Aurulie wrote:Xosasai wrote:it may have been mentioned earlier, but i can't be arsed to dig thru 20 pages of postings, however, if i remember the particulars of the history of alcohol correctly, beers and wines (and tea, but that is for another topic) first came about as an alternative to water that humans could or would tolerate.
even if both of these glasses of water were technically potable water (safe to drink) which would you choose ?
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well, back before the rise of modern water filtration to the point where we could refine and filter out ALL of the particulates out of a given amount of water, odds are that you would have the choice between water (visually cloudy, and thus, still questionable as to its potability, even after boiling) or alcohol, such as primitive ale-wines, and bitter beers.
This, imo, is why alcohol (and various tea recipes) was traditionally/historically the go-to beverage, rather than mere boiled water, which although technically potable, usually did not have anything approaching a pleasant taste. This, in combination with its ease of production (no really, have you seen the sheer genius of the absurd simplicity of some of these rigged-up stills ?) enables the making of alcohol from a fairly widespread list of ingredients, alot of which are also necessary in other realms of cooking and food-sources.
orange juice
oatmeal
sugar (such as syrup, honey, or what-not)
Sounds like a decent breakfast, right ? Well, with the right lines of thought, and afew choice common items, i can use 'breakfast' to make a bottle or three of a decent citrus ale, over the course of a weekend. No permits, no paperwork, no bothering myself to appeal to and appease thuggish law enforcement or spineless bureaucrats for what i could do on my own, and of my own free will (and indeed far more easier and expedient than indeed pretzeling myself to appeal to and appease said govern-mental types.)
Prohibition in the 20's was a grinding failure, mostly because of a still-largely rural mass-culture which supported alcohol as the drink of choice (sidenote - this is why feminism took off, because first-wave feminism initially launched from a platform of 'please stop drunkards from beating their wives'.) and a future prohibition will fail even-more-so, because not only is there an urban cultural need for alcohol (partying hard on the weekends) rather than a physical necessity, but this time around, there will be many magnitudes more knowledgeable people, as well as a cluster of infrastructures ripe for gathering supplies for stills of any sufficient design; the internet, walmart, any given hardware store.
If prohibition was to be attempted again, it would fail even more horribly, as alot more people would be brewing their own concoctions; college students, apartment urbanites, bored suburbanites (think Breaking Bad, but with booze rather than the chemically complex meth, and since alcohol is far easier to produce, multiply that by a thousand-fold.)
Of course, law enforcement has also improved; intrusive and active surveillance is up, tolerance is down (along with Police IQ, but thats also another topic), and the variety of tools and methods available to the cops are so improved, it all just went sideways (which nobody saw coming ?)
TLDR; its alot easier to get the info and items to make alcohol, but if another booze ban did happen, its also alot easier to get caught, if you're unable to be smart about it.
We could ban the information used for making it.
And how would you actually go into someone's head to get it out?
What's your plan, mass brain surgery?
