Attendance dropped due to lockdowns and the fear campaign.
I was there, remember? The pubs were rammed, Boris started saying "don't do X", numbers decreased a lot, he said "we make this legal now", the world stopped.
I'm bored of debating this now so whatever, all I get online is a stream of trolls. Good luck.
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.
If we don't lock down and you break your leg, you may not get medical attention.
So let's lock down so that it's impossible to break your leg.
I'm totally happy to accept that contracting coronavirus could be triaged lower than acute chronic conditions, heart attacks, etc, that's an interesting debate to have because healthcare is scarce and therefore an ordering _must_ be chosen.
What makes no sense is just flinging our hands up and saying "well, stop the world for everyone instead".
If you want to lockdown, you can lockdown, and now you are safe. You don't need others to do so, the virus does not travel through windows and walls.
As such the stance is definitionally illogical which makes it flippant - it falls apart under even mild scrutiny.
I've seen about a billion variations on it now, it just gets boring to bat them off. e.g. "if the healthcare system is overwhelmed, you'll die in a minor car crash, so don't go outside, then you won't drive your car or stand near cars, then you can't die in a minor car crash anyway, err... but lockdown though!".
It's tautologically broken. The basic premise is of "not doing X, in order to not do X".
Yeah, okay. I know anecdotes are not data, we're supposed to trust the Internet over our own eyes and all of that, but come on, do you think I'm dense?
I know over a hundred people who've had coronavirus at this point, this is clearly total nonsense.
It is not possible because it is not possible to arrive at the stance via logic.
If not for the marketing campaign; certainly if not for the "original sin" of Italy's lockdown; we wouldn't even be speaking about this.
If coronavirus were highly transmissible ebola it would make sense. It's just not, most of us know tens or hundreds of people who've had it at this point (the UK has a _confirmed_ case rate of over 17%).
People who call for authoritarian measures such as using force in order to prevent people from leaving their homes, from associating with friends and family, and from engaging in business, should not have the best assumed of them.
They have malicious intentions a priori because they treat controlling others with the same level of discipline as they would choosing which flavour of jam to put on their toast in the morning.
They are enemies of freedom and democracy; I'd argue they are truly terrorists, in that they seek to use fear and terror to control others' behaviours.
People who _explain and convince_ are interested in what you call discussion. People who use force against you unless you do exactly what they tell you are not engaging in discussion, they're engaging in an attempt at control.
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...?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.