6 ms·

Well before acceptable risk became a dirty word during the covid pandemic, we used to argue as a society as to how much risk in our daily life we are willing to

Well before acceptable risk became a dirty word during the covid pandemic, we used to argue as a society as to how much risk in our daily life we are willing to tolerate. Now zero is the only acceptable answer to many

rootusrootus 5y ago
To be fair, covid has wiped out more than 10x as the flu usually takes, and the entire population of the planet started out susceptible. Plus, there's a fair bit of distance between 0 and 700,000+.
- iammisc 5y ago
  I didn't mention the flu. I mentioned making tradeoffs between death rate and living life. Why does everyone bring up the flu when talking about covid? Flu is a deadly endemic virus that most people have natural immunity too (yes, even if you get a bad flu, the fact that your body has some past experience helps you fight it off and not get as sick as someone who's immunocompromised).
  - KittenInABox 5y ago
    I mean honestly I live in the US and my life hasn't been that affected. I can go to karaoke, bars, parties, even with strangers with no concerns. I show I'm vaccinated, wear a mask, that's it. Oh, wait, I also use more hand sanitizer than before. I even got the nice kind that has a good scent to it and doesn't dry my hands. I'm sure it sucks more for people with conditions that compromise their immune system or people who live with such conditions. And I wish more people would vaccinate and mask up like me so they don't have to worry about its spread. But its political now, so our most vulnerable suffer.
    - iammisc 5y ago
      Oh well, that's way worse than where I live in the United States, but the fact is you shouldn't have to do any of that to go anywhere. By the way you put it your 'not affected' is actually more strict than Oregon state (which is known for having had more severe lockdowns than others). Shows you how far the definition of 'not affected' has come. If you had told us four years ago you needed to provide medical information to enter a store, most people would have rightly been horrified. Thankfully the united states is not there yet.
  - rootusrootus 5y ago
    > Why does everyone bring up the flu when talking about covid? Because the next step for covid is to settle into endemic status. Influenza is instructive because it serves as an indicator of the level of risk society is willing to tolerate from a virus.
    - iammisc 5y ago
      The flu regularly (like every few hundred years or so, I think) mutates into a strain that kills 10x as many as other strains. And our level of risk has basically always been... nothing. We don't do anything special for flu, at least not in general society.
dc-programmer 5y ago
Like I mentioned in another comment, people are refusing to accept increasing worse outcomes (at least in pedestrian safety). Additionally, I’d wager most reasonable people are willing to accept the unavoidable risks of driving. However, many car collisions involve people taking risks that are not necessary to transport themselves from A to B (speeding, drinking, texting, failing to indicate turn). Breaking traffic laws aren’t crimes of necessity, or borne of poverty, it just people refusing to think about how their shitty actions effect others. Society is completely complacent to bad driving behavior. The whole zero risk thing is a straw intended to shit down the conversation
- iammisc 5y ago
  > speeding, drinking, texting, failing to indicate turn Are these not already against the law? BY no means am I asking to repeal these sensible laws. Also, I dunno what I'd wager any more. I used to think that people would not accept being forced to hand over personal medical information to enter a location to prevent a disease with an incredibly low deathrate for most of the population and with an incredibly low deathrate for the remainder of the population with a freely available drug, but everybody else seems to think this is normal. Or like, after 9/11, I thought having your nudes photographed by the government to enter an airplane would be considered a gross violation of privacy, but now having a pornographic photoshoot / assault is considered totally normal at the airport. It seems to me people are increasingly willing to trade freedom for 'security'.
Karrot_Kream 5y ago
The problem with weighing risks and rewards with driving is that the balance differs significantly based on whether you're a driver or a non-driver. Drivers experience many of the rewards of driving and driving-oriented infrastructure (wide roads, convenient parking, private spaces) and very few of the risks (noise, pollution, risk of injury, risk of death). To make matters worse, for the last 50 years, significant safety improvements have gone into the driving experience without significantly helping the non-driving experience. This means that drivers not only have higher reward and less risk, but they perceive the act of driving as becoming _safer_ with better design and more technology (like blind-spot sensors) while larger vehicle sizes and faster speeds have resulted in _increased risk_ for non-drivers. This is also why these debates are usually so fractious; drivers see a world of convenience and increasing safety being threatened by anti-car advocates, while non-drivers see driving as an increasingly dangerous, callous, and selfish act only becoming more dangerous and more callous to non-drivers. Add into the mix the inherent climate implications of driving (even though electric cars may not emit exhaust into the air, generation of electricity itself is not clean in most parts of the US) and the risk-reward becomes even more complex. There's also the question of tax burden. Non-drivers receive almost none [1] of the benefits that road taxes, but in most of the US things like public transit are expected to be largely funded through fares and not taxes. Then there's the even murkier territory that roads in lower income areas are mostly used as thoroughfares by wealthier folks who don't live in these areas, and their through usage ends up putting a higher tax burden on the roads in these areas despite these lower income folks not actually accounting for most of the usage of their own roads. I'm not going to talk about COVID at all. [1]: There is indirect benefit here through the truck logistics network and probably meeting friends and family over interstates that makes this more murky.

rootusrootus 5y ago

To be fair, covid has wiped out more than 10x as the flu usually takes, and the entire population of the planet started out susceptible. Plus, there's a fair bit of distance between 0 and 700,000+.

iammisc 5y ago
I didn't mention the flu. I mentioned making tradeoffs between death rate and living life. Why does everyone bring up the flu when talking about covid? Flu is a deadly endemic virus that most people have natural immunity too (yes, even if you get a bad flu, the fact that your body has some past experience helps you fight it off and not get as sick as someone who's immunocompromised).
- KittenInABox 5y ago
  I mean honestly I live in the US and my life hasn't been that affected. I can go to karaoke, bars, parties, even with strangers with no concerns. I show I'm vaccinated, wear a mask, that's it. Oh, wait, I also use more hand sanitizer than before. I even got the nice kind that has a good scent to it and doesn't dry my hands. I'm sure it sucks more for people with conditions that compromise their immune system or people who live with such conditions. And I wish more people would vaccinate and mask up like me so they don't have to worry about its spread. But its political now, so our most vulnerable suffer.
  - iammisc 5y ago
    Oh well, that's way worse than where I live in the United States, but the fact is you shouldn't have to do any of that to go anywhere. By the way you put it your 'not affected' is actually more strict than Oregon state (which is known for having had more severe lockdowns than others). Shows you how far the definition of 'not affected' has come. If you had told us four years ago you needed to provide medical information to enter a store, most people would have rightly been horrified. Thankfully the united states is not there yet.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  > Why does everyone bring up the flu when talking about covid? Because the next step for covid is to settle into endemic status. Influenza is instructive because it serves as an indicator of the level of risk society is willing to tolerate from a virus.
  - iammisc 5y ago
    The flu regularly (like every few hundred years or so, I think) mutates into a strain that kills 10x as many as other strains. And our level of risk has basically always been... nothing. We don't do anything special for flu, at least not in general society.

dc-programmer 5y ago

Like I mentioned in another comment, people are refusing to accept increasing worse outcomes (at least in pedestrian safety). Additionally, I’d wager most reasonable people are willing to accept the unavoidable risks of driving. However, many car collisions involve people taking risks that are not necessary to transport themselves from A to B (speeding, drinking, texting, failing to indicate turn). Breaking traffic laws aren’t crimes of necessity, or borne of poverty, it just people refusing to think about how their shitty actions effect others. Society is completely complacent to bad driving behavior. The whole zero risk thing is a straw intended to shit down the conversation

iammisc 5y ago
> speeding, drinking, texting, failing to indicate turn Are these not already against the law? BY no means am I asking to repeal these sensible laws. Also, I dunno what I'd wager any more. I used to think that people would not accept being forced to hand over personal medical information to enter a location to prevent a disease with an incredibly low deathrate for most of the population and with an incredibly low deathrate for the remainder of the population with a freely available drug, but everybody else seems to think this is normal. Or like, after 9/11, I thought having your nudes photographed by the government to enter an airplane would be considered a gross violation of privacy, but now having a pornographic photoshoot / assault is considered totally normal at the airport. It seems to me people are increasingly willing to trade freedom for 'security'.

Karrot_Kream 5y ago

The problem with weighing risks and rewards with driving is that the balance differs significantly based on whether you're a driver or a non-driver. Drivers experience many of the rewards of driving and driving-oriented infrastructure (wide roads, convenient parking, private spaces) and very few of the risks (noise, pollution, risk of injury, risk of death). To make matters worse, for the last 50 years, significant safety improvements have gone into the driving experience without significantly helping the non-driving experience. This means that drivers not only have higher reward and less risk, but they perceive the act of driving as becoming _safer_ with better design and more technology (like blind-spot sensors) while larger vehicle sizes and faster speeds have resulted in _increased risk_ for non-drivers. This is also why these debates are usually so fractious; drivers see a world of convenience and increasing safety being threatened by anti-car advocates, while non-drivers see driving as an increasingly dangerous, callous, and selfish act only becoming more dangerous and more callous to non-drivers. Add into the mix the inherent climate implications of driving (even though electric cars may not emit exhaust into the air, generation of electricity itself is not clean in most parts of the US) and the risk-reward becomes even more complex. There's also the question of tax burden. Non-drivers receive almost none [1] of the benefits that road taxes, but in most of the US things like public transit are expected to be largely funded through fares and not taxes. Then there's the even murkier territory that roads in lower income areas are mostly used as thoroughfares by wealthier folks who don't live in these areas, and their through usage ends up putting a higher tax burden on the roads in these areas despite these lower income folks not actually accounting for most of the usage of their own roads. I'm not going to talk about COVID at all. [1]: There is indirect benefit here through the truck logistics network and probably meeting friends and family over interstates that makes this more murky.