10 Things I Hate About Perth Part 2: The Short Work Day

Perth has its retinue of backward folk, with backward ideas and backward mindsets. It seems the electorate values sedation over a strong work ethic. This causes problems. Amongst the problems that we encounter in their pursuit of sloth, is the short work day.

Businesses in Perth open at say 8-9am, perhaps 10am…and run through to about 4-5pm. 6pm latest. Now, most government offices, big business, schools and universities and hospitals have their opening times when do you ask? That's right, 8am-5pm. The fundamental idea behind business in Perth is that everyone should go to work and return home at the same time. Students in university and TAFE need work, but they can't get any because all the businesses that would employ them are closed. This is quaint and certainly unbecoming of a city.

This is the issue: a lack of "extended trading hours" and weekend trading results in fewer people spending money, and fewer jobs available for people who have non-work commitments in the day time.

The fact that the moneyed folk, the people with jobs and consumer power, are working (often full-time) during 90% of the opening hours of all other business means that little meaningful business is actually attracted during the week. Often we may find truant (and broke) kids loitering about or old-age pensioners hunting for cheap groceries, far from what we'd look at and think "staple of business". And this is all well and good if you can expect an evening rush of thriving business, like you may find in Asia or in the eastern states, or in the United States of America. But alas, you will find none such in this sleepy joke of a city. The city, suburbs and all, shut down after 5pm. Everyone will retire to their suburban sprawl cottages and find reason to get upset about the lack of money in the household. Or that there was no food to be found in the household because no one could go shopping.

Shopping aside, there is the idea that business drives the engines of economy, and businesses regardless of size or funding need workers. And to be a worker, you need a business that will pay you. Consider the droves of university and TAFE students, or for that matter, high school students, for whom seeking a job and being gainfully employed is not just an accessory to their social standing but a tool of survival. Well okay, perhaps not for high school students, but for those in tertiary education, this is a stark reality.

Having undergone long periods of unemployment while still studying – one begins to realize why one is still unemployed. A student in a full-time vocational course will find it difficult to allow him or herself to gain an evening job. This is because the biggest casual work employers around, big businesses of the likes of Coles and Woolworth are disallowed by state law from routinely operating for any extended period during weekday evenings. It isn't like Coles and Woolies don't want to extend their operating hours, in a past referendum the people of WA actively voted against extended trading hours and weekend trading. Consequently, few people get their shopping done properly, and many students are robbed of a job opportunity.

And they wonder why so many of us are relying on youth allowance and welfare? Seriously, we'd rather work and live just over the poverty line somewhat more comfortably than have to rely on $244 a fortnight.

Seriously WA, freakin' wake up already. You've left this town uncultured (more in my next post), and as a result unemployed. Extend your trading hours and get with the rest of the world, we're sick of you wanting a "cruisy and relaxed lifestyle" at the expense of leaving people below the breadline. Simply untenable.

10 Things I Hate About Perth. Part One: Transperth

Time for a series titled, 10 things I hate about Perth. It's no secret to anyone who associates with me that I have a deep resentment to what Perth has become, contrasting to what it could (and should) be....

1. Transperth

Ever since Transperth was privatised and contracted out to independent operators in the late 1990s, quality had faltered dramatically and public transport has turned into an almighty chore.

The reach of public transport remains woeful in the Eastern Suburbs (ie. east of Midlands), and at points where the jurisdiction of transport contractors intersect (ie. Madeley), there is often scanty, poorly planned service. Worse still, areas where there are thousands of people working in industry and logistics and so forth, are inexplicably and pointlessly underserviced.

It seems as if Transperth is complicit in a great conspiracy to increase the amount of road traffic, by providing unreliable and unpunctual public transport service so as to make it socially unpalatable. It is no longer an argument about personal space or privacy; in a world of Ipod hermitage and sunglass shells, it is about personal efficiency - an element of which Transperth severely works against, leaving only the expensive option of automobile use. These issues, including the increasing bureaucratic stress of dealing with Transperth officers, reduce the quality of life of the denizens of this city.

Ever tried to jump on a train to work? No, you're NEVER going to find a seat...but that doesn't matter, you can stand through the whole journey, right? Wrong.

As early (and as ungodly) as 7am, trains are packed, sardine-tin packed. And for pointless reasons beyond my ken, it is in their unfounded wisdom that they see fit to field trains that are not full-length, that have perpendicular rows of seat rather than seats running parallel to the walls (increased standing space hence allowing more passengers). They're packed. Solidly, sordidly, unhygienically, packed. People stand back-to-back, nudging an elbow takes out an eye, releasing your bag me result in your bottom slamming into the hips of an unsuspecting fellow Transperth victim. And we have to *pay* for this?

No matter, wait for the next train, right? Wrong again. The next train will not only be packed, it will be late. It takes 3 minutes for a train that is 1 minute away to arrive. Honest, that's what happened this morning. In Japan, commuter trains and bullet trains with the same level of inefficiency will go bankrupt; travellers are granted free passage in the event that a train is more than 1 minute behind schedule.

Another isssue; why allow students to purchase a student-concession ticket without a Smartrider? Easy. It is a Transperth ploy to ensnare poor students of their hard-saved cash. They do this, by slapping on a $55 fine for not having a "WA-valid student card". What on earth do you mean, you might ask? In the past, anyone who held a student pass, regardless if you were an international student or interstate student, was entitled a student concession upon presentation of your student card. Today, this concession must be present on the Smartrider and no other document can vouch for the same concession, not even a student card.

Late trains, absentee buses and frankly evil concession rules. All these stupid issues are crowned with the hubris of Western Australian insufficiency and inefficiency - the short work day (more in this, in another post). The trains stop at 2am, where in many other major cities, trains are a round-the-clock year-round service. Understandably, there are (very unpunctual, often absentee and often unsafe) bus services covering the gap hours.

Timetables. Transperth apparently prides itself on a JourneyPlanner website which is non-functional or slow 99% of the time you wish to access it. Predictably, this occurs prior to, and at the end, of Perth's 9-5 workday. Solution? "Browse the site during non-peak periods". "Blame the ISP". "Upgrade your internet connection". Listen here webmaster, don't blame the users of your arthritic and asthmatic server for trying to save the planet by using your half-past-six moneymaking scheme of a public transport service. Either you're spineless, or your too stupid to realise that the limitations of your site is that the IOPS for your servers are low, you know it can't handle many requests per second, you know it doesn't work, SO FIX IT! What couldn't a decent set of FusionIO SSDs, a few SunFire racks a serious re-think of the GUI and search algorithms fix?

Also, yes, browsing the site outside of peak periods is workable, but here's a problem. Where am I at peak hour? In front of a computer? On the internet at my leisure. No. I'm seeing patients. I'm draughting plans. I'm working a mine. I'm studying at school. I'm doing my work and carrying out a productive deed. I cannot afford to allow a menial, trivial question of getting from A to B dictate the course of my life. So...why don't you do your jobs Transperth, and buck up?

Oh, and one other thing - get a new advertising team. Your man-in-Smartrider-suit farewelling a multirider card was stupid and corny. Piggy Bank revolutions and anti-Smartrider protests? Puh-leeze. Threats to the public about a mutant creature who has BOTH the annoyance of a parking attendant AND the powers of a police officer, demonstrated in an ugly half-and-half image of two people? Why? And Archie-style comics about a giant squid stopping ferries and a satellite crashing in Joondalup amuses no one.

I can see you're trying to be clever, but you're not. A lot of people have an irrational hatred for that bleach-faced man in a Smartrider suit for the bureaucratic mess he symbolised when we all got out first Smartriders. It wasn't very smart. Piggy Banks revolting against Smartriders? Well. Here's an example of Transperth thinking we're so anally-straight laced that we all keep our change in piggy banks for the next time we take a bus, so with Smartrider we stop using piggy banks and the piggy banks suffer what appears to be a severe abandoment disorder as they rob banks and get stomped on by grandmothers and hide in teapots. And yes, we get the idea that your two-bit blue-uniformed fine jockey anankastic Neanderthals are given powers beyond justifiable reason, but why make a poster intimidating the general public about it? Chances are, the ones committing an office are too blind drunk or too illiterate to understand. And those comic posters...no one found them funny, they were lame and the fact of the matter is most of the delays and problems posed in using public transport are not on their email alert service, and not everyone is so dependent to have to check these alerts on the go, on their mobile phone. Oh and yeah, fix the JourneyPlanner service on the phones, it doesn't work.

Take heed Transperth, your slow and overpacked trains, absentee buses, uncomprehensive service and frankly rubbish timetabling deserve an accolade for being one of the things that makes Perth so unbearable.

PICO and the Faculty

When you're given a case study, you're expected to formulate a PICO question (Patient, Intervention, Comparator, Outcome aka the foundation of evidence-based medicine). Cool.

So I look at a recent case of mine,

Term-gestation baby girl presenting to ED at 7 days' of age with febrile illness and tachypnoea. APGAR 9, 9. Septicaemia at 3hr life, all septic screening negative, mother's perinatal testing negative, baby had CRP of 14. Commenced on empirical IM amoxycillin and IM gentamicin and discharged the next day with PO Amoxycillin as clinical well (despite CRP 7), and returned with current presentation. Impression of partially treated neonatal sepsis.

This baby had new bloods taken and was found to be positive for Streptococcus sanguinis, a Group B Streptococcus, with patchy lobar pneumonia previously dismissed on CXR at birth.

Now, Group B Strep, Coagulase Negative Staph and GN bugs cover the majority of bacterial causes of neonatal sepsis, and in the past we would have included H. influenzae in pre-vaccination days. Subtracting Haemophilus from the equation, the three sets of species above are often well-covered with a penicillin and an aminoglycoside. Indeed, current practice for neonatal sepsis is parenteral amoxycillin + gentamicin. It'd help to get MCS for targetted treatment for sure.

I began to wonder... why not just treat them IV amoxycillin + IV gentamicin for a week pending cultures? Surely it will reduce the time of sepsis, treat any nidus and prevent further complications such as pneumonia and febrile seizures, via increased bioavailability and since we're already giving these antibiotics it won't be at greater risk of selecting out bugs given the high inhibitory concentrations reached....

My glorious PICO moment had arrived in dapper and timely fashion:

In neonatal sepsis of unknown origin, would a weeks' IV amoxycillin + IV gentamicin be superior to IM injections of the same in reducing the incidence of hospital re-admission?

Daydreaming of Nobel glory aside, I had to find a study which asked pretty much the same question above, and analyse it. A search on Medline had no dice, so I discussed this with someone in the faculty:

Students are expected to formulate a PICO question on the basis of a case study, and then search for a study exploring the same, or similar PICO, to evaluate the strengths and limitations of the paper.

Wait. Brakes on. Hard. Stop thinking, now. We're expected to

a) Pick our brains to find a question
b) Research this and hope someone else already has the answer to the same question we asked
c) Mark the answer like a teacher and see what they got right and wrong.

Riiiiiight.

First, this is the antithesis of original scientific thought. Having to ask a question (for the purpose of an original PICO) which was re-visited several thousand times in several thousand RCTs stinks of redundancy. Yes, I understand you'll probably have to have a BMedSci or a PhD to test these original PICOs, but still, why ask a question that everyone else has asked, and everyone else has the same (or similar) and correct (or at the very least highly effective) answer to?

Second, what is the point of making us ask a PICO question, and then merely perform a literature review on ONE (1) published paper? In fact, what is the point of making us ask a PICO question at all?

We may as well find a study on a topic relating to the case (ie. intrapartum antibiotic prophylaxis for GBS), figure out a PICO question to fit the title of the paper (ie. creatively re-wording objective of a paper aka "In expecting mothers, are Clinical Risk Factor-based guidelines superior to GBS culture screening guidelines in preventing neonatal GBS sepsis"), and then just doing a literary review on that, effectively stealing a paper on a related topic and coming up with a PICO "of your own" that coincidentally the same as that asked the paper.

Voila, Faculty-endorsed plagiarism.

A month of gah

Just over a month has passed since my last post. In that time, I had (in no particular order):

1. Tapped
2. Tapped
3. Dumped
4. Babycheck!
5. Hardcoring in the gym
6. Soccer; being hopeless in

I'm attempting to burn off 800 calories a day at the gym for 5 days a week, and restricting diet to less than 1700 calories a day. Should work.

I'm planning on heading to convention...more on this later.

Now, gah.

1. Gah at stress
The premature baby with gestational diabetes may be born with hypercortisolism, causing complications. Similarly, the medical student may be faced with the fallout of this hypercortisolism (the baby adds an extra hour to an already-extended ward round) and the resultant lethargy. The temptation for you, the student, to go and eat your stress away is tempting, but no. Go to the gym instead!

2. Gah at women
You'd have thought a completed double-degree in Social Work and Psychology would help even the most hard-up broken-family nymphomaniacal bimbo into easing herself to polite, quality society, and accepting the cream rather than the dregs. Be my boyfriend...4 Days later...please don't hate me for this, but I need space, I don't want to hurt you but I like another guy...no I liked you before but I like him now. I'm sorry I'm such a bitch....

No, you're not a bitch. You're a sociopath.

Moral of the story? Don't date a sociopath....or just, don't date. Too many sociopaths

3. Gah at life
Amidst the chaos, you expect to find a core of order. In the USA, the chaos lies in the faltering, wayward economy, with a core of Obama sensibility. In a society filled with disposal people flying to and from your scope, it'd be nice to have a nucleus of warmth. A reactor of altruism even.

So, why the heck are you so cold? Spread to love already, it's not like you'll catch syphilis from a smile and saying hi and telling someone s/he will be okay.




We now return to your regular programming.

Millionaire/Billionaire mindset vs. Actually living life

Not too long ago I chanced upon an inkling of a billionaire's past life; he sold toys in a market. Twenty-odd years later, he owns Chelsea FC and a host of other luxe commodities, and I think a couple of yachts? All entirely self-made (well okay, maybe organised crime was involved but you'd have to be somewhere big to get their support anyway?).

Another very rich guy made heaps out of flatpacking and supplying us Allen keys to make things ourselves, and he still takes the train and still owns his old 240GL stationwagon.

A wise friend of mine once said that "millionaires don't get rich by spending their money", which is quite true.

How to be rich and boring?
It takes a special breed of person to become self-made super-rich. Shrewdness is one thing; grabbing opportunities to consolidate and grow wealth are key steps in becoming rich, as is careful risk management. Luck plays a part, but only to an extent, just look at the stories of lottery millionaires who end up returning to social support/Centrelink payments; a lack of shrewdness and discipline let them down.

Discipline. Discipline seems to be a standard theme in building any sort of massive project, whether it is a cult of personality or a large amount of wealth. Following strict rules and self-control, you will be able to do well, anything. Build pyramids, fast cars. A billion dollars. Ya.

Now, starting from the ground up. Considering you saved everything, and you spent nothing outside of pure essentials. No entertainment, no non-essential hygiene like EDT, no indulgence. Then you save maybe, $10,000 to $15,000 a year, if you worked casually. That's a lot of money, but no you can't touch it; it goes to an investment of sorts. Slowly it will develop into a large sum of money, and you may become a millionaire five times over in perhaps, 10 to 15 years of doing this. You really could.

But it's not money you can actually appreciate, or enjoy. You get wound up into an unreality of wealth without the trappings that come with it. The situation? You have everything, but nothing to show for it.


Profligate Hedonism: The Antithesis to Wealth
Consider making $200,000 a year, after tax. Plenty of money that?

Think about not saving a cent.

Buy yourself a Porsche on loan. Get another loan, and get a top-flight penthouse. Dinner, every night, at a posh restaurant, running up at least $100 each night. Fancy, expensive designer whatevers? Get the lot. Your bank account consistently has less than $1000 in it.

The situation? You have nothing, but you have everything to show for it. But heck, is it fun or what?!

GAH, WHAT DO I DO?!
At the end of the day, wealth building and the enjoyment of wealth appear diametrically opposed. There naturally needs to be a balance of in vs. out. The facilitation of a lifestyle beyond that of wealth generated has been financed via credit for eons, but this has naturally led to the current credit crunch, as we all can plainly see. Avoiding your own personal credit crisis is favourable in these times, but it is a banal piece of advice parroted through the ages, only because it is so exhaustively true. Ah well, this is what we can do:

1. Minimalism is chic
2. Less is more
3. Location, location, location

Hope that helps :-)

Winnie the Pooh

See the animals above?

Read this

Pathology in the Hundred Acre Wood: a neurodevelopmental perspective on A.A. Milne

Sarah E. Shea, Kevin Gordon, Ann Hawkins, Janet Kawchuk and Donna Smith

Abstract

Somewhere at the top of the Hundred Acre Wood a little boy and his bear play. On the surface it is an innocent world, but on closer examination by our group of experts we find a forest where neurodevelopmental and psychosocial problems go unrecognized and untreated.

I have always, always wanted to do this. Pity these Canucks beat me to it, and what a good job they've done!

Girls of the Internet

There once was a legend asserting that there are no sane girls on the series of tubes, that these women are either:

1. Thick-glassed entomologists ,
   
2. Crazy cat ladies (Laugh out loud, cat),
3. Charged $4.95 a minute,
4. Robots, or
   
5. Men

Not true. Not true at all.

Maaaaaybe prior to the WWW (a time when BBS and Gofers lived on the otherside of a 2400 baud monstrosity) there were fairer-sex types fullstop, because their live were richer and more interesting than that of your typical whistlephreaker.

But today, surprise Geek-san, there are girls online. And not your katoey flavour either.

What are they like?

Feeling like a cat with a deathwish, I signed up to a website whose name is the same as that of a great rock band, and a wet spot in the desert.

Of the myriad of gorgeous and frankly downright wonderful women, I dated Bushpig and Psychopatty, mainly because the others gave me the proverbial "You're a nice guy, but."

Anyway...

Ms. Bushpig came from a state less backward than WA, but my god did she belong here or what? Heck, she was trailer-park. Nevermind, give it a chance. A couple of dates. I couldn't have the heart to turn the heifer away, lest she think I were a male chauvinist (who, me?). The story Bushpig brought to sorry little Perth was no less pathetic. Kicked out by her mother for being, frankly an unproductive, unskilled, hedonistic, corpulent, Peter Jackson-chugging degenerate, Ms. Bushpig hurtled her way to beach-side Scarborough. Sad, but hey, everyone deserves a second chance, make something of themselves. So we get her a job at K-Mart as a checkout chick.

She complained about the 3 hours' of work she did on a cash register ('It's too long', 'my feet hurt', 'My boss won't let me smoke' and various other complaints). Coup d'grace? Bushpig tried her best to cost me my OSCE by being someone too clingy and precious than her BMI 50 would've suggested. Nah. Fuck off.

Psychopatty's words were like cocoa butter, sweet and creamy. She seemed perfect, fun-loving and family-orientated. You love Wii's and DeviantArt? Wow, me too! "I love you, I would never cheat on you". That, almost as sweet and gentle as that sledgehammer of an innocuous text message, "I cheated on you and I never loved you", five days later. Heh.

Later on came MingleSum (figure it out), Narcissist (I come to look for dates so I can talk about myself), DSM-IV BPD Punk (I love you/Don't talk to me) and various others. All of them, fuck off.

So, what is it about Internet dating that attracted this reputation? 100% safe? Maybe. But will you find love? Proper love? Is it really that much better than meeting the nutcase next to you at the Leedy vying for a free grenadine vodka?

The datum point of this issue lies in trust. Ever noticed just how much paranoia there is in the world today? Never mind the terrorists and pretence wars; look at your mates.

How many of them are reluctant to share the phone number of a mutual friend? For fear that you have some beef for them, or worse, you're a stalker?

So what hope is there for a person shouting into the dark, "Is there anybody out there?!" if only the psychopaths and the deranged will answer?