231–240 of 470 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And some of us have been cooped up with spouse and kids for almost a year. When I get a little alone time I'm especially grateful. Still, I'd love to go to this bar! Or the pub down the street.
The way things are going at the moment, I'll have to emigrate to somewhere "sane" like Belarus in order to even meet another person.
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In my case there's a goal. I'm putting together enough money for a house deposit in another country when we emigrate later in the year. When I'm tired as all hell and wishing I could just go back to bed, that's what keeps me going. When I'm not tired as all hell I actually still enjoy the work, so that helps.
Out of curiosity, where are you planning to go? I am planning to leave the UK too and would like to know some options. So far my plan is to end up somewhere in Eastern Europe. Cost of living is low enough that I can actually afford a property instead of burning piles of cash for a shitty London flat.
Cost of living is pretty high, salaries are pretty OK (better than a lot of UK perm, not as good as UK fintech contracting AFAICT), houses are big if you live out of the city centres, the sun shines and the beaches go on forever :)
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Different countries, and different situations. Living in a big old house in the country with your family? Your life is probably basically the same as it always was. Potentially better, depending on the work situation. Okay, sure, you're not going on as many holidays, and depending on how strict the rules are where you are, dinner parties are off the cards. Living in a flat as a single person in the big exciting city?…
> Living in a flat as a single person in the big exciting city? Literally everything you do has been illegal or restricted in some form for almost a year now. And unsafe , too. I'm not not going to restaurants because I'm not allowed to (they're actually opening back up a little bit here now), but because under the present circumstances it's not safe to do so.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Different countries, and different situations. Living in a big old house in the country with your family? Your life is probably basically the same as it always was. Potentially better, depending on the work situation. Okay, sure, you're not going on as many holidays, and depending on how strict the rules are where you are, dinner parties are off the cards. Living in a flat as a single person in the big exciting city?…
> Living in a flat as a single person in the big exciting city? Literally everything you do has been illegal or restricted in some form for almost a year now. And unsafe , too. I'm not not going to restaurants because I'm not allowed to (they're actually opening back up a little bit here now), but because under the present circumstances it's not safe to do so.
I don't know anything about your personal situation, but if you're healthy and relatively young the risk from Covid (first catching it, then having a bad time with it) in resuming these aspects of normal life may be extremely low, even compared to activities you wouldn't think twice about doing pre-pandemic - like taking a short car ride for example.
I think there are probably a lot of people struggling with this sort of thing. Cognitive behaviour therapy incorporating aspects of exposure therapy could be useful here.
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Yes, it's terrible. Even those of us who are "coping" aren't coping terribly well. But ironically the disconnection has made the costs of the disease invisible as well. The zoom funerals. I personally know a couple of people who are now effectively long-term disabled with respiratory issues - well enough to leave hospital, but their previous lifestyle can't come back. The death toll dwarfs every single "disaster" in…
But those mostly killed people still the prime of their lives, while COVID mostly (not entirely, but mostly) advances the Grim Reaper for the old and sick who likely only had a few years anyway. If we measured the toll in disability-adjusted life years instead, the comparison would be quite different. Cynical thought: COVID lockdowns are extreme largely because unlike most public health problems it affects the rich t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, it's terrible. Even those of us who are "coping" aren't coping terribly well. But ironically the disconnection has made the costs of the disease invisible as well. The zoom funerals. I personally know a couple of people who are now effectively long-term disabled with respiratory issues - well enough to leave hospital, but their previous lifestyle can't come back. The death toll dwarfs every single "disaster" in…
But those mostly killed people still the prime of their lives, while COVID mostly (not entirely, but mostly) advances the Grim Reaper for the old and sick who likely only had a few years anyway. If we measured the toll in disability-adjusted life years instead, the comparison would be quite different. Cynical thought: COVID lockdowns are extreme largely because unlike most public health problems it affects the rich t…
'at least they're old'
This has wiped out FAMILES. 2.4M worldwide and nearly 500k in the US. And it flies past people due to fatigue and habituation.
On a weekly basis, I miss "camping out" at my Starbucks and reading, growing slowly more wired on caffeine. This is the lack that seems to have put me off of my game the most, despite it not having a whole lot of personal interaction.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But those mostly killed people still the prime of their lives, while COVID mostly (not entirely, but mostly) advances the Grim Reaper for the old and sick who likely only had a few years anyway. If we measured the toll in disability-adjusted life years instead, the comparison would be quite different. Cynical thought: COVID lockdowns are extreme largely because unlike most public health problems it affects the rich t…
> COVID mostly (not entirely, but mostly) advances the Grim Reaper for the old and sick who likely only had a few years anyway What a disgusting attitude. How is this different from "Why bother treating cancer patients? Most are going to die early anyway"? Do you think old and sick people simply provide no value to society? I think you're trying to argue that it's worse if a young, otherwise healthy person dies, but…
No, the GP is pointing out the well-established social-psychology theory that people already implicitly rank things this way, and that this is why the death toll doesn’t have more of a mental impact on people in changing their decisions, even when they hear about it.
It’s the same reason that news like “baby of suburban WASP nuclear family gets kidnapped” turns into a whole-community man-hunt with special ribbons that gets remembered for years, while news like “baby of urban black single mother gets kidnapped” never even gets acknowledged by the community.
When people who are high-status to society go away, the whole of society mourns. When people who are low-status to society go away, only those directly affected mourn.
Any death-toll number, in the mind of most human beings (or rather, of any human being who’s only engaging with the problem using System 1 thinking), isn’t interpreted as “raw numbers” of lives lost, or even QALYs lost — instead, it’s felt as an aggregate of social-status lost, subjective to the listener’s personal social-status ranking function.
For the same reason that people don’t tend to worry much about disasters half-way across the world (the aggregate social-status weight computed through their status ranking function still sums low), people won’t tend to worry much about the impact of a local disaster if it’s only directly hurting local low-status people. Even if it’s indirectly impacting high-status people by taking away people they care directly about, that still doesn’t generate the sort of performative shame for not having acted that comes when high-status individuals are taken†.
And since that very performative shame is what policy-makers rely on as a group impetus to for getting changes pushed through on a society-wide level, a lack of it means that nothing can really change, even when there are clear rational reasons to implement change.
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† Evo-psych just-so hypothesis (i.e. take this with 50 grains of salt): people are expected to sacrifice to protect high-status people; people who do so are rewarded by the high-status people; and so, over generations, it became a eusocial instinct to feel an urge toward performative shame when you “fail to protect” a high-status person in your community—even one you never personally knew.
But people aren’t expected to sacrifice for low-status affiliations of high-status people (since it’d “only” be the high-status person, and not the rest of the community, enforcing the norm on you), so a similar eusocial instinct toward performative shame for failing to protect those people never arose.
Maybe it's the rural setup where I'm from, but I'm glad that in 2020 and 2021 I barely visited bars. Summer was spent by lakes and forests, drinking beers, cocktails, appetizers, and eating freshly grilled BBQ for a fraction of the price, having quality time in the sun with friends. I don't miss commercial society, I don't miss their tropes and their rituals. Fake friendship and banter from people hanging around to g…
Fuck off into the sun. Of course people are going to lament when their jobs vanish and the business they built over years of hard work is in a very real danger of tanking. I should know, my food service business is down quite a bit - and we're one of the lucky ones that is doing well enough to stay afloat given that we had a strong takeaway focus even before the C-19 hit. An entire segment of jobs blown away - what do those people do? Shit like "learn to code" is not a helpful answer, and history suggests that what they do end up doing after a long enough period of hopelessness is not pretty.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But those mostly killed people still the prime of their lives, while COVID mostly (not entirely, but mostly) advances the Grim Reaper for the old and sick who likely only had a few years anyway. If we measured the toll in disability-adjusted life years instead, the comparison would be quite different. Cynical thought: COVID lockdowns are extreme largely because unlike most public health problems it affects the rich t…
> COVID mostly (not entirely, but mostly) advances the Grim Reaper for the old and sick who likely only had a few years anyway What a disgusting attitude. How is this different from "Why bother treating cancer patients? Most are going to die early anyway"? Do you think old and sick people simply provide no value to society? I think you're trying to argue that it's worse if a young, otherwise healthy person dies, but…
> rather than fast, decisive action
It is worth noting that even if there had been the "fast, decisive action" that epidemologist advisers wanted, that would have still imposed border closures in perpetuity. Life might have gone on "like normal" within a country, but people could not interact with their neighbors.
We see already some Australians advocating for hotel quarantine to be obligatory even after COVID, because a year of closed borders has made them regard outsiders as dirty. How long before border closures awaken old nationalist conflicts that freedom of movement and actually getting to know the other side had largely put to rest?