Larian Studios Forums General Chat RPG Chat Coronavirus

So how are you lot dealing with the coronavirus I am just sticking to playing video games or just talking in forms like this my life has not really changed do to the coronavirus do to the fact that 90% of the time I stay in do to being disabled

I've spent most of the day (bearing in mind I got up at 2:30am) trying to sort out some online grocery orders. Needless to say it was a fruitless endeavour. I would say "literally", but as I tend to avoid fruit and veg at the best of times that's not really earth-shattering news! Other than that I never go out anyway, so I'm just cursing the sun reflecting off my screen as I try to play Andromeda and making my motion-sickness even worse. Arse. etc.

So much the same by the sound of it.

On the plus side, now that the roads are pretty much empty I'm much less stressed about driving to where I need to be. But to negate that positive, there are still speed cameras. argh.

Probably be a profitable business for a while to come up with speed camera jammers.

Cool keep safe

It hasn't really affected me that much other then the panic buying having deleted some items I needed (dog food, paper towels, etc) at the stores. In the very small city nearby (I think about 3000 people), most every business is essential thus open with some new precautions. Tomorrow I'll be going to the not as small city (Spokane, WA) to see if I can scrounge up some dog food so, that might prove interesting. My nearest neighbor is a mile away (nearly 2 miles by car) and I tend to not make trips to town anyway unless there are items I badly need (diesel for the electricity, bottled water (my well water is mineral rich so tastes awful)) so it's not much of a change.

You might be better off getting your dog food online that's what I had to do with my pug

Ordering stuff online has become all but impossible. Quite worrying really. I don't think the major retailers have adapted to the situation very well at all and yet again I'm wondering why these "professional CEOs" are paid so much as things always seem to go wrong under their stewardship. Contrast that with the "we need a temporary 4,000 bed hospital and quarter of a million volunteers": a day or two later, it's done. Imagine if it was left to the CEOs? We'd have a wait of several years by which time they'd provide three beds at a charge that would bankrupt the country. Grr.

It has gotten harder to buy stuff online but I always buy my dog food online do to not being able to buy it in pet shops I agree with you that leaving it up to the big business companies would be a very bad idea the main problem we are having in the UK is people are thinking it's a bank holiday and not do what there have been told to do stay in unless you really have to go out like doing your food shopping the main thing that really is disgusting me is how some business are trying to make money out of the pandemic like Sports direct trying to keep it's doors who in there right mind would want to by sports gear in a pandemic? what there are doing is pure greed and putting the workers at risk

The owner of that company has previously caused significant controversy about his treatment of workers. It's probably safer to not go into too much detail but e.g. insisting that they submit to intrusive searches carried out in their own time when they leave work didn't win him any popularity contests. And a huge problem we're now seeing with business is this just-in-time logistics fad that was one of the Gordon Gecko-era management idiocies which I knew at the time (I learnt about it as part of my IT diploma) was way too fragile and a problem waiting to happen. And now it has happened. The problem isn't panic-buying but a system that is so precarious that it took almost nothing to topple it over.

Added to that the austerity programme inflicted on the country by the UK's worst ever comedy double-act, Porky & Cokey. It snuffed out the slight recovery in the economy it was supposed to save and made the problem much worse than it already was, and pretty much every area of support and infrastructure was trashed and left in a dysfunctional condition even without an additional crisis to test it.

If anything good comes out of this, I hope it's the end of that particular era. 40 years was too long and I want to see my country rebuilt.

Sadly I think this coronavirus will be lasting for about a year well in the UK anyway do to what the UK government have done and what there have not done I mean who lets in people from coronavirus zones into another county without testing them to see if there have the coronavirus? but on another note do you lot need help on what masks to buy I can help you lot out on that here is me wearing my mask it might be a bit on the extreme side but I know this coronavirus is going to get a lot worse before it gets better also me and my family members are high risk to the coronavirus so I can not afford to take any risks my mask is the mp-5 polish gas mask I got it on ebay if you lot do buy masks make sure it is not a medical mask there only stop you from giving it to other people there do not stop you from getting it you need to go for masks that are p2 or p3 respirator masks I hope this helps you lot out

I'm quite happy staying indoors, so no need for a mask! That is a bit... large, and I'm somewhat reminded of the one I had in the army: fun and games going for a long "double march" (i.e. jog) on a randomly hot October day in a respirator and "noddy suit", i.e. a nuclear-biological-chemical protection suit you wear over your regular camo (i.e. heavy) gear. That was unpleasant.

Apart from the risk of frightening small children, you'd need to check it would filter out the relevant particles or vapour: not all masks filter all things. And if it's an older one (which it doesn't seem to be) or of unknown provenance that it doesn't use asbestos as a filter medium: very good at filtering stuff but not so good for other reasons.

Well the mask is a modern gas mask but on the filters I am planning getting myself a new filter on monday it's the s10 and nato gas mask filter that will do the job but on the good side of wearing this mask is it is keeping away people who would try to come up to me and my pug so it is keeping me safe in more ways than one lol but on the bad news I have just found out my cousin and my aunt have got the coronavirus over facebook both of them are high risk my aunt is over 60 years old but my cousin is pregnant and has a 2 year old girl I hope there can come out fine

Isolation and distancing will be much more effective than a respirator, which will just make you sweaty and may even provide an infection vector if you don't have the means to keep it absolutely clean.

Even among high-risk people, the actual risk of serious unpleasantness is fairly low so hopefully they'll be okay. The reason they're making such a big deal of it isn't the individual risk, where it's unlikely to become very serious, but that a small risk when multiplied by the entire population (and it is very infectious indeed, much more so than common 'flu: though 1.3 vs. 2 new infections per person doesn't sound much, exponentially it makes a gigantic difference, e.g. assuming both have a five day cycle, over two months assuming a cycle time of 5 days i.e. 12 infection cycles, 1.3¹² would mean 23 new infections, whereas 2¹² would indicate 4,096 new infections. That's a lot of assumptions and not to be taken absolutely literally but it demonstrates the problem) means very quickly overwhelmed critical care units which would make the entire health service cease to function. And other health problems haven't gone on holiday for the duration.

Er, so anyway, that is why it's such a massive big deal at the same time as personal risk is very low and hopefully that will be the case with your relatives.

I understand that children are relatively resistant to the disease. I mean we were all little plague-carriers once and were virtually unkillable!

Well I have been keeping my distance from people and only go out to take my dog for a walk so I only have my gas mask on 20 minutes a day the only other times I have used it is when I need to do my shopping the main worry is for my aunt do to her age and health issues but I am cleaning my mask with a wipe every time I use my gas mask the main problem is in the UK is people are thinking it's a bank holiday this is a group of people today in my town not doing what there have been told lucky the cops have fined them but still there should know better it's people like this that makes my blood boil I mean most of the people had the coronavirus before the lockdown but people like this are making it X10 hander on the NHS who don't have the right gear to deal with the coronavirus in the first place

I still wouldn't bother, it's too much effort and not really necessary, though I do understand the concern even though in my case it's filtered through the lens of "can I be bothered?"

But yeah, the other people. I'm generally not a stickler for the rules (yeah I know, not a great line for a mod) and one of my finest moments was a meeting where I was told off for being "unnecessarily flippant" in front of my co-workers who sniggered a lot, but in this case it's actually important and it's not about them, it's that they couldn't give a monkey's about passing it on to other people. Lucky if they have the coppers dealing with them since both the army and the now otherwise unoccupied pub bouncers are being pressed into service to enforce civil behaviour and are likely to be significantly less delicate about it.

Agreed I do think that the only way people will do what there are told to do by the UK government is by having the army on the streets helping out the cops just saying to people not to go out will not stop some people it will go the same way as speed cameras there will still go out even when there have to pay the £60 pounds fine I really don't like the idea of army people on the streets but if this is the only to stop stupid people from going out than so be it

I am also not a stickler for the rules so don't worry about that but there are people who have no common sense I mean I like to do my own things in life but people like in the pic are just putting others at risk

Well, that's classic "this is why we can't have nice things": there are some people who have to be made to comply as they won't otherwise do so voluntarily. It's always a fine balance because excessive application of the rules infantilises a lot of people and generally pisses them off, and it pisses me off when I see someone pedantically going on about "but it's the rules, it's the ruuuuuules" as if that's all that matters. But sometimes they're important and have to be followed.

Personally I don't have a problem with seeing soldiers on the street and in some regards prefer them to the police as they're more independent-thinkers. They're still selected to a high standard and the "problem" ones weeded out during selection and basic-training. That's not to say you don't get the odd one but overall it's not as if they're just thugs. If anything, the UK is a bit of an oddity in the way it polices, a lot of countries have a similar arrangement to France where the everyday policing is done by the military police, the gendarmes being technically soldiers IIRC (and similarly armed) and the "civil police" being analogous to our CID.

Speed cameras I have a special hatred of because speeding is only a very small part of dangerous driving and often not even a factor, and IME the standard of driving has reduced significantly since most traffic policing is now automated: it makes it much less likely that people get pulled over for actually dangerous driving e.g. tailgating, failing to observe give-way signs etc, drunk driving and generally being arseholes. They had an experiment locally where they turned off the cameras for a short period of time and put patrol cars back on the streets; it made such a difference even just audibly in that the very obvious road-racing that's long been a problem stopped. But being idiots they went back to speed cameras and the problems returned.

Boy, not here in the USA. Every town/city have their own police force. In most of the country, counties have a sheriff's department. In the east coast (and maybe the Pacific coast too - I tend to avoid that area), counties are divided into townships that have their own police forces. The state government has state militias (national guard) and state police. Federal government has several police forces all competing with each other (FBI, Federal Marshals, etc). Dividing power and keeping it close to the people are a real thing here. It does help in this crisis - what works in the cities could be more dangerous then the pandemic in rural areas. Size is one issue, I think. Germany can have a federal police force because it is so small (Germany is about the same size physically as the state of Oregon albeit with a heck of a lot more people jammed in). I think flexibility and local control can be good with a lot of open space between towns; not very good in a city, though.

I'd have thought physical size is less important than population, but I dunno how that'd work in practice. Although the major European countries are physically smaller than most US states, each has a bigger population than almost all of them. But the EU and US are not the same as much as some people are seemingly calling for a "United States of Europe": there'll be more *exits before that comes to pass.

Here in the UK there are a number of police forces which are geographic but don't necessarily follow any county lines: here in Oxford we have Thames Valley Police which is pretty much what it sounds like, except for the bit of the Thames Valley where London is which has the Metropolitan Police. In other places I've lived there's the likes of Northumbria Police (Northumbria hasn't existed as a specific place for most of the past 1,000 years, but it covers some of the region in question) and Essex Police which is a county force. They have some differences when it comes to stuff like traffic policing policy and so on but they're all much of a muchness in terms of how the law is applied. And that's pretty much it.

There are some specific non-geographical policing organisations like British Transport Police and the Military Police who have specific duties: they usually work within that remit so the military police will police the military (rather than the military doing the policing which is a temporary arrangement in emergency situations such as now) but have the same powers as the regular constabularies wherever they happen to be involved.

And that's it, pretty much. The US system is something that looks absolutely confusing to me, with local sheriffs, state police, the FBI and others who often seem to disagree not over points of law but rather territory, and it seems to an outsider that the disagreements tend to become quite entrenched even when one technically has authority over the other. And then there're the ones who don't seem to fit into that system at all: an acquaintance was nicked for speeding when we were over there and got pulled by a "state trooper". We'd already been warned about them as they have a habit of shooting people, apparently. And also not to get out of the car if we're pulled over because that turns out to be a guaranteed way of being shot. eek.

This is why I am not too keen on going to the US anytime soon I remember reading or hear that blind people are allowed to own a gun having said that I don't mind people having a gun but I would not like the idea of a blind person shooting and end up hurting me do to not being able to see me

I imagine it's probably for the likes of home defence rather than shooting out in the open. They have things like revolvers that fire small-gauge shotgun cartridges so not too much risk of over-penetration.

The gun debate is one of those never-ending things. I'm extremely ambivalent about the subject and can't even reach consensus with myself let alone anybody else. IMHO the US is way too lax about such things but here in the UK we're at the other extreme with even deactivated weapons owned by collectors and those with an academic interest being all but banned now. It makes no difference to public safety (contrary to the pontification of people who should know better, they really can't bought cheap and returned to working condition with half an hour's work: those guns will never fire again, not without replacing so many parts that it'd be safer and cheaper to buy a functioning black market gun) and is one of those useless laws to placate the tabloids. Similar stories with e.g. swords where even people who make and use them professionally are potentially putting themselves at risk from the law simply by transporting them in the boot of their car.

But on the other hand I'm not comfortable with the idea of pretty much anybody who feels like it carrying live firearms of varying lethality. Nobody ever seems to mention the rest of that constitutional thing about the right to bear arms "as part of a well-organised militia" or however it goes. Which renders the argument kinda pointless as somebody who cracks open a few beers and shoots at the empty cans a couple of weekends a year is going to be no match for trained soldiers. Where's gbnf when we need him? I think he's the one that pointed out that when things go bad, armed citizens who take it upon themselves to intervene are very likely to be shot.

The police apparently have an unwarranted bad record over seas. State police are the best trained out there and are organized like a military unit. It's the local reserve officers that one has to sometimes worry about as they are part time police and not required to have the training regular officers have. Jurisdictions are set in stone - the only overlapping is state police and federal police and if that happens, it's always federal over state over local. As far as police shooting, if any shot is fired, another police force investigates and the officer is put on administrative leave until cleared so it is rare that someone is shot unless they did something stupid (like, pull a toy knife - the officer doesn't have time to determine that it's a toy). There's only a small percentage of people who carry guns - the vast majority are for hunting, sport, and home defense. Statistics are rather clear too. Places that changed their laws to allow concealed carry nearly always have a sharp decline in violent crime which, BTW, has been dropping in the USA since the 1970s even as laws were changed to allow easier access. Really, FBI statistics show that nearly 10 people are clubbed to death for every one non-suicide gun death. That is really the main issue as it is much easier to pull a trigger then any other type of suicide and the suicide rate has gone sharply upward. Gun crimes are also not scattered - they are heavily concentrated in a few very urban areas and usually related to gang and drug activity. However, most international visitors go to these large cities so that may not be important from their perspective. American cities are very dangerous places to be. The "well organized militia" feature is always brought up but there are arguments both ways. For instance, in the US Constitution, "the people" and "militia" are interchangeably used and it is mostly agreed that militia is defined as all able-bodied citizens. In the late 1700s through about the 1850s, states required regular people to assemble when called and bring a military grade weapon with them (in those days, a musket or rifled musket) along with lead and powder to be regulated (trained to the level of regulars). It never really worked, though - militia troops tended to run after a single volley and the cost to states was high so they opted for a state army of sorts (state militia, now National Guard which can be federalized) that was a select few so much easier to successfully regulate. That really is the current argument - follow the Constitution as written or change it without amending it left mainly on whim. Do we use the definition when written or a modern definition (language changes a lot)? Since both sides are fairly evenly divided, it won't change much in the foreseeable future. Plus, Americans have had a huge mistrust of government dating back to at least King George III - much of the Constitution is there to defend the people from the government and to defend minorities from majorities so we don't get something similar to the mob rule of the French revolutionary period. I know, that happened later but it is exactly what the founding fathers didn't want to happen. Any way, this argument has been going on since the 1960s and will probably still be happening in "Futureama" times. It is more emotional then fact based so will go on.

Sadly you are right about people who come on to tv shows and use emotion than facts there are some people who do use facts on tv shows but not that many here in the UK when we got rid of guns the knife crime doubled so saying that getting rid of all guns will stop crime is bull $hit also I hate it when celebrities say you should not have a gun and yet there have like ten bodyguards

Thanks for the clarification, Canine; I think my "knowledge", such as it is, has been assembled from dribs and drabs of news (and other countries' news may not be as bad as it is here in the UK, but I should know better than to not question it) and various comments picked up here and there which tend to be quite politically motivated. Plus my assumption that Starsky & Hutch was a documentary and that all of the US was like that!

And yeah, knife crime. Plus I dunno if gun crime has significantly reduced in the UK either: my understanding is that it's actually increased slightly after the last few pointless attempts to tighten it up because not surprisingly the trade in black market guns that entered the country illegally and were thus never legally held was not affected by laws that affect legally owned stuff. We did have a police officer round here who was actually armed, though just with a pistol (they usually carry sub-machine-guns if they're armed).

Yeah, I found about sub-machine-guns the hard way. My German is not good. In Wien, Austria, I parked in a spot I thought the sign said was legal. When I returned from the museum, my car was surrounded by police with sub-machine-guns. Turns out the spot was reserved for OPEC.

Oh dear

Sounds like they have some serious traffic wardens over there. Considering what my parking is like, I think I won't go.

I've been stuck in my property in Germanyhttps://tranio.com/germany/ for weeks now as we have a lock down in the country. Seems like they are starting to lift it up gradually. I hope everybody's lives will normalise soon.

It's just been extended for another three weeks here in England. Which didn't surprise me at all. I mean other than not following the news, because "UK media lol" etc.

How's the PM doing?

Dunno, due to my avoidance of the media: I'd started reading online news again to keep abreast of developments but as is always the case I started feeling depressed and realise that they were doing nothing to dispel my ignorance of current events. In fact the news tends to make you more ignorant thanks to its torrent of dishonesty.

All I know is that he's recovered and is recuperating. Either it really has knocked him out or a doctor has had strong words with him as he hasn't returned to office and probably won't for some weeks, by accounts, so we still have The World's Dullest Man standing in for him. I suspect that was a deliberate tactic by Boris so he wasn't left with anything too "exciting" to deal with once he returns.

As for things in general, I haven't noticed a lot of change as lockdown is basically what my life is like anyway. It has been a bit of an eye-opener as to how difficult other people are finding it after less than a month.