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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.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by insanumingenium on Wednesday January 31 2018, @06:10PM (13 children)
I don't disagree, but my point was that if you wanted to not have the "attractive" product, there is no shortage of options on the market. It is almost like our entire system is run on an expectation of unlimited exponential growth. The day someone finds a way of breaking that expectation, they will have earned the title "savior of mankind" in my book.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday January 31 2018, @07:17PM (12 children)
Is that where this buzz word trend of claiming your policies are "sustainable" [xkcd.com] comes from? Of course they stretch the meaning of the word to just mean whatever makes a profit or suits their political goals. Modern economics would have to be completely redesigned to not depend on infinite assumed future growth. Maybe it would have to reset completely. Although I suppose the gradual shift from physical manufacturing and mining of natural resources to businesses based on financial transactions, computer software and communications can mean that some of this growth can come from them instead. When they're imaginary, mental things making the money, they can grow as much as anyone wants so long as people don't lose confidence in them.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Wednesday January 31 2018, @08:18PM (2 children)
Actually it's caused by the exponential growth in people.
When life isn't going right, go left.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday January 31 2018, @08:23PM (1 child)
Ah but is that the cause or the symptom? The bigger the debt and the profit projections, the more hard working tax payers need to be spawned to make up for it.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 31 2018, @08:41PM
last time there were too many people, they killed a lot off in a war.
the baby boomers were a result of the people that came home, and the golden age of things because a lot of people were culled and did not consume resources.
true, good and bad died, but the takeaway is that you dont have growth limits if you aren't facing resource restrictions from too much growth.
most wars are related to people and growth. emotions cause problems. the stock market works similarly... there are plenty of good stocks that are not endlessly growing, but you have to dig to find them because its the easy gains from continued growth that people look for.
anyway before the tide pods, they added blue crystals to unlock enzyme power or something. cleaned mostly the same.
buying loose power in a box is the most economical way to do it, but even my dishwasher manual says it cleans best with cascade platinum pods. and that the loose powder is for poor losers and when your friends show up and see you are violating the social contract by not using the most expensive product, no woman will sleep with me and my children will refuse to pay for my retirement.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 31 2018, @08:19PM (8 children)
No, I think it comes from the same people who think that because growth can't go on forever, it has to stop right now.
When would it have to be completely redesigned? After all, we're currently elevating a ton of people out of poverty currently and there's a lot of big goals that haven't been achieved (such as my favorites: end to aging, space travel, and shiny AI). There's a lot of room for growth. So what's the difference to us today between growth that lasts millennia versus growth that lasts forever? Not much.
Unless, for some reason, you don't think that much growth is... sustainable.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday January 31 2018, @08:40PM (7 children)
Ahh but those are the good kinds of growth. Unfortunately politics and big business aren't run by techie geeks. Bill Gates, Elon Musk... Oh wait! Not only run by techie geeks then and not necessarily benevolent ones.
Make sure you figure out what to do about running out of space and resources for unlimited population growth before you solve the aging problem though!
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 31 2018, @08:50PM (2 children)
Aging should NOT be solved. The moment we make people functionally immortal is the day humanity dies. It would turn into the worst dystopia and we have plenty of fictional stories about how that would turn out. I can't see any good outcome and can only predict a small group of immortals slowly gaining power of the entire planet, and their basic humanity gets worn out by seeing all the "little people" live and die.
I could be wrong, maybe the immortals would become very wise and compassionate after their first 100 years. Maybe they would work for the benefit of humanity once they realize short lived humans are more like children and most don't mature until they're almost on the death bed. At best we should have therapies that extend life a few decades.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 31 2018, @11:19PM
[...]
Let me guess. You're probably complaining right now about short sighted, "got mine" people who don't give a damn about anything that happens after they die? They may never grow wise and compassionate, but they would at least live long enough to experience these problems. That gives them an interest in solving the problem that doesn't exist now.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Wednesday January 31 2018, @11:34PM
Credit given.
So we should settle for ineffective anti-aging therapies that don't fully address the problems of aging damage? Interesting.
All diseases should be treated, preferably with the underlying problems addressed rather than symptom management, ie. cures should be found. If we've cured aging diseases effectively, then death should be postponed indefinitely. Any social implications of that should be addressed after it happens. If defeating death is actually possible with upcoming medical knowledge/technologies, it could be less expensive than you think (the ultimate preventative health care would prevent the need for lots of expensive hospital stays). If it does get done, good luck banning it (the War on Drugs is pretty futile, but the War on Anti-Aging would be laughable).
We don't see billionaires being taken out by an angry public today (for the most part? [theguardian.com]), even though their wealth already perpetuates itself through their descendants and income inequality is rising. Immortal billionaire vampires barely make a difference when it comes to the people at the bottom. Immortal billionaires could even have a positive impact if they inspire people to finally rise up and overthrow/kill the billionaires, or tax them appropriately (the compromise option). We may be living in the "worst dystopia" right now (endless bread and circuses, rising income inequality, with various threats to humanity looming) and immortality could be the cure.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 31 2018, @11:02PM (3 children)
Perhaps, we didn't structure our regulation of business in such a way as to encourage the growth of big businesses?
To the contrary, I think the running out problem will get solved only when we've solved the aging problem. When people will actually live through a future problem, then they start caring more about that future problem.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday January 31 2018, @11:14PM (2 children)
I don't understand what you mean. It seems to me western economies now favor big businesses over smaller ones. Are you saying to end aging, explore more of space and get strong AI the businesses need to get even bigger?
Good point, although average human lifespan is already much longer than it was a few hundred years ago. Are we more forward thinking? We have vastly more technical knowledge, so it's hard to compare.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 31 2018, @11:35PM
Regulation creates strong economies of scale. Figuring out how to run a business to be compatible with a particular rule set is roughly constant cost, meaning it's a lot cheaper per unit of economic activity to cover the regulatory needs of a large business than it is a small business. Similarly, it's a lot easier for the big company to figure out how to bend the rules more effectively to stay in compliance while eking out larger profits.
Do you have to ask? How we handle risk is a great example. When people are almost all very poor and relatively short-lived, then people aren't very interested in safer working conditions or better environments. It's accepted that people will die in accidents and that pollution happens. But give people a long life and they care when that life is greatly shortened by a sloppy workplace or nasty pollution that could have easily been cleaned up.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday February 01 2018, @04:28AM
In addition to my previous statements on regulation, consider this example. You want to build a new laser printer that's really good. Right away, you will run afoul of a variety of regulations in the US and elsewhere about building laser printers that a) leave identifying marks on the page, and b) detect when someone is trying to print any of a number of protected currencies (including the US dollar). So it's not enough to just build a better printer. Your printer also needs to pass various frivolous regulatory tests as well.