Bay 12 Games Forum

Quote from: misko27 on January 22, 2017, 10:26:29 pm

Quote from: Rockphed on January 22, 2017, 07:48:58 pm

The reason many of Trump's poorer supporters don't like Obamacare is because it made them choose between expensive & bad health insurance and paying for other things in their budget.  And then, if they chose the latter, they got fined.  Sure, it made it "easier" to buy health insurance, but it also screwed up lots of people's coverage and made things more expensive.

Well, the "good" news is we're soon going to be able to rebuild it from the ground up, because it looks like Trump's going to gut it from what I hear.

Wasn't there a provision for the poor in there, that waived the fine?  *checks*  Yeah:
http://obamacarefacts.com/obamacare-mandate-exemption-penalty/  (click through the intermediary page)
Basically, if you make under 10K a year or the healthcare would be 8% of your budget, you're exempt.
So it's not like people were going into debt from these fines...

It wasn't like it actually made things more expensive for the vast sodding majority of those poorer supporters, either. Or anyone, really. ACA has slowed down the rise of healthcare costs in most parts of the country, as far as anyone has actually been able to tell. If it hadn't been there, most folks would be in the same damn position except worse off with worse treatment.

... mind you, believing it did is a lot of the reason many people, conservative and not, have for wanting to scrap the thing. It's just that belief is by and large straight up bullshit, reinforced by repetition and volume more than absolutely everything. There's exceptions to that for specific areas, where it hasn't slowed down the rise, but that's usually less ACA implementation's fault and more their bloody legislature et al screwing them over, yet again.

Have republicans in general been screaming for war in these last 8 years, though? Many families with people in the military vote republican and hold a good ammount of sway among republicans, and all I've been hearing from that crowd recently has been "bring our boys home", which is something that was very halfassedly done and never actualy completely executed.

Conservative sentiment that I've seen on that has frankly trended towards pretty close to being able to be called a DID symptom. There is a big "bring our boys home" message, but at the same time the message is borderline hyperaggressive when it comes to things like ISIS, Iran, etc., etc., etc., and there's also still serious support for expanding the military (which, by extension and no matter how much some folks like to try to claim otherwise, increases the extent it's used, as well) and adopting very belligerent foreign policy (sometimes hand in hand with increased isolationism, but don't ask how that works), i.e. basically goading other parts of the world into reacting violently. It's a sort of talking out both sides of their mouth thing, where they call for one thing and then call for other things that are diametrically opposed to said thing with similar or greater fervor.

If support for military aggression has really pulled back much on the conservative side of US politics, I haven't really noticed it, basically. There's been some overall conversation composition shift and some narrative is working against it nowadays (bring 'em back, et al), which is perhaps a bit of a change, but if the shoe drops and trump declares war on turkmenistan or some shit (never mind all the procedural borderline impossibilities involved in that), I can't really see much of the conservative parts of our electorate doing much to rally against it. It'd be nice to be surprised, but I'd be surprised if I was surprised

Eh, gameplay wise it's mostly strategy et al rather than tactical decisions (mostly; there's some stuff on the ground level with army composition, terrain, items, and choosing which spells to cast). Deciding where to go, how to use your resources, what's worth defending and not, so on, so forth. Illwinter mostly does that kind of thing... they tend to be pretty hands off so far as combat or fiddly construction or whatev' goes, and even with dominions (their bigger/more complicated game) all you do so far as that goes is set up formations and limited orders (charge forward, hold a couple turns, incentivise certain spells for a few turns, that sort of thing). There's a vaguely messed up amount of nuance involved there, but it's not your standard kind of direct control thing.

Vis a vis buildings, there are some permanent structure type things for some classes, though they're usually more modifying stuff that's already there than making new map features, but you're generally not flapping around building new towns, no. And not all classes have access to something like that, either.

It is kinda' slow, though. The games are actually intended to be relatively short, from what I understand,* but most of the classes don't have much that goes very fast and the way resource generation and seasons and whatnot function kinda' work counter to that t'boot. Some of the classes have an easier time with that... though I forget exactly which ones, ehehe.

Still, you'll probably find it taking less time as you get more familiar with things, get a better handle on expansion and what units move fastest, have to spend less time figuring out what you intend to do, and that sort of thing.

* Picking the largest map was pretty much guaranteed to make it a slog, basically, and the lowest difficulty AIs are... kinda' braindead, even for turn based strategy AI, to the point they pretty regularly get taken out by moose or somethin'. Smaller map and smarter AIs make for something where you're doing a lot less trudging around and a lot more other stuff. More commanders and more armies definitely can help, too.

Wait, I thought it was the Republicans who were the warhawks. Democrats want it too?

No, not really. At the absolute least they'd certainly prefer a diplomatic solution to things in that area, whereas the republicans, well. Glassing is part of their campaigning vocabulary. Ninja'd a bit, but eh.

I doubt these people want to be seen as responsible for killing thousands of American soldiers in a war against the Persians.

You haven't really been paying attention to the republican party/american conservatives over the last... uh. Longer than I've been alive. Then :V

Somewhat less tongue in cheek, by and large both the politicians in question and their constituency doesn't really pay that much attention to long term concerns, particularly when it comes to military force projection. It's pretty doubtful they'd claim or assign responsibility for the theoretical fatalities being considered. And if it really came into focus, you'd mostly just hear a lot of babbling about patriotic sacrifice and maintaining the free world and etc., etc., etc.

I meant more 'I wish we had as many and as diverse choices for Dems as there were for the Republicans'.

... were the republican choices actually diverse? Like... at all. I seem to remember most of them being more or less interchangeable with (at least) three or four of the other candidates. Even trump to a fair degree, really. Differences were there but they weren't exactly substantial, and policy wise they were pretty close to cookie-cutter t'boot. There was a lot of bodies in that mess but m'not sure if there was much in the way of functional choice involved...

Would say they more need to figure out a way to get things done without the town and rural voters, tbh. Or at least no more than they have now. There's basically no message the dems can give to those folks that's not a straight up fucking lie that they haven't already been giving for decades, to little avail and less attention.

State level legislature has been an issue for a while, though, yeah. Kinda' sod all you can really do about it in rural et al areas, unfortunately. Inroads aren't going to happen there until repubs finally screw up hard enough th'populations in question pay bloody attention to who's been driving the last few decades of sodomy train and start listening to information outside very specific venues. Challenge there is the screwing pole to reach before that happens is high enough commercial flights can pass under it.

Might be better off hoping the reps get more fractious, honestly, and part of it starts pulling left/less-freakishly-stupid on issues of governance hard enough they actualy stop bending over for the rest of 'em. Breath holding and lack thereof, etc., etc.

Nah. It'd just lead to a new market for touchscreen compatible electricity gloves.

Two, "peace through strength" sounds a lot like the authoritarian government in V for Vendetta's slogan, "Strength through Unity, Unity through Faith".

Unfortunately, I don't think anyone involved with the US version is as charismatic or laden with alien supertechnology as Kane.

The statement itself is kinda' oldish, though. Reagan or before, with an idle check.