throwaway55421

I recently submitted an objection to an advertising banner in my city and the planning board rejected it.

Result.

No, I don't.

I want to run in the forest, stand outside in the rain, enjoy a pint with a friend after handing over a crisp fiver. I want to chop firewood and build a cabinet. I want to feel the cold Siberian breeze, and thank the postman with a bottle of wine. Drive my old, rusty, loud car through busy city traffic, and fuck my partner over the kitchen worktop.

The only real use I can see for VR that would actually appeal is in disability adjustment. Everything mentioned in the article sounds like a junkie's version of the real thing.

An inspiration. The best way to challenge insanity is to simply ignore it and move forward without consideration.

You can't debate apartheid because it's farcical to begin with. The terminology even - exemption - makes our brains feel fuzzy, confused. What is this "exemption"? I'll just do my thing, thanks.

We could all learn something from this.

Unironically using the term "mingling indoors" is an indicator that you're sufficiently far gone down the corona rabbit hole that it's pointless for us to discuss further because we see the world in completely different ways.

More value would be derived from discussing climate change with a Martian.

We could hash it out over a pint at the pub, but you don't mingle indoors see, so...

Sorry, but I think this is a bit comical, I don't have the patience for such farce.

We had a consecutive six months of it being literally illegal to visit family in the UK.

My job was banned by the Government and hasn't recovered.

I have _still_ not been able to practice many of my hobbies because the legal framework has made it impossible to plan forward more than a week or so.

Is it a gulag? No. Is it worth it? Worth what? Coronavirus is a 1% IFR disease, lower with vaccines. Boring.

> I merely observe that friendships did not flow naturally from going to meetups, the way you seem to be suggesting happens readily.

You're right, you definitely need to put a lot of effort in, inviting people, navigating problems, finding good people, etc.

And yeah, some social occasions are better than others.

The main point I'm making really is that you need to get out there and do stuff. If you don't even try then you have a 100% chance of failure.

Which is why I find some of the comments below rather odd.

The potential downside to asking your neighbour out for a pint is almost zero, the upside is unlimited. I mean, they could be an axe murderer or rapist, but actually we don't live in a movie and they're probably not, lol.

You've spent two years not socializing but you like socializing?

Well, that's enough HN for today. Merry Christmas.

Did you invite anyone from the meetups to do stuff?

Interestingly, your wife isn't Feynman's wife.

I live in inner London.

I don't really want to reveal much more hence the throwaway. But honestly I think, you get what you put in. If you want something, assume other people want that thing too, and go from there.

Usually it happens when new people move in, so a few times a year.

It's more common for us to meet in the street e.g. say hi whilst someone is at their front door.

To be fair I don't live in a megablock, they're not that common in London, most people I know live in converted townhouses which only have a few flats in them.

e.g. https://i.pinimg.com/originals/01/9e/b9/019eb97dd77c0dc3191e...

usually they're smaller than this.

It's interesting that we can have such different life experiences.

Well, me and my neighbours are happy to be weird in your view. You do you. I don't think you're weird btw, just less social I guess?

Mask mandates are a political choice, though.

The UK was doing well throughout all of Summer and we've only now had a bit of an Omicron scare due to people not wanting to self isolate over Christmas.

Most people aren't that bothered about corona, they respond to legal threats and marketing.

My suggestions are literally in rank order of the people I most frequently spend time with.

I take part in a few hobby based meetups and run events based around those things. Some of the people I have met through these are pretty tight now, we had a Christmas dinner a couple of weeks ago.

The last time I moved home I threw a house warming and invited the neighbours around. Knocked on the door with a bottle of wine. The ones that came along I still know and some are now close friends.

I could go through the other examples but really I guess it just comes down to whether you think I'm full of shit or not. :)

You are conflating the emotion of grief with mental disorders.

It's pretty common nowadays, I find it quite strange.

My grandfather died when I was younger and it sucked. I still miss him.

But I could go to his funeral and hang out with my friends in the bar, go on holiday, study hard at University, etc, employ all of the normal time tested coping mechanisms.

Coronavirus restrictions deliberately took and removed almost everything it means to be human from people.

Sitting inside and only interacting with the world through a screen is obviously hilariously unhealthy.

It's not the case that they would need to close.

Across the Western world the vast majority of the economic and social issues have been caused by legalities rather than pandemic reality.

For example, for better or worse, if the 10 day isolation and testing regime did not exist in the UK then staff shortages would not either. People aren't actually getting ill en masse - we've just recalibrated what ill means.

> As long as you're actively invested in spending your time, and not just let it vanish one second at a time, I believe any activity is worthy of experimentation.

This is a great sentiment and one that lines up well with my philosophy in life, thank you for summarising it so concisely!

What probably makes sense is to enforce that a measure of equal fire risk reduction is applied if reasonable.

The easiest way to achieve this is probably external ladders for most buildings and putting disabled occupants on the ground floor or just in bungalows or something. Sheltered housing is pretty common in the UK.

A fully covered, fancy carpeted staircase seems OTT if its' purpose is basically to be a fire escape.

Introducing yourself to your neighbours is too "weird" for you?

Well, revealed preferences I guess. Best of luck. I enjoy chatting to my neighbours and I'd have no issue with them popping in for a cup of tea.

Meet up groups, popping to the pub for lunch and meeting the locals, knocking on neighbour's doors to introduce yourself, asking an old friend if they want to come over and play some Goldeneye.

You just have to actually do it.

For disclosure though, I don't work remotely, the benefits (mainly skipping a bit of cycling each day) seem minor to me compared to the downsides. And I never stopped socializing to begin with since I think corona is overblown, so I'm maintaining and adding to social groups.

I have lost a lot of friends too, of course.

This doesn't match my experience at all, you just have to have a good sense of humour.

One of the first things I learn in a language is how to say some variant of "I'm a little puppy", spring chicken, I speak like a 2 year old, etc.

You're never going to sound like the Queen, no-one reasonable expects that.

This is true for speaking but listening is impossible.

The vast majority of people do not speak using the simple terms that are in those 100 top lists.

As an example - I would guess that from my previous sentence, "vast", "majority", "simple", "terms", "lists" and possibly more would not be present, and that's in only one relatively simple sentence.

I can "speak in" probably ten languages, but I'd only say I can really _speak_ bidirectionally in one or possibly two.

Educational subscriptions.

I used to be a huge miser and resent the idea of paying for, well, anything digital or knowledge based.

Now I realise that, well, I'd spend £5 on a pint in a pub, what's £10 a month? Even if there's only a 1% chance I actually learn XYZ that's better than nothing.

No, lots of people do actually think that, but we believe that three main methods can be employed to mitigate this:

1. aggressive triage based on chances and QALY remaining

2. increased healthcare funding

3. voluntary isolation of individuals who see lockdown as being preferable to their personal coronavirus risk

Will it result in more deaths than February 2020? Sure. But we don't have that choice because sars2 exists now.

We think it's better to ration healthcare and therefore doom an unlucky minority, versus rationing life itself for everyone (via lockdowns and restrictions) and slow killing everyone.

As far as I can tell, most of the lockdown debate centres around an erroneous idea that we can just do X, Y, Z, and then immunosuppressed Harriet can rejoin the world and avoid contracting coronavirus.

But she just can't. Even the original strain would have eventually infected her with high probability unless we continued to cycle lockdowns or she voluntarily isolated.

Triple vaccinated, got probable Omicron recently.

Asymptomatic. Not truly - in hindsight I had a bit of a cough and felt slightly off for a day or two - but nothing above baseline (I get coughs every couple of weeks)

Could have been a secondary or tertiary exposure though, I don't usually bother testing.

Well, the entire point of thinking is to feel. There is nothing else - feelings are how we ground our value systems.

Thinking helps you decide on facts, feeling helps you decide how to act on them.

If my boss suddenly invented a new demand on me and said "do this or you're fired", I might do it whilst making plans to quit as well.

In fact I have.

Do what you want to do, rather than what you "need" to do, and you won't think about this stuff.

I'm not the world #1 badminton champion. So?

Smaller companies that don't specialise in a specific thing.

Do you have the money to pay a locksmith a competitive rate? Same.

This sounds like basically just having an employee but with different legal standing as a loophole or something.

Contracting is completely different, you generally define a set project to complete, do it, and get out.

In the UK there's something valled IR35 which means that in order for you to be considered an independent entity for tax purposes you should have full control over working hours, practices, etc.