Nintendo Switch game cartridges taste offensively bad (2017)
polygon.com
polygon.com
Are there bitterants that evaporate similarly to alcohol but are not toxic?
Source: some friends make drinks with grain alcohol, and then don't want it any more after they make those drinks (gee, I wonder why?). Provides an essentially endless supply of alcohol for cleaning purposes for me.
[1]: https://www.webmd.com/first-aid/ss/rubbing-alcohol-uses
I don't disagree with the idea, but to be precise torture and execution at the hand of police and secret services is still a thing in the EU. Especially since the covid lockdowns started almost two years ago, it seems police murders have raised significantly in some parts of the EU (like France).
Council of Europe Annual Penal Statistics – SPACE II – 2020 - so evidently 2021 not published yet.
that is the full report maybe take this https://wp.unil.ch/space/files/2021/06/KeyFindings_Probation... which is the keyfindings and a quicker read.
Figure 3 on page 5 (in the keyfindings document) - Probation and Prison population rates (per 100,000 inhabitants) on 31st January 2020 shows the median prison population is 103 per 100,000
where probation is concerned on 31st January 2020, there were 1,512,765 probationers under the supervision of the 31 probation agencies of the Council of Europe member states which use the person as the counting unit for their stock of probationers...
which would lead to a probation population rate of 311 probationers per 100,000 inhabitants. However, when the European median value is estimated on the basis of the population and the number of probationers of each country, it corresponds to 149 probationers per 100,000 inhabitants
in Table 3 on page 16 shows Composition of the probation and prison populations on 31st January 2020 and mortality during 2019.
Is your suggestion that some part of these deaths are killings by the EU authorities as a part of policy / extrajudicial killing, or do you mean that there are other deaths that are not in this table. If so - your sources for this claim please?
https://basta.media/recensement-interventions-policieres-let...
If talking about secret services murdering people, the Rainbow Warrior would be a good example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Rainbow_Warrior
And about police torturing people, i've been lucky enough to be only mildly hurt by police who beat me down on more than one occasion, but i know first-hand people who were tortured by police. These situations are well-documented by copwatchers. One case made news worldwide two years ago but is a good symptom of the wider problem: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/26/paris-police-f...
Likewise, we put up physical barriers like metal posts and concrete walls to dissuade drivers from crossing certain lines even though it would obviously be outrageous to punish a driver for crossing a lane line by smashing their car. As long as drivers strike these very rarely, it's reasonable to use these as disincentives.
By all means, if we find disincentives (like bittering agents) that are just as effective with even less risk, we should use them. But claiming that poison is being used as a punishment for tax avoidance is unjustified.
Physical barriers on the other hand are both obvious to car drivers, there's no situation where a car driver believes a physical barrier might be safe to drive into, and more importantly, physical barriers are used to protect other road users, not punish people. So you're trading an increased risk of death to prevent bad driving, you're increasing the risk of driver death to reduce deaths caused by bad driving. If drivers regularly strike a barrier that protects a school, it would be completely unreasonable to remove that barrier, and allow drivers to strike children instead.
so you're not killing tax evaders, but rather random innocents.
And no doubt causing permanent blindness in an even higher number of survivors.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC1771266/
> During summertime, the patient had earned his living by fire eating at different Spanish locations.
> According to the patient, a sudden episode of hiccough during fire eating caused accidental ingestion of denatured alcohol containing methanol.
> Our patient demonstrates that accidental ingestion of even small amounts of denatured alcohol containing methanol can cause irreversible blindness with intracerebral lesions.
> As a clear, colourless, volatile liquid with a weak odour, methanol is difficult to differentiate from other forms of alcohols such as ethanol.
> Methanol is rapidly absorbed not only after oral ingestion but by inhalation or after cutaneous exposure and becomes oxidised in the liver to formaldehyde and to formic acid, metabolites which are more toxic than methanol itself
Horrifically, the US government actually increased methanol in industrial spirits during an prohibition with what seems to have been clear intent that more people would die as a result[1].
https://www.vox.com/2014/8/8/5975605/alcohol-prohibition-poi...
You are arguing that the risk of accidental poisoning by methanol is in fact high. Thats an empirical question, and I explicitly agreed in my comment that if the risk is high then this is not a good method of disincentive. Importantly, your argument is not the one I was rebutting, that poisons are bad disincentives because they are inhumane punishments for tax evasion.
But more to your point: methanol poisoning is often used in situations where the potential drinkers are highly informed, e.g., people ordering chemicals out of a catalog. The risk, ultimately, is an empirical question, and you are invited to check how often accidental poisonings of this type happen.
> It's the equivalent of deciding the punishment for tax evasion is to execute one in every hundred tax evaders.
It's not, both in terms of numbers and in terms of principle.
> physical barriers are used to protect other road user...
You have misinterpreted my comment. I did not refer to protective barriers. There are plenty of examples where metal posts and concrete barriers are used to stop cars from getting to places where they would be a nuisance but not dangerous (e.g., pay parking lots, dedicated express lanes, and "no thru traffic" barriers).
I’m arguing that no level of introduced “deterrent” fatality risk is an acceptable trade off for preventing a crime that itself isn’t punishable by death (and I believe that no crime should be punishable by death).
The only situation I would consider deliberately introducing the risk of fatality as a deterrent, is when there’s extremely clear evidence that such a deterrent lowers the overall fatality risk associated with the crime, by reducing harm to victims, or to the perpetrators themselves.
> methanol poisoning is often used in situations where the potential drinkers are highly informed, e.g., people ordering chemicals out of a catalog.
It’s also used in plenty of situations where potential drinks are completely uninformed. Such as when bought for the purpose of paint thinning, camping stoves, and as a cleaning product. Plenty of situations where a completely uniformed individual may purchase the denatured alcohol, or have easy access to denatured alcohol.
> Importantly, your argument is not the one I was rebutting, that poisons are bad disincentives because they are inhumane punishments for tax evasion.
I can provide a pretty simple rebuttal to idea that poisons are good disincentive to prevent tax evasion. If you’re not educated on the process of methylating spirits to make alcohol undrinkable, then by the time you’ve drunk enough of it to figure it out, you’re dead.
Now in a an extremely pragmatic way, that makes poisons extremely effective at preventing tax evasion. Those educated enough to know better don’t try to evade the tax, those that do die. This all evaders are either discouraged or eliminated. Of course one issue with this is assuming the person consuming the substance is the same person that evaded the tax. There have been plenty of cases of people diluting normal alcohol with methylated spirits to bulk up their stock, in the process making the assumption the dilution is great enough to avoid poisoning people, or that they won’t be around to face the consequences.
I think as a society we’ve agreed that this sort of absolutist approach to law and order is pretty barbaric and unbecoming of a more civilised society.
> It's the equivalent of deciding the punishment for tax evasion is to execute one in every hundred tax evaders.
> It's not, both in terms of numbers and in terms of principle.
You’re right. It’s closer to killing a random small proportion of tax evaders, and also killing a random small proportion of anyone who’s had the misfortune of doing business with them.
> You have misinterpreted my comment. I did not refer to protective barriers. There are plenty of examples where metal posts and concrete barriers are used to stop cars from getting to places where they would be a nuisance but not dangerous (e.g., pay parking lots, dedicated express lanes, and "no thru traffic" barriers).
Again, it’s obvious to anybody what a physical barrier will do to their car, protective or otherwise. It’s pretty hard to conceal a physical barrier in a manner that would cause someone to unknowingly drive into it. Unlike methylated sprits where’s it trivial to conceal its nature.
All deterrents have a non-zero chance of causing death. People die in prisons, catch fatal viruses in court, etc. Indeed, even bitterants can cause allergic reactions, and so definitely have a non-zero probability of causing death.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6571374/
Since you reject this idea, there is no point in us discussing further.
Prisons and courts aren’t designed to kill. Methylated spirits are. This is very simple concept you seem to be struggling with, governments shouldn’t seek to kill their citizens, or introduce deterrents that operate entirely on the principle of making people fear for their lives if they fail to comply with the law.
I don’t really see the point of risking poisoning people as a way of dissuading tax dodging especially when alternatives exist. In the same way we don’t put solid barriers on roads unless people walking need to be protected - when a barrier is there to dissuade a driver it’s designed so a car runs through a barrier without hurting the driver and passengers.
You're not disagreeing with what I wrote.
> In the same way we don’t put solid barriers on roads unless people walking need to be protected
Not true. We also put up barriers when people driving over the line would merely be a nuisance, e.g. in parking lots or to keep people from entering closed areas.
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 deterrents then they should be used. This leaves open the possibility that if bittering agents don't deter as well, poison may be a reasonable choice. Yet the only thing we're talking about deterring is tax avoidance. In which case poison seems completely unreasonable. This leads one to suspect that you believe there are other public goods brought about by deterrence which would equal the weight of an occasional poisoning.
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 less maintenance than wood).
> This leaves open the possibility that if bittering agents don't deter as well, poison may be a reasonable choice. Yet the only thing we're talking about deterring is tax avoidance. In which case poison seems completely unreasonable.
This is a good line of inquiry, but your blanket conclusion is wrong. Again it depends on the details.
If bitterants are 90% effective but methanol is 99.9% effective, corresponding to $100M vs. $100k worth of alcohol in the black market, then this must be weighed against the statistical value of life, which is ~$8M in the US, and the number of people killed by the poisoning.
The poison isn't a punishment because it isn't being drunk by people who we intend to have drink it (which is no one). The poison is being accidentally drunk by people who don't know it's there, which is exactly the opposite of what's intended. That's what makes those poisonings accidental side effects, rather than penalties.
In contrast, "man traps" (booby traps intended to harm or capture trespassers) are generally illegal because their effect (bodily injury and/or, effectively, kidnapping) are illegal because they unjustly inflict consequences on their intended targets.
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.
You never actually gave a reason for that assertion.
> Whether it's reasonable to use poison as a disincentive ... > (because, indeed, the poison is not intended to be a punishment)
What is the difference between "disincentive" and "punishment" here?
> "Likewise, we put up physical barriers*
So, would you be OK with replacing the physical barriers with, say, spikes that would tear up a car's tires and instantly cause an accident, should the car try to cross the line? Just to make the disincentive more effective?
As discussed elsewhere in this thread, all interventions carry some risk of bad unintended things happening. You can get killed in car accident driving to court, but we don't eliminate court.
> What is the difference between "disincentive" and "punishment" here?
Traditionally, punishment is seen as having up to three components: deterrence, retribution, and/or incapacitation.
https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/reasons-...
I'm using "disincentive" here to emphasize that (1) only deterrence is sought, (2) the deterrent is created before the deterred action rather than implemented later, (3) the deterrent is "bound up" with the deterred action in a particularly tight way. There is more to say about (3), but it would take a while to unpack, and I think (1) and (2) are sufficient for this discussion.
(I'm happy to use better or more standard terminology if it exists.)
> would you be OK with replacing the physical barriers with, say, spikes that would tear up a car's tires and instantly cause an accident, should the car try to cross the line?
Only insofar as the effectiveness went up so much that the total harm caused was less.
The spikes sound scary and bring a grisly accident to mind, and intuitively we know that in the real world drivers would sometimes hit them by accident. So let me try an alternative hypothetical that may help illustrate my position better.
Suppose we are trying to build a humane prison and we need to find a way to keep people inside. First note that, traditionally, a fence with razor wire on top is used as a disincentive even though we all agree it would be terrible to punish escapees by cutting their hands with a razor. And say there is some rate of prisoners escaping (1 per decade, or whatever) with the fence. Now, imagine we could replace the fence with an extremely deep pit around the prison that would be fatal to fall into. (For the sake of the thought experiment, we assume counterfactually that the pit is as cheap as a fence and introduced no other issues.) Suppose the pit has a railing around it so no one falls in accidentally, and also that it is much more effective at preventing escape because essentially no one bothers to try.
Death by falling is even more unreasonable as a punishment for trying to escape, yet the situation seems better than the razor wire. The reason is that the pit is a very effective disincentive (a deterrent created prior rather than after the fact) and the total harm (number of escapees plus injury to attempted escapees) is much less.
Interestingly a valid treatment for methanol poisoning is ethanol: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol_toxicity#Treatment
Also, "The preferred antidote is fomepizole, with ethanol used if this is not available."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol_toxicity#Treatment
>Fomepizole is a competitive inhibitor of the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase, found in the liver. This enzyme plays a key role in the metabolism of ethylene glycol, and of methanol.
Now you need to figure out a way to stop people from consuming cleaning products.
>Isopropyl alcohol, via its metabolites, is somewhat more toxic than ethanol, but considerably less toxic than ethylene glycol or methanol.
(Can't link link to the page due to mysterious iOS bug...)
So some countries sell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denatured_alcohol, which is alcohol with additives to discourage consumption. Some countries limit themselves to just adding a foul taste and smell, while some add poisonous substances to it to make it toxic.
They tax stuff some people like, because other people think its bad. But some stuff they can't tax because companies want it, so they make it taste awful or poisonous so people won't like it.
Yes, there is. Methanol and ethanol are very chemically similar and small amounts of methanol in your ethanol is usually acceptable from a chemical standpoint. But denatonium benzoate is not like ethanol, and can be a contaminant that destroys the process.
To get around this, you either have to find old-fashioned methylated spirits in very high purity, pay the alcohol taxes (which are stratospheric on 200 proof...), or file a crapton of paperwork to buy ethanol tax-free because you're doing chemistry things with it, not drinking it. The latter is what big operations do, but it's a giant pain in the ass if you are not a big operation and you just need moderate volumes of high purity alcohol for your critical cleaning operations....
Username checks out, any fun stories to share? I find most people who've worked in lab's have at least one.
So don't bloody well drink anything above 190 proof, ever, no exceptions! Though when you're going through 55-gallon drums of it to clean clean-room equipment, a lot of it tends to end up in the air... turns out you can get enough alcohol in the air to get noticeable effects on you.
Like I said, lots of ways to kill you.
Also the really high purity stuff (for HPLC and the like) has the "fun" chemicals removed from it and a chemical analysis printed on the side of the jug. Benzene content can be well below safe drinking water standards depending on the product. Pretty sure you'd be paying more at that point than just buying taxed vodka though.
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.
Downsides: It's flammable and you wouldn't want it accessible with kids around.
Everclear is 151 in states where it’s not legal to sell spirits of higher proof than that (for example, California).
I discovered this little disappointment while attempting a limoncello recipe that called for real Everclear and all I could legally buy was the 151 proof version.
And so now I write code for a living instead of trying to push the frontiers of medical chemistry :)
FYI I fully get why many chemicals are fully regulated. I recall a funny story from uni and how only the big boss head of the entire chemistry org had the authorisation to handle lysergic acid (precursor to LSD) and he had to be supervised while pouring it/measuring it for your experiment.
Given the number of wannabes PhD in chemistry having peaceful religious beliefs that are entering in EU every year, this is really for the better.
The reasoning is public health. You can argue that it's not a preferred solution but there's definitely more than tax to it.
Did Sony do this with the Vita cartridges? I don’t remember hearing so (and never thought to taste them?).
Heh.
Kind of Japan's Apple in some ways (with SEGA unfortunately being Japan's NeXT).
https://stoneagegamer.com/blog/the-xbox-almost-the-dreamcast...
A company like Nintendo doesn’t seem like it has an American equivalent, and I actually can’t imagine a company like that surviving the ups and downs of the 80s/90s/00s tech cycles in the US, especially with our tendency towards M&A.
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 everything)
They weren't focused back then, but neither was Apple.
Also, random thing, but both Orbis (Playstation operating system) and OS X are based on FreeBSD.
https://www.theverge.com/2014/2/5/5380832/sony-vaio-apple-os...
https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Da... seems to have information on this.
The userland and libc are actually a lot more similar and some pieces are even up to date with them.
Unrelated to your point, but Nintendo is older than Sony and Apple combined.
Apple 45 years
Sony 75 years
Nintendo 132 yearsCan confirm it tastes bad.
Trading cards (cutting edge color printing) -> Mechanical toys (cutting edge machining) -> Basic games like Game and Watch -> Video Games.
Nintendo just makes complex toys using cutting edge tech and always has.
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.
The names of their products. How do you keep anything straight when the name of each product is UUID?
Q: Which iPhone do you have A: iPhone 12 Pro Max (I choose this one because it's one of the longer iPhone names)
vs
Q: Which Sony headphones do you have A: MX 4 or something like that. Let me check my Amazon order history. Oh yeah, here it is. The WH-1000XM4
I'd much prefer the iPhone naming convention to what Sony does, and Apple having screwed up the iPad naming doesn't really excuse Sony here.
I think the problem for this is they have separate divisions often developing the bits and bolts behind their consumer/business hardware who are doing very high quality and innovative engineering and then the separate company developing the actual devices that use that hardware is more of an afterthought. They just want to sell the bits and bolts to everyone else as well.
What does Sony do poorly? Sony has the same dysfunction Apple has - everything has to be invented in house. If you told me that a company invented an high end camera that 20% more than the competitors and used proprietary connectors and memory cards, I wouldn't be surprised if that was Apple.
>decades between the device side (that wants to make devices that are useful) and the content side (that wants DRM out the ass on everything)
Remember FairPlay?
The Qualia fiasco?
PSPgo?
Was FairPlay the name of the rootkit they'd install if you tried to play one of their audio CDs in a Windows PC?
Sony is like a fancier Microsoft
Who knows with Nintendo
On the other hand, many people thought Nintendo (as we know it at least) might go belly-up in the Gamecube and Wii U eras. There was real talk of them becoming a game dev with no hardware if the Switch was as much of a failure [0]. Similar to the talk around Apple post-Newton, pre-iBook.
[0]https://www.gonintendo.com/stories/376204-after-the-failure-...
Since Sony has entered home console market, Nintendo was essentially unable to compete with them. Nintendo 64, GameCube and Wii U weren't successful compared to PlayStation. Wii and Switch on the other hand succeeded by doing something completely different to what PlayStation did.
Another company I'd lump in with these 2 would be Disney for the same reasons as above.
I find they're similar to pre giant-media-conglomerate Disney. Their products target families, and are very child friendly. Ridiculous limits on when you can buy things (Disney Vault, Mario 35). Both are incredibly litigious.
Although I can't think of any comparisons to Nintendo's lack of decent online services.
Especially back in the PS3/XBox360/Wii days, they seemed like the only thing stopping the VG industry from a nofun dystopian duopoly.
It worked for the Game Boy. Its competitors were more powerful, but it turns out that people would rather not spend more money for a color screen if it your system chews through a set of six AA batteries in three hours.
It worked for the Switch. Its competitors were more powerful, but it turns out that people like the portability, and it doesn't seem like they're getting cut-down inferior versions of games for other systems.
It didn't work so well for the N64, Game Cube, or Wii U.
But I use their products, and love them anyway. Cause generally (with exceptions, of course) they create some of the very few computers/consoles/software out there that feels like it had someone constantly questioning whether the thing is fun/nice to use throughout the design process.
Well, wonder no longer. I just licked a PS Vita copy of World of Final Fantasy and it only tastes faintly of plastic.
and thank you
>Intrepid reporter Julia Alexander tried tasting cartridges from the Nintendo DS, Nintendo 3DS and PlayStation Vita. None of them had any particular taste.
I couldn't taste it at first, but then the wave of toxic unpleasantness slowly built up, even after I had moved the cartridge away from my tongue. It was different than I remembered it being, but then again it had been a few years since I tried it (probably spurred by this same headline). Really horrible. Good to know that this bitterant it still is a deterrent if you have anosmia!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LG3_w7IOivw&list=PL32E3dB2pp...
Most "flavour" are actually perceived with your sense of smell, which is why you felt like you lost the sense of taste. However things like bitter, sour, salty, sweet and umami are perceived with your tongue so you likely didn't lose those.
The cartridge is probably bitter which is why you could taste it.
If that happen again try it, you should still be able to taste salty and sweet typically.
That was unexpected and interesting.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7043a2.htm
You would think that if something says non-toxic, licking it shouldn't kill you, but apparently not.
> Non-toxic is essentially a placebo term and unlike food-safe or food-grade products, has little to no government regulation in terms of its accuracy. [...]
> What non-toxic means is that the product contains no ingredients that have been linked to toxic responses in humans. Toxic responses are things like hormone disruption, poisoning, or cancer.
[0] https://www.greenmatters.com/p/does-non-toxic-mean-food-safe
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
This luster dust apparently contains lead, how these manufacturers managed to conclude that it is non-toxic is beyond me.
I thought lead metal was maybe also inert enough to prevent lead poisoning from metal ingestion—just as you can drink substantial quantities of metallic mercury with no ill effects—but that turns out to be wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead#Toxicity says, "Most ingested lead is absorbed into the bloodstream," and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_poisoning#Lead-containing... says, "Ingestion of metallic lead, such as small lead fishing lures, increases blood lead levels and can be fatal.[126][127][128][129]"
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".
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.
From an OSHA perspective, "toxic" means (amongst other things) a mean-lethal-dose (LD50) of up to 500 mg per kilogram of bodyweight when ingested orally in lab rats.
There's all kind of stuff that doesn't meet the standard of toxic that you still wouldn't want to eat.
That's a given, but this this is something where it comes in a small jar to sprinkle with and a single spoonful is dangerous.
I simply grew up to like the bitterness. You put your t-shirt on, there is bitterness in your mouth. You enter the BMW 5-series with leather seats, sit down and just enjoy the bitterness. This thing is really really spreading easily in powdered form. That was fun childhood/teenager times :) Actually, really inspiring, I've met a lot of interesting people - from random sales people, random purchasers, seen extremely interesting usecases for the Denatonium (like checking whether the cooking process is actually kosher, if it's not the food would be bitter, amongst more funny stories), met CEOs of petrol companies, met whole bunch of liquor producers... Honestly lucky me to be born to a producer of Denatonium Benzoate.
I have not tried licking a Switch cartridge.
Does anyone know if Denatonium Benzoate will still taste bad to me, or is the badness entirely contained in the "bitter" that I cannot taste? I could experiment myself but I've resisted the urge to lick the cartridges for 5 years and I'm not particularly fond of the idea of tasting something awful.
Edit: Looking more at this in Wikipedia, it sounds like the genetic inability to taste bitter is specific to the TASR38 receptor, and that Denatonium Benzoate targets a different set of receptors. I am not a subject matter expert here, but it sounds to me like I should be able to still taste it.
Thanks for saving my lunch by letting me know that it is not just a momentary bit of unpleasantness, because I was about to go grab one from the Switch case here at 11:46 in the morning just to see how bad it is.
EDIT: curiosity got the best of me. If I can eat a green persimmon, I can handle a Nintendo cartridge. A little lick of the sticker tells me not to put the whole thing in my mouth. Lunch should be fine, though. :-)
And it lasted for maybe 30 seconds, maybe it's different if you realllllyyy get into it but I wouldn't advise that anyway.
Article was not wrong about the taste.
IIRC, Play-Doh is basically flour and the salt is there as a preservative.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00319...
obligatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-jp3bgyUCo&ab_channel=A%26E
Hard to believe the Switch is five years old…
The Wii ended up being a very disappointing launch experience IMO but we had a fun time waiting for one.
Video games are kinda just OK now. The actual experience was always like 70% set and setting. The game companies put a lot of effort into the games themselves but where are the LAN parties and release events? Where is.... any other aspect of gaming except the games?
Esports youtubers don't really replace split screen multiplayer.
I dearly miss LAN parties so much. Used to help coordinate one recurring one back in early 2000s. We had so much fun when Battlefield Vietnam was released and everyone was playing it together while sitting next to each other and speaking mostly in expletives. DC++ was a huge factor as well, especially when someone with a 100GB hard-drive from the biggest city nearby arrived and could share everything they managed to pull down from the almighty broadband connection they had.
I got home, turned on the Wii, and was asked to insert a startup disc. I searched that box at least 20 times trying to find the disc with no luck.
I was a heavy user of GameSpot's forums at the time and asked about this disc. Literally everyone thought I was trolling. Nobody believed me until I uploaded photos of my TV.
Eventually my dad called Nintendo and they shipped out a new one ASAP but my 16 year old self was so pissed given all the hype going into it. Days waiting with a useless Wii staring back at me.
Startup Disc: https://lostmediawiki.com/Wii_Startup_Disc_(found_software_d...
We pleaded with her to stop.
We bribed her.
We got special pretty thumb covers for her to wear at night. She always pulled them off.
Finally we got the special nail polish containing the bad taste agent and put it on her thumbnails. One application was enough. The first try tasted so bad it put her off thumb sucking for life. It's been years now and she is cured. Thanks, denatonium benzoate!
You need to experience this.
It did not disappoint, no matter how bitter you think it can be, it is worse. The aftertaste lasts for a very long time and rinsing your mouth makes little difference.
> Sure, Breath of the Wild is fun; but how does it taste?
What chemical is causing that? Because I don’t think you can explain that with denatnonium. Or maybe extreme stimulation can cause some kind of intra-gustatory synesthesia in some people. Or it’s a cultural thing, like we had to import the concept of umami from Japanese, where they in turn often use the same word for green and blue.
No effect, tastes like nothing to me. This is because I am a non-taster.
I have notoriously blunt taste amongst my loved ones, sometimes they won't even waste good wine on me, ha!
Another example of not tasting bitter: I am rather fond of Jeppson's Malort, a meme liquor popular in Chicago for its extremely bitter taste. Personally, I think it tastes bad, but do not have the same reaction as many other people.
A) Satellaview/Sega Meganet/Telegenesis taking off worldwide to reduce trips outside to buy games for systems one already owns.
2) Early implementation of online multiplayer console games in the 5th generation, possibly even delaying or stunting developments in console 3D graphics.
III) Parents just straight up don't let kids go outside/mingle (there was already the satanic panic and then the fear of kidnappers after all), single player games become superbly dominant.
Four) Couch multiplayer becomes so unthinkable that no console is ever built to support more than 2 controllers ever again.
ɛ) The entire games industry crashes/crunches hard because of supply chain problems.
六) Going outside is considered dangerous enough that portable consoles don't do as well as they did.
0111) An AI developed in a top secret soviet lab to manage airdrop supply chains goes rogue and attempts to crush human civilization starting in Moscow, with giant falling containers full of explosive payloads. A global crack team of scientists, pilots and demolitions experts get together and realize they can just barely defuse all the bombs in time, but only if they intercept the connected crate packages mid-air and guide them into orderly straight lines.
So under a kind of Streisand-esque effect, tons of people are now doing this who would never have done such a thing.
Nintendo Switch Cartridges Taste Terrible
https://www.ign.com/articles/2017/03/02/nintendo-switch-cart...
“A bittering agent (Denatonium Benzoate) has also been applied to the game card,”
To prevent children from eating them.
I didn't know that it was. Interesting that they assume this is common knowledge. Other people must be putting a lot more in their months than me.
I’ve never tried tasting either but I wonder if the process is the same?
Good work.
If there is any suspicion of swallowing a coin cell, go direct to hospital. Do not give the child anything to eat or drink until given the all clear.
“A bittering agent (Denatonium Benzoate) has also been applied to the game card,” the spokesperson said, adding that Nintendo recommends keeping Switch cartridges away from children “to avoid the possibility of accidental ingestion.”
It's somewhat common practice, some products will even say "contains a bittering agent to prevent ingestion" somewhere on the container. I believe engine coolants are required to have it.
This has been successfully used to poison people in the past. The end result is heart failure, which is not a surprising/suspicious outcome for a large portion of people.
Not my kind of fetish but ok. :)
>When MacOS X was announced, Steve Jobs said “We made the buttons on the screen look so good you'll want to lick them.” When was the last time you licked the screen of an Apple product?
https://www.zdnet.com/article/lickable-buttons/
>“We made the buttons on the screen look so good you'll want to lick them.” Steve Jobs on Mac OS X’s Aqua user interface, January 2000
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzfhAcz0OKw
>Steve Jobs Introduces Aqua (UI Design Language): Aqua is the graphical user interface, design language and visual theme of Apple's macOS operating system. It was originally based on the theme of water, with droplet-like components and a liberal use of reflection effects and translucency. Its goal is to "incorporate color, depth, translucence, and complex textures into a visually appealing interface" in macOS applications. At its introduction, Steve Jobs noted that "one of the design goals was when you saw it you wanted to lick it".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_(user_interface)
>Design elements: Gray, white and blue are the three principal colors which define the Aqua style. Window toolbars, window backgrounds, buttons, menus and other interface elements are all found in either of these colors. For instance, toolbars and sidebars are often grey or metal-colored, window backgrounds and popup menus are white and buttons (in older systems also scrollbar handles) are accented with a bright blue. In versions of OS X prior to OS X Yosemite, most controls have a "glass" or "gel" effect applied to them. David Pogue described this effect as "lickable globs of Crest Berrylicious Toothpaste Gel".
https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2000...
>Everyone expected him to unveil a new computer or two. Instead, Jobs showed off a flashy, completely redesigned Macintosh operating system called Mac OS X [ten], which, when it's delivered this summer, will put a glossy new face--graphical user interface, that is--on the Mac. "We made the buttons on the screen look so good you'll want to lick them," he says. (Some of the design elements he approved help illustrate these pages.)