Distillation also concentrates the methanol, which can kill you. You have to know how to get rid of it (it has a bit lower boiling point), which makes it a non-trivial task with a significant downside. If you then sell the bad alcohol you've just made yourself a public health threat.
The way this is solved in our country is that you can legally make your own alcohol, but only at a state-approved distillery, where the personnel knows how to handle this.
bollocks. the methanol exists in tiny quantities and has the lowest boiling point of basically anything in your booze.
you don't need "to know how to get rid of it" -- there are no skills needed: just pour it out.
you literally just pour out the first 0.5% of whatever comes out of the still. water it down heavily and flush it down the toilet or burn it or whatever. I literally just take the first ~25-50ml of liquid and ditch it -- problem solved.
all other nasty compounds have a very noticeable smell and are fairly easy to detect coming out of the still.
the "public health threat" is literally a prohibition scare-the-rubes meme.
> you literally just pour out the first 0.5% of whatever comes out of the still
So you have to 1) remember that and 2) calculate how much will come out. You will be surprised to hear not everybody does.
> the "public health threat" is literally a prohibition scare-the-rubes meme.
I'm not from the US, we never had prohibition. We however had people poisoned (blind or dead) by methanol - I'm originally from the countryside and making and drinking fruit spirits is very common here.
Also more people dead from methanol sold as alcohol on industrial scale - like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Czech_Republic_methanol_p... - of course this happened because the alcohol taxes are high, but OTOH if they weren't high, people would drink even more, and that reverberates through the health system and society as a whole.
Why should everyone care about founders of a different country that's not even working particularly well at this time.
> while substantive decisions about guilt or liability are made by randomly selected juries
A system gamed as easily as any other one.
> Meanwhile other countries trust random people at companies
They don't trust them to do the right thing, which is why there is a law telling them what to do. The alternative is to ban privately-owned social networks (either all of them or at least those that don't follow the laws).
> Why should everyone care about founders of a different country
Because the U.S. was the first country in the world created, with great study and deliberation, by high-IQ political philosophers. Because the country was already a successful democracy for 189 years before all the EU17 countries became democracies even on paper. Because the U.S. was having orderly transitions of power since it was as poor as Bangladesh is today.
> A system gamed as easily as any other one.
Decisions of randomly selected jurors are much harder to “game” than decisions of corporate censors or election board bureaucrats.
> They don't trust them to do the right thing, which is why there is a law telling them what to do.
Every dysfunctional third world has beautiful “laws telling people what to do.” We have those in Bangladesh. As often as not, such laws just become vehicles for manipulating elections because what the law says to do or who is following the laws or not is highly debatable. Such laws effectively turn the prosecutors and the court system into the locus of corruption, because they have the power to decide “who is following the law.” (It’s like Iran’s system with more steps. Iran actually has fair, functioning elections. It’s just that the Guardian Council, an expert body of highly educated scholars, gets to screen who is allowed to run for office.)
Please try to understand the difference between procedural/power allocation laws and laws that incorporate substantive standards. Instead of having laws that say “what to do”—which is always open to interpretation—you should have laws that focus on “who decides” and “how do they decide.” You need to either make the decision mechanical so everyone can see whether the rule is being followed or not, or you need to put the decision in the hands of a body that can’t credibly be accused of having their own agenda.
> Decisions of randomly selected jurors are much harder to “game” than decisions of corporate censors or election board bureaucrats.
Sure, which is why the laws in the US are not approved by randomly selected lawmakers. In that way it's irrelevant what some random jury decides, when the executive branch, the lawmakers and top judges are owned by the ruling class.
> We have those in Bangladesh. As often as not, such laws just become vehicles for manipulating elections
Sorry about that, but that's not a rule that applies everywhere, far from that. And of course the elections in the US are already heavily manipulated even without that.
> In that way it's irrelevant what some random jury decides, when the executive branch, the lawmakers and top judges are owned by the ruling class.
That’s the problem with having the executive branch, lawmakers and judges oversee the mechanics of the voting and elections. You’re making my point for me.
It's about the particular mechanisms how this is done. I don't live in the US and while we have many issues in our country, the elections were never in question. And I can assure you our country was not created by "high-IQ political philosophers".
Meanwhile in the US, if a majority party does not like the voting districts, they just redraw them, and if they don't like the voters, they disenfranchise them. Truly great high-IQ work.
> The most economical way to manage that in general is owning your own vehicle.
It might not be the most economical way to manage that. Often owning a car is seen as a status symbol, and economically it would be more rational not owning one. But I doubt many people do a really thorough honest calculation - they don't have to, they can afford a car. In that way, a car loan is helping them to do the, strictly economically speaking, wrong thing.
> But it's a large capital expenditure upfront.
Yes, which is why in many countries the private owners are not the biggets market for new cars; instead, companies are, because they have the incentives to buy new. And private owners mostly buy on the secondary market.
If it's 100% coal, then yes, otherwise EVs are better. And since the grids are moving to renewables all over the world, it will continue to get better.
Even it's 100% coal the EV's are generally better. But it's close enough to equal that you can bias the comparison either way through vehicle choice. The standard mechanism was to choose one of those horribly inefficient compliance vehicles manufacturers created by putting an electric engine in a gas car frame. "It's a fair comparison because it's the same car". Choosing an EV 1000 pounds heavier than a purpose built EV will make the gas car look good.
It's not even the weight of the EV but mostly how you calculate CO2 of the EV manufacturing part (which is usually higher than that of ICE). That combined with high-coal electricity generation pushes the lifetime CO2 break-even point further away.
Once EV manufacturing is decarbonised (which is I assume ongoing) this will be moot too.
If that means businesses will accept a card without grumbling (or at all) I'm all for it. Feels strange to come from a supposedly less-developed country to Germany and having to pay cash.
We wish, but that might not be true. Last year a South Korean government data center burned down and some data was lost forever with it. A few days ago, Ukraine attacked Yandex data centers (3 of them I think?) and some services stopped working, one of them a bank, so people can't get to their money, and it's not certain they will in the future.
Power generation generally seems to be much more redundant in that war. In part because Ukraine connects to the EU power grid and Russia itself has a huge grid. Sure for a small island country the situation would be different.
The BBC article fails to mention that this new 2CV is aiming for the new M1E vehicle category, created especially for small, affordable EVs.
If you want something bigger (than 4200 mm) then the battery will be so expensive anyway that most of the added tech does not change the price considerably. And also forget about the analogue dashboard because we have a billion mandatory digital assistants anyway (I'm not complaining, anything to save lives).
The way this is solved in our country is that you can legally make your own alcohol, but only at a state-approved distillery, where the personnel knows how to handle this.
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