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I dunno but it's fucking awesome.
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don't get me wrong - i'm absolutley all for incenting healthier or more high-quality choices through policy.
i'd be all for banning hamburger helper and canned ravioli from the food stamps/ wic program because i feel like it's worth the step up in funding to discourage people from poisoning themselves. on the other hand, grass-fed skirt steak is like $18/lb and that seems pretty extravagant for public assistance.
but there is a tradeoff with the cost of the program. ideally, the attempt would be to thread the needle of "cost-efficiency" and "incenting healthy food choices."
In America at least, the factory packaged brown eggs cost more to produce because the hens bred to lay them require more feed, supposedly.
On the farm, where things aren;t so uniform, there is damn difference at all.
http://www.npr.org/2013/04/25/179038260/signing-up-for-food-stamps
imma knife fight you
switchblades at dawn
#FreeScheck
#FreeSKFM
hi
#FreeScheck
#FreeSKFM
It's an MMO built around running (pretty darn well designed) instanced content of various forms like DDO or Guild Wars 1 (as opposed to lots of wandering around open areas like pre-endgame WoW or Guild Wars 2).
The combat is quite fast and involves positioning and reflexes to avoid attacks (AOEs and big attacks from mobs get marked on the ground and give you a sec to dodge out of the way). While playing you will wear right through the left mouse button with the constant clickclickclickclickclick. It does not feel like standard quick-bar-mmo combat.
There are some nice support features already like being able to access the auction house or set your minions to crafting stuff from a web app.
So, all good time so far. But there's a big downside. The business drones in charge of the "free to play" model for this game are completely fucking insane. Prices are about 10x what they should be. And every single little damn thing in the UI is pushing pushing pushing some form of their several overlapping kinds of funbucks. There's plain old gold. Which is used for buying a horse and maybe some potions? Not much. Then there's Astral Diamonds which you can get in measured amounts from certain daily quests and special promotions. A daily quest gives 1000 of these usually. Then there's the direct money funbucks in the form of "zen". A zen is 1 cent real money. You can trade astral diamonds for zen but the rates are absurd (some people think they may come down, I think probably not). A zen, or one penny, is 400-500 astral diamonds.
What makes this all suck is that things that cost zen, and that's a lot, are so overpriced. A single bag slot? $6 for a small and $10 for a large (no bag crafting for you like in WoW). Some of the mounts are $45. Making your armor glow blue? $5. Paying money makes crafted stuff have 20% better stats for the same item. 2 more character slots (you get two to start with) is $5. Respeccing is $6.
The biggest one is that your companions are level capped without spending real money. So if you want a companion that is actually useful in the end game (especially healers, which draw agro like woah and don't have enough HP to keep up while level capped) you are looking at $30+ fucking dollars
Basically, they have shit all over their pretty darn good game with a horrible FTP model.
Right now we're in a position where we rely mostly on private insurers, so not much control there. If private insurers want to charge a surcharge for an arbitrary reason, that's their right (as long as they remain within the bounds of discrimination laws). And the government then needs to take those market conditions into consideration instead of pretending they don't exist. If we switched over to a modern, government-based healthcare system, the government could drop smoker discrimination (which I dislike because it sets a bad precedent) and switch over to a functionally equivalent sin tax on cigarettes (which is better).
We have a guild?
I said "basically" !
That wasn't a normative statement that being not-a-lib is a bad thing -- just a reflection of my impression of D&D based on pretty much every politics thread I've posted in.
yeah i was just going to ask this
brown eggs were cheaper when i was a kid because people found them uglier. but they taste just the same as the white ones
i guess they're a little worse at making easter egss
I stopped watching guild chat when I realized everyone in it was from the MMO forum and annoyed the shit out of me.
*beep boop*
Lapse in love of government detected. Report to the nearest re-education camp. Hail, Big Government!
I'm on food stamps right meow.
can't you have some of that UAE oil money western unioned over, or do the morality police in Dubai keep arresting the office workers?
Here if you buy a box of eggs they will generally be a mix of colours.
I had assumed that "brown eggs" was being used as some kind of shorthand for something like organic or cornfed.
I am against this whole fucking heartedly. It's a dumb "fuck smokers, no one likes them anyway" move that gets easy support, but is much less actuarially effective than simple age banding.
#FreeScheck
#FreeSKFM
Almost beat Gradius III on arcade difficulty but died when I had a momentary lapse.
My nephew is permanantly disabled, can never drive or work 80% of jobs
Why should he be restricted to basics, other than by total amount of funds, exactly?
Stringer playing with fire
cops always one step behind
Daniels has huge pecks
nothing ever changes
Frank
A blend of old fashioned breeding, hormones, steroids, food selection and genetic modification have allowed us to make millions of eggs uniform in color and size without a large amount of hassle.
But with their FTP model they are trying damn hard to extract more than a subscription fee + box cost from every player.
i smoked for like 18 years. it was hard to quit, and i probably wouldn't have if cigarettes hadn't climbed to like $9/pack in mass.
i'm basically fine with government benefits and tax structures being built around incentivizing good/ healthy life decisions - quitting smoking, losing weight, eating well, taking care of their kids, getting education, etc.
i'm not really sure where i'd draw the upper line on that. i was fine with the aborted NYC big gulp ban, which seems to be beyond-the-pale gummint paternalism to a whole lot of people.
I distrust anything that's sold to me with no rationale except that it is "conventional wisdom", and doubly so when it deals with economics.
I certainly wouldn't call it "discrimination" in the way we normally use that word.
I can't really think of a good argument against the surcharge from an "excessive government intervention" point of view. This is pretty much a perfect example of the Free Market(tm) at work.
This is what we do now, though I think the amount of tax varies heavily state to state (on top of the federal and local taxes). The downside is that cigarette smoking is, iirc, the most prevalent among lower-SES people, so any further surcharges or taxes will disproportionately target lower-income people.
But anyway, do you jerks think this would make a good thread? Or would we just go in circles?
Car insurance companies charge someone with an expensive car and points on their license more than someone with an econobox and no violations. The same should apply to health insurance and people who do things that endanger their health purposefully.
Sure, let's start a pilot program for this in Atlantic City.
:rotate:
#FreeScheck
#FreeSKFM
We always go in circles here, but I would participate.
just fyi
i am gonna try it out tomorrow night. i'll holler at you
Conventional wisdom is even worse when applied to psychology, biology, or quantum mechanics though.
I was only in Dubai for the fall semester, and racked up like $5500 in credit card debt because of it.
If I was actually Emirati I wouldn't shut up about it because it'd be so effin' sweet. Instead, I just don't shut up about being Pakistani.
there are threads that don't go in circles?
i would follow it but i am not a super active poster so