NationStates

Trotterdam wrote:In popular culture, though, scurvy is strongly associated with pirates and other sailors, which is why I'm curious about how it's really coded.

Bears Armed doesn't have pirates -- and never did -- but the chart places it at 7.2% for scurvy as a cause of death.
I suspect that saying "No" on 'Workers' Rights' legislation is a factor in this, due to the Admins & Editors presuming that in nations where that happens most of the workforce lives in conditions where it has to subsist on poor-quality diets (largely from 'McRonalds', perhaps?).
The reason why Bears Armed says "No" to choosing those options however, IC is that much in the way of Workers' Rights' legislation simply isn't needed here: Make a job particularly unpleasant/unrewarding, and instead of staying to suffer those conditions most of the Bears would go back to the woods to live on nuts & berries [etc] instead... with the berries providing enough Vitamin C, usually, to prevent scurvy. I explained this to [Violet] during a relevant conversation over in Technical, some years ago, and she actually agreed that because the game hadn't been coded to take nations of educated Bears into account it would be perfectly reasonable for me to ignore this stat...

Trotterdam wrote:In popular culture, though, scurvy is strongly associated with pirates and other sailors, which is why I'm curious about how it's really coded.

Bears Armed doesn't have pirates -- and never did -- but the chart places it at 7.2% for scurvy as a cause of death.
I suspect that saying "No" on 'Workers' Rights' legislation is a factor in this, due to the Admins & Editors presuming that in nations where that happens most of the workforce lives in conditions where it has to subsist on poor-quality diets (largely from 'McRonalds', perhaps?).
The reason why Bears Armed says "No" to choosing those options however, IC is that much in the way of Workers' Rights' legislation simply isn't needed here: Make a job particularly unpleasant/unrewarding, and instead of staying to suffer those conditions most of the Bears would go back to the woods to live on nuts & berries [etc] instead... with the berries providing enough Vitamin C, usually, to prevent scurvy. I explained this to [Violet] during a relevant conversation over in Technical, some years ago, and she agreed that the game hadn't been coded to take nations of educated Bears into account so I think that it would be perfectly reasonable for me to ignore this stat...

[violet] wrote:We do try to keep things broadly applicable, but I must admit we are not easily able to take into account that a populace may consist of well-educated bears.

I imagine bears have somewhat different nutritional needs than humans, anyway.

(Though they're more similar to each other than to ponies...)

Trotterdam wrote:I imagine bears have somewhat different nutritional needs than humans, anyway.

(Though they're more similar to each other than to ponies...)

Well, they are omnivores like humans, but I agree that that's a good point. Probably they till need an external source of vitamin C, instead of being able to manufacture it themselves from other foodstuffs, but I admit that this is a point I've never checked. ("Oops!") In any case, whatever it was that turned them anthropomorphic & sapient also gave them some of Humans' dietary capabilities (They can eat chocolate, and onions/garlic/leeks/etc, neither of which is good for "natural" bears, for example, and many of them are lactase-persistent as well...) so they might have picked up some of humanity's dietary weaknesses at the same time.

Hmm. Over 1/4 of my peeps end up getting lost in the wilderness. Maybe that's a euphemism, too.

What I'd like to know is what gets Bungee Jumping added to a nation's chart...

Bears Armed wrote:What I'd like to know is what gets Bungee Jumping added to a nation's chart...

Space shuttle mishaps too. I won't stop solving issues until people begin to die from them!!!

If I recall correctly, space shuttle mishaps are caused by the peculiar combo of Space Program + No Computers, but that might have just been a theory someone had.

SherpDaWerp wrote:If I recall correctly, space shuttle mishaps are caused by the peculiar combo of Space Program + No Computers, but that might have just been a theory someone had.

I think it's too common for that. It's probably related to #361 option 1, effect line "the explosive fireball of the disintegrating space shuttle has devastated Cape @@NAME@@".

(Which, now that I think about it, seems unrealistic - the shuttle would probably burn up before hitting the ground, and even if some fragments survive and hit something important, they'll just poke holes in a few houses rather than causing city-scale destruction.)

This is a cool thread. I hope it's not too old for me to boost it.

Trotterdam wrote:

Merni wrote:I'm rather surprised that "Accident", "War" and "Malnourishment" aren't much higher than they are... I get NS stats are partially satirical, but still 66% more people dying from scurvy than accidents is a bit weird.
Even if you look at my original table, "Malnourishment" is incredibly low and accidents are less than niche things like "Lost in Wilderness" and "Exposure".

Huh, yeah. Particularly since "Accident" is ridiculously vague as a death cause. Realistically, you'd want to separate out at least a few of the more common ones (car accidents) as separate statistics.

In fact there already are a few things that I might consider "accidents" that are treated as separate death causes: Bungee Jumping, Space Shuttle Mishap, perhaps Nuclear Spill and Vat Leakage too... but these are all extremely niche. (Actually, does Work count as an accident? It could be interpreted as either accidents resulting from unsafe workplace environments, or death by exhaustion from overwork.)

Merni wrote:(Also, isn't scurvy generally a consequence of malnourishment?)

Realistically, yes, though it's more a matter of eating the wrong things rather than just not eating enough in general.

In popular culture, though, scurvy is strongly associated with pirates and other sailors, which is why I'm curious about how it's really coded.

I earnestly believe that the "accident" rate represents the rate of "homicides not ruled as homicides". They're murders committed by people who commit "no" crimes, and so the rate of "accidents" can't be modified by manipulating the crime rate. I've been struggling to get my "accident' rate down from a high of about 2.4%, and as of yesterday I had it at 2.1%, but today it's up at 2.2% again.