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America has a drinking problem

theatlantic.com

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Re: America has a drinking problem

#801

Post by misiti3780 »

misiti3780 wrote: post #738
notsureaboutpg wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you like to go out on the weeks and drink 8 beers with your friends, all the more power to you. People have been drinking since time immemorial, it's part of who we are as human. This just isn't true at all and it's probably offensive to large groups of people who view alcohol drinking (with pretty good reason) as a vice. Abstaining from alcohol is also a praised act since time immemorial. Trying to keep one's mi…

1) If I want to accelerate my end voluntarily, that is my prerogative. 2) You have no evidence that drinking 8 beers in one sitting once a week will cause (1). Send me lots of studies that link excessive alcohol consumption to esophageal cancer, I will send you lots of studies that show the opposite. 3) Not everyone drinks excessively and partakes in "risky and dangerous behaviors which endanger the public" (this is…

quite*

Re: America has a drinking problem

#802

Post by banannaise »

twodave wrote: post #775
yason wrote: post #744

Earlier quoted context omitted.

often results in people getting assaulted on the street. These laws let the police do something about this Aren't there laws against assaulting people on the street that the police could use, then?

Sure there are, but those require someone to be assaulted to enforce them. If they can short-circuit the process during the "drinking in public" preamble to the assault then one might say violence was prevented instead of punished. The perpetrator ends up with a lighter sentence (DIP not nearly as frowned upon as violent crimes) and the would-be-victims aren't even involved.

Pre-crime! Just have the police harass the people most likely to commit crimes, then put them in jail for increasingly long times as their criminal record gets progressively longer.

At least you understand that a lot of American policing is deliberately abusing poor people and minorities who aren't doing anything wrong, under the assumption that later they'll do something wrong.

Re: America has a drinking problem

#803

Post by jcadam »

rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote: post #16
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #3

The statistics about alcohol consumption are so stunning that I often wonder how accurate they are. If these numbers are correct, the top 10% of alcohol drinkers consume the equivalent of 10 drinks per day : https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/09/25/think... The unit for a single drink is a fixed measurement, so someone pouring a tall glass of wine or a very stiff drink could be consuming 2-5 “drinks” in…

Honestly, as someone who has 2-3 drinks per day, I've always been more surprised by the amount of people who basically don't drink at all. In that chart it's over half of Americans. Travel a bit, any you'll quickly discover that a couple drinks in the evening is basically normal in much of the world. I'm not arguing that it's healthy (it's not), but the median American really doesn't drink much - our Puritan values r…

Split a bottle of wine with the wife most days. That equates to 2-3 "standard" drinks per day I suppose. I find buying standard bottles of wine (versus boxes, 1.5L big bottles, etc.) exerts a certain amount of discipline. You're going to be averse to uncorking a new bottle after you just finished one :)

Re: America has a drinking problem

#804

Post by rudnevr »

golergka wrote: post #754
dougmwne wrote: post #743

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of this is just because the USA is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to the USA:) Plus, this is a country made up of a little piece of every other country in the world. "American identity" is an ex post facto rationalization. Not to mention that politically we often oper…

Russia is bigger in terms of area, just two times smaller in terms of population, but 10 times more uniform, at least. You wouldn't be able to tell apart two typical provincial Russian towns from the opposite sides of the country. So, no, just the size itself doesn't seem like a complete explanation for this.

This is both true and not.

Yes, overall diversity is smaller, it's all white and mostly Russian population, skewed to West, but also some very different minorities (and climate). Russian North and Caucasus are very different.

And two typical provincial towns in Russia can have more difference than two typical provincial towns in US. Both in population, demography, education, urbanization level.

Re: America has a drinking problem

#805

Post by ARandomerDude »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #702
tolbish wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Policymakers don't really have to deal with the realities of what you mention. Like the bad education, for instance. That isn't really "your problem". The externalities of an awful public education system are borne by the unfortunates. Not you, who did things right, and not the people like you, who it is important you identify with. And so you're not going to give that issue anything more than lip service. ^ also wri…

The fundamental moral basis of the US is that some people are born better than others. If you have money, you're one of the chosen ones. The more money the better, without end. The losers who don't have money are not your problem. If they were as superior as you are they'd sort themselves out and have money too. But they don't, and of course that just proves how inferior they are. It's absolutely an 18th century aris…

This simply doesn't match the facts. For example, the United States ranks near the top of the World Giving Index, which certainly wouldn't happen if "the losers who don't have money are not your problem". Importantly, this is a man-on-the-street level index, not a government spending index, meaning it more or less assesses the charitable attitudes of the people in various countries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Giving_Index

Re: America has a drinking problem

#806

Post by netizen-936824 »

bumby wrote: post #716
netizen-936824 wrote: post #680

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People love to make excuses for shitty behavior, such as calling the US an experiment

The claim that the US is an experiment has a long precedent. > No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth. Our first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all the avenues to truth. -Thomas Jefferson, 1804

Okay so someone said it in a time when the "experiment" was slavery. I'm not sure what your point is.

Re: America has a drinking problem

#807

Post by wombat-man »

victorp13 wrote: post #665

I'm curious as to what the movie/tv industry's role is in this increase in solitary drinking. I was an active 'solo' drinker as well, who recently stopped altogether. Since I stopped I've noticed something peculiar that I wonder if other people noticed as well: A lot of TV shows and movies contain scenes where alcohol is being positioned as a "fix" for something. - Just had a tough situation? Have a drink! - Feeling…

I think part of it is the character needs something to do with their hands, or something like that. I've cut back a lot in my drinking and noticed this a lot too. Lots of straight liquor drinking.

Re: America has a drinking problem

#808

Post by bumby »

netizen-936824 wrote: post #806
bumby wrote: post #716

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The claim that the US is an experiment has a long precedent. > No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth. Our first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all the avenues to truth. -Thomas Jefferson, 1804

Okay so someone said it in a time when the "experiment" was slavery. I'm not sure what your point is.

While your response is entirely predictable, it’s obvious why such a reaction misses the point because the scope is much wider than one issue.

Yes, it was said during a time when slavery was the norm. But the “experiment” also included allowing systems that challenged that notion rather than maintaining the status quo. That’s the point.

Re: America has a drinking problem

#809

Post by russh »

dougmwne wrote: post #743
Wxc2jjJmST9XWWL wrote: post #636

Whenever I explain the "USA" to (Eastern) Europeans, I always simply state the notion: "diverse country of the extremes". Yes, widespread obesity, but health obsessions also run deep in that country, gym memberships, elite universities with sports programs full of money. How many weird diet fads start basically in the US? Self-help books, alternative gurus, etc. Bad education? Yes, pretty much. But also some of the b…

I think a lot of this is just because the USA is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to the USA:) Plus, this is a country made up of a little piece of every other country in the world. "American identity" is an ex post facto rationalization. Not to mention that politically we often oper…

I used to think mind-boggling big was a bunch of hyperbole until I drove from Georgia to Washington State. I’ve flown across the US a few times and it seemed big but not mind-boggling big. I can’t imagine how much bigger the US would be on horseback or on foot, and I’m ok with that.

Re: America has a drinking problem

#810

Post by munificent »

sjg007 wrote: post #771
munificent wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many things are power laws, but many things are not. It's really easy to overfit your intuition here and assume it's all power laws, but that's an overcorrection from everyone previously assuming everything was a normal distribution. The reality is that some stuff is power laws, some stuff is normal, some stuff is bimodal, etc. The more useful mental exercise is to try to learn what the actual distribution for someth…

The top 10% of drinkers drink more that double the drinks of the remaining 90% of drinkers.

Right, so the interesting question to ask here is, around the biology of alcohol tolerance. How much alcohol does someone have to consume tolerance level X, and in turn how much more alcohol does someone at tolerance level X need to consume to reach the same level of inebriation as before?
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