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Comment by scotty79 | Hacker News Reader

My point is that each delivery rider can do his job without getting within 6 feet of any other person during his shift. They do come closer but their job can be easily changed so that they don't.

Uber drivers are entirely other thing. Maybe driving people should be only allowed if you have a car that has completely separate spaces for the driver and the rider and where spece for the rider can be fully vented and disinfected after each rider, which maybe again should be mandatory.

A lot of people can't do their essential jobs remotely. But very few of them can't do those jobs not in groups and not in contact with other people.

The world before covid looked how it looked not out of necessity, but just because we didn't have to pay attention to some things.

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Have you considered that most normal human beings require social interaction with others to maintain mental health. Solitary confinement is considered torture by many for a reason. In addition, digital forms of social interaction are obviously not subsitutes for physical interaction, especially considering the harmful effects social media and dating apps already have on mental health. I definitely wouldn't want to live in a world where Zuckerberg and co. control all my social interaction with others.

I have a compromised immune system. I have a close relationship to my two adult sons who still live with me. I don't like strangers touching me.

Historically, humans lived in small, close-knit family units or small villages. The human mind is optimized to deal with a social group of about 150 people, not a city of thousands.

A lot of our loneliness and similar problems could be largely resolved if we returned to a pattern of small, close-knit communities as our norm and we could improve germ control at the same time.

It's a general human norm that most cultures promote a long-term, monogamous relationship as the standard. Sex is vastly less dangerous if two people are only intimate with each other and neither of them sleeps around.

Reducing casual social contact in no way means we simply can't get our social needs met. It can mean the opposite. It can mean a return to meaningful social bonds instead of casual hookups from grinder.

Social interaction doesn't require breathing the same air. Internet is wonderful place of bustling social interaction. I'm doing way more social interaction with you just by writing this comment than I usually do by going outside and apparently Zuckerberg has no say in it.

Solitary confinement is a torture not because of the solitary part. It's because of the boredom part. How unpleasent do you think would be solitary confinement for nearly all people if it was done in a library with internet access and netflix account instead of small dark empty cell?

It's not the same thing though. We know that there are chemical responses for things such as touch and other physical interactions. You don't get that online. It's a vastly different thing.

There are vastly more chemical responses to having sex and yet most of us don't do it casually with large group random people, only with the the closest ones and often with one any given period of life.

Touch could be also culturally restricted to closest family with ill effects milder than caused by mild infections you get through that, let alone ncov19.

Some human cultures are less touchy some more. All survive.

Chemical responses to anything less than touch are way less documented and I suspect easily replicated with good quality audio-video connection.

That’s a good point I hadn’t considered. Only time will tell, I guess. These are now really scary times to be in.

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