Fireside Chat Transcript 29 Feb 2k20

There is not much to talk about today. The biggest changes that have happened in the galaxy is
DEDCO has functionally imploded. SortDragon is, his corporation is either moving into the initiative
or wandering off and doing something or other. He basically said that he was done with DEDCO
and his corp was going to go do something and the other corps were going to do stuff and who the
fuck knows. And then he got on a plane to go to Iceland having dropped the crown behind him.
This is extremely unusual. It is very rare that you see block leaders of any kind take themselves
voluntarily off the chessboard, but that essentially has happened and that means that there are
a lot of DEDCO corporations and members looking for new homes across the galaxy. There are of
course knock-on effects from this. The Siberian squad was leaving that area in the northwest to
join Legacy Coalition and just before this fireside got apparently betrayed by somebody
they wanted to, like this Federation of Conifer group, let them use a Fortizar and then they
jumped to the Fortizar and then turned around and them and Trigger Happy like a couple of like that
just happened in ECTAC. I don't really know what's happening there because Sort said that he was
dropping the crown and then got on a plane. It is interesting because we do have a lot of people
who were in DEDCO that used to be part of CFC alliances. There was a lot of former F-Con groups
and stuff that are in DEDCO. If people want to find their way into the light of the Imperium,
we're accepting applications. We'll take a look and see what they have to offer if we let them in
or not. Basically the bounce of power in the galactic northwest has been completely upended and
lots of people are moving around the map and/or dying and/or getting trapped and I'm cool with it.
I'm totally cool with it.
And yes, we do have filaments in COSIS and it is cool and good that CCP has put them back in.
As most of you guys know, I'm going to pivot the filaments discussion. Anything related to the
Jeff I'm not going to talk about now because Jeff is going to have a meeting shortly after the
fireside so we're not going to be touching on that stuff here. So if you want to hear about Jeff
or Jif, you'll hear about it from the leadership of that organization after the fireside.
One other thing that is quite important, and I included this link in the broadcast,
I have, I believe, a duty to warn all of you based upon the things that I know when it comes to the
threat presented by the coronavirus, particularly for people who are like myself based in the United
States. There is a tremendous amount of disinformation that is going around and it is
very, I don't really like sort of bragging about this kind of thing. I'm not a medical
professional myself, it's just I come from a family of people who know all of this shit.
My mother and my stepfather are retired biochemistry professors. My stepsister was at NIH
and her mentor during her residency, she worked directly with Tony Fauci for many years, which if
you're in the United States you will have seen Tony Fauci's name popping up a lot. He is the
best virologist in the United States. And yeah, so anybody who's telling you that this thing is
not a big deal because it has only a two percent death rate is a fucking idiot. They are a fucking
idiot for reasons that I can tell you based on data that you can confirm for yourself. You do
not need to listen to me about it. Generally speaking, if you are listening to me talking
about this, you are probably fine and you don't really have that much to worry about because most
likely you are under 60 years old. Based upon the data that we have currently available, the case
fatality rate, the CFR of the COVID-19 virus is something that is very age specific. If you're
like 40 years old, it's not really a big deal. It's like not even really a challenge compared to
a regular old flu. It's fine. But when you get into the 60 and up demographic, 70 and up demographic
now is an eight percent CFR and 80 years and above is almost a 13 percent CFR. So this thing, unlike
most flus, this thing does not kill children. It does not kill kids. It does not kill people who
are relatively healthy. But it is extraordinarily dangerous to your parents and your grandparents.
So I have a duty to warn you about this. There are things in, you know, so again, you're not
gonna have to worry about like potentially catching this thing and dying if you're in your 40s.
But you will have to prepare if you're in the United States for societal level disruptions.
I've linked in the broadcast the Scientific American article about how to prepare for this
in a sane way. That does not mean going out and buying MREs and hiding in a bunker. It means
buying a couple of weeks extra food of the kind of food that you already eat. And conveniently,
we're all EVE Online players, which means that if you're in a situation where you're like, "Wow,
I'm just gonna stay inside and play computer games for a month and cool," you should be in pretty
good shape. Running for masks isn't going to help you because masks are something that is only going
to help you prevent the spread to other people. Gloves would be nice, but just don't buy into the
hype about masks and run around grabbing masks. Leave the masks for the healthcare professionals
that are going to need them. And if you are not rolling your eyes at the things that I'm saying,
I tend to post updates on my Twitter feed about this every single day as it is going. So yeah.
Generally speaking, when it comes to risk mitigation in general, you do not need to buy
into the idea that this thing is going to happen and it's going to be bad. You do not need to
agree that it is some big serious deal or not. If it is a matter of mitigating risks simply by buying
an extra five bags of rice and beans and then shoving it in your closet, and then, hey, worst
case scenario, if it doesn't – or best case scenario – if it doesn't turn out to be a big
deal, then you just eat your stockpile until it's to a level you're comfortable with and no big deal.
[Pause]
Oh, never mind. We are not actually – apparently we're doing a
YIF leadership meeting, not a fireside. My bad.
So don't worry about that. I do have something here from our Diplos.
[Pause]
So that should work. CD has been extraordinarily busy recently because the galaxy has been in
chaos, which means that CD does lots of work. And I am very proud of them. I'm quite pleased
with the work product we've had recently. EVE Vegas is happening. Make sure that you sign up
for that because HyperViper has made really cool arrangements along with the rest of the team.
And if we can get a link for that, that would be good.
[Pause]
And yeah, EVE Vegas is always more fun than FanFest anyway, so
yeah, hopefully people were not fucked too badly by the cancellation of FanFest. But again,
if you're like, "Oh, this whole thing is not a big deal," if you're seeing
lots of people who have money invested in things, cancelling plans, cancelling group events,
maybe they're taking it seriously, so maybe you should consider taking things seriously too.
[Pause]
All right, let me see if there's anything else. And I think that's going to be it
for bullet points for me. So I will take Q&As and then wrap this baby up.
[Pause]
Official alliance stance on ska music. That is a fantastic way of dating people who were
my age because I was in college right when a real big fish was having a surge in popularity.
[Pause]
When is the stream of the politics talk/debate? Annika, good question. So basically what we're
doing with that is Graf Talcum needed a new microphone and boom and all that setup audio-wise
to get that going, so I've sent him some stuff. It will turn up on Monday and then we're going
to be scheduling our second recording. Our first recording was okay, but we realized we needed to
have better shit before Tuzzy would let us out of the pain box. [Pause]
Any update on the Goon Job thing? That's a very good question and I will make a point of asking
Anominate that, except that Anominate is on a flight to Iceland where FanFest has been canceled
because of virus concerns. But Anominate is not a boomer, so he should be fine. [Pause]
When we're looking at people from DeadCode, do we give them a pass on killing goons? Well,
yeah. Like, DeadCode was hostile to us and we killed the shit out of them and then we
got 40 Fortizar's out of them and then we killed the shit out of them more, but we're sort of
fighting on their side with the Jeff deployment, but not really. So, you know, yeah, people from
DeadCode are going to have relatively hostile histories. That's sort of how war works. [Pause]
But yeah, don't ignore people who would be interested in joining the Imperium from DeadCode
just because they were in DeadCode and shot goons. [Pause]
All right. [Pause]
Questions about us staying in VNL? That's a Future Plans question and I'm not going to be commenting
on that. [Pause]
There's no changes to the OCHRE rule that continues in place. We are not doing a meta show today. The
only thing that we have to discuss on the meta show is how many things have been canceled and
the spread of a worldwide pandemic, which is now that it's hit sub-Saharan Africa and soon will be
in the subcontinent. Shit is going to get real. If you drink the Kool-Aid that I'm drinking,
yes, congratulations on bingo. If you drink the kind of Kool-Aid that I'm drinking,
the concept that I believe we are dealing with here is William Gibson's jackpot, which is a
complexity crisis that may last several decades rather than a single unitary situation, and that
is one of the reasons why having a stockpile of food is just a good idea anyway. [Pause]
William Gibson has been pretty good about dictating the future for, I don't know,
40 years now, so it's good enough for me. [Pause]
I actually don't know about the rules for the Afdelf colonies regarding
the OCHRE rule. The OCHRE rule, actually I do know that because the OCHRE rule applies to only
specific areas, and just look at the fucking wiki which has the ratting and mining rules,
and that will tell you there is no OCHRE rule in the Afdelf colonies.
All right, boys and girls, that's going to be it for this week. Thank you for coming. We will be
here next week, and yeah, make sure that your parents and your grandparents, if you still have
them, are safe and are knowledgeable about the CFRs, please. Good evening and good luck.