The average of the top 10% is a really weird statistic to pick that seems to me to be intended to purposefully mislead. That is people will think it means the 5th percentile, but it doesn't at all.
How common did you think alcoholism was? There are enough alcoholics (estimates range between 5-10%) that this number is basically the same as "what's the average number of drinks that an alcoholic drinks in a week."
I am kind of surprised by where the percentiles fall. I would have guessed that absolute teetotalers were no more than maybe 15% of the population, and less-than-a-drink-a-week drinkers another 20% on top of that, but that by the fourth decile you'd be talking about people who consistently had at least a drink or two every week.
Reporting deciles is common enough that I don't see why it's going to confuse people. Or at least why it would confuse people in public health.
4: I think the problem is reporting the average alcohol consumption of the decile. What I expect when I see a decile is the crossover point at the bottom of the decile (there's a better way to put this) -- the number of drinks the lightest drinker in the top 10% puts away in a week. Averaging the decile inflates the number if you have outliers at the top, in the way that the average income of the top 1% looks different depending on how many billionaires you have in there.
(This actually seems like less of a problem for drinking than for other things, because there's got to be a hard limit on how much one person can drink without dying, so the outliers can't outlie too far.)
I meant to send this in but forgot to. Absolutely astounding. I'm also confused by "the average of the top 10%"; why not just report the actual decile values (e.g. tell me what the 90% drinker has)? The averages kind of work for the non-edge deciles, but it doesn't really tell us a whole lot about the top 10%--are 90%-96% kind of like 80-90% while 97%+ are off the charts, or what?
Anyway, I think I drink a lot but it's nice to know I'm not up in there.
6 before 5.1.
I thought 5.2 but that average for the top 10% is more than I thought a human could tolerate regularly.
I can count on one or two hands the number of times I've had ten drinks in an evening (the accounting gets fuzzy, for obvious reasons). I kind of hit a wall at 5ish and I really hate puking. My wife is a more vigorous drinker and a more willing puker; I never understood what is so great about being incredibly drunk that it's worth the sick and the hangover.
Looks like I am somewhere in the 7th decile. 8th decile in a good week.
I probably got quite close to 10 units a day, averaged over a week, in my mid 20s. 10 units is about 4 beers or a bottle of standard red wine. I had a job at the time where there was a fairly strong culture of going for a few pints post work, every day, so I was probably clocking in a good 4 -6 units a day, just on those couple of post-work pints. Then out for an actual drink and/or a gig, or clubbing, maybe 3 times a week. Where that might mean 10 - 15 units, easily.
That adds up pretty quickly. Maybe not 70 units a week, but definitely 50 or more, most weeks. And I'd certainly have hit higher on weeks when I was out more, if say, a few good gigs were in close succession, and someone had a birthday. I wouldn't describe that as freakishly higher, either, for a 20 something with a busy social life.
I drink much less now, though.
As related here before somewhere, my father reports a night spent consoling a friend about his impending divorce that involved seventeen Manhattans each. That's got to be near the humanly possible limit.
I can't think of any reason to mix means and deciles. Tell me about the distribution, or don't. It would be far more informative to see the 95th and 99th numbers.
I'm assuming 'drinks' in that article means units? Yes?
11: The bartender probably started using only vermouth after 8 or so.
13: Americans generally have no idea what a unit of alcohol is. We don't have any (nationwide, might be state) laws about labelling like you do.
13; I don't think so -- if you read the text, they translate into amounts and a 'drink' is a can of beer (presumably 12oz). That's more than an alcohol unit, right?
Oh, if a pint is more than one "drink" then I probably hit ten pretty regularly.
Well, it'd be one and a third 'drinks'.
Didn't Piketty do a lot of averages-of-ranges?
We might be used to the range boundaries, but average works better to answer the question "what is the top decile (or whatever) like?". Assuming the decile isn't itself hugely diverse.
8
I hate being hungover and hate vomiting, but when I'm drunk, I am not capable of doing the same cost/benefit ratio that I would do when sober. The more I drink, the more I want to drink. I drink about a unit a day right now. My school and discipline are known for their hard drinking, so I drink much more when I'm in residence.
re: 17
A pint of strong continental lager [over 5% alcohol] is closer to 3 units.
A pint of IPA is probably more than a third more alcohol than a can of lager. Don't make me do math.
Or: see 21. By "lager" I meant something like Bud.
I am a less than 1 per week person who drank next to nothing before age 21 because I was so afraid of becoming an alcoholic.
I thin that I had 10 drinks in an evening *once*. I was sick for more than a day.
I am definitely drunk on 5.
I have the same problem as 20. Usually mitigated by not drinking with other people with the same problem. And the drinks vs. units things is meaningful: I've learned that if I'm having more than a single bottle I need to stay away from the microbreweries with 8%+ beers.
8, 20: Yeah, same here -- anyone who's been to enough meetups has probably noticed that if I have three drinks, the fourth through eighth become an obviously good idea. I've never vomited drunk (although I certainly have hungover), though.
According to wikipedia, 284ml of 3.5% beer is 1 unit. I drink 330 ml of about 3% beer* each night.
*yes, the beer here is really depressing. At a dinner the other day I drank about 7-8 500 ml bottles of beer the other day and barely got a buzz, and then realized I was drinking 2.5% beer.
26
I once vomited at jury duty, but I'm pretty sure I was no longer drunk at that point. Also, jury duty is a really terrible place to have a bad hangover.
This post is an intervention for Moby, right?
That's got to be near the humanly possible limit.
This is complicated by the boot 'n rally. I think I mentioned that for my for my friend's 21st birthday, we each had 21 drinks, but that was non-fatal only because we barfed (at least once--who the hell knows?).
Now, of course, I don't drink at all. Because I'm an American.
A bottle of wine is a pretty good match for an evening, a few nights per week.
seventeen Manhattans each
One short of the Dylan Thomas lethal standard. That was a close one.
I always get confused trying to tell doctors how many drinks I have in a week -- most days, I have at least one, and I have more than one more often than none, but three or more is really fairly unusual, probably not more than once or twice a month... ten? Maybe? And that's blindly equating any serving of alcohol with any other, on the theory that it evens out in the end.
30.1: I'm fine. I have had more than ten drink in a day for decades.
A standard drink (in the US). I think that's the same site that the underlying data comes from.
You also need to look at the alcohol by volume vs. alcohol by weight.
For US technical purposes, a "drink" contains 14g/17.7mL of ethanol. The UK "alcohol unit" is 7.9g/10mL. So 10 drinks a day, as reported here, is almost 18 units.
Guys, everybody knows that a "unit" of alcohol just means whatever bounded container you're drinking from. That's why really seriously alcoholics drink from the bottle; they only want to have one.
34: Missing a "n't", or a cry for help?
In other related recent news drinking from a Maß is hilarious, because you really do think "oh, well, I just have a little bit of beer left" when you're down to 12 ounces or so remaining.
Judging by that chart, I'm definitely in that 9th percentile - about two drinks a day, probably three more often than one or fewer. And they're usually wine, cocktails, or beers with ABV over 5 percent, not shitty beers like Bud. I think I might have a problem.
Up to four drinks a day, the more a man drinks, the healthier he is.
a "unit" of alcohol just means whatever bounded container you're drinking from
My mom, nursing a hangover: "God this is so unfair. I only had three beers!"
Me: "They were 22 oz. and 8%"
Mom [sourly]: "I know how to count beer."
Ten seems like a lot.
They used to have a thingin the 70s here with, in the last couple of years, 10,000 people drinking 1,000 kegs of beer. Whatever the units per person that works out to, I more than held up my end. And, after the last one, drove home. Because 70s.
I all but stopped drinking after losing a lot of weight a couple years ago, because I found that the amount of alcohol needed to get me unpleasantly drunk had dropped to somewhere between 0 and 1 drinks.
I know how to count beer."
It's like they do in pre-mathematical cultures -- one, two, three, many.
Sadly, the weight I put on after having kids did not increase my alcohol tolerance an iota.
48: That may explain the Russian counting system.
A friend of a friend drank a quart of vodka daily while training for a marathon. Her equally bibulous husband went somewhere to detox and stepped off the return flight smashed. Say what you want about that kind of alcoholism, at least it's an ethos.
OK, so to "clarify": the author didn't post more information about the distribution, so we do not know whether the 10/day mean for the highest decile is 99%, 95%, or something else. The average of the next decile down, 15.85 drinks/week, might similarly be 86% or 89%, we don't know.
NIAAA says that a bottle of wine is 5 drinks, 12oz beer is considered equivalent to 1.5 oz spirits, is their standard unit.
I looked earlier, didn't see the data.
Tying this into the other thread, where DFW's AA mindset got correctly pointed out, here are AA's 12 questions to think about whether there's a problem.
I always get confused trying to tell doctors how many drinks I have in a week
I don't get confused any more, because I've learned that this is in the "things to lie to the doctor about." Any answer more than 7 has tended to raise eyebrows IME. Five drinks a week it is!
Alcohol makes my insomnia awful - as in waking up halfway through the night and being stuck awake, not trouble falling asleep - and I loathe being hungover more than I can express. Otherwise I'd probably drink more. Besides the constantly-pregnant thing, and then general calories of beer. Ask me again in five years.
I can't remember where I heard this -- probably here -- but I recall hearing or seeing somewhere that light/moderate drinkers lie to doctors about how much they drink, and heavy drinkers are much more accurate. So, five drinks a week means ten or twelve, but twenty means twenty.
Obviously, I can't vouch for the accuracy of this, but it makes a certain amount of psychological sense to me.
52: Two yesses. And even those are just to be very cautious. Whew, I can enjoy half a bottle of wine tonight with a clear conscience.
At a certain point, you can see it in the face of the drinker.
53: I drink very little, so there's not much to lie to my doctor about, but we did have a conversation about how doctors inflate the numbers. I said that I drink 3 or more maybe 2 or 3 times a year, and I was just being honest. She knows me well enough to know that I'm pretty straight.
She did talk to the med student about a consult she did with a male patient who was shaking. The resident was struggling to figure out what to do, because the guy said he only had one drink a day. It turned out that one drink was a 12oz glass of whiskey. So, she made sure to get him something to help with the withdrawal.
||
1. How long can chicken actually sit out, freshly cooked? Ie it will be about a two+ hour roundtrip for me to take Hawaii to ballet. Do I actually need to refrigerate it till I use it when we get home?
2. That life-hacker trick of cutting a handful of cherry tomatoes by holding them steady under a plate and slicing horizontally works amazingly well.
|>
Weeknights probably 3-4 glasses, weekends, probably 4-5. Almost exclusively bourbon & wine, with occasional cocktails and schnapps nightcaps. AB is a glass or two behind me, pretty much just wine and occasional cocktails.
As I'm pretty sure I mentioned before, AB's GP suggested not that she/we reduce our intake by volume as such, but that we take off a night or two every week - completely dry - essentially to give our systems break from the daily cycle. I don't think I've really seen this advice elsewhere, but I trust this doc, and honestly it's easier to do that than it is to moderate (which we had tried to do in the past, mostly to save money).
My main difficulty is that it has led to a mild case of "better not waste a drinking day"*, and I've probably been having about 1 drink more than I used to. But as they say on the TV, knowing that you've got a problem is halfway to the solution, and I've cut back a scoche.
*God, this all sounds so problematic.
Sixth or seventh decile. Hardly drink at all at home - e.g. bought 6 bottles of dark beer when in Belgium in July and 3 of them are still sitting here. (Although I have been losing weight, so that puts me off drinking I guess. It's nice beer.) My parents didn't drink an awful lot at home, although they open a bottle of wine most nights I see them now. My dad gave up drinking for a while, after a 'Christmas box' full of alcohol resulted in him drinking with tramps somewhere round the back of Shaftesbury Avenue and being told off by the police for pissing in the road. C doesn't drink much because his mum, as I mentioned just the other day, drinks a lot. Bottle of wine plus spirits each day - although that still is probably only "10 drinks".
60.1: Not even remotely a problem. For cooked, non-sauce/gravy covered food, I worry about days, not hours.
Any answer more than 7 has tended to raise eyebrows IME.
Which - and of course this sounds defensive coming from the guy who wrote 61 - is ridiculous. More than 1 drink a day is a problem? There's just zero evidence that a normal size adult* is harmed by 2 drinks a day.
*without a drinking problem, obv
O.K. Let's back up to the drinking with tramps part.
64: Thanks. Somehow it hadn't come up before this semester, because I was either prepping things days in advance or doing it all in one sitting, until working from home now, when I often have a 2-3 hour break.
60.1: Depends a bit on what happens to it after the 2 hours. If it's all eaten in the 3rd hour, then 64 is right. But if it's, like, a whole roasted chicken, and half of it's going into the fridge for leftovers, but only after sitting another couple hours at the dinner table... that's a long time in the zone where they say to be careful.
I mean, in truth, I'm probably with LB. And whole pieces of meat (that is, with lots of volume and less surface area) tend to be pretty safe. Probably wouldn't hurt to tent it with foil, keeping it hot longer at the outset.
65: I wonder if there's a self-fulfilling prophecy effect going on; doctors assume you're lying, so start worrying about you well below the reported amount of drinking that would actually be a problem, and patients, reacting to inappropriately tense doctors, lie. I don't think I've ever gotten a funny look for saying ten drinks a week, though.
You pretty much eat the outside, and the inside should in theory be relatively sterile from cooking it, so I don't see the problem.
54 - I drank a lot during the year after I finally finished breastfeeding. I hadn't had a birthday not pregnant or breastfeeding since I was 25, then only stopped just before my 34th birthday so wasn't really back in the swing of drinking by then, but by my 35th I'd got the hang of it again.
I do miss being in a life-stage where getting drunk was the occasion for doing exuberantly irresponsible things. Now, mostly, I have more than two drinks and I just get sleepy.
I don't drink enough. Maybe 5 drinks a week in a good week?
LB is on crack on food safety. Days?? http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/24/dining/bending-the-rules-on-bacteria-and-food-safety.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
66 - he and a friend were very drunk, at work. Went out for more dinner and drinking. The friend bailed at some point. My dad started talking to some tramps because he thought they might have some alcohol, then got threatened by one of them because he thought my dad was eyeing up his woman. Tried to buy some wine from the back of a restaurant I think! Had already had a policeman suggest he went home, then the same policeman caught him peeing and was a bit more persuasive. Woke up the next morning and thought "argh, I must never drink again .... actually, not drinking sounds like a good idea". Told my brother and me (late teens) the full story on a packed late night train, entertaining those around us as well. Think it was 4 or 5 years he was dry for.
not drinking is bad for you
http://www.psmag.com/navigation/health-and-behavior/truth-wont-admit-drinking-healthy-87891/
worse than drinking 6+ drinks a day
Americans generally have no idea what a unit of alcohol is.
This is true wrt the Euro standard, but those billboards showing a can of beer, a glass of wine, and a glass of whiskey were (are?) pretty ubiquitous. That was my basis for understanding the study before I followed the link in 36.
The thing that baffles me about the link in 36 is that brandy is listed separately from spirits (though the standard drink size is the same because the proof is the same). Are there a lot of people out there who separate the two? "No, no I wasn't drinking hard liquor - just brandy."?
I drink a lot less now that it interferes with my drugs, but before that I had to learn about lying to doctors the hard way. In my case the hard way involved repeatedly answer the list of "are you an alcoholic or did you just have a cocktail and some wine on the weekend" questions. After a few appointments like this the nurse taking my information started giving subtle cues like "Five drinks on Saturday? Are you sure you didn't mean four? [meaningful look]." I tried asking Doctor friends how to adjust for the "patient is lying about their drinking/smoking" factors and the consistent response I got was laughing agreement that oh yeah Doctors totally do that, and then they changed the subject.
Brandy is medicine according to the medical literature if your medical literature is 150 years old.
77: Hmm. I don't really trust McGee or Ruhlman. Maybe they can have a food safety-off and both die?
That's probably too harsh. I've been in pennant race mode.
77: Please. To come up with a 'but someone got sick!' story, they had to resort to one family in Japan? For wet stuff; soup, gravy, anything saucy, I wouldn't leave it out overnight without refrigeration, and I'd be careful about reheating to boiling when I served it again. But cooked meat? I'm not going to worry about it, certainly not in the 'couple of hours' zone.
82: All I can figure - aside from 83 - is that, since brandy is wine-derived*, it's somehow less alcoholic?
*but do people even know that? and is it even correct, or a gross oversimplification?
I assume that drinking is just one out of many ways doctors are more judgmental and patronizing towards women of childbearing age.
5 drinks a week . . . is what I tell my doctor, too. (A form I filled out semi-recently at a dr's office asked for lifetime number of sexual partners. Nope! Not because I particularly care about telling the dr that info, but because it was not a trip down memory lane I was particularly interested in taking at the time.)
Which - and of course this sounds defensive coming from the guy who wrote 61 - is ridiculous. More than 1 drink a day is a problem? There's just zero evidence that a normal size adult* is harmed by 2 drinks a day.
Right?! My current doctor was not pleased when I estimated 12 drinks a week. But I do like her otherwise. She hasn't given me any grief about my weight, unlike, oh, every other doctor I've seen in the past decade.
79: I'm pretty sure you'd get at least a citation for that here. The peeing on the street thing.
A form I filled out semi-recently at a dr's office asked for lifetime number of sexual partners.
It's way too soon for me to know that.
Apparently my household pretty much mirrors JRoth's, down to skipping days. Our doctor recommended it as well. (However I think today was supposed to be a skip day and somehow I ended up with a (very small) glass of whisky.)
Grr, stupid phone losing my info.
87: You'd think so, right? Or something like that? But the site specifically lists Brandy as being 40% alcohol, and then also lists hard liquor as being 40% alcohol, and gives the same amount for each of them.
One hundred proof spirits are clearly superior to eighty proof ones, and you almost never see brandy over eighty proof. But you don't see whiskey or rum over eighty proof as much as I'd like either. And they don't bother to account for higher proof spirits any more than they do for IPAs or stronger wines.
Maybe someone was enamored of the classiness of their habitual post-prandial and said "Don't you dare lump brandy with the likes of whisky!"
Anyway, I'm in the 9th decile. But so is my father and he was born during Prohibition.
(However I think today was supposed to be a skip day and somehow I ended up with a (very small) glass of whisky.)
This has happened once or twice, but I figure it's in keeping with the spirit of the thing, as long as it doesn't become a way of just ignoring the rule.
I probably said this last time as well, but: the best part of this new routine is learning that I wasn't waking up semi-hungover every morning; that's just how I feel most mornings. For the most part, I can't detect any difference between mornings after dry nights and after 3-4 drink nights. After 5 drinks, I'm probably a bit bleary, but after 20 minutes awake I'm fine. I've been truly hung over only a handful of times in my life, thank goodness.
To come up with a 'but someone got sick!' story, they had to resort to one family in Japan?
No, that was the "not being careful can kill you" story. Do what you like! Not even the least conservative person in that article says food is fine out for days.
You suck. I've got a decent shot at a real hangover after three drinks these days, and occasionally after two.
On the hangover thing, I think that no small part of the (minor) hangovers I feel some morning is because of the absurdly smokey atmosphere in the particular bar I visit. At least, if I go drinking somewhere else, I wake up feeling better.
97.2 is why the one beer/glass of wine/glass of spirit measurement isn't particularly helpful. The strongest common beers are about three times as strong as the weakest. Wine and liquor have a smaller range, but the pours are less standardized--not all wine glasses are created equal, and with whisky I usually don't pay very close attention to whether I'm pouring 1.5oz or 2.5oz. So sure, we're still counting how much we've had in some imprecise sense but it's very different from the nominal meticulousness of the UK, where every bottle of alcohol will tell you how much is in it in units (we have a small bottle of whisky that says it's something like 17 units--fun night, I guess) and liquor servings at a bar are required to be an integer multiple of 25mL.
102: Possibly because of what you eat?
Rum and two-days-in-pantry chicken.
When I turned 23 I went from not getting any hangovers to getting them every time I go over five. It was a really dramatic shift, from feeling great the next morning to wretched.
Man, I'm practically abstemious compared to you guys.
I always have trouble summarizing my drinking because of its infrequency. I have a rule against drinking at home or alone (family history of alcoholism), so it's 3-5 drinks when I'm with people for an occasion, which occasions are not very predictable.
Also: as bad as hangovers are, the next day is always glorious. Is this common? As in legitimately better than normal, not just happy to return to the norm. I think it's because I usually sleep pretty poorly, but on the night of a hangover I tend to get very deep sleep.
The average of the top 10% is a really weird statistic to pick that seems to me to be intended to purposefully mislead. That is people will think it means the 5th percentile, but it doesn't at all.
I don't think it's a weird statistic. You define "heavy drinker" and then come up with a single statistic to summarize them. You could also report the 95th percentile, which would be the median of the top 10%. It's not clear to me that the average is a worse statistic than the median. If the distribution is so heavy-tailed that the top 1% of drinkers really pull up the average, then that's an interesting fact in itself. If there are people who drink 30,000 beers every day, then the median is not going to reflect that important tidbit of information.
I mean, a billionaire makes the average income in a room look misleadingly high, but at the same time the median income can mislead you about the existence of incredibly rich people.
At any rate, the average value in the top x-ile is a statistic that is commonly used in risk management.
I have an average of four drinks a day, which puts me at the top range of healthy according to the link in 40, and probably in the ninth decile according to the article in the OP. (21 drinks a week is much closer to 15.28 than to 73.85. Still I'd really like to know where the cut off is.)
I thought the real argument of the report was
1. 50% of the industry profits come from the top decile.
2. The top decile is obviously alcoholic.
3. Therefore the industry depends on human misery to survive.
The odd choice of averages of deciles, rather than cut offs, might be part of an effort to find a level that both looks like describes people with a serious problem and accounts for a significant part of industry profits.
Piketty, IIRC, sometimes uses means for deciles and sometimes uses cutoffs, depending on the point he is trying to make.
The other thing I wonder about is what really marks the difference between moderate and problem drinking. It doesn't seem like it could be just damage to your liver. It seems like the real measure is behavior. But that means that there could be total assholes in the 5th decile who are problem drinkers, and people in the top decile who are sweethearts who mind their own business. It is just as much about personality as about quantity.
There's a distinction there between you have a problem with drinking, and you are a problem to other people when you drink. Say, someone who gets in fights when he gets drunk -- he'd be a bad drunk, and probably a total asshole. But if he didn't have any trouble not getting drunk when he didn't want to, I don't think you'd call that a drinking problem. Someone else might be a complete sweetheart, even when on the brink of passing-out drunk -- not a problem to those around him at all. But still, if he couldn't control his drinking, that's a drinking problem.
The absolute amounts aren't so much the issue in either direction, although there's probably an amount under which anyone who drinks that little is vanishingly unlikely to be unable to control their drinking.
The other thing I wonder about is what really marks the difference between moderate and problem drinking. It doesn't seem like it could be just damage to your liver. It seems like the real measure is behavior.
Addiction, right?
I feel like I might be damaging my liver sometimes, but I don't ever feel addicted. It just seems like if I want to drink something that isn't water, and doesn't have caffeine or sugar in it, it has to have whiskey or brandy or fernet in it.
Somewhere in the archives I mention a guy I knew in the Peace Corps who used to go out and beat people up with his friends when they all got drunk together. He decided this was probably a bad idea, so they switched to getting stoned. A scary, weird guy, but not a drunk.
Can you have liver pain? Asking for a friend.
115: I always knew we couldn't trust Big Peanut. (If there's more to tell, I understand if you have to go preisdential.)
115 is sort of surprising to me. I would have thought that the premium for top shelf booze would be a considerable driver of industry profits, maybe even more than the people drinking a 12 pack of Miller Lite every day. On our tour of Buffalo Trace somebody asked the guide why Blanton's is so expensive. The guy went on an incoherent rant about taxes in response, so I assumed the real answer was "because price discrimination."
Kleiman uses those three points to argue that alcohol should be taxed at much higher levels. The large majority of the population won't notice the costs but it will discourage the problem drinkers substantially.
Oddly I almost never get a hangover when I go out drinking, even if I drink a lot for me (which is 4-5, usually happens at vendor-sponsored parties at conferences) but if I drink at home even just 2-3 I get a bad hangover. I don't think I'm drinking significantly different booze in terms of quality. Although we do have a bottle of peach schnapps that came with us when we moved 10 years ago so maybe some of my stuff has gone off. Maybe my measurements are off at home and I'm drinking more than I think.
The moral of the story: Moar meetups!
But even if you say that the relevant behavior is addiction, don't you need to throw in some kind of destructive component? Otherwise how do you distinguish between someone who can't quit and someone who doesn't have a reason to quit?
I'm think of the analogy to maintenance drugs, like for cholesterol or depression. You have negative outcomes if you stop taking them, but you don't say you are addicted to them.
121: I doubt that the top decile is drinking that much less of the top shelf booze than they are of all the booze.
122: If only our economic system was set up for progressive consumption taxes. (I know, even with the tech it'd require too much tracking to ever fly in America.)
Moar meetups!
122: Or they'll switch to moonshine.
Scandinavian countries have really high taxes on alcohol for that reason, no? I wonder if it works or not.
Otherwise how do you distinguish between someone who can't quit and someone who doesn't have a reason to quit?
I think it's hard to distinguish, and you can't necessarily until there is a reason to quit or slow down. But there are enough temporary reasons to slow down (you need to drive at a time you'd generally be drinking; you're around people who you don't want to be drunk in front of) and so on, that if you really can't control it you're likely to find that out.
123, the moral of the story is that your bar is watering down the drinks.
128: It results in whole bunches of really drunk Swedes in all the places that are not Sweden.
I don't think he's even saying tracking/progressive consumption taxes, just a flat per-unit tax. $1 extra per drink is a couple bucks a week for most people but $10 or more per day for the high end.
I'd say I'm about evenly split between 0, 1, and 2 drinks. The definition of "drink" being what it is and craft beer being what it is, that probably means 10-12 official drinks a week.
132: In the future, only the wealthy will have liver disease.
Huh, maybe that's why so many vendors are generous with the open bar. I have learned not to go for the pre-mixed jugs of margarita but to actually order from the bar on someone else's tab.
114
It is just as much about personality as about quantity.
I found the checklist in 52 illuminating. (And, like I said, comforting.) It's almost all behavioral stuff, yes.
High alcohol consumption tax + high estate tax = equality!
I can't order stuff on other people's tab because the bartenders know who I am.
Margaritas specifically, I think it's hard to tell when a bar is serving them watered down. When I make margaritas at home, they're vicious -- people are bumping into things on their second (not doing anything special, just following the recipe). Ordering them in bars, they're much less dangerous, usually.
Apparently I should be drinking more for health reasons.
I average about 1 drink every 2 months.
([excise taxes] are generally levied by the gallon and vary according to proof, not the price of the product).
WA also has a spirits sales tax of 20.5%
"because the bartenders know who I am."
The real problem with frequent drinking.
131: You're not kidding. To me, the UK has very high alcohol tax; to the Swedes, it's like Tijuana or something. We kept running into massive groups of Swedes, Danes, & Norwegians on Islay (and had a really nice solo Swede as a travelling companion) and they were marvelling at how much less expensive booze was. And then drinking copious amounts of it.
Also: as bad as hangovers are, the next day is always glorious.
These days, a real proper hangover lasts until the second day. I haven't been really staggeringly, gibberish-spoutingly drunk since Good Friday and I couldn't move on Saturday and didn't feel well until Monday. It was very biblical.
(And I realised I actually stopped bfing Kid D just *after* my 34th birthday. I was getting mixed up with leaving her to go away for a weekend (which was about a month previous). I know you don't care, but I want TFA to be as accurate as possible.)
Wow! Even off-premises?
From the link:
The tax rate for sales to consumers is 20.5%
The tax rate for on-premises retailers such as restaurants, bars, etc., is 13.7%.
Since spirits purchases made by licensed on-premises retailers are for resale, their wholesale spirits purchases have a lower spirits sales tax rate.
Note: The regular retail sales tax does not apply to sales of spirits unopened in the original container; however, it does apply to sales of spirits by the drink (glass)
146: I've only had one or two multiday hangovers, the result of truly excessive drinking (combined with little eating or water drinking). I dread that becoming the standard.
I was trying to remember if there was any occasion when I'm sure I had more than ten drinks in an evening and was coming up short until I remembered that one time I drank all that grappa. Although I've forgotten the numbers, it looks like grappa alone may not have been 10 drinks, although I had some wine earlier with dinner, so it might add up. Also I was fine afterward. Comment threads here are surprisingly useful for looking up details of past events I've forgotten.
124, 136,
NIAAA is much more conservative about flagging problem drinking than AA in 52. The AA list is simple, undeniable markers of problems, written so that heavy drinkers stop lying to themselves upon reading the questions and thinking. There's a huge gray area of possibly problematic drinking before the habit indisputably damages your life.
You are welcome!
104: Eh. There's some value there, but I'm not convinced that alcohol consumption is really driven by titrated judgements of desire. Liquor "sneaking up" on people IMO has a lot more to do with confounding factors like sweetness or general tastiness (pick a cordial you like and one you don't; your rate of consumption will not be tied to the number of units available).
Oh, maybe I should say-- I do like a glass or three. Like many of the individual descriptions above, I'll drink slowly and steadily for a consumption level that's probably not great for my liver on some weeks. Personally, I stop drinking during bouts of pronounced unhappiness, though, as depression and alcohol absolutely do not mix.
148 - you're young! On the plus side, I can get quite drunk with no noticeable hangover. But more than two bottles of wine was not good. Although coming home rat-arsed and finding that Kid A had some friends round and joining them to watch Pacific Rim entertained the hell out of me at the time (she was not so entertained).
Everybody panic about ebola.
And play Plague Inc.!
I'm in the middle of that graph now. Did some serious binge drinking in college and just after, now it's perhaps one drink when out to dinner, one drink for the various anniversaries around here, like cat's birthdays, and the assorted deaths, and so on.
I've only had two hangovers, both after great quantities of rum. Those were the classical cartoon types, devils with pitchforks and hammers behind eyeballs and all.
I'm absolutely certain I've never had a multi day hangover. It's possible I've gone to bed still slightly hungover, but really, if I'm still feeling hungover at 6 pm, then I don't drink that night*, and by 11 pm, how could I still feel shitty?
Maybe this is metabolism (although mine has slowed since ~35), or maybe my liver still works well because I never binge drank in my youth (never more than a taste of alcohol before I was almost 22, never seriously drunk until 25). But honestly, even after a big (e.g., holiday party) drunk, it's incredibly rare for me to feel it after noon the next day.
When I make margaritas at home, they're vicious -- people are bumping into things on their second
Yep. I've see recipes as strong as 1:1:2 of juice:sec:tequila, and that's just insane, at least as an accompaniment to tasty Mexican food. I usually do 1:1:1, maybe with an extra splash of tequila. And even that shit is pretty intense.
*again, this is rare
liquor servings at a bar are required to be an integer multiple of 25mL
Your old-timey mixologists must get their moustaches in a twist.
Huh I feel like most margarita recipes I've seen are either 1:2:3 or 1:2:2.
Now that I've read past the first ten comments I see that I have no idea how to count drinks and probably one drink of grappa is like 3.8 ttaM-units or whatever.
1:2:3 ?! Surely you're thinking of pound cake.
I had maybe two drinks every couple of weeks until my 30s when someone tactfully informed me I was more fun after a few drinks and I realized I was also happier, more relaxed, a better sport. I would happily have two drinks an evening now if it wouldn't make me tired and 1,000 lbs heavier. But I never really feel like having more than three. Being medium-drunk is as fun as being very drunk and hangovers aren't fun so why bother? Of course now I am trying to lose weight and have had one drink in the last three weeks so I'd like to go swimming on gin.
The link in 38 says 5 fl oz of wine is one US drink, which makes 5 drinks per bottle, which sounds about right to me. ttaM's 10 says that one bottle is 10 units, so I conclude that one unit is about half a US drink, and this "10 drinks a day" thing translates to 20 units. Whatever a "unit" is.
Assuming a 750 ml bottle is standard.
And "the link in 38" meant "the link in 36" and I see Nathan got all quantitative in the actual 38. I resolve to read before commenting in the future.
Two parts triple sec to one part juice? That seems crazy to me. For awhile, I didn't like margaritas, because (cheap) triple sec set off my bitter taste buds, and I did not like. It took me a while to figure out what it was, though. But, in my 20s at least, cheap triple sec tasted like showing on orange pith.
Schumann definitely says 1:1:2, and I'm 90% certain Cook's Illustrated does as well.
Although what I really want is Zingers. Really specifically. Yellow zingers, or maybe two yellow and one chocolate, as I think they used to package them.
I resolve to read before commenting in the future.
It's sad what some people will do when they've drunk too much.
I've never seen cocktails in Cook's Illustrated.
171: Margaritas were in the '90s. And they also have done sangria. Not sure about anything else.
Old school margaritas are just tequila sours with an orange liqueur in place of straight sugar, so really any of those proportions would work. I've seen really severe proportions like 1:2:8 (orange liqueur/juice/tequila) tossed around. I think the ones you get at restaurants and bars are basically just tequila punches though. They're larger and for drinking slowly over time, instead of small strong cocktails that you take down quickly. It would be funny to serve the proper cocktail version in one of those massive margarita glasses that are really intended for something very watered down. But it wouldn't be a good idea unless the people you were serving it to were really good at holding their liquor, because it would be a serious drink.
When I say 3:2:1 and 2:1:1, I of course have tequila as the 3 or the 2, then cointreau-alike, then lime.
When I say religion, I mean the Christian religion, and when I say the Christian religion, I mean the Protestant religion, and when I say the Protestant religion, I mean the Church of England!
Well, I picked up a six pack on the way. I hope you're happy, unfogged.
I wish I could buy the beers I really like drinking in six-pack form.
Maybe I should just get a costco membership though.
This is timely, as I'm in bed with a hangover. I had less than ten drinks. I think I had 3 -- two glasses of wine and then most of someone else's gin and tonic. It's my second hangover this week! It's only Tuesday. Getting old is brutal. I've got to stop drinking. Or stop aging.
Man, come home from work (where you can't drink), eat dinner when you have to drive immediately after, settle down with a nice Jack Daniels over ice, and 185 posts on drinking. You are fast and (let's face it) given some previous comments on other threads, heebie is trolling. For shame.
For the record: two pretty stiff JDs over ice tonight.
The Oak Room makes a proper margarita cocktail.
I've dropped drinking beer because of the diet -- I've lost 15 lbs this month -- but will have some Bushmills 10 when I get home tonight. I have no idea what you people see in mixing all that stuff up when there are perfectly good single malts to be drunk.
I have never tried drinking at work. My new office has me about a hundred steps from anyone in the same group as me except for one person who is part time. It might work. Drinking before dinner is easy because I commute by bus.
189. Back in the day (startup, people almost all 20s or 30s) we drank at work. We had stuff in our desks, we had parties, we had drunken groping, etc. Now, not so much.
That's not even going into what got approved as "customer dinners." I remember a time the sommelier said, "Oh, I've never served a full bottle of this before."
I'm impressed by people who have had multi-day hangovers. I thought that was a feature of Irish (or maybe Scots) fiction. Sheltered life, I guess. Though I did once win the "tequila challenge" and then drive home (very slowly, about a mile) without mishap. (Yes, I'm sort of ashamed of doing that, but it was a long time ago.)
Forget to give the punchline. I barfed not long after getting home.
I never get hangovers anymore. I never barf.
I think it has been more than a decade since I last consumed more than 2 units of alcohol in a single calendar day.
In unrelated news, I do not live to party.
I keep forgetting to get a bottle of booze for my desk at work.
I wonder what a margarita made with amer pic on would taste like?
Margaritas specifically, I think it's hard to tell when a bar is serving them watered down.
It is? If I can't taste the tequila, I assume it is too weak. But then again, I'm with nosflow on the ratios.
I think I had 3-4 gimlets one night. I was in bed most of the next day and still kind of sick the day after. I drank nothing at the party that I went to that evening.
193: Maybe 2.5, Captain Sticklepants.
Captain Sticklepants
That must have been quite the meetup
As regards drinking at work, I'm gearing up to haul in a keg of homebrew to the office this week. I'm hoping that they don't decide to have "random" security inspections on the subway that day, because explaining a couple of pressurized metal cylinders and a bunch of tubing and gauges sounds like it would make me late.
For wet stuff; soup, gravy, anything saucy, I wouldn't leave it out overnight without refrigeration, and I'd be careful about reheating to boiling when I served it again. But cooked meat? I'm not going to worry about it, certainly not in the 'couple of hours' zone.
Returning to this - what's the distinction with something wet/saucy/(low-hanging-fruit) vs dry meat?
Good lord did I have an awful restaurant margarita tonight. The sort of thing you'd expect at an old school Mex chain, not a "Taco Joint" with genuinely interesting and successful tacos.
202: As noted in that McGee article in the NYT, moist environments are ideal for bacterial growth, while dry ones aren't. The inside of a piece of meat* is protected from airborne bacteria, and the surface is too dry for rapid growth.
If you left e.g. a pan of chicken marsala out, the chicken breasts themselves would be fine, but the sauce they're sitting in will be blooming bacteria pretty quickly.
Anyway, you're evading the question: do you still have the same number of children you started the day with?
*this is why ground meat can be dangerous - all of it has been air-exposed at some point. If things are made fresh, it's fine, but ground meat is more likely to be mishandled than a steak all along the process.
The rest of the proof is left as an exercise to the reader.
Are crackpot emails that come from 16-year-old girls more or less than depressing than those that come from 60-year-old basement-dwelling dudes?
Ask her to wait two years and write you back.
Tonight I had too many 8 or 9 drinks. Some kind of tequila something. With bitters. Too expensive. I will probably regret it tomorrow. I don't drink that often, maybe three times monthly, but when I do I almost always drink too much. I haven't looked at the chart see where that puts me percentile wise. And of course I'm not counting bourbon or beer. I drink more of those.
Technically, I think that you are supposed to count those.
Late to this party. I really only ever drink at Unfogged meetups. So definitely a vote for moar meetups!
Easily in the ninth here. Mostly wine and gin. Sometimes whiskey or bourbon. Getting drunk with the wife is a regular thing on Friday nights and some holidays. I drink a lot of coffee which science says will protect my liver.
Had a Rob Roy tonight (measured correctly, 1.5 ounces scotch, 0.5 ounces sweet vermouth, bitters, cherry) plus two and a half glasses (5 oz each) of a lovely Barolo I'd been saving for years, with dinner. (I'm drinking down my supplies before I move.)
Folks on another very social blog were complaining today about how people in that social group don't drink at parties, and then someone said, "If it makes you feel any better, I've puked in Benquo's toilet." I feel good about myself now, I think. I'm a good influence.
||
Vasectomy tomorrow. Valium is optional! (Very funny, Doc. Give me the fucking Valium.)
They suggest one bring an iPod. Anybody got any good sterilization playlists?
|>
Have ice packs on hand. So to speak.
214: Ha, get ready for some crazy bruising action down there.
Scandinavian countries have really high taxes on alcohol for that reason, no? I wonder if it works or not.
Besides what 131 says, my family also makes their own. My parents have a story of visiting the family and getting off the bus at about 10 am to be greeted with a nice glass of vodka. After making the rounds, they were completely trashed by about 11:30.
I've maybe told this story before, but my one set of grandparents didn't really drink much, except for a Schnapps before bed. In his 80s, my grandfather read that red wine was good for the heart, so he decided to switch to wine. He bought a jug of Carlo Rossi, and every night before bed he'd fill a juice glass half up with wine, and then top the other half with milk. It would turn this fetid purply color. He'd always offer to make me one, but I'd refuse. He'd then slug it back like a shot. He'd accompany this with a light snack of potato chips and butter. (He lived to 92 and died of cancer caused by asbestos exposure in his youth.)
You people are killing me here. I haven't had a drink for 5 months, but when I decided to quit I was probably knocking back 2-4 medium bourbons or beers most nights, and maybe once a week getting into the 6 territory. Too bad it was fucking with my depression meds, because from reading you lushes I could have kept on going at that level just fine. [Deprecated smiley face]
I've promised my wife I'd quit for a year before reevaluating. I really hope I can figure out a way to reintegrate booze (at alower/less frequent level) without it turning into an issue again. If I can't it's not the end of the world, but fuck does steak go down better with wine.
218 last: As it so happens, tonight was top sirloin and Malbec.
I've just sent my kids off to school with burritos in their lunchboxes, filled with chilli con carne that I made last night and which has been sitting unrefrigerated on the stove top since. I'll report back tonight if fewer children come home than set out this morning.
217.2: I remember that. It's a very vivid image.
214: You should write a poem. "To My Balls on the Occasion of Their Retirement."
214: White Lion's "Out With the Boys".
Anybody got any good sterilization playlists?
This seems essential.
227: No (more) children. (And no fewer, one hopes.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdfpRPvMxoE
4th or 5th decile; the companies aren't counting on me to make their quarterly numbers. I never drank much in a night, which is probably why I never developed a taste for most drinks. The most I have consumed was at a wine pairing; 5 glasses over 5 courses over 3+ hours--it was delicious and wonderful.
218: For me at least this is possibly the most obnoxious thing about psych meds. I spent nearly two years with a painful motor tic as a result of a poor experience with some, and if I had to opportunity to go back to that in exchange for the ability to have a drink or two and still be able to sleep decently for the next two or three days I'd seriously consider it. I mean, it's obvious why this tradeoff happens, because the effects of alcohol come from it smashing around in the brain randomly throwing switches and breaking things in pretty much the same way that a really drunk person would behave in the middle of a complicated and delicate bit of machinery. But it still feel really unfair.
232 suggests that alcohol products drunken behavior by introducing a drunken homunculus, or perhaps getting your existing homunculus drunk. But by what mechanism is the homunculus made drunk? Does it have a drunk homunculus itself?
Congratulations, Woodrow! May you have many happy dry runs at reproduction!
In the picture, alcohol is the homunculus! It's not exactly a carefully targeted or subtle drug, which makes it kind of impressive how generally positive its effects are.
MHPH, sorry to hear about the tic, etc. I was lucky enough to lose mine after 6 months but my pupils still don't close properly and after 15+ years I don't think they're going to. That "random switch" thing sounds very familiar for psych meds too, though my medication days ended way before my drinking ones began.
234: Of course it has an even tinier drunk homunculus! And so on! It's like you're not even up to date on the latest medical knowledge of the 15th century.
dry runs
Okay, 'moist' doesn't bother me, but somehow this does. I'm imagining dry runs:diarrhea::dry heave:vomit.
237: But it went away! Admittedly, it went away when I decided the neurologist was an idiot and looked the stuff up on my own, which only reinforced my general "I am smarter than medical doctors" suspicion. But all the same - cured! And short of headaches and the occasional public (mild) embarrassment it really wasn't that bad, honestly.
There's a very important lesson I can pass based on that drug, though. If your Doctor suggests a drug to you that has, as a potential listed symptom, and one of the many "agitation", "restlessness", "emotional lability", etc. symptoms (all euphemisms for akathisia), do not take that drug unless really, really necessary. Seriously. That shit is bad.*
*You're thinking of a particular class of drugs right now! But the one that caused trouble was not in that class, or anywhere near it. I just have a talent for rare and strange reactions to drugs. Though, it turns out, only prescription drugs. As long as I bought it from a sketchy dude and I'm not sure what the precise dosage is or even entirely certain if it's the drug I supposedly bought I'm fine, apparently.
Also congratulations Woodrow! When it comes to the inevitable/uncomfortable swelling, remember to ice down and wear tight pants and go out in public a lot so people can be secretly but mistakenly impressed.
If anyone starts to describe drug classes as different animals, I will hunt them down.
Oh I had akathisia once, in the form of...well, I started taking Paxil, and spend the next three days awake, lying on a couch, shaking my foot. It wasn't uncontrollable or involuntary exactly, so I don't know if it was akathisia per se, but it felt like the only valve I had for the anxiety that was being amplified by the Paxil. Akathisia: also a good drag name maybe.
I have thought in the last year about trying antidepressants again. (Time to go presidential? Eh, fuck it.) I think I won't, though.
I was gonna get a vasectomy like 3 years ago, and then it turned out I had insanely high blood pressure, which is back, and hard-to-find vas deferens. So, no vasectomy after all. I didn't know you could get Valium with it though, might have to reconsider.
If anyone starts to describe drug classes as different animals, I will hunt them down.
As the mighty 5-aminosalicylates hunted the swift anticholinergic antiemetics on the veldt.
245.2: Are you thinking more shrew-type antidepressants or weasels?
I've been taking an ermine and two stoats every day for some time now, and it's worked out pretty well. I tried weasels for awhile, but they really messed with my head, and interacted very poorly with alcohol.
All you people who have never had multiple-day hangovers are missing a key element - drink lots & lots, mix all your alcohols (champagne + high ABV beer + hard stuff = WOW DRUNK), AND get stoned. Voila! Two day hang over!
250: Smearcase can probably quote this more accurately than I, but Robert Benchley criticizes people who give hangover cures for never having had hangovers, since it's clear that the only cure for a true hangover is death. I was very sympathetic to that as a teen, since I felt very much the same way about migraines.
TBH I'm not sure the Valium did much more than keep me from crawling out the bathroom window in the waiting room.
I recall Ecstasy giving me a week-long depressive hangover.
I love Benchley but didn't know this line.
Things like 253 are why I never tried it though it sounds like fun.
Smearcase can probably quote this more accurately than I, but Robert Benchley criticizes people who give hangover cures for never having had hangovers
"Some people say the worried blues ain't bad. Must not a been the worried blues they had."
255: it is pretty variable. Didn't happen to me for years, then did.
251: What is life but one long hangover, a fleeting trip to the porcelain god before the comfort of the all-enveloping abyss?
258 is, mutatis mutandis, the text of every Sacred Harp song.
245: If you've had something like that side effect before my recommendation is not to try the one with the nine day half life. I don't even know why we have drugs that stay in effect for two weeks after stopping them, but seriously that shit is a terrible idea for anyone who might react badly to it. It's worth noting though that when the propanolol killed the symptoms it was easily the most intensely pleasurable sensation I've ever experienced. (Important qualifier: also one intense enough that I really never want to feel anything like it again which, before that, I didn't know was a possibility.)
239: I suppose it's reasonable to assume that alcohol contains alcohol.
What if you froze it and made a cup out of it?
You can't fool us, it's alcohol all the way down, young man.
If you police language only police will have language.
Aren't alcohol solutions (e.g., 70% isopropyl alcohol) typically referred to as "alcohol," for simplicity's sake? One might also refer to a 40% solution containing various adulterants as "alcohol" in devil-may-care moments.
239 was taking the view of alcohol causing your homunculus to become drunk, not the homunculus of the alcohol--which I assume to mean that if one were to look carefully at the individual leptons and quarks of an ethanol molecule you would find that they're actually made of even smaller ethanol molecules. More practically, alcohol has a freezing point. No reason you can't have beer mugs of beer.
263 is the sort of objection only a philosopher could entertain.
Police can get by with, "Get out of the car," and, "He was coming right at me!"
Thing Contained for the Container.
Would you even need to freeze it? You could just pick up a glass of alcohol, point at just inside the rim and say "this alcohol contains.." point at the very middle of the glass "..this alcohol". I mean, you can have more than one thing in the same glass, even in both things are the same kind of thing - like with ice in water.
I mean a boilermaker seems like an even simpler way to achieve this.
I contend that none of these examples get at what Benquo was saying or what I was denying and you all know it.
242
akathisia
Hey, I think I have that! And propagnosia too, but then, ISTR that's popular to claim around here. In other fora, trendy unfalsifiable disorders are OCD and gluten intolerance. Here, it's being bad at socializing.
I meant, I think, merely that some strict subset of alcohol is alcohol. Which, if you assume substances are continuous, or even infinitely divisible, seems necessarily true.
Whereas if there is some smallest thing, or some amount of any substance small enough that you can't divide it and still get the same substance on at least one side of the division, then this would seem to make the infinite recursion of homunculuses impossible, which is absurd, since then they would have no explanatory power.
Therefore, all alcohol contains alcohol.
(I am genuinely unsure whether this reasoning is specious, and would be glad if anyone else can clarify this for me.)
(I am genuinely unsure whether this reasoning is specious, and would be glad if anyone else can clarify this for me.)
250: indeed! but definitely the get stoned has to be at the end when you stop drinking or you will puke right then and it will be a waste. two-day hangovers are THE WORST EXPERIENCE LIFE HAS TO OFFER. when you wake up the second morning hungover and you didn't drink the previous day, it is some rough shit. alcohol is really a very serious contender for most addictive, gets you to the most fucked-up (because of the blackouts), kills you the most (because of accidents in addition to just liver failure), makes you hurt other people the most drug of all the drugs anybody ever gets around to taking. methadone gives you merely an equally bad hangover as your worst alcohol hangover, which is worse than a smackover (though those are horrible. but can be relieved easily via the hair of the dog method, moreso than alcohol hangovers can with the judicious applications of bloody marys or 2 cold cans of beer or whatever.) it's fun and all, but if you're a problem drinker (and even if you're not--this is the fun, kind of) it really is like someone went up on the control panel of your brain, which you may imagine to be the controls for a spaceship in a 1960s B-movie, and just started pulling levers and smashing buttons at random. "I love you!" "I'm going to kick your ass you sorry motherfucker!" "where am I?" usw. I have to say that I don't miss it. but I wasn't a normal drinker even as a young person, so I didn't have the same experience normal drinkers do--obviously it can be tons of legally sanctioned delicious fun also. plus, bourbon exists. at my worst in the year before I got sober I drank about a bottle of absolut vodka a day. not a handle, obviously. but every day tho.
Alcohol is nested like Russian dolls.
wait, well, the argument can't rely for its force on destroying the explanatory power of homunculus-type arguments, since they themselves are false. i.e., it can hardly be, "if x, then a homunculus isn't in control of my body, so x." because a homunculus isn't in control of your body. in regards to a physical compound such as alcohol it seems clear we will eventually get to a set of three molecules, of which we can say, this set holds two (trivially true) but if we go further and have one chemical molecule of alcohol...can we say it contains one? not in the sense of contain you seem to want, with both an exterior and an interior. and should the molecule be disassembled then all bets are off. I vote specious.
228: Alcohol is recursive. Alcohol is a language. The unconscious is structured like a cocktail.
nah, also to 283. you've prolly been drinking so it's all good, man. and if not, maybe a nightcap is what you need in your life?
The unconscious is structured like a cocktail.
1:1:1 or 1:2:2?
283:
A homunculus isn't in control of your body
You can't possibly mean that in the expansive sense. What could possibly cause my actions, if not some sort of animate being?
Do you mean that the homunculus can't be said to be in control of its actions because it is drunk?
278: I don't think we can take 'contains' and 'subset' to be equivalent outside of specific mathematical contexts. At least, we don't use the words the same way when talking about normal stuff in the world. ("This table contains four legs" and "The passenger is a subset of the car" both seem wrong/off.) Contains usually requires some sort of physical relationship involving location (and not one where it's 'in the same place').
Alternatively if they are the same then all bodies contain a homunculus, coextensive with its boundaries, that controls its (voluntary, for some values of 'controls') actions. But the explanations you get from that are not always useful ones.
It would be closer to the truth to say that your body contains a homunculus that thinks it is in control of its actions but is really just along for the ride. Like a small child in a car who has a toy steering wheel and thinks he is actually driving the car.
The male body contains that, anyway.
I find all I want to drink anymore is beer. Like I will reluctantly have some wine or something else if required. But however I have to take conscious steps not to drink a few beers every single evening.
OT1H I love like some Belgian beers which are super tasty and v. strong. OTOH I have been buying when I can some Aldi 2% beer so I can drink a few and not be banjaxed next day.
In my 20s I probably went through long periods where I drank equiv 4-5 pints most nights. Now that's a big night out or a long evening into night.
Jesus I posted a comment earlier, where'd it go?p Anyhow drat I had 4 x 500 ml Erdinger and am kinda drunk now since not proper soakage, just book launch canapés. Have now had spuds and butter but too late
http://www.forbes.com/sites/trevorbutterworth/2014/10/02/when-data-journalism-goes-wrong/
It turns out that they adjusted the survey results upwards to match total consumption, basically they multiplied every bodies answer by 1.9
