It’s been 18 years since drug companies replaced pseudoephedrine with phenylephrine to keep their cold medications available over the counter when the people waging War On Drugs(tm) decided to restrict the main ingredient in Sudafed (and what it was named after) because it could be used to make meth.

Though I remember some other decongestant plugging the idea that “unlike those medications, we chose not to change our formulation…” Yeah, because you weren’t using an ingredient that got semi-banned!

From the start, the new formulation clearly wasn’t as effective. When I found out that I could still buy the real medication as long as I asked at the pharmacy counter (and showed ID so that the DEA or whoever knows I’m not trying to get around limits by hitting every pharmacy in town), I stopped bothering with the OTC versions entirely.

I wasn’t surprised when studies showed that phenylephrine doesn’t work.

Back in 2015.

(Restricting sales of the real stuff didn’t seem to make much of a dent in the meth problem, either.)

“Only” eight years later, the FDA reached the same conclusion.

And yet the industry is complaining that “if oral phenylephrine were not available over the counter, it would be a significant burden to consumers.”

HOW?????

It doesn’t work. People who buy it are wasting their time and money on snake oil instead of buying a different medication that might actually do something for them. (Not that this is a problem for the supplement industry, where “not evaluated by the FDA” might as well be a selling point.)

We all ended up worse off: cold meds that don’t work, submitting to surveillance to get the meds that do work, and it didn’t even slow down the meth epidemic.

Food companies are adding sesame flour to foods that didn’t have sesame so they can “comply” with new labeling requirements by always labeling “contains sesame” instead of instead of adding it to their existing cross-contamination protocols.

Meaning people with sesame allergy are suddenly finding that foods they used to be able to eat are now hazardous.

This is like a skydiving outfit deciding to stop maintaining their parachutes and disavow responsibility in their waiver instead of complying with a requirement to maintain their parachutes a little better than they were doing before.

Actually it’s worse than that. It’s like actively damaging some of the parachutes, and adding fine print saying that people who want well-maintained parachutes shouldn’t fly with them. And not mentioning it to repeat customers outside of that fine print.

You wouldn’t add wheat to a dish just to avoid having to guarantee it was gluten-free. Or add lead to your water so you don’t have to worry about keeping environmental contamination out. Or…

Ugh, those sound way too probable. People can be awful sometimes, and business has a tendency to remove ethics from decision making.

Update: Malicious compliance is a good term for it.

Not the first time

And apparently this wasn’t the first time companies have done this crap, either. After the 2016 labeling law went into effect, some companies added peanut flour to foods that didn’t have it. Not enough to impact the baking or texture or flavor…but enough to trigger an allergic reaction.

Disturbingly, I missed that previous round. I say disturbingly because I actually am allergic to peanuts, so I’m lucky I didn’t end up in the ER from something that used to be safe. I can only think of two explanations for why I didn’t notice:

By 2016, I was doing most of my grocery shopping at some of the slightly crunchier stores, and buying snacks from smaller brands that were either less likely to take that shortcut, or already had foods I was allergic to by the time I took my first look at the ingredients panel.

2016 was also the year the Epi-Pen price-gouging scandal boiled over.

Corporations behaving badly

Pharma giant Mylan had already gained a virtual monopoly on epinephrine auto-injectors. After FARE spent years lobbying for states to require epinephrine to be stocked in schools for emergencies, Mylan raised the price of the auto-injector drastically (a factor of 5 or 6), to the point where many people who needed them couldn’t afford it anymore.

Whether FARE was used itself, or a co-conspirator who used its members, I lost a lot of trust in them and stopped following their newsletters as closely. That was also the last year I participated in FARE’s Walk for Food Allergy fundraiser, and I only did that after they stopped accepting money from Mylan.

(Interesting note: The Intercept article mentions that Mylan deliberately set out to stop selling single Epi-Pens in the early 2010s and only sell the two-packs in order to justify charging more. I was already carrying two-pack at my allergist’s recommendation, which turned out to be highly fortunate the time in 2006 or so when I was hit by anaphylaxis and messed up the first injection.)

Expanded from a thread on Wandering.shop

Making the blue check mark mean “This person can afford $20/month” instead of “This person is who they say they are” is only the latest way Twitter has downgraded its signal/noise ratio over the years.

Word is that Twitter’s new owner is planning to charge $20/month for a blue check mark.

Which of course, means the blue checkmark will now be useless. Well, useless to the users of the site, anyway. It won’t tell you which of several accounts is really the person you’re looking for, just who has $20/month to spend on it. (Not that it was perfect, but at least it was a signal.)

It’s sort of like when SSL certificates went from being expensive and needing verification — so they were a sign that you were on the right website — to cheap and later free. Except an SSL/TLS cert still tells you something: your connection is protected from eavesdropping. The checkmark doesn’t tell you anything valuable.

But Twitter’s been messing with the signal/noise ratio for ages.

Downgrade the Signal

Ads themselves (or promoted tweets, or whatever you call them) are already adding noise. Then they started showing you other people’s “likes,” removing some meaning from the action and adding noise to the stream. These days they even show you tweets from people that people you follow are following.

On Mastodon I’ll sometimes get distracted from something I wanted to do or look for, but I can almost always get back to it. I’ll pop onto Twitter for 5 minutes to look for something and I’m there twice as long because I can’t find it in all the attention-grabbing “features.” The other day I decided to unfollow all the corporations and organizations and only keep the actual people on the list, and I still had trouble finding things.

I suppose from Twitter’s perspective it worked, because I was there for 10 minutes instead of 5…but it makes me less interested in coming back later.

Every bit of noise you add to a signal cuts down on how much value the listener gets out of it. Eventually the ratio is no longer worth it, and all that attention you managed to extract from them by ratcheting up the noise drops to zero.

While I’m griping about Instagram, why the heck are the detailed notification preferences split between the app and the system notification UI?

That’s terrible design.

Well, if it’s intended for usability, anyway.

If your goal is to make people see more notifications, though… 🙄

Yeah.

IMO there are two sensible ways to handle granular push notification preferences:

  1. Use the system’s per-app settings for all of it. (Tusky does this, even putting your per-account preferences in the system UI.)
  2. Use the app’s settings for all of it, and let the system just be an on/off toggle for what you’ve chosen in the app (like it was before Android even had UI for it).

Either way, everything’s in the same spot so you know you haven’t missed anything you want to turn off. Or anything you want to turn on, for that matter.