Bay 12 Games Forum

I tend to treat organizations that harbor terrorists as also part of terrorism, so if the Muslim Brotherhood gets shafted, I'm ok with it. The Muslim Brotherhood really is an umbrella group that tries to appropriate any expression of sunni islam (they're not very fond of shia AFAIK) and bring it under its authority, seemingly with the purpose of taking power and then using it for their leadership's goals.

Good to see you think the US is a part of terrorism, too. So is this a matter of not caring how two groups that sporadically harbor terrorists tear into each other or what?

Quote from: MetalSlimeHunt on February 08, 2017, 10:28:53 pm

There's nothing conspiratorial about it. There is no other possible motive but the corruption of voting machines, not that we should use those at all anyway.

I wouldn't say there's nothing conspiratorial about it, but it has more to do with run of the mill corruption, incompetence, and the universal practice of always picking the lowball bidder even when they provide an absolutely defective product.

Hey now, not really universal. Even exempting pork barrel stuff. US just has hella' incentive to cut corners on a lot of things gov't funding wise, due to that whole "we keep refusing to raise taxes" thing. Personally met a fair few more than one acquisitions/contract-seeking type critter in public works say they'd love to hire someone that's better than the absolute baseline, even if it cost more, but it can be complete goddamn misery to fit anything major into the budgets a lot of these areas are workin' with. And particularly when it's something that's used like maybe a week or two every other year or so, and doesn't involve something that's going to directly kill people if it doesn't work at 100%, well...

E: Also extra bonus fun time rolls in when some degree (sometimes relatively little, sometimes almost entirely) of the ones who ultimately hold the purse strings for that area are elected officials. A common source of kvetching vis a vis fanfiction is the absolute lack of qualification and quality control on what's produced/who's writing/etc. What we're talking about is basically the governmental equivalent :V

It can make for fun times. Actually had an illiterate alcoholic elected as mayor of a town near me, a handful of years back. He didn't last the full term

E2: And that wasn't hyperbole or exaggeration. Literally someone that'd done a round or two through rehab (it didn't stick) and was not able to read.

I'unno, generally even if it comes back in another form it comes back later, after you've had time to prepare a bit more and clear out the orcs or whatev'. So either jacking and tossing the thing works and things are good, or it doesn't and you still get a while to call in better reinforcements or undermine said evil's material base or somethin'. Seems like a win/win to me.

I'm no coder, and I haven't looked at basically anything of what bits of CoQs stuff is visible from our end, but even with that just poking in the .xmls for a few seconds (was looking to see if anything gave a better idea of where the hell that glowpad was hiding ) suggests you'd at least be able to auto-give the quests on game start, or something along those lines. Probably wouldn't be that hard to tweak things so stuff finished and rewards were received more or less immediately, too.

... all that said, you can totally just walk out of joppa and never come back, if you really don't want to deal with the main quest. Could probably burn your way into grit gate, too, if you felt like it, though I have no idea what that'd do to hostility and whatnot. Know you could blow your way through a wall at some point back when ASCII was all there was without enraging the porcupine bears, but that may have changed somewhere between then and now.

So what kind of consequences would making the Fed powerless have?

All sorts of crap. The exact results involves so many variables it's not really worth considering much of the particulars. Still, some of the bigger things you have to remember:

Most of our states are not particularly self-sustaining; even the ones that are net exporters in terms of finances or physical output rely quite a bit on interstate and international commerce in one realm or another of their industry and infrastructure. Remove the framework existing and enforcing the means to trade between states and across borders (i.e. the federal government and specifically the portions related to trade) and pretty much everyone is fucked. How hard varies by region, but the possibility of any individual state (or, frankly, any political entity of meaningful size on the planet) benefiting much on the net from a federal dissolution (in practice if not name) is basically nil. Trade and whatnot could be reworked, settled into new paradigms and whatnot, but... you'd be looking at decades. Possibly centuries. Before all that got sorted out. And in the meantime everything works worse; shipments have harder times getting around, there's next to no surety of encountering one set of business/legal conditions in one area as another (i.e. investment conditions in what used to be the US goes to complete shit. Have fun with that.), and on, and on, and on. The concept of the fed dissolving is one that would have any sane businessperson waking up screaming in terror during the night. Similarly any and every one that deals at all with anything involving logistics, infrastructure, etc., etc., etc. Nightmare doesn't even begin to describe it.

Education standards would be fucked. There would be no accreditation that was not regional, and basically none of those could be trusted. Existing accreditation would effectively be nulled. Communication between schools -- i.e. for transferring, moving, etc., etc., etc. -- would be buggered in about seven thousand different ways. Eventually things might settle down on that front, but you'd either be looking at approaching-50 state contracts or states that were just complete garbage and had next to no capability of sending their people elsewhere (you want to know how many colleges are going to spend notable effort bringing people from a state with a failed education system up to par? Ha.) or digging themselves out of the hole.

Corollary to the first, transportation would be fucked. You could not be assured you could go across state borders without facing immediate legal consequences. Your license would be shit, your tag would be shit, the standards you were previously operating under would be shit and fluctuating even harder than they already do every few dozen miles. Moving would now be equivalent to goddamn immigrating. Long distance transportation would have to deal with even more legal and procedural hoops than they already do. Interstate or cross country transportation lines (highways, railroads) would now face radically shifting conditions in regards to funding and maintenance. You now have (at least, who knows if some states would splinter under the conditions ensuing) 50 different entirely distinct flight zones, most of which do not have much experience with treating their own airspace as singular. Good luck. Also none of that is exhaustive, of course. There'd be whole hosts of other crap going down on that side of things.

Infrastructure would be fucked. Any area that requires resources or connection to other areas -- like water, electricity, communication lines (telephone, internet, etc.) -- would now have to renegotiate pretty much every aspect of what they previously did, and gods help them if there's more than two state actors involved or one of the ones they need to work with is now belligerent. Most of them would no longer have the same degree of financial, material, or human resource support. You would shortly see power outages, water quality and access failures, broken communication lines, and so on. These might clear up, eventually, but it would not be short, it would be painful, and it would be expensive in an environment where every aspect of economy just got kicked in the reproductive organs with a spiked rocket-powered pneumatic repeater boot.

Healthcare would be fucked. Good luck maintaining even a facsimile of a sea to sea baseline for medical professions. Good luck actually maintaining any sort of database or register or something like it that tracks what sort of background and qualification any particular person claiming to be a medical professional has. Good luck keeping various regional medical issues from spreading. Good luck doing anything continent wide (such as HIV outreach, medical research, and on, and on, and on). Good luck knowing what happens to you if you're in a different area and shit goes down. Good luck with that previous system of healthcare that was keeping millions of our elderly (among others) from straight up dying. Take all the good luck you can get, you're going to need it.

... and honestly, now I'm tired of trying to list just the major ways we'd all be screwed by it. That ain't all of it, I've just run out of steam. Imagine if all of europe had been in the EU for a couple centuries, had no or next to no previous precedent tailored to the individual countries to fall back on in regards to cross-border interaction, had significantly higher degrees of codependency, and decided, "Nah, let's just junk this shit."

There's a (lot of) reason(s) why, while I may be able to follow the reasoning and ideological basis behind the GOP perspective on governing, I am not even remotely a republican. Even if I had any other ideological crosstab going on with the other aspects of their platform, that one alone, the insistence and pursuit of a minimized federal government, is something that as far as I'm concerned is equivalent to national-scale suicide. It would end this chunk of north america as an economic or political power.

People that think the effects would be relatively small or even not frankly disastrous do not realize how interdependent our states and the systems within them are, nor how dependent that interdependence is on the federal framework, nor how poorly prepared our states are to even consider fracturing from a logistical/economic/etc. standpoint. Absolutely huge swaths of our lifestyles and economic and legal frameworks are incredibly reliant on the basic concept of being able to go from one place to the next and face relatively similar conditions. Of certain laws being enforced in one place largely they same as they are in another, in certain standards being met in regards to infrastructure/construction/etc. between one side of a state border and another, and so on, and so forth. Among all the other stuff it does, that is the federal government. Take that away and you effectively rip out the core of american political systems, economic systems, infrastructure systems, education systems, and continuing onward until you've covered just about every goddamn thing this country and its constituent parts does. You'd have to rebuild the whole thing from something that's so close to scratch the practical difference is academic, and you'd have to rebuild it something approaching fifty different times, each of them in relation to fifty different political entities that are also building in relation to fifty others.

tl;dr: Shit is the worst juju. Or close enough it probably doesn't matter.

... I won't lie, after remembering the glowpad existed, I think I've spent... probably two or three hours real time, just this afternoon, wandering around the marshes trying to find that bloody thing. Over multiple characters. Even after I kicked on overworld encounter display, I still couldn't find the ruddy plant. Even after starting to use the debug map reveal thing, I still couldn't find the pad.

Freaking ninja glowpad. One day, plant, one day. I am going to find you, and then I am going to cordially trade with you, and then I am going to eat you.

E: Uh. Okaaaay. Started a new game, had the unfinished et al content option ticked. Immediately after I clear the start message, Mehmet explodes into a plum of blue cloud effects. "frozen Mehmet dies!" Says the message log. Welp.

Town didn't turn hostile or anything, it just appears Mehmet spontaneously... self-cryocombusted? _{i have no idea what just happened, and it is mildly terrifying :V}

Hrm. Have to keep an eye out for em, then. Don't think I've actually seen one since I started playing the newer version, heh.

Axe is definitely worth remembering, though, least if you have some strength bonus squirreled away. Cleave is pretty significantly effective, apparently. Enough that if I've ran up a +3 or more bonus getting that and nothing else starts getting really tempting, even if I'm mainlining rifles or somethin', heh.

... man, it's from yesterday and the conversation has moved on and all sort of shit, but I didn't notice anyone saying anything about it in the interim and it's something that honestly needs saying so.

Welfare might do more than just feed people and reduce work incentives a little (though the vast majority of people still work even in countries with decent welfare).

Welfare reduces incentives to make money any other way, so not just in the way we say is "good", but it also reduces incentives to make money in ways we say are "bad". i.e. crime.

Welfare does not reduce incentives to make money any other way. Most of the bloody point of welfare is the exact opposite of reducing incentive to work, and most that I've seen actually goddamn manages that to one extent or another. If someone is seeing welfare as something that makes people want to work less, they are completely ignoring what the damned stuff is implemented for, near to the point of it having to be intentional to miss that badly.

The point of welfare is to address glaring disincentives to work and live. When you're one major problem from exposure or starvation, have to skimp on healthcare for yourself and/or your family, have significantly limited transportation options, are incapable of building capital to pretty much any extent, and on, and on, and on, you cannot find good work, do a good job, improve your life, or frankly do bloody anything but suffer nearly as well as someone that's not being persistently sodomized with varying degrees of literalness by such issues. Meaningfully contributing to society from an economic standpoint or otherwise becomes both significantly more difficult, and less effective to the extent it is possible.

Really, people need to stop thinking that misery or bad conditions improve someone's incentive to function in any way beneficial to themselves or society. People that succeed in those situations do so in spite of them, not because. The whole thing about starving artists somehow doing better is complete goddamn bullshit, and just about every other iteration of the concept applied to other walks of life just as much so. Most -- the vast friggin' majority of -- people do not need to be beaten (however metaphorical) until they stop being lazy. They need obstacles to them doing things they want to do (or just could be doing, that's a net gain to themselves and others) removed, and then let loose. The point of welfare, among a great many other things, is exactly that. Get the bullshit out of the way so people can do more than whatever it was they were previously limited to.