throwaway55421

Start a physical gathering.

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.

MMOs with markets in them. RuneScape and friends.

It taught me that money isn't really that hard to get, you just have to repeatedly care slightly more than the next person.

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.

Wealth is just another axis.

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?

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.

Sigh. I'll spell it out explicitly for you.

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.

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).

Sure, so just ignore them.

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.

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.

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.

You're not, you can hide inside forever.

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.

This seems intuitively obvious to me.

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.

Facebook and friends were screwed before they even got going.

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.

But we do need more energy.

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.

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.