Bay 12 Games Forum

Mental health /= healthcare... that's new.  They both even have the same word right there in the name.

Eh... nooooot really new. At all. Lots of people for quite a long time have been uncomfortable with addressing mental health issues, even if they're otherwise on board with better healthcare. We're only barely getting to the point of starting to treat such concerns as something other than a taboo to never be spoken of and buried as far under the table as possible.

Fairly sure the amount the patients pay doesn't really have much to do with the supply of doctors, save maybe for the incentives it gives to hospitals to hire the fewest doctors/nurses and maintain the fewest beds they can get away with in order to maximize profits,* or the extent it reduces demand and subsequently puts less pressure on hospitals to move towards a larger staff.  Gods know I've forgotten the details, though.

Or to put it another way, the costs in the US, particularly for the patients, has roughly fuck all to do with how many beds or doctors a hospital has. Near as I can remember, the major bottlenecks (to the extent there actually is one, considering the various resources the US has to throw around if it gives enough of a shit to do it) is more education costs, profit minded hospitals being skinflint, and defunding efforts near entirely led with GOP politicians at the head.

Basically, least if my memory's not horribly failing me, patient costs are effectively orthogonal to most of the logistics issues involved with running hospitals so far as the US's fucked up healthcare system goes. Aiming to reduce demand side problems isn't likely to do terribly much save make things less hella' shite for lots of people on the demand side of things.

E: Well, and maybe fuck over the health insurance industry a bit. Which, uh. I'm not sure you're going to find many people not part of it shedding much in the way of tears about the health insurance industry getting a portion of the shaft they've been inflicting on everyone for the last long while.

* You'd think they'd be encouraged to get the most beds they can, but the fucked up pricing, among other things, means there's no few number of incentives to limit them in order to reduce the number of people that can't pay in part or at all. US healthcare is a case study in perverse incentives, heh.

Eh... it's a shame I don't think you're running one of the mods that lets you buy boss summoning items. If you are, or just have the materials to make them, a ten stack or so of king slimes generates somewhere in the range of 70+ souls. If you don't feel like zerging it (zerg pot is about as good as it gets, speed wise*), it's a pretty good way to farm up souls real quick like.

* Iirc, I spent prob five to seven minutes of a zerg pot in an appropriate biome (hallow, I think), and came out of it with (well) over 500 souls. Not sure what, if anything, can top that, heh.

E: Though now that I check, I might be confusing that with the fifty stack of king slimes soul pile. Eh.

Ehehe. Definitely the buried champion first. Gotta' get dem wings, and I seem to recall the bronze set being a nice bit of melee/speed boosts. Think it's actually the easier of the two, too...

... in other statements, folks at home might be interested in checking out the teleporters unchained (iirc; the title is either that or wireless teleporters) mod. It's a little thing that lets you burn some ectoplasm to upgrade teleporters into using gem combinations to determine what they're linked to instead of wires. It's a nice quality of life addition, particularly on medium+ maps.

Oh, hey. Limited injunction on the third travel ban came out of the 9th circuit appeals court just recently, and the ban itself found variously unconstitutional, if the thread hasn't already noticed.

Too early in the morning for me to go news article hunting, but you can find a .pdf of the ruling itself here.

I could see republican attempts at welfare and entitlement reform going staggeringly well, particularly when they're coming into the elections having pretty straight up facefucked blue states and massive swaths of high end professionals everywhere. Might let us see the highest minority turnout in ever :V

Storage wise, if you have 9 storage boxes, so long as you keep up on the upgrades that should be plenty unless you're going hella' crazy on hoarding junk. That said, so far as expansion goes you'll probably want another crafting box eventually. Some point between the start of hard mode and shoving together one of the super crafting stations, you tend to end up filling all the available station slots and still have ones you want to be considered. Swapping out isn't exactly a problem, per se, but it is kinda' annoying. Second crafting interface mostly solves that pretty easily.

So far as extractionator goes, it does indeed not work for magic storage crafting, so far as I've noticed. Could have swore bottles did, but regardless alchemy tables definitely do. They're even nice enough to keep the chance to save materials.

... other than that, your continued adventures kinda' has me wanting to try antiaris out, heh. Sorta' can't, though, unless an update's changed something. Trying to check the info inside the browser straight up crashes terraria for me last I checked... could try installing manually, but eh. There was something about tremor that kept crashing my game, too. Pretty sure something graphics side, which I... can't do much about. Some of terraria's shaders or something hates vista, apparently.

Eh. Closest I've gotten to drunk is sleep deprivation or opioid/laughing gas highs (wisdom tooth removal, no more than the doctor ordered amount, but that's all it takes, too). Can definitely see how folks get addicted to opioids, but it's (the gas, too) a pretty miserable experience to me. Not as bad as the pain was, but way shittier than my normal pretty shitty existence. That feeling of your control getting ripped away by degrees by some bloody chemical is fucking terrible, regardless of whatever the other effects are.

... that said, I think I've said it before that I'm pretty you-do-you on substance use, at least so long as I don't have to be near it. Folks can do more or less whatever they want, but watching people slowly (or quickly) get messed up on something is an exercise in existential dread every time I see it, bleh.

Bothers me less if I've never interacted with them when they're not on something, though. It's the transition and difference that's disconcerting. Goddamn real time pod person replacement in a bottle (or whatever).

Also an exercise in increasingly bad headaches, in the case of smoked stuff. Getting knocked unconscious by the pain once was one time too many. Those twits that say second-hand smoke isn't much of a concern can go jam a tiny cactus in their ear so they can know my pain [/grousing].