to create slack. But what we can do is stretch the budget enough to give one more person a home, and I think that's the most important thing.

Sorry, I did say if the government built block housing there would be almost no homeless. I was at the time imagining a fantasy world where the government gets its shit together and actually tries to solve the homeless problem. Take this current comment as assuming that the government doesn't decide to tax the rich appropriately to fund this endeavour.

Yeah, I know there's impractical brutalist buildings, but those are the big expensive projects, right? The cheap ones are practical as far as I knew

Yeah nah I don't get it. Homeless is homeless, housed is housed. I'm currently homeless and I'd take apartment #5722 in a heartbeat, long as it was near public transport and had good insulation. Guess there's some people who'd rather rough it than stay in a boring apartment, but I think maybe we should house all the people who are willing to stay in boring apartments before we worry about catering to picky people. If they're comfortable enough on the street that a boring apartment is worse than the street, maybe they can stay on the street a little longer than the rest of us and be relatively okay. I definitely believe in helping them, but I think we should be trying to help the most people the soonest with the limited budget available.

I prayed to the sun for electricity and erected a shrine made of solar panels. It worked. /da

Praying helps. Praying is a mediaeval, prescientific form of therapy. Talking out your day, and your feelings, to someone who will listen. That works just as well with a family member, a supposed god, or my imaginary friend Bill.

And given that therapy costs money and many people are poor, prayer is an appropriate self-medication option for many people who need to talk to someone about their feelings. It's even an appropriate option for people who see a therapist but not as often as they'd like.

Now this is all beside the benefits prayer has if you're trying to create or empower an egregore, of course.

Of course it works. It's another name for the placebo effect.

I don't believe in omnipotent or omniscient gods, only normal ones, but I'll bite your hypothetical.

An omniscient god would necessarily have a perfect sense of empathy. They would know what everyone is feeling. And to know a feeling is to feel it, so they would feel every feeling in the world, at full intensity. Obviously such a being would need to be all emotionally resilient as well as all knowing. But they would care for the problems of mortals, because they would feel what mortals do. Perhaps in such a hypothetical, prayers are simply a person attaching a feeling of urgency to their needs, in hope that their god will feel this urgency too and respond.

But of course, I believe in normal gods, so this is all just an intellectual exercise to me.

Well I may be biased because I think brutalist architecture is beautiful, but I disagree. Every penny saved on the appearance of the building is a penny towards the functionality of the building, or towards housing more people. Would I rather have a pretty brick facade or 1% better thermal and sonic insulation? I'll pick the insulation. Would I rather have a visually interesting architectural shape or rooftop solar? I'll pick the solar. Visual appearance has never been a factor in my living needs, ugly wallpaper aside. I don't really understand the mindset of that stuff being important. I'll pick a nice colour for my bedsheets, and that's as far as it goes. And besides, elegance of form and function is a beauty all its own. I recently got a new mouse and it's beautiful to me because it works well. It has a pleasing heft, comfortable shape, no waste, and that's beautiful. A mouse in the most pleasing colour, but with poor ergonomics, would be ugly to me. Single family detached houses are hideous to me.

Haha. Two days. Tiny. Itty bitty state. Not even as big as New South Wales.

Low effort brutalism looks cheap because it is. And that's a good thing. In my country there's a homeless crisis. The waitlist for government housing is five years. And that's because too much of the government housing is single family detached houses. The politicians always say "we don't have enough money to build government housing for everyone who needs it". You know how many homeless we'd have if the government built soviet block style apartment buildings? Next to none. The people who can live on their own and just don't have enough money can live in that, the people who need support can stay in the homeless shelters that have support, and only the people who want to be homeless would be left. Brutalism is efficient. American style suburbia is inefficient, so much so that it needs to be subsidized by the government using money taken from the city, because the suburbanites can't pay for their own single family detached houses, even the ones with high paying jobs.