None of this is to say that the pandemic is no big deal, or that it was handled well. But the point is that between mainstream media and social media, the picture, not just of the pandemic, but for any given topic, is always taken to the extreme. Every new bit of information is evidence of the apocalypse, the collapse of society, and the impending extinction of the human race. Enemies are everywhere. Nothing can be trusted. You are always being taken advantage of. The dystopia is now. You can't even google symptoms for an illness, without, as my doctor puts it "discover that your stubbed toe is actually terminal cancer and you have six months to live".
The reality is that there are definitely things worth being concerned about both as a society and individually, but very rarely does it live up to the "hype". I've found that the more I unplug and spend that time and energy engaging in my day to day life, the less bleak the world seems, and the happier I am.
Remember that most media is built on the idea of capturing attention and it is easier to capture attention with stories of fear and disaster than it is with positive stories. 3 local acts of violence will get headlines while 300 acts of kindness will go without promotion.
On the other hand, we can now mitigate deadly diseases in less than 12 months, as a species, although we'll be fleeced by pharma companies for the trouble.
Hopefully we stop trusting politicians, physicians, and scientists and start trusting Science and statistics.
For those who can afford it. Just another example of the rapidly growing chasm between the wealthy and the poor.
If they're lucky, Medicaid is in no way universal. Why shouldn't everyone have access to this technology via universal health care?
I'm both mocking the healthcare cartels and giving you a genuine solution.
Universal healthcare doesn't solve the supply issue.
And this tech was obviously very expensive, and the rich had huge advantages in keeping it to themselves, I mean why give the poor access to all information in the world right?
So the rich just kept smartphones to themselves to get richer and more powerful.
Oh wait… what did I get wrong in this story?
We still can't create a vaccine against HIV (but we have some ideas).
The mRNA vaccines didn't spring up out of nowhere, they are the culmination of ~20 years of research into mRNA vaccines.
It hides inside the immune system itself! It writes itself into your DNA! Diabolical stuff when you think about it.
Life is suffering with sparse sprinkles of happiness here and there. If you feel bad take a page from Budism, it's the best religion for your mind, and I am an avid agnostic. It's the "No bullshit" religion, basically it's your problem, fix it or learn to live with it.
It teaches you to embrace suffering as part of living, everything is for you to endure, consider how to solve (or not) and grow. By solve I mean reflect on the outcomes and choose to do something, just accept it or just ignore it. The best thing you can do is learn to be your own support, by analysing the issues that throuble you and choose a path.
Besides that We live in the best era human kind has ever had by a long mile.
* There is food to survive for almost everyone, no famines in the last 100 years.
* Big world changing wars have not happened in almost 100 years.
* So much extra wealth in the world almost anyone can enjoy life a bit, have a hobbie, travel, eat out, go out, movies, theather, sports.
* No cold war, no dooms day clock
* Democracy, information is basically free.
* Freedom to do whatever you want ( and face the consequences too)
* Poverty is getting smaller by the day (yeah rich are getting richer but check 1500, 1600, 1700, 1800 or 1900 out for a good perspective on what being poor was)
Randomly pick to someone from any other year that ever lived, your life is better even if you get a king it's probably still better.
It absolutely is not, there are many threats to democracy right here in the USA. Many Republican states are passing massive voter suppression bills.
I mean in the world, yours might be worst but check the other countries, in the last 50 years a lot of military governments and dictatorships ended.
Some of your points are true, but I would argue about these in particular:
> * There is food to survive for almost everyone, no famines in the last 100 years.
> * So much extra wealth in the world almost anyone can enjoy life a bit, have a hobbie, travel, eat out, go out, movies, theather, sports.
> * Poverty is getting smaller by the day (yeah rich are getting richer but check 1500, 1600, 1700, 1800 or 1900 out for a good perspective on what being poor was)
Many more Americans are food insecure than they were 50 years ago. The USDA estimates that 11 million children are food insecure in the US. Poverty in the US has in fact been increasing for decades, but government statistics don't reflect it because they measure poverty based on a 1950s spending model.
The West has endured decades of trickle down economics when the reality is that wealth trickles up. Of course total wealth is increasing, but the lower and middle classes have captured none of it. The vast majority of humans on Earth cannot afford to travel or even take vacations, and those in prosperous Western countries have had continually decreasing disposable income for decades.
> * No cold war, no dooms day clock
> * Democracy, information is basically free.
You have this so backwards that it's baffling. The doomsday clock is the closest to midnight it has ever been since its inception in 1947. It currently sits at 100 seconds to midnight. World leaders have become increasingly reckless, unstable and authoritarian. The last US president said, "We have all these nukes, why aren't we using them?"
Whether we lack a cold war is debatable. There has not been a significant drop in proxy wars or in militarization of world powers since the fall of the Soviet Union. The US still spends an ever increasing share of its budget on military, and it actually uses it to kill. The US has been in a continuous state of war for the longest period in its entire history. There are people voting today that were not yet born when the war with Afghanistan started.
> Basically we are the luckies people that ever lived, COVID or no COVID. Randomly pick to someone from any other year that ever lived, your life is better even if you get a king it's probably still better
This is not as true as you think, and I don't believe it will be true for long. For most of human history there were very few humans. There were probably about 100 billion humans that have ever lived, and about 8 billion are alive today. So if you were to pick a random human from history, there's a non-negligible chance that your pick would be alive today.
I've argued above that we in the West are experiencing decreasing quality of life. I worry it will start to fall much more rapidly over the coming decades due to climate change, wealth inequality and potential nuclear war. Considering the big picture is probably not a good idea; we may be better off living in ignorant bliss.
I also live in a 3rd world country and it’s a sharp upwards change on the last 50 years.
Population has increased 5x but there is less people starving to death, getting killed by curable diseases and so on.
The only thing that has increased is crime because of drug gangs related issues here.
Most, middle eastern, eastern European, Asian, Central and South american countries enjoy a far more democratic governments than 50 years ago. Number of crazy dictators has decreased greatly in those 50 years.
Maybe the american situation is getting worst but I would argue that the vast majority of the planet is now being able to enjoy a bit of that “american life” that was only the privilege of a few.
* Feel good about the things you are doing that make a positive difference, however small.
* Don’t feel guilt about the things that aren’t under your control, however big.
P.S. Nobody is in control and the only way big positive differences ever happen is because of the aggregate of small positive differences that everyone makes.
These people have external locus-of-control. They don't change the world because they kickback and let life happen to them. Mostly, it's religious types who think like this and say "it's god's plan." Bullshit. They're learned helplessness cowards.
> Why Kids Love Garbage Trucks
> This didn't address my favorite theory: that (some) kids are programmed to learn as much as they can about the nearby megafauna, and in this world the closest approximation is these big garbage/fire/construction vehicles.
There is an asymmetry between the level of information we can collect in our immediate surroundings and online. The same method that kids employ to detect an unknown and quickly classify it as a non threat with the limited information they have available to them becomes paralyzing when the amount of information available is seemingly infinite. An endless number of threats, and an endless amount of information available about them.
Before the internet and television, how many times would a person feel threatened in their lifetime before a threat materialized that ultimately took their life? What is that number now?
Can't say I was successful, for number of reasons. News still find their way into my head via HN headlines (although I disabled them via Tampermonkey scripts), via buzz in comments, via talks with (some) friends etc. Also, only bad news go through via these channels, so the world looks even more depressing because when something good happens, nobody brings it up.
Probably I need to cut myself from passive consumption of reddit/HN too.
For example, everything on the news is supposed to match your worst nightmare. The more closely it matches, the less likely it is accurate. Knowing that helps filter what you actually need to be cognizant of and react to. Actually consuming it is just to apply critical thinking to know why it isn't the complete story, and solely for conversation purposes.
To my experience, it's the opposite.
- The radio I used to listen to during the day had a small news segment every hour. I replaced it with listening to my own music (or use Spotify, Apple Music, etc). It was mostly repetitive and had advertising, so it was easy to replace.
- I no longer watch TV, especially news stations. They keep repeating the same thing every 30 minutes anyway and hyping up everything that happens because there's not enough content. What I used to watch on TV (eg: series) can be found somewhere else and I can watch it when I want.
- No more "news" notifications. Most "news" aren't really "news" (I don't care if a celebrity did or said something...) and most of the "breaking news" are not that important.
- Disabled/removed everything that had news on it (they're everywhere!). I don't use a news app, my browser doesn't show me news in the new tab page, left Facebook (best decision ever - I use direct messages to keep in touch), stopped following people that shared news or where always fighting with someone on Twitter.
Now I use newsletters, podcasts and RSS feeds to follow the news.
- Some news organisations have free weekly newsletters or a weekly podcast with a recap of the week. Short, direct and doesn't use much of my time.
- RSS feeds allow me to follow certain subjects or websites that I want to follow closely.
- Some news agencies seem to do a better job than some rag using clickbait titles to bring traffic to their crappy website. They're often not as one sided as certain orgs and tell you what happened without wrapping it in their opinion.
- Sites like Hacker News can be useful. I already knew this about the Pfizer vaccine, but some people made good points here.
Sometimes I'm a bit behind other people, but not by much. For some things, it's nice to follow everything as it is happening, but usually I don't miss much.
I might be interested in knowing what's happening, but not everything about who did it (eg: the sad story about the people involved - I can find more details if I want) or as if it was entertainment. The rush to be first at reporting the event also means that often they're wrong about something. I also don't really care about some accident that happened in a completely different country, need to know what's the covid situation everywhere in detail or something bad that may happen.
This works for me, but it also requires some self control and some curation. RSS feeds and podcasts won't help me much if I subscribe to all websites and multiple podcasts about news, politics, etc.
Don't browse news sites (including HN if the stuff here gets you down). Don't use social media where you have poor control of what gets in your feed. If you have contacts who keep sending you news, ask them to stop and if they won't, put them in an ignore list. If your in-person contacts with friends is always about the news, limit the time you spend with them.
Substitute that time with other things - be it other sites, hobbies or activities. Reading novels can be a lot of fun. Building things, etc.
It is in your hands.
Try it. You'll be improving your own immune system, you'll be happier, and you can forget all this fearmongering garbage.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.22.21257658v...
What did your ancestors do for 10 000 years up until public healthcare in rich nations? How did they stick it out so that eventually you could prosper? And FYI I'm not sure there are any public resources in most rich nations for this kind of support anyhow.
We're over the worst of it, the data on D variant is just a warning to maintain vigilance.
Keep your chin up.
Sometimes the world does get worse. History is not a linear function of progress, there are many examples of generations which have been much worse off than the generations that precede them. It's time we re-evaluated society and how we care for each other because we're not at the end of history. Ruthless capitalism isn't compatible with our rapidly decaying biosphere. It's completely ridiculous how much wealth a handful of people have while the rest of us suffer under the USA's medieval healthcare system. We know what choices to make, we just refuse to make them because rich people might get mad. The world is getting worse, but we can ameliorate the biggest problems if we choose to do so.
Coronavirus was never a big deal unless you were old, sick, or obese. Even with these demographics, it had a 1% death rate, the same order of magnitude as various viral illnesses.
We really should have not blown this out of proportion. I think when people realized we could work from home, people faked fear to enjoy a mini vacation. Media loves fear. Politicians wanted to use this.
Do we spend trillions of dollars a year on safer cars? No, but apparently if we use statistics we should.
Or, you know, people who have "old, sick, or obese" people in their family and maybe don't want to get them killed?
The lockdowns didn't work. N95 masks do work.
The overreaction was anti science from statistics to actual implementation.
It's not a small problem. And neither is having 1% of your population sick and dying in such a short time.
Edit- And the ambiguity of the word "lots" is particularly unhelpful
I don't find it to be in particularly good faith that as soon as someone disputes your claims, you immediately ask them to do research work that you didn't want to do.
Or unless you happen to require hospitalisation at the same time than a lot of "old, sick or obese" people where saturating the available beds and ICUs of every hospital.
There are second order effects on the wave that we experienced. The most dramatic probably has been in India, where the lack of available oxygen produced a lot of deaths. And we will start to discover next year what other effects like undetected conditions, or worsened after a year of delaying treatment, will cause.
A 1% of a considerable chunk of the population is a lot of people.
But also my metro area of 5 million people never ended up having a shortage, and our area had a bunch of anti maskers.
> Do we spend trillions of dollars a year on safer cars?
The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's annual budget exceeds $1T (EDIT: $1 billion, not trillion, thanks KptMarchewa) [1], and that's just part of government spending on highway safety -- far from the full picture of "vehicle safety." Your homework is to look up the safety R&D spending of the top automotive manufacturers in the USA. "We" absolutely do spend a ton of money and research on vehicle safety, and it's paid off in the form of an exponential drop in deaths per unit distance traveled.
[1] PDF Page 11 of https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2020-02/F...
Yes, we probably do, if you consider the cumulative cost of better engineering and safety technology on all the cars sold and serviced in a year, plus highway construction standards.
And that's before considering that personal car transport is probably _inherently_ dangerous, and most cities are trying to move to a higher percentage of walking and cycling.