throwaway55421
There are lots of us that want to meet and aren't obsessed with corona. I hold regular weekly meetups and have done so throughout the last few years, it has been a welcome respite and I have formed some long standing and close relationships.
I have found the people I've met to be more community minded and more prone to take the initiative and branch out to new people.
It taught me that money isn't really that hard to get, you just have to repeatedly care slightly more than the next person.
We knew. We knew in March. We knew _straight away_, we knew that supply chains would fail, all sorts of cascading failures would happen, prices would rise, there would be all manner of mental health effects, people quitting their jobs, etc
We bloody knew. And we still know. And we've been screaming it.
But the opinion in "educated" circles is that lockdowns and restrictions are worth it no matter the cost because life has infinite value.
Even here, on Hacker News, people used to dealing in the trillions will look at e.g. coronavirus deaths in the UK and act as if they're enormous when they're just not. In 2 years (150k) coronavirus has claimed about as much as pneumonia/flu would in 5 (30k a year).
But well, yeah. My career has still disappeared, we're still intentionally depriving children of their development, we're still intentionally causing labour shortages.
And people wonder why no-one gives a toss about society any more. Because at scale you're bloody lunatics, that's why.
You may well have pretty friends, learned friends, tenured friends. Married friends, hippie friends. ...
One person can't even be all of this at once. So why be jealous of it?
I am a local in the town I live in. I like to meet new people. I organise meetups for locals, tourists, travellers, whatever. I help people out if I see them staring at the Tube map.
Some of my friends don't do this, they have hobbies or work or whatever that they prioritise over it. Or they're just not that interested or social in the first place.
So when you are travelling, look for me and not my friends.
There are ten million of us, we are quite varied here.
I enjoy being the stereotypical Brit and waffling on about pubs and where the best chippy is and all of that.
France: About 150 deaths per day, 200K cases per day.
UK: About 150 deaths per day, 200K cases per day.
Same population size. Massive delta in restrictions.
I would say "have a good day", but after your big old rant about you wanting to force people into doing stuff and how they're all despicable, I mean, meh, look inwards.
I agree that being vaccinated is sensible. I just think that's it. Nothing else besides uberlockdowns have any demonstrable effect on long term mortality (e.g. over the course of a year). We don't need anal vaccine digital ID checks or FFP83 hazmat suits unless you just want to make the world worse because you're grumpy.
By contrast, to give a recent and poignant example, the idea that e.g. _only_ a Harvard epidemiologist or equivalent should speak out on coronavirus restrictions is absurd.
They might have more precise data about specific models, but in the general case they don't know more about the impacts restrictions will have on anything else, they don't have a representative opinion on what an acceptable risk reward balance is, and it's also likely that they have personal bias due to their family and friends (as we all do).
It's really not hard to identify stuff that makes no sense at all, and having to manually filter through that stuff is worth it if it means being able to form a model of the world that's actually correct as opposed to simply being what the most powerful entities want.
Brain damaged space lizard believers aren't doing scientific research, as an obvious example.
So it's not really "or", it's just "and".
You can either have everyone gets corona, or you can have everyone gets corona plus a miserable digital dystopia, loads of restrictions on everyday life etc.
Either way, unless you manage zero covid which is almost universally considered to be impossible at this point in most of the world, your options are still "hide inside forever" or "get corona". Which brings us right back full circle to risk vs reward.
In the UK we have issues with driving tests because everything closed down "cus Covid". Except the virus had nothing to do with it and now most of the instructors have already had their mild cold anyway.
0.2% of the population dying, heavily weighted towards the elderly, does not break supply chains.
In the real world we accept risk vs reward. My neighbours having a kitchen knife in their house presents a nonzero risk to me, and that's a-ok and I don't wander about wearing a stab vest.
You're selecting for people who care less about health at all costs.
Different group, but I'd expect anti-lockdown/restriction people to have higher non-covid mortality as well. I'll probably die on some old arse biplane in the Siberian outback. Or maybe a brand new STI. Beats plugging myself into Meta.
I find it amusing that people use "getting news from Facebook" as a slur. It's stupid, but for entirely the opposite reason that they think it is.
Energy can fix essentially any problem we have. Need to desalinate water? Energy. Need to heat your Arctic home? Energy.
Being able to use energy in crazy and inefficient ways is a feature, not a bug. Everything you ever do outside of subsistence level agriculture is proof of that.
The ideal state of being would be one in which we have limitless fusion power or similar and we basically just do whatever we wish. If we get that and alchemy we win the Universe.
The problem is in not pricing in externalities. If I have a fusion reactor in my garden then I can use as much of it as I want and it has no negative effect on you.
If we tax carbon heavily then Bitcoin and friends will actually get us to that future more quickly.
That politicians are fucking around with stuff like low emission zones and labels on meat or whatever rather than just taxing carbon is almost genocidal at this point. It's hilariously off the mark.
I think that we have a responsibility to speak out on matters we believe in and ignore negative pushback.
The alternative is that anyone can shut down a viewpoint by simply flooding the opposite side. You don't know whether a poster is a troll, a real person that's simply misguided, or a real person that posts in good faith.
You don't even end up with what's merely emotionally satisfying - that would be bad enough - but with the set of events or opinion that wins out purely based on competition.
We're not far off 1 in 5 _confirmed_ in the UK and most of that was pre Omicron.
Based on the experience of my friendship group I believe that huge numbers of people have probably had it and not even noticed. I finally had a positive test and it was indistinguishable from the other 30 times I've woken up a bit tired in the morning over the past two years.
You have to remember that a lot of people aren't tuned in to the "omg test every time you move" stuff.
It's restricted because in aggregate or when done repeatedly it would be a disaster (particularly when drunk driver A interacts with drunk driver B), not because doing it once in an emergency would be problematic.
Citation: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3433627/
(at 0.08% BAC fatal accident risk is 13x - what's the risk of waiting ten minutes for an ambulance if your friend is dying?)
If you attempt to spread it out and succeed, you're at 100% capacity basically all of the time, plus 99% of people get to deal with the fact that coronavirus restrictions are utterly miserable.
Omicron has probably made all of this irrelevant anyway, it's so contagious that effectively everyone who goes outside is getting it this month. 1 in 15 in London right now and that's only the confirmed cases I believe.
I have had three coronavirus jabs. I think mandates are hysterical and counterproductive and I resist surveillance.
Being anti lockdown, anti surveillance, anti discrimination... generally just anti hysteria, is the only correct choice.
At some point, there is no realistic difference between R=10 and R=7. Everyone is getting this. Some of us have known that since March 2020.
If your theory includes "avoid being infected with coronavirus" and you live in a democratic country it is a flawed theory. Only full home isolation or hazmat suit rituals will suffice.
So no, it doesn't. You may as well say that exhaling CO2 is causing global warming.
I don't want there to be a way for you to stop me from sending data, so I'm going to work on that.
All I'm going to say is, good luck. You're fighting against your entire field.
But not everyone subscribes to this sort of extreme collectivist mindset.
You don't have to believe I derive value from it because I don't need you to believe it. It still works.
There is nothing to refute. I mostly just find it amusing that these people think we care. They're just talking to themselves.
It's a trap for people like me to even respond to this stuff, we could be out doing things instead of arguing the toss about whether sugar is tasty or not. Like yo, I like it and it works for me. I don't care whether the health service in aggregate likes me eating sugar.
TL;DR: don't use it then.
You are going to get it. Everyone is going to get it, probably repeatedly. France has vaccine passports out of the wazoo and 200k cases.
"Reducing the spread" of something implies that the spread is actually reduced at the macro level. It's irrelevant whether a single vaccinated person has a slightly reduced probability of transmitting the disease if _in aggregate_ everyone gets it anyway.
You may as well say that an umbrella helps prevent wet hair. Well yeah, but not in a blizzard. In a blizzard your hair is saturated anyway. No prevention has occurred.
"Vaccinate the world" doesn't solve covid. Vaccinated populations still get and transmit the virus. They're much better off of course because the individuals fight off the virus more effectively and their health systems function better.
But they still bloody get the virus, still provide a reservoir for mutations, etc.
If I had a quid for every totally nonsensical proclamation about "solving covid via xyz" I'd be a billionaire.
If you have a "certain level of wealth", why would you move from tiny apartment to tiny apartment? You have no need to sell your previous one, or just no need to move. Also, why are they tiny?
It sounds like you're talking about being nomadic on a middle to high income.
Most wealthy people I know own big houses in places like Kensington or Hampstead or whatever the equivalent is. They might also have a pied a terre or three, sure, but they're not constantly moving.
Until the road outside my house is pedestrianised.
Then I move further out and everything I do pollutes more, heh.
There's a balance between 0 cars and all cars.