Before that. Her breakthrough album was 1977 and Total Eclipse of the Heart came out in 1982, so it was more the 8-track era. It remained a staple of radio plays (remember those?) through the 80s and 90s though, and was remade by Nikki French into a chart-topping dance version in 1995.
A lot of HN is folks in their late 30s, 40s, and early 50s (and sometimes even older!), so many folks here would've overlapped with the radio era. A lot of folks here were involved in making YouTube/Instagram/TikTok, not listening to it.
It's not really analogous. One of the hypothesized ways that microplastics are harmful is that they disrupt the immune system; there has been evidence found of this in bivalves. Another is that they cause inflammation, which is also mediated by T-cells. A null result on the impact of microplastics on human T-cells is directly relevant to these hypotheses.
The mechanism of harm for asbestos is known to be that the fibers enter the lungs and can't be expelled, eventually leading to cancer. Its interaction with T-cells is quite irrelevant there.
It's not unbelievable at all, and it is well-known. It's been publicized that Microsoft sends every URL you visit in Edge back to Microsoft servers, tied with all the IDs on the device:
Not using Chrome is a better bet for privacy than not using systemd or D-Bus. If you sign into Chrome (which by default happens any time you sign into a Google product), your entire browsing history is logged on Google's servers, and tied to your email address, Android ID, and any other machine identifiers Chrome can read.
Anyone serious about privacy is using Firefox or Tor Browser, with various settings to harden it against tracking.
Somewhere else in the comments here, someone else remarked "Individuals perhaps [move to the new models], but not organizations."
That's illustrative. The mechanism by which organizations are forced to update their technology, move to more competitive suppliers, and cut costs is a recession. In one, every business that doesn't do so goes bankrupt, and what's left are the more efficient businesses that have adopted technology effectively.
We haven't had a real recession since 2009. (2020 was an odd case, because it was effectively brought on by government edict and so it actually killed a number of efficient but unlucky sectors while doing nothing to clean out the dead wood in major corporations). The next one is likely to be a doozy, because the economy is filled with bullshit jobs, bullshit corporations, and bullshit products.
There's a huge case of survivorship bias when trying to recall historical analogues, because in every instance where margins collapsed and competition made the industry a commodity business, the big proprietary names are no longer with us. Here's a selection of examples, though:
1. Memory chip margins collapsed so much in the 80s that Intel exited the memory chip business entirely. At the time, they were known much more as a memory chip company than a microprocessor company.
2. Margins for high-end workstations collapsed in the face of cheaper IBM PC clones and an explosion of MS Windows software. This led directly to the deaths of SGI, Sun, Symbolics, Lucid, LMI, etc.
3. Proprietary UNIX variants like HP-UX, IRIX, AIX, and SCO Unix have basically completely died out, replaced by lower-cost proprietary OSes like Windows and MacOS, or by open-source descendants of Linux and BSD.
4. Many commercial database vendors like Oracle, dBase, Sybase, FoxPro, and Microsoft (SQL Server and Access) found themselves very much under margin pressure from PostGres, MySQL, and SQLite. Oracle survived thanks to their massive installed base and legal department, and Microsoft survived because they could cross-subsidize from their OS and Office monopolies, but dBase, Sybase, and FoxPro are no longer with us.
It's a pretty terrible way to go. Death doesn't come immediately; you seem fine at first, and then about 3 days later you suffer intense abdominal pain and vomiting. At about 4 days you realize your liver is irreversibly shot and you're a dead man walking unless you can get a liver transplant. Then you enter multi-organ failure as your body and brain shuts down.
Acetaminophen poisoning actually featured on two episodes of House, and one of them had the suicide plotline. In S05E11, "Joy to the World" they suspected an overweight teen OD'd on acetaminophen trying to kill herself, but the actual diagnosis was eclampsia from an undisclosed pregnancy. In S06E10, "Wilson", a friend of Wilson's suffers acetaminophen poisoning while trying to manage his back pain.
It's not true that there has never been a recorded death from THC. A quick literature search turned up:
B. Hartung, S. Kauferstein, S. Ritz-Timme, T. Daldrup, Sudden
unexpected death under acute influence of cannabis, Forensic Science International
(2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.forsciint.2014.02.001. Case report of two otherwise-healthy 20-something men who died of cardiac arrhythmia's following large marijuana doses.
Noble, M. J., Hedberg, K., & Hendrickson, R. G. (2019). Acute cannabis toxicity. Clinical Toxicology, 57(8), 735–742. https://doi.org/10.1080/15563650.2018.1548708. Clinical review of 253 Poison Center cases involving acute cannabis poisoning; 8 patients were admitted to the ICU, 3 were intubated, and 1 died.
There's also a Heyndrickx 1969 paper that everybody cites (including my original reference on hazard ratios), but I can't find an abstract or full text anywhere on the web.
Cases of cannabis poisoning fatalities are extremely rare, but they do exist. Your citation was apparently unaware of (or possibly published before) the other cases.
The therapeutic index for ibuprofen is considerably better: it's around 10, fairly similar to alcohol. Accidental overdoses of ibuprofen are rare.
The main issue with ibuprofen is that it can have fairly annoying (but non-life-threatening) side effects like stomach upset and GI bleeds even with normal dosing.
Yes. 4g is generally considered perfectly safe and is fairly commonplace dosing. 7g can kill you. Hence a therapeutic index of < 2.
This is why you have to be very, very careful. If you're doing 8 500mg Tylenol pills and then you also do 6 doses of DayQuil or Mucinex without realizing it's also acetaminophen, you can end up needing a liver transplant.
The article kinda glossed over it, but one fact under-appreciated by the general public is just how dangerous acetaminophen overdoses can be.
Scientists often talk about the "therapeutic index" or "safety ratio" of a drug. It's the LD50 (dose at which 50% of recipients die) divided by the effective dose. Common hard drugs like heroin or methamphetamine have a safety ratio of about 6-10 [1]. "Soft" drugs like marijuana or LSD often have safety ratios of about 1000.
The safety ratio of acetaminophen is under 4. A typical dosing schedule for an adult is 4-6 500mg tablets within a 24 hour period [2], for a total of no more than 3g. 7g of acetaminophen can kill you, and 12g is likely to [3]. Acetaminophen is the leading cause of liver failure in the U.S, causing 50% of cases and 20% of transplants.
When they tell you "don't exceed 6 doses daily", they really mean it, and it's across all acetaminophen-containing products. The margin for error is narrower than heroin.
You absolutely can react, but in general, in a functioning competitive market, you can not alter your competitors' actions.
Examples of the former: cutting prices yourself; increasing product quality; differentiating yourself; spending more on advertising to get the word out about your product.
Examples of the latter: crafting exclusive deals with your distributors to prevent your competitors from getting shelf space; politically influencing regulatory bodies to declare your competitors' existence illegal; making direct agreements with the leadership of opposing firms to not drop prices or hike wages; assassinating, extorting, or kidnapping rival business leaders.
Basically it comes down to "control yourself, because you cannot control others". In a functioning market, you have no control over what rival firms offer. Your only legal reaction to competition is to improve your own offering until it is the best it can be. In pathological markets where the assumption is (as in the paper) that you can punish rivals for not colluding, you actively make your competitor's offering worse.
Those pathological markets exist today, but if you're analyzing markets economically, your root assumption should not be that pathology is normal and only the lack of information keeps it in check, it should be that information is abundant and it is the lack of ability that keeps it in check.
The paper seems to be based on an invalid assumption. From the abstract:
> If P != NP, the collusion detection problem is computationally infeasible for markets satisfying a natural instance-hardness condition on their demand structure, rendering punishment threats non-credible and collusion unstable.
...and then from the paper:
> Stigler (1964) famously argued that the “chief difficulty” of collusion is detecting “secret price-cutting.”
The thing is that Stigler's insight is far from proven, and indeed, the primary difficulty in collusion is often not the detection of defection. Firms know they're being undercut all the time. The problem is that very often, there is nothing they can do about it. Markets are specifically structured as firm-to-firm transactions, where competing firms have no leverage over what your firm can do or what sort of transactions you can conduct, and as long as this condition holds it doesn't matter if you know that a competitor is fucking you over, you can't do anything about it.
I'd argue that the increase in collusion and anticompetitive behavior lately is because these conditions increasingly don't hold. When you intersperse another party in the transaction, eg. a regulatory agency, permitting body, or exclusive distribution deal, you introduce a leverage point for incumbents to punish competitors who choose to undercut them.
This is sort of the story of the telephone system of the 1950s-1970s, or electricity in the early 1900s, or cars from 1950-1980s, or airplanes from 1910-1939.
I have no idea how an electrical transformer works (well, other than the bare theory I learned in physics courses), or how power gets from the power company to my house, or how the circuits in my home are setup. I plug something in, and it works, and occasionally I throw a breaker if something is malfunctioning. There's no resistance there (pun not intended), and there shouldn't be. People got killed trying to wire their own homes.
I used to read about phone phreaks from the 1970s that could do black magic to get free long-distance phone calls. When I grew up in the 80s, that was basically gone. You picked up the phone, got a dial-tone, and called. And now it's really gone, with everyone having an encrypted cell phone connection over 5G, and your IMEI and IMSI being phoned home to every tower you connect to.
It's the nature of technology and capitalism. As the technology matures, it gets hidden away to become increasingly invisible to the end user, so you just do what you want to do with it. And then the engineering resources get spent on new problems.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1WrHH-WtaA