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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday January 31 2018, @03:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the darwin-award-candidates dept.

Teenagers Are Still Eating Tide Pods, But Don't Expect A Product Redesign

If you've never seen it, a Tide Pod looks like a little rounded packet, white with two separate swirls of blue and orange liquid. To be clear, a Tide Pod is laundry detergent heavily concentrated into a single packet, meant to dissolve in water and clean a single load of laundry. But these days, it's a dare — an Internet meme, in which teenagers try to eat Tide Pods as a "challenge." The trend picked up in December, but the pace of poisonings is still getting worse. So far in January alone, poison control centers have received 134 reports of "intentional exposures" to laundry packets, Tide or others. That's compared with 53 cases the American Association of Poison Control Centers reported for all of 2017, mostly involving teenagers.

[...] Designs like this are never willy-nilly, says Chris Livaudais, executive director of the Industrial Designers Society of America. The process starts by studying the habits of a potential user to find ways to make their life better in some way. In this case, the condensed formula does away with a heavy jug and the need for measurement.

[...] The colors are already associated with liquid detergent, Livaudais says. And the swirls "might imply how active the ingredients are and how well it would do the washing job."

Jones says the swirls were indeed a design choice — indicating that the pod brings together three ingredients (cleaning, stain-fighting and brightening, he says). The pod is transparent because customers have told Tide they like to know what they're putting into the wash with their clothes.

Livaudais says industrial designers spend a lot of time mulling best and worst case scenarios for the use of products. But if someone knowingly chooses to misuse them? "That's completely out of our hands," he says.

National Poison Help hotline: 1-800-222-1222.


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  • (Score: 5, Funny) by Snow on Wednesday January 31 2018, @04:05PM (21 children)

    by Snow (1601) on Wednesday January 31 2018, @04:05PM (#630987) Journal

    When I was a kid, all the cool edgy kids would snort pixie stix. It was a terribly unpleasant experience that would leave your nose burning and a terrible lingering taste that would run down the back of your throat. Eating glue was another popular pastime. I had a particular fondness for gluesticks. The texture was just more enjoyable than the Elmer's white glue or the yellowy-clear glue with the nipple on top.

    Now, with the Vines and the Snapchats and the Instagrams, the kids are no longer competing with the other kids in their desk pod, but rather with all kids in the world. Eating a small bit of glue is no longer cool enough to get the likes. Now you, need to eat a whole stick, or maybe a couple sticks. Maybe even the purple gluesticks (which, while still pretty good, aren't as tasty as the white glue sticks). This increased competition for likes leads the kids to do stupider and stupider things for likes. In my day, we were happy with one like, but the kids now need many, many more.

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  • (Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday January 31 2018, @04:16PM (3 children)

    by acid andy (1683) on Wednesday January 31 2018, @04:16PM (#630993) Homepage Journal

    Yeah but generally the ones with half a clue would check for "Non Toxic" labeling before beginning their stunt. I'll accept though, sadly, that many teenagers and a great many adults possess considerably smaller fractions of a clue than half! I think it doesn't help that the gullible or those that haven't fully developed critical thinking skills readily accept their peers and the internet subcultures they embrace as a sort of authoritative source of guidance and information.

    --
    If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Freeman on Wednesday January 31 2018, @04:52PM (2 children)

      by Freeman (732) on Wednesday January 31 2018, @04:52PM (#631015) Journal

      Exhibit A: YouTube.

      --
      Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
      • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday January 31 2018, @07:02PM (1 child)

        by tangomargarine (667) on Wednesday January 31 2018, @07:02PM (#631097)

        The videos there, or the comments? YouTube comments are a rotting cesspool, too.

        --
        "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
        • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday February 01 2018, @04:52PM

          by Freeman (732) on Thursday February 01 2018, @04:52PM (#631534) Journal

          Yeah, anytime I look at the comments, I remember why I don't bother. The YouTube reference was in regards to the stupid things that people do and then post on YouTube. For their 60 seconds of Fame.

          --
          Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
  • (Score: 2) by Snotnose on Wednesday January 31 2018, @05:11PM (9 children)

    by Snotnose (1623) on Wednesday January 31 2018, @05:11PM (#631024)

    When I was a kid, all the cool edgy kids would snort pixie stix.

    When I was a kid the trendy thing was to hold your breath until you passed out. None of my friends did it, we laughed at the idiots who did it.

    A classmate, Alex Popko, died from it. He passed out standing up, hit his head on the concrete when he passed out. I was happy as hell. He was a year older than me, twice my size, and the biggest bully in the school.

    --
    Why shouldn't we judge a book by it's cover? It's got the author, title, and a summary of what the book's about.
    • (Score: 2) by Snow on Wednesday January 31 2018, @05:26PM (8 children)

      by Snow (1601) on Wednesday January 31 2018, @05:26PM (#631029) Journal

      That's really sad.

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Wednesday January 31 2018, @06:00PM (7 children)

        by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday January 31 2018, @06:00PM (#631048) Journal

        Sad about the death, yes or maybe.

        Sad about the reaction, no. I can see it as a natural instinctual reaction if one has repeatedly been a victim of a bully. Yes, seriously. Bullies are bad enough that they cause people to either kill themselves, or bring guns to school to kill others, or both but in reverse order. Nothing wrong with being honest about feelings about bullies. People honestly express rage and desire to kill certain foreign enemies -- especially ones who are monsters. I don't remember anyone shedding tears for Osama bin Laden. And I'm not too inclined to shed tears for bullies. Yes, there may be reasons why they became what they are. And THAT is the sad part. But the result of what they become is still what it is. Just an opinion.

        --
        People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 31 2018, @07:02PM (6 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 31 2018, @07:02PM (#631096)

          I don't remember anyone shedding tears forOsama

          That said I thought the scenes of jubilant laughter, grinning and ecstatic cheering were in poor taste. The guy instigated some terrible events but no-one's death should ever be cause for joyous celebration like that. A sombre end to a sad story. People who had felt fear would feel relief, sure, but if you rejoice openly like that, don't you lose any moral high ground? In the case of the bullies, I understand what you're saying about the feelings being a natural reaction for someone that was actually bullied by them and you're probably right.

          • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday January 31 2018, @08:26PM

            by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday January 31 2018, @08:26PM (#631154) Journal

            I remember what I read in Newsweek when Romania fell on 22 December 1989. As I recall, all of the people who swarmed the palace to lawfully arrest Nicolae Ceausescu couldn't resist the urge to unload all their bullets into him. There was singing and cheering in the streets. They were playing Christmas music over the town's public address system. Christmas music had been outlawed for over 40 years.

            I'm not so sure you lose any moral high ground to be happy about the passing of people who deliberately and with joy, caused tremendous amounts of suffering of other people. I'll take the biblical example of the death of Jezebel. [biblegateway.com] (while they were celebrating her death, the dogs came and ate almost all of her remains -- as had been foretold.)

            --
            People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
          • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday January 31 2018, @08:27PM (3 children)

            by Phoenix666 (552) on Wednesday January 31 2018, @08:27PM (#631156) Journal

            I was in Park Slope, Brooklyn on 9/11. My street is near the top of the glacial moraine across the western end of Long Island and overlooks downtown Manhattan across the East River. The prevailing wind goes straight from where the twin towers were, and on that day little bits of burning paper were falling all around us like snow. When the towers fell I saw them and felt the ground shake. People were leaning out their apartment windows and screaming.

            So, I wanted Osama bin Laden dead. I'm a progressive but I had no patience with the surrender monkeys who wanted to dissuade us from tearing Afghanistan apart. It was unbelievably frustrating to watch 8 years of Bush and Cheney fail to get the guy.

            When Obama finally did get him, i felt no joy. It was more like...grim satisfaction. It was the same with the demise of Saddam Hussein and Qadafi.

            No, we should not rejoice at killing mass murderers and tyrants, but we must put them to death. Justice demands it.

            --
            Washington DC delenda est.
            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 31 2018, @08:47PM (1 child)

              by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 31 2018, @08:47PM (#631169)

              i thought an eye for an eye made the world blind.

              maybe you can't really see that view though.

              too bad the dictators in your example seemed to have managed to at least set expectations. the people in those countries now can't even go to a market or wedding without a fear of randomly being blown to bits by someone they don't know. the dictator's at least had rules, and if you followed them no matter how shitty they were, you wouldn't be blown up for being near someone with different religious beliefs and become collateral damage.

              dictators at least want control along with the power. random violence isn't control, but anyway, the eye for eye thing has no place in a justice system. justice is already blind; you are merely repeating tribal rhetoric

              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 31 2018, @09:09PM

                by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 31 2018, @09:09PM (#631177)

                Phoenix666 has noticeably changed to a more conservative tone post-trump. The emotional desire for retribution can be overpowering, it is built into our DNA.

                Perhaps it had to do with Obama being so awesome on the face of things while secretly continuing the nastiest US practices. Just the drone program was a pretty terrifying thing. So Phoenix goes from President Uber Democrat to Precedent Krusty the Klown, I can totally see that causing a break in some people's psyche.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @08:40AM

              by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @08:40AM (#631377)

              No, we should not rejoice at killing mass murderers and tyrants, but we must put them to death. Justice demands it.

              Your version of "justice" completely fails when all we are doing are replacing them with worse mass murderers and tyrants (ii.e. ISIS).

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @08:36AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @08:36AM (#631375)

            The guy instigated some terrible events

            The guy *allegedly* instigated some terrible events.

            He should still be considered innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. *Especially* when he is prevented from ever prevented from appearing in court by the very people who want you to believe he is guilty.

            If the powers that be are unhappy about that, they only have themselves to blame.

  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 31 2018, @06:30PM (6 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 31 2018, @06:30PM (#631078)

    When I was a kid in seventh grade, my best friend and I came up with a plan to make money.

    All the cool kids were always talking about getting laid. And we both went to the big city every week for youth group on Wednesday’s. My mom had aerobics and the store sold condoms in 36 packs. Way cheaper than the local store. We made so much money that year. Off of braggarts.

    However this insight didn’t mean I was super smart. In 9th grade all the rage was red wings. And I got mine.

    The taste was so horrible I am pretty sure they were all lying like in 7th grade. But how I missed this insight with two years more wisdom under my belt? You got me.

    Fails on youtube probably explain they stupidity of humans in full.

    Pretty sure we are only smart enough to kill ourselves long term. Tide pods proves it!

    • (Score: 3, Funny) by HiThere on Wednesday January 31 2018, @06:50PM (5 children)

      by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday January 31 2018, @06:50PM (#631088) Journal

      Red wings? I don't understand. You mean you ate boots? Certainly wearing them has noting to do with their taste.

      --
      Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 31 2018, @07:19PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 31 2018, @07:19PM (#631106)

        You dont want to know, but if you must, google earning them.

        • (Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Wednesday January 31 2018, @07:53PM

          by Aiwendil (531) on Wednesday January 31 2018, @07:53PM (#631128) Journal

          1) I know people with that as a kink
          2) EEW TMI
          3) This will make NHL news bearable for the next couple of months, thanks for the expression

      • (Score: 5, Informative) by realDonaldTrump on Wednesday January 31 2018, @08:08PM (2 children)

        by realDonaldTrump (6614) on Wednesday January 31 2018, @08:08PM (#631138) Homepage Journal

        I'll tell you, it's when a lady is bleeding from her whatever, and she wants you to lick THAT. The blood. Don't do it. Because there are so many diseases. Vaginas, these days, are potential landmines. There’s some real danger there. You have to have a roving doctor, his office has to be in your briefcase. He has to be your best friend. He has to go with you at all times. He has to do onsite tests. Dating is like being in Vietnam. You’re the equivalent of a soldier going over to Vietnam, it's just as bloody. And just as dangerous!

        • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday January 31 2018, @08:31PM (1 child)

          by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday January 31 2018, @08:31PM (#631160) Journal

          The best way to get young boys to learn to stay away from vaginas is to calmly sit down with them and explain that women's vaginas are lined with razor sharp teeth that can bite off a child's hand.

          --
          People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
          • (Score: 4, Funny) by realDonaldTrump on Wednesday January 31 2018, @08:46PM

            by realDonaldTrump (6614) on Wednesday January 31 2018, @08:46PM (#631168) Homepage Journal

            I think you're joking, maybe you're joking. Because if you just put your hand in there it's OK. For me it's always been OK. But when you start sticking your whatever in vaginas, then it gets VERY EXPENSIVE. Some guys spend too much. I never spend more than I have to. Because I have terrific lawyers. I always, always get the prenup. And it's been worth every penny!