Inside almost every arcade cabinet is a Dell Optiplex running Windows 7, or 10 if its really recent. There’s no such thing as an arcade board anymore, they’re all Dells, or sometimes those HP mini PCs, usually with the protective plastic still on.
Daytona even uses a Raspberry Pi to control the second screen. SEGA intentionally ships those with no-brand SD cards that consistently fail after 3 months. It’s in their agreement that you’ll buy another card from them instead of just flashing the image onto an SD card that won’t break.
The Mario Kart arcade cabinet uses a webcam called the “Nam-Cam” that is mounted in a chamber with no ventilation, which causes it to overheat and die every few months, so of course you’ll have to replace those too. The game will refuse to boot without a working camera.
Oh yeah also all arcade games with prizes are rigged. All of them. We literally have a setting that determines how often the game will allow wins.
Oh yeah also all arcade games with prizes are rigged. All of them. We literally have a setting that determines how often the game will allow wins.
One time on vacation, my little sister and I found a crane game in the game room of our hotel that was clearly over tuned - basically every button press was another win, it was great. We still remember it fondly. A stupid thing, but even at that age we knew these are usually scams and we we’re stoked to just basically get cheap toys.
If I was to open up a classic video.game arcade and run it entirely on downloaded roms is someone coming to take me down?
Yes. You have to have a license to charge people money to play those games.
Otherwise you would have seen a ton of arcades open already
Edit: I only know this because I asked a guy who ran one. His machines were in pretty bad shape and I inquired why he didn’t just do as you thought.
You have to own the game to legally download a ROM. Can’t say other than that.
I worked in an arcade in the 90s. Wow have things changed. I bet pinball games are not easily fixable anymore either.
Optiplex is fucken goated stg
Supermarket employee here. We have a “fresh” fish counter selling stuff like whole mackerels and raw salmon fillets and the like.
Each and every one of these has been frozen at least once - this is a mandatory health hazard prevention thing (to kill off parasites etc) and also basically the only food-safe way to transport them in great quantities over long distances without them going bad. They get delivered frozen solid, get thawed behind the scenes and then put on display / on ice for customers to buy. And then they’re lying there all day long until someone happens to buy some … people still treat the pre-packaged fish from the frozen foods aisle as a second choice, even tho those have NOT been lying around half-thawed in the open air for 10 hours straight.
Long story short, “fresh” fish from the counter is less fresh than the frozen stuff, despite customers commonly believing it to be the other way around.
Hold up, you mean that market in the middle of nowhere (like Kansas) with “fresh caught” fish was not caught by my local fisherman.
Shocked, I tell you 😂
Oh you’d be surprised … by the way, the same goes for literally everything at the bakery counter. Heard a customer complain once that she won’t ever buy pretzels in the store again because they weren’t actually freshly made, the employees just tossed prepackaged frozen pretzels ino the oven yadda yadda … uhhhm lady, do you really think they’re kneading dough behind the scenes?! Never wondered why your croissants, bread rolls and the like always have the same shape, size and weight? It’s almost as if they were made in a factory or something …
…yet these, too, are treated like first choice over the frozen bread rolls you can bake at home, because “a real baker made them” …
The bakery part hits me especially hard, I’m living in germany, where many people are proud of the bread culture, and you basically need to look for artisan bakeries to get stuff they actually made themselves instead of having frozen stuff delivered and just baked in the store. The saddest part is most people don’t realize, while still writing comments online about how “american bread is just sugar”
Hear, hear. Another bullshit part about this is that they often explicitly ask for baker apprenticeship and/or certificates in the job description, and you still end up just tossing factory-made frozen dough clumps into an oven. Why do you first need to prove that you can make cakes and doughnuts and the like from scratch, in order to be allowed to toss frozen clumps from a factory into an oven? It makes no sense.
Just a guess, but marketing and truth in advertising laws. They can then say they have real bakers preparing the products and not be lying.
If you’re ever in San Francico there’s this hole in the wall Bob’s Donuts on Polk Street, go there after 8pm and order whatever was just made. Eat a five-minute-old donut.
Bob’s supplies most of the cafés and donut shops in San Francisco, and tapping the source is a fast way to becoming a donut snob and addict.
I am eating a kaiser roll that was baked in my local grocery store at 3 am today.
I have a micro-bakery (I run it completely alone) where I make everything from scratch, and every day I get customers who enter and immediately leave disappointed because I only have 6 or 7 different breads at most, when the big-name franchise store in the main street has literally dozens of varieties. Once one woman asked me why I wasn’t baking fresh baguettes every hour like them. I don’t know, lady… maybe because my baguettes take more than 3 hours just to do the first proofing, while they simply have to put industrial made ones in the oven?
Please tell me more. I’m obsessed with good bread. Where are you based? Do you have to work mad hours to survive?
Sorry for replying late.
I am in East Asia. I work about 11 to 12 hours a day, every day. And it is NOT worth it, we survive because we are fortunate enough that my SO has a well paid job.
If you really crave good bread, I can give you this advice: find yourself a copy of “Bread” by “Jeffrey Hamelman”, get a nice baking stone (pizza stone?) for your oven, and bake it at home. It is incredibly easy (really, you will be amazed), and really satisfactory.
If they’re by a creek, then maybe!
Along with this, just because you are going to a shoreline restaurant, doesn’t mean you are getting fresh seafood. The same frozen fish that gets deep fried in that quaint shore town is the same frozen fish served 6 hours inland.
I have an allergy to a bacteria that grows on fish during the freeze/thaw process. I can definitively say that if you don’t catch it yourself, or witness it being caught and prepared, then it’s been frozen. I’ve tried a few “fresh” fish places, and the result is always a sleeve of benedryl and being itchy for 3 days.
Yep, I always ask for the bag of frozen shrimp, and smack my husband upside the head when he buys the thawed stuff. I’ve TOLD you, over and over, get the frozen bag!!
Hit him with the frozen shrimp bag, maybe he’ll remember for the next time.
That’s what I pictured when I read it
and smack my husband upside the head when he buys the thawed stuff
Is that considered a form of foreplay in your house?
Otherwise, ouch!
In the UK that’s not true here. I work at a supermarket distribution centre and fish comes in chilled not frozen.
I’ve worked with massive customer databases of over a million people multiple times in jobs I’ve had. And while each company has spent tens-of-thousands of dollars in cyber security to protect that data from outside hackers, none have given any fucks at all about who accessed it internally or what they do with it.
I’ve literally exported the entire customer database in two different jobs, dropped the CSV into my personal Google Drive (from my work computer), and worked entire databases at home.
No one has ever known I’ve done it, cared, or checked if I have any customer personal data when I quit.
Sounds like they didn’t spend any money on Cyber security’s team to properly implement it then…data exfil %100 would have been picked up by any real DLP solution and even barebones heuristics based EDR would have thrown a red flag as well.
Haha, please. You’re talking about machine learning when the best any business is using is antivirus. You forget, Boomers are still running big business and IT departments are running security.
It’s perfect world vs. real world my dude, and real world puts out tender for the cheapest solution.
It sounds like you’ve been working for Mom and pop shops then, and they’re not having audits done. Companies with millions of customers will usually either have in house secops or an mssp handle everything. Point being is, without audits then insurance usually will not be approved for PII loss or they flat out will not work with the company at all. It even more so with HIPAA laws.
I’m with the above commenter. I’ve worked at many companies of various sizes, from small local shops up to international corporations, including at least one contractor for the US military.
Every one of them had rules and policies and training on security, to varying degrees. But at every one of them, I’d find some vulnerability, or instance where someone was neglecting security. Each time, I’d bring it to the attention of someone in management. Each time (with one company as exception), those warnings would be “heard” and “passed up the chain”, and then nothing would happen. Only one company in 20 years of work actually fixed a security issue I found. And no company I’ve ever worked for was leak proof.
In my experience, until it threatens to cost a company much more money in losses than it would cost to fix the problem, but said problem will not get fixed. That’s profit motive. And often it seems they’d rather roll the dice until a loss occurs, and then (maybe) fix the issue.
I’ve worked at plenty of companies with exfil protection and people still did this. One has 100 devs and 500 total employees
That sounds highly illegal depending on what’s on the databases.
Lol same here. Some for ecomm, but the most egregious was underwriting PPP loans. There was a database none of us could access after the loans were underwritten and sent to processing. But most of those documents came in thru the portal and we had to download that package and combine it with anything we got in email… Tax forms, IDs, and all the most sensitive personal info as a lot of businesses that applied were sole proprietors. All those documents say on my local HDD and I catalogued them in case they were needed again.
None of that was handled securely, it was on my home network with no VPN, and after the project was over very suddenly I sat on that laptop for 6 months until they sent a return label. I was a good worker but it was a mass hire and not a lot of vetting that happened.
Private mental health providers in the US are pretty unsupervised and have a conflict of interest in that they make more money by keeping their patients/clients unwell, which can lead to negligence and abuse. The only thing keeping in line is the possibility of someone informed and insightful enough to report them to the licensing board or pressing a lawsuit.
For example, if a provider has poor integrity, it is in their best interest to not treat depression, but rather help the patient/client feel good for the moment. What the patient/client experiences is that they feel better when they see their provider, so they become dependent on their provider. This ensures the provider a reliable source of revenue.
Another issue is that masters level therapists, while capable of providing treatment for simple cases such as a clear depressive episode, are not properly trained to conduct thorough assessments for complex cases, meaning they can misdiagnose quite easily. Complex cases would be better treated by a well-trained psychologist that can conduct thorough psychometric assessments that are quite sophisticated and take lots of time to analyze. These services are costly and the vast majority of insurance policies won’t cover them.
Relevantly, yet another issue is insurance for mental health. Most insurance policies that pay for mental health services pay low, so the care you receive can be substandard since the more effective providers are charging what they’re worth in a market economy. One example that comes to mind is Better Help. They pay providers insultingly low, like around $30/hour, while effective providers are charging ~$150/hr out-of-pocket. That means that when someone uses Better Help to obtain care, they’re getting the bottom of the barrel therapist.
Lastly, the majority of family and marriage therapists aren’t properly trained in narcissistic emotional abuse. This can mean that therapy would not only be a waste of time, but can make things much worse as they can help the narcissist abuse the victim even further. Narcissistic abuse is quite complicated and requires a relationship therapist that specializes in that to properly assess and help the victim escape.
Tips: If you have been seeing a therapist for 12 sessions, and you haven’t realized any considerable long-term changes, find another therapist. Also, if your therapist doesn’t call you out on your bullshit, let’s you ramble about tangential matters, or focuses on helping you overcome specific weekly struggles, rather than helping you develop skills and restructure deep cognitive matters to address them yourself, find another therapist. An effective therapist would develop a clear treatment plan with you that aims to meet objectively measurable goals within a certain time frame.
Note: I am not a therapist. I have just worked in the mental health field and have friends that are therapists.
An effective therapist would develop a clear treatment plan with you that aims to meet objectively measurable goals within a certain time frame.
This is a great point and true for non-therapists as well. A good measure of whether or not someone helping you is providing you value is if you are progressively improving in measurable ways.
True for doctors, meds, physical therapists, coaches, you name it
One example that comes to mind is Better Help
During the pandemic, this company was heavily advertised across Twitch. Not surprised they pay shit wages. Wonder if they originally paid 2-3X market rate during the hype, but slowly clawed back the teaser rates in favor of the dog shit rates.
I heard all the bad shit about better help. But I had been interested in therapy so I tried to find a therapist from a local person instead. Found out my bill was nearly $200 a session. And since therapy isn’t something like an annual doctor visit or a twice a year dentist visit, I noped out of that.
So I more than understand why people choose Better Help. It’s often actually affordable.
This is very accurate. I worked 5 years in a BH Insurance company. We saw shitty providers all the time, and we were constantly having to play the game of deciding how much we (and our members) could tolerate before cutting the providers out of the network. Cutting too many providers doesn’t correct bad actors or replace providers for people who need them and can cause backlogs if other providers aren’t available to take on their patients.
The only thing we were able to do to correct many providers by changing their pay to a value based model, so providers would get paid more for better outcomes (and sometimes only paid when patients improve). It would increase pay a lot over standard rates. But providers fought that big time. They just wanted to do things their way and cash a check of a set amount with little or no oversight.
Better help is used by providers as a way to supplement their income, and they typically pay a bit less than conventional appointments because of the digital channels. However, Ive heard they have some issues with data security on their platform and their matching system is pretty flawed due to their network being somewhat ephemeral.
If you do want to seek therapy, remember you have multiple ways to get it covered. Your health insurance probably has some coverage, and your employer (in the US) likely has an EAP program which will have coverage for therapy for at least a few sessions (typically 3-12) sessions. It’s worth looking into that before paying out of pocket.
I get that Better Help isn’t necessarily that great of a service, but therapy without Better Help is so ungodly expensive.
I was interested in therapy so I found a local provider that takes my insurance. Found out that even with insurance, it was going to cost me nearly $200 per session. So I passed on it because I’m not exactly in dire straits. I don’t understand how average Joes afford regular therapy. Better Help’s main advantage seems to be that it’s actually affordable. Though granted, I’ve never used them so maybe it would still end up being that much with my particular insurance.
You nailed it. 💯
This is why I hate that “get therapy” has become a common meme. Most therapy is a scam in the US.
The USA is run by unpaid 22 year old interns being supervised by underpaid 24 year olds.
Old people in charge are definitely a problem (McConnell, Feinstein etc) but the people in their offices doing all the heavy lifting are basically children.
I mean, people in their 20s have done some pretty amazing things.
Yeah but most people aren’t Alexander the Great or Mozart. And even if you are, you’re probably not working in congress, hah
Alexander had Aristotle to tutor him. If you find yourself young and in power, you better hope your elder advisors are that good.
Best I can do is Blippi sorry
(Google him if you haven’t, he’s hypnotic)
Nice
Many European language versions of anime and games are being localized not by translating the original Japanese, but the English.
Lots of translators also seem to use Google or DeepL, which makes the issue even worse.
The English language version often don’t even translate, they write their own version, calling it “creative liberty”. This leads to a completely different version than what was intended, with others, such as the German or Spanish version, being even further from the original.
That’s why claims of people of having “learnt Japanese from anime” are dubious in the best of cases.
Source: Am Japanese, working in game translation in Tokyo. I’m also trilingual, which makes it even worse to watch this. Ignorance is bliss.
The flip side of this is the Samurai Pizza Cats, where they completely rewrote the dialogue to make the English version way more entertaining.
IIRC they did this with Crayon Shin-Chan since a bunch of that show’s humour was based on cultural nuances and taboos that simply wouldn’t translate outside of Japan.
I’m currently learning Japanese at the moment and if I could tell my younger self that it’s stupidity learn Japanese from English substitutes then I would
Also using AI to translate and companies firing real translators because of this bro ☠️
RIP proper translations.
At least dlsite is being open about it, if the game has an AI translation, that translation is always free and tagged as AI.
Do you have any tips on learning languages?
I’m sorry, I don’t have any recommendations. Maybe there are useful communities for this on Lemmy?
- Be very young
- Be so young that you don’t understand you’re learning a language, you’re just making sounds with grandma
- Be exposed to unique sounds like the German “ü”, the French “r” and the Dutch “ch” and try to imitate them when you’re 3 years old and your brain, tongue and throat are still flexible
If you’ve fucked up 1 to 3, plug away at it for a long time, then at some point, before you think you’re ready, live somewhere where you’ll have no choice but to use that language.
This also applies to a lot of subtitling in general. Shows that are in a different language than English are usually first translated into English, and then that file is used as a template for the other languages it’s translated into. It’s easier and cheaper.
Proper translation is really, really hard, especially for something like Anime.
Not only do you have to get across the same message in a language that works completely differently, you have to time what’s being said so it matches the timing from the original language. And then there’s the fact that there are many cultural differences. If you just translate the words, sometimes the meaning doesn’t make sense to the new audience because what’s happening relies on a cultural understanding that’s different.
Too much “creative liberty” is a problem, but it’s just as bad to get rid of it entirely. That’s why it’s so refreshing when someone makes the effort to do it right. Doing it right is really hard and takes a long time. It’s often a labor of love because doing it acceptably well is much faster and normally pays the same.
Absolutely. The problem arises when the source material then gets translated from English, which already suffers from losing nuances.
It’s also often debatable if something counts as liberty or is really a lazy shortcut, when it’s clear that something could have been done in better ways.
[in the US] your insurance dictates your healthcare, not your disease, deformity, symptoms etc. If your insurance pays for an allergy test, you’re getting an allergy test (even if you came in for a broken arm). If insurance pays for custom orthotics, you’re getting custom orthotics (even if you came in for a wart removal). We will bill your insurance thousands of dollars for things you don’t need. We’re forced to do it by the private equity firms that have purchased almost all of American healthcare systems. It’s insane, it’s wasteful. The best part is the person who needs the allergy test or the custom orthotics can’t afford it, so they don’t get the shit we give away to people who don’t need it.
I would gladly kill myself if it meant we got universal healthcare, but private equity firms can’t monitize a martyr so it would be pointless.
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Burning waste qualifies as recycling.
I used to work for a specialty waste company. We would brag about our ability to recycle better than any of our competitors. Because we would burn most of the waste.
I’m in the industry, at least in the US, and this is not technically accurate… especially not using the language and common understanding of the layperson.
What is it then?
Disposal and/or treatment of waste. Unless its “waste-to-energy”—in which case you’d use that terminology, but you’d never call either “recycling.”
Pile of ash - made from 100% recycled materials
That’s pretty fucked up.
Rapidized oxidation treatment.
Recycled into energy feed stock
Restaurants are 100% more disgusting than your own kitchen.
It really doesn’t matter which one unless it’s like super high end. And you’ve almost definitely eaten something that was dropped on the floor.
I was a chef for 10 years and worked in multiple kitchens. This just isnt true. At least its not a blanket rule.
Ive worked in cheap places with immaculate kitchens and posh places with grotty kitchens and vice versa.
Its luck of the draw sometimes but ive never EVER served food that fell on the floor or witnessed it happening.
I think you have likely worked in some bad places.
It’s important to remember that the food is only as clean as the grossest person who had access to it. I was genuinely surprised at some of the shit I would see when my cooks thought I wasn’t watching them, especially during prep
Like i said. Its not a blanket rule. Some places are bad. Others are good. But i was responding to someone who said all restaurants are less clean thatn your home kitchen which is verifiably false.
Worked in commercial refrigeration for 10 years. Even the super high end ones are almost always disgusting…
And the inside of the ice maker is probably about as clean as the floor drain.
I think the previous owners of my house would give them a run for their money. Even apart from parts of the fridge and range being broken, I’d have seriously considered tossing them just because of how disgusting they were. I don’t like tossing things that still work though. So while I wasn’t keen on spending over a thousand to get them replaced, I’m probably much better off for it.
I honestly don’t know how they could stand it being that dirty. Everything was caked. I even had to give the pantry a scrub down before I could paint it.
Same here! Our whole kitchen had at least 2 sets of owners worth of grease and grime coating everything. The people before us only owned the house for a couple years, but I don’t think they cleaned the place even once. We spent the first day of homeownership scrubbing all the nooks and crannies of just the kitchen. The outsides and tops of the cabinets are still a bit sticky, but we’re hoping to replace them soon. One of the burners on the stove was absolutely encrusted with burned stuff, the bottom of the fridge drawer had tons of dust and crud, and the walls were covered in handprints, food splatters, and misc. grime. Bleh!
I’ve read enough horror stories about this that I have started eating out much less. With friends or partner to have fun sure, I don’t want to give up or reduce my social life (even then I try to pick “safe” food, and definitely cooked food), but unless I am like super tired or really didn’t have a second to go buy groceries, I will cook my own food and not order take-away any day of the week. At least I trust what I am cooking.
If Gordon Ramsay’s nightmare kitchens taught me anything, it’s exactly what you said.
That might be true where you live, but that’s definitely not true here in Europe.
This pertains to the US:
A lot of people are unaware of cancelation lists, and a lot of providers don’t really advertise that. When I was a casemanager for adults with severe mental illness, I would always ask to have my clients added to the cancelation list, and this would often get them in much sooner.
Also butted heads with a receptionist last year when my client was literally experiencing congestive heartfailure and she wanted to schedule him like 1.5 months out to see his specialist about having a defibrillator implanted. I said it was unacceptable and said he needed to be added to the emergency openings I know the providers reserve. She got a look on her face and said “But I need to get provider approval for that…” I told her “I think you better talk to the doctor then.”
Specialist eventually came over to scheduling and asked what was going on. The receptionist said what we wanted and asked if she would approve it, with a real dismissing inflection. The specialist said “Oh my god, yeah of course he’s approved for the emergency list…”
Some of these things are just so overlooked/unknown by the general public. And sometimes you’ve got to be assertive and stick with your guns to be treated fairly and get the attention you deserve. Especially now more than ever. Our healthcare system was bad before, but it’s been so strained ever since covid…
The healthcare system can be a nightmare for average people functioning well. It is so much worse for the population experiencing severe mental illness/with cognitive disability. This barrier for care plays a significant role in the reduced life expectancy in the disadvantaged population I worked with.
Patients suffering from severe mental disorders, including schizophrenia, major depression and bipolar disorders, have a reduced life expectancy compared to the general population of up to 10–25 years. This mortality gap requires urgent actions from a public health perspective in order to be reduced. Source
If anyone reading this has family or friends with severe mental illness or trouble with intellectual functioning, you may want to offer some support for doctors appointments. Honestly, everyone would benefit from having another person in their appointments for support and as a second set of ears.
Anyone reading this with severe mental illness, don’t be afraid to reach out for support. If you don’t have a social support system, there are services out there to help. Try to find social services in your area to get some help navigating thru all the bullshit. And don’t give up hope.
Always like to share this website with free evidence-based resources that I used all the time with my clients. I personally benefitted from the material as well.
Cars produce more harmful airbourne pollutants from their brakes than they do from the tailpipe. Copper is being phased out and the ultimate goal is to abandon friction braking entirely in favour of electrical regeneration.
Cars produce more harmful airbourne pollutants from their brakes than they do from the tailpipe.
That’s why you never live nearby a freeway or major highway.
People brake less often on highways?
Have you seen a highway in Los Angeles during rush hour?
…Have you seen almost any other highway in the U.S. ever?
That’s why you never live nearby a freeway or major highway.
People brake less often on highways?
Versus freeways? I would imagine not, that they would be roughly similar.
Where I live, freeways and highways are the same thing, so I’m confused here.
Where I live, freeways and highways are the same thing, so I’m confused here.
Oh they’re definitely different here.
Freeways are usually eight length cement highways with an impassable divider in the middle and no buildings on their immediate sides, just off ramps.
Highways are usually two or four lane roads that you can pull off of at any point to go to a building. They have more traffic than regular city streets, but they’re not considered throughways like freeways are.
To my point I made earlier that you reply to about the confusion, I wasn’t speaking so much about breaking, but just the faster you go the more tire wear and tear and hence the more tire dust you get to breathe, as well as emergency braking for sudden stops or lane changes, etc. City streets cars are usually a little more tame and mundane speedwise than they are on highways and freeways.
New home construction materials are the lowest possible quality that will meet specs. The allure of a new coat of paint and modern design masks the cheap quality and low durability. Some doors are basically slightly stronger cardboard. My theory as to why American homes have gotten so huge is that for the same budget you can get a much larger volume of materials than in the past.
There is a golden period from about 1985 to 2000 where houses were built without asbestos but with real building materials. I only buy property built in this window.
Every property I’ve inspected built after 2010 that’s more than 5 years old is either splitting at the seams, sinking into the ground or both. They’re built from polystyrene with a coat of plaster. They’re built to palm off to naive new homeowners who don’t understand or landbankers who don’t give a fuck and I pity anyone trying to live in one for more than a few years.
Housing cost still rising tho :/
Never buy a brand new home. Get one that’s at least ten years old. All the mistakes made during construction will have been found and hopefully fixed correctly. It’s still new enough to not have a lot of the old code issues that crop up in pre 1990s houses
Restaurant manager here, been doing this for a few decades. You do not want to know just how much leeway we get with basic sanitation. Seriously, be very thankful that you have an immune system.
Not a restaurant manger, but I worked for Sbarro’s back in college. The one on campus wasn’t bad, but the one in the mall? We had pizzas sitting under heat lamps for 6 hours or more before they were bought, tossed in the oven for a second, and then handed to the customer. They had to search for gloves because I was the only one who wanted to wear them.
At one point, I needed to put pepperoni on a pizza.i told my manger I couldn’t because the pepperoni was moldy. My manger reached into the bag, pulled a small handful of moldy pepperoni out, threw it out, and declared that rest of the bag perfectly good (without even looking at it).
It’s been 30 years and I still can’t eat at Sbarro.
Magazines are routinely reprinting articles from the last year every year again, slightly changed. Especially timeless stuff like “Why is tick season so bad this year?” or “This is how you bake the perfect apple pie”.
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I am a researcher studying diseases. You have no idea how many mice get killed without generating any data. There’s a rule in place whenever you want to work with animals that you need to plan ahead and only use as few animals as you need to get the data that you’re looking for. But things in research basically never happen according to plan. It could be due to a variety of factors: unexpected failures, overlooked factors, technical errors, or just simple negligence when performing an experiment. A lot of data and samples obtained from killed mice are discarded for one or more of the above reasons.
I get that mouse experiments are important to prove that our findings can translate to actual living animals, but I personally will not touch a mouse because, frankly, the “useful data per mouse” ratio is way too low for me to justify using mice.
While you didn’t get the data you were looking for, at least in many of those cases you mentioned you did identify a flaw or failure and learned how to design an experiment that does.
I wouldn’t consider those mice as dieing without teaching you something. It might be a failed experiment, but you learned something.
but I personally will not touch a mouse because, frankly, the “useful data per mouse” ratio is way too low for me to justify using mice.
Are there any alternatives you work with, or do you abstain completely from those kinds of experiments?
Good question. You may be surprised to hear that my stance isn’t that uncommon in research. If I recall correctly, somewhere around 50% of researchers personally will not use mice in their experiments. In these cases, we would either use a lower lifeform (fish or fruit flies), or use immortalized cells. Immortalized cells are aggressive cancer cells that happen to retain some of their cell properties. For instance, immortalized lung cells tend to act somewhat like actual lung cells. It’s not a perfect model, since you’re experimenting on cancer cells instead of actual cells, but the ease and low cost of growing and using them makes them extremely valuable for a lot of grindwork experiments, where you just need to burn through tons of different hypotheses quickly.
For me, I prefer to use immortalized cells. It works out for me anyways, since I prefer to focus on the mechanism of disease (which tends to be easier on immortalized cells) rather than practical effects of disease (which tends to require animals).
That’s very informative! Thank you!
Imagine if we were doing this to our own species.
We did during WW2 and that pushed medicine further in just a few years than thousands of years of medical history before that.
Yeah, I don’t think it was consensual
Can you give an example of how medicine was actually advanced? Cause I’ve only heard that claim made by white supremacists.
Modern medicine did not even exist before WW2. Literally everything we know is thanks to this one event. If you need just one example - antibiotics. And no, they were not invented by Nazis in their camps :) But they were tested on real people. Who died. From testing.
No one denies that wars bring medical advancements. What is questionable is the claim that Nazi experimentation advanced medical science.
Where did I mention Nazis? Where did you get them from?
