I take it you’ve never heard of a thing called an armistice?
It did for the past however-million years. Today, humans think they know better than Nature, and pay the price.
No, you have the illusion of choice, enhanced by the illusion of human competence.
It is if they voted for that government 
Society, not homo sapiens.
No, society. People used to accept that they had very little control over the universe-at-large. Now, because we’re all sciency and stuff, we think we can control absolutely bloody everything. Somewhere in the middle is a sensible, sane society.
As @Andrew0409 put it elsewhere (I paraphrase): how many young lives are you prepared to destroy in order to save some small percentage of those people who are nearing the end of their own (either through their own poor life choices or by the natural course of events)? Because that is the tradeoff.
Or to quote Mr Spock: the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Or the one.
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Successful societies protect those who need protecting. And it does not have to be a tradeoff. Combine enlightened leadership with a society of.people who care enough about others to follow simples rules, and you would not need complete shutdowns.
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Exaggeration, many younger people support restrictions and in general young people lives are not being destroyed, they are still going to school and college even if remotely. It’s temporary and vaccines are coming. Middle aged people suffer just as much or more if they lose their jobs anyway.
You are not going to have a healthy economy with a raging pandemic. Same outcome but more deaths.
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Doesn’t that demonstrate my point? I was using the word “young” to mean people in their prime productive years (ie., under 60 or thereabouts).
Here is Elbonia the entire economy has been ripped to pieces, for no apparent benefit. Everyone’s life has been destroyed (except for the ultra-rich). I fully expect the country to descend into fourth-world conditions if they keep this up, at which point, I imagine, China will simply waltz in and take over. For our own good, of course.
No? Why not? I don’t think this has been demonstrated by anyone. It’s a bit of a hypothetical, but given the (largely non-existent) symptoms of COVID-19, I’m just not seeing it.
If it were an ebola pandemic I’d completely agree. It isn’t. And deaths, in and of themselves, do not destroy healthy societies or economies. Healthy societies accept and understand death (cf. the Freudian view on the tension between Eros and Thanatos). Modern man does not.
To return to my basic prediction here: humanity has learned buggerall from this, with their “vaccines are coming real soon now” hype, and we will continue abusing nature and continue thinking that we hold all the control levers. This time we’re seeing a modest number of deaths. Next time, we’ll be decimated. And the time after that, Nature will take 40-60% of us, as she occasionally does. I predict that will happen sometime this century - most likely an antibiotic-resistant bacterial disease. And the scientists will still be selling their snake-oil solutions.
k, good luck with that
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Doesn’t mean you don’t fight it tooth and nail. Keep the old people around and healthy as long as you can. There is an evolutionary reason that humans live longer than most animals and that human societies don’t discard their infirm.
Yes, as long as you can. Not longer. Not at all costs. I’m old, and I don’t expect society to expend too much effort on keeping me alive. It would be nice to get something back for the money I’ve put into various state Health schemes, but I’m not bitter about the fact that (inevitably) people who are younger and have a higher chance of survival will be given priority if I contract a terminal case of COVID-19. That’s a rational medical decision. It’s the sort of decision that doctors make every day, all the time, although the general public like to pretend that it doesn’t happen.
Summer 2022 y’all can fly to wherever you want like it was Christmas 2019.
Best prepare mentally for another summer (2021) stuck in Taiwan.
Start making even grander plans for truly hidden places in Taiwan to visit.
Hope is what elections promise. Reality is what happens when you run into stubborn governments.
Knowing something of what is happening there I don’t disagree. It’s absolutely terrible.
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History shows again and again how nature points up the folly of man.
What you can’t control, survive. That’s good enough for Darwin.
Then again, the oxygen destroyer might do the trick. You never know.
I’d prefer to go out meeting my antiself.
But you can’t get Aids by just being in the same room as someone with Covid
And Covid only kills a small percentage of people.
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Sure, but “society” has never been inundated with so many very old and very vulnerable people. Something like this, given plagues gonna plague, was bound to happen, and it did.
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Are you sure this is true? Maybe in terms of sheer numbers but probably not percentage wise.
I predict that if you’re lucky enough to live in a society where the majority of people are intelligent enough to see the life-changing benefits of wearing medical-grade face masks and don’t whine like bitches about wearing them the following will happen. There won’t be a death from COVID-19 since last May or a case of domestic transmission since last April. Furthermore I predict that due to the Great Wall of masks kicking COVID to the curb there won’t be any lockdowns. Your schools and businesses including restaurants will remain open and operating normally the whole time, avoiding unnecessary destruction to your economy for no real benefit.
That’s my post-COVID-19 world prediction.
Not all of them. Only the ones worth keeping around.
Percentage seems to be going up up up since 1960. I think vaccines, health care, better food and less war have helped a lot. I don’t think I’m too far out on a limb when I suggest that the percentage of very old people was NOT higher at any other time in history…just considering those factors. I left my FACTFULNESS book in NY, but it seems reasonable.
If you go back too far, then you have to adjust what “very old” means, as life expectancy has skyrocketed too, some places by 30 years since WW2.
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