Bay 12 Games Forum

I'm pretty fond of ToME4's, right now, and it's still undergoing (some pretty hefty) changes. It doles out sex in loot form, but not in a way that's entirely broken (on their own, anyway~). Plus one of the better loot tiers is purple, and purple is best color. Sufficient reason in itself!

Quote from: GlyphGryph on June 21, 2012, 07:11:21 pm

*snip* waah! doctors are expensive! *snip*

...allow me to refer you to some of Truean's posts on the topic of whether the time of a professional costs money or not. Also, I can't guarantee it 100%, because laws change from place to place, but in many countries aggression against a medical professional rates on par as aggression against a cop, so it might be a bad idea to carry out your threats..

Honestly, gryph's rage seems more about this

after doing a barrage of pointless tests I told him I didn't want. And I just paid a fucking thousand dollars in who knows what this morning for OTHER bills, and it's impossible to find out what they were even for, because god forbid they actually tell you.

than problems with the cost. Less a "medicine is expensive" and more "doctor just billed me for shitloads without actually seeming to do anything, after doing shit I specifically said don't do." If the costs were actually explained and the reasoning behind them sound, there probably wouldn't be as much anger there. As it is, it just looks like flat out robbery and spurious charges from gryph's perspective, which is something that's fair to get pissed off about.

Harder to read, but I will never speak ill of purple so no go, there. I'd actually like it if it were a size or two up, font wise. Bit smaller than I prefer, as is~

Cosmology is a system of beliefs that answers religious questions. Cosmology is only a religious thing.

Wait, what? No. Cosmology is a system of beliefs that answers metaphysical questions, specifically about the nature of existence. Religions generally do that, too, but so does other things (like say, science!).

Is... is that what the book is saying? That cosmology is strictly a religious thing? If so the philosophers that shat out anthropology in their down time would like to have some words. E: There may be a little professional (sorta) derision there, though. Re: Cultural anthropology especially. It's got some good folks working in it and doing some fairly impressive things, but in general it's a field of study that philosophy students look down on as being too much bullshit. This is a thing that speaks volumes, heh. E2: It's more accurate to say that it's just an incredibly young field of study that's still not quite sure what it's doing or how it's going about doing it.

The rest of that definitely sounds like an introduction text type thing, though. Bleh, I say. Bleh. Those things sometimes cause more trouble than they're worth.

Quote from: Lagslayer on June 21, 2012, 05:44:18 pm

Most people are just as motivated by greed as the business owners.

Fixed that for you. Greed (understood as the general desire for accumulation) is a human trait. To fault any individual or group for it is probably the wrong way of going about things.

We've got a number of "human traits" we've been actively trying to suppress and find ways to prevent from manifesting for... um. Millennium, I guess. Xenophobia (i.e. the root cause of a great deal of society-destabilizing bigotry) is a good example of that. Resource accumulation drive isn't nearly the worst of them (in the short term, anyway), but just because it's a natural aspect of the human animal doesn't mean trying to fix that is the wrong direction to take.

Desire for excessive accumulation is more of the problem, though, and a certain amount of greed (in the sense you're using) is generally healthy because it's necessary for self-preservation. It's figuring out how to curtail the former that's more of the problem and a system more or less specifically designed to exaggerate that feature, well... it's understandable how it can cause issues and how some folks can be a little leery about it.

This seems to be pure heresy to many Americans, but I kinda think people actually have a right to have food on the table, a roof over their heads, and some amount of medical care without having to go into huge amounts of debt.

...

I know, crazy talk, right?

Honestly, a lot of that derision for the unprivileged (i.e. poor, ripped off, etc., so forth, so on) seems to come more from a sort of "somebody else's problem" thing any actual belief in that sort of hardline position. Lot of people harping those lines are really loud about it right up to the point it hits them, and then there's suddenly an issue.

I've heard someone relate it to a sort of societal level self-entitlement issue, iirc. "Obviously it's not a problem, because it could never happen to me (/my in-group). If someone else is in trouble, it's just because they did negative-thing!X, not because the system screwed them. They brought it upon themselves." Which is a position that helps dehumanize someone outside their in-group (and remember that bit about the human trait of xenophobia up above ), makes them feel better, reaffirms group bonds... there's a lot going on there, really.

The constitution says that the federal government is required to completely cover two things: Foreign affairs and defense. Now it would be pretty terrible if infrastructure, agriculture, health, education and other departments would go poof, but a huge government is not necessarily an efficient one.

No sized government is necessarily an efficient one. The question wasn't if larger gov is less efficient, but whether why small gov is supposed to be moreso. Pretty sure that's what Sheb was asking, anyway, and gryph and co. more or less answered.

The only necessarily efficient government is an efficient government

The axiom being assumed is that a smaller (whatever that means, o'course -- gryph's explanation is an interesting way to look at it) government would have an easier time of being efficient. Whether that's actually true, well...

We... have shotgun pistols in real life. I do understand they've got a kick to 'em, but not bad enough to break your wrist if you're braced properly.