Yes. In the EU product "denatured alcohol" for most purposes is likewise treated with the same agent. This replaces the widespread use of methanol and similar products which are poisonous (yes even if you call the product "meths" it probably isn't methanol in the EU today). The rationale is that poisoning people is not an appropriate reaction to attempted tax avoidance. Alcohol is only "denatured" because booze is taxed, there's no technical reason to use poison, and so the EU took the poison out, for the same reason it doesn't execute or torture criminals.
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....
Labs aren't buying their stuff at Walmart, so I don't know why they'd by affected by any remotely reasonable law. The supply houses can keep selling methylated alcohol, but let's get the unnecessary poisons off store shelves and out of consumer cabinets.
Probably the latter. You might not even need to become better; just tell a few more stories and find yourself shocked at what we all find entertaining.
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 using such fun substances as cyclohexane, benzene, and isooctane, and they definitely do exist in the final distillation output. Most of these are rather more poisonous than ethanol on their own, so you don't want to drink them.
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.
You left out pressure-swing distillation which doesn't require any "fun" substances to break the azeotrope. I'm not sure if it's used commercially for ethanol though? I believe it's more expensive.
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.
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.
I started using Everclear as a kitchen disinfectant when Covid started. It's 190 proof, kills germs, and it's non-toxic (in small amounts) so you can use it on food surfaces like cutting boards. A big bottle is surprisingly affordable in the US and after 2 years I still have half a bottle left.
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.
I read a WWII book about wartime pilots doing crazy shit. At one point the wings freeze over and the alcohol spritzers for de-icing are all plugged up, so somehow it vents into the cabin and gets the pilots drunk from the fumes. I think they ended up landing on a glacier in the fog, thinking they were about to hit water.
And if you denature that, it's almost twice as toxic because methanol is so much nastier. Hopefully I don't need to point out why completely banning alcohols is a rather different conversation.
Nobody gives it to them. 5-year-olds have sufficient intelligence and dexterity to get into all kinds of things, but don't necessarily know not to eat/drink/play with it, etc.
I'm somewhat of a lush and the idea of drinking two shots of 190 proof ethanol sounds like an excellent way to purge my stomach. I'd be impressed by any baby who could keep that down even if they got past the rank stench. Any baby that extreme would almost certainly survive.
Except this is why chemistry is less entrepreneurial - you can't just set up a lab in your shed (for better and for worse)
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.
As kid I had a reprint of the Boy Mechanic from the turn of the 20th century. Sooo many of the activities involved going to a pharmacy and getting X dangerous compound or element that I doubt most pharmacies today even carry let alone would sell to a 12 year old kid.
Drinking this medical disinfectant denaturated alcohol has become a meme in Romania, where very poor people drink it because it's so cheap - $1.5 for 1L of 70% ABV (almost twice Vodka strength which is about 40% ABV).
While Mona is a disinfectant, it _is_ ethanol, only the production method differs, it's obtained through industrial processes (or so it was explained to my by someone who worked at some industrial alcohol synthesis factory) as opposed to fermentation and distillation. Drinking methanol will fucking blind or kill you, so... a bad idea overall.
Very interesting. It's not the methanol that's toxic but its metabolites, so the ethanol slows down the liver's metabolism of methanol, stretching it out to the degree that the metabolites do not reach an unsafe concentration?
Also, "The preferred antidote is fomepizole, with ethanol used if this is not available."
>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.
I'm sorry for my ignorance, but could someone give more context on this? I don't understand what "denatured alcohol" is, how it relates to tax avoidance, or what illegal use people are finding for it?
There are many uses for Ethanol like starting fires, some stoves, not to mention industrial uses. Alcoholic beverages are normally taxed with a 'sin tax' to discourage consumption. Goverments realized that people could just drink Ethanol that was sold for other uses, maybe mixed with stuff to make cocktails, but that circumvents the 'sin tax' i.e. tax avoidance.
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.
Governments started adding poison to alcohol products that are not meant for human consumption. They did this because people would buy products like rubbing alcohol to produce alcoholic drinks at home, since they were cheaper (e.g. avoiding sales taxes).
Alcohol is extremely useful for many things but some people will drink it if they find it. So they add denatonium to it to discourage that. Alcohols that are meant for people to drink are taxed more heavily, so adding denatonium puts it into a completely different category of product thereby avoiding all those taxes. Just like the way Sony avoided taxes by adding Linux support to the PS2 and PS3 which caused it to be classified as a different type of computer.
Obviously the government doesn't understand Turing Completeness, and that some people game professionally, while other people hack for fun, so they made a sin tax error.
More toxic than what? I assumed you meant than methanol (which is added to ethanol-based cleaning products in the Netherlands), but then I read this on the Wikipedia page for isopropyl alcohol:
>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...)
"Even more toxic" is not usually the preferred phrasing for comparing with ethanol; it implies you're comparing with something that's already quite toxic, and ethanol, while indeed toxic, is not normally considered quite toxic enough that we don't need to go out of our way to stop people from drinking it.
Many countries levy a tax on alcohol in beverages. One way around that is to put something in it that makes anyone who drinks it sick. If you have an industrial process that can use denatured alcohol, then you don't have to pay the alcohol tax.
Ethyl alcohol is an industrial solvent. People like to drink it. The market is bifurcated into industrial use and recreational use. The former can often use impure alcohol for their purposes, or explicitly require it, but those impurities are poison if consumed.
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.
Does this bitterant leave a residue when the alcohol evaporates? That seems like one benefit of methanol vs bitterant: all of the alcohol can still evaporate without depositing bitterant as a side effect.
Are there bitterants that evaporate similarly to alcohol but are not toxic?
The bitterent used is so powerful, the concentration is like 0.01 ppm. So unless you are in a clean room, there will be more dust from air which deposits.
Here in Germany they add Butanone, which evaporates at very similar temperatures as ethanol so it’s very difficult to purify the ethanol even with a lab setup.
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.
If you're using alcohol for cleaning 70% concentrations are better as they actually kill and lyse pathogens at that concentration, while 99% will just desiccate them, allowing for reactivation when in a moist environment.
Of course alcohol is a powerful solvent at any concentration, but there are definitely studies[1] that demonstrate 70% being a bit more effective at disinfecting.
That's always been the rule of thumb that I learned growing up too. My dad kept 90% or stronger concentrations for cleaning electrical contacts and other industrial uses, and 70% for first aid and sanitizing, because that's what each was made for.
Yes, just checked and my current bottle is actually 190 proof, good call. But I swear I've gotten a bottle covered in Russian text that claimed 198 proof before. Not sure how reliable that is, to be fair.
Well, for Sweden there's the national monopoly, so denaturing it means being able to sell it for private establishments like hardware shops... And also not requiring an ID check and being > 20yo to buy.
The reasoning is public health. You can argue that it's not a preferred solution but there's definitely more than tax to it.
Whether it's reasonable to use poison as a disincentive needs to depend on how often people consume it, accidentally or purposefully. If it's extremely rare, then this is a reasonable use case, even if we don't think poisoning is a reasonable punishment for tax avoidance (because, indeed, the poison is not intended to be a punishment).
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.
Your situations are not comparable. It's impossible for a human to tell the difference between methanol and ethanol using our readily available senses. Once the methylated spirit is removed from its container there's nothing to warn someone the alcohol is poison that will probably intoxicate, then kill or blind them. Methylated sprits substantially increase the risk of death for no other advantage than to prevent tax evasion. It's the equivalent of deciding the punishment for tax evasion is to execute one in every hundred tax evaders.
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.
Even more so, counterfeit drinks contaminated with methanol have killed people who accidentally bought and unknowingly consumed said drinks, even in bars! Becherovka incidents come to mind.
so you're not killing tax evaders, but rather random innocents.
> 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
This highlights the fact that the average person has no idea how seriously methanol should be taken. I started distilling my own moonshine / hand sanitizer at the beginning of the pandemic, and before that I really hadn't heard the horror stories and had no idea how common accidental poisoning was.
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].
> It's impossible for a human to tell the difference...
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).
> You are arguing that the risk of accidental poisoning by methanol is in fact high.
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.
> 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
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.
> People die in prisons, catch fatal viruses in court, etc.
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.
A bitterent that can cause allergic reactions (and most substances can!) is on a completely different scale to something that is an actual poison and consuming a small amount can cause permanent damage/kill you, regardless of your immune system's sensitivity.
> If it's extremely rare, then this is a reasonable use case
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.
> I don’t really see the point of risking poisoning people as a way of dissuading tax dodging especially when alternatives exist.
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.
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 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.
> 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 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.
> 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.
> If it's extremely rare, then this is a reasonable use case
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?
> You never actually gave a reason for that assertion.
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.
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.
> for the same reason it doesn't execute or torture criminals.
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).
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?
The OP is probably referring to this well known article (in French): "In 2020, 27 deaths as a result of law enforcement response, including 12 during containment"
I was not referring to this article specifically but yes i was referring to those infamous stats. Before Macron, we had a casual rhythm of ~1 police murder/month. Under Macron they started raising, until we hit over ~2 police murders/month last year, as you pointed out.
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...
While I salute your dedication, reading the article was enough to know actually :
>Intrepid reporter Julia Alexander tried tasting cartridges from the Nintendo DS, Nintendo 3DS and PlayStation Vita. None of them had any particular taste.
It's actually amazing how Nintendo's "Focus on 1P titles and make HW that is appealing to the masses" used to be its greatest disadvantage and is now probably the only reason for their existence.
Kind of Japan's Apple in some ways (with SEGA unfortunately being Japan's NeXT).
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)
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.
Yea it's crazy. My dad has a classic Gameboy that his great grandfather purchased during the first world war. That Gameboy saw a couple more wars after that too, including 5 years up my grandads ass in a POW camp, and 2 more inside another soldier who brought it back for us.
I know you're trying to make the point that Nintendo revolutionized itself and is a foundationally different company than it was in the 1910's, but not really.
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.
It's a bit of an amalgam, and it honestly depends on which version of OSX you're talking about. Mach itself was designed as an improvement over BSD, and it was more or less a microkernel developed around BSD concepts with binary compatibility. My understanding is that as time went on, performance issues and security concerns forced Apple to poach more and more BSD code onto Mach, which leaves us with the pretty messy codebase they use today. Supposedly (?) a lot of the zombie code is being cleaned up internally, but it's been an ongoing, multi-year process for Apple, probably made even more difficult with their bonafide UNIX certification.
> 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.
I dont know if you can say that Sony is doing stuff “poorly”. Most of the hardware they make is very solid. Think about their speakers, headphones, the consoles, etc.
But yes i agree, they are a huge company with a lot of divisions where sometimes the decisions are at odds.
Which parts do you think are doing poorly?
That's easy, UUIDs are unique, so it's easy to tell them apart, although it's hard to group them. Much better than deciding what the heck 'new iPad' means or if you want a new old 3ds or a used new 3ds, or if updating iOS means your phone or your router.
Just because Apple has had some bad names doesn't make Sony's names better. Don't compare Sony's naming conventions with iPad, compare them with iPhone, which is significantly easier.
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.
Naming things is still one of the harder problems in computer science. The iPhone 12 Pro Max is descriptive, but doesn't say everything. How much storage it has, how many sim slots (there are dual-nano-sim iPhones in special regions) it has, the modem and antenna configuration, the color. From Apple's POV, the plebs don't need to know the difference between A2342, A2410, A2411, and A2412 versions of the iPhone 12 Pro Max and it's not clear that they're wrong.
Hardware is generally great but their software and UI are often crap.
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)
It's not entirely about the business structure or its fundamental revenue sources. Don't think like an accountant here, it's about the brand. In terms of being the top-tier tech and hardware firm of your nation, Sony is Japan's Apple. It's a strong household name too, regardless of their conglomerate style being close to Microsoft.
I pin the failure of the Vita (a system designed around downloadable games with hardware buttons) on the need to use proprietary memory. Yes, Sony made more off of the proprietary memory than off of SD/uSD cards, but handicapped the system and made the downloadable games that should have been its bread and butter an expensive proposition for users.
I would say Panasonic is actually the Apple of Japan but with more of a focus on business to business in addition to consumer. They make a gazillion things but generally they are all damn good.
That comparison aside, I think Nintendo and Apple are very similar in a spiritual sense. They both love vertical integration, they both love to own as much of the software and hardware stack as possible, they both have a perceived emphasis on quality, independence of thought, they don't play nicely with others as much as they can get away with, they both have super loyal, obsessive fanbases, and they have literal mountains of cash because of this attitude within their respective industries. I think Sony is in a similar line of business as Apple but they don't have the same attitude that these two share.
Another company I'd lump in with these 2 would be Disney for the same reasons as above.
> A company like Nintendo doesn’t seem like it has an American equivalent
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.
I would disagree - No one ever really assumed Sony would go out of business from a fundamental standpoint. They may have gone through a period of diminished value and failed projects (laptops, smartphones, etc.), but the PlayStation has always been a hit, the media arm has always been a 'Top 4' player, the headphones were always category-leading, the camera sensors were always top notch, and I'm sure I'm missing many other aspects of their business. If anything that brings to mind MSFT (who's always led in core areas, but has also had periods of diminished value and failed projects).
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.
Nintendo has a lot of money, a failure of a home console after Wii U probably would kill their home console division (no reason to continue making products if they all fail), but it wouldn't kill the company as a whole, in particular they would keep making handheld consoles.
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.
They really are an interesting company. They are slower than Sony/MS, yet more innovative at the same time. They make a fair amount of bone-headed decisions, but I certainly trust them more than I do most other tech companies.
Especially back in the PS3/XBox360/Wii days, they seemed like the only thing stopping the VG industry from a nofun dystopian duopoly.
It's interesting that Sony and MS have not even attempted to compete directly with the Switch, despite it being a massive success. They're kind of in their own market right now, which is where they usually succeed (like the Wii). Steam is coming in 5 years late with the Game Gear 2, so I guess we'll see how that goes.
I think Microsoft is trying to compete via cloud streaming of games -- saying "you can play Halo on basically any device with an internet connection" is a compelling argument, even if they have a ways to go to make it a compelling experience.
It's really true, I definitely get the same feeling using Nintendo products as I do using Apple's. A constant struggle of love and hate. A company that's doing things in its space so differently than all its competitors, and is in a completely unique situation from the rest that allows them to do those things so differently. Occasionally annoying and archaic with their inability to get with the times in certain areas.
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.
Seems like Nintendo tried the same strategy over and over again, and it sometimes works due to the right confluence of decent hardware design (not all of their hardware is good) and the right circumstances.
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.
When I had Covid in December, I briefly lost my sense of smell and taste (only for a few days, thankfully). I decided I would see if the Switch cartridges tasted as bad as I remembered - purely in the interests of science, of course.
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!
That is really interesting, especially because you could compare the taste with vs. without anosmia. Thank you for trying that for the sake of science and glad you recovered shortly thereafter.
There's a small YouTube channel by a person with anosmia who made a number of videos explaining what anosmia is like. I think the series is worth a listen if you're interested in that:
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.
> “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.” The representative also noted that denatonium benzoate is non-toxic.
Note that non-toxic does not mean edible, as the FDA recently clarified due to many people being severely poisoned from eating cakes decorated with luster dust meant for crafting.
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 product shouldn't pose serious risks to one's health. In other words, licking a Nintendo Switch cartridge should not result in a dose of denatonium anywhere near high enough to cause any deleterious health effects. Drinking entire bottles of the stuff probably will.
This luster dust apparently contains lead, how these manufacturers managed to conclude that it is non-toxic is beyond me.
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 table salt. But table salt doesn't accumulate in your bones and brain over time, so seasoning all your food with galena would still be worse for you, even if you didn't chip your teeth.
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]"
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".
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.
Kinda makes you wonder what the relative toxicity of a Switch cartridge is. Some labcoat at Nintendo probably ran the number for this one on the weekend.
If anyone else is wondering, the only somewhat concise explanation I found was this[0]:
> 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.
One of the basic principles of toxicology is "the dose makes the poison".
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.
I immediately knew what's the article about, just by looking at the header. Anecdote time: my father used to be one of top-5 world's manufacturers of Denationium Benzoate, before he decided to retire. I grew up with this substance, I moved bottles, bags, canisters, flasks, barrels full of it. I drove in a car that was used to ship it. I had my clothes washed together with the clothes that was in contact with the DB.
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 cannot taste "bitter" (it's a genetic thing), though bittering agents used in food/drinks do taste very unpleasant to me (I don't know what it is I'm tasting in those or why it's so unpleasant).
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.
I think your edit points out the reality: what we call "bitter" covers a wide range of different tastes and we have at least 25 different receptors that are considered "bitter".
You REALLY have to try monkfruit - it has some weird enzyme or something that will make sour things turn sweet. And given that bitter and sour often go together......I wonder how the hell that would taste given your genetics
I was unfortunately reminded this when swapping out game cartridges on a flight once. I stuck one in my mouth a bit to hold it while I messed with the carrying case and other cartridge and had the awful bitter taste for the rest of the flight.
...and had the awful bitter taste for the rest of the flight.
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. :-)
Trivia. I ate green persimmons, but there is a trick. It --must-- be a persimmon from the correct cultivar (or a treated one). It doesn't worth it, but is perfectly doable. Somebody trying the same in a common persimmon will suffer the persimmoncalypse.
Eh, when I got a Switch last year I tried it out right away (after reading such articles in the past) and if you just give it a careful lick you will immediately notice it but it’s not as if it’s lingering around forever.
I haven't even put a cartridge in my mouth and I've still had to experience it. I think I swapped out some cartridges, and a moment later licked my finger for some reason. Turns out that the agent lingers on your fingers after you handle the games.
> People have speculated that the manufacturing process for Switch cartridges involves coating them in a layer of foul-tasting film, so as to discourage people from, well, putting the cartridges in their mouths. (Why do you think Play-Doh is so bitter and salty?)
IIRC, Play-Doh is basically flour and the salt is there as a preservative.
I think it's more than that, it has something to do with its consistency. You can find recipes to make your own and they all use a seemingly ridiculous amount of salt.
The same bitterant has been used in anti-freeze for about a decade now to help prevent poisonings of children and animals. It is also used in air duster cans, which I've found annoying because it can go from your keyboard to your fingers.
Windshield wiper fluid, too. I got a little on my fingers once, and didn't notice for a few hours, when I licked a finger... what is that flavor... probably licked it a dozen times before I remembered. Whoops. Problem is, I like bitter flavors, and that one was just fascinating.
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.
I take small pride in the idea there’s something I can taste better than my dog. All I ever hear is how their senses are orders more heightened than our own. Do you know if there are any smells that humans can detect better than dogs?
Ironically, while my dog is happy to eat his own shit, _citrus_ is a bridge too far, for him and most dogs, which is why citronella is used as an anti-bark collar component.
Yes, very sweet. The lethal does is also quite low - ~2.5 fl oz of pure (CH2OH)2 for a 200lb adult. A very similar chemical, propylene glycol, is FDA GRAS and used in foods, drinks, and inhalers. It is also an effective anti-freeze, so there is a push to have it replace ethylene glycol.
I waited outside GameStop on launch day to snag a Switch with my friend. We had heard about the bittering agent applied to the cartridges by day two and immediately tasted them ourselves.
I have a fond memory of camping outside a Target from ~10:00p to 6:00a when the Wii was launched. We hung out with a group of strangers in camping chairs, talked about our favorite games, and tried to keep warm. When the Starbucks bakery delivery came a few hours before the store opened the driver gave us all free pastries.
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?
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.
Gaming console computer technology was very different to PC. The last unique one was PS3 Cell (but also RSX by Nvidia). Now they are just PC or smartphone based.
I have a not so fond memory camping out in Walmart for my Wii. I think we could just stay inside since it was 24hrs and they were selling them right at midnight.
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.
What's hard to believe is that Nintendo is still milking what was already an ancient screen and SoC for all its worth, or that despite making container-ship levels of profits off the Switch, they haven't bothered to make joycons last longer than their warranty period.
another example of this kind of intentionality from nintendo is the curve on top of SNES, which is there to discourage setting drinks on top of it, unlike the NES before it
My daughter was sucking her thumb even on the first ultrasound. When she was a baby, thumb sucking was cute and she never needed a pacifier. However as she got to be a toddler it became a problem in terms of hygiene (her thumb was often not clean). Plus her thumb was pushing her front teeth out of line, which was affecting her speech.
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!
Definitely second this. I have been downloading all my Switch games but bought one cheap cartridge just to see what all the craze was about.
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.
Ours has a couple of copies of 20-30 games. The waitlist can be a while since you get 3 weeks / checkout. They have some recent titles such as Bowser's Fury and Metroid Dread, as well as older things like Breath of the Wild.
This is an incredibly timely repost. Last weekend, my 8 month-old third kid was on the floor next to me while I was talking to my other kid when she started screaming. She had found a Mario Party switch cartridge under the couch and had it in her hand. I thought she had bit it too hard on her toothless gums because it had some saliva on it. She was more upset than I would have expected, and this has to be why. Thanks for reposting!
According to another comment, the bittering agent is in the sticker, so presumably you could remove the sticker before consuming your switch cartridge.
> It doesn’t hit you at first. It tastes just as plain and feels just as slippery as the other three cartridges. In just a few milliseconds, though, a very sour taste invades your taste buds.
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.
I remember seeing this at the time, and trying to lick a cartridge.
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.
> 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.
I hate how in the matter of like 2 minutes I can be goaded into doing something dumb like licking the cartridge right out of my Switch, only to learn precisely the lesson I could have learned by simply reading the article: That the cartridges taste profoundly offensive.
This is so funny. But, anything that dissuades the kids from putting them in their mouths is okay by me! (If only because the games are so expensive I don't want them eaten!)
The title is clickbait; it should be something like "Nintendo Switch game cartridges taste offensively bad because they're coated in denatonium benzoate (2017)".
Touching you tongue to both terminals of a small 9V battery also tasts bad and sour. I've done it several times as a kid, checking if a battery was (almost) empty :)
Thanks Nintendo. There are undoubtedly a bunch of kids around still today who avoided having A Bad Time because of this (...and the kids won't even know it)
I had to buy some coin cell batteries a few months ago (CR2032s or similar) and was surprised to see the package proclaiming they’d done that. Made sense, but had never thought of the need before.
Coin cell batteries can kill toddlers within 48-72 hours if swallowed. Even if they don't kill, they can cause terrible internal burns when the gut shorts the terminals.
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.
Kids swallowing coin cell batteries is a recurring and very serious problem. Hospitals will take it very seriously (x-rays, etc) if there's even a suspicion that one has been swallowed.
Well, they aren't just telling them not to do it, they are physically dissuading them from doing so. This is probably a lot more effective than a warning sticker to not put the cartridge in their mouth.
“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.
> 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.
>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?
>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".
>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".
>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.)
