Bay 12 Games Forum

... so basically, he acted like your average US doctor? How shameful :V

We're entirely aware it very specifically won't.

E: To clarify a bit, whatever is they can do with this particular technique is tried and tested (obviously on smaller scales) -- we know pretty much exactly what will happen if we got desperate enough to implement it. Its primary downside isn't "surprise unintended greenhouse gas" it's "acid rain freaking everywhere, me hearties", which is one of the reasons folks haven't exactly decided to use it preemptively -- world's still got a few degrees to go before it starts getting bad enough those kind of side effects are offset by letting things continue their course.

First we try social engineering and smaller scale technology changes in hope of slowing down and halting the problem sufficiently, then we go to inflicting several decades/centuries of acid rain upon ourselves :V

Well, with something big enough you could just vaporize enough water...

Don't think that would actually work... general system's closed enough flash frying chunks of the ocean shouldn't really get rid of much of the actual water, once the whole meteorology thing finishes up a cycle or two. It'd just rain like the bugger and we'd be back where we started, except probably worse.

... I've actually been kinda' enjoying it, m'self. Makes things more chill, spreads out the periods between minor anxiety over whether this turn is the turn that everything goes to hell. Also means y'can comfortably only check in on the email once a day without worrying about losing out on much wiggle time. Is almost nice :3

Yeah, BFEL's probably just got scouts, unless they seriously lucked out on a province. We do have spies down here (patrols have caught one or two already :V), but it's not BFEL's spies.

Not so much buddy buddy as one of us can't do shit about it and the other has had some troubles starting off, and apparently we're all trying to exploit other venues at the moment instead of screwing with each other. Probably because the latter would be fairly likely to end in ruin for whoever tries it as the third party takes advantage of the distraction :V

... I'm neither sure why you're bringing this up again, ree, nor how the zog you think that fails the anime "style" test. That is anime as hell. Straight out of 70-80s era, just cleaned up and modernized a bit.

... we do actually have that armchair general thread if y'all want to talk about whether a 20+:1 (at the absolute low end of estimates) mixed militant and civilian vs US military casualty rate qualifies as standing up to or not, and all the other silliness being brought up in trying to equivocate the american civilian firearm situation with anything even remotely resembling the middle eastern/north african/south american/etc., etc., etc. one.

Re: The gun thing and the escalation of rhetoric going on here, there's a hell of a lot we could do to cut back on problems there without actually stripping the right to gun ownership. Quite a few countries have actually managed that via (usually fairly simple) limitations sans full on removal. Our more or less reckless firearm proliferation over the years would make the initial bits of that difficult, certainly, but calling it impossible is just kinda' silly. And even if we didn't go as far as many other still-functioning countries go, there's still a lot of room for general improvement.

Neat proposition I've heard lately on that front -- not exactly wide spread or serious, but it's an interesting one -- is to institute a (fairly small) tax on firearm and ammo sale that goes into a sort of worker's comp for victims of gun violence. No questions, no need to sue, basically no nothing -- if you end up hurt by firearms, the funds get paid out, and in the process you largely waive the right to bring civil suit against any relevant part of the firearm industry. Basically an attempt to offset some of the externalities the gun industry inflicts on the country as part of it doing business, and maybe bring proliferation down a bit in the process of doing so (by, y'know, actually making sure the producers and sellers are getting market signals more, if not entirely, in line with what they should be -- right now, manufacturers and sellers are mostly sticking society for the entire cost of the people they help injure and kill).

Kinda' liked the thought myself -- as is, most people that get shot in the states not only get fuck-all to offset it, if they survive they just get probably-massive medical bills, possible legal costs, all sorts of other problems (work loss, crippling injuries, etc.) on top of getting shot and getting nothing. If they don't, family members or the state has to suck up funerary costs with, again, no recompense from the folks for whom their suffering is part of doing business. Seems a little off to me, y'know? Several of our other deadly industries have to shell out (either via tax/regulation or civil cases) in part to offset the societal price of doing business, but so far as I'm aware the firearm industry gets off more or less untouched despite having significantly less societal benefit than, say, chemical processing. It'd be nice if they were reigned in a bit, help victims out in the process, and maybe starting us down the path of getting our firearm circulation under control.