Bay 12 Games Forum

Gnar is kind of OP at the moment simply because he follows the design philosophy of a lot of the newer champs; instead of specializing hard in one thing, he can do a pile of things reasonably well, and with items can do them nearly as well as a champ that can only do that one thing. He has a lot of mobility, he has good poke, he has circumstantially good all-in potential, he has a certain amount of built in sustain thanks to his transformation (not to mention tankiness), his actual damage is strong enough for him to make a passable ADC and his abilities are all practical. Yasuo and Braum are both really similar, with kits that cover nearly all the bases. Compare them to older champs like Veigar, whose entire kit comes down to "Hold person in place, hit with lots of damage", Garen, "Be a tank with some peel", and old-Soraka, "Heal the carry, provide the carry mana, poke a little bit". The meta really strongly favours mobile, multi-purpose champs also, so a lot of otherwise solid, formerly balanced champs are useless since there is a multi-purpose champ that can do their job and more if necessary.

In other news, I tried Fiddlesticks mid and he seems decent but his all-in from mid is a bit underwhelming and I always get dominated by assassins when I play him, so I'm looking for a new solid mid. Since my current (narrow) mid pool lacks mobility, I figure I could use a mobility champ, and at the moment I'm leaning towards Kassadin. He seems to have a lot of potential if used right, and he isn't insta-ban anymore, plus I get kicks from the idea of having two nearly opposite champs (Kass and Malz) as my mid mains.

Also, I repeat my pessimistic prediction: No wins, probably in a 55%-45% vote or something similar. We'll know the results tonight.

Looks like I had it to the percentage point. Unfortunately.

Well, if Scotland makes like Quebec, they'll be back in 15 years and it'll be a lot closer then.

The Scots don't really need to have the official sanction of a country to use their currency. I mean, they could use the Pound the way the Panamanians use the USD, or the Euro, or even the USD itself. They'd have some minor issues with control over inflation and so on, but then the general policy of pretty much every country these days is a variation of "Create enough new currency to hit ~2% yearly inflation, adjust slightly depending on economic strength" so it isn't like they'd be likely to do anything radical with currency independence that they wouldn't otherwise.

Alternatively, they could simply not declare anything legal tender and let Scots use whatever they wanted as currency, which would work just fine too with the benefit of preventing the Scottish economy from being hammered as hard by foreign currency devaluation. The only problem would be collecting taxes, which could be solved pretty easily if needed.

My general support for secessionism and decentralization in general makes me hope Yes wins, but I simply can't see No not pulling off a Quebec and winning in the end. Still, I hope I'm wrong.

Dude I think you just got bitched out by Owlbread.

It's kind of hard to tell, he's very... British.

Or, if things go his way, Scottish.

The repeat of 2008? Seriously? The world economy hasn't even recovered yet from 2008 crisis!

It has if you're a banker, a construction worker or a part time worker in a Western country

I wouldn't put much stock in the ratings agencies. I mean, they had subprime mortgage debt as being quite safe back in 2008, and they consider the US (a country with several trillion dollars debt and a deficit in the hundreds of billions) to have safer debt than China (the country that buys the US's debt), so take what they say with a small mountain of salt.

Anyhow, by the looks of things, things are headed for a repeat of 2008 in the near future barring some massive economic restructuring, and "trade wars" between Russia and Western Europe will only make that come sooner and be more painful for all involved.

Quote from: Ghills on August 30, 2014, 04:14:50 pm

It wasn't a case of emergency surgery needed (I have done my research, you know).  Under a nationalized system, we would have been triaged as 'not going to die right now' and scheduled when the doctors could get to it.  Because our healthcare system allows us to control appointment times, we shopped around, got better doctors and found a schedule opening.  It turned out the problem was way worse than the doctors had realized, and it was a very good thing we had pushed. Not being able to control doctors and scheduling would have left us in a much, much worse position.

That's about as valid a criticism as saying that with privatised healthcare doctors will leave you to die if you can't pay the exorbitant prices. Nationalised healthcare doesn't have to completely ignore the concerns of citizens, and privatised healthcare doesn't have to be entirely staffed with dicks.

EDIT: Wait how did a healthcare discussion end up in this thread?

To my understanding, people being left to die because they can't die is pretty much a myth even with the current US system.

Anyhow, living in Canada, I can say that it is true that if you urgently need care you'll pretty much get it immediately, and there aren't "death panels" in the sense some Americans say. However, this sorta disguises some problems with our current system. For one thing, if you have a very painful/debilitating issue and it's not life threatening, there isn't a guarantee that you'll get treatment in any reasonable amount of time. So someone spends 6-8 hours in the waiting room in pain, maybe sees the doctor, and then either the problem has a simple solution that could have been done earlier or something is scheduled in the future.

The other problem, which is the one Ghillis is talking about, is that you can see a doctor for a problem, it turns out to be potentially fatal in the long term so another appointment/surgery is scheduled for the future whereupon it turns out that things worsened for one reason or another and the planned surgery won't work anymore. This problem can stem from many issues: some specialized equipment is fairly rare (at least compared to the US), and thus is either not used much or else has very long wait times to use. Doctors don't want to push non-emergency issues forward too fast, since enough doctors doing that results in problems (eg. on more than one occasion there have been ambulances driving all over Toronto, unable to find emergency rooms with space). Finally, you might simply have shitty luck and get complications the doctor didn't foresee in between checkups. Regardless, it's a bit more complicated than "get your healthcare early if you need it, otherwise wait a bit".

On the topic of the US in rankings, there are two things worth noting: first, the UK, unlike countries like Canada, has both private and public systems. From what I've been told, the NHS's quality varies wildly from one area to the next ranging anywhere from "pretty good" to "abysmal", so if you want anything reliably good you basically have to pay twice. Also, both countries feature systems that vary in quality from one hospital to the next, with the US notably having some of the best hospitals in the developed world as well as some pretty terrible ones. I'm a bit skeptical that the survey is entirely representative, though, simply because I know for a fact that, at least near where I live (Windsor, across from Detroit), waiting times in the US compared to Canada are basically non-existent.

Anyhow, I'd say that, for most people, healthcare quality isn't too different for people from Canada, the US, or Europe, and I'd agree that it's mostly just "different". I mean, the biggest problem in the US is the cost, but to my understanding most Americans receive insurance from their employers at basically no cost (even before the ACA), and the care they receive is quite good generally speaking. It has a lot of problems, mind, but this isn't really the place to get into a long winded discussion of the problems of the American healthcare system.