esotericn

I fully accept that you are willing to put up with this and that you'd like to see something 'in between'.

I'm not and most people I know aren't. The 2 metre rule will kill off all of the cultural institutions I hold dear. The recent video of a Wetherspoons pub with 2m distancing has people guffawing up and down the country.

It doesn't make sense to me anyway - as I've said, a person in a vulnerable group will not wish to perform outdoor leisure activities, or work, etc, even with the 2-metre-rule in place.

We'll just have to agree to disagree.

If you refuse to engage on my points, which you still are (as is the Government, literally completely ignoring the main issue people are having) then you need to justify that with reasoning other than "well I don't care about it, so you shouldn't either".

I don't mean to insult you, it's simply baffling to me that you can just ignore this as if it's a nonentity. My brain is different to yours, yours to mine, however we slice it we need to bridge that gap in order to understand each other.

Again: this shut down is trading some lives for other lives. I don't think it's a net gain, I've explained why, and all you can offer is "just wait" on a loop forever. Waiting 1 month locked in a box as a single person is a 0.1%-1% fatality rate depending on demographic.

And yes, '2 meter land' is the same thing if pretty much all of the joy in your life revolves around being close to other people.

You can engage with that on an honest basis, or you can just pretend it away and watch people slowly stream outside, you know? I apologise if I'm getting combative, but it feels like I'm left with no choice...

As another northern man from the UK, you're an absolute fucking beast, mate. :)

It bears repeating again - as responsible individuals, we can handle lock down for a few months. It's a reasonable thing to do given the uncertainty of the situation.

We won't do it for years - that's a delusion, a fantasy that ignores how the human mind works.

It sounds like you don't want to take the risk of either contracting, or further spreading, the disease.

No-one _wants_ to take that risk.

But if the only alternative that you can suggest is deleting 1, 2, ... years of the prime of my life, staring at screens or meeting friends behind plexiglass, you've lost me completely, because you're describing the actions of a paperclip maximizer, not a human being. You're impacting others by expecting them to give up their lives.

In that world view, either I'm autistic or you are; we don't have the same brain chemistry; your experience of the world is _so far_ from my own and most people I know that a blanket policy for both of us makes no sense.

It's possible for a short period. It's not possible for years. We won't do it. Really, we just won't. I can't be clearer on this, I consider it pointless, frustrating even, to discuss - it feels like arguing against a strawman - if you think that humans will simply stop mixing for years on end, viewing each other through a screen or far away enough that we can't even smell each other, there are really only two explanations in my mind:

a) you have some atypical neurochemistry which means you don't/can't understand human socialisation properly

and/or

b) you're locked inside with your family and so you can't "feel" the dread that millions of people are feeling right now, wondering whether they'll ever touch another human again

For me, it's an urge almost as strong as the urge to drink water. If you refuse to take that on board and just pretend that people are being irrational because your brain doesn't work that way, you're going to remain confused by this.

If you don't want to go to a language class, a theatre, a gallery, a pub, a cafe, sit on a bus, a train, a restaurant, go on a date, have children play in a playground, work in an office, and so on and so forth, for years, or you want to replace them with some wanky dystopian "social distancing" version in which you sit behind screens, wear masks, and have 10 people in a hall built for hundreds, that's cool, you do you. I'll do it for a few months, I won't do it for years, because that represents the imposition of a >2% mortality rate on me anyway by removing all of the good parts of life. My response to this is pretty much "OK introvert", you know?

That over with;

Of course, I do think that we should, for a few months, attempt to reduce the spread of the virus, via whatever measures are reasonable!

I strongly disagree that the status quo of "you can get on the tube to go and work in a supermarket, but can't cuddle your partner" is sustainable.

There's no guidance. As I've repeatedly said, we need a plan to deal with mental health _right now_. Not next week, not "if the R number goes down", not "if Boris has a good day", we need a date at which it will be legal for people to have autonomy and decide whether they want to take the risk to visit their friends and family, and to make new friends.

Notice, by the way, that you're not giving any concrete plans for this in your post - it's all wishy washy "oh, well, we might do this, or I suppose that, well maybe" nonsense. There's no sense of urgency at all. You're really not understanding that many, many people would rather die than live in a dystopian world in which people treat each other as virons. A few months, sure we'll take it. A few years - completely intractable.

We were urgently locked indoors, the world was turned off, and now our needs are being ignored with this child-like "we're not there yet, darling" fluff.

So again - I ask you - what's the plan for long term partners meeting each other? Family members? For dating? For meeting new friends? Do you have one? You do realise that the Government has literally broken up families so that they can prioritise the flower shop opening?

Or are you going to twiddle your thumbs and moan about people breaking the lockdown whilst giving them zero indication that it's ever ending (and seemingly actually _enjoying_ it?)

When people bottle up mental health issues the inevitable result is a release like a pressure valve.

At the moment we _still_ have no date in the UK for when people will be able to visit their wives, husbands, partners or children if they're not cohabiting.

If you're living alone, then you still have no idea when it will legally be permitted for you to embrace, play games with, spend the night with, kiss, hold hands with - experience humanity with - literally anyone else.

If you're single, all of that _plus_ you now need to fight through a 2 metre social bubble in order to perform basic human functions like, for example, attracting a mate in order to perform sexual intercourse.

All of the above is very silly to me. I honestly think the whole "let's wait for the science" approach misses the point. At an absolute minimum we need a hard deadline of something like "look, in N weeks/months you can go and be a husband again".

People _will_ take a risk of death in order to do the above. If you think this is all about young individuals believing that they're invincible you've completely missed the point - the issue is that a life without those things is _not life_ - 1 year of being a hermit for many may as well just be a deletion of 1 year of the prime of their life, i.e. a >1% mortality rate imposed upon them anyway.

The longer term view on this is people actually starting to worry that perhaps that's just it - their parents had a good life when you used to be able to go out, party, meet a girl, and so on and so forth - and now, oops, that's illegal, sorry, we're doing social distancing for the next 10 years. It's utter madness.

If the Government refuses to address this, and they very much are refusing to do so, then the inevitable consequence will be that people just begin to wholesale ignore the guidelines.

If I had children on the other side of the country I'm not watching them grow from age 5 to age 6 over a video link regardless of what the R number is. There's no political process to address these concerns, other than just doing it anyway, so people will do it anyway.

The article here is describing a time-frame of years.

Yes, most people are on board with a lockdown of a few months. Flattening the curve is a sane aim.

If you persist with this idea of deleting social interaction for multiple years, people are going to rightly conclude that you're insane and just want to force your antisocial vision on them.

That's what's causing the antsiness - there's no exit plan, it's all "oh, well, you might be able to have a normal life.. or perhaps post-2020 we deleted society".

If you can't understand that, you're probably in a special situation (either very introverted, or living with family so you already have some social contact).

Strawmen everywhere as of late.

It has to happen, because people cannot stay inside forever, with all the will in the world.

This is definitional unless you're planning to create a police state and forcibly prevent the young from interacting with each other for years at a time.

Protecting the vulnerable is the only practical solution.

We are not eradicating the virus, we are flattening the curve.

The goalposts have moved, I support lockdown on the original basis, not your fantasy, because it's not only physically impossible - we are not doing it politically or socially, so it's irrelevant.

Being charitable - you're inadvertently being dishonest here.

Your "close friends", unless you met them all on IRC or whatever, literally _exist_ because you met them. Your family exist because you spent time close to each other.

I don't think you really understand what this whole brave new "social distancing" world means. It means never forming social bonds. It means young people never finding a partner, having children. It means children growing up thinking that their friends are virons.

We can do it in lockdown, for a while, that's what we're doing, and sensible people have no issue with that.

If you think we are going to do it for years, you're being daft. It's like imposing a chronic disease on 100% of the population.

Yeah, I reckon that's fairly probable (the lockdown - not the second wave, I think that's inevitable, where the case numbers sit after that is yet to be seen though).

I figure we have N waves, with herd immunity building during the process, and an eventual vaccine which may or may not need to be applied across the whole population by that point.

Yeah, I'm doing everything I can personally at the moment, this is more a discussion around how in N months I feel hands will be forced.

The current situation is some sort of distributed trade of mental health for physical health; the brains of the youth for the bodies of the old. It's not a stable state and will break at some point.

Regarding "russian roulette":

Everyone I know who feels at significant risk is doing the whole "don't leave the house" thing.

Care homes are almost certainly fucked regardless.

I tend to think the major impact is going to be amongst 50+ year olds who are in good health and decide that they can't be arsed with staying inside. We basically don't have a way to deal with this issue collectively.

You're in good company there ;)

For every pint they don't drink, I'll drink two? :)

FWIW, I don't feel that way at all (re throwing old people under the bus).

I think that what's happened is the opposite - the young have been thrown under the bus (even disregarding social activity we have things like school closures, university admissions, exams cancelled), and that economic activity is being hindered unnecessarily, which is having enormous knock-on effects already which will persist for a generation.

I think that the appropriate response is for the vulnerable (old, immunocompromised, or really just anyone with low risk tolerance) to isolate and be given the resources to do so.

Care homes, for example, should be dealt with via paying the staff much higher salaries and having them stay on-site, effectively 'sealing off' the care home and creating an isolated unit.

If you're poor and have to go to work, you should be given enough money such that it's your free choice and you can stay at home if you want.

My vulnerable friends and family are forced into doing this, lockdown or no lockdown, they're disinfecting packages, haven't been outside for months, and probably will be forced into a "new way of life" for the foreseeable future.

This is the sort of thing that we should be using the severe lockdown time for - determining an appropriate way of protecting the individuals which we know to have very high fatality/complication rates - the people for whom we're bothering to do this at all.

What I strongly disagree with is the idea that the lives of the healthy should be deleted in some asinine attempt to drag out the (in my view, inevitable) death toll over a multi-year period.

In the real world, people across the country will be piling in to pubs to socialise (actually socialise, not just 'chat at 2 metres away from a person they already know') and a blind eye will be turned.

People will go out, get smashed, snog, dance, hug, etc. If you force them out onto the street they'll do that. Maybe we'll even have a resurgence of good old pub violence.

Most pubs can't even support this nonsense - a business with 10% of its' normal capacity is a dead business, there's no point in even opening the doors.

I'll accept that the Government _might_ attempt a re-closure after the above happens, but I find that unlikely.

Same here, and that's ignoring the asymptomatic cases, so you can at least triple/quadruple that number.

I use the phrase 'mild insanity' because I honestly feel that it's some element of cabin fever that's caused a minority of individuals to become paralyzed in this way.

At this point we've gone way beyond any semblance of 'flattening the curve' and gotten stuck because there was no plan to unwind the lockdown.

The article takes a long time to essentially get around to saying this:

> But covid-19 and the extreme social-distancing measures used to combat it pose a new and more profound danger to the capital

I feel that during lockdown a fair few people have turned mildly insane - they seem to honestly believe that we're going to stand very far apart from other humans for the rest of time.

It's just not the case. I'll be in the pub by the end of the year.

These posts miss the point of life, to me. They read as propaganda distributed by sociopaths or something.

It's intuitively obvious that if you're a relatively healthy person, and grind at a goal exclusively with no other desire, you'll eventually be at least good at it if not spectacular.

Applying that to something that you're personally interested in makes sense - but the idea that you want to be a "top performer" in some wanky capitalist game so that you can have a load of numbers and buy some fancy toys at the cost of deleting your empathy is totally absurd to most people.

That's _why_ it's abnormal, because it's a shit way to live and most people don't want it. Hell, I thought I wanted it for the longest time, eventually I grew out of it and I'm glad I did and that I'm still able to make up for lost time.

As long as you can convince yourself that you know it's possible - you don't need to like, actually do it. Go and enjoy yourself and those around you, we're only here once.

The PinePhone is $150.

It makes me genuinely really angry that this isn't the case, it has me questioning why I even bother to interact with the development ecosystem when it seems like 90% of the stuff out there is this sort of closed-off 'got mine' fuck-the-environment style thinking.

Maybe it's just too much time on HN?

Like, how many times does one have to push against the bullshit bootlicker arguments before one just gives up?

That answers the question of why management operates the way it does.

It doesn't answer the question for developers.

I actually can't fathom it at all, I find it completely impossible to sustainably perform tasks that I think are socially negative, pretty much regardless of the reward, I'd just shut down and get sacked if they pushed it.

The general response I get to this sort of thing is some variant on "you are privileged", which completely misses the point, it assumes that I have a choice in the matter of whether I do bad stuff.

Maybe I just have too much free time to think about this stuff in and that could be the 'privilege'?

I think you've missed my point here, this goes _way_ further than this specific individual issue.

The entire ecosystem is built on a model that turns it into a disposable toy and there's no sign that this is going away any time soon.

Why do we need hobbyist movements to produce devices that we can actually run real software on and that won't be completely useless as soon as Google decide to update the API?

I ordered a PinePhone the other day and I'm going to do as much as I can to try and make it my daily driver.

I really can't be arsed with this stuff any more.

Why are the developers at Google acting in such boneheaded ways? Is it literally just "I get paid loads of money, lol"? Do people not grow out of that eventually when they have enough?

Like, you're literally a developer. Why would you make something you wouldn't want to use? Is the company just wholly made up of people who actually don't care about computing?

Are HMRC paying you for this comment? :)

I think you're more pointing to the fact that most 'raises' are joke tier. The word 'raise' in and of itself generally refers to an ~inflation bump.

5% per year is practically nothing. There is no point in my life at which I would have ever even noticed the difference other than on a spreadsheet, all the way up from a corner shop minimum wage job.

I think the reason most people push is for those lateral changes when you break into a different "role" and double your salary, change your working hours/respect, etc, because that's a material difference.

Literally nowhere that is a good place to work is even listed in these rankings. It's always massive corporations that get the award for some weird PR reason.

Thought experiment: Google controls 90% of the search market, the 10% (or 1%, whatever) they don't serve being made up of people who are oppressed in some way by the 90%, deliberately or otherwise.

Google censors information relating to that 10% for everyone else. They don't care enough to switch.

Centralization is an issue _a priori_. It's giving power to a single entity that we have no reason to trust will act in everyone's best interests.

Precisely.