Bay 12 Games Forum

Eh... it's not guaranteed it's due to the ADAS systems, though. We've also had an upward trend in shitty, lethal car design, too, e.g. those fucking trucks with cliff faces for a front that's currently inflating our pedestrian death numbers.

It may be correlation instead of causation, and there's also the possibility ADAS stuff is working to reduce fatalities... just not hard enough to fully offset the intentionally lethal horseshit folks have been buying in increased numbers for the last while.

Couldn't you just write a law that says, "if you don't pass a new budget, then you by default get last year's budget, scaled by the ratio of tax revenue this year to last year"?

"What could go wrong"? 

Didn't the US actually have that as the federal level law for budgets at some point? Or something very similar to it.

... I think Chair's pulling your leg with that. Morbid curiosity lead me to check, and I couldn't find anything corroborating the claim, heh.

Sorry I didn't mean "general" welfare - I meant basically just keep paying the people you just laid off, a large chunk what they were making before because they're no longer employed and there just isn't enough other job demand instantaneously to employ them.

It'd probably still be a net gain to the health of the country, economic or otherwise, so... again, there's worse ideas. Keeping private insurance in its current state is probably one of them :V

I mean… what makes you so certain there’s going to be a huge amount of unemployed anyway?

Universal healthcare is going to require more people to do clerical work and things like that given the higher demand in healthcare

It's entirely possible I'm misremembering things, but that may not even be true. It's really, really hard to understate how badly private insurance is fucking the US's healthcare system just in regards to clerical work, nevermind all the rest of it.

I can't remember if there's been explicit projections on it, but it's pretty damn possible the savings in terms of all the goddamn shit hospital staff has to deal with to work with insurance companies actually ends up greater than whatever workload gets added by higher demand (though iirc that demand's fairly likely to plateau and then drop back down, as the benefits from folks actually getting help before issues become acute start kicking in).

If there's one thing the last few months has reminded me of, it's that home repair/remodeling folks worth a damn don't operate in rural areas. It's just. It's just a rule, it's how this stuff works.

Like, I knew that, y'know? I've known it for years, family worked in the field at points in my life, etc. The folks that can actually do a good job are worth good money and pretty much always go where the good money is (i.e. not rural areas). But sweet blue fuck has the last while reminded me of that.

Today, plumberfellow -- earnest enough guy, experienced, good enough references, etc. -- tried to turn water back on after running some (badly needed, should have been done long ago) new pipe.

Two pipes burst, one of the water heaters (legacy feature of the house, it used to be part commercial and had a dedicated heater for part of it) put water on the floor full blast. One fairly large room half flooded, one of the bathrooms soaked from wall to wall, a hallway sopping end to end. Cleanup's not too bad, got fans/dehumidifier in the worst spots, it's whatever.

And I'm, just, like. This sucks, but it sucks like a hurricane does, yeah? It's just what happens in shitholes like these. This is rural construction, three months over schedule, unintentional holes in the ceiling, parts of the wall open for weeks, and half the house soaked. At least the roof proper doesn't seem to be leaking again, hahaha.

Echo that. Hopefully something will shake out, get better...

With rare exception, the only untoward abuse I've seen modern communists plan for capitalists that want to keep doing what they're currently doing, is to make sure they have a comfortable standard of living, with food, shelter, healthcare, community access, etc. easily available, and that they don't get to run around fucking everyone else's lives over anymore.

... which, if you listen to the heavily capitalist inclined, does seem to be some sort of unconscionable torture for folks really attached to being able to poison the local water table for profit or whatever, but I'd be surprised if they couldn't adjust to only having one house and reasonably priced food and no casual abuse heaped on poor people and whatnot, eventually. It's probably a livable condition, moreso than congenital defects inflicted on someone due to living in an area capitalist excesses plagued with coal pollution or generational poverty or whatev'.

There's more than a few words in english that started out as two (or more) words and then eventually smooshed down into one, though. It's common enough there's literally a specific phrase for 'em, good ol' compound words. Nevermind existing at one point as two words don't mean it can't be one nowadays.