Bay 12 Games Forum

This. About one hour's worth of Gang Beast gameplay footage. Fair warning, it's got a fair amount of vulgarity, ahaha.

For what it's worth, I've got a headache bad enough I could totally be confusing them with some other R name. We've got more than one that's squirreled away in irrelevant parts of the world :V

Wow, it's a shock that the USA is behind Germany in aid spending in the Americas. My thought on that, is that for the USA, the local "backyard" is a source for cheap labor and resources. US Corporations have a vested interest in keeping the South underdeveloped, because it helps to keep American corporations globally competitive. Gotta put the sweatshops somewhere, right?

It's not by terribly much, for what it's worth. Also, ho, found some humanitarian aid numbers! And look lower in the post for much better ones, as I'm not going to take the effort to rearrange this post to put it up here where they probably should be.

... they're much smaller numbers than the developmental aid numbers, and the US is... actually performing at about the same level in a relative sense, near as I can tell skimming over things (point against the report at the top: It's much more floweryand annoying to find raw numbers than in those DA ones). Government spending on humanitarian aid in '14, ferex, was ~6 billion from the US, ~2.3 bn from the UK, ~6.7 if you bundle the top four EU sources (which would include the UK's 2.3) together.

Though... actually, now that I skim a bit further down, it actually looks like they're using the DA numbers I linked to before? Maybe developmental aid and humanitarian aid are the same insofar as data gathering is concerned? Ah, in conjunction with this, apparently, which does seem to be something specifically focused on humanitarian numbers, though how much you trust a UN source and the methodology being used is perhaps up to the reader, aheh. It's a pretty neat site on the face of it, though. If the european commission and the individual european countries are different things, the EU on the net is indeed kinda' kicking our ass, heh.

@rol: Acronym-y wise, most of it you can just sorta' ignore unless you're very interested in the nitty gritty of where the numbers are exactly coming from, so far as I can tell. Just eyeball the donor and recipient bits when you get to actual dollar amounts to get a general feel of things, heh.

I tried to figure out how much of that was spent on Greece and other very local interests, but I've already spent too much time on this solo.

You can check this page if you still want to see some numbers -- the .pdfs nearer the bottom are probably the easiest to parse, looking at things. Seem to be coming from the same statistics that wiki page used, too, if that makes a difference to you, and there's some pretty nice breakdowns in regards to donors and recipients. Checking the europe specific one, it... kinda' looks like those numbers on the wiki page don't include aid to greece at all (though I may be reading it wrong, definitely -- m'a wee titch out of it at th'mo), and about half of the european developmental aid is split between turkey, serbia, and ukraine. And germany alone has apparently given more to the region than the US, heh, which is interesting.

Another couple interesting tidbits from that before I go back to doing other things, is that it looks like something around 70ish percent of global humanitarian aid is funneling into africa and asia. Looks like most of the spending on the americas is going into south/central parts, to little surprise, but what is surprising is that germany is apparently beating the US in our own damn back yard in regards to raw spending amount, though that may have changed in the year or two since the numbers were gathered.

... honestly, I'm now sort of curious if germany is specifically going around and one-upping our ass somehow. Not enough that I'd rather be checking the rest of those pdfs instead of murdering elves with a chainsword berzerker ghoul, but somewhat.

Though @max, I couldn't quite puzzle out the difference between emergency and developmental aid in practice, either, hah. Searches and whatnot for humanitarian all seem to lead directly back into numbers on development, and looking at some of the historical trend data on the DA seemed to suggest that it the more crisisy stuff is bundled into it. But see chainsword berzerker ghoul, I'm also now fairly tired of looking

We actually are kinda' assholes in general on foreign subjects, though.* Even below the governmental/corporate level. Like, I'd probably be pretty accurate calling myself better than most americans (or at least most of the ones I live near) on that subject, and I'd still call myself a fair bit of an asshole in regards to what I'm aware of, what does and doesn't bother me, attempts to connect with other (non-english speaking) countries, etc., etc.

Like... I get most folks here, and plenty of individuals all over the nation, aren't really jackasses (or at least try to mitigate it) when it comes to foreign matters, be they countries, cultures, or people. But, uh. Quite a lot are. I'm of the opinion it's a good idea to own up to that, m'self, and either do something about it (to whatever extent you can) or at least acknowledge the extent that foreign pathos for the US isn't exactly groundless.

*And fairly specific assholes for certain nations and areas. We aaaarrreeee kiiiiiinda' fairly substantially responsible for several hundred thousand dead civilians over the last decade or so, after all, among all sorts of other shit, and most of the actions that lead to that got rather substantial domestic support, even after it was pretty broadly known the reasons we did it were more than somewhat shoddy ones.

(is there any? The whole "Politics isn't for polite company" thing always sort of bugged me too, it puts an expectation for emotional argument in front of the conversation that might not even be there to begin with)

There definitely is. There's a reason that "politics isn't for polite company" thing gets hammered so often and so regularly: Because people keep doing it in otherwise polite company. Just about any regular gathering place (restaurants with regular patrons, bars, churches, the list just kinda' stretches into the far distance) will see plenty of talkin' politics, most of it just as empty of substance as your average hashtag meme.

"Flap and flitter, flitter and flap,
I've come to bring your whole country the clap."

Sometimes it's the little things.

So far as I'm aware there's not really anything strictly illegal about calling people and using an alias, no. It can be under certain circumstances, but generally not. Certainly so long as you're not harassing someone (or I guess committing slander), you can call pretty much anyone, tell them you're anyone (save for impersonating people that actually exist, anyway), and spread whatever news/lies/etc. you feel like. If you're actually talking about yourself while under an alias, you could say pretty much whatever you damn well please. Can't slander yourself, heh.

It's... definitely kinda' odd, though, at the very least. Near as I've heard nowadays, the primary folks practicing it regularly are scam callers trying to steal money or identities from people, which is... probably not a good association, considering how much misery those bastards spread around this country.