Bay 12 Games Forum

Quote from: Reelya on April 02, 2017, 10:27:57 am

I think calling government run healthcare "capitalist medicine" because it's more efficient is in fact a cop-out.

It's not when almost every first-world capitalist nation has one. USA is really the big exception here.

It... really kinda' is a cop-out, or more specifically just outright untrue. Government run healthcare is usually pretty specifically anti-capitalist, and heavily controlled by government specifically because capitalist systems break down and stop working right with certain industries (especially with anything approaching normal consumer/market interactions), healthcare among them. The optimization capability and advantages of capitalism requires market forces to be able to work appropriately to function -- customers have to be able to have choices, chances to deliberate on them, be interacting with a market that has actual competition, a legitimate choice to opt out, etc., etc. -- and there's a fair bundle of shit where they just don't, where it's very much physically impossible just due to the nature of the market for it to give the necessary signals for someone operating under primarily capitalist methodology to get a good results and often even a barely mediocre one. Similarly, there's quite a number where they do more than not and non-market interference is going to cause resource misallocation. One is where you curtail or eliminate capitalist economic implementation. The other is where you use it.

Trying to run a pure capitalist or pure socialist or pure just about anything in terms of economics is what is technically called by anyone in the field with two brain cells to rub together "massively goddamn stupid". You use what works for a specific economic issue. If that's capitalist economics and a mostly uncontrolled market, good, use that. If it's socialist/state-run control and a tightly controlled or non-existent market (so far as free market stuff goes), then you use that. Every major developed country is called a mixed market economy for a reason. Capitalism does not work on a national scale on its own. Socialism has serious problems as well. Most ideologically pure economic systems, or things very close in alignment with them, similarly fuck up. An economy is not a box of nails that can be drove into place with the same hammer. A suite of problems that cannot be solved with the same solution requires the use of a different solution or the problem is going to either stay or get worse.

Two or three people on the wide interwebs, yes. Makes it no less untrue. You'll find no use on the actual website, or pretty much any official documentation you care to find. One bit in that second link that pointed to something was suffering from failing a reading comprehension check, heh. Closest you'll come is them being called lentil-shaped.

... y'know, isn't there some kind of D&D modern ruleset? It would be hilariously off due to how little attention was probably given to conversions and whatnot, but that would, technically, be able to get you numerical information like how many bullets a Nth level character can take, how hard they would be to hit, etc., etc. From there, you can crunch physics numbers and get a pretty precise (if farcical) picture of what's what.

If you're looking for more general stuff... well, I'd probably say assume a younger dragon is roughly equivalent to a tank, if maybe not a particularly large one. So say juvenile or young adult (CR 7/9ish, for what that's worth) is around an abrams or something. Figure out at which point any particular class can do meaningful damage to one of those, and you have your baseline for when you're dealing with something that can do nonsense like filet a main battle tank with a longsword, at which point you're well past just about anything real life human and air strikes are rapidly becoming of questionable utility.

Though for some real fun, Olympics comparisons might be amusing. World record long jump has a DC of about 30. For a reference, that means an at-most 9th level (and almost certainly lower) wizard would be able to casually allow anyone not suffering from penalties to match or break it, offering peak human with a touch. That would probably set a decent ceiling on the point you're no longer dealing with stuff inside the realm of human possibility, and capability is reaching the point threat evaluation is involving words like tank battalion, off shore artillery, or unconditional surrender. Can almost certainly reach that point before 9th, but there's probably little to nothing after it that hasn't. So somewhere around 8th or 9th is likely when things have become inhuman pretty much across the board.

... and the other issue (among several others) is that we live in a society that has pretty massive problems with reporting and testimony when it comes to crimes like rape (it's not alone there, mind -- the issues are near identical for stuff like abuse, basically anything where evidence can be slim, repercussions for the victim can be significant, and power (in terms of financial capability, social influence, legal control) easily very unbalanced). Innocence must be presumed and all that, but we're having to balance what that means with the flat fact that it takes very little to make reporting and conviction rates start to drop like a rock, and not because it's cutting down on false claims.

It's a real damn delicate balance, and with zero doubt one we haven't found yet, but it's pretty doubtful we've swung too far in the direction of the accuser quite yet. If only because we were damn far in the hole in the other direction in recent (sub-century) history

Though yeah, treatment of the accused and convicted in this country is pretty fucked up, too. Kinda' what happens when it can involve disenfranchisement and potential economic exploitation that's particularly attractive to certain sorts of politician and/or lobbyist to encourage. I'd just consider that as something of a separate, if related, issue, if for no other reason than it's endemic to our legal system rather than specific to any particular class of crime.

If you are male, most people consider an accusation of sexual harassment or misconduct to be absolute proof.

It's more than a male thing with teachers et al at the absolute least. Pretty sure I see more news in that field about sexual impropriety coming from women. Part of that may be because it's only news when a guy is behind it if things are particularly egregious, though. Never seen anyone attempt to actually sit down and gather/crunch numbers on the subject... which isn't entirely surprising, considering a lot of the stuff never makes it past local papers at most, and it's a complete bastard to track those over a large area/long period.

You know, it's actually really, really surprising that it's this bad. Is America full of paranoid people that think that everyone left alone with someone else is automatically going to rape them?

Full of that particular sort of person, no. Vast majority of people don't really have or cause a problem on that front.

But it only takes one, and particularly if you're dealing with dependents of one sort or another (kids, elderly, whatever) you'll rapidly find that there's almost always one or two parents/guardians that are basically completely fucking insane. They're the sort the kind of practice you quoted is aimed at.

One solution that I actually think is pretty smart... is a news embargo on rape cases until AFTER the result of a court case.

That's actually rather notably stupid when dealing with this particular class of crime. It's rather far from uncommon for other victims to come forward when they see someone else accusing their attacker, and that can be the difference between a rapist or serial sex offender of some other sort getting out and having a few more goes and not. There's false claims as well, but there tends to be those for any class of crime that can involve witnesses or multiple victims. Part of the point of our court system is to filter those out.

Though regarding undercurrents and whatnot, it's... not really that, exactly. We've got decent data on reporting and conviction (and successful appeal) rates. We're entirely aware a lot of people get away with it.

... all that said, yeah, a lot of the stuff regarding the sex offender list and a number of lesser/non-crimes related to it is all kinds of fucked up. For all we do have problems that need to be addressed, there's some pretty damn serious issues with how we handle laws on the general subject.

... of course it isn't? It's just a bit of insight into pence's character, and nothing we either didn't know or couldn't pretty easily guess, if not the exact specifics. Side note corroborative with previous information, not anything more substantial, and more or less entirely unrelated to all the other shit going on we're waiting for more stuff to fall out on.

Eh, if what the UK was getting on that front and all the rest of them wasn't enough, I doubt taking a dump on humanitarian issues would have made a difference. Lot that cared about that would have just buried the polish under more shit or somethin'.