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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Fruit juice naturally has around 0.5% alcohol. It’s just a side effect of wet sugar.

    There’s no legal federal limit, it’s all state law. Some states go by that 0.5%. others go by a definition that includes “things sold as beer” essentially.
    "You are holding a container. It is labeled beer. Do not give it to anyone under 21.”

    Other times stores just assume and card everyone because it’s waaay easier than nuance and you’re not legally required to sell non-alcoholic beverages to minors.



  • It’s common and they were already in place when prohibition ended.

    So after a good chunk of time with all the breweries becoming unavailable, they were fast to start selling and it just became a common brand.

    Having the three key elements to an alcohol consumed for social purposes rather than taste also helped: cheap, available and cheap.

    We’ve got others around, but they’re generally not everywhere.

    I don’t know that I’ve ever heard anyone say they like the taste though. I think the closest I’ve heard is someone saying they like how it’s cold.


  • The real reason is you don’t. Not in every state. Some defined it by a strict measurable standard. Others defined it to close off what’s depicted in this image. Others defined it to describe what was banned as oppressed to what you measure, so that if you’re selling beer you can’t sell it to kids. No checking labels, no “well, it’s my home brew so I don’t know”. Is it beer? You can’t sell it to kids.

    The last one is almost funny because you can almost feel the confusion about why the concept of non-alcoholic beer even exists.


  • Technically the drinking age isn’t a national law at all. Setting the state law to alignment is a precondition for national highway funding. A state can set the age to whatever they want, but the federal government wouldn’t give money for road maintenance.

    As such, different states define a prohibited beverage in different ways. Some set the limit based on a set alcohol limit. Others based on intent or similarity, essentially so that they can prevent advertising alcoholfree beverages to kids and getting them in the habit at an impressionable age.

    Most common is the abv limit based on what’s typically found naturally in juices and such, with limited exceptions for religious ceremonies, parental supervision, or accidental ingestion and such. (Technically speaking, if you call 911 because your 3 year old stole a canned alcoholic beverage off the counter and drank a bunch before you noticed and you’re scared, they would be required to also give you and the child legal penalties without that clause).


  • People in charge of the company I work for are actively delusional.

    We had a four hour mandatory meeting to go over our product strategy. The high level vision. For the engineers. No rest breaks. It was announced there would be a test on the materials. Not as a joke.
    The top question in the Qa section afterwards was “what is our product strategy?”.
    The meeting had roughly 10k attendees.

    “AI agents are going to become so pervasive that we’ll need to put a computer on every desk in every office. I’m serious: have you tried to buy a Mac mini lately? They’re just not available”. “Datacenters in space”.

    We think they were announcing a new product dashboard, but we’re not sure.

    A huge amount of freakout about how AI will make everything different and better that most people on the ground don’t agree with, but we’re mandated to reorganize stuff according to the theory of how it should work in their vision. Teams that change and shift every few weeks. No fixed goals in the week to week timescales. Less planning, more demos, and development goals dictated by higher ups AI agents.

    When it all shits the bed they won’t be the ones getting fired. They’ll be the ones collecting the same paycheck and talking about how “limited restructuring” is hard for everyone, but market forces dictate.

    I’ve never been under the impression that my work makes the world a better place. I’ve always sold a product that goes to companies that do stuff that might help someone else help people.
    It’s someone else having a goddamened coke bender on 50k people’s livelihoods with no consequences that has me down.



  • Traffic congestion doesn’t happen because of lack of coordination. Coordination prevents collisions. Our success rate could be a lot better but the system does pretty well with coordination limited to blinking lights, a noise that says “fuck off”, the mutual knowledge that we all got the same training and the private knowledge that everyone else on the road is a suicidal idiot who slept through the training.

    Congestion is a physical property of the road network. There’s a physical limit to the number of cars you can push through a road in a given time period. Drive the cars too fast and they fly off the road when it bends, or cars slam into each other when a deer tries to commit suicide.

    Traffic is well modeled as an incompressible slightly non-newtownian fluid, like runny oobleck. If you apply more pressure/increase vehicle volume the fluid starts to bind up as it becomes harder for the cars to maneuver without collision, regardless of coordination.

    You reduce traffic by taking cars off the road, or scheduling utilization. Self driving cars won’t help, and we can do both of those without them. Long term they’re likely to make collisions worse because humans don’t know what they’re going to do, so the primary mode we have of coordination, “the theory of mind” will break down. Right now they’re so uncommon that you assume any car is a human who reacts and prioritizes like you.

    Tear down the freeways and replace them with trains.



  • Almost certainly.

    They don’t have to, since it’s not a part of the system that it requires them to hold onto the information, but they all invariably hold onto the information to keep training on it, which includes your personal information.

    They are likely not using for selling to other people or anything since that’s not their business model at the moment, but it’s probably finding it’s way into the next version in some capacity.



  • Sure. But also: planning a funeral and communicating your funeral wishes is also for the living, which the father is. and respecting the deceased by honoring their wishes is also for the living, since it’s how we help solidify the norm that we respect people’s final wishes.

    Demanding they do it your way is shitty and self centered.

    Yeah, how dare that fucking asshole ask his son to attend his funeral just because he cares about “family” or something. It’s like he doesn’t understand that his sisters might ask some slightly uncomfortable questions or gossip!

    You’re right that funerals are for the living. They’re a place for the living to grieve, mourn and honor the deceased. Acting like it’s shitty or self centered for someone to express an opinion about their funeral or what’s important to them is honestly disgusting.
    The man isn’t asking his son to deal with someone who traumatized him, or violated him in some way: he just doesn’t like the aunts. That’s like refusing to attend the funeral because you just really hate waking up early if you don’t have to.




  • It’s some of that, on some platforms. Other platforms also get paid to promote posts or advertisement. Depending on who pays the most, you can see different things based on your demographics.
    An important thing to remember is that they will show you something in the money making category. If they know what you want, they make more if they show you something that’s likely to be effective. If they don’t know what you want, they make more if they show you something targeting your demographic. If they’re fuzzy on everything, they show you something.

    Which political geographic is more likely to target Facebook? Which one is more likely to spend demographic money to try to court younger white men from a low to middle income bracket?



  • Feel free. There’s nothing stopping you.

    The reason it’s not feasible is because most human activity happens during the daylight hours. As such, having the unit of a “day” cover what’s typically a day makes things easier.
    For example, banks , businesses and schools need to have a unified schedule across a jurisdiction. If the jurisdiction specifies a utc offset that defines the official business day you just have a less coordinated timezone system.
    You also make knowing roughly what part of the waking cycle other parts of the world are in much harder. Right now it’s 0100 in utc-5. So it’s 0800 in utc+2, and people are eating breakfast, at work, getting kids to school and so on. If I want to know that without timezones I need to know where they are on the planet and what the relevant legal jurisdiction has mandated as coordinated business time. That’s effectively just a worse version of timezones.

    The human conception of time is intrinsically linked to spatial location. Fighting that is just making it hard for no reason. What we need to do is stop fiddling with the time. No more (major) clock adjustments. Daylight savings only sucks because of the switch , so we should just pick one and stay.




  • It’s because I live and work with Muslims. Turns out there are as many of them who hold values I agree with as there are Christians or Jews.

    The biggest difference I see is which groups get hate. I don’t see the need to defend Christianity because there’s no pervasive disparagement or hostility.
    I occasionally defend Judaism because I occasionally encounter disparaging language or people who conflate the nation of Israel with either the ethnic group or the religion.

    A lot of people make comments about how they’re not islamaphobic, but it just so happens to be that reality perfectly reflects their prejudiced beliefs.
    Kinda like the people who aren’t mysoginists or anything, but have found that, coincidentally, the ideal and natural gender roles and power dynamics between the sexes perfectly mirrors the media representation of the 1950s.

    As much as I think we should look to Europe for running a society, race and religious tolerance are not one of those subjects in which I defer to them.

    Do you actually think it’s unexpected that people who are never fully allowed to integrate into society for some reason don’t fully integrate into society? That laws that make it specifically difficult for them to coexist might result in them … Not coexisting as well?

    If it’s the content of their texts that’s causing you a concern, have I got news for you about every fucking religion.