SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 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.