Coronavirus and me and you

Another way of looking at it is that everyone I know has either been paid to fake the symptoms of the hoax disease, or else had their tracker chips successfully implanted by the One World conspiracy.

 

Or an aluminium foil hat

 

As far as I understand being vaccinated is not 100% foolproof. You still have a (much reduced) risk to catch Corona with a much reduced chance for a dangerous infection. And it has not yet been determined for all the various vaccinations if, after being vaccinated, you could still transfer the virus to others. And the most important part - while more people every day have been vaccinated we are far from the 60+% needed for herd immunity so until then some sort of lockdown will be maintained.

 

I guess I am an outlier then, if more than 60% of the people I know are already post-Covid in one way or another.

I don't understand this issue around people who are vaccinated still being able to spread it though. Surely the whole point of the immune system is that it eliminates the virus from your body, and the vaccination works as a crash course to teach the immune system how to do this, without it having to learn from the real virus.

So then in a person who has either recently had the virus, or recently been vaccinated, what opportunity is there for the virus to replicate itself in enough volume to become transmissible to someone else? If the person its currently in has a functioning immune system that knows all about it and is actively combatting it, then surely any small number of virus instances absorbed from an external source would quickly be broken down before they can take hold and replicate.

What's more, I'm pretty sure that symptoms in general are actually caused by the immune response, so it doubly doesn't make sense to me that you could be vaccinated (or had it previously) and then catch the real virus (again), and start transmitting it to other people without any symptoms of your own.

 

The vaccination takes two doses and only a while after you got the 2nd dose do you have the full protection the vaccine offers. That means until then you might still transfer it. And depending on vaccine the protection offered is "only" 95% and a lower chance at a dangerous infection.

It is possible. People not belonging to one of the higher risk-population groups (80+, chronic disesases) and who are healthy quite often have an infection with either no symptoms or only symptoms that you could have for a influenca or even only for a cough. Quite similar to what is well known about AIDS where some people carry the disease and can infect others, but do not show symptoms themselves.
e.g.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/11193439/can-i-have-coronavirus-no-symptoms/

Then it is possible that someone who had the virus is re-infected. After all ALL those corona-viruses do mutate. We are just so used to it that influenca shots are needed on a yearly basis that we tend to forget that we do need them because the virus has mutated. For the influenca shot nowadays usually *FOUR* variants are included in the shot (those that were the main distributed in the southern hemisphere the season before) while a few years ago only 3 variants were regularly vacccinated with the influenca shot.

There are already the normal, british and south african variansts known for Corona and experts from the RKI expect that people who have been vaccinated will need a refreshment in a yet unknown duration (e.g. influenca each year).

 

Yes, I'm aware that the popular press is saying "Oooh! You might still transmit the virus even if you've been vaccinated!!!1111!1" But I'm asking what the biological mechanism for that is.

AIDS is a bad comparison, because what makes HIV particularly unique among viruses is that it compromises your immune system. The reason you never get symptoms of HIV is because, in effect, your immune system never responds to it, and gets weakened. You then die of other things that you could normally fight off.

From reading the literature, it seems that this re-infection thing isn't unique to Covid, and yet I've never really heard of it being a problem with anything else of this sort. You expect to get measles or chicken pox once (or get the vaccines once), and then never again.

Are they just saying something like - if I've had Covid before, or the vaccine, then any virus entering my body would be swiftly annihilated, but I could still for example breathe in while standing next to someone who has it, and then the virus hangs around on the surface of my lungs or nostrils, and then when I breathe out in the presence of my grandmother it could travel out and infect her? I mean, sure, I guess, but that seems like a very weak transmission vector - I'm likely to breathe out hundreds of times before that point. I struggle to see how that effect alone could lead to R being greater than 1. Especially if I'm washing my hands properly too.

Alternatively, is there some kind of low end viral load during re-infection? i.e. the virus can still get off a few thousand copies before the primed immune system ramps up antibodies to shut down the virus, so during some brief interval you can be mildly contagious again, though still far less so than if you weren't already immune and your internal virus count got up into the millions?

 

Today, on games that Smuel recommends for you to pass the time in lockdown, because that's what this thread is about, right?

… we present... Prosperous Universe - a free to play space trading simulator, in the vein of Elite, or X, but focusing solely on the trading part.

Seriously, it is ONLY the trading part. There aren't even any graphics. Like, not even any pictures of ships. Like, if you took Crusader Kings II and removed the character portraits, and set it in space, and made it about trading, you'd get Prosperous Universe.

It's a massively multiplayer game, but due to its nerdy nature, and also because it's still in beta, there aren't any annoying 12 year olds insulting your mom. It's just clever 12 year olds undercutting your prices on the commodity exchanges.

They reset the universe a couple of weeks ago, and I started playing a couple of days ago. Everything is still at a basic level - the universe evolves its products as players trade and develop their facilities to produce more advanced components. Apparently the last universe ran for two years. So now is your chance to get in at the beginning! The game plays in real time, but there's no grinding as such - you queue up production orders, or send ships on trading routes, and come back later to see how they've progressed and if anyone has bought your stuff, etc.

If you are interested, here a few tips to start with:

• You can reset your account one time (actually multiple times, but the first time is free). So you could just plunge in, make some disastrous mistakes, and then reset. That's what I did. This also means you can ignore the rest of my tips, if you want.
• Pick one of the faction home planets as your starting planet. I picked a planet at random and ended up in an outer orbit far away from the nearest commodity exchange, which meant long expensive flights to ferry goods back and forth, which made no economic sense. Later in the game those distant planets have resources that you can mine, but at the start it's better to be close to the exchange to build up your finances.
• When picking a starting package, don't be a carbon farmer - that market is saturated right now. It's actually quite easy to change direction later though, so also don't stress too much about which package to pick.
• The interface is a little bit clunky, but don't let that put you off. You can read the tutorials - that's faster than watching the videos, and you should have the hang of it within about an hour.

Also, in theory we could create a House of Lords conglomerate or something, if one of us pays for a subscription that lets you do that, though I don't know what kind of benefits that brings. It's not a pay to win game - you can still do all the trading bits in the free version. For example, I'm about to corner the market in metals on the Hortus exchange!

Well maybe. I don't actually know what "corner the market" means, so it may not be applicable. But I'm going to trade some metals on the Hortus exchange!

Well, in two days of real time when my transport ship arrives there. But then I'll make a huge profit!

Well, if nobody else has dumped metals on that exchange in the meantime to bring the price down.

See! Exciting.

 

So, that didn't quite go to plan. I flew my ship to a distant exchange to buy up the metals and ores that I needed, and bought up all the stock of a couple of things. Then I was about to fly back and found I'd exceeded the weight limit of the ship. Whoops! So I had to relist some quantities back for sale on that exchange. Of course I set very high prices, because I don't really want to sell it - my ship is going back there to pick up the remainder at some point. But for a couple of days I was then the only seller of those commodities on that exchange, so in some sense I really had cornered the market. Just not the one I was expecting to.

In the meantime I don't have enough excess of the materials to sell them back at Hortus after all - so instead I'm just slowly using up what I was able to transport. Then I'll sell the resulting products as one of the few producers in that region.

So it's still actually mostly sort of going to kind of plan!

 

You are failing at this task.

 

If you're referring to the task of making a profit in Prosperous Universe, then, well, I wouldn't say I'm failing. Though perhaps my super smart trades weren't as super smart as I initially thought. I'm still making teh moniez though.

If you're referring to the task of getting everyone jazzed up to play the game, then I humbly accept your rebuke. I guess it's pretty niche, though if you're into that niche, it's a great example of it. I was a little sceptical myself at first, but before long I was scouring the game's exchanges looking for arbitrage opportunities, and calculating production costs per hour. Also, did I mention that it's free to play?

If you're referring to the task of satisfying your mom, well, in her own words, "mmmh mmmgg mhhgggk".

 

Free to play as in no money - free game? Or in the sense that everything you do, someone who spends a few pennies here and there can do better (free-to-pay/micropayments)?

 

There aren't micropayments, and it's not really pay to win.

If you pay for a subscription you don't get production bonuses or better buildings or anything like that, you get the following perks:

• Access to "Local markets". This means you can make trades directly with other players on the same planet, bypassing the commodity exchanges. This is probably the single biggest feature that a paid subscription gets - it effectively means that players can cooperate to supply each other with goods without going through the exchange, which means they aren't limited to whatever the current market price is. However, the exchanges are still more convenient for off loading large amounts of your products, or any excess materials. In practical terms, since the paid players tend to also have the most advanced production (since they know what they're doing), it means that the most highly developed components are kept off the markets for a little while, as paid players trade them between themselves, until the amounts build up enough that they spill over into the exchanges, or until some free players develop those production facilities too.
  
• Creating a corporation. You can JOIN a corporation as a free player, but you can't CREATE a corporation. Corporations are groups of players that are co-operating, they share products among themselves first, before putting the excess up for sale. This allows them to co-ordinate their production lines so that they perfectly complement each other. If you're a free player and join a corporation then this is a way of getting access to something similar to a local market.
• Currency exchange. Each of the four factions in the game uses their own currency. As a free player you can trade on any exchange, but if it's not in your home system then you would first have to fly a ship there with some goods to sell, to receive some of the relevant currency. Then you can use the currency to buy things on that exchange. That's what I did earlier - I bought some products locally, flew them to Antares, sold them, and used the proceeds to buy minerals and ores there. Then I flew back to my home system. If I'd had access to the currency exchange, I could have traded local currency for the Antares currency and made the trades immediately, but I would still have had to fly there to pick up the goods. So the currency exchange gives you an advantage in being able to react to price changes on other exchanges quickly, but its absence isn't really a limiting factor on gameplay.
• Ship building - once you are really far into the game, you can build more ships. I believe this is limited to paid accounts.

There are some other convenience factors to a paid subscription, like allowing repeating production orders, but that doesn't come into play until you have loads of factories and are having trouble managing them all. So you can certainly experience 90% or so of the game as a free player.

 

If someone creates a House of Lords I may be inclined to try out the game.

 

We/you/he/who/they could still co-ordinate without an actual corporation. Simply knowing in advance when goods will be hitting the exchange is useful.

If anyone does join, and wants to contact me in-game, my user name is Ficks_Dinkum.

 

Okay, so... if anyone except Zanza joins...

 

I'll pass, sorry. I don't have time for online gaming.

Anyway....

 

I'm very disappointed with the lacklustre response that everyone has given to Prosperous Universe. Do you guys not like spreadsheets or something?

Did I not hype it up enough? It's got like 400 different materials to produce or trade, from individual elements like hydrogen gas, through food and clothing, all the way up to building and spaceship parts. They interlock in interesting ways, e.g. to make building parts you need iron and limestone. You can mine limestone directly, but to make iron you need iron ore plus oxygen and carbon. There are a few planets where you can get all those things in the same place, but it would require you to build infrastructure to extract them. So are you better off buying the component materials or mining them yourself? It depends where you are, and what you want to focus on. Some people work out the maximum revenue generating path and specialise in lots of those buildings. Some people want one of each building to become self-sufficient rather than dependent on market prices for inputs. And some people don't bother with production at all, sell all their starting materials, and just fly around between exchanges trading on whatever opportunities they spot. And there are a lot of opportunities.

You can spend all day staring at the markets if you want, but you can also set things up and then come back later to see what's happened. Everything is timed, so you can set a spaceship going between two points over a two hour period, or alternatively let it take twelve hours, which uses less fuel, and time it so that the spaceship arrives when you're next going to be online, which could also be when your production orders are finished, ready to be loaded up and sent off on another trip.

Also, did I mention that it's free? C'mon, it's not like you have lives to be getting on with or anything.