Bay 12 Games Forum

... no guarantee it ever stops being terrifying, though.

Family, I love you, but please stop frakking moving my shit around when you visit. Yes, I'm saving those, no, stop trying to throw away my food while I'm cooking, please go take your nap and get out of my goddamn kitchen. Yes, I know where my junk is, at least until people start putting it other bloody places. No, you don't get to throw away the bedding you half ruined before I get around to having a go at rescuing it. That noise? That noise is me actually beginning to growl, because that's what happens when genuine irritation starts manifesting. It doesn't happen very often! Pretty chill, most of the time.

Though at least bit that waited until they'd left the house. Mumble, mutter.

I do like seeing these people, and they're largely unobtrusive and are helping me out a lot, but yes, family, I am actually fairly capable of handling myself when left to my own devices, these days. Stop rearranging my stuff. I knew where it was until you put it somewhere else, and now I'll have to fix it.

Cynicism misspelled, I imagine.

Or a massive bloated military budget. The US spends something like $700 billion on its armed forces. Imagine what an extra $5billion could do for secondary age (11-18) schools in the US and what little effect that would have on the US military?

Between 1 and 1.4 trillion in 2012, overall. Federal spending was pegged at 681 billion according to the source (which I found here -- it's an .xls file. You can see the notes on the wikipedia part to see where the discrepancy's coming from.), and education at 91 billion -- but only 39 billion of that going to K-12 education (including vocational training) and 20 to higher education. It'd take less than a 10% (~8.6%) cut to the military spending listed there to have flat out doubled primary et al and higher education spending in 2012. Total spending on what's normally called welfare here (unemployment, food and housing assistance -- only one of which, unemployment, involves "just handing out money for fun") was around 200 billion. You'd have to cut that by better than a forth to double education spending. For what it's worth, we spend more than half as much on veteran benefits as we do on overall welfare (of the sort mentioned: ~120 billion vs ~200 billion).

Plain cash disbursement (especially to folks that aren't unemployed) isn't actually much of th'states' welfare spending, and is more or less a pittance of the overall budget. The big hits are military, medicare, and social security... and at least one of those we could probably stand to loosen up on, just a titch.

As for that five billion. Would be an 8.4% increase in the 2012 education budget for primary et al and higher education, in exchange for a .7% decrease in defense spending. 2.4% decrease in welfare spending, 4% decrease in veteran spending, if you were to draw from one of those, instead. .6% if you were to roll veteran spending into overall military.

Which... should probably help understand why there's this certain subset of folks who want to cut military spending and redirect it into, y'know, other things. As th'states' spending goes, military is one of the less directly necessary or beneficial things money's being spent on, and so much is being spent on it the nation could get significant gains (budgetary, in any case), in other areas. Areas that are considerably more likely to have notable benefit back home, as opposed to pissing off the rest of the world and crippling a fair number of our youth. Being fair, also fending off some of the people we've pissed off, but... yeah.

... 28 pages, with default posts per page. Bit more than a post every other day, by the numbers. In any case, free games worth mention aren't something that happens every day, and this thread isn't really intended for discussion so much as listing stuff that comes up. So there's probably not going to be high volume, regardless.

That said, if you feel like actually contributing, hey. You could do that.

Ignorance is probably pretty likely, in this case. Due in large part (s'far as I'm aware, anyway) to how insurance has played out in this place, most folks (this is definitely including me) don't really seem to have any goddamn idea how much anything medical is supposed to cost (well, beyond "a lot" for anything beyond, like, a check up for a cold or whatever). Most people don't actually pay the fees, they pay a co-pay and whatever the insurance costs, and sometimes never even see the direct medical bill.

It can also vary seriously between places of operation. Like, the same procedure can cost 1k in one place and 3k in another and be literally the exact bloody thing. Sometimes even using the exact same facilities, exact same personnel to do the tests, etc. Situation's a little fucked up, honestly.

E: Which isn't to say there wasn't emotional abuse involved, anyway, just that the dollar amount might have been ignorance rather than targeted malice.

... probably the Seiken Densetsu (Secret of Mana) games.