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.
I honestly, really do despair at reading this sort of stuff.
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're just describing the fact that there are, well, different people.
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.
Most of those issues are due to choices like quarantine and lockdowns.
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.
Or, we can do what we've done in the past to address this very situation by giving everyone the following choice: get the vaccine, or forfeit some privileges. It's not hard, and it's not without lots of precedent, so it should not be controversial.
Well, you can. France are doing it. They are having 200k daily cases.
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.
Very few French are dying of it (like, 300/day), which I'd call a massive success story. Containing COVID is of course out of the question at this point, and I never argued otherwise. However, the risk of life and limb to people who did get vaccinated is nevertheless increased by the presence of those who did not, because the unvaccinated get sick and eat up hospital resources that would then be denied to people who need medical attention for unrelated reasons. Moreover, they increase the risk of spreading COVID to people who cannot get the vaccine (e.g. babies, folks with weak immune systems). So, it really is in everyone's interest to get everyone vaccinated -- everyone's risk of dying a preventable death decreases.
What's the cost of this? Why, it's the very same as the cost of getting most everyone vaccinated for literally anything else we get vaccinated for! No one has a conniption about vaccine regimens for measles, mumps, polio, etc., because the programs for implementing them at scale have been so successful that hardly anyone gets hospitalized or dies from them anymore. Want to attend public school? Get vaccinated. Want to join the military? Get vaccinated. Want to live in a college dorm? Get vaccinated.
The marginal cost of adding one more required vaccine on top of the ones almost everyone regularly gets (and almost no one complains about) in order to participate in normal society is negligeable.
So no, it's not a case of "everyone gets corona" vs "everyone gets corona and we have a miserable digital dystopia", as you put it. It's a choice of "everyone gets corona and a lot of other people needlessly die for want of medical care" vs "everyone gets corona and/or the vaccine, you have to fill one more checkbox on your vaccine card (which already has a dozen or so), and comparatively fewer people die for want of medical care." Life will get back to normal either way; at this point it's really a question of dealing with the selfish, paranoid, delusional, despicable people who would rather see the mass death of their fellow countrymen over having to fill one more checkbox on their vaccine card.
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.
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.
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.
Sounds like ideology to me. I, for one, need many thing from basic food to nice music, but energy on its own in not in that list.
I wonder what people picture when they say "energy" but probably not that thing that is equivalent to movement and that is always a constant by definition (at least here and now), and that increase entropy when we manipulate it (entropy being that thing every life forms is designed to fight).
Anyway, carbon in the atmosphere may be a bigger problem than a fusion reactor in your garden, yet I'm a bit concerned by how much faster "we" could destroy our environment by producing more useless stuff if it became cheaper to do so.
> I, for one, need many thing from basic food to nice music, but energy on its own in not in that list.
Energy is a dependency of both of the things you listed - and an abundance of energy makes those things more accessible to more people, yourself and myself included.
> 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.
No, using energy inevitably changes the state of world we live in (that is actually the point). Use crazy amounts of energy in a distributed and unregulated manner, and the world will be nowhere like the one we evolved in, and we will die.
Social media has basically turned the world into a sort of bizarre mob rule situation when it comes to unpopular opinion.
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.
> I think that we have a responsibility to speak out on matters we believe in and ignore negative pushback.
You can try, but new "fact checking" norms will ensure unpopular (especially politically unpopular) opinions get censored on social media before anyone sees them
This is a complicated issue and requires a careful approach. I don't think any serious fact checkers simply declare non-mainstream views as false, rather they would highlight only issues where a clear scientific consensus exist. So you flag an article about masks being ineffective and quote a clear analysis, or you flag an article about the Chinese (or US) government purposefully spreading covid, but you don't flag an article discussing the evidence for and against origin theories. See e.g. also the EU imitative on Russian disinformation:
>I think that we have a responsibility to speak out on matters we believe in and ignore negative pushback.
I would prefer to read you thoughts in areas you have experience in rather your random believes, as a non political example I don't care about your option on Linux init systems if you are not a system administrator, distro maintainer or somehow that is more then a random Linux distro user, same with programming languages opinion, I don't care about your anti-X pro-Y opinion if you have zero experience on X and Y but your opinion is just because your hero blogger/developer/youtuber hates X and likes Y.
For sure there are topics where you have experience with and you can share that and there are topics where everyone has same level of experience and we can all give our opinion.
Sure, your take is a bit overly harsh though. I don't think, with the exception of the odd mentally ill crackpot, most people do do this. Like, you don't see QAnon theories about systemd because well, it doesn't affect them at all, most people don't even know it exists.
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).
The sad thing, even as you identify into this (true) dynamic, is that it’s happening in this community in favour of this supposedly heterodox viewpoint.
The slightest counterpoint to this supposedly suppressed lab leak theory is downvoted, flagged, and the community congratulates itself on its paradoxical unity-in-contrarianness. Before our very eyes!
Just asking questions — and saying what people really think — has long been a profitable grift. It’s sobering to see how different audiences succumb to it so acutely.
The problem is that what you have said is literally the exact same thing that people say to promote their not just crazy but nonsensical conspiracy theories. I mean, the QAnon folks literally go on and on about "what the media doesn't want you to see" as they wait for JFK's return in Dallas.
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.
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.