In this market, a better high for less money will attract lots of customers, even if it is less healthy than the alternative.
So, if you’re in the business of selling the somewhat healthier product, and one supplier starts to supply the otherwise superior product, that’s not good for business, either. You will lose customers.
Now, do you accept that, saying “I won’t sell that”, do you fight to outlaw the product (will be hard given at you’re not selling healthy products, either), do you fight the suppliers of the new product (a gang war) or do you add the product to your inventory?
There often isn’t a clear choice; each option has its pros and cons.
Fentanyl is not a better high. It's decidedly less euphoric than traditional opioids. It's just dirt cheap, ridiculously potent so it's easier to traffic, and doesn't have any agricultural footprint. The market pressure for fent is completely on the supply side.
"less healthy" is a bit of an understatement; they're not selling cigarettes that will kill you in the long term (or even the medium or short term). Fentanyl will kill you the first time you're exposed to it.
Increasing the potency of some drug with fentanyl is an interesting choice, because by the time the user *knows* how strong it is, there's some likelihood they're already dead.
There's always a continuity there ("the dose makes the poison"), there's no known substance that will reliably kill you if you're exposed to a single molecule of it.
The issue with potency is that the more potent a substance, the more precise equipment and quality control you need to stay on the safe side. With fentanyl, healthcare and pharmaceutical industry can handle the precision and QC demands (which includes guarantees and maintaining public trust). Criminal enterprises cannot.
1.53 × 10¹⁵ molecules per 1mcg. Which is 15 orders of magnitude larger than a single molecule. If 2mg of fentanyl is considered potentially lethal that would place carfentanyl at 20mcg, though I’ve heard conflicting reports on potency with some placing it at 10x not 100x. So roughly 16-17 orders of magnitudes.
I don’t take fentanyl but I regularly take signaling peptides where the doses are typically in the mcg range and still rather potent - though with signaling peptides the response curve typically flattens out so bigger doses don’t necessarily mean stronger effects - they can be saturated. Depends on what you’re signaling though.
I had correctly predicted my hypersensitivity to semaglutide (ozempic) so started using it for treating autoimmune issues at a dose of 25mcg and I still ended up with temporary gastroparesis.
Even with prions, there evidence that the body (and probably more so with some people than others) has some level of ability to resist, slow, or sometimes prevent a prion infection.
See these:
- The influence of PRNP polymorphisms on human prion disease susceptibility: an update [1]
- A naturally occurring variant of the human prion protein completely prevents prion disease | Nature [2]
Mine was an honest question because I was concerned about my kid. She recently udnerwent a 30-min GA, even so, her behaviour has considerably changed. Her personality as well. So, I am not sure why it was being downvoted, and the snark in your comment is also undeserved.
Everytime you deal with nominal professionals you should be concerned, because their professional ability is not granted. People who deal with bodies deal with an immensely complex and subtle mechanism: they do not know it as well as needed, and their regard is easily not too different from that of Robert Liston in their evaluation of compromises - your due diligence does realistically involve verifying that values are aligned (otherwise they may decide that they can sacrifice something that for you is critically vital).
> I am not sure why it was being downvoted
Neither do I - I did not. (I did take the implied into account.)
> snark
Good: since we are here, can you kindly explain what "snark" is, because I find the term in the guidelines, I have no idea how to interpret it, I asked it a few times and I got downvoted for the question?
Sometimes, text gives off a different vibe than intended. for instance:
"Pharmacology is the discipline that deals with drugs" is a very obvious statement that anyone with a primary grade education should know. So, if an obvious statement is stated, it constitutes a snark, <as if the other person is too stupid to realize that>. But given your new comment, it appears you didn't mean that.
Yes, you require analgesics for general anesthesia, it’s not optional.
The reason synthetic opioids like fentanyl are used is because they actually have less side effects. Opioids can cause a histamine response, digestive issues and constipation. Newer synthetic and hybrid opioids cause that less, so they’re preferred in hospital settings.
There’s essentially no long term risk with the small doses required during surgery. The main risk is, of course, acute respiratory depression, which kills you. This is how opioid overdoses happen. This doesn’t happen under GA because the dose is tightly controlled, and your airway is supported anyway; you’re intubated.
Thanks. That is alarming. I wonder what the long-term side effects would be even for one time, which my kid underwent. She is not the same anymore. She used to be so joyous.
>>>>Fentanyl will kill you the first time you're exposed to it.
This is why DARE failed. You can't blatantly lie about everything just because you want what's best for people. At some point people find out you're a liar and don't believe a thing you say.
> My pet peeve is changes in 'user agreements' for paid services that add increasing amounts of adverts and tracking, but if you decline, you can't use the service, but the service continues to charge you. For the service they're no longer supplying.
> Just the kind of thing that the EU could regulate if it chose
“Where the contract provides that the digital content or digital service is to be supplied or made accessible to the consumer over a period of time, the trader may modify the digital content or digital service beyond what is necessary to maintain the digital content or digital service in conformity in accordance with Articles 7 and 8, if the following conditions are met:
[…]
2. The consumer shall be entitled to terminate the contract if the modification negatively impacts the consumer's access to or use of the digital content or digital service, unless such negative impact is only minor. In that case, the consumer shall be entitled to terminate the contract free of charge within 30 days of the receipt of the information or of the time when the digital content or digital service has been modified by the trader, whichever is later.”
“The International Criminal Court (ICC) is an intergovernmental organisation and international tribunal seated in The Hague, Netherlands. Established in 2002
[…]
The establishment of an international tribunal to judge political leaders accused of international crimes was first proposed during the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 following the First World War”
Designing a table and letting somebody else build it can be enjoyable, too.
There are plenty of people enjoying designing, for example people who 3D print objects they design, or people designing PCBs or even entire gadgets but outsourcing production.
With LLMs, I guess a factor is how much direction you give the machine. “Build me a graphical desktop” likely isn’t very enjoyable, but I can see co-working with a LLM being enjoyable. Examples
- think of some novel UI interaction, and let the LLM code it
- spending hours to speed up the GUI or to make it use less memory
Knowing your limitations of building, but being good at designing and watching somebody/something else realise your vision is incredibly satisfying.
I see it like 3D printing. Nobody can extrude molten plastic out of their bodies to make things, but the skill of designing the construction well and then watch the machine execute it is certainly a good feeling. I dont really see how this is different to designing some software verbally and prompting an ai to build it for you.
INHO the only unsatisfactory part for this "explorative" work is that you never really get into the flow since the LLM just takes too long between interactions (sometimes minutes). That's long enough to prevent from getting into the flow, but not long enough to focus on something else in the meantime.
But the compiler assumes the function will make forward progress. If the function does that, it will return, so why doesn’t the compiler emit a function epilogue?
Because there is an infinite loop that makes the epilogue unreachable, so it is safe for the compiler to remove it!
Sure, that optimization interacts badly with the optimization that removes the infinite loop. But half the point of UB is to avoid needing to deal with such interactions, because they are defined out of existence.
The compiler can assume that the function will return, but it can also statically deduce that the function cannot return. That's a contradiction, so the compiler deduces that the function is simply UB when called, i.e. no need to emit an epilogue. It's the logical principle of explosion in compiler format, basically.
I would think a bit less. You won’t get a factor of 5 decrease in atmosphere to watch through and I would guess you’d get more vibration.
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