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> I value a day in my life much higher at my current age than I would serval decades in the future, and in general I think this is true.

Write this down somewhere for yourself and look back on it in two decades.

Personally, this is not true for me when I look backwards two decades ago. I also doubt it will be true when I look back two decades from now.

Nobody wants to live to be 100 except the man who's 99.

It's also not entirely simple. My mother is over 65 and while at risk due to her age she now has to deal with the fact she can not see her grandchildren which are very important to her.

I life in Australia and had intended to visit the UK this year or have her come over, now she will not likely see her grandchildren until sometime into 2021, nearly 3 years since she last saw them.

She was also looking forward to seeing my sister with her young kids this Christmas, she lives in the mainland UK, and has had to give that up as well.

Whether or not people who frequent HN value human interact much is irrelevant for my mother she very much enjoys seeing her family and that's not happening this year and makes her quite sad.

Different people have different priorities. Some might prefer [risking] death to physically visiting their prodigy less often.

Am I correct in assuming this grandparent lives on a different continent than the grandkids?

> Am I correct in assuming this grandparent lives on a different continent than the grandkids?

>> I life in Australia and had intended to visit the UK this year or have her come over

Hard to read that any other way

Nothing says a special visit by gran then it turning out to be her last due to an entirely preventable illness.

I think it's different for everyone. Myself, two decades ago, I was happier. I'm still happy now, but I was much more exuberant, in general, back then. The zest and passion of youth sort of stuff. I'd rather live through COVID now that I'm older, instead of back then.

If I were still in my 20s I'd be very upset over these conditions and how that will compound over the rest of my life. The compounding really, really matters for young people. They're being diminished. It's an extraordinary trolley problem as another poster stated.

My view: we're choosing to diminish youth to preserve the elderly. Maybe ok. Maybe not. Probably not; they're the future. I don't know what the balance should be—which way to swing the trolley switch. My judgement is that public debate is shallow, binary, and without nuance. The weakest and poorest suffer as a result.

I don't think there's any right or wrong answer here. But lots of people are getting hurt in different ways and in different durations.

The restrictions in the UK are to try and prevent the healthcare system from being overwhelmed. COVID is maxing out capacity which is having a knock on effect where normal treatments are having to be delayed. Eg cancer treatment for a young person. Even if young people aren't at risk directly from COVID as much as older people, they are at greater risk with health issues that affects all ages because of the delay in treatments.

But yeah I understand your point of view. It is frustrating all the same.

> "the pandemic and response has taken away a not insignificant chunk of the prime of my life."

Bits of your life which don't go your way are still lived, and still your life.

You may as well argue that sleep takes your life away, and that illness does, and that employment does, and nickel and dime your way down to defining "your life" as just the bits you choose, and then further slice them all down into "the bits which went exactly the way I wanted". Newsflash, it's /all/ your life.

> "Life is risk

risk includes things not turning out how you hope, do you say that risks which don't pan out are "taking away my life"?

Would you agree to withhold all medical care for over 60s for a year or two to let covid run free?

No?

So what would the solution be when 10 million people need hospital beds and there are only 1 million, most of which are taken up by people without covid

No one is accurately talking about the risks. The vast majority of people who have died have been over 60. There have been young people who died, yes. But young people die all the time of things that often kill very few: fungal infections, respiratory disease, bicycle wrecks. Now the narrative is "Long Covid" which comes from very limited case studies and papers that depend on web surveys and lots of other questionable research that falls flat once you start diving into the papers.

Meanwhile, all the things people are doing are about as effective as TSA Security Theater. The lockdowns simply do not work. We can see that in the numbers between California, South Dakota, Sweden and others. Every nation or municipality that takes a hard approach is no better off, and often much worse, than places that did substantially less. The masks are a placebo at this point and the numbers show they probably do next to nothing (except contribute to massive pollution, waste, shame and make us fearful of each other).

In 50 years, the only way I think historians will look back upon this ear is pure mass hysteria; global mass hysteria on a scale never seen before. This is not a time of honor and should never be returned to.

> The lockdowns simply do not work.

We don't really know this because almost nowhere is actually locking anything down. We have these feeble and unenforced "stay at home" orders which are full of loopholes and largely ignored. If you go out for a drive in your town today (against stay-at-home guidance), you'll see all manner of stores open, people out and about horsing around, even restaurants. We're hardly taking any precautions at all. We don't know if lockdowns work because we haven't actually tried it.

It's like the Simpsons quote, "We've tried nothing, and we're all out of ideas!" [1]

A few places on earth like NZ and Australia actually did stay-at-home with far fewer loopholes, mandatory quarantining, contact tracing, and they're doing much better.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOTyUfOHgas

We do know if we look globally. Many countries in Asia have real lockdowns, and they do have things under much better control.

When the compliance is good the lockdowns work well. Witness the results in the east Asian countries.

They failed horribly in countries where people care less about others and compliance is too low.

Pure mass hysteria on any matter these days is all thanks to the Like and Follower counter based reward system.

Over energetic, mindlessly ambitious, attention craving lunatics on the Left and Right get propped up and dominate all discussion these days thanks to the counts.

Everyone else has to enter into Count accumulating arms race to even be allowed into the room to speak.

The counts enable the best panderers in society and validate everything they do and say.

>> these days

Was it ever any different? Pythagoras is on record saying something pretty similar to your words, ~2500 years ago.

About the only thing that has really solidly changed over the last several thousand years is the near eradication of warlike hunter-gatherers and human sacrifice/cannibal societies. Every other stupid human behavior (and enlightened human behavior) is more or less the same now as it has been as long as there’s been civilization.

Most of the obnoxious things people do are features of our biology, not some emergent effect of the blame target du jour.

Go look at Melbourne Australia and come back and say lockdowns don't work.

They went from 700/cases a day 30,000 infections. To 0/Day 0 Infections in 16 weeks. Everything you said is categorically wrong.

Almost(?) every country on Earth had a lockdown at some level. Australia is one of very few that got a good outcome.

This is nonsensical. Lockdowns aren't a binary system. The countries that did real lockdowns combined with testing, contact tracing and isolation are doing extremely well. Look at how China is doing today. Or Taiwan. Or New Zealand. Or Australia.

If lockdowns that aren't "real" (by the way, saying "real lockdowns" brings the no true Scotsman fallacy to mind) don't work to stop the virus, then why are >95% of the countries in the world doing them, since they still have all the negative side effects but without the benefit?

Because politicians are idiots. They think doing some lockdown-light with 50% of the boxes ticked from scientists recommendations will get 50% of the promised effect. And if they pick the right 50% of boxes, it'll also not inconvenience anyone important...

95% of the countries in the world have not done a lockdown. Stay at home orders are not lockdowns. In the USA we have never had an actual lockdown.

Even with your definition, my question stands: if stay-at-home orders aren't lockdowns and so don't stop the virus, why are >95% of the countries in the world doing them, since they still have all the negative side effects but without the benefit?

Australia (Victoria) just got 3 cases and mandated stage 4 measures including limiting gatherings to 15 people.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-31/victoria-coronavirus-...

This is because it was reintroduced by returning Australians due to the rest of the worlds inability to contain it. Now we'll hopefully have some minor restrictions until we get on top of things again because you can effectively contact trace at these levels of transmission.

This doesn't prove that lockdowns don't work anymore than a car crash death proves that seat belts don't work.

Yeah, but Australians come from a notoriously conformist, law-abiding culture, so we can't extrapolate from them to Western society.

/s

Can you link some good studies that show masks do next to nothing?

"Life is worth losing." -- George Carlin