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YOU ARE THE REASON

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hello vonnie
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#extradirty
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Alisa U Zemlji Chuda

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unmute
You are Called
It is time for my calling. I can hear and see the Archdemon in every shadow, a wraith that stalks my dreams and my waking hours. I leave my sword to my apprentice with a letter, words only for her. I do not face her myself. To give one last embrace before my time comes is to invite the temptation to wait out a slow death. I walk through the halls of Orzammar to the city gate. The Legion greets me with a salute of steel fists upon their breastplates. They know all too well of our sacrifice. The Smith caste presents me with a weapon designed for their cause, good dwarven steel with a silverite edge. Flexible, and as sharp as a drake fang. I shake my head and laugh, to think that I would be presented with a blade such as this only moments before I march to my death. The drums begin to beat and the gate begins to rise. There is a hush in the darkness and the shadows seem to retreat from my presence as I draw my blade. Purpose burns in me, hotter and brighter than the whispers of the Archdemon. In this moment, I am no longer the teacher. I am only the Warden.
âIsha. I have no lessons left to teach you. My greatest hope is that you surpass me, in every way, so that in the coming Blight, your name will forever outshine mine in the pages of history.â
This image brings an incredible sense of calmness
A vague sense of animal crossing
Beanbag chairs for tired elven college students
Infinity War Bloopers (x)
(All hail the true GOAT of the MCU)
Goaty McGoatface in action.
Retail
If you treat people who are trapped in a job that they hate as if they deserve it, then you are a terrible human being. And you deserve worse.
Batman Beyond character casting idea
Michael B. Jordan as Terry McGinnis and Hugh Laurie as Bruce Wayne.
Shadowrun: Obsolescence
The great cities stand, headstones made from polished steel and grey concrete, streaked and slashed with neon lights and loud corporate adsâthe latest lies from those in power. They rise high into the heavens, and cast a long shadow across the blackened earth. The higher they build, the longer, and darker the shadows run. You call those shadows home now, whether by choice or circumstance, you run in the dark. You are a Shadowrunner, but, that name and your demeanor belie a certain brightness to you. Like a coin tarnished with rust, you conceal a brilliance within, a flame in the wind that refuses to die.
My Fallout New Vegas Review
Letâs give an honest critique of this game in 2018 now that the Fallout series is basically on life support and depending on what Bethesda does at this yearâs E3, probably about to have the plug pulled. New Vegas is a competant Role Playing experience and an enjoyable one. Itâs aged about as well as dry pondscum but with ENB and graphical modding available for free on the PC, thatâs a moot point. It does however commit the cardinal RPG sin of ârailroadingâ players whether by invisible walls, or by placing super sonic murder wasps just a few miles north of the starting area to force you to take a circuitous route to your destination. But this game, unlike fallout, 4 has a soul. It has a tortured soul that is at once terrible and beautiful like watching glass shatter in slow motion. Your actions have consequences, your past is a mystery, the future is yours to claim, and in this fleeting moment we call the present, all you can do is take the path that lies before you. Our pathâThe playerâs path, as well as that of the fanbase does not lie at Bethesdaâs back, following mindlessly where they would have us go. Our path is for us to choose. We, the players, will choose whether or not Fallout survives into the next era of gaming by weighing the actions of hubristic companies making what will sell instead of what is worthy of being called art. For all itâs jank, gameplay issues, bugs and flaws, New Vegas is the truest Fallout experience. Donât be railroaded into giving Bethesda money it doesnât deserve for a series it has squandered.
Death comes for Minerva McGonagall.
It comes for her, as it came for her husband, so many years ago. It comes for her, as it came for her Headmaster, the price of his ambition. It comes for her, as it came for far too many of her friends and students, in one war then another.
Death comes for her.
Minerva McGonagall Looks at Death, and raises an eyebrow.
Death pauses, then nods and backs away. âWeâll call this number three then, shall we?â
She smiles as she turns back to her paperwork. There is a reason her animagus form is a cat.
Single best thing ever in my life have I ever read about my one true babe Minnie.
This makes my blood boil..They really do not gaf about poor people..
Rest in peace Yeweinisht Mesfin. You wonât be forgotten.
Jesus Christ How⊠how does someone deserve to live in her damn car because she doesnât sit behind a desk?
If you donât think a job is worth a living wage, do without the job. Donât hire anyone to do it, let that work go undone. If itâs really that worthless, you wonât miss having someone do it.
What? Canât do that, because youâll end up with trash all over the place and shit plugging up all the toilets from your customers and guests?
Whoops, looks like that jobâs more valuable than you thought.
Pay a living wage.
Irish people; The faeries arenât real
Irish people; No fucking way will I go in that faerie ring
#look#you donât go in a fairy ring and you donât fuck with a stone in the middle of a field#these are just facts#nobody does it#fairies will fuck you up#Ireland#folklore#fairies (Via @false-dawn)
Look, I donât believe in God, but I will not disrespect the Good Gentlemen of the Hills. Thatâs just common sense.
Between this and the Icelanders with their elves I do not understand what is going on above the 50th parallel.
My general rule of thumb: you donât have to believe in everything, but donât fuck with it, just in case.
^^^ that part
This is truer than true. Especially the Irish part.
Let me tell you what I know about this after living here for nearly thirty years.
This is a modern European country, the home of hot net startups, of Internet giants and (in some places, some very few places) the fastest broadband on Earth. People here live in this century, HARD.
Yet they get nervous about walking up that one hill close to their home after dark, because, you know⊠stuff happens there.
I know this because Peter and I live next to One Of Those Hills. There are people in our locality who wouldnât go up our tiny country road on a dark night for love or money. What they make of us being so close to it for so long without harm coming to us, I have no idea. For all I know, itâs ascribed to us being writers (i.e. sort of bards) or mad folk (also in some kind of positive relationship with the Dangerous Side: donât forget that the root word of âsillyâ, which used to be English for âcrazyâ, is the Old English _saelig_, âholyââŠ) or otherwise somehow weirdly exempt.
And you know what? Iâm never going to ask. Because one does not discuss such things. Lest people from outside get the wrong idea about us, about normal modern Irish people living in normal modern Ireland.
You hear about this in whispers, though, in the pub, late at night, when all the tourists have gone to bed or gone away and no one but the locals are around. That hill. That curve in the road. That cold feeling you get in that one place. There is a deep understanding that there is something here older than us, that doesnât care about us particularly, that (when we obtrude on it) is as willing to kick us in the slats as to let us pass by unmolested.
So you greet the magpies, singly or otherwise. You let stones in the middle of fields be. You apologize to the hawthorn bush when youâre pruning it. If you see something peculiar that cannot be otherwise explained, you are polite to it and pass onward about your business without further comment. And you donât go on about it afterwards. Because itâs⊠unwise. Not that you personally know any examples of people whoâve screwed it up, of course. But you donât meddle, and you learn when to look the other way, not to see, not to hear. Some things have just been here (for various values of âhereâ and various values of âbeenâ) a lot longer than you have, and will be here still after youâre gone. Thatâs the way of it. When you hear the story about the idiots who for a prank chainsawed the centuries-old fairy tree a couple of counties over, you say â if asked by a neighbor â exactly what theyâre probably thinking: âPoor fuckers. Theyâre doomed.â And if asked by anybody else you shake your head and say something anodyne about Kids These Days. (While thinking DOOMED all over again, because there are some particularly self-destructive ways to increase entropy.)
Meanwhile, in Iceland: the county council that carelessly knocked a known elf rock off a hillside when repairing a road has had to go dig the rock up from where it got buried during construction, because that road has had the most impossible damn stuff happen to it since that you ever heard of. Doubtless some nice person (maybe theyâll send out for the Priest of Thor or some such) will come along and do a little propitiatory sacrifice of some kind to the alfar, belatedly begging their pardon for the inconvenience.
Theyâre building the alfar a new temple, too.
Atlantic islands. Faerie: we haz it.
The Southwest is like this in some ways. You donât go traveling along the highways at night with an empty car seat. Because an empty car seat is an invitation. You stick your luggage, your laptop bag, whatever you got in that seat. Else something best left undiscussed and unnamed (because to discuss it by name is to go âAY WEâRE TALKING BOUT YA WEâRE HERE AND ALSO IGNORANT OF WHAT YOUâRE CAPABLE OFâ at the top of your damn lungs at them) will jump in to the car, after which youâre gonna have a bad time.
If youâre out in the woods, you keep constant, consistent count of your party and make sure you know everyone well enough that you can ID them by face alone, lest something imitating a person get at you. They like to insert themselves in the party and just observe before they strike. Itâs a game to them. In general you donât fuck with the weird, you ignore the lights in the sky (no, this isnât a god damn night vale reference, yes Iâm serious) and the woods, you lock up at night and you donât answer the door for love or money. Whatever or whoeverâs knocking ainât your buddy.
^ So much good advice in this post right here
I live in the south and⊠you just⊠donât go into the woods or fields at night.
Donât go near big trees in the night
If you live on a farm, donât look outside the windows at night
I have broken all these rules.
Iâve seen some shit.
If it sounds like your mom, but you didnât realize your mom is homeâŠ. itâs not your mom. Promise.
One walked onto the porch once. Wasnât fun. But theyâre not super keen on guns. Typically bolt when they see one.
You think itâs the neighbor kids.
Itâs not the neighbor kids.
Might sound like coyotes but you never really /see/ the coyotes but then wow that one cow was reaaaaaally fucked up this morning. The next night when you hear another one screaming you just turn the tv up a little more. Maybe fire a gun in the air but you donât go after it. If it is coyotes then itâs probably a pack and you seriously donât want to fuck with that and if itâs the other thing you seriously REALLY donât want to fuck with that.
So in the south, especially near the mountains, you just go straight from your car to inside your house, draw your curtains and watch tv.
If you see lights in the fields just fucking leave it alone.
Eyes forward. Donât be fucking stupid. Mind your own business. Call your neighbors and tell them to bring the cats in. Thereâs coyotes out. Some of them know. Most of them donât.
Other than that everythingâs a ghost and they died in the civil war. Literally all of everything else is just the civil war. We used to smell old perfume and pipe tobacco in the weeks leading up to the battle anniversaries.
Shitâs wild and I sound fucking crazy but I swear to god itâs true.
I live out in a forest in Texas, can confirm. Donât go out at night especially during a full moon, I have seen some fucked up otherworldly looking shit during the full moon.
Try not to think too hard about why that one specific little spot currently smells like sulfur.
Try to keep calm when you look through your window and see that the glowing orb of pale red light is floating by a house outside.
Be thankful that the dog is so vigilant with his hobby of bolting through the forest and barking at ânothingâ. You know damn well that just because you canât see it doesnât mean itâs not there, but donât you dare speak the name of it.
ME Ficlet: Valentineâs Day, 2200
After more than a dozen of them, Garrus knows how vehemently Shepard insists she doesnât care about the day he stubbornly refers to as the human love day with all the hearts.
He also knows sheâs lying.
Oh, she doesnât care about the chocolate (she prefers lemon, which he had toâin a moment of utterly worth it embarrassmentâlearn from Vega). She and flowersâespecially the ones most prevalent on human love dayâhave an uncomfortable history. Heâs never been as good at picking out lingerie for her as she is for herself (heâs never been able to live down the year he bought her a collarbone-revealing nightgown that, she said through giggles, reminded her of something someoneâs great-great-great-grandmother mightâve worn).
For all the difficulties it presents to get it just right, Garrus loves human love day.
Every year, he finagles some reason for the Council to avoid meeting on the equivalent of Earthâs February 14th. Early on, once or twice, opposition was raised. On both occasions, the staunchest support for Garrusâ requested leave came not from the human councilor, but from the Prothean one. Javik, as it happened, could be very convincing. Even a dozen years later, most delegates havenât realized Javikâs muttering about airlocks never becomes reality.
Every year, he hacks Shepardâs omni-tool so the usual endless parade of requests for her help, her presence, her opinion, her sartorial advice (Garrus is perturbed by how often itâs the latter) is silenced for twenty-four hours. Itâs become something of a game. She knows he does it. Her unspoken human love day gift to him is the increasingly difficult code she sets up to block him.
Sheâs always known him so damned well.
Every year, the children spend a few days with whichever of their many aunts and uncles swoops in to collect them first.
Usually, itâs Jack. Garrus knows better than to even think about teasing her about it.
Every year, he lets Shepard sleep in. That she doesnât immediately wake the moment he stirs is a more potent gift even than the tricky omni-tool defenses she devises. In the kitchen, he toasts more bread than any one human should be able to eat. He makes coffee and pours a mug roughly the size of Shepardâs head, doctoring it with the extra cream she prefers. He puts a slice of lemon cake (extra lemon, do not skimp on the lemon) on one of the pretty dishes sheâs collected over the years.
When the bedroom door slides open to admit him, she stirs. He is the only one who gets to see this soft Shepard, with drowsy eyes and hair a lush, red fall around her, wearing decidedly non-grandmotherly lingerie. He is the only one who gets to see the particular smile she smiles when sheâs sleepy and satiated and no one has asked her for anything in twelve whole hours.
She always takes the coffee first. He never expects words before coffee. After the first sip, her smile broadens and he thanks every deity heâs even heard mentioned that heâs the one sitting next to her on the bed, watching her eat toast and drink coffee and smile like heâs the present she always wanted but didnât know to ask for.Â
âIâm impressed,â she says.
âSame coffee as every other day.â
She shakes her head. He runs the pads of his fingers through her soft hair. âI worked really hard on my defenses this year. Thought for sure youâd be stumped.â
âItâs like you donât know me at all, Shepard,â he scoffs. âSince when has a little code ever defeated me?â
She leans against his side, resting her cheek against his arm. He nuzzles the top of her head. A moment later, he whispers, âI needed Taliâs help.â
Her peal of laughter is bright, unfettered. Heâd walk into the hells of every deity heâs ever heard mentioned to hear that laughter.
âHappy Valentineâs Day,â she says.
âHuman love day,â he corrects. âWith all the hearts. Turians would never do anything this sentimental.â
âYou know you donât have to, Garrus. Itâs just a day.â
âMmm,â he says. âLetâs make the most of it, then.â
If theyâre lucky (Spirits, he hopes theyâre lucky), theyâll live to see a hundred more.
Shared this on Facebook, might as well share it here too.
Someone: asks if Fjord and Jesterâs relationship is a father-daughter kinda dynamic.Â
Laura and Travis: âŠ
(same, guys)
Travis (as Fjord): I mean, are you inclined to call me Daddy?
Laura and Travis:Â
Blogging this tweet because this explains SO MUCH about the mindset of pretty much all the folks Iâve known whoâre against single-payer, itâs not even funnyâŠ
ThisâŠ.
This never occurred to me. Not once. That Americans are against Health Care because they think it actually costs tens of thousands of dollars for a broken arm, hundreds of thousands for a complicated birth, millions for cancer treatment.
Because theyâve never known anything different. The idea that a broken arm is only a couple hundred bucks; a complicated birth a couple thousand; cancer treatment only tens of thousands; all easily covered by existing tax structures.
This explains a lot. Â And itâs a good example of what I was talking about in my post on scarcity being used to prop up ableism â always question the idea that a resource is genuinely scarce. Â Even if it seems obvious that it is, quite often thatâs the result of careful manipulation and misconceptions that youâre not even aware of. Â
And never think youâre too smart to be fooled by that kind of thing, it doesnât work like that. Â Similarly, donât think people who are fooled by something are stupid. Â Nobody can have all the information about everything, and nobody has the time and energy to investigate and put together conscious conclusions about every piece of information theyâre given. Â It doesnât take being stupid, or even just gullible, to believe something like this.
I currently live in a country without free medical care and still, itâs enormously cheap compared to the USA. An American expat wrote a piece for our English language paper about how she paid more for parking at the hospital than giving birth to her baby thatâs pretty interesting:
https://grapevine.is/mag/articles/2016/01/06/healthcare-in-iceland-vs-the-us-weve-got-it-so-good/
If price fixing was actually enforced against medical providersâŠ
If this is difficult to assimilate, consider the humble aspirin. There are no aspirins on Earth that are worth the money that USA hospitals charge. Aspirin - a simple cheap form of salicylic acid - is worth less than pennies and the formulation doesnât vary. You can buy packets of aspirin for less than a dollar and a lot of that is packaging. In market value, individual aspirins are worth fractions of cents. Hospitals in the USA will make a spirited attempt to charge you wild amounts for them. Ten dollars apiece! Twenty dollars? Thirty? Who knows! Hurray!
I ⊠did not realize this
I do need to add here that part of the reason medications cost so much more in hospitals is because the cost includes helping to pay for the people preparing (the pharmacy staff) and administering them. It may sound like giving an aspirin to a patient isnât a big deal, but it actually is, because aspirin is generally used these days as an anticoagulant rather than as a pain reliever. Which isnât to say that drugs arenât massively over-priced here in general. They are. But part of not having universal health care means paying out a lot of money to coders and billers, which takes money away from things like nursing care, which is way more important. Seriously, one of the biggest issues that we have here is how many people and how much money we have to spend to deal with the byzantine craziness that is all the different insurance companiesânegotiating with them, following their guidelines for what they will & wonât pay for, etc. The money to pay nursing staff (and the patient care techs, the pharmacy techs, etc.) has to come from somewhere, and itâs the nurses who, with a lot of care and skill and background knowledge, administer the medications to the patients.
Oh see in the NHS, the nurses just cast a spell to materialize the aspirins from raw fundament, already in a little paper cup, and we pay them in acorns that we leave under toadstools.
Sorry, that was uncalled for, I just liked the mental image.
So we are actually agreeing with each other, I think you possibly got confused (probably my fault) and took a different angle.
Letâs say that the cost of making a burger is $5, and a restaurant burger costs $15. Everyone says, âhey, thatâs pretty fair. Five dollars goes for the burger, five for restaurant overheads - salaries and electricity and decor and so on - and five for the restaurant to make a profit.â
In the UK, they said âokay, weâve decided that burgers are a human right, not something you should squeeze profit from. We will charge $10 for a burger. Thatâs the cost of the ingredients, plus the admin fees of making and serving it and so on. Itâs a nonprofit, a National Burger Service. but you can still pay $15 for a private one at a premium restaurant if you choose.â
America looked at that and said âburgers are $45.â
âBut America,â everyone said, âbut âŠwhy?â
âBecause burgers cost a lot.â
âEr, could you show your math?â Everyone asked, except they probably said âmaths.â
âYes. $5 for the ingredients, $5 for salaries and electricities and the restaurant decor and whatnot. $20 for profit. And another $15 to collect the profit.â
Everyone else says âhuh, how ⊠interesting!â And continue to provide their citizens with $10 burgers, which somehow functions.
So then some American citizens say âoh, we like the look of the UKâs National Burger Service. Should we do that too?â
And America goes, âwhat, suddenly you can afford to hand out $45 burgers to every random fucker you know? Burgers are $45, you fools.â
And the citizens say âoh, youâre right, that sounds expensive, sorry. Letâs not do that.â
And this thread, including Elodie, says, âby the way - burgers themselves, as burgers, are worth more in the $10 range, which is what other countries charge.â
And youâre like âNO ELODIE BURGERS ARE $45 BECAUSE YOU NEED TO PAY FOR THE CARPETS, AND THE BURGER BILLING DEPARTMENT, AND THE COLLECTIONS AGENCIES, OTHERWISE HOW WILL WE PAY THE POOR SERVERS?.â
But that is not QUITE what we are talking about. Healthcare costs in countries with socialised medicine do not include the paying for the cost of the salaries of the billing departments because billing doesnât work that way under socialised medicine.
So one way we could start working towards that is by saying âthe $10 burger is possible, and indeed it is practiced in many economies.â Then, I think, people will feel more relaxed about it, and will start to consider it without panicking.
Thereâs a bit more to it than this, related to the effect of health care outcomes on the cost of providing health care.
In the US, clients who are known to be able to pay subsidize those who are not able to pay. This is because of a law that requires hospitals to provide emergency care to anyone regardless of means.Â
However, emergency care is actually one of the most expensive types of health care to get. For a fewreasons:Â
By the time a problem is bad enough to warrant care at the ER, itâs become really serious and requires a lot of hands on deck to manage
As an example, consider asthma. An asthma attack will require at minimum, one nurse, a doctor, and possibly a respiratory therapist. In extreme cases, it will require an entire critical care team and crash team.Â
By contrast, if you deal with asthma early, it can usually (usually, mind you - some folks like me have more tetchy asthma) be managed with twice-a-year doctorâs or nurse practitioner visits.Â
By the time a problem is bad enough to warrant care at the ER, it usually requires a lot more physical resources than it would have if caught and treated early
Still on the asthma example: Treating an asthma attack in the ER requires IVs, a spirometer, usually a nebulizer, sometimes BiPAP or intubation with life support
By contrast, all but the most severe cases of asthma can usually be managed with light-to-moderate doses of inhaled controller medicine the patient can self-administer, with reliever medicine as needed.Â
By the time a problem is bad enough to warrant care at an ER, it often has become complicated by other problems as well - that is to say, itâs no longer one problem, but three or four problems in one.Â
Still on the asthma example: Common complications of asthma attacks include chest infections (pneumonia, etc), pneumothorax (i.e., ruptured lung), collapsed lung, respiratory failure, and in extreme cases, heart problems, brain damage, or death. Plus, living with untreated asthma causes physical symptoms including fatigue and weakness that can lead to poor performance and difficulty living a full life, as well as chronic stress that contributes to asthmatics having higher risks of mental health troubles including depression and anxiety. For me as well, bad asthma kills my appetite, which means I also tend to suffer from malnutrition when my asthma is severe and uncontrolled.
By contrast, if asthma is treated early and monitored properly, your risk of these complications is severely reduced. The most common complication of treated asthma is oral thrush, which is caused by not rinsing your mouth well after taking your controller medicine.
Chronic conditions especially tend to result in a lot of repeat visits to the ER if someone cannot afford maintenance health care, making chronically ill patients much more expensive in a mixed-model system like the US as compared to a single-pay system like Canada or the UK. Â
All of that ^^^ is to say that the way the US currently delivers health care to its poorest citizens is literally the least efficient way you possibly could do it, which means itâs the most expensive. US critics of single payer systems are right about one thing: Someone has to pay for the ER visits of poor people who canât pay themselves. In the US, itâs everyone else, and thatâs part of why hospitals hyper-inflate the cost of things like bandages and medicines (the other part is price-fixing and profit-seeking).Â
What US critics donât realize - or refuse to acknowledge, depending on the critic - is that single-payer systems arenât as expensive because not as many people get to the point of needing emergency care. And, furthermore, those who do donât tend to get to that point as often. Part of how single-payer systems save money is by trying to catch problems as early as possible, before someone shows up at the ER on deathâs doorstep. Is it perfect? No. But does it help? Hell yes.Â
Again working off the asthma example because thatâs what Iâm familiar with: When my asthma got bad and I was going to the ER on a regular basis, the single-payer system in my province recognized I was an ER âfrequent flyerâ because of my poor asthma control. So I was referred to a specialist by my doctor (note: I had to do nothing in way of paperwork or approvals to get in with the specialist, and I did not have to fight with an insurance agency that I really needed a specialist. My doctor had complete authority over whether I got the referral) and an asthma education clinic (likewise) for more in-depth instruction on how to manage my asthma. The specialist identified the cause of my poor control (an allergic asthmatic with a severe cat allergy living with two cats isnât exactly the best arrangement for health⊠The specialist was able to diagnose my allergy and that led to me needing to find new homes for my cats because my cat allergy is so bad that owning cats could literally kill me) and the asthma education clinic taught me tools to compensate for the fact that my breathing had been shitty for so long Iâd literally forgotten what good breathing felt like and didnât know how to recognize when I was getting bad until it was an emergency.Â
In the US system, because I would not have been able on a grad studentâs salary to pay for a specialist, I wouldâve continued getting sicker and sicker and costing hospitals more and more money for more and more ER visits until such time as my asthma became disabling and I got Medicare or an attack finally killed me.
In the Canadian system, everyone saved money by having me get the care I needed when it first became apparent I needed it, not when my condition progressed to the point of permanent damage. I saved money on taxes and missed work time. The single-payer system saved money by having to pay for way fewer ER visits. And other taxpayers saved indirectly by not having to pay as much for my care. While I havenât been able to completely avoid the ER since completing the education course and seeing a specialist, Iâve gone form having twice-monthly ER visits to averaging an ER visit once every two years or so, six years on.Â
In Canada, an average asthma attack ER visit costs the province about 75K Canadian. The cost of visiting a specialist and my asthma education was about 6K Canadian. By sending me to a specialist and asthma education clinic and enabling me to cut down on my ER visits by well over 90%, the province saved itself over ten and a half million dollars in the six years since I was referred to the education clinic. Thatâs for one person.Â
And that is the unspoken difference between a single-payer system and a profit-driven mixed-model system like the US. Single payer systems are motivated to improve health care outcomes in order to save money. The US system has no such motivator, because what they lose on ER frequent fliers they can just make up on everyone else. Â
The whole Templar thing gives me flashbacks to things I have seen. Like itâs pretty common for abusers in relationships with addicts to drugs to be their victimâs provider of the drug. It makes sure they are dependant on them and become unable to survive without them in a physical level. Some victims of abuse who were also addicts whose abusers literally kept them from taking the drugs to induce pain as a punishment through withdrawals. Which is unbelievably cruel considering how awful withdrawals can be once youâve hit a certain level of addiction.
The Chantry is implementing that abuse tactic at a systematic level. On a group of armed men who often come from very poor backgrounds and join the ranks of the Templar Order because they have no other choice
The Chantry is not only harming mages but also its own Templars. ANd it makes me think this is why the Chantryâs charity is bullshit. Of course they donât want to solve the poverty problem in Thedas-they are profiting directly from it. As long as there is poor, starving families there will be people willing to give up their body autonomy to become Templars.Â
Like itâs very easy to hate Templars. Weâve seen Templars kill and rape and treat mages and elves like subhuman creatures but itâs also a gross way to ignore the ACTUAL grey aspects of the conflict-the Chantry has rigged the game in its favor against the poorest people in Thedas and excused the abuse to the point itâs become an enabler to people like Meredith.Â
Itâs very easy to hate Templars, but honestly the root of the problem, the problem itself lies in the Chatry as an institution that has profited for centuries of the oppression of the poorer strata of Theodosian society.