Bah to buttreflies. What about those leaf-cutter ants?

@bareboards2

I'm also glad that we can discuss these issues like reasonable people. I apologize if I've come off as unreasonable in the past. The truth is that I'm always willing to talk things out.

I've heard the rhetoric about death panels from both sides; I just haven't put in the effort to separate fact from fiction. Now that I've looked into it, this is what I've found. What you're describing (end of life consultations) is not the same thing as what are now being called death panels in Obamacare. Yes, it is true that the provision you are speaking about was demonized by republicans and ultimately removed from Medicare. I'm actually not sure how I feel about it, because it is a form of assisted suicide, and it could be abused. Some seniors may feel pressured into forgoing care, just as you hear of some people receiving substandard care because they are organ donors.

http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/dad-rescues-brain-dead-son-from-doctors-wishing-to-harvest-his-organs-boy-r

In any case, the conversation has evolved, and we are no longer talking about these end of life consultations when we are talking about death panels. The death panel in Obamacare is an unelected board of 15 "health care experts" (the Independent Payment Advisory Board, or IPAB) who will make critical decisions on what services within Medicare are financially viable, and which aren't. Here is a quote from President Obama in the first debate acknowledging this:

"It — when Gov. Romney talks about this board, for example, unelected board that we’ve created, what this is, is a group of health care experts, doctors, et cetera, to figure out, how can we reduce the cost of care in the system overall?” Obama said.

“Now, so what this board does is basically identifies best practices and says, let’s use the purchasing power of Medicare and Medicaid to help to institutionalize all these good things that we do,” Obama added.

This is also acknowledged by a senior adviser to Obama:

"WE need death panels. Well, maybe not death panels, exactly, but unless we start allocating health care resources more prudently — rationing, by its proper name — the exploding cost of Medicare will swamp the federal budget."

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/17/opinion/health-care-reform-beyond-obamacare.html?_r=2

So call it death panels, or rationing, the principle is still the same. The recommendations this board makes will become law unless it is overridden by a 2/3's majority vote in congress. Here is a good example of how this type of legislative oversight is making health care "better" (penalizing hospitals for readmitting patients within 30 days):

"Beginning Monday, the hospitals will receive lower reimbursements on Medicare claims filed with the government for each admitted patient. Over the year, the total amount of those reductions will vary from $1.2 million for MedStar Washington Hospital Center in Northwest Washington, the region’s largest private hospital, to about $12,000 for Reston Hospital Center in Virginia. Of 16 hospitals in the District and Northern Virginia, all but three will get paid less."

"Some of the hardest-hit facilities are inner-city hospitals that tend to treat sicker, poorer patients. These patients sometimes end up being readmitted because they have a harder time getting medication and follow-up doctors’ appointments, often because they lack transportation, hospital officials said.

“Not only do we have the very sick patients, they also have very significant social needs,” said Kamaljit Sethi, who heads quality and safety at Providence Hospital in Northeast, where officials estimate they will lose about $320,000 in the coming year."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/hospitals-in-dc-va-to-lose-millions-from-medicare/2012/09/30/2fe0f96c-08ca-11e2-afff-d6c7f20a83b
f_story.html

What this means is that patients with the greatest needs will lose the most services, because the hospitals will no longer be able to serve them because of this penalty. This outcome could turn out to be deadly for thousands of people, ultimately, all in the name of efficiency. This is a perfect illustration as to why Government should have as little power over your health care as possible. Here is testimony from the front lines:

" Today while working my shift in the emergency room, an old lady was brought in very sick and in fact near death. I did my usual workup and evaluation and attempted to administer life saving treatment. It was my plan to admit this woman to the hospital. I found out a little later that this same woman had been a patient here just slightly more than 2 weeks ago with a DIFFERENT DIAGNOSIS. I was told that if this woman was admitted, the hospital would not be paid.

The new Medicare rule now is that if the same Medicare patient is re-admitted to the hospital within 30 days, the hospital will not be paid. When they first started this nonsense they said this only applied to patients with the same diagnosis. Now they have "expanded" the rule to include re-admissions for any reason. So if you're in the hospital for pneumonia, and 3 weeks later, you break your leg.......too bad. Medicare will not pay the hospital to fix your leg."

http://grouchatrighttruth.blogspot.com/2012/10/death-panels-are-here.html

This is completely outrageous, I think you will be forced to agree. Personally, I think we need to have a national conversation about this issue, and both sides need to come together to hammer out this issue. Obamacare is clearly not ready for primetime, and as it stands it is going to hurt people.

As far as your other comments, I'm not limiting myself to any particular news source. I am a political independent and I will share with you that I won't be voting for either candidate this year. I will still participate in the local elections but I cannot vote for either candidate in good conscience. While I am socially and fiscally conservative on many issues, I am liberal on others, such as helping the poor, the environment (within reason), and immigration. I don't fit into a polical cookie cutter and I don't automatically support a candidate because they give God lip service.

>> ^lucky760:

>> ^Yogi:
>> ^lucky760:
Reminds me of Clint Eastwood preparing to escape from Alcatraz using a bundle of matches to weld together a mini pickax (made out of a small nail cutter and its little nail file, IIRC).
Just me?

Who's Clint Eastwood?

He's a historical figure from the 1880s who unfortunately fell to his demise in Clayton's Ravine when the train he was engineering failed to stop before the tracks ended at an uncompleted bridge. Google "Mad Dog Tannen" for more info.


Ding ding ding!

Close out the comments. We have a winner.

>> ^Yogi:

>> ^lucky760:
Reminds me of Clint Eastwood preparing to escape from Alcatraz using a bundle of matches to weld together a mini pickax (made out of a small nail cutter and its little nail file, IIRC).
Just me?

Who's Clint Eastwood?


He's a historical figure from the 1880s who unfortunately fell to his demise in Clayton's Ravine when the train he was engineering failed to stop before the tracks ended at an uncompleted bridge. Google "Mad Dog Tannen" for more info.

Reminds me of Clint Eastwood preparing to escape from Alcatraz using a bundle of matches to weld together a mini pickax (made out of a small nail cutter and its little nail file, IIRC).

Just me?

you'd think they'd have some template cutter that you just press into the pizza. That's instant and accurate...

I've wanted to invent pizza-cutter holsters ever since I worked in a pizza shop.

I blame the Stone Cutters for that.

Making tumblers out of beer bottles is pretty easy though... but this is a lot faster than using a glass cutter to chop the top off (if its real.)

My bad on D1 dungeons.

There will always be cookie-cutter builds. And besides, when you're talking about 'the' build, you're talking about the ideal items to have, the vast majority of people will never get there. Meanwhile, the options for 'best with what you have' varied heaps. I played D3 through with a Monk, and the entire time, the only stats that felt worthwhile chasing were damage, dexterity and vitality.

I'm not saying it didn't have dark elements, but vast portions of the story, dialogue and tone, particularly after Act 1 (which I thought was best part of the game), where juvenile and completely off for a Diablo game. I mean for christ sake, the game delved into damsel in distress territory multiple times. Anyway posted this elsewhere, going to just copy paste:

1. Story tone is horribly off for a Diablo game. Act 1, the tone is almost that right mix of dark, macabre & grim horror albeit with overly colourful graphics. Then, in Act 2 and especially 3/4 the game becomes flat out goofy. It's almost like different studios designed the two parts. Regardless, it's obvious the whole gothic, cheesy but serious tone of previously Diablo games has been thoroughly ditched.

It becomes obvious there is a reason that most of the prime evils were mostly mute & why your characters was kept to making sarcastic remarks and one liners in D2. Diablo beretting you with grating "if it wasn't for your meddling kids" dialogue completely ruins the game's tone. Overall the mix of occasional ultra-violence and the overt colourfulness and childish NPC banter gives it an almost surreal and contradictory theme. As if a design house was of two minds, fighting over dominance over the franchise's feel.

There was just no need to muck with what was not broken to the point that it's hard for me to NOT imagine Activision sitting behind the developers dictating them how well the WoW tone sits with target demographics. There is nothing wrong with WoW existing in its own space with it's own unique identity. There's a problem with creative variety between Blizzard games becoming non-existent because they've caught on to what sells best and decided to stick to that.

As for launch issues, I didn't play D2 at launch, but that's not what really bugs me. It is abundantly obvious though that foisting online-only is part of the reason they're having so many launch issues.

Here's my full bitch session - http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5149543659

>> ^mentality:

>> ^RedSky:
@mentality
D2 felt like a huge leap on D1. Randomized dungeons, huge increase in class and especially item variety, introduction of a vast swathe of new environments. In comparison critically looking at D3, while it does have an expanded skills system, at the end of a prodigious 11 year development cycle, D3 has far less item variety at launch, and arguably simplified gameplay mechanics on a number of levels.
Personally, I happen to also think the story is a let down, the tone of the game has been inappropriately been made cartoonish (art design non-withstanding).

D1 had randomized dungeons. Item variety in D2 was very limited because there often was one set of unique item that was 'THE' item for a specific build. The expanded environments in D2 were also very cartoony compared to the dungeons of D1, and calling D3 cartoonish with levels like the Halls of Agony is outright ridiculous.
The fact of the matter is that the grass is always greener, and we all look at the past with rose colored glasses. History repeats itself, but it seems like few people remember all the problems, controversy and bitching surrounding Diablo 2's launch.

In reply to this comment by dannym3141:
Take bioware for example. Before they were 'bought' by EA they made some of the (arguably, but almost universally accepted) best games of their particular genre. Baldur's gate 1 and 2, neverwinter nights....


Forgot about Bioware. They're on my list as well. They used to be an automatic buy, but DA2... EA is poison to game companies.

It's difficult to explain to young'uns who were raised on consoles why old-school PC gamers are so disappointed in the current state of PC gaming. This whole backlash that PC gamers are "elitist crybabies" is just so tired. I have a gaming mouse and a 104 keys, yet many PC games are designed for multiple platforms, and, unfortunately, the lowest common denominator is an ADD-addled console player with a gamepad. The result is cookie-cutter dross that is only made discernible in its genre by the textures and artwork that make up its world. I'm not saying great AAA pc games aren't being made any more, just that there are so few, and this move by developers towards always-online DRM for single-player gaming (Ubisoft, Blizzard) limits my choices even more, as I refuse to support that bullshit.

I still play through Doom and Doom2 about once a year and have a blast every time. I'm about halfway through yet another run of Diablo II, and I'm thinking I'll fire up Planescape: Torment or Baldur's Gate after that. So many excellent older games to play and replay, not to mention the large number of quality indie games being released. I don't miss Diablo III one bit.

Your right but back then they were still constricted by programming and memory constraints since the average computer had maybe 128k of ram to work with. I remember programming in Basic when I was like 8yrs old. I remember having to do programs sometimes upwards of 500 lines or more that only ran once and couldn't be saved in anyway. And the finished product was some Pixel Art or maybe a song that played "Mary had a Little Lamb" through a PC Speaker. Granted Basic was a very limited programming language to begin with.

Then there was the gaming crash of 83' that pretty much destroyed those same bedroom coders your speaking of.
It wasn't really till the invention of Shareware which didn't become widely used till the late 80's that things started to get back on track and people had some of the freedoms we are enjoying now with indie games and crowd-funding. Though I see and acknowledge your point about things being cyclical. If games hadn't suffered such a major setback in the early 80's things would have been very different today.


>> ^spoco2:

>> ^Auger8:
A new age has dawned for games. The ideas of the common man can now be expressed to the world in a way that was never possible before. Free of the restrictions of publishers and corporate giants. Free of the expectation to make the next great cookie cutter FPS or RPG. We can now for the first time in history truly make the games that we WANT to make. We can innovate. We can push the boundaries of the old genres. We can create new genres and we can tell the stories that not only change the industry but change the hearts of the players we strive so hard to reach. This is the second Golden Age of Gaming and I for one couldn't be more excited to see it arrive!

Erm, hardly 'for the first time'.
The first games on home computers, back in the mid 80s, were largely one man jobs. A whole collection of bedroom coders made buckets of money back then creating games for computers like the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64.
Yeah, it then became taken over by the giant media companies, and yes it's now becoming far more accessible for people to be able to code quality games with tiny teams, and have them reach people via the internet and delivery systems like Steam.
But it's a return to that, not a first time thing, it's all cyclic

>> ^Auger8:

A new age has dawned for games. The ideas of the common man can now be expressed to the world in a way that was never possible before. Free of the restrictions of publishers and corporate giants. Free of the expectation to make the next great cookie cutter FPS or RPG. We can now for the first time in history truly make the games that we WANT to make. We can innovate. We can push the boundaries of the old genres. We can create new genres and we can tell the stories that not only change the industry but change the hearts of the players we strive so hard to reach. This is the second Golden Age of Gaming and I for one couldn't be more excited to see it arrive!


Erm, hardly 'for the first time'.

The first games on home computers, back in the mid 80s, were largely one man jobs. A whole collection of bedroom coders made buckets of money back then creating games for computers like the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64.

Yeah, it then became taken over by the giant media companies, and yes it's now becoming far more accessible for people to be able to code quality games with tiny teams, and have them reach people via the internet and delivery systems like Steam.

But it's a return to that, not a first time thing, it's all cyclic

A new age has dawned for games. The ideas of the common man can now be expressed to the world in a way that was never possible before. Free of the restrictions of publishers and corporate giants. Free of the expectation to make the next great cookie cutter FPS or RPG. We can now for the first time in history truly make the games that we WANT to make. We can innovate. We can push the boundaries of the old genres. We can create new genres and we can tell the stories that not only change the industry but change the hearts of the players we strive so hard to reach. This is the second Golden Age of Gaming and I for one couldn't be more excited to see it arrive!