Live data from Hacker News

Wine bricks saved the U.S. wine industry during Prohibition (2015)

vinepair.com

61–70 of 190 posts

Re: Wine bricks saved the U.S. wine industry during Prohibition (2015)

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This resulted in a marked decrease in hospital admissions, traffic accidents and domestic crimes. That was the same worldwide because nobody was outside. Holy retcon, Batman!

Traffic accidents actually went up in the US. https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2021-12-08/traffi... Generally speaking, emptier roads encourage more speeding and reckless driving, increasing the severity of car accidents.

The US isn't the litmus test of everything though. In the EU, road deaths dropped sharply in 2020. https://etsc.eu/euroadsafetydata/

Re: Wine bricks saved the U.S. wine industry during Prohibition (2015)

#62
post #15

Similar story: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datenklo Assembly instructions: "And now never ever connect pin x and pin y, because then you'd have a working modem, which would be illigal...

Or cryptography. It used to be illegal as well, right?

It was illegal to export certain classes of cryptography software. It was however never illegal to export books about that software. So what they did was publish a hardback book about the algorithm [1], which contained the entire source code of the software. This book was then freely sold all around the world. Now all you had to do was scan and OCR the relevant pages, cat together the resulting files and compile. All perfectly legal.

I remember there being distributed proof-reading groups on Usenet and IRC where you would get 1 page of OCR'd text and the corresponding scanned image and you would manually go through and verify and correct the source code.

[1] https://books.google.com/books/about/PGP_Source_Code_and_Int...

Re: Wine bricks saved the U.S. wine industry during Prohibition (2015)

#63

How did they make the concentrate without destroying all the subtle things I hear that wine is supposed to contain (and the yeast)? Did they boil it? Reverse osmosis? Vacuum?

I doubt those “subtle things” were a priority in this case. Or any consideration at all. People didn’t drink this stuff for its flavor.

Re: Wine bricks saved the U.S. wine industry during Prohibition (2015)

#64
post #15

Similar story: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datenklo Assembly instructions: "And now never ever connect pin x and pin y, because then you'd have a working modem, which would be illigal...

Or cryptography. It used to be illegal as well, right?

The export certainly was - but the 1A provided a loophole - they printed the code for PGP into book form, sent THAT overseas then scanned and OCRd it.

Re: Wine bricks saved the U.S. wine industry during Prohibition (2015)

#65

One cool thing about the pandemic is that many countries took the opportunity to run large-scale social experiments under the guise of Covid Restrictions. I expect social scientists will be digging into this data for years to come. One experiment in South Africa was banning the sale, or transportation, of alcohol. (Production and consumption was still allowed, just not sale or transportation.) This resulted in a mark…

The thing about human psychology is that if you tell someone not to do something, especially something that is not outright harmful to themselves or others, they will yearn to do it.

The answer to alcoholism is to de-glamorize it. Young impressionable minds are susceptible to such glamorization.

If governments around the world are seriously committed to reduce alcohol consumption, better shun it, rather than putting in laws to prohibit or restrict it.

Ultimately, if the people reject it, it will come down. And that is the only way it works.

Re: Wine bricks saved the U.S. wine industry during Prohibition (2015)

#66

One cool thing about the pandemic is that many countries took the opportunity to run large-scale social experiments under the guise of Covid Restrictions. I expect social scientists will be digging into this data for years to come. One experiment in South Africa was banning the sale, or transportation, of alcohol. (Production and consumption was still allowed, just not sale or transportation.) This resulted in a mark…

[deleted]

Re: Wine bricks saved the U.S. wine industry during Prohibition (2015)

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This resulted in a marked decrease in hospital admissions, traffic accidents and domestic crimes. That was the same worldwide because nobody was outside. Holy retcon, Batman!

Traffic accidents actually went up in the US. https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2021-12-08/traffi... Generally speaking, emptier roads encourage more speeding and reckless driving, increasing the severity of car accidents.

The miles really melt away when your doing 160, love those open roads and wide curves in the southwest. Yeh Eisenhower! :)

The biggest problem I run into is two lane highways where the semi trucks constantly block the left lane going just at the speed limit while trying to pass other semis in the right lane going just under the speed limit - literally a 1mph difference between the two. The speed limit for cars is 10mph above the truck limit but your lucky to do the truck limit consistently. California was particularly bad in that regard.

People from Oaklahoma are also a constant scourge on the road, they can not tolerate someone going faster then them, so if you try to pass on the left they will pull in front of you and bumble along at the speed limit or one mile over (def a culture thing, cops in OK have a zero tolerance policy for speeding, no margin, regardless of conditions, passing, etc.). On an open road you can just pass them on the right but in any moderate traffic they cause a lot of problems. Check the plates the next time someone does that, pattern isn’t hard to see.

Roads in West Virginia are basically paved over goat trails, I watched some douche in a pickup take a blind 5 mph turn at about 85mph trying to blow past a small sedan he obviously thought was going to slow and wedged himself in a stream about forty feet beyond the road. Luckily nobody was coming the other way around he turn or it could have been really tragic.

Re: Wine bricks saved the U.S. wine industry during Prohibition (2015)

#68
post #18

I'm very curious how this tasted and I wonder why there isn't anyone selling them anymore (based on a quick Google search). If it tasted half decent I'm curious if there could still be a market for something like this, given it seems to be able to be stored dry?

You can still buy something like this in Sweden. They sell it at my local food store (food stores cannot sell alcohol above 3.5% in Sweden). I, uh I mean a friend, might have tried it when in high school and it tasted not great, but not so bad you couldn't drink it. And honestly, I've had worse 'real' wine in my life.

Re: Wine bricks saved the U.S. wine industry during Prohibition (2015)

#69
post #46
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a number of other examples... Like the companies selling whip cream chargers by the case of 600... You know, for the people that need to make whipped cream by the gallon at home.

One of these cream whippers came into my hands recently. It came with a box of 10 chargers, where 1 was missing. I speculate the owner used their new cream whipper once and decided it was too much work to clean. After ~20 years they gave it to the non-profit's yard sale, where I found it. One charger cartridge is good for maybe a pint of whipped cream. You'd need 4+ chargers for a gallon of whipped cream. A restauran…

No post body was provided.
Post reply on HN