One even worse thing about smart tv’s - they come with a bunch of free “channels” you can watch. If you have streaming services or cable, who cares?
Except the people that don’t – rural folk who never would pay for cable – gobble it up. And it’s all right wing propaganda garbage. From Fox News to Newsmax, they’ve got every kind of anxiety-inducing conspiracy-laden “news” you can watch.
I enjoy a good non-oversexualized depiction of Samus. She’s an absolute badass. But everyone just wants to drool at her skin tight blue suit.
The industry standard is HPLC (high performance liquid chromatography). Those things go for tens of thousands of dollars up front, plus maintenance and consumables.
If there was a less costly way of doing it, you bet companies would have settled on that by now.
make the best decisions they can
I would recommend an HPLC and a competent analytical chemist to gather data and decide whether or not a batch is safe to consume.
This has been posted to a bunch of different communities, and I’m gonna be a stick in the mud each time.
I’m a process chemist. I do this for a living. I’ve made kilo-scale batches of pharmaceuticals at work that have gone through the regulatory process and made it into people. I went to school for ten years to do this.
This is a colossally dangerous thing.
Every time you run a chemical synthesis, you generate impurities. Slightly different temperatures, concentrations, reagent quality, and a million other things will vary the identities and concentrations of those impurities in your product.
The nature of biochemistry is that most compounds, even at very small concentrations, can have effects. Usually bad ones. So drugs have tight specs on how much of each potential impurity can be present. Usually it’s in the 0.1% range, but sometimes a lot lower.
Detection of impurities at that level cannot be done with ‘hacker’ gear in your garage. So if you do this, you’re going to be taking unknown quantities of unknown impurities.
There are trade-offs. If you’re definitely gonna die without the medicine, then the worst that can happen is you die faster, or more painfully. If it’s medicine to maintain quality of life, then you might die fast and painfully.
I’m not saying the current system is good at all. Medicine is too expensive. It shouldn’t be limited by right wing nutjobs. Those things are true. Those things require a solution.
This is not a good solution.
No. Never. It takes whole teams of people to get it right. (Even then, they sometimes get it wrong.)
That’s a false dichotomy if I’ve ever heard one, dude.
No, just follow the money. It’s all going into marketing. Ban marketing (like the rest of the world!) and prices drop overnight.
There is exactly one easiest option: be like the rest of the civilized world and ban consumer marketing of medicine. HUGE amounts of the prices of drugs are just down to TV ads. “Ask your doctor about…” is horse shit, let your doctor decide what prescription drugs you need. And fire the cocaine-riddled, law-breaking marketing departments that soak up so much money.
“Our recipes are consistent, like a good espresso maker.”
“Okay cool, how do you know that?”
“So many questions! We’re hackers! We are very smart.”
That’s the thing. They have no way of even knowing if they messed up! I’m not even sure the way they could be messing up is a thing they know they should be worried about.
I’m not disputing the reasoning behind why this is important. But “it is important” does not imply that their solution is the right one.
People make illicit drugs chock full of impurities all the time too, and it fucks people up.
There are standards for purity on pharmaceuticals. Impurities have to be ridiculously low. Lower than you can measure in your garage.
These dudes either don’t know you need to even measure purity or have decided that it’s inconvenient and are ignoring it.
I’m a process chemist. I do this sort of thing for a living.
These guys don’t even know why what they’re suggesting is so dangerous. Do not do any of this.
I feel bad for laughing at this
Technical people that move into management usually (but not always) suffer from something I’ve started calling management brain rot. They’re exposed to the spreadsheet warriors and their corporate jargon, and it doesn’t take long for the good ones to give up and the bad ones to thrive in a, let’s call it, “low-information environment.”
It was a scan during upload to their cloud photos system. Everyone else does it on their servers, Apple was going to run the scan before so they didn’t have to ever have them. To not have images scanned before upload, a user would just not have to use their cloud photos service.
The messaging was really badly handled. They almost certainly just scan all the same photos on their servers instead now.
Plastic that’s got a lot of color (especially black) is very, very hard to recycle. Getting the color out so you can make like-new, colorless plastic makes the economics pretty much impossible.
Should recycled plastic that isn’t colorless be accepted? Yep. But basically every manufacturer that uses recycled plastic only accepts colorless stuff. Even if they’re going to turn around and dump a bunch of pigment and dye into it! (Or especially if they’re going to do that. They have specific color targets.)
So, for now, if you buy something that’s made from recycled plastic but isn’t clear and colorless, that plastic is now outside of the recycle-able ecosystem. It’s a bummer.
But there are ways to get around that coming online. One is to turn the plastic polymers back into monomers (the building block molecules). It’s sometimes easier to separate out the pigments and dyes once you have a chemical soup of monomers instead of a block of plastic. Then you take the purified monomers and repolymerize them. Bam, you have recycled plastic that’s nearly indistinguishable from new.
I worked on a chemical recycling / depolymerization project for a couple of years. That tech is currently being scaled up into a big plant that’ll actually churn out like-new plastic from really crappy input material. Pretty exciting stuff. (As long as the business and engineering guys running the project now don’t ruin it.)
The Nobel committees frequently give prizes in an area that really have more to do with other areas. Six of the last ten Nobels in Chemistry have been explicitly biology focused. Two more were materials science stuff, so maybe half chemistry. Only two were what I’d consider actual chemistry.
But this one is pretty rough. The Nobel Prize in Physics goes to setting the world’s energy reserves on fire so coked-up executives’ lines can go up and basement-dwellers can generate waifus with big tiddies. UGH