Quote from: Lynn;1125543In some respects, they have to be. There are some markets where you only find people in business that actually love whatever the interest is. Business people that seek dollars only go for better returns.

Nailed it.  I happen to have an MBA from a very good school.  Anyone who's even been through the first semester of the program can see all the reasons that he wouldn't want to own a FLGS or a game production company.  If I were to do it, it would have to be in addition to a corporate job, and because I love it, 'cause I couldn't support my family on that.  I'd be pleased just to break even.

Quote from: Mistwell;1125578How can you still be this deep in denial? You're sounding like the black knight from the Holy Grail by now with this "it's just a flesh wound" silliness. Dude, it wasn't nonsense. It wasn't panic. It wasn't basically the flu. You were wrong.

I'm guessing the conservatives in the US won't admit it was a problem until 600,000 or more are dead. Since that is 10x some annual flu death estimates or roughly 200 9/11s worth of casualties.

 
Of course it still won't be something Trump had any control over. Only Democrats are responsible for mismanaging disasters /s

ASIDE: I voted for Trump. I regret it now.

Quote from: Mistwell;1125578How can you still be this deep in denial?

How can you still be falling for the laughable bullshit?

Kung Flu is the biggest scam in human history. It's a nasty bug (especially vs. those with weakened immune systems), but the media induced panic is the real disease. We've shut down the world for the sniffles. We are forced to cower in our homes because the TV scared everybody into submission.

Annually, the flu (which nobody ever cares about) kills 290k to 650k worldwide. We lose an average of 36k in the USA from the flu every year and it never makes the news. Just imagine if every TV station had a running total of the millions who got the flu, the hundreds of thousands hospitalized and tens of thousands dead...and if that tally was run every year. You'd have a totally tweaked out populace...just like today!!

If the mighty Corona Chan whacks 700k worldwide, it simply qualifies as the high end of bad flu years. And be honest, anybody offhand remember which years in the last decade were "bad flu years"?

Wanna hear about really bad flu years? In 1958 and 1968 the flu killed a million worldwide and 100k plus in the USA, but we didn't shut down the world. Difference? TV brainwashing wasn't dominant yet and the internet wasn't invented.

Quote from: Mistwell;1125578How can you still be this deep in denial? You're sounding like the black knight from the Holy Grail by now with this "it's just a flesh wound" silliness. Dude, it wasn't nonsense. It wasn't panic. It wasn't basically the flu. You were wrong.

It's way less deadly than the Spanish Flu (really the American Flu) - https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1918-pandemic-h1n1.html - which had a 10% death rate, killing 50 million of 500 million infected. OTOH it's at least 10 times more deadly than regular seasonal flus (1% vs 0.1%); parts of Italy and Spain have seen major mortality spikes.



So, 10 times less deadly than the 1918 flu; 10 times more deadly than regular flu.

Quote from: Mistwell;1125578How can you still be this deep in denial? You're sounding like the black knight from the Holy Grail by now with this "it's just a flesh wound" silliness. Dude, it wasn't nonsense. It wasn't panic. It wasn't basically the flu. You were wrong.

Corona-Chan told me not to worry.....

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Quote from: S'mon;1125589It's way less deadly than the Spanish Flu (really the American Flu) - https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1918-pandemic-h1n1.html - which had a 10% death rate, killing 50 million of 500 million infected. OTOH it's at least 10 times more deadly than regular seasonal flus (1% vs 0.1%); parts of Italy and Spain have seen major mortality spikes.

From what I have heard the major mortality spikes in Italy or Spain could be because the Hospital system was completely over whelmed and essentially patients were left to either die or recover on their own.

There have also been rumours that Health Professionals directly caring for infected patients who catch the Chinese Wuhan Flu have a higher death rate for unknown reasons that may relate to the viral load that they are infected with and/or possible mutation of the virus from muliple sources.

Quote from: Shasarak;1125605From what I have heard the major mortality spikes in Italy or Spain could be because the Hospital system was completely over whelmed and essentially patients were left to either die or recover on their own.

Most of the dead in Italy were never even diagnosed with Coronavirus BTW, they presented with eg Pneumonia and were sent home, where they died. So they don't show up in the Coronavirus official figures, only in the monthly total-mortality figures.

Quote from: Shasarak;1125605From what I have heard the major mortality spikes in Italy or Spain could be because the Hospital system was completely over whelmed and essentially patients were left to either die or recover on their own.

That's why you need lockdowns.

    80.9% of infections are mild (with flu-like symptoms) and can recover at home.
    13.8% are severe, developing severe diseases including pneumonia and shortness of breath.
    4.7% as critical and can include: respiratory failure, septic shock, and multi-organ failure.
    in about 2% of reported cases the virus is fatal.
    Risk of death increases the older you are.
    Relatively few cases are seen among children.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

No healthcare system can bear 5% of the population needing critical care at one time. Lockdowns will even out the load on the system but currently we are waiting to see how the dice roll when we get it.  Comorbities here:

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-sex-demographics/#pre-existing-conditions  

Conclusion & oblibatory gaming content: Not good news for fat old gamers (Cardiovascular disease, diabetes, hypertension) - but we are quite good at not going out.

Quote from: Rhedyn;1125488More people can play RPGs right now than ever before.

I haven't done any tabletop gaming since the whole quarantine started because I can't have friends over to the house. OTOH, I've gotten some old modeling projects done and been practicing my airbrush.

Quote from: Spinachcat;1125588How can you still be falling for the laughable bullshit?

Kung Flu is the biggest scam in human history. It's a nasty bug (especially vs. those with weakened immune systems), but the media induced panic is the real disease. We've shut down the world for the sniffles. We are forced to cower in our homes because the TV scared everybody into submission.

Would you like to come up to Milan, Lombardy, where I live, and see, sir? Unprotected, of course - because after all this is a scam. I will then offer you a nice tour: from the Army trucks bringing hundreds of corpses every night to the crematory, to the filled wards where 50 people die every day (and their beds are quickly prepared for the next 50 infected).

By going around unprotected you will be able to demonstrate an important scientific fact: that the Coronavirus hits two targets - lungs and stupid people.

Quote from: S'mon;1125589It's way less deadly than the Spanish Flu (really the American Flu) - https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1918-pandemic-h1n1.html - which had a 10% death rate, killing 50 million of 500 million infected. OTOH it's at least 10 times more deadly than regular seasonal flus (1% vs 0.1%); parts of Italy and Spain have seen major mortality spikes.



So, 10 times less deadly than the 1918 flu; 10 times more deadly than regular flu.

Problem with stats. If 2/3rds of those deaths could have been prevented with the iron lung, then the death rates come closer together.

COVID-19 deaths are much lower because of modern medicine, which is about to be over burdened.

Even with a perfect healthcare system, a 1% fatality rate globally with a highly infectious disease with many silent carriers would be over 60 million dead. If it only infects a 10th of the world, we are still looking at more than 6 million dead.

Quote from: Brad;1125558I wanted to open a bar at one time, so I did a massive amount of research. Something like 80% of all bars close in 6 months of opening. 80%! Because the people opening bars think they can run a business and have no idea how. I decided to shelve that idea for a while until I got more business acumen and experience. So while I get where you're coming from (you're right, obviously), I just wish some of these people who were REALLY passionate about RPGs, for instance, would realize they should maybe spend 6 months or a year learning about finance, logistics, management, etc. Or at least fucking hire someone with that experience to run the damn thing. Myself, for instance, I took some MBA classes as electives as part of my current PhD just to learn how to do accounting properly. Probably gonna save myself from wasting $100-$200k.

Unfortunately, 'genius syndrome' persists - that is, people thinking because they are creators in a vertical market that they can easily know and master the business framework around it. I deal with that in the tech market and sadly saw some wonderful tech products crash and burn because the creator thought he understood business better.

Quote from: S'mon;1125589It's way less deadly than the Spanish Flu (really the American Flu) - https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1918-pandemic-h1n1.html - which had a 10% death rate, killing 50 million of 500 million infected. OTOH it's at least 10 times more deadly than regular seasonal flus (1% vs 0.1%); parts of Italy and Spain have seen major mortality spikes.
[snip graph]
So, 10 times less deadly than the 1918 flu; 10 times more deadly than regular flu.

It'd be cautious about ascribing a 10% case fatality rate to the 1918 flu. The standard answer is 2.5%, and there's certainly evidence it was higher, but there just isn't good enough documentation to draw a solid conclusion. The estimates for how many people were infected and how many died are all over the place. Though there's no dispute it's a lot worse than COVID-19. Another important distinction: The 1918 flu killed the young, coronavirus kills the old.

The 1% case fatality rate for the coronavirus is the best guess at the moment, but it's still just a guess. With ambiguous symptoms, a large number of asymptomatic cases, and no population-wide testing, we know we're missing a lot of people who had the disease, and recovered. That means the official CFRs are inflated, probably massively. The CFR in South Korea (1.33%), where they did extensive testing, is probably the closest to the actual CFR.

Calling the 1918 flu the American flu isn't particularly accurate, either. There are multiple theories with evidence (French flu? Chinese flu?), but none are conclusive:
https://academic.oup.com/emph/article/2019/1/18/5298310

Quote from: S'mon;1125607Most of the dead in Italy were never even diagnosed with Coronavirus BTW, they presented with eg Pneumonia and were sent home, where they died. So they don't show up in the Coronavirus official figures, only in the monthly total-mortality figures.

Good article here:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/italys-coronavirus-death-toll-is-far-higher-than-reported-11585767179

Quote from: Shasarak;1125605From what I have heard the major mortality spikes in Italy or Spain could be because the Hospital system was completely over whelmed and essentially patients were left to either die or recover on their own.

There have also been rumours that Health Professionals directly caring for infected patients who catch the Chinese Wuhan Flu have a higher death rate for unknown reasons that may relate to the viral load that they are infected with and/or possible mutation of the virus from muliple sources.

When some people began describing a loss of taste and smell, it made me think we already had a variation.

What also concerns me is the growing evidence that the Commies are lying about the number dead. We still do not know for certain that you can't get it again or even when someone is likely to be contagious. With all of that in mind, I think with all then numbers we have so far, we simply don't have enough information to make really accurate predictions.

Quote from: Lynn;1125624Unfortunately, 'genius syndrome' persists - that is, people thinking because they are creators in a vertical market that they can easily know and master the business framework around it. I deal with that in the tech market and sadly saw some wonderful tech products crash and burn because the creator thought he understood business better.

One of the more ironic examples was Lenin, who wrote in The State and Revolution:

Quote from: Chapter 5, Section 4Accounting and control -- that is mainly what is needed for the 'smooth working', for the proper functioning, of the first phase of communist society. All citizens are transformed into hired employees of the state, which consists of the armed workers. All citizens becomes employees and workers of a single countrywide state 'syndicate'. All that is required is that they should work equally, do their proper share of work, and get equal pay; the accounting and control necessary for this have been simplified by capitalism to the utmost and reduced to the extraordinarily simple operations -- which any literate person can perform -- of supervising and recording, knowledge of the four rules of arithmetic, and issuing appropriate receipts.

He was firmly convinced that running a business was simple and anyone could do it, which of course led to repeated economic disasters.