Jesus_666
@Jesus_666@lemmy.world
- Comment on It's funny how once a country has Universal Healthcare they never give it up. 1 week ago:
Country size has nothing to do with it; it’s all in the lobbies.
Much of what’s wrong with American healthcare could be fixed with a few pieces of federal legislation:
- Any medical practitioner who deals with one health insurance provider has to deal with all of them. Likewise, all insurances have to accept bills from all licensed medical practitioners.
- There are limits to how much can be billed for a certain procedure within the health insurance system.
- There are limits to how much a health insurance is allowed to charge for the basic plan relative to income.
- A health insurance’s basic plan must cover at least a certain set of medical procedures (but is allowed to cover more). These include all regular life-saving procedures and a range of preventative ones (e.g. semiannual dental checkups).
- Health insurances are not allowed to deny basic coverage due to pre-existing conditions.
- Deductibles are banned.
- Copays are regulated.
This gets rid of the “out of network” bullshit and basically turns the American healthcare system into an approximation of the German one. The German system is one of the most expensive in the world and generally considered to be of middling quality compared to other wealthy nations but it’s half as expensive per capita as the American one; based on free enterprise (with a fuckton of regulations, which is normal for the medical sector); and wildly more effective than the American system, which doesn’t even rank among other developed nations.
The only reason the USA don’t have a better healthcare system is that lobbyists spend an unholy amount of money to ensure it doesn’t and lawmakers are willing to do whatever the highest bidder tells them to. Size and diversity have nothing to do with it.
- Comment on bruh 2 weeks ago:
That’s why I never touched it; the whole thing sounds like boring neocolonial milprop. If it’s essentially a modern army vs. a medieval country with flying lizards, how is it any different from when the USA go shit all over a third world nation and then give themselves an award for being such great warriors?
My expectations may be colored by growing up in an age where RTSes were a thing but wouldn’t a more balanced fantasy adversary lead to more interesting scenarios?
Like trying to do counterintelligence against someone who can use clairvoyance to listen in on your meetings. Or stopping saboteurs with access to invisibility spells. Or the fantasy guys figuring out how to do magical EMPs, taking your telecommunications and modern vehicles out of commission so you have to use message carriers and jury-rig technicals out of vintage cars.
I dunno, kinda sounds more interesting to me than the “modern military equipment is superior to a medieval army” that everyone always describes the show as.
- Comment on Microsoft patent describes in-game advertising triggered by boss fights, loading screens, and cutscenes 2 weeks ago:
Yes. That’s how art works.
Most musicians, including many bands that fill stadiums and go on world tours, pay the bills with regular full-time jobs and do all of their band stuff in their spare time. It’s similar for artists, authors, etc.
A really good game takes years of hard work. It can take surprisingly little money; a small team driven by passion can be very efficient. But it does take effort. And sure, not everyone can be Tynan Sylvester or ConcernedApe or Pixel or Team Cherry; most tiny indie games aren’t genre-shaping mega hits.
But they don’t have to. There’s plenty of small games out there that are just good and that’s good enough. The idea of even just a hundred people playing one’s game and being entertained is enticing enough for thousands of developers to sink hours and hours of their spare time into.
Will there be a bazillion lame asset flips in the future? Yes, just like there have always been lame derivative bands, shitty overhyped artists, terrible indie movies, and drivel-slinging hack authors.
Just like there have always been shitty AA and AAA games, for that matter. 90% of everything is crap. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of gems hiding in between all the chaff.
(And while I’m at it: While making a game does requires a lot of knowledge, that knowledge can be acquired along the way. The original Cave Story was a one-man project and Pixel certainly didn’t start out as a professional programmer/artist/composer/screenplay author. Learning how to do all that is part of the fun for some people.)
- Comment on It was cold this morning. You all know what this means. 3 weeks ago:
- Comment on Ancient Historians v. Modern Historians 1 month ago:
That’s my point: The classical definition makes the assumption that written records are the only records with any kind of reliability, which doesn’t hold everywhere.
- Comment on Ancient Historians v. Modern Historians 1 month ago:
I wouldn’t say the idea of prehistory is disrupted per se. But we have to accept that it’s region-dependent. In any given region (recorded) history started when the oldest still available account was preserved.
Some regions are far better at preserving very old accounts than others.
- Comment on Low rating 1 month ago:
Well, there was Rainfurrest, which was so bad that I know the name off the top of my head without even being in the furry scene. From what I’ve heard it was an outlier organized by people who’d been banned from other conventions so by no means typical.
But it’s not like I’ve never heard of a furry convention going wrong.
- Comment on Cancelled Quake 4 expansion gets surprise GitHub release after former XCOM 2 developer discovers it on an old hard drive: 'This essentially saved my life' 1 month ago:
Technically we already had XCOM 3. Apocalypse wasn’t half bad, actually, despite the weird realtime/turn-based combat system.
- Comment on The rich passing our money back & forth 1 month ago:
It would be so immensely amusing if one of those companies got fined by the EU for something – with the fine calculated from their revenues. That should lead to some interesting fireworks.
- Comment on The perfect date 2 months ago:
It does to me. mm-dd is not used at all in my native language and would be considered grammatically incorrect. Since English doesn’t prescribe it I have no reason to fully accept it.
Note that I still prefer to write ISO 8601 dates but my spoken dates are big-endian.
Middle-endian dates like “June 15th 2046” are just bad, of course.
- Comment on Anon overdoes it 2 months ago:
Also, caffeine addiction is relatively easy to overcome. Nicotine addiction isn’t and tobacco, its main source, contains tons of other crap, which is why governments have been running anti-smoking campaigns for decades but keep their actions against caffeine to “don’t give energy drinks to minors” and “please don’t sell premixed alcoholic caffeinated beverages”.
- Comment on the Home Alone house then and now 2 months ago:
Clean lines and a warm color scheme might be a good middle ground. The old version’s wallpapers were a bit too busy and the new one definitely looks way too sterile.
But yeah, of I had to choose I’d go with the old one.
- Comment on How to summon a group of gym bros (100% working tutorial 2026) 2 months ago:
It kinda is if you’re a woman. Of course there’s not very much overlap between women and 6’1" 300 lb guys.
But yeah, the problem there is the abuse of steroids and growth hormones. That will fuck your body up in various ways you might not even notice at first.
- Comment on If the movie Falling Down with Michael Douglas was made today in these times would it be too meta on the current society? Or would it be seen as trying to push an agenda? 2 months ago:
I don’t think Foster is portrayed as heroic.
Sure, he picks fights with people/things many viewers would like to be fought, from street gangs to Nazis, from corporate bullshit to inflating prices. But he’s also shown to be unstable and dangerous even when he doesn’t want to be.
His very reason for being in the traffic jam that makes him start off on his rampage is that he can’t face the fact that neither his company nor his family want to deal with him.
The more the movie goes on the more it drives home the fact that Foster is not someone to look up to. He’s always been unstable and entitled and now he’s finally snapped.
The cop is shown as more heroic but is really just used as a vehicle for suicide by cop. A suicide that is clearly Foster telling the easy way out of a life he can’t handle anymore.
I take Falling Down as a deconstruction of the kind of power fantasy we get when things piss us off. Sure, we think it’d be great to just blow up what we don’t like but the movie shows what kind of person we’d have to be to actually do it.
- Comment on YouTube Premium Lite 3 months ago:
YouTube Premium Lite Professional RTX Turbo for Workgroups & Knuckles – Featuring Dante from the Devil May Cry™ series
- Comment on It's been a while since I was fired from my job, so here's a picture of Windows updating at the wrong time 3 months ago:
My company uses a third-party deployment platform that gives you dialog with a 60 minute countdown and a button to start immediately. And I think the deployment dialog can’t pop up if you’re not on the computer. Because nobody likes nonsense like five minute countdowns that can start while the screen is locked.
- Comment on Horror story 3 months ago:
“Houston, what is ‘New Teams Classic’ and why is it asking me to log in three times in a row?”
- Comment on I just wanted to watch video about old GPU, why youtube like that? 3 months ago:
I’d certainly like to assnuke all those slop videos.
- Comment on European Commission rejects new laws for Stop Destroying Videogames 3 months ago:
Expected, though. The EC is not exactly known for having sensible opinions.
- Comment on Just me and my cement truck 4 months ago:
What’s this? A bunker full of billionaires unbothered by bees? My dump truck full of bees ought to put a stop to that!
- Comment on Hail math! 4 months ago:
“Let me do a check to see if I give you the right blood… Nope, not with a 5. Here’s your blood orange juice.”
- Comment on Anon reads horror 4 months ago:
That’s not necessarily why you take drugs.
Uppers like cocaine (which he was very fond of at the time) are often consumed to be more productive or to “enhance” an otherwise already positive time. From what I’ve heard, he was introduced to coke at a party, which makes perfect sense. Cocaine abuse starts with making a party exhilarating, then it continues with giving you so much energy while working, finally you simply take the stuff because your brain doesn’t know how to work with natural levels or serotonin/dopamine/noradrenaline anymore.
To name another class of drugs, taking psychedelics (which I haven’t heard of King having much business with) to hide from your inner demons would be a profoundly bad move since those tend to forcibly confront you with yourself. Great if you have the feeling that deep down there’s something you need to address but you don’t know what. Terrible if you know there’s something but you can’t handle dealing with it.
Downers like cannabis (which King apparently did at least occasionally use) can be used to silence the bad thoughts. Putting up a smokescreen between your conscious and your subconscious isn’t exactly the best way of handling things but at least you’re not pouring fuel onto the fire.
Drugs of all kinds can still take your mind in directions you normally would’ve shied away from, that’s true. And a sustained drug habit of any kind is often indicative of an underlying problem; happy people don’t mess with their brain chemistry as often. The specific underlying problem can vary wildly – unassisted psychological distress, physiological issues like chronic pain, performance anxiety, peer pressure… the list goes on and on.
Of course, given that King also had a sustained alcohol problem and apparently at one point abused everything he could get his hands on, he definitely seems like someone who couldn’t handle what was going on inside of his head. Thankfully he had the support he needed to overcome his drug problem.
- Comment on Anon is a gamer 4 months ago:
Good to hear, although the mere presence of a bullshit lawsuit can do a lot of damage to a smaller company.
The problem remains, however, that the patents in question were granted in the first place, as were the retroactive addenda (which is a terrible “feature” of Japanese patent law).
Game mechanics are patentable both in principle and in practice. And that’s a problem.
- Comment on Anon is a gamer 4 months ago:
Counterpoint: Summoning characters by throwing an item and having the character appear at the position of the item has been patented by Nintendo, as has using a summoned character as a hang glider.
Japanese patent law is pretty terrible.
- Comment on All in one 4 months ago:
Add conditioner for me because I have super hard water. And my soap is body wash. But yeah, same principle.
- Comment on Uh well actually- 4 months ago:
Not necessarily. hCaptcha is not very reliable in my experience. Sometimes it wants you to select multiple pictures but only shows one that matches the prompt. Sometimes it tells you you passed but then doesn’t bother setting the token correctly so you have to do it again. Of course this can continue until you solve variations of the same damn captcha thirty times in a row.
hCaptcha is such a horrible buggy mess that my base assumption is that I’ll get trapped in an infinite loop anytime I see it.
- Comment on Sick of this shit 4 months ago:
Being insecure is fine. Being insecure and then never shutting up about how great you are and how everyone should be like you is deeply annoying. Lie to yourself if it makes you feel better; everyone does that. But don’t insist I should be part of it.
- Comment on Most could work on anyone really 5 months ago:
Of course the real trick lies in figuring out which decade is your last one.
- Comment on Anon was bullied 5 months ago:
They did everything you hate back when you said liked anime. They still have bonkers shit today. There’s variety. It’s not like the entire extremely prolific animation industry of an entire country is moving in lockstep to deliver exactly the same product across the board.
Sure, there trends like the onslaught of bland isekai shit we had for a while but even the worst seasons of that had their gems. Heck, even that genre has gems; there a reason KonoSuba is well-regarded (and it’s full of people who would be utterly unacceptable in Japanese society).
You probably have the same problem that gets people to think that all music became shit approximately 20-30 years after they were born: They mainly remember the hits of their youth and forget that 80% of airtime went to shitty music back then as well.
- Comment on Perhaps the only appropriate use of AI 5 months ago:
An LLM trained on the PoE ingame chat would try to solve all my problems by asking to buy my Kaom’s Sign Coral Ring for 1ex.