Worldbuilding Realism Consultation Thread Mk. 4

[Dostanuot Loj]

Reasoning:

There was a company in Russia that provided alcohol in 5-liter 'jerry cans' [real jerry cans are much bigger] by phone order, for 800 roub/can.

I am wondering if such a thing could exist in Allanea.

Why not?

[DnalweN acilbupeR]

Reasoning:

There was a company in Russia that provided alcohol in 5-liter 'jerry cans' [real jerry cans are much bigger] by phone order, for 800 roub/can.

I am wondering if such a thing could exist in Allanea.

fine spirits.

[The Akasha Colony]

I've updated them all to 300px to see how it looks. Personally I do feel they look a bit small this way, but I'm a dull norm-follower so I'll stick to the conventions for fear of being called sloppy in the future.

It looks a lot better now, more consistent.

While I agree with this - and ideally would like to add fake citations, etc - I'm not really sure what to put there. This is the only "Public housing in [Nation]" article on iiWiki (hurrah!), and even if it weren't, my RPs and canon are mono-regional which limits the range of pages I can logically link to.

The general Wikipedia "public housing" page links to "welfare state" in the "See also" section. In the absence of anything else, to fluff up the section I used to just include a link back to my main nation article (although not so much anymore since I have more specific sub-articles for this).

You could possibly use more red links to future articles fill up the space, which I know Questers and Galla do, but the current Wikipedia standard is to not have any link at all if the destination page does not exist so I don't use them. Fake citations are way further than I'd ever go since I didn't even do anything serious with citations in actual Wikipedia during the brief time I was a semi-active editor.

If you make a Soodean Imperium category table though it'll help fill up the end of the article anyway so it reduces the need for very many "See also" links.

[Nioya]

Does anyone know how I can make my nation's history more 1600s-ish? It's in the nioyan state factbook.

[Questers]

Regarding booze.

As a low-cost product, the price of alcohol can vary immensely - a person once paid $225,000 at the London auctions for eight bottles of wine.

But to produce really low cost alcohol you need really low cost inputs. It needs to be done in your country so it doesn't have to be shipped internationally and deal with export/import costs, it needs to be made from the lowest quality ingredients and the workers and the plant machinery need to be dirt cheap. Allanea is a developed country so I doubt if it can make distilled spirits alcohol for $2 a litre.

However it is technically possible. In Thailand, which has an intense - Russianesque, perhaps - rural alcoholism problem - they have something called lao khao which is a distilled rice spirit which doesn't even include the abv on the bottle (it's >40%) that costs perhaps 100 THB for a litre - slightly over $2.50. Rumoured ingredients include formaldehyde. It tastes nasty as fuck, but it is still quite drinkable if you mix it with fanta or if you shot it. It's godawful, wrose than any supermarket value spirits I've had in this country or in the east, but it is not quite as bad as drinking petrol. As Sumer alluded to, only very hardcore actual alcoholics seem to drink things with no preference to taste whatsoever.

[Costa Fierro]

I've noticed that Internal Ministry troops in both Ukraine & Russia have been conspicuously better prepared\preforming than the actual Army, does anybody know why this would be the case? I didn't think they had particularly better men or equipment, so is it just that the Army is only really mobilized when there is a war on, and thus internal troops are better prepared on a moments notice?

Both countries have also suffered from internal stability issues and, in Russia's case, it's also reflective of the authoritarian nature of the Russian political system.

[Crookfur]

Regarding booze.

As a low-cost product, the price of alcohol can vary immensely - a person once paid $225,000 at the London auctions for eight bottles of wine.

But to produce really low cost alcohol you need really low cost inputs. It needs to be done in your country so it doesn't have to be shipped internationally and deal with export/import costs, it needs to be made from the lowest quality ingredients and the workers and the plant machinery need to be dirt cheap. Allanea is a developed country so I doubt if it can make distilled spirits alcohol for $2 a litre.

However it is technically possible. In Thailand, which has an intense - Russianesque, perhaps - rural alcoholism problem - they have something called lao khao which is a distilled rice spirit which doesn't even include the abv on the bottle (it's >40%) that costs perhaps 100 THB for a litre - slightly over $2.50. Rumoured ingredients include formaldehyde. It tastes nasty as fuck, but it is still quite drinkable if you mix it with fanta or if you shot it. It's godawful, wrose than any supermarket value spirits I've had in this country or in the east, but it is not quite as bad as drinking petrol. As Sumer alluded to, only very hardcore actual alcoholics seem to drink things with no preference to taste whatsoever.

Honestly it should be more than doable even somewhere like the uk. Taking a rough look at own brand vodka from various super markets and taking the VAT and duty off it and you are looking at a retail price of about £1.20 to 1.50 a litre.

Even home brewying/distillation should be able to beat £1 a litre production costs using pure sugar at £0.64 per kilo (which should give about 1.4l of 40% abv).

[Questers]

One pines for the days when £1.50 was $3.

[DnalweN acilbupeR]

Regarding booze.

As a low-cost product, the price of alcohol can vary immensely - a person once paid $225,000 at the London auctions for eight bottles of wine.

But to produce really low cost alcohol you need really low cost inputs. It needs to be done in your country so it doesn't have to be shipped internationally and deal with export/import costs, it needs to be made from the lowest quality ingredients and the workers and the plant machinery need to be dirt cheap. Allanea is a developed country so I doubt if it can make distilled spirits alcohol for $2 a litre.

However it is technically possible. In Thailand, which has an intense - Russianesque, perhaps - rural alcoholism problem - they have something called lao khao which is a distilled rice spirit which doesn't even include the abv on the bottle (it's >40%) that costs perhaps 100 THB for a litre - slightly over $2.50. Rumoured ingredients include formaldehyde. It tastes nasty as fuck, but it is still quite drinkable if you mix it with fanta or if you shot it. It's godawful, wrose than any supermarket value spirits I've had in this country or in the east, but it is not quite as bad as drinking petrol. As Sumer alluded to, only very hardcore actual alcoholics seem to drink things with no preference to taste whatsoever.

Is alcohol like the crack/meth of Russia?

[Questers]

Regarding booze.

As a low-cost product, the price of alcohol can vary immensely - a person once paid $225,000 at the London auctions for eight bottles of wine.

But to produce really low cost alcohol you need really low cost inputs. It needs to be done in your country so it doesn't have to be shipped internationally and deal with export/import costs, it needs to be made from the lowest quality ingredients and the workers and the plant machinery need to be dirt cheap. Allanea is a developed country so I doubt if it can make distilled spirits alcohol for $2 a litre.

However it is technically possible. In Thailand, which has an intense - Russianesque, perhaps - rural alcoholism problem - they have something called lao khao which is a distilled rice spirit which doesn't even include the abv on the bottle (it's >40%) that costs perhaps 100 THB for a litre - slightly over $2.50. Rumoured ingredients include formaldehyde. It tastes nasty as fuck, but it is still quite drinkable if you mix it with fanta or if you shot it. It's godawful, wrose than any supermarket value spirits I've had in this country or in the east, but it is not quite as bad as drinking petrol. As Sumer alluded to, only very hardcore actual alcoholics seem to drink things with no preference to taste whatsoever.

Is alcohol like the crack/meth of Russia?

No, tobacco is.

But Russia has big alcohol problems, sure.

[Allanea]

Russians seem to have an association [in theirt own eyes] between Russian identity and drinking alcohol, that's possibly beyond the actual consumption levels. That said, Russia is still 2nd in the world in alcohol consumption per capita. The average adult Russian drinks fourteen litres of ethanol a year.

[Questers]

That's not really a catastrophically huge amount - that's 50 bottles of a standard 70cl 40% abv spirit per year - just about one bottle of vodka per week.

If loads of Russians drink, that's a fair amount, but if comparatively fewer drink, then it means the actual amount the drinkers consume would be pretty high.

The big thing will be that some people pull the average down by drinking little. Now that makes you wonder about the people who are not pulling the average down and how much they drink. So that is a lot.

[Purpelia]

Maybe I am the odd one here but I genuinely fail to see how 1 bottle of vodka a week per average citizen would be a problem. I mean, it's more like, whatever.

[Allanea]

Maybe I am the odd one here but I genuinely fail to see how 1 bottle of vodka a week per average citizen would be a problem. I mean, it's more like, whatever.

The two big problems are health costs and violence problems. Alcohol is by far the drug associated with the most violence.

[Purpelia]

Maybe I am the odd one here but I genuinely fail to see how 1 bottle of vodka a week per average citizen would be a problem. I mean, it's more like, whatever.

The two big problems are health costs and violence problems. Alcohol is by far the drug associated with the most violence.

I understand what you mean, on principal. Especially once we correct for uneven distribution of both drinkers and their drinking habit. As in that it's more likely it's not people having 1/7 of a bottle a day but 1 guy having 5 bottles a day.

But just looking at the statistic on face value its really not much. Like, the hypothetical mean average drinking Russian would not even be drunk, only like mildly buzzed at worst.

[Austrasien]

If pure ethanol is the goal it can indeed be produced for very little, profitably.

Drink producers generally have trouble reaching the same scale as fuel producers though.

[The Soodean Imperium]

Statistical means should always be interpreted with caution because they are easily pulled by outliers.

In this context, the above figure (e: ninja'd, not the graph Kyiv posted) does not mean that the average (median) Russian drinks one bottle of Vodka equivalent a week, it means if you divide the weekly Vodka equivalent consumption by the Russian population you get a figure of about 1. But the actual distribution of weekly alcohol consumption is probably right-skewed, in that you have some people who don't drink at all, a healthy dose of light to intermediate drinkers, and then a long right tail of increasingly heavy drinkers, culminating in far-above-average outliers who drink multiple bottles a day. In the presence of a strong right-hand skew, the mean will always be higher than the median, and vice versa with a left-hand skew.

The real question from a social-problems-and-alcoholism standpoint isn't the average alcohol consumption per se, it's the proportion of the population that falls above some cutoff point. This will also be your market for mail-order ultra-cheap hard liquor.

IIRC the Russian Army turns down some fairly high percentage of conscripts every year because of health/fitness problems related to excessive drinking and smoking.

[Purpelia]

I know. I just find the whole thing how statistics work out to be mildly amusing.

[The Macabees]

Mean = average.

Median is not the average.

Edit: The general point being made is right, though. But it's the median that offers an initial clue that the distribution is skewed one way or the other, not the mean.

[Tule]

Statistical means should always be interpreted with caution because they are easily pulled by outliers.

In this context, the above figure (e: ninja'd, not the graph Kyiv posted) does not mean that the average (median) Russian drinks one bottle of Vodka equivalent a week, it means if you divide the weekly Vodka equivalent consumption by the Russian population you get a figure of about 1. But the actual distribution of weekly alcohol consumption is probably right-skewed, in that you have some people who don't drink at all, a healthy dose of light to intermediate drinkers, and then a long right tail of increasingly heavy drinkers, culminating in far-above-average outliers who drink multiple bottles a day. In the presence of a strong right-hand skew, the mean will always be higher than the median, and vice versa with a left-hand skew.

The real question from a social-problems-and-alcoholism standpoint isn't the average alcohol consumption per se, it's the proportion of the population that falls above some cutoff point. This will also be your market for mail-order ultra-cheap hard liquor.

IIRC the Russian Army turns down some fairly high percentage of conscripts every year because of health/fitness problems related to excessive drinking and smoking.

Remarkably, there is actually a remarkably stable ratio in much of the developed world of drinkers to non-drinkers, approximately 25% of men and 38% of women do not drink alcohol.
This is the case in Russia, the US, Sweden, Japan, Greece and Iceland to name a few.

When it comes to right skewed drinking though, few if any countries come close to South Korea. More than half the population abstains from alcohol, but South Korean men who drink in the first place drink an insane average of 37.6 liters of pure alcohol per year!

That is 70 British units of alcohol per week. 5x higher than the maximum amount recommended by the British NHS.

[DnalweN acilbupeR]

Statistical means should always be interpreted with caution because they are easily pulled by outliers.

In this context, the above figure (e: ninja'd, not the graph Kyiv posted) does not mean that the average (median) Russian drinks one bottle of Vodka equivalent a week, it means if you divide the weekly Vodka equivalent consumption by the Russian population you get a figure of about 1. But the actual distribution of weekly alcohol consumption is probably right-skewed, in that you have some people who don't drink at all, a healthy dose of light to intermediate drinkers, and then a long right tail of increasingly heavy drinkers, culminating in far-above-average outliers who drink multiple bottles a day. In the presence of a strong right-hand skew, the mean will always be higher than the median, and vice versa with a left-hand skew.

The real question from a social-problems-and-alcoholism standpoint isn't the average alcohol consumption per se, it's the proportion of the population that falls above some cutoff point. This will also be your market for mail-order ultra-cheap hard liquor.

IIRC the Russian Army turns down some fairly high percentage of conscripts every year because of health/fitness problems related to excessive drinking and smoking.

Remarkably, there is actually a remarkably stable ratio in much of the developed world of drinkers to non-drinkers, approximately 25% of men and 38% of women do not drink alcohol.
This is the case in Russia, the US, Sweden, Japan, Greece and Iceland to name a few.

When it comes to right skewed drinking though, few if any countries come close to South Korea. More than half the population abstains from alcohol, but South Korean men who drink in the first place drink an insane average of 37.6 liters of pure alcohol per year!

That is 70 British units of alcohol per week. 5x higher than the maximum amount recommended by the British NHS.

so it's a 50/50 alpha/beta distribution?

[Taihei Tengoku]

Statistical means should always be interpreted with caution because they are easily pulled by outliers.

In this context, the above figure (e: ninja'd, not the graph Kyiv posted) does not mean that the average (median) Russian drinks one bottle of Vodka equivalent a week, it means if you divide the weekly Vodka equivalent consumption by the Russian population you get a figure of about 1. But the actual distribution of weekly alcohol consumption is probably right-skewed, in that you have some people who don't drink at all, a healthy dose of light to intermediate drinkers, and then a long right tail of increasingly heavy drinkers, culminating in far-above-average outliers who drink multiple bottles a day. In the presence of a strong right-hand skew, the mean will always be higher than the median, and vice versa with a left-hand skew.

The real question from a social-problems-and-alcoholism standpoint isn't the average alcohol consumption per se, it's the proportion of the population that falls above some cutoff point. This will also be your market for mail-order ultra-cheap hard liquor.

IIRC the Russian Army turns down some fairly high percentage of conscripts every year because of health/fitness problems related to excessive drinking and smoking.

Remarkably, there is actually a remarkably stable ratio in much of the developed world of drinkers to non-drinkers, approximately 25% of men and 38% of women do not drink alcohol.
This is the case in Russia, the US, Sweden, Japan, Greece and Iceland to name a few.

When it comes to right skewed drinking though, few if any countries come close to South Korea. More than half the population abstains from alcohol, but South Korean men who drink in the first place drink an insane average of 37.6 liters of pure alcohol per year!

That is 70 British units of alcohol per week. 5x higher than the maximum amount recommended by the British NHS.

Korean culture is manic-depressive so this comes as no surprise

[The Soodean Imperium]

Mean = average.

Median is not the average.

It depends on which definition of the word is being used - and this is where people tend to make mistakes.

"Average alcohol consumption" refers, by definition, to the mean.

But "amount of alcohol the average Russian drinks" is using a different definition: typical, common, or ordinary. This meaning of average (which is just as valid in the dictionary) is better captured by median or mode, depending on the type of data you're working with.

To give the oft-repeated textbook example, if a hundred debt-burdened college students are sitting in an auditorium, then one walks out and Bill Gates walks in, the mean net worth jumps up to about $860 million. One would be correct in saying that the "average net worth" in the room is $860 million, but one would not be correct in saying that the "average person" (e.g., the most typical, common, or ordinary person in the room) has a net worth of $860 million. By contrast, even when such an egregious outlier is tacked into the dataset, the median and modal income in the room will stay exactly the same.

Which, again, is why when comparing levels of alcoholism across societies, the most useful figure would be the percentage that falls above a given "heavy drinker" threshold. Removing non-drinkers from the population of interest, as Tule does, gets closer to this, but even then it doesn't tell us whether all non-non-drinker South Korean males drink 37.6 liters per year (and none exceed 40), or whether there is even more skew within this proportion.

Edit: The general point being made is right, though. But it's the median that offers an initial clue that the distribution is skewed one way or the other, not the mean.

You're not wrong, really, but you're not right either. The key clue comes from how the mean and median compare to one another. If you only know one, you can't tell if the distribution is skewed or not, or even whether it's normal.

You might be able to identify signs of skew in other ways. The mean and standard deviation may suggest skew, but only if the variable is exclusively nonzero and centered less than three standard deviations from the Y-axis. The median, maximum, and minimum may suggest skew, but can't tell it apart from single outliers. A substantive proportion of cases with a value of zero strongly implies right-tail skew. But I can't think of any statistical method under which the median, and the median alone, will offer an "initial clue" about skew.

[The Macabees]

If you're talking statistics, you should use the relevant definitions, otherwise you confuse the reader. Edit: Even if you write, "the average Briton" - if you're talking statistics, average has a specific definition. Don't leave it up to your reader to guess what you mean.

Edit: I am a statistical analyst, I know statistics, no need to waste valuable time.

Edit 2: Totally get what you mean, though.

[Ainin]

If you've ever been to basically any restaurant in Seoul, you'll realize pretty quickly that half the people are there to eat and the other half are there to get drunk.