What happened to the family doctor?
U.S.-focused but clearly relevant to Australia as well:
“Today, primary care is being squeezed from all sides. Long-standing patient-doctor relationships, once the foundation of medical treatment, are becoming less common: The number of Americans who say their source of medical care is a personal physician has been steadily declining. That is especially true for younger patients: As of 2018, nearly half of adults under 30 said they did not have a primary care doctor.
Many opt instead for the convenience offered by urgent care clinics, clinics in retail stores, and even their local emergency room.”
Any sufficiently advanced form of data centralisation is indistinguishable from kleptomania
“Many would prefer that NHS England invested in its own capacity, instead of farming out to private enterprise. The frontrunner for the contract to run the FDP is the US tech firm Palantir, which has performed data analytics work for the US security services, border forces and police. If you don’t know Palantir, you may be familiar with the company’s chair, Peter Thiel, a tech billionaire and Trump supporter, who has funded anti-abortion candidates and invested in anti-birth-control startups.”
‘Our health data is about to flow more freely, like it or not’: big tech’s plans for the NHS
Wildfires and xenophobia
Twitter/X really is the new Gab:
“Armed militia groups, some linked to extreme far right political parties, seized on the tension to conduct illegal arrests. And elected officials, like the ultranationalist Paraschos Christou Papadakis, gave them a boost. “We’re at war,” Papadakis has been filmed saying. “Where there are fires, there are illegal immigrants.”
On X, previously known as Twitter, and Facebook, it is easy to find Greek users who contend that migrants are to blame for the fires and that the fires are indeed deliberate. In the comment fields on videos in which Greek vigilantes are filmed “hunting” and restraining migrants, it is not unusual to find people calling for migrants to be burned and thrown in the fire.”
While Greece burned, politicians blamed migrants
Interview with a McKinsey whistleblower
An interesting interview with a former McKinsey consultant about what it’s like to use spreadsheets to further human misery overcast.fm/+Fd_yzr4a…
Based on this article The Nation www.thenation.com/article/s…
The last of the fungus
“Before sunset, we found more than 30 caterpillar carcasses. We arrived back at his village after nightfall, and Tenzin sold them all to a middleman for $300. Two weeks of unusually good days like this would bring in roughly the average income for a Tibetan household for an entire year.”
An excellent article about the fascinating, valuable and doomed prcatice of collecting catepillar fungus. I saw some of this in the highlands of Bhutan when I was there for work in 2016, where its also prized for traditonal medicine.
The Last of the Fungus - A young scientist’s quest to transform a dying way of life
“Gambling addiction has contributed to 184 suicides in Victoria over eight years, although the true figure could be much higher” www.theguardian.com/australia…
The pursuit of Aboriginal literary sovereignty
“Perhaps critique and analysis informed by the traditions and priorities of the settler colony can never register the full living and survivance of the oldest continuing culture on earth upon whose disappearance the success of the colony is predicated? Perhaps these traditions and priorities are unable to depart from the assumption of a right-to-know fundamentally incongruent with Aboriginal ontologies, which necessitate opacity and cultural sovereignty? Perhaps the answer is to withhold and to preserve our knowings for ourselves first and foremost?”
Reading and Speaking With - Evelyn Araluenon on the pursuit of Aboriginal literary sovereignty
Trilemma facing carbon extractive multinational corporations
“In this report, we have argued that Shell will face a trilemma with respect to these questions. It can achieve only a maximum of two out of three goals. The three goals Shell is aiming for can be described as:
Goal A continuing to operate as an oil and gas giant profiting from consuming ever greater portions of the global carbon budget; Goal B continuing to pursue high shareholder returns; and Goal C transforming itself into a major renewable energy player.
For a just transition, Shell can achieve only one of the three goals.”
Good insights in this report from SOMO - Stranded: Why Shell is unable to navigate the just transition trilemma
“offers insights into how NGOs play a critical role in stifling the development and independence of radical African movements”
“In Western philosophy the proper way is considered ethics, whereas in Aboriginal society, as far as it is known, there is no equivalent term for ethics, this is because proper action comes from the external order internalised through collective empirical observation over tens of thousands of years, rather than abstract individualist thinking.
The term ethics will be employed, but with the understanding that Aboriginal ethics encompasses more than simply applying principles of right action in order to know how to act.”
Really interesting article by Mary Graham on “The Law of Obligation, Aboriginal Ethics: Australia Becoming, Australia Dreaming”
“Rich people get lots of it.Poor people don’t get any of it!”: Fifty years of tackling the Inverse Care Law
I was fortunate to have the opportunity to speak at the South Western Sydney Local Health District Primary & Community Health Research & Innovation Showcase on 6 September 2023 about 50 years of the inverse care law.
My slides are at harrisroxashealth.com/2023/09/inversecare50/
60 years old, the Yirrkala Bark Petitions are one of our founding documents – so why don’t we know more about them? - Prof Clare Wright
theconversation.com/friday-es…
Why engage in a deeper exploration of the creation of meaning when ChatGPT can do it for you?
I dread the garbage I’m going to be sent to review.
