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[Trekkin]

Personally I think covid has given people a bit of perspective on what a true catastrophe is. I doubt people will be able to get as worked up about how much brexit is the literal apocalypse when they remember dead bodies decomposing in homes with nobody wanting to enter for fear of catching deadly disease.

If 1918 is any guide, the public will forget in short order. There will be some brief slactivisim to thank the heroes nobody wants to pay, some grandiose speeches about unity from people about to blame each other for everything, a smattering of return-to-normalcy discounts, a lot of whining from the usual monomaniacs about how It All Just Goes To Show I Was Right All Along, and then everyone will return to their regularly scheduled memes and distractions. The coronavirus is too immutably real to compete for memory in a world of ten thousand advertisements and pointless social games.

Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, mind you. There's nothing most people can do about these things anyway, so they might as well get back to distracting themselves.

[thompson]

I wonder if any religion holds in a 'starting seven.' Christianity's 'starting two' just seems like such a slow start, and God used the exile function way too soon in the game. I mean, I'm sure it was fun to pick them up on adventure mode, but honestly. He should have waited for them to do some decent mining and crafting first.

Nah, he was doing a minimalist embark and just threw it in once he realised the caravan wasn’t coming. Forest embarks aren’t much fun without picks or axes.

[Starver]

I wonder if any religion holds in a 'starting seven.'

Ask the people of Westeros?

(Well, more a septuinity of aspects, I think, not being sufficiently immersed in the lore. Though creation myths often have godly avatars create their own "first born" mortal to interact with others' own inventions, leading to an earthly reflection of the heavenly politics before one or other system implodes and goes fuzzy. JHVH just cheated by cut'n'pasting from His original to create the second individual. Maybe because it would have been weird to have had the Father and the Holy Spirit create their own humans separately, all the while telling the Son that he couldn't play with the clay because He hadn't even been born yet. Or something. IANATheologian.)


I think seven is a funny number. Too high to be definite (solo, pair, even a pair of pairs or a handful) too low to be "oh, like multitudinous aspects, we're a bit fuzzy about the numbers". SFAICT, seven works best when trying to establish a Rock-Paper-Scissors sort of circular hierarchy-of-'equals' and you think five is too low/clichéd. (Don't know if that made George R. R. a fan of Kingdom Of Loathing or not...)

Nah, he was doing a minimalist embark and just threw it in once he realised the caravan wasn’t coming. Forest embarks aren’t much fun without picks or axes.

Apparently, there wasn't any booze, and not even an anvil (though there was at least one flaming sword added in, probably tied up most of the embark points). And wasn't this the version where zoning could sometimes be ignored by fruit-pickers?

[NJW2000]

Personally I think covid has given people a bit of perspective on what a true catastrophe is. I doubt people will be able to get as worked up about how much brexit is the literal apocalypse when they remember dead bodies decomposing in homes with nobody wanting to enter for fear of catching deadly disease.

Or perhaps people will become more disgruntled about the economy getting screwed over by a spasm of patriotism after we're already in a recession. Because even though the UK really isn't Ecuador, you can still starve here from being poor.

At least our population may think again about whether they've really "had enough of experts", what with the epidemiologists holding the government to account, that history student Cummings blathering on about herd immunity and lestting pensioners die, and NHS staff sacrificing their lives for the common good. It might happen, though I'm not very hopeful really.

[Starver]

I'm long past hopeful.

Not for the situation, but for the people who take any indication that (say) some computer model isn't exactly predictive of what has come to pass to just reject any and all other suggested outcomes that aren't in line with their own utopian vision.

My take on these things is that it can swing wildly any which way, so it could deux ex back to nothing at all or maybe I and everyone I love are already dead but just don't know it yet. I'm basing my reactions on a window of possibilities where I am neither cowering under my safety blanket nor shouting "All gods are bastards!" on top of a hill[1] in a thunderstorm.

And even if any crazy-preparedness I do is over the top, I stand by the Rule Of The Buffet... "If there's not too much, there wasn't enough" (But never so much more that it isn't practical to gradually eat what I can of the leftovers over the next few days after the party I hosted, rather than just wastefully chuck it all away, and that saves on subsequent cooking.)


[1] Traditionally, this is whilst wearing wet copper armour, but Faraday effects should technically apply, even assuming the occasional touching point to bare skin.

[Bralbaard]

every day there's more people leaving the ICU than coming in, so capacitiy is freeing up.

Mostly because people leave in coffins. According to tuesdays numbers about half the people that have "left" ICU so far, did so because they died. The other half was discharged from ICU but many of those are still in hospital.
It is encouraging though that the number of new admissions is relatively low.

https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/meer-sterfte-gemeld-ic-bezetting-neemt-af~bf0cc7cd/

[Iduno]

Florida is absolutely going out of its way to not fucking test, yes. So far as I'm aware we still don't have a state-level relaxation on guidelines for who to test, guidelines that would pointedly fucking miss asymptomatic, presymptomatic, and mildly symptomatic infected. It's basically an utter pain in the ass to even get recommended for testing unless you're approaching the point it's time to stick your ass in a hospital.

There's apparently supply issues in regards to testing availability, too, for what it's worth, but florida is fucking up basically everything it can fuck up on top of it. If there's a hell, desantis'll burn in it for the clusterfuck he's helmed in regards to the crow plague.

Like letting Florida residents off the cruise ship to spread disease, but keeping everyone else confined?

I really don't know what I'd do with that one. to be honest. You'll spread the infection if you let them - no precaution seems to be enough to ensure safe contact, let alone in a hospital.

It's atrocious to bar people, but let's be real, the hospitals are probably already doing worse things just to get through this. I'm not even sure if that's an argument for or against letting families in.

What would you say if you were given the choice of not saying goodbye, or not leaving yourself (as you were likely to be infected now as well) until you tested negative after a quarantine period? Roll the dice and hope you make it through?

[Frumple]

It is encouraging though that the number of new admissions is relatively low.

https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/meer-sterfte-gemeld-ic-bezetting-neemt-af~bf0cc7cd/

I mean, that'll be encouraging if there isn't a spike commensurate with the reduction in the number of people dying at home. NYC has had something like that happen, iirc. Cases at the hospitals appeared to stabilize or go down, right as the number of "inexplicable" home deaths started crawling upwards

[Starver]

UK meta-guidelines for going outside...

(I have just such a fence.)

[misko27]

Now technically New York didn't have a "spike" of people dying at home recently vs hospital admissions, it's just that statistically, they weren't counting those all along, and then they all got added to the total at once.

[TD1]

Personally I think covid has given people a bit of perspective on what a true catastrophe is. I doubt people will be able to get as worked up about how much brexit is the literal apocalypse when they remember dead bodies decomposing in homes with nobody wanting to enter for fear of catching deadly disease.

Or perhaps people will become more disgruntled about the economy getting screwed over by a spasm of patriotism after we're already in a recession. Because even though the UK really isn't Ecuador, you can still starve here from being poor.

At least our population may think again about whether they've really "had enough of experts", what with the epidemiologists holding the government to account, that history student Cummings blathering on about herd immunity and lestting pensioners die, and NHS staff sacrificing their lives for the common good. It might happen, though I'm not very hopeful really.

Eh, there are an awful lot of assumptions in there which tend to be tied to a certain strain of political thought. I was tempted to chase 'em all, but this ain't Pokemon

Suffice it to say that disgruntlement, if need for it arises, will be juxtaposed with direct fear for their own lives.

[Reelya]

It was looking like it was getting better, but then over 6000 deaths were recorded in one day in the USA of coronavirus recently.

That puts the deaths to known cases at around 5%, which implies that it's just the tip of the iceberg.

[NJW2000]

Suffice it to say that disgruntlement, if need for it arises, will be juxtaposed with direct fear for their own lives.

Among many people it will, yes. A majority of the people who think a No Deal Brexit may cause economic damage will be in more danger from covid than poverty. Not all, however.

Once the Covid global recession occurs, the welfare state will most likely be put under a lot more pressure than it has the resources to deal with. At that point, we will be forced to acknowledge that for some people, economic downturn entails unemployment entails homelessness.

While I do indeed follow a certain strain of political thought, nobody even bothers to deny that the hard Brexit currently being pursued will hurt the economy in the short term. That short-term impact may be one of the few things people find less palatable when they start getting hungrier.

[McTraveller]

It was looking like it was getting better, but then over 6000 deaths were recorded in one day in the USA of coronavirus recently.

That puts the deaths to known cases at around 5%, which implies that it's just the tip of the iceberg.

That is a reporting anomaly, not an actual 6000 deaths on one day - and the data has tons of asterisks by it because of that.  Although to be fair, we don't really know how many deaths there are due to the disease on a given day.

This also goes to show why you should never change reporting criteria in the middle of a data set - you should instead fork the data sets - continue the old way in parallel with the new way for instance.  Or just stop the old data set and start the new one.

[WealthyRadish]

When doing some kind of statistical analysis it'd be worth keeping multiple sets, but for data you're showing people for informative purposes it's easy enough to differentiate the additional deaths on that day, or annotate the vertical jump if it's a cumulative graph.