There's a distinction between "healthcare crisis laws" (such as the initial lockdown for a few weeks in the UK), and making it illegal to visit friends and family indefinitely.
I'm just repeating myself now though.
6,997 karma · joined October 14, 2018
I'm just repeating myself now though.
Well, I've certainly learned a lot about society in these eleven months, that's for sure.
Models indicate around 25% infected in the country, 37% in London.
The rest of your post, well, I'm glad that you find it easy and have lots of compassion for people who don't find social isolation as trivial as you do.
It leads me to my original post:
> They will throw you under the bus immediately and comprehensively as soon as there's even the slightest microscopic threat to their wellbeing.
> And they'll cast the blame on you. They'll say it's your failing. They'll say - never mind our responsibilities to you - you need to do your bit regardless.
Avoids germs, you see.
I personally couldn't give a toss; in the UK we're eleven months in to the sunk cost fallacy. But that's outside of the scope of this article.
You can wear a helmet, and you can cycle safely, but given enough years, you'll eventually end up falling off.
That doesn't make helmets or cycling proficiency pointless, but it does mean not making wild claims that you're "immune" to accidents.
There is no way to completely avoid the coronavirus whilst interacting with other humans unless it's simply not prevalent in your area (e.g. Australia, NZ).
Pretty much everyone has failed. Football teams, film studios, politicians, the lot. It's like trying to catch the wind.
The way to eliminate it, if you want to, is to accept that it will infiltrate your group, slowly quarantine it out until there's none left, and then allow no-one into or out of the group.
I don't understand how an intelligent person couldn't simply derive this from first principles, it's been eleven months or so now.
Do they exist in a different world to the rest of us or what? Most people I know, unless they're barricaded inside, have pretty much accepted that they're going to get it, the last study I read indicated that 1 in 4 individuals in the UK have already been infected.
"Just a few weeks to flatten the curve" was a once in a generational play. I did my bit, and so far I've been punished for it.
I really hope for our sake it doesn't come down to this again, because this time it really will be a bloodbath, rather than a particularly bad year or two.
Initially, at the start of the lockdown in March 2020, people voluntarily acted far in excess of legal requirements, or even guidelines.
I think that this made sense, and I'm proud of our behaviour on that front. I remember walking out of the house, once a week, in my homemade mask, to do the weekly shop.
Beyond that, as we learned more about the virus, but bizarrely went the other way and started to make everyday activities unlawful in an attempt to control the population, well, I've been increasingly choosing not to comply for the sake of retaining my sanity.
The Government simply does not get to decide on my behalf whether I have my friends and family over for dinner. I don't give them that power; if they wish to send men with guns like an authoritarian despot, that's their choice.
I think that if we'd enacted sane policies it wouldn't bother me as much.
Amazon, Deliveroo, Uber etc should have had an 80-90% windfall tax for the duration given that their competition is essentially illegal.
Tenants with no income should have had their rent cancelled. Not delayed - cancelled.
Working from home policies should have been optional for employees. Students should not have been required to pay full rent and full fees for Zoom calls.
But we haven't done any of that. We've taken a public health crisis and used it to absolutely destroy the country.
There was a time, when I was.
And I've been blindingly lucky to crawl, bit by bit, out of that.
But I still identify with that, because precisely the same societal decisions that fuck me, are the ones that fuck them too.
I owe them something. They're still struggling.
I don't owe the rest of society anything at all.
Are you sure you're not the one that's spying on the wrongthinkers? ;) Just kidding.
Those are the most minor, trivial aspects of what has happened over the last year in the UK, and what continues to happen as we speak.
How about we make a trade.
I'll wear a mask in situations where others are concerned, take my vaccine, and you may distance from me as much as you'd like. You know, like I am and have been doing for eleven months now.
In return - I want my life back. Let's reinstate the democratic process, let's make it legal for me to go for a walk without an excuse, run my own business without having goons lock the doors, you know, stuff like that.
You keep your end of the bargain, I keep mine.
Fair trade? Or is this the part whereby you call me names, shout at me, and expect me to respond in kind?
I am choosing to do this, for you. It does not benefit me. Take it for granted at your own peril.
It's not about my accomplishments, but whether I feel like I have a stake in this. I have no stake in it now. They want a future that I don't want.
No social ties, no bonds, no community. No counter-culture. No culture. No high street. No shopkeepers.
Amazon, Deliveroo, Uber, Facebook, Netflix.
Skyrocketing wealth inequality. Printing, printing, printing, QE, home prices ten times the median wage.
An elite, and an underclass.
A society that interacts, in a regulated manner, through a screen. By _force_.
Because it's "safer". De-risked. Comfortable.
And their answer for me? Therapy. Anti-depressants. Coping strategies. Learn to love the screen.
Embrace the new future.
Not me. Your insults, your attempts at control, they bounce off me now. "I'm alright, Jack", as they say.
It's individualism for me now. Me, my friends, the neighbours.
Everyone else, figure it out, I'm not your pawn.
I'm saying that this applies at every level of the scale, in work, love, friendship, society, everything.
We are wasting mind-bendingly tremendous amounts of talent in our world simply because of tunnel-vision mindsets.
And it saddens me that as hard as I try, I can't change this. I've spent my career trying. The well has run dry, and now I'm one of them. :/
The times that I have been the most successful, most motivated, most driven, most productive, and most useful, in study, career, relationships, and life, have tracked exactly with periods in which I've gotten out what I've put in.
When I started my career and a company took a chance on me - we absolutely killed it, I was paid well for the time, everyone was happy.
When I moved on and was given the respect and decision making ability that I wanted - same thing. Absolutely smashed it out of the park, money flowing from every plug socket.
Whenever I've been in a working environment that has cost cutting, or bureaucratic bollocks, or management that decide what's best for the employees rather than asking them - my productivity has been horrendous, the company has lost money.
Every single time I've worked without return - burnout. Every time, without fail.
This extends outside of work. The last year has been a period in which I've gone from wanting to take part in society, work on big problems like climate change, sacrifice for the greater good, donate my time and money, to just thinking - you know what?
No-one outside of your immediate circle cares. They never did, and never will. They will throw you under the bus immediately and comprehensively as soon as there's even the slightest microscopic threat to their wellbeing.
And they'll cast the blame on you. They'll say it's your failing. They'll say - never mind our responsibilities to you - you need to do your bit regardless.
Well, you know what? Fuck you guys, I'm getting mine now.
That's the role that politics serves. To take into account all of the data we're given, think about outcomes across all scientific fields, take into account the opinion of the population and execute on it.
I think that for the most part, snappy soundbites like "follow the science" are a result of social media and reactionaries breaking our normal, carefully considered methods of discourse.
Physics tells us that the Universe has enough space for an unfathomable number of humans.
Biology tells us that the conditions aren't there.
Psychology tells us that even if they were, people wouldn't be happy plugged into capsules.
Behavioural science tells us that, regardless of the other three, we might just have to work out a solution anyway, because we're gonna breed.
Politicians... well, from what I can tell usually they just sort of do whatever they want and manipulate the population into wanting it. :)
"For example, we have two families that we're co-sheltering with"
Right, so you're not alone, and these rules don't result in you having 0 social interaction most days.
If I hadn't had the in-person, real contact that I do with friends and family, breaking so-called "rules" to do so, I would have gone postal. Full psychotic break. I was very close, and I am still very close.
> you've expressed a preference for putting others at risk
I don't have a preference for putting others at risk at all; I don't think you realise how offensive a statement that is.
Coronavirus is not the only thing that exists in the universe; for you it may be the #1 most important factor because your other needs are taken care of, that's fine, it's not for everyone.
These policies put me at risk. Telling me to look at screens as a substitute for human interaction puts me at risk. Not just me, but my friends and family, a year in everyone is going mental.
I am preventing myself from losing control of my mind, which would put myself and others at far more risk than even SARS 1 would have.
I'll keep that in mind when I'm not able to keep it in mind.
Glad you're having a nice time of it.
A husband, wife and children living together are surrounded by social contacts at all times.
In the UK, a single person is told that they can select one other person and visit them.
All of their support structures - office chat, therapy, meet ups, the pub, dating, everything else - completely gone and replaced with staring at four walls.
The regulations completely ignore my living situation. In practice it would mean that once a week I end up seeing a friend and the rest of the week I'm totally isolated.
Whether they were explicitly designed to hurt people like me, or whether I just 'fall through the cracks', is mostly irrelevant.
I'm just not doing it because it doesn't work. As I posted above, I tried it and became mentally ill.
It's not a 'hardship' like say, running low on money and having to try to find a job, it's an active legislative attack on my wellbeing and basically all of the escape hatches have been closed.
If building regulations in my area required walls to be built out of jelly, I'd still build them with bricks. It's safer, regardless of what some bureaucrat says.
I followed the rules until it became clear that I was becoming psychotic as a result of extreme isolation and about to snap and hurt myself and others.
To avoid a 100% suicide rate, I will take a 10% death rate. If you're interested in convincing me why I should sacrifice myself for your benefit, I'm all ears.
Hyperbolic, 'holier-than-thou' messaging doesn't address the problem.
It's a policy thought up by rich folks, in huge family houses, with good family relations, and inflicted on the rest of us.
I live alone.
I cannot - not will not, but simply cannot - follow rules that mean I have social contact once every week and spend the rest of the time in complete isolation.
A 100% probability of a mental breakdown is far worse than an 0.5% probability of death to me, shrug.
If the culture of software development remains primarily WFH, and it becomes too onerous for me to find a job that's actually an in-person, in-office role, I'll just leave, wasting all of the experience I've built up and contributing further to the supply issues.
It's just sad. Terribly sad. You want to sit at home and only look at a screen - that's cool, enjoy your dystopia. I'm out, I don't need this shit.
Take your data and shove it up your arse. If you work on this stuff, you're a cancer cell. You just haven't realised it yet.
I don't need your "credit". I don't even need you. No-one does.
Ecosystem destruction is negative.
Using energy is not negative.
Focus on the problem. Bitcoin could disappear tomorrow and we'd still be fucked unless we address the real issue.
We're all criminals now. Such are the '20s.
With the trajectory our political system is on, a few more months of this and the outcome where the guy with the gun pulls the trigger may well be preferable.
The main escape valve at the moment is that the regulations aren't being enforced.