The vast majority of heroin addicts today started with prescription painkillers. Many of them went into a doctor's office and took the pill that was prescribed to them by a trusted community member with a diploma on the wall. The problem was that these doctors were frequently either directly corrupt or under the unwitting influence of false advertising from Purdue Pharmaceuticals.
When I had my wisdom teeth pulled and was prescribed an entire bottle of Vicodin, when I didn't even need a single one, that wasn't a greater issue in my life. That was medical malfeasance and a just society would execute the principal architects of it.
I think this is definitely the problem in the United States. In my country they don't just willy nilly prescribe opioids. The best you get is ibuprofen. For example, after a terrible shoulder injury or tooth extraction, that's all you get. It helps with the pain, but doesn't remove it 100%, doesn't get you hooked though. Of course they give IV opioids after surgeries and such, but even then something mild and in small doses, and only for a certain period time. I remember still feeling pain after an appendectomy, but they refused to give me any more tramadol and just switched to IV ibuprofen. It's just not a thing as a prescription medicine. Except maybe for terminal cancer patients or something equally drastic.
Going off on a tangent, what my country might have a problem with, is benzos, however. They're prescribed like psychiatric vitamins.
What does the manufacturer of OxyContin (Purdue) have to do with you being prescribed Vicodin? And the world generally agrees that a just society wouldn't execute anyone. And the greatest issue in your life was that you were prescribed some pills you didn't need to take, just in case you had been in pain? That's a pretty good life.
A just society executing the principal architects sounds similar to Italy recently prosecuting the seismologists for incorrectly predicting earthquakes.
I agree that there is a problem with over prescription of opioids, but this problem isn't solely due to a simple conspiracy of drug makers. I think that sort of rhetoric is unhelpful.
What you fail to see in drawing your analogy is that seismologists aren't being incentivized to give specific readings. Pharmaceutical companies are loading the gun and they know it.
I see your point with the pharmaceuticals and they have a share of blame, but I would argue that the analogy has merit as the prosecution in the seismology case would not have pushed for punishment if the scientists were merely wrong.
From my reading (and I will admit I do not see the logical reasoning at all, which I think is why the case was later overturned) the judge thought that they were guilty not of failing to predict it, but of giving an inadequate message. Presumably, to me this implies some sort of laziness, or intent to not make more of an effort despite knowing better.
I will admit that I am biased being a doctor dealing with this daily, but I think that blaming this solely on the pharmaceutical companies is easier to do than looking at what is happening to our culture, expectations of pain, the way we deliver healthcare, how we grade healthcare (for example read about Press Ganey's Fifth Vital Sign).
That's not true at all. Drug companies bribe prominent doctors with multi-million dollar payments to convince other doctors that drugs are safer and more widely applicable than they actually are. If you refuse to take an opioid painkiller for fear of developing addiction, you are empirically demonstrating that you know more care more than your doctor about the risk/reward profile of the medication.
What if you are actually in pain? In that case, it might be fully rational to take the potentially addictive opioid painkiller, despite the possibility of developing an addiction.
Of course they will. Americans have turned on each other in their period of greatest economic vulnerability, basically self-destructing while the Chinese government gladly hands out 5x your research grant from elsewhere to do that research in China. America's running on desirability to high-skill immigrants and existing ecosystems, both of which are fading fast. NIH is halving budgets while China is multiplying them by 10. The West is fucked, I just wish I spoke Chinese.
I up-voted you, even though we disagree a bit. A friend went to work in Hong Kong years ago because it was easier to get long term AI research money than in the USA. I think he is still happy with the support that he gets.
A little off topic: here in the USA, every medium and large company seems to be morphing into an 'AI company' which I think is generally a good thing since individually they can all take advantage of control over their own application stacks and data sources. Many people concentrate on the advantages of huge companies like Google/Microsoft/Facebook in AI development, but there is plenty of opportunity for smaller companies to enhance their own systems with machine learning.
It's horrifying to see people questioning the morality of their perfectly legal and adequate method to collecting a paycheck. Their employer has 0% loyalty to them. Their employer would stab them in the throat for 50 cents. And here is the employee asking if his sweet arrangement is ethical.
That's how hard Americans have been brainwashed into the idea of corporations and business as "Good" -- that a man is asking whether spending 38 extra hours a week with his son is built on an "unethical" foundation.
> Their employer has 0% loyalty to them. Their employer would stab them in the throat for 50 cents.
You don't know that. The fact that he's asking this question means he thinks they have more than 0% loyalty. If you knew they had zero loyalty and would fire you upon disclosure of the automation you wouldn't concern yourself with ethics.
I see what you are saying but it's still bad faith from my perspective. If you automate part of your job you should celebrate that and figure out somewhere else to add value. He's being paid a full time wage to provide technical expertise as a professional. To withhold that expertise they are paying for is unethical in my opinion. He's taking advantage of the company's lack of knowledge in the space and also taking advantage of "working" remotely.
However, if I was him, I'd try to figure out if I could fire up an LLC and license the script back to the company for maybe $1-2k/mo and then go do the same thing for other similar businesses. He could potentially make more, come clean, and still get to his goal of spending more time with the family based on his mailbox money.
So he could move to full time contractor (so he can write off his home office or whatever). "Write" the script. Inform the company that he automated it and would like to license it to them. Even that is somewhat unethical because the company should own the script, but at least he can move on and get rewarded for his initiative.
When I had my wisdom teeth pulled and was prescribed an entire bottle of Vicodin, when I didn't even need a single one, that wasn't a greater issue in my life. That was medical malfeasance and a just society would execute the principal architects of it.