Fireside Chat Transcript 7 Mar 2k20
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So for people who are relatively new to our organization, if this is your first fireside, the way that we do these is we have a chat room called Elysium@conference.goonflea.com. That is where you guys can post dick jokes or make fun of me when I make an ass of myself or ask questions. We usually do a Q&A period at the end of every fireside, just like question time in Parliament. What color shirt today? I'm wearing a white shirt because I'm going to do another experiment with the blue suit I got for Nimblar's wedding. But based upon Mirana's advice, I will be wearing a silver/gray tie rather than a black one. We'll see how it works. Okay, so first things first, I'm going to discuss the pandemic situation for a bit. And I won't go too long on this because some of you already know what's up and some of you don't. One of the things that we are confronting is discussing a pandemic situation in a way that people will actually listen to it and not be alarmist. So you guys are all evenerds. Most of you are engineers or mathematicians or love your spreadsheets or generally speaking can do math yourself. We have several people who work in public health that are part of the directorate and we have some just useful guidelines for people. So first things first, I have a thread that instead of trying to convince people to take it seriously, you guys are fucking evenerds. Like I said, you can do spreadsheets and math yourselves. And here's something from an engineer. And you can just take a look at that on your own time if you haven't seen it yet. One of our former directors, Irv Tiberd, Graham, if you guys know him from old school shit, basically boiled this whole thing down to two rules for a game. We are all essentially playing a game. Lots of people will die and it's going to be horrible, but it's probably easier to think about if playing a game. There are two rules in this game. Us versus COVID-19. Rule number one is, this is very simple, super, super simple. Hopefully you can explain it to your family and people who are aware yet. Rule number one is to delay getting sick for as long as possible. And rule number two is when you do get sick, try to avoid getting other people sick. That's it. Try to delay getting sick for as long as possible. And then when you do get sick, don't get other people sick. And this is exactly what Gunbom Galente just said in Elysium, which is you want to smooth out the curve. So what are we talking about here? Stripped of any kind of hyperbolic, oh my God, broadcasty language. And we're just going to go into the facts here. Again, I already linked the Twitter thread there. If you are a coder or a math snob, you guys know me, I can't add my way out of a paper bag. I am terrible with math. I'm terrible with any of these things. I am the schmoozy social leadership type. And I try to rely on experts who can actually add things together to tell me how shit works. But most of you already inherently understand the difference between a arithmetic curve of growth and a exponential curve of growth. So if something doubles every six days and this can be plotted on a graph, you can make predictions. That's an exponential curve. You know, you had one case, you got two case, you get four case, you get eight case, you get 16 case, you know, 32, all the way on up. So that's how this shit works. It's a virus. We have mathematical modeling for all of it. And you guys can figure it out yourselves. Again, you're spreadsheet nerds. You can do the math. You don't need me to do it for you. And my math is terrible. But one of the things that Asher always talks about when it's a Reaver's op or when we're doing Jeff things or Jeff things, or even when we're doing if things is the concept of money in a bank, right? The idea that you need to put money in the bank when it comes to ops that are tough and difficult because, you know, maybe you'll have to blue ball. Maybe you'll have to do tough things you don't want to do, but it's going to pay off in the end later with interest. And the reason why I'm using the money in the bank analogy suddenly when we're talking about a pandemic is simply this. When you guys go through this and you do, you add up the numbers and you plot that six day doubling impact and you start seeing the curve of exponential growth. What we need to do and the reason why I keep talking about this so much is that action before the exponential growth curve pays off down the line way more than action later. Once everybody realized what's going on. So, like, even if a few of you start taking it seriously and doing what's necessary and try to avoid getting sick as much as possible. You're basically saving us time on the other side of the curve. And if you don't want to do it for yourself, do it for somebody else's grandma, because that's really what's at risk here. Most of the people who are playing EVE Online are relatively healthy, but a lot of us aren't. And I think people who are disabled or people who have comorbidities or underlying issues, when they see people who are healthy, say whatever, it only affects the old and the sick. And the reason for this is simple. I am extremely healthy. I have no underlying medical issues. I'm 41 years old. I don't really have anything to worry about. But my father is like 78 and is in Manhattan, which is right at the center of a big pile of bad shit. And if more people take steps to delay getting sick, it will slow down the spread of this thing, which buys our scientists around the world time. And it is essentially a race for time to delay. And so even if you are not personally at risk or you've judged yourself as not being at risk, please do take some sensible steps to the math yourself and do what you can to delay getting sick for as long as possible, because it's not necessarily about you. If you're healthy, you know, if you have friends who have like Crohn's disease, who are roughly your age and they're taking immunosuppressant medication to deal with Crohn's disease, which is pretty fucking common in nerve circles, you know, we don't know what that's going to do to people. So even if you're OK, take this seriously for everybody else, because it's money in the bank now, early, before it gets everywhere. Every single day we can buy gives millions of scientists across the world time to find out what's going on and to cultivate a more effective response. OK. So we have a few different things of advice to give you, and we're going to go through this quickly. This is the big speech next week. This thing is going to be much bigger. So people are going to be less. Oh, my God. You know, why are you talking about this? And more. Oh, shit. I see why you were talking about this for several weeks now. So basically, number one is to if you can avoid it, stop traveling straight up, stop traveling. It's all over the global supply chain. If you doubt that it's all over the global supply chain, the global supply chain is breaking down. There was a Harvard Business Review article that came out a couple of weeks ago talking about how, you know, ports are empty of containers because China has stopped exporting things, which is going to have a bunch of economic effects. But stop traveling if you can avoid it. Socially isolate if you can avoid it. If you can avoid social isolation, if you can. Oh, my God. Such a nerd thing to say. But I mean, socially isolate yourself if you can. And early isolation will smooth the curve of the viral surge, which is currently projected to hit about 80 percent of the adult human population by July. You know, handwashing. That means seeing the ABCs while washing your hands. It takes that long. The virus can last for nine hours, at least nine hours. Actually, we don't know about the date on this. Some people are saying nine hours on open service. Some people are saying nine days. We do not know how long it currently lasts on a surface. Even if you're healthy, even if you're not worried about it, do it for your friends, parents. Do it for your friends, grandparents. Do it for your parents and your grandparents. We will all have to fight this battle individually because most likely we will all catch this. And I hope that for most of us we can win. It does not. There are things that we can do in order to make sure that we individually win our fight against this thing. Sleep more. Getting asleep is very important for your immune system. So I have been going to bed at midnight every day by midnight and I have been getting up. I just allocate nine hours of sleep every night. And so usually I'm waking up before my alarm. But I know that my body is getting as much possible sleep as I can for my immune system. I would genuinely ask you guys to avoid getting really drunk, which is really ironic because we just got our CSMs back from Iceland where there's a bunch of cases and everybody spent the entire week there drinking and partying like they do. But alcohol is bad for your immune system. If you get a really bad hangover and stuff like that, it could put you at more risk and you are more likely to make stupid decisions. Touch your face, lick yourself, lick subway poles or whatever stupid shit if you're drunk. So be careful about that. If you feel sick, for God's sake, stay home. If you are unlucky and your employer cannot does not give you sick leave or something like that, that's a huge problem in the United States. It is going to be very bad here in the US, which is one of the reasons why I've been trying to make so much noise about this. That is a particularly vulnerable public health situation. If you are lucky and you are in one of the other countries, then things are to varying degrees being handled better or worse worldwide. We're going to find out organizationally speaking who's naughty, who's nice in terms of doing the right thing pretty damn soon. I have a link here for high risk populations. This is guidance from the CDC itself here in Freedom Land that came out just the other day. It's explicitly saying if you are at higher risk, this is an official government warning from the United States. Even though I am in really good health and what have you, I caught a cold from Sion because we were playing Dungeons and Dragons and he caught a perfectly normal cold. You really do not want to have two viruses in your system at once, especially when one of them is novel and you have no immunodefense about it. Literally, if all you do is stay at home and eat weed edibles and masturbate a bunch and play computer games, which is pretty much my plan for the next several months, it can be a lot of fun if you prepare right and you're making sure that everybody's safe. You are helping save somebody else's grandma while you're staying at home wanking and doing drugs, as long as those drugs you're doing are not impacting your immune system. Quite serious. So a couple of other things. And again, I'd like to thank Marana for pointing out before this little bit of the fireside that people will take this more seriously if I completely remove any emotional language or say, "Oh my God," like whatever. But if you guys look at that Twitter thread I linked earlier, and then you extrapolate a six-day doubling, which is what our best epidemiologists are seeing through each of these outbreaks, you will see that probably the entirety of the United States will have this thing. Everybody who's going to get it will have had it by probably late June, early July, unless there are effective containment measures put. And so this is something that the whole global supply chain and political class is currently grappling with, is that it looks like a huge are at risk of functionally being shut down. This is what the surge thing is when people are talking about flattening out the curve. That's that. So there you go. Let me see what else I got. Obviously, the usual stuff. Avoid touching your eyes, your nose, your mouth, cover your cough or whatever sneeze on the inside of your elbow to avoid spreading it. Wash your hands with soap and water. Clean off touched objects and surfaces using Lysol or something similar. Apparently, disinfection works pretty well. There was a study that came out pretty recently. There's like studies hitting every single day about this because literally the entire global scientific community is at war with this thing. The public hasn't caught up to that yet. That's the reality in science land. And the good news is that if you do wipe things down, it's if you sneeze on a surface, for God's sakes, try to like clean it off. And that does work. Cloroxing things and surfaces will kill it. There is no specific antiviral treatment yet. So be vigilant on keeping your home and yourself clean. If you. Oh, that's interesting. If you use hand sanitizer and you smoke, the hand sanitizer has alcohol in it, which evaporates at room temperature. Don't put hand sanitizer on and spark a lighter to smoke a bowl or cigarette or you're putting yourself at risk for major bones, major burns. Do point out that any hand sanitizer you use needs to have, we believe, about 70 percent alcohol in it. It'll still help with bacterial stuff, but you need to have that high level of alcohol in the hand sanitizer. Washing your hands is actually better than using hand sanitizer. And that concludes the virus discussion. You can take the math and the data and the links. I also in between my shit posting rampages on Twitter, when I post things on Twitter, oftentimes I'm posting virus related things. So you can follow ways to track this if you're interested. You'll be hearing about this every week. And this is going to be our lives. This is this is what happens during a global pandemic. It just it is what it is. Eighty percent of the human population is going to come down with this. And it is the case. It's just a question of, like I say, get anything away from this conversation. Two rules for playing the pandemic game. Number one, delay getting sick as long as possible. Number two, when you do get sick, make sure you don't get other people sick by isolating. If you can work from home, please do so. If you can isolate early, if you are a privileged, like a Risto nerd like me or something like that, and you have the money and the means and the ability to just hole up and play games and wank for the next while, every person that isolates early is slowing down the spread of this because also you're reducing the risk of the surge itself. Right. What is the surge? The surge is when in the middle of April, every hospital bed in the United States, the Brumpley is. We look at my math. We're looking at about two million cases by May 5th. And then again, since it's every six days, we're looking at about four million May 11th, eight million May 17th. What we do know about COVID-19 is that when people do have severe complications for this, you don't just go to the hospital and get fixed. You go to a hospital and people are staying in hospital beds for weeks. So the people that are most at risk are particularly the elderly and have things like that. When they go in for this, they're taking those hospital beds up. And so if you are isolating early and taking me, keeping yourself safe, that also means that you're not likely to get hit by a truck and then try to go to the hospital for your broken leg. And sorry, there's no beds. And also now you have the virus. Right. So there you go. Enough about that. Let's talk about spaceship. So while you are hopefully self-isolating and taking precautions and things like that, we expect we don't know what's coming. We don't know what's coming. It could be as soon as Tuesday. It could be next week. It could be the week after that. We can predict the curve of the virus. We cannot predict CCP, but we do know that CCP has made it very clear that they intend to nerf the shit out of null sec income in general. Right. And yes, by the way, you, Yashin, this whole thing is depressing, but it doesn't have to be a panic. It doesn't have to be depressing. We can do something. And what I what I want everybody to take away on this is that you yourself can make a difference in a global battle that will save lives by reducing the are not of this thing, which is a technical term. We're all about to become amateur epidemiologists as a species. Those of us that don't get Darwin awarded out of here. You can make a difference. You can save somebody else's grandparents, maybe not your grandparents, but you can help save people by taking these precautions. Rule number one. Delay getting sick as long as possible. Rule number two, when you do get sick, make sure you don't give it to anybody. It's literally all of humanity against this thing, and that is terrifying, but it is also it fills one with a degree of purpose. Like you are making a difference. You are saving lives if you are taking precautions and avoiding getting sick. And that is a good thing. And most people are not often in a position where they can say this is mathematically going to help the species. So get in front of this, take ownership of it, enjoy your agency, exercise your agency as a human being to help. Fight for all of humanity. It's a very rare opportunity. But back to spaceship. We know that CCP wants to nerf us and that's fine. We're the richest group in the game. We have the best economy. We are the most organized economy. And now is the time to get as rich as possible. You can get rich in the off-Delve colonies. You can get rich in Delve. I really want people to start focusing. And I know that a lot of you are deployed on Jeff things or doing Jeff things or El Hefe things or whatever. Things are coming down the pipe. Meetings are taking place. But the priority of the Imperium for the next period of time here is just to get fucking rich. Get ISK, mine stuff, stock and supplies. I want everybody just rolling in it as much as possible between now and when CCP nerfs the shit out of NulSec as a whole. Because that will create a stockpile. Virus joke not intended but actually applicable. This is prepping our stockpiles for supply crunch. Which is also going to happen in the real world. Art imitates life. Yeah, Leekin is absolutely right. It's stockpiling all the way down in real life and in the game. So, related to that, we have a Locust Fleet tomorrow. Now, we don't know when CCP is going to patch shit. They usually do patches on Tuesday. We have a Locust Fleet tomorrow. There's a lot of moons there. I want you guys to go hard on this Locust Fleet. We are going to helicopter dick the shit out of everything on this Locust Fleet. Because for all we know, we have no idea what CCP is going to do. For all we know, this might be one of the last really good Locust Fleets while we see what CCP is going to do to moons and to the economy. So, tomorrow when we have this Locust Fleet, I want you guys to be there. And I don't want you to just be there. I want you to be there with your supercaps so that we can make sure that we have the umbrella secure while we do this. And just mine like you don't know when you're going to next get a chance to get at that hot, hot moon goo. So, please turn up for that. [silence] Okay, a couple of other things we're going to talk about. So, again, off delve colonies are also there for you to make money. We've talked about that before, the off delve colonies being in a period base. [silence] And now, let me talk about a couple of other things. We have a recruiting drive for Corpus Diplo, which is quite important. Let me get the link here. It is very rare that we actually let people try to become diplomats. And it is a very difficult process to get in for good reason, because a diplomat in Goons from Federation holds more power than the, basically most alliance leaders have less power in this video game than your average Corpus Diplo blueberry. So, we are doing recruiting. There's a link to that in Elysium. You will have to do a shitload of work and you will be tested because it is probably one of the highest vetted organizations that we have. [silence] So, it's very prestigious, but if you get there, you will have to do a shitload of work and you'll have power, but you won't necessarily ever have anybody realize you have it. But you get to help participate in literally the coolest internet spaceship empire that humanity has ever created. [silence] Alright, so what else do we have? INN is recruiting. Since basically a huge chunk of humanity is about to be trapped inside with nothing to do but play around on the internet and write things about it, there has never been a better time to become an INN writer if you are interested in that. And I will send a link to the Join Us page for INN here in a moment. [silence] Once Babby Mittens figures out how to copy and paste, there we go. [silence] Alright. [silence] So now it is time to take questions. We do have a meta show today. We did not have a meta show last week, but we have a meta show today. We're going to be talking about all the crap that has happened in the last two weeks, including CCB cancelling FanFest because of the virus. South by Southwest is cancelled. Basically, you should expect that if you had plans to travel in the next couple months, you don't actually have plans to travel in the next couple months because everything is going to be cancelled as the Hoi Poloi wake up. [silence] Is Jeff going to stand down? The Jeff leadership is having a meeting, and you will hear about what Jeff is up to once they are done having their meeting and saying things. [silence] Vegas is still on, and that's important because I would not cancel any plans for going to Vegas. Vegas is in October. Based upon the epidemiological models, we can anticipate that the viral surge will peak. Based upon what we know now. We don't know. It's a day by day thing, guys. Most of the modeling that we've seen suggests June and July as the peak of everybody is sick and locked inside to one degree or another. That's going to be the worst of it. Vegas is in October. It'll be cleaning up after the cyber apocalypse and then going for a big party. You don't have to worry about Vegas being cancelled. That's in October. It is out of the danger zone. But if you had plans for April, June, July, you should probably start planning for what happens when either you choose to cancel them or other people choose to cancel them for you. [silence] Somebody's saying, "Seven months away we may have a vaccine or some shit." That is disinformation. It takes approximately a year to a year and a half to produce a vaccine for a novel virus. Do not hold out hope for a miracle vaccine. I know that some countries are telling people that that is right around the way, but that is not how science works. We care about facts and evidence, not about feelings. [silence] Yeah, there's a tremendous amount of misinformation on a country by country basis. I would recommend to everybody, regardless of what country you live in, to use YouTube to watch the news broadcasts of other countries besides your own. I have found it very valuable to watch the Canadian news, the CBC news. I live, of course, in the United States in Wisconsin. I've also been watching DW, Deutsche Welt, or I can't pronounce it right, but the German news, one of them. BBC is good. And in general, you just need to look around the world for news sources outside of your own country and locality. Because if there is one thing that we have seen about this pandemic so far, it's that most you got pretty much 50/50 odds about governments taking it appropriately seriously. Essentially, what we are living through right now is like the first episode of HBO's Chernobyl series, where something is going hellishly wrong and the scientists are all saying, Jesus Christ, what the fuck is wrong with you people? Look at the math. And the politicians are trying to keep people from measuring it and keep people from talking about it and keep people from telling the truth. So that is the scenario we are in. So please diversify your news diets accordingly. And containment has failed in the West collectively. Like the South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, mainland China have apparently, Vietnam as well, have all done pretty good jobs, actually very good jobs. You can see on the reports, you can literally watch on the graph the curve of the surge getting smoothed out. And that's what we want. If you are a player who lives in the West, we want to achieve kind of a smooth gradual curve like what you're seeing in South Korea, in Singapore, and in China. Regardless of whether you believe the Chinese number, that's the goal is to smooth that curve. And containment unfortunately has failed in the United States. If you have a cruise plan of any kind, I would suggest that you cancel your cruise plans because essentially every single ship that's out there is probably a plague ship at this point. Can we rat and query us? There should be a ratting and mining wiki page that will answer all of your questions about where we can rat and mine. I have a nasty habit of just making assumptions because we do change our policies periodically over the last decade or whatever long that I will blurt out and say, oh, yeah, you can totally rat here, you can rat there. And it turns out that I'm wrong and that we changed the policy a bit ago and I just derped on it. So that's why I'm referring you to the ratting rights link. Thank you very much for linking that in Elysium because that will always have the most updated information. And if you see anybody else asking questions about where and what you can do, please do send them that link about what are the ratting rights, what can we do where, rather than just roosting misinformation. How's the job forum thing going? That is a very good question, Dave the Raver. It has been stalled because the person who is number one on that was in Iceland for a week and that is on Anominate. That is his project. If people are worried about a Mad Max apocalypse kind of thing or something like that, don't be. It's not going to be like that. There are going to be probably millions of people are going to die. There will be a period of disruption. There is likely to be an economic depression. It's going to be bad, but we will all be in Vegas together, hopefully, in October and it will be over with by then. But the next few months are going to be rough. People need to prepare. Here's the thing. Unfortunately, I think that people have this discourse choice where it's like, don't panic. But if you're trying to prepare people and talk in an open and mathematically proven way about a serious challenge, people will say, "Oh, you're spreading misinformation or you're panicking or whatever." It's not a binary thing. We can all fight this thing together. Just try to delay getting sick as long as you can and when you do get sick, don't spread it to anybody else. HyperViper has done a lot of work along with several other people to make sure that eVegas happens this year. Again, it is in October. You will not need to worry about virus bullshit getting in the way of eVegas. We are going to be partying together in eVegas. By that point, we will all either be dead, which probably won't happen, hopefully, or immune to this thing. It's going to kill a bunch of people, but it's not going to be the end of the world. It's not the end of civilization or whatever. You just have to prepare adequately for the fact that shit's going to go sideways. [silence] Yeah, and you guys need to understand, people will often look at a death rate or a CFR, a case fatality ratio, and they won't actually extrapolate it to what that means for them. Maybe you don't hang out with that many people who are at risk, but you don't know. If you have a friend with Crohn's disease who's taking—I don't know if Crohn's disease actually add more risk than other people. I do know that for some people, they do take an immunosuppressant, and that might cause complications, but we don't know. We do not know, and that uncertainty is dangerous. But most people, the theory is Dunbar's number. Most people know approximately 150 human beings. They know, they recognize their names, they recognize their faces, that kind of stuff. So you know, probably, personally, about 150 people. That's average. That's Dunbar's number, sociological stuff. We talk about it all the time, usually when we're comparing things in Eve politics with empires, which have to have institutions, bureaucracies like we have in the Imperium. This is an empire. Versus Dunbar's number orgs, which is 150 people in a little tribe. Dunbar's number orgs are lower than 150 people, the organization that we have here. But what does this mean about the virus thing? Well, if you're looking at a 3.4% CFR, and you know 150 people, you have a reasonable expectation, just mathematically speaking, that 4 or 5 people that you know, personally, that are a part of your life are not going to make it out the other side of this. So when people are looking at these things and just blowing off, and maybe it's not people your age, maybe it's your grandparents, maybe it's your parents, but it needs to be taken seriously. Because if you know about 150 people, and it's 3.4 CFR, and they expect 60 to 80% of the human population to catch this, all of us are going to lose friends, all of us are going to lose some family. It's going to be rough. There's no reason to panic about it, but you need to prepare for that mentally, you need to prepare for it emotionally, and you need to understand that at some point we are all going to be having this thing. We're all going to be fighting it. And I hope, for all of your sakes, that we all just catch the asymptomatic strain and nobody actually gets a cough or anything bad. But that's where we are. CFR is the case fatality rate. One of the things that people do not realize when they're looking at the numbers on this stuff is people will catch it, they go onto the roster as having been infected in the areas where they have good testing. And then there's a period of time. One of the things about COVID-19 is that if you have a severe case of it, you're in the hospital for weeks. That's what we see now is that people who have to go to the hospital for the more severe cases, they're fighting it for weeks. If you have a smaller case, you can catch it and then be done with it. If you're younger, what you'll probably have is not really a big deal. You get a fever, you get a cough for a little bit, you self-isolate for a few weeks, and then everything's fine. But when there's complications, somebody's in the hospital fighting it. So one of the reasons why we don't know as much as we would like to know about this damn thing is when you see a number until that case goes through recovered, it's infected, question mark, question mark, question mark, maybe they're in critical care, maybe they live, maybe they die, until that infection number comes out the other side as either a death or a recovery, they're in that limbo for weeks and we don't know whether we're going to live or die. We can just make predictions based upon the existing CFRs. So I don't want to be a downer. What I'm going to end this conversation on is, again, just reiterating, even if you are not at risk, you can buy us time. It is money in the bank, and if you don't want to do it for yourself, do it for your grandmother, do it for somebody else's grandmother, do it for humanity. Rule number one, try to delay getting sick as long as possible. Number two, when you do get sick, make sure you do everything you can to avoid spreading it to other people. Let's slow this thing down, let's mitigate the surge. We'll be talking about it again next week where it'll seem a lot less alarmist because it'll be much more obvious to the hoi polloi what's going on. But you guys are on the front line because once you realize what is going on, you all have large networks of people and you can convince them of the same way. It's money in the bank now. The more people we get taking action sooner, the easier this will be for the entire species. All right, so that is it. We will be getting together again next week for a fireside chat. In the meantime, again, Locust Fleet tomorrow. Get as much money as you can in the game because CCB is going to try to nerf us and apply for CD or INN if that interests you. Let's get that money. Thanks for coming, guys. I'll see you next week. Meta Show in 20 minutes.