What do they talk about at the dealership sales manager's office anyway...
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@julianlam said in What do they talk about at the dealership sales manager's office anyway...:
Guys, can we stay on topic here? Don't make me use my mod powers and fork this topic 6 ways from Sunday.
/s (I don't have any mod powers)
YMBNH
PS thanks for putting up with us for all this time.
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@Gribnit said in What do they talk about at the dealership sales manager's office anyway...:
they're not the same chips
The silicon does come, ultimately, from the same foundries (that produce large ultrapure super low defect silicon crystals). And that's where the bottleneck is; the foundries are expensive factories to set up, so the owners are none too keen on investing without really good evidence that they'll be able to recoup their investment. Even though interest rates are currently very low…
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@dkf said in What do they talk about at the dealership sales manager's office anyway...:
@Gribnit said in What do they talk about at the dealership sales manager's office anyway...:
they're not the same chips
The silicon does come, ultimately, from the same foundries (that produce large ultrapure super low defect silicon crystals). And that's where the bottleneck is; the foundries are expensive factories to set up, so the owners are none too keen on investing without really good evidence that they'll be able to recoup their investment. Even though interest rates are currently very low…
How many CPUs am I even using, though? I've probably got a larger process size and totally different EMF environment in the car as well, and I can use cheaper wafers because my biggest problem isn't speed, it's noise.
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@Gribnit said in What do they talk about at the dealership sales manager's office anyway...:
How many CPUs am I even using, though? I've probably got a larger process size and totally different EMF environment in the car as well, and I can use cheaper wafers because my biggest problem isn't speed, it's noise.
They're not necessarily CPUs (those are probably easier to source). They might be simple power regulators and other bits like that. My point was that the bottleneck is with suppliers who provide things that all chip makers require, from the most humble to the most advanced. Getting better quality silicon just reduces the defect rate at the next stage, which tends to make everything downstream cheaper. Everyone wants good silicon, even if they do radically different things with it.
It's coupled to the fun fact that some of the designs that automakers were using have now gone permanently out of production; the machines that print the circuits have been scrapped to make way for ones that can serve a greater range of customers (this is as a consequence of the market for chips of all types being super-hot yet the automakers saying last year “we've got enough inventory; we're stopping buying” despite being the last customers for components with that feature size. While the automakers aren't wholly to blame for the crunch, they have definitely made things worse for themselves with some very bad bets.
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@dkf said in What do they talk about at the dealership sales manager's office anyway...:
the foundries are expensive factories to set up
On the order of 1 billion dollars. Billion, with a "b". Not many companies have that kind of money to spend, and they don't spring into existence on short notice.
foundries (that produce large ultrapure super low defect silicon crystals)
"Foundries" usually refers to the factories that make the chips, and specifically ones that make chips for third-parties that don't have their own factories, not the ones that make the crystals. In fact, we pretty much never even think about anything prior to wafers sliced from the crystal, polished, cleaned and ready to use, which just sort of appear magically at the click of a purchasing clerks mouse, or something. That's not to say there couldn't be a bottleneck at that point in the supply chain, but it's not something usually think about, and certainly not when we're talking about foundries.
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@HardwareGeek OK, so I used the wrong term.
But it's rather an attractive term, as the process for making the crystals does involve a lot of heat and processing. It's using a trick where the impurities concentrate in the molten boundary of a hot crystal (well, at least with silicon they do) so by passing a heating element along a crystal at the right temperature, you concentrate the impurities at one end of it. A little bit. You've got to keep on doing it. With the right temperature and pressure, you also encourage the solidifying crystal behind that moving frontier to reform without so many flaws. The result, eventually, and after sawing off the end where the impurities are concentrated, is its own marvel of modern materials.
And then we turn it into rubbish that mines bitcoin.
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@dkf said in What do they talk about at the dealership sales manager's office anyway...:
impurities concentrate in the molten boundary of a hot crystal (well, at least with silicon they do)
Yeah, it's a common property of many (most? all?) substances. The impurities are slightly more soluble in the liquid phase than the solid, so as the silicon solidifies, the impurities tend to remain in the liquid part.
You can see the same phenomenon at home; freeze some salt water, sugar syrup, juice, or something of the sort. As it freezes, the first ice that forms will be relatively pure water, and the salt, sugar or whatever will tend to be concentrated in the part that's still liquid. I haven't tried it, but presumably if you repeated this a few times, discarding the last frozen/first melted liquid each time, you could end up with fairly pure water.
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@HardwareGeek said in What do they talk about at the dealership sales manager's office anyway...:
@dkf said in What do they talk about at the dealership sales manager's office anyway...:
impurities concentrate in the molten boundary of a hot crystal (well, at least with silicon they do)
Yeah, it's a common property of many (most? all?) substances. The impurities are slightly more soluble in the liquid phase than the solid, so as the silicon solidifies, the impurities tend to remain in the liquid part.
You can see the same phenomenon at home; freeze some salt water, sugar syrup, juice, or something of the sort. As it freezes, the first ice that forms will be relatively pure water, and the salt, sugar or whatever will tend to be concentrated in the part that's still liquid. I haven't tried it, but presumably if you repeated this a few times, discarding the last frozen/first melted liquid each time, you could end up with fairly pure water.
This is the basis of a distillation technique for hard alcohol in some regions.
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@Gribnit or for making the strongest (by alcohol) beer in the world, IIRC.
Filed under: let's make another thread boring
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@remi said in What do they talk about at the dealership sales manager's office anyway...:
Filed under: let's make another thread boring
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@HardwareGeek said in What do they talk about at the dealership sales manager's office anyway...:
Yeah, it's a common property of many (most? all?) substances. The impurities are slightly more soluble in the liquid phase than the solid, so as the silicon solidifies, the impurities tend to remain in the liquid part.
You can see the same phenomenon at home; freeze some salt water, sugar syrup, juice, or something of the sort. As it freezes, the first ice that forms will be relatively pure water, and the salt, sugar or whatever will tend to be concentrated in the part that's still liquid. I haven't tried it, but presumably if you repeated this a few times, discarding the last frozen/first melted liquid each time, you could end up with fairly pure water.
I recently needed to get some iron supplement into my daughter; after trying a few things, I ended up putting the liquid iron into juice, and freezing that into ice cubes.
The iron supplement, completely unhelpfully, remained as a liquid smear on top of the ice cubes, after the rest of the juice froze. I had to try a few more things to get my daughter to consume an iron supplement.
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@PotatoEngineer Find tiny iron pellets (like marbles, but smaller), small enough that she can swallow them without choking. Then let them lie around on various places at your daughter's height (coffee table, shelf...), and the first few times she starts playing with them, sternly tell her that she really, really, shouldn't put them in her mouth. Then relax your attention a bit and let the natural mischievousness of children do its thing.
Filed under: The bad ideas thread is
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@remi said in What do they talk about at the dealership sales manager's office anyway...:
@PotatoEngineer Find tiny iron pellets (like marbles, but smaller), small enough that she can swallow them without choking. Then let them lie around on various places at your daughter's height (coffee table, shelf...), and the first few times she starts playing with them, sternly tell her that she really, really, shouldn't put them in her mouth. Then relax your attention a bit and let the natural mischievousness of children do its thing.
Filed under: The bad ideas thread is
It turns out that there are chewable-candy-like iron supplements, in semi-heroic 43mg doses. That's what I'm using now, and it's working great. The pediatrician's suggestion was 75mg/day, which is even more ridiculous, but we're not quite getting that. But the great part is that my daughter is sleeping through the night on a regular basis; apparently, much of her waking-in-the-night was due to some kind of restless-leg-syndrome thing that can be treated with iron.
On a tangent, my wife started stocking the house with gummy vitamins several years ago, and it's how I get multivitamins into the daughter today. Seriously, why has it taken so long for "it doesn't taste like crap and isn't a soulless pill that you only take out of duty" to become a thing in vitamins!?
But I admire your
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@PotatoEngineer I hate that most of those gummy vitamins use coconut oil as a base. Which I'm sensitive to.
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@Benjamin-Hall I have a restraining order against coconut oil. it's not a chemical matter, I find it emotionally abusive.
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@PotatoEngineer said in What do they talk about at the dealership sales manager's office anyway...:
Seriously, why has it taken so long for "it doesn't taste like crap and isn't a soulless pill that you only take out of duty" to become a thing in vitamins!?
I guess it derived from the same issue with other drugs: you want them to not taste like candies to avoid people gulping them like, well, candies. But at the same time, for children in particular, you need it to not taste like vomit to avoid people, well, vomiting them. So we got weird chemical flavours that no one really likes but that hopefully not too many people abhor either.
Obviously with something as benign as vitamin pills the overdosing risk is pretty minimal (not totally impossible for some of them, but really, at that point you get probably the same effects by overdosing on gummy bears), but since they're made by the same kind of companies, they probably started with the same thinking.
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@remi said in What do they talk about at the dealership sales manager's office anyway...:
@PotatoEngineer said in What do they talk about at the dealership sales manager's office anyway...:
Seriously, why has it taken so long for "it doesn't taste like crap and isn't a soulless pill that you only take out of duty" to become a thing in vitamins!?
I guess it derived from the same issue with other drugs: you want them to not taste like candies to avoid people gulping them like, well, candies. But at the same time, for children in particular, you need it to not taste like vomit to avoid people, well, vomiting them. So we got weird chemical flavours that no one really likes but that hopefully not too many people abhor either.
Yeah, that's always struck me as weird. Because if you go for not-too-good-but-not-too-bad, you're still going to end up with some children absolutely loving them. My child loves soap and raw limes, for instanace. But I suppose it keeps the total number of accidents down.
Obviously with something as benign as vitamin pills the overdosing risk is pretty minimal (not totally impossible for some of them, but really, at that point you get probably the same effects by overdosing on gummy bears), but since they're made by the same kind of companies, they probably started with the same thinking.
Yeah, iron is the one that people usually worry about overdosing on. So a lot of children's vitamins don't have iron in them. Which is weird, because Flintstones vitamins have iron in them, and they're just about the oldest game in town!
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@PotatoEngineer said in What do they talk about at the dealership sales manager's office anyway...:
Yeah, that's always struck me as weird. Because if you go for not-too-good-but-not-too-bad, you're still going to end up with some children absolutely loving them. My child loves soap and raw limes, for instanace.
Everyone knows (or was...) a child with at least one weird liking (and equally weird disliking!), so yeah, any flavour is going to have some unwanted fans, and haters. Still better than actual candies that a large proportion of children are likely to love, though.
Yeah, iron is the one that people usually worry about overdosing on. So a lot of children's vitamins don't have iron in them. Which is weird, because Flintstones vitamins have iron in them, and they're just about the oldest game in town!
Also IIRC, it's actually impossible to overdose in a bad way on iron? There was far too much iron in my water supply a few years back (some days the water was visibly a muddy red!) so I looked it up. Apparently the worst you can get from getting too much iron is simply some sort of digestive illness (i.e. vomiting/diarrhoea), which is definitely unpleasant but not life-threatening (unless you also have other issues yada yada). So even if children were to eat the whole box, the side-effects probably wouldn't be much worse than eating the whole box of gummy bears. Unless the iron in pills is in a form that causes different effects than the iron in water, but I doubt it?
(annoyingly to me, this lack of danger means there is no upper limit on how much iron can be in drinkable water, only "guidelines", and this therefore meant the water company could initially brush off all complaints saying that water still was within allowed limits (since there is none)! Thankfully when it became really awful and the whole area was affected they finally agreed that something was wrong and gave us bottled water while they fixed the problem.)
ETA: the gummy bears from hell's review. Read at your own risk.
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@PotatoEngineer said in What do they talk about at the dealership sales manager's office anyway...:
My child loves soap and raw limes, for instanace.
Your child is weird. But we know where she gets it from.
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@remi said in What do they talk about at the dealership sales manager's office anyway...:
Also IIRC, it's actually impossible to overdose in a bad way on iron?
Iron poisoning was once the leading cause of death from medication overdose among children under age 6 in the United States. Iron poisoning is now on the decline. However, it remains a serious health risk for children.
*Nausea
*Abdominal pain
*Vomiting blood
*Bloody stool
*Low blood pressure
*Tachycardia
*Pulmonary edema
*Jaundice
*SeizuresIt's almost impossible to get too much iron in the diet, but supplements can definitely do it.
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@HardwareGeek TIL. My memory is probably skewed by the fact that I looked at water regulations specifically, and IIRC at around 1-2 g/L the water becomes visibly (and tastes the same) awful (*) and thus you're unlikely to drink it. You'd have to really force yourself to drink a lot to get to poisonous levels (25 mg/kg for a 75 kg adult works out to 1.875 g i.e. 1-2 L of a water with a disgusting taste, so not something that's gonna happen by accident).
(*) in my case I bought a test kit that on the worst days said something between 0.5-1 g/L, IIRC, and we definitely didn't want to drink that water.
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@remi said in What do they talk about at the dealership sales manager's office anyway...:
0.5-1 g/L
Jesus. Start a mine.
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@remi said in What do they talk about at the dealership sales manager's office anyway...:
Everyone knows (or was...) a child with at least one weird liking (and equally weird disliking!), so yeah, any flavour is going to have some unwanted fans, and haters. Still better than actual candies that a large proportion of children are likely to love, though.
Both of my kids absolutely hated children's medicine, whether liquid or chewable. By an insanely early age (3 or 4?) they were both taking pills with water. We had told them that they had to either deal with the kids' medicine or learn to take pills and they actually did that.
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@boomzilla said in What do they talk about at the dealership sales manager's office anyway...:
By an insanely early age (3 or 4?) they were both taking pills with water. We had told them that they had to either deal with the kids' medicine or learn to take pills and they actually did that.
OTOH, I was an adult (or nearly so, maybe late teens) before I could swallow pills. I still have to fight my gag reflex for big ones (INB4 QooC), like vitamins. With the number of s I have, I've had lots of practice swallowing (INB4 QooC again) pills, both prescription and OTC, but it's still not fun.
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@HardwareGeek said in What do they talk about at the dealership sales manager's office anyway...:
INB4 QooC
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@topspin said in What do they talk about at the dealership sales manager's office anyway...:
@HardwareGeek said in What do they talk about at the dealership sales manager's office anyway...:
INB4 QooC
Technically, INB4 is not legally binding.
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@HardwareGeek said in What do they talk about at the dealership sales manager's office anyway...:
OTOH, I was an adult (or nearly so, maybe late teens) before I could swallow pills.
By "pill", I assume you actually mean "tablet":
As opposed to this:
?
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@Zerosquare said in What do they talk about at the dealership sales manager's office anyway...:
@HardwareGeek said in What do they talk about at the dealership sales manager's office anyway...:
OTOH, I was an adult (or nearly so, maybe late teens) before I could swallow pills.
By "pill", I assume you actually mean "tablet":
As opposed to this:
?
Those are
capsule
s notpill
s. No one has shown apill
so far. You have contrastedtablet
s andcapsule
s.
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@Zerosquare said in What do they talk about at the dealership sales manager's office anyway...:
Newspeak! Minitru!
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@Zerosquare As you noted, "pill" includes both. IIRC, I first learned to swallow pills of any sort when I had to take some prescription (antibiotic, maybe?) that was only available in the form of capsules. Eventually, I learned to swallow tablets, too, although ones that start to dissolve and get sticky before they get all the way down can still be a problem sometimes.
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I find capsules easy to swallow. Tablets, on the other hand, tend to get stuck in my throat. I wonder how many drugs are only available in tablet form for cost reasons.
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@HardwareGeek said in What do they talk about at the dealership sales manager's office anyway...:
As you noted, "pill" includes both.
False. Another pebble fallen down the scree.
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@Zerosquare said in What do they talk about at the dealership sales manager's office anyway...:
I wonder how many drugs are only available in tablet form for cost reasons.
I'm not sure it matters really that much. I remember browsing a supermarket aisle for supermarket-brand painkillers (so really the cheapest ones) and the price was the same for capsules and tablets. Though arguably that could be a pricing strategy from the supermarket (less or even no margin on one of the two to simplify their offering), but I don't think so. I suspect that compared to the rest of what goes into the price, tablet vs. capsule doesn't matter much (and conversely, that the price is only a minor factor in choosing to package a drug as tablet vs. capsule).
Also, to stay in the spirit of the anecdata up-thread, my brother couldn't swallow (inb4...) until at least 12 yo or maybe even more. I remember one occasion where he had to take pills and my parents had to grind them to a powder so he could take them -- and of course, the pill not being intended to be taken that way apparently had an awful taste that made it even harder for him. I can't remember what his illness was, but the pills contained methylene blue, which had the fun side-effect of making his pee blue(-ish?).
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@remi said in What do they talk about at the dealership sales manager's office anyway...:
grind them to a powder
There are a fair number of medications that explicitly say not to chew or grind them; they must be swallowed whole. I think pretty much anything that's time release will say that, and maybe others too, for different reasons.
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@HardwareGeek My brother is still alive and doing well, so I'll assume that my parents either checked before (maybe asked the doctor, knowing how my brother would have trouble swallowing them), or were lucky that in that case it didn't matter.
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@remi It doesn't matter for all medications, maybe not even most, but it does for some. I suspect it may be more common now than it used to be, because timed release formulations are more common.
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@HardwareGeek I think they're more likely to use capsule formulations where the time release stuff is important; people are less likely to chew those by accident.
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@dkf said in What do they talk about at the dealership sales manager's office anyway...:
@HardwareGeek I think they're more likely to use capsule formulations where the time release stuff is important; people are less likely to chew those by accident.
^^ dat der bunny. Tablets also are a little harder to make time release even if they're not swallowed - you're not dealing with spheres anymore and you need the matrix material to have mechanical properties (to hold together) in addition to predictable slow solubility.
Also, if it's not made by compacting a powder in a round mold, it's not a pill.
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@remi said in What do they talk about at the dealership sales manager's office anyway...:
There was far too much iron in my water supply a few years back (some days the water was visibly a muddy red!) so I looked it up.
I lived on a farm once upon a time and the well water was similarly full of iron and always red. We had to put in a special filter for it and (IIRC) change it once a month.
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@Parody Same for me. For unrelated reasons I happened to have a water softener installed at about that time, and it was installed with a filter. The cartridge for that sits in a transparent cylinder, so I could see how red the filter (which is white when new) became, and changed it about once a month or so. It worked great, the water after the filter was pretty clean. Now that the water supplier has fixed the iron issue, I change the cartridge maybe once every 3 or even 6 months, and it's a brownish-dirty-white colour, nothing like the red-orange it was before.
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@dkf said in What do they talk about at the dealership sales manager's office anyway...:
@HardwareGeek I think they're more likely to use capsule formulations where the time release stuff is important; people are less likely to chew those by accident.
Of the 5 medications I'm currently on (all 24h time release), only 1 is in a capsule.
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@dcon said in What do they talk about at the dealership sales manager's office anyway...:
@dkf said in What do they talk about at the dealership sales manager's office anyway...:
@HardwareGeek I think they're more likely to use capsule formulations where the time release stuff is important; people are less likely to chew those by accident.
Of the 5 medications I'm currently on (all 24h time release), only 1 is in a capsule.
wow, given a 1/5 chance per medication of being made in India, you are... (runs some numbers) dead.
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@dcon said in What do they talk about at the dealership sales manager's office anyway...:
Of the 5 medications I'm currently on (all 24h time release), only 1 is in a capsule.
must be a time capsule
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@TimeBandit said in What do they talk about at the dealership sales manager's office anyway...:
@dcon said in What do they talk about at the dealership sales manager's office anyway...:
Of the 5 medications I'm currently on (all 24h time release), only 1 is in a capsule.
must be a time capsule
See, there's that excessive politeness biting. This could have been much trollier, in honesty. Hardly rises to the need for an emoticon. The only necessary use is if you have some reasonable expectation that without it, the recipient will be motivated AND ABLE to have a hit put out on you.
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