Society

Has somebody got it in for Boots the chemist?

There was a BBC investigatory programme a couple of weeks ago which tried to make out that Boots mixes up prescriptions horrendously.

In fact, as the programme showed and couldn’t help but show, Boots’ record of correct prescriptions versus wrong prescriptions is better than at any other pharmacy.

In fact, Boots make such a good job of it that the incidence of wrong prescriptions is tiny. It’s minute.

Of course, it is serious when a mistake is made. But is also serious when no mistakes are made.

And now on the BBC news today there is another incident at Boots which is given publicity that relates to a mixup in prescriptions.

Has somebody got it in for Boots?

In a different world, I wouldn’t think about it. But now, with the attempted destruction of the National Health Service – I am suspicious of a drive to smear Boots as a prelude to something else.

Is it an attempt to stop Boots filling NHS prescriptions?

Is it connected with the fact that Boots is now owned Walgreens, an American company?

Something is going on.

Daniel Burd was a Canadian High School student who in 2008 isolated two bacteria (Sphingomonas and Pseudomonas) that at the correct temperature ate almost half of a plastic sample within six weeks.

He won the first prize at the Canada Wide Science Fair and a $20,000 scholarship.

In an article in The Record (the article no longer there), Burd is quoted as saying:

The inputs are cheap, maintaining the required temperature takes little energy because microbes produce heat as they work, and the only outputs are water and tiny levels of carbon dioxide – each microbe produces only 0.01 per cent of its own infinitesimal weight in carbon dioxide.

I have googled repeatedly for Daniel Burd since then and haven’t found anything more.

Daniel Burd, where are you and what has become of your discovery?

I was in a shop recently and the owner said that they will not take Scottish £20 notes because so many in circulation are forgeries. It’s not news; forging bank notes and coins has been going on for centuries. and you will know that when a forgery is detected, the note is confiscated and removed from circulation.

Whether most forged notes are captured and destroyed or whether there are a lot in circulation undetected, the governing principle is that the notes are detectable.

I mention this because there is at the moment a surge in the number of malicious WordPress plugins, Github code snippets, and other resources that are built to mine cryptocurrencies on someone else’s setup.

They are commandeering the CPU resources and electricity of the computers running sites that have unwittingly incorporated these assets.

It seems to me that mining in this way is unlike counterfeiting non-digital currency. The difference is that malicious crypto mining is like counterfeiting non-digital currency with the original plates.

That’s because there is no way to see where the mining took place. There is no ‘counterfeit’ in the old sense. There is just unauthorised, perfect reproduction.

So what value does the mined currency have?

What value ought it to have?

People talk about the problem of artificial intelligence as the risk of AI entities thinking for themselves and acting against their human masters. That may be a problem, but I see a much more obvious one.

Every despot stays in power only so long as he can command violence or the threat of violence. Pushed too far there is always the risk that even the Imperial Guard will turn against the despot. History teaches us that many tyrants are poor judges of when the tipping point is near. But poor judges or not, tyrants are aware that there is a tipping point. Many will play with pushing things to the limit. But they are nonetheless aware the tide can turn against them.

And that knowledge curtails their worst excesses. Or if they push on regardless as some tyrants have done, then history teaches that that can bring on a revolution. Either way, behaviour is modified.

But take away the conscience from the Imperial Guard – replace it with robots – and there will be no end to tyranny.