How the fentanyl crisis' fourth wave has hit every corner of the US • Hacker News Board

Re: How the fentanyl crisis' fourth wave has hit every corner of the US

#101

Post by tzs » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 11:29 PM UTC

fabian2k wrote: post #89

rawgabbit wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair in many parts of the world 40000 and 100000 is written like this 40.000 and 100.000. So it may confuse non Americans.

Yes, I don't really use thousands separators because I use both number systems regularly and the ambiguity annoys me. It's not a practical issue in this case I think as almost everyone would assume US numbers here. But they feel weird to me somehow. I have used spaces at times as a thousands separator, but that might be even more confusing.

Spaces is actually an international standard, as part of SI, for scientific writing. If a numerical value has more than 4 digits on either side of the decimal marker, make groups of three using a thin fixed space.

For the decimal marker "." and "," are both acceptable. Use whichever is appropriate for your country or for where you readers are or whatever.

Unicode U+2009 (thin space) or U+202F (narrow no-break space) are good for this, but unfortunately neither of them are among the Unicode that works on HN. HN converts them on input to a normal space.

E.g., 12 345 (space), 12 345 (U+2009), and 12 345 (U+202F) are all the same on HN.

That wasn't always the case. I'm not sure when they started filtering these out on input, but 6 years ago I posted a comment where I pasted in some text demonstrating various Unicode spaces [1], and that works so the change was sometime in the last 6 years.

Note: it only works for me in Chrome. In Firefox and Safari the browser changes them all to normal space. I don't know if that is just something peculiar to my Firefox and Safari installations or if Chrome just does Unicode better than they do.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16194485

Re: How the fentanyl crisis' fourth wave has hit every corner of the US

#102

Post by giardini » Mon, Sep 18, 2023, 2:57 AM UTC

flybrand wrote: post #40

My wife has pre-cancerous moles and every few years some need to be removed. This year it was done - and they told her to take Advil for 6 inch long incisions on her back. In the past? Pain pills like Oxicotin - which they are now afraid to prescribe. So she’s dealt w 2 weeks of agony as she heals. American medicine is cruel.

She might ask her doctor about ramping up the Advil(ibuprofen) - dosage is not limited to one 400 mg pill per 4-hour period.

An adult can usually tolerate up to 3200 mg of Advil per day. Large dosages can be prescribed (easier to take as a single pill). Again, she should ask her doctor.

I had a cracked bone once - 800 mg Advil for 8 weeks erased the pain while the bone healed. Bone healed OK (advil didn't affect healing negatively).

There are other NSAIDS. Aleve(Naproxen sodium) is one of my favorites. Read up on the differences and side effects, b/c YMMV.

Re: How the fentanyl crisis' fourth wave has hit every corner of the US

#103

Post by ceejayoz » Mon, Sep 18, 2023, 3:54 AM UTC

oneTbrain23 wrote: post #69

0xCAP wrote: post #10

Non US person here, so feel free to call me out on BS. IMHO people who do fentanyl already have pretty serious mental and/or existential issues going on, like who tf would play russian roulette like that? Sounds more like a societal problem than a mere drug distribution regulation problem to me.

Think of it like guns. In the east, children don't touch guns that easy as Americans. So you not going to hear about accidental gunshot in the east no matter how stupid or how genius you are as Asian. In America, that is a normal annual statistical happenings. Fentanyl is like that. There are many incidents paper money laced with fentanyl where you touch it, you get fentanyl overdose. You almost can argue it seems fo…

> There are many incidents paper money laced with fentanyl where you touch it, you get fentanyl overdose.

This is a myth perpetuated by cops having panic attacks.

You can dip your hand in liquid fentanyl and be fine. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35722948/

"This has never happened," said Dr. Ryan Marino, a toxicologist and emergency room physician who studies addiction at Case Western Reserve University. "There has never been an overdose through skin contact or accidentally inhaling fentanyl." https://www.npr.org/2023/05/16/1175726650/fentanyl-police-ov...