The industry standard is HPLC (high performance liquid chromatography). Those things go for tens of thousands of dollars up front, plus maintenance and consumables.
If there was a less costly way of doing it, you bet companies would have settled on that by now.
make the best decisions they can
I would recommend an HPLC and a competent analytical chemist to gather data and decide whether or not a batch is safe to consume.
This has been posted to a bunch of different communities, and I’m gonna be a stick in the mud each time.
I’m a process chemist. I do this for a living. I’ve made kilo-scale batches of pharmaceuticals at work that have gone through the regulatory process and made it into people. I went to school for ten years to do this.
This is a colossally dangerous thing.
Every time you run a chemical synthesis, you generate impurities. Slightly different temperatures, concentrations, reagent quality, and a million other things will vary the identities and concentrations of those impurities in your product.
The nature of biochemistry is that most compounds, even at very small concentrations, can have effects. Usually bad ones. So drugs have tight specs on how much of each potential impurity can be present. Usually it’s in the 0.1% range, but sometimes a lot lower.
Detection of impurities at that level cannot be done with ‘hacker’ gear in your garage. So if you do this, you’re going to be taking unknown quantities of unknown impurities.
There are trade-offs. If you’re definitely gonna die without the medicine, then the worst that can happen is you die faster, or more painfully. If it’s medicine to maintain quality of life, then you might die fast and painfully.
I’m not saying the current system is good at all. Medicine is too expensive. It shouldn’t be limited by right wing nutjobs. Those things are true. Those things require a solution.
This is not a good solution.
No. Never. It takes whole teams of people to get it right. (Even then, they sometimes get it wrong.)
That’s a false dichotomy if I’ve ever heard one, dude.
No, just follow the money. It’s all going into marketing. Ban marketing (like the rest of the world!) and prices drop overnight.
There is exactly one easiest option: be like the rest of the civilized world and ban consumer marketing of medicine. HUGE amounts of the prices of drugs are just down to TV ads. “Ask your doctor about…” is horse shit, let your doctor decide what prescription drugs you need. And fire the cocaine-riddled, law-breaking marketing departments that soak up so much money.
“Our recipes are consistent, like a good espresso maker.”
“Okay cool, how do you know that?”
“So many questions! We’re hackers! We are very smart.”
That’s the thing. They have no way of even knowing if they messed up! I’m not even sure the way they could be messing up is a thing they know they should be worried about.
I’m not disputing the reasoning behind why this is important. But “it is important” does not imply that their solution is the right one.
People make illicit drugs chock full of impurities all the time too, and it fucks people up.
There are standards for purity on pharmaceuticals. Impurities have to be ridiculously low. Lower than you can measure in your garage.
These dudes either don’t know you need to even measure purity or have decided that it’s inconvenient and are ignoring it.
I’m a process chemist. I do this sort of thing for a living.
These guys don’t even know why what they’re suggesting is so dangerous. Do not do any of this.
I feel bad for laughing at this
got lucky
That is not how I’d characterize 2016 at all. Also, I would like to refer you to argument number two.
Why on earth are we still listening to Nate Silver?
We eat him last.
Yes. Muzzle loaders. Shoot once, then spend a few minutes loading a powder charge and a bullet down the barrel. They weren’t flintlock muskets like it was the 1700s, they were modern rifles. Just loaded through the muzzles. It gives the deer a fighting chance. You have to hit on the first shot. Did you know that people also hunt with a bow and arrow? Those have been around since the Neolithic. Sometimes not using the most advanced tech is the point.
It’s funny that you typed all that stuff trying to explain firearms to someone who you assume knows nothing about them. I’ve shot everything from pellet guns to the aforementioned muzzle loader to a .30-06 to, yes, an AR-15. I can pick up most guns and check to see if the chamber’s clear. I can disassemble and clean and put them back together.
I want these things to go away. Not just AR-15’s. Anything semiautomatic with a magazine that can hold more than, let’s say, six rounds. Anything beyond a revolver is over the top for personal protection, and if you think that’s not true you’re a lunatic or just want to cosplay army guy. Duh, AR-15’s are the most commonly used firearm in shootings because there’s a lot of them. How about we make there be less of them and other guns that can kill so many people so quickly?
Enforcement at fewer points (manufacturers, distributors) is much easier than at each individual person with a gun being evaluated.
The data is interesting. But this is a really poorly constructed graph.