The robots cometh
Don McKinnon writes: Re. “Rundle: the automation revolution begins, with jobs mercilessly crushed beneath robotic heels” (yesterday). In the 70s, in my “reading too much Kurt Vonnegut” phase, I read Player Piano. It’s quite a prophetic book (written in the early 50s) as it predicts automation taking jobs away and how society adjusts. Freakily, as Vonnegut predicted, the people who automate employment sectors are often the people working in them and who therefore kill off their own jobs. I have to say I don’t understand why it’s never referenced in these sorts of articles. Especially when groups like Tony Abbott’s Green Army so parallel the Reeks and Wrecks (Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps) in Vonnegut’s book. From memory it was as clever an observation of human behaviour as 1984 or Animal Farm but with the added attraction of the science-fiction (?) aspect which is only science-fiction if you look at it from the 1950s’ perspective because now a lot of it has actually happened.
On codeine
Katherine Stuart writes: Re. “Bizarre nanny state codeine policy an excruciating headache for taxpayers” (yesterday). So sensible Bernard Keane seems way off on this one. There seems to be a good argument that if you have such excruciating pain that you need to be doped down with codeine (I’m unusually sensitive, but one of those strong painkillers with a small amount of codeine is enough to send me off with the fairies), you probably should be seeing some kind of health professional — be it a doctor or a physio or a clinical psychologist or an acupuncturist — to identify and remedy the cause, rather than, in good old Aussie blokey tradition, pretending it’s nothing that can’t be cured with a Bex and a good lie down.
Do we want to return to those days when women (and not doubt men) ignored their pain or smothered it with cheap drugs or alcohol? Seems that’s more nanny state than ever. Seems that’s far less about taking responsibility for one’s health, and far more about wanting ‘nanny’ to fix it.
Katherine Stuart .. does not appear to understand that the problem is that codeine containing medication, currently available over the counter, will now require a script.
This will add to the cost for everybody and is not really likely to make any difference to whatever the numbers of Panadeine “addicts” there may be (???). It has been a minor problem thus far and needing a prescription is not likely to make any difference. Why would anybody trust KPMG anyway, after their part in hiding the criminals and problems that led to the GFC?
Simple preparations are useful when paracetamol is not enough. There are alternatives but some people can not take them.
Katherine Stuart recommends consulting—amongst other practitioners—an acupuncturist if one is suffering from “excruciating” pain. No self-styled acupuncturist is sufficiently qualified, if at all, to “identify and remedy” its cause. The basis of this pseudo-science is that the purported flow of energy along the body’s (non-existent) meridians is disrupted, and can be repaired by the insertion of needles at very specific points, dependent on the malady allegedly being produced by this disruption.
“Acupuncture is a theatrical placebo” is the science-backed conclusion made by Professor Steven Novella from the US Yale University School of Medicine.
Ironically, a Bex (aspirin-phenacetin-caffeine) and a good lie down would be far more effective—to a limited degree of course—than any variety of quack acupuncture treatment.
Anyone trying to be a junkie on OTC codeine isn’t serious and tabloid hysteria about people becoming hooked “accident” is ludicrous – even with heroin one really has to work and put in a lot of effort.
The great danger is the adulteration of opiods with toxic shit such as paracetamol which will irreparably damage the liver while delivering so little buzz – as with laudanum addicts in the 19thC who were being destroyed not by the opium but the alcohol in which it was suspended.
Yet another moral panic with no facts involved.