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Sorry, I missed this reply when you made it 11 days ago. Happy to respond: Automation of manual labor _should_ result in a _lot_ of benefits to workers. But here's the thing: Automation is, largely, capital. And under capitalism, ownership of capital is private. That means that the benefits from automation are largely under control over the owners of it. And that ownership is for the purpose of making a profit. It is more profitable to automate as much as possible while simultaneously working the workers who are left as hard as possible, while paying the minimum amount to successfully do so. This leads to a situation like we have in the U.S., where productivity has massively skyrocketed while median real wage has actually _decreased_ since the 70s. That median real wage means workers who can pay for less for a given hour for work, which means workers who need to work more _somewhere_ in order to support their conditions of work (pay for a place to live, pay for food, etc). Working more hours means getting less rest, which means less recovery, which means ::drumroll:: more chronic pain. The stats bear this out, and it's trivial to corroborate: The lowest-wage earners work more hours for less pay than they did fifty years ago, while percentage of take-home that goes to mortgage/rent has increased. This is a recipe for misery, and the most unbelievable thing about it is that it's not patently obvious to everyone. "Over-prescription" exists in those conditions: Pharma both has the incentive to sell more than is necessary, and no incentive to cure the actual _cause_ that bring people to seek a remedy for pain in the first place. "Partying", in this analysis, is not just a thing people "like to do" that they are now suddenly doing with more-abundant pain meds--it is a thing people are doing _with pain meds_ because those meds are _the thing that makes the general pain of being alive easier to deal with_, a thing large-scale abuse of substances (notably, alcohol) has been doing for thousands of years, where increased consumption has correlated strongly with increased human misery. |