South Pacific

Pretty pumped that new stats are finally being implemented. I was excited by the announcement of their beta testing for new ones, and that felt like ages ago. Somehow, I have managed to be considered as having the highest Food Quality in the region, though presumably future technical tweaks will fix this error. Lingang appears to be the most Patriotic in the region. *salutes Lingang*

I believe this page shows the ongoing betas being tested. "Generosity" and "Ease of Commute" both sound interesting. Looks like, from the archive, that the other new proposed stat "Hunger" was rejected. I can't find the complete thread in Technical that originally discussed all of the potential stat changes that were in the works, but I believe there may have been a few more.

I netted +1 gold badge with food quality!

For Patriotism, however, I'm practically dead last ranking at past 219000th place with only 0.72 flag salutes per day. But not all is bad for my patriotism stat, as I've actually had issue #930 ("Flag it down?") stored up for this beta release.

Furthermore, Patriotism is ranked as an independent stat, the same way as weather:

viewtopic.php?p=36456112#p36456112

And it being ranked the same way as weather is very good news for me because I am very good at weather:

nation=the_unified_missourtama_states/detail=trend?censusid=41

In another of my useless trawls; here is a full list of all betas since they started allowing players to see them. I have struck through the betas that are not going to be added and bolded the ones that still may be added:

[spoiler]

• [001] Banning Religion affects Religiousness IMPLEMENTED

  Implemented: 3 years 183 days ago

  Proposed Change: Consider whether religion is officially banned when assessing citizen religiousness.

• [002] Religion ignored by Scientific Advancement/Primitiveness SUPERSEDED

  Proposed Change: No longer consider religiousness when assessing nation advancement/primitiveness.

• [003] Employment math fix IMPLEMENTED

  Implemented: 3 years 125 days ago

  Proposed Change: Correct mathematical error that prevents nations from displaying the correct workforce participation rate when it should lie in the range 52%-62%.

• [004] Weaponization IMPLEMENTED

  Implemented: 1 year 205 days ago

  Proposed Change: Consider effect of compulsory military service. Reduce "gun explosion" effect whereby nations with more than 1 gun per capita tend to collect extreme numbers of guns. Reduce effect of opposition to Defense industry and anti-crime, especially when gun ownership is encouraged/mandatory.

• {[005] does not appear to exist on its page anymore (or ever at all even be proposed?)}

• [006] Lifespan IMPLEMENTED

  Implemented: 1 year 205 days ago

  Proposed Change: Major reworking of lifespan modeling. Less important: the environment, political corruption, and citizen niceness. More important: citizen health, economic strength, poor incomes, and government spending on health and welfare. Executing the elderly has less effect in nations where citizens rarely reach 65+ anyway. Brand new, ordinary-ish nations have lifespans in the high 60s rather than low 60s.

• [007] Campaign Finance Law decreases Corruption & increases Integrity IMPLEMENTED

  Implemented: 3 years 125 days ago

  Proposed Change: Normally, less political freedom is associated with greater government corruption. This beta reverses that effect for legislation that specifically restricts the influence of money in government. It also includes Renormalization (beta 013), which monotonically increases all nations' scores that lie between 1.2 and 40.0.

• {[008] does not appear to exist on its page anymore (or ever at all even be proposed?)}

• [009] Rescale Authoritarianism IMPLEMENTED

  Implemented: 3 years 125 days ago

  Proposed Change: Change unit of measurement from Stalins to milliStalins, with 1,000 milliStalins per 1 Stalin, which provides greater granularity. Additionally, scale more strongly as nations approach zero. Together, this fixes a current problem where many nations score 0.00 Stalins despite having different levels of underlying authoritarianism. All nations will show large increases: those currently on 1 Stalin or above will show rises of approx. 100,000%, while those with fewer Stalins, particularly if close to 0, will show greater rises.

• [010] Agricultural industries: Decrease effect of Environment IMPLEMENTED

  Implemented: 1 year 205 days ago

  Proposed Change: Reduce the multiplicative effect of environment on industry size in Cheese Exports, Trout Fishing, and Beef/Agriculture. This has flow-on effects to the broader economy, affecting all industries, government departments, and tax rates.

• [011] Average Disposable Incomes (New) IMPLEMENTED

  Implemented: 3 years 125 days ago

  Proposed Change: A new World Census scale that measures average incomes after tax. For comparison purposes only, "Average Income" (pre-tax) is displayed below as "Old," although that continues to exist unmodified as its own scale (#72: "Highest Average Income"). Nations with no income tax show identical pre- and post-tax incomes, while nations with 100% tax rates show 0 income.

• [012] Tourism IMPLEMENTED

  Implemented: 7 hours ago

  Proposed Change: Recalibrate the measurement of nations' attractiveness to tourists, with reference to environmental beauty, culture, safety, and national personality.

• [013] Renormalization IMPLEMENTED

  Implemented: 3 years 125 days ago

  Proposed Change: Correct a flaw in a scaling algorithm that can cause displayed scores to move very rapidly within a particular window, despite only modest moves in the underlying value. Affects many scales to different degrees. This beta is not comprehensive and previews only the most significant changes. This is a monotonic change; i.e. it will alter scores but not ranks.

• [014] Generosity (New)

  Proposed Change: Dedicated World Census takers posed as amputee refugee city beggars to measure national generosity.

• [015] State-Owned Industry IMPLEMENTED

  Implemented: 1 year 205 days ago

  Proposed Change: Minor change to the weighting of internal factors when determining the proportion of industry that is private vs government-owned.

• [016] Extend top and bottom range of Economic Efficiency IMPLEMENTED

  Implemented: 1 year 205 days ago

  Proposed Change: Allow Economic Efficiency rating to exceed 0-100, reverting to the system used pre-2016. Nations with scores between 0-100 are unaffected. This fixes a problem with very large numbers of nations hitting either extreme and not tie-breaking sensibly. There will be no theoretical lower/upper limit, but the plausible min/max is around -5/105. Nations' Economy rating on their front page and default Trend page are unaffected.

• [017] Civil Rights: Drop tracking of crime-related freedom IMPLEMENTED

  Implemented: 7 hours ago

  Proposed Change: Delete inconsistent tracking of freedom relating to crime, which is currently measured in a redundant and haphazard way.

• {[018] does not appear to exist on its page anymore (or ever at all even be proposed?)}

• [019] Patriotism (New) IMPLEMENTED

  Implemented: 7 hours ago

  Proposed Change: Flags saluted per person per day.

• [020] Hunger (New) REJECTED

  Proposed Change: World Census takers carefully assessed the cleaness of post-prandial orphan bowls to see which nation's hungry have the rumbliest stomachs.

• [021] Food Quality (New) IMPLEMENTED

  Implemented: 7 hours ago

  Proposed Change: Professional food critics checked out thousands of restautants {[sic]} and home kitchens and called it "work", judging ingredient quality, creativity and diversity of food.

• [022] Ease of Commute (New)

  Proposed Change: Blood pressures before and after the daily commute were measured to see how stressful it is to travel from one place to another.