Is universal healthcare important enough to cede control over what we put into our own bodies?

That's the only important question. As far as I'm concerned the answer is definitionally no, and I live in the UK where we arguably have it.

It's an endless rabbit hole of authoritarianism. Ban cigarettes, ban sugar in high concentration, ban fast food, mandate vaccines. If we find out that taking an aspirin a day improves health outcomes - mandate that too. Ban unprotected sex - just use phone cameras to enforce it or whatever.

There is literally no end to it because if we only take into account the one metric "does this thing affect aggregate health outcomes" you can justify banning anything.

I'm sure someone will read this and get grumpy that I've mentioned vaccination. I have three, they're ace.

The idea of authoritarian policy is that you don't have a choice; your opinion is truly irrelevant. I don't think its' proponents often hold that in the forefront of their mind, they only focus on "well, right now I'm on the popular side" or whatever.

This sort of thing is why I still use cash as much as possible.

That way you have an atomic transfer. I get food, you get money.

It could easily work with card, just pay on arrival and show the driver the payment confirmation.

But that would mean Uber taking a small risk of fraud (e.g. people ordering food they didn't want before their account gets banned).

So it won't happen unless people force it. It's the sort of thing that makes me wish that everyone else just, well, had a backbone. There are so many minor examples of bad systems all over the place that continue to exist because most people just put up with bad practice.

Not an advert, but I predominantly use Just Eat in the UK for this reason, or just go directly to restaurants. Their fees are lower too.

That is funny because I always use credit cards because I want to protect myself… if I give you cash for something and then you fail to give it to me, I have no way of getting my cash back. If I use a credit card, my bank can get it back for me.

Right, except with an atomic transfer this is impossible.

You can literally stand at the door, check that the food is there, done.

The worst case is that the restaurant scams you and it's not good food. This happens far far less than the middleman scams or pseudo-scams like oversubscribing delivery drivers so that everything is cold or late.

I'd like to hear more about the industry of delivering food without prepayment.

I mean, almost all pizza delivery was cash on delivery until fairly recently, which is food delivery without prepayment. The driver would tell you how much you owed, and you hand them the cash plus a tip. Yes, sometimes pizza places would have issues with people prank ordering a bunch of pizzas to someone else’s house, but pizza shops had ways to try to mitigate that risk.

If you are really too young to remember this, you can watch “Home Alone” to see some examples of how this worked.

Right, the fancy delivery apps aren't even ten years old yet. You couldn't even pay by card at all until ~2010 in the UK, I'm sure the odd weird pizza shop might have allowed you to read out details over the phone...?

Thanks, but I wasn't asking about history. You can't roll the clock back.

I'm old enough to remember when you could pump gas before paying, and there was actually at least one place that had full service in town (I've never lived in NJ or OR).

Umm, you can still order from most pizza places and pay on delivery. You just call them up on the phone.

Er, basically every takeaway I've ever bought?

Is this a joke? Come to mine and we'll get an Indian in? lol.

I'm getting the impression that people are avoiding saying "it's a thing outside the US".

I'm in the US, though, so I was interested if it was a thing in the US.

I am also in the US (California) and still sometimes order pizza to be paid with cash on delivery. It is a thing in the US

foodpanda

>This sort of thing is why I still use cash as much as possible. >That way you have an atomic transfer. I get food, you get money.

Oh no you don't.

I got burned at a food truck that only took cash. I gave them money, they produce the food a minute later and say I haven't paid. I have no receipt and it's too busy for witnesses.

How many places do you pay cash and they don't give receipts? Don't you think there is a positive correlation? Why might that be? Who does it benefit?

I don't really think that reading news improves my life. In some cases it directly contradicts my lived experience and understanding (loosely it could be described as propaganda, but often it's just nonsense for clicks). In other cases, it's just fluff.

I do it anyway, but only really because it's accessible. If it weren't a few clicks away, I don't think I'd bother.

Particularly over the past year or so, my life has been improved by simply ignoring what the news is saying because it's been so conflicting and nonsensical.

So, yeah. I'd say that it's only worth doing something if it improves your life. If it does, crack on. If not, well, there's a big world out there and a lot to do.

Lobby to change the rules because they're ridiculous, or develop a method that makes it impossible for them to get caught?

It just makes no sense to me on the face of it. What do you do if they have a chat in the pub after work, bug the table?

For clarification, a chat in the pub is not “written communication”, and therefore has a different rule.

Yes, it’s dumb, and your point stands.

In the UK and US about 0.2-0.3% of the population have died of this thing and we're almost certainly over the worst of it (e.g. annual death rates will be lower going forward) due to vaccination.

It doesn't matter how many times people are fed the stats - they just have different opinions. To some people that's a big number, to others it's trivial.

I have found no way to bridge this gap, it's probably the main reason that I've found the past two years difficult.

You either think it's a non issue because 1-2% of people die every year anyway, or you think it's the worst thing ever because... well I don't know, but lots of people think that and want us to reduce our quality of life dramatically to try and combat it.

I think it’s because your stats are off.

“The age-adjusted death rate decreased by 1.1% from 731.9 deaths per 100,000 standard population in 2017 to 723.6 in 2018.”

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db355.htm

So that’s an overall death rate of 0.7% in the US pre COVID. If the death rate becomes 1%-2% with COVID, that’s an increase of 50% - 200% in the number of people dying.

That’s … not negligible.

Whether you think that should affect your “quality of life” I think depends a lot on your level of empathy.

150K in the UK have died of coronavirus, we have 67 million, that's 0.22%, and most of that was pre-vaccine.

I can't really be bothered to trawl US stats, but I imagine the figures are about the same. Let's say it's 0.3%.

I just don't think that reducing our average annual risk of death by 0.3% is worth doing stuff like locking ourselves indoors or just not doing anything communally any more.

It's _our_ quality of life, fwiw - I'm not the only person that exists, restrictions affect everyone and empathy is applicable to all scenarios.

edit: actually, it's not even annually 0.3%, because it's now been ~21 months since coronavirus hit our shores, so we're looking at ~0.12% or so annually.

The headline here reads a bit like "person takes mask off to eat a sandwich".

Obviously people use messaging software with their colleagues.

The correct solution is to design systems in which that isn't an issue. If you need to monitor what people are saying at all times then you have far bigger problems.

Either you didn't read the linked article (you generally should, before commenting) or you fail to grasp the issue at hand.

It's a wholly different situation if colleagues were just informally chatting with one and another but they were circumventing regulations that require talk about customers to be documented.

I disagree that there's an issue, saying that I "fail to grasp" it is needlessly insulting.

I am in a fairly similar situation. Your issue is simply that you must learn to relax, after spending most of your life grinding it can be challenging to simply... be.

You worked your arse off for money. And now you have it. It's completed, finished, done. Mission accomplished. Whack at least half of it in stable investments and chill.

You don't need to join Facebook or Google because you don't need their money. You know as well as most of us that they're not doing anything useful or even interesting.

So go and buy that house you wanted. Learn DIY. Learn a language. Travel. Learn to cook. Work out, get a personal trainer. Figure out how a microcontroller works. Garden. Build a car. I don't know, I'm just describing stuff I enjoy.

Do all of the things you couldn't do because you didn't have time. Now you have time and money.

Now life really begins, because now you are free, truly free, to do what _you_ want, and not what others decree upon you for their own benefit. Savour it!

Along the way, I promise you, you will figure out what you truly love.

Why do others need to adopt it?

It's a useful tool regardless of how widely it's used. Would it become better if others used it as well?

So they "mandate" a third dose, nothing happens long term, so they do a fourth lockdown, close some businesses again, do some travel bans, tell people to put things on their faces, nothing happens long term, so they "mandate" a fourth dose, do a fourth lockdown...

And then the virus is still everywhere, it's still significantly more dangerous to be outside than it was in February 2020, and now it's a tremendous administrative pain in the arse to do everything, everyone is terrified due to your big marketing campaign, and we all get it anyway repeatedly.

But this time, of course, it'll be different.

> everyone is terrified due to your big marketing campaign

Yeah, a lot of people dying tends to terrify people.

The data has only trended in one direction since the beginning. The response continues to trend in exactly the opposite direction.

This is increasing apparent with Omicron.