From an IGN article in 2017
Nintendo Switch Cartridges Taste Terrible
https://www.ign.com/articles/2017/03/02/nintendo-switch-cart...
Nintendo Switch game cartridges taste offensively bad (2017)
241–250 of 284 posts
Re: Nintendo Switch game cartridges taste offensively bad (2017)
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those nuisance barriers you mention are often intended to cause limited damage. For example, water barrels in a gore point or the gates of a parking garage which are made out of wood and intended to snap off. The problem with the first sentence of your initial post is that you seem willing to justify some degree of death if it serves as a deterrent, even though you later claim that if other options are equally good d…
> Those nuisance barriers you mention are often intended to cause limited damage. For example, water barrels in a gore point or the gates of a parking garage which are made out of wood and intended to snap off. Some are, and they may indeed be preferable to ones that cause worse damage, but some are not. The correct choice depends on the risks involved and the costs of the various methods (e.g., concrete requires les…
> this must be weighed against the statistical value of life
Must it be? There are a great many regulations concerning safety devices and procedures that government and industry shell out for which cost more to industry than the statistical value of lives saved. Safety compliance is an added cost to virtually every aspect of commerce. You seem to suggest that any cost of compliance beyond the actuarial value of lives taken by noncompliance is unwarranted. But in this case we're going much further, since the addition of methanol is not merely a lax safety regulation but an added cost to manufacturing which serves no purpose other than to make the product less safe.
Consider safety caps on pill bottles, or seat belts in cars. Both those things had to be forced upon manufacturers, because the cost to manufacturers of fighting civil litigation - which we can assume both operates upon and inflates your $8M figure - didn't provide sufficient economic downside to spur costly implementation. Their existences are both examples of life being valued by society as more than its actuarial value, or value provable in court.
If, as a libertarian would, you argued that companies should never pay for any safety regulations beyond the dollar value of the internal and (maybe) external costs inflicted on the public by their products, implying that the value of human life should be reduced to a dollar figure, even then it would make no sense to pay more just to make a product more dangerous.
I feel like you mean your statement to be objectionable. And I feel like we're getting to the root of why your statements in this thread have generated such a bad feeling; your disdain for life is coming out. We could get into a discussion of the actual value of human life versus its average value in economic output - including the externalized costs manifested in social disorder and rebellion when life is snuffed out by neglect or malpractice. But again, this is why I think the motive for adding poison to products is suspect, and can't be attributed only to economic motives. It implies a hatred of humanity. Indeed, the value proposition for many governments to add methanol to industrial alcohol isn't based at all on actuarial tables, but on "moral" judgments. In Iran, the lacing of all industrial alcohol with methanol is part and parcel of the religious ban on personal consumption of ethanol, and it led to more deaths during the pandemic than the virus itself. So perhaps there, it could be justified economically by saying that the life of someone who indulges in drink is worth a negative actuarial value; but this is economics shaded by fanatical belief, and must not be taken as a proxy for the true value of life.
Re: Nintendo Switch game cartridges taste offensively bad (2017)
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given my friend's dog licked up a bunch of antifreeze a couple months ago, I'd say it doesn't work very well.
It's the most bitter compound know to humans, with a detectability down to 0.05 ppm, and average aversion dosing around 10ppm. Lab tests show that some animals require 100,000 times the dose before detection. This discrepancy is leveraged for another application - making rat poison repulsive to children without reducing its efficacy. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00319...
And yet I know a vet who routinely gets "rat poison dogs"
Re: Nintendo Switch game cartridges taste offensively bad (2017)
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dose makes the poison. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8351798/ > The toxicity of denatonium benzoate is low with acute po LD50's in rats of 485-740 mg/kg. https://www.chemsrc.com/en/cas/3734-33-6_1028011.html TYPE OF TEST: LD50 - Lethal dose, 50 percent kill ROUTE OF EXPOSURE: Oral SPECIES OBSERVED: Rodent - rat DOSE/DURATION: 584 mg/kg DOSE/DURATION: 508 mg/kg Non-toxic definitely means that common exposure to the…
Apparently one of the "luster dusts" was 25% lead, and another was pure copper dust, which is also pretty toxic if ingested. Lead sulfide (galena) is 86% lead, shiny when in large crystals and probably low enough toxicity that you could label it as "nontoxic". https://www.mindat.org/mesg-361788.html says the oral LD50 of galena in guinea pigs is 10000 mg/kg, which is about three or four times less acutely toxic than…
Yeah none of those luster dust formulations should qualify as "non-toxic" in my book.
Copper and lead salts are not only acutely and chronically toxic to humans, they can be disastrous to aquatic life if they get into water ways. Cu powder gets a solid GHS09: dead fish. Suprisingly does not get the the Health Hazard GHS8. PbS gets GHS7/8/9, right proper toxic.
Maybe they mean it's not acutely toxic? Usually either short or long term toxicity is more than sufficient to call something "toxic".
Re: Nintendo Switch game cartridges taste offensively bad (2017)
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't get the Sony:Apple comparison at all. If anything, Sony is Japan's Microsoft: Do a gazillion things, many of them poorly, to such a unfocused extent that some of your divisions actually end up competition with each other. Like in Sony's case, how they've had internal battles for decades between the device side (that wants to make devices that are useful) and the content side (that wants DRM out the ass on eve…
Sony is older than Apple and was one of Steve Jobs' main inspirations. He even wanted to make everyone wear uniforms (which Sony and Nintendo still did then) - that's where his same outfit every day habit came from. They weren't focused back then, but neither was Apple.
> make everyone wear uniforms (which Sony and Nintendo still did then)
Nintendo still requires uniforms. They're pretty casual about it and you can just throw the factory-style short sleeve shirt or the jacket over whatever you're wearing, but everyone except the suits does wear it.
Re: Nintendo Switch game cartridges taste offensively bad (2017)
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apparently one of the "luster dusts" was 25% lead, and another was pure copper dust, which is also pretty toxic if ingested. Lead sulfide (galena) is 86% lead, shiny when in large crystals and probably low enough toxicity that you could label it as "nontoxic". https://www.mindat.org/mesg-361788.html says the oral LD50 of galena in guinea pigs is 10000 mg/kg, which is about three or four times less acutely toxic than…
Yeah none of those luster dust formulations should qualify as "non-toxic" in my book. Copper and lead salts are not only acutely and chronically toxic to humans, they can be disastrous to aquatic life if they get into water ways. Cu powder gets a solid GHS09: dead fish. Suprisingly does not get the the Health Hazard GHS8. PbS gets GHS7/8/9, right proper toxic. Maybe they mean it's not acutely toxic? Usually either sh…
Yeah, I don't know. Maybe it's just a negligent error?
I'm not going to try eating some copper powder to find out, but I'd expect stomach acid to yield a substantial amount of highly soluble copper chloride. I guess I could try vomiting on some copper powder. But I won't.
Re: Nintendo Switch game cartridges taste offensively bad (2017)
#247> In a statement emailed to Polygon, a Nintendo representative confirmed the theory that Switch cartridges are coated in a material that’s meant to dissuade people from putting the units in their mouths.
So under a kind of Streisand-esque effect, tons of people are now doing this who would never have done such a thing.
Re: Nintendo Switch game cartridges taste offensively bad (2017)
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except 100% ethanol would be considered a poison too. 100ml (4 ounces) could likely kill a 5 year old child. https://www.alcohol.org.nz/alcohol-its-effects/health-effect...
Absolute alcohol (200 proof ethanol) has a number of ways to kill you. It's slightly poisonous on its own. It's a massively powerful dessicator, so it can turn tissue into leather. And, if you've got industrial quantities of the stuff, it's probably not quite pure: turns out you can't just distill it past 190 proof due to water and ethanol forming an azeotrope. To push past that limit requires azeotropic distillation…
Sounds like there are some interesting stories behind this advice ...
Re: Nintendo Switch game cartridges taste offensively bad (2017)
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except 100% ethanol would be considered a poison too. 100ml (4 ounces) could likely kill a 5 year old child. https://www.alcohol.org.nz/alcohol-its-effects/health-effect...
Absolute alcohol (200 proof ethanol) has a number of ways to kill you. It's slightly poisonous on its own. It's a massively powerful dessicator, so it can turn tissue into leather. And, if you've got industrial quantities of the stuff, it's probably not quite pure: turns out you can't just distill it past 190 proof due to water and ethanol forming an azeotrope. To push past that limit requires azeotropic distillation…
100% ethanol is generally made by a molecular sieve and it does not require any sort of poison. I have drank it before, and it is very strong of course, but no more dangerous than everclear. If there is any poisonous chemical other than ethanol in it, it is by definition not 100% ethanol. You can actually trivially make your own by purchasing molecular sieve material online. Of course I would never do that besides distilling is illegal :)
Fun fact though: it’s not 100% ethanol for long after you open the bottle because it will absorb water from the air until you hit the azeotropic limit.