Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 337 posts

Re: US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional

#291

Post by dv_dt »

dualvariable wrote: post #232
_heimdall wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a whole ball of wax here that boils down to whether a society would rather be individualistic or collectivist. Its a chicken and egg problem as well, the way we regulate and manage health care and health insurance (at least in the US) allows for costs to pretty easily bleed out to the rest of society. That implies that we must then be collectivist in other policies, though that is counter to many of the origi…

> There's a whole ball of wax here that boils down to whether a society would rather be individualistic or collectivist. Yeah, but the US seems to me to be one of the worst places for individual responsibility. Everyone expects their environment to be perfect safe, and they can behave with a large degree of personal negligence, and if anything goes wrong they want to sue anyone they can think of. And then corporation…

The way I see it is that enabling individualism, perhaps through strongly collective rules is very different than individualistically segmenting all sorts of experiences and protections. The latter of which, as you have noted, may not result in individualism on any sort of practical level - especially if it just lets large corporations mow down all sorts of people segmented to an individual level of power.

Re: US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional

#292

Post by margalabargala »

bluGill wrote: post #287
margalabargala wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how that works. You're repeating a myth that was started by the intentional addition of methanol during prohibition. There's no way to produce a dangerous amount of methanol at homebrew scales unless you are trying to do so. Methanol does not all come out in the heads. It is present across the whole distillation run. There's just not enough of it to be dangerous.

It is not a myth. It might be overblown (in the typical home batch sizes there probably isn't enough methanol to worry about anyway.) However methanol will start to boil out first and so the head will have measurable more methanol than latter - this is the basic physics of distillation. You won't get all the methanol out by discarding the head (again this is how distillation works), but you will get an elevated porti…

The myth is that a home distiller can unknowingly produce something that is poisonous due to methanol.

Your statement about methanol being in the heads is also wrong, because the evaporative properties change when you have ethanol, methanol, and water all mixed together. It's not as simple as the naive "lower boiling point means it comes out first".

Here's more info if you're interested https://fx5.com/dispelling-misconceptions-about-methanol-hea...

Re: US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional

#293

Post by ch4s3 »

angry_octet wrote: post #86

As tourists to sketchy places in Asia discovered, methanol poisoning is a real risk, even from large scale distillation. It is the quality control that matters. Illegal stills make quality control impossible, so legalisation and government certified testing can make it safe. However, this ruling is not about alcohol, it is about dissolving Federal authority exercised via the trade and commerce clause of the Constitut…

There is precisely 0 methanol risk in distilling grain based alcohol. The quantity of methanol produced is minuscule a the antidote is ethanol which is also present. Any methanol poisoning is from adulteration with industrial alcohol which has large volumes of methanol added intentionally to make it undrinkable.

Re: US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional

#294

Post by eru »

LaffertyDev wrote: post #285
eru wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't see how brewing is different. It's very lucrative to tax brewing and even more distilling.

You cannot sell homebrew (and presumably won't be able to sell distilled beverages) without a very expensive license. Homebrewers (of all forms) are generally very aware of this when they get into the hobby. Even "cute" forms of recompensation are heavily frowned upon. The most I've seen are to "pay for the glass itself". All that is to say, the government is not harvesting tax from homebrew.

> All that is to say, the government is not harvesting tax from homebrew.

And that's part of why it's so heavily restricted.

Re: US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional

#296

Post by noosphr »

angry_octet wrote: post #86

As tourists to sketchy places in Asia discovered, methanol poisoning is a real risk, even from large scale distillation. It is the quality control that matters. Illegal stills make quality control impossible, so legalisation and government certified testing can make it safe. However, this ruling is not about alcohol, it is about dissolving Federal authority exercised via the trade and commerce clause of the Constitut…

So is food poisoning. Time to ban cooking.

Re: US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional

#297

Post by stalfie »

functionmouse wrote: post #172
lores wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Society still has paid at least for your education, depends on your working power to at least fund your dependents, and at least on some degree of reasonableness from you not to raise everyone's insurance premiums. There's a line to draw somewhere, but even the most ra-ra-individualist heavily depends on society, and has/should have obligations in turn.

Either pay for my health care or get your nose out of it. If my healthcare is going to be my own private matter, then it should be just that. How insulting.

One problem with this mentality is that reality doesn't really make the ideological distinction between whats private and what isn't, or who pays for what. Healthcare is not an intersubjective field, and so actions have consequences, no matter what you think about them.

Vaccines are a good example of this, herd immunity is needed for many of them to work. Antibiotic stewardship is another, unregulated usage of antibiotics risks breeding superbugs.

More generally, "private" ideas are rarely private. Kids born to idiots practicing alternative medicine often die. This scales to societal effects if you have enough idiots. Even though capitalism makes this very fuzzy, many resources in medicine are in fact finite, meaning that time and money spent on one person might mean that another dies. Sometimes that other person is in another, usually poorer country. COVID vaccine availability illustrated that effect nicely.

Essentially what you are advocating is widespread natural selection, with potential consequences affecting anywhere from small local communities to the entire planet in rare cases (COVID is a good one, look up Trichophyton Indotineae for a recent example). And even if you actually do want that, unless you truly follow through, this also comes a huge amount of waste of very limited resources. That is unless you are willing to go the distance and advocate that unvaccinated kids with pneumonia from a measles infection should just go ahead and die because of their parents or neighbors stupid choices.

If you take Kants approach to ethics, that you should only act on principles that you would want to become a universal law, then the principle of healthcare being a private matter is a bit of a non-starter, at least by most ethical systems.

Re: US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional

#298

Post by dghlsakjg »

rayiner wrote: post #265
AlotOfReading wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Death of the author. People sailed under the statue to get to Ellis island, it's not a difficult connection to make. The location was known when the poem was presented in 1883, 2 years before the statue arrived in the US and the author volunteered for one of the numerous aid organizations helping jewish immigrants.

The fact that people used it after the fact for marketing an unrelated issue doesn’t have anything to do with the original intent of the statue. There was a lot of ret-conning American history in the late 19th to early 20th century as a result of mass immigration.

Things can come to mean something different from what their funders intend.

It happens all the time, especially with art, language and especially public monuments.

The Statue of Liberty’s connection to Ellis island is undeniable. The national museum of immigration is part of the same monument and run by the same staff.

It’s not ret-conning to say that the Statue of Liberty is indelibly linked - physically and symbolically - to mass migration of working and lower class people. It was the busiest port of entry for more than 60 years, and more than 20 million people entered there. There are uncountable contemporaneous accounts of immigrants viewing their passing the statue as a marker of the end of the voyage, and the beginning of their life in America.

One French guy funded it for one reason. 20 million others saw it as a symbol for something different in their lives.

Re: US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional

#299

Post by pessimizer »

hilbert42 wrote: post #228
adzm wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, ethanol is an antidote to methanol

Where's the authority on that? Ethanol can be used as a temporary measure in methanol poisoning as it temporarily outcompetes methanol in the metabolic process. So it's only useful until proper medical help arrives when better alternatives such as fomepizole are administered. Even then there is no guarantee of success. Methanol is still metabolized to dangerous formaldehyde and formic acid by the liver's alcohol dehy…

> The logic of giving ethanol or fomepizole is to slow down the rate of production methanol's dangerous metabolic byproducts so less damage is done, nevertheless those dangerous metabolites are still produced.

Who cares if dangerous metabolites are "still produced" when the danger has been limited? It's like claiming that blood transfusions don't help with shock because the patient still lost the same amount of blood.

> Using ethanol is a last-ditch stand to try and take some minor control of an otherwise out of control situation.

This is some weird-ass over-elaborate synonym for antidote.

> There's nothing subtle about it—it's a blunderbuss approach that often doesn't work well because replacing one poison with a less toxic one is a pretty hit-and-miss process.

I don't even know what this is supposed to mean. This all reads like AI slop.

> Antidotes counteract poisons, that's not what happens when you give ethanol in methanol poisonings.

You literally give it to them to counteract the poison. You're using a idiosyncratic version of the word "counteract," which doesn't relate to the health or survival of the person poisoned, but has a lot to do with the absolute levels of "dangerous metabolites produced."

Re: US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional

#300

Post by smsm42 »

angry_octet wrote: post #86

As tourists to sketchy places in Asia discovered, methanol poisoning is a real risk, even from large scale distillation. It is the quality control that matters. Illegal stills make quality control impossible, so legalisation and government certified testing can make it safe. However, this ruling is not about alcohol, it is about dissolving Federal authority exercised via the trade and commerce clause of the Constitut…

Most of methanol poisoning during the Prohibition happened because the government deliberately poisoned ethanol supplies, to prevent them from being converted to drinking spirits. This insane policy caused 10 to 50 thousands deaths. There's no good data about how many died from moonshine methanol poisoning, but likely, outside of prohibition years, the numbers are in low tens per year.
Post reply on HN