Yeah, there were historic cases dating to the prohibition era/early 20th century. And there were historic laws – largely unenforced – that stayed on the books for a while. Laws based on total nonsense. It just got caught up as part of garden-variety moral panic.
There’s definitely still an air around the spirit that it is somehow more illicit and special. Which it… really isn’t.
Absinthe is such a strange mythos.
The thing is, absinthe was quite strong (often ~120 proof – nothing you can’t get today by any means and there’s a lot of popular whiskies that bottle even stronger). It had a whole ritual around drinking it involving fountains/bloom. Importantly, in its heyday, it was popular among the young and arts types because it was just a regular old fad. It was trendy.
But most important, it was popular during a moment in history where alcohol abuse was RAMPANT. One of the drunkest times in history. It was a really bad time that often gets elided over, but the mid 19th century had bonkers alcohol consumption. People were routinely drinking a pint of strong spirits with breakfast and then continuing through the day.
So the tea-totalers slandered it. They made shit up. They said it made you hallucinate, abandon all virtues, go into rages, blah blah blah. Every known thing any drug could do to you, absinthe could too, according to the anti-alcohol lobby. People were literally dying of alcohol toxicity routinely, so the stories were easy to believe. And absinthe developed this almost mystical reputation for being different from other kinds of spirits in the effects it would have on consumers.
A reputation it still has today. People STILL think it is/was illegal, even recently, because it was a hallucinogen. The urban legend that some particular ingredient in it – often the wormwood – is a unique and special substance capable of things nothing else can do. It still has this weird mythology around it.
Meanwhile, anisette spirits much like it are honestly super common all around the Mediterranean and likely the world. Herbsaint, Ouzo, Pastis/Richard, Sambuca, Arak, and any number of Aquavits or Aguardientes. Most of them involve the same kind of ritualized drinking/bloom that absinthe does, too. But none of them have the mythology (+ frequent highly artificial coloring) that absinthe does, so none share it’s ridiculous reputation.
I do like it though. Absinthe limeade is my go-to summer tall drink.
I think a lot of people might be sympathetic to the idea that in wartime, you need to be stricter because of the incredibly high stakes. That Ukraine is at war, so they need to find and deal with these sources of disinformation.
I think those same people need to realize that the policies never get rolled back to a more liberal state when the war is over.
It sucks that this is a systemic advantage for authoritarians. It really sucks. It feels bad. But it’s the handicap you have to accept to resist authoritarianism.
They literally are claiming they found a new fundamental force.
It’s bullshit. He’s a liar and “the debrief” should be goddamned ashamed of publishing this tripe.
This can’t be ion propulsion because ion propulsion involves a propellant – the ions.
Preventing the collection of data by the state may be impossible, but they should be accountable for who has it, who it’s given to, and they should need to go through proper due process to use it against you in any kind of official proceeding.
It might be impossible to get everyone out of the databases, but we can at least force warrant requirements and the like.
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Also, how can we be assured the privacy practices of their subscription/payment platform are at least better than the (likely blockable) trackers?
Forming a financial relationship with a website is, theoretically, infinitely more traceable to your personal identity than all the cookies in the world.
Or any of the nearly-unavoidable-because-it’s-a-monopoly evil big corpos like Amazon. Chase handles their credit card and definitely significant other financial parts for them.
That guy was convicted of voting while on probation for a felony with a plausible explanation for why he thought the felony probation had ended. The guy might be a huge piece of shit, but his story does not prove anything and does not bear repeating.
Crystal Madison’s sentence was reversed – although not without a fight.
The twin stories show the profound difference in how the law treats a white middle class conservative man vs a younger black woman, but the conclusion we draw from both situations must be the same: felons should not be disenfranchised and so no one should be punished for voting while on felony probation. Voting ought to be a right and not a privilege.
I’ll never argue with someone who wants that true, rural/countryside/homestead life. The appeal is there for me too, even if my own calculus says the cons wildly outweigh the pros.
I’m pretty skeptical you’re going to find it 5 miles from a healthy town, though.
Big cities let people find their community because therefore a lot of different ones to try.
You should read the horror stories from so many of those NYC co-ops. Some would make even the most jackbooted HOA presidents blush.
I don’t really think this is unique to cities of some specific size. I definitely agree that it’s going to be harder to find a perfect fit in a smaller town. But it’s also harder to meet people at all in an anonymous metropolis where you have to work 75 hours a week just to make rent.
If you take away anything from what I have written, it’s that I think this dichotomy is bad. We need a compromise. The lowrise old-world city is what worked for our species for at least 5 millenia – it’s only in the past couple of decades we decided to rethink it and force a schism between the fake rural aesthetic of the suburbs and the productive, efficient downtown – and in so doing we destroyed both city life (by making it ungodly expensive thanks to the immense financial drain the suburbs and lack of continuing infill development represent) and the peaceful countryside life (by putting to death small towns in favor of the interstate highway big box store commercial strip). The only lifestyle that has weathered and still works pretty well in this day and age is the homesteader life, and to say that way of living is not for everyone is definitely an understatement.
This entire question is completely distorted by the poor-qualtiy postwar urbanism that is rampant everywhere.
The reality is, there shouldn’t be much difference. Lowrise cities – 2-4 story buildings/townhomes, small apartments, walkable neighborhoods/mass transit, corner groceries, all that stuff that people think can ONLY exist in big cities should be the norm for nearly all towns.
I don’t think many people would describe a place like, say, Bordeaux as a “big city”. 250kish people in 50 square kilometers is hardly Paris. It’s a small city, or maybe a big town. And it has everything you can want from a city and more. Shows, museums, beautiful multimodal neighborhoods, a robust tram system, restaurants and cafes and bars. All this kind of stuff.
The problem is we’ve all been mentally taught you can either live in island, R1A zoned suburbs which require driving to do ANYTHING or else you need to live in a huge metropolis like NYC. Or else we’ve been trained to think of a “city” like the bullshit they have in Texas, where it combines all the worst features of those island suburbs/car dependence with all the worst parts of city (crazy prices, noise, exposure to nearby-feeling crime, etc).
While a lot of the US big cities are trying to sort out the knots they’ve tied themselves in, your best bet to find beautiful, livable urban-ism is in those much smaller <500k cities that don’t even show up on the typical lists of cities. Especially if they are historic, since the more historic a place is the less likely it got bulldozed in the 60s to make room for more highways (destroying local neighborhoods in the process) Some kind of a big university also tends to be a plus, though it’s a mixed bag. Check for places that do not have an interstate carving through the middle of the city.
We can only get the amenities of modern urbanism in the biggest metropolises these days because of how badly the “suburban experiment” has distorted and destroyed our community life. And there can only be so many metropolises, so they’ve naturally turned absurdly expensive. People can’t afford to live in them because of how much people want to live in them. So they settle for suburbia, since financial poverty feels way worse than poverty of community.
Outside of the US, you can get a 10k or less electric mini-van, mini-truck, or mini-car which would serve 90% of most peoples’ needs. Most US trips are under 3 miles after all and giant fast luxurious vehicles for those bike-range trips is just totally silly.
Meanwhile the cheapest new car in the US is what, a Mitsubishi hatchback for $18k? It’s ridiculous. The US Automakers are in a tacit conspiracy to squeeze us as hard as they can by refusing to sell anything affordable – by inflating sizes and bloating features to justify way higher MSRPs. Meanwhile the French have access to cheap ICEs like the Skoda Citygo and even ultralight city EVs like the Citroen Ami for half that price while still being easily 90% as capable for most people.
Or for roughly the same price as that bottom-of-the-market US ICE car you can get a totally workable EV like the Dacia Spring.
The US subsidizes huge vehicles in a million pointless ways. I absolutely refuse to believe that vehicle inflation is just caused by some cultural woo. It’s mostly just that we create giant roads, giant parking spots, giant highways, and have automakers that intentionally go as big as the market can bear because bigger means more money. And sprinkle on some bullshit tax loopholes and state agencies/NHSTA being ultra-conservative and you have a disaster. Smaller cars thrive in the old world because the old world doesn’t make it as convenient as possible to have a goddamn road yacht. They’d go big too, but it would just be a nightmare dealing with those huge cars because their governments don’t prioritize making way for them in every way possible.
And that’s not even getting into the frankly fine $2-3k EVs you can get in China. This is all just Europe.
All of those headings are single words.
Taste is subjective, but mine says either color the whole heading or don’t color it at all.
Apple innovates in new and exciting ways to not support devices. They invent new antirepair technologies and have pioneered locked-in walled-garden app stores that prohibit users from doing what they want or need to keep their devices working.
They don’t get to wear the white hat just because they do some shit well. They are the bad guy. And they could change posture pretty much immediately if they were at ALL serious about their devices having long-term support. They control basically their whole tech stack and could make it so their devices can continue to be maintained indefinitely even if they aren’t doing it. But control matters more to them than support.
I really don’t think anyone should be giving them credit here, not even as a backhanded compliment.
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This is the exception to prove the rule that the other interests are definitely illegitimate. This is the website telling you that they give away your data for illegitimate purposes.
It’s not a surprise. We knew this was true. But seeing it’s spelled out like this is a little galling.
Illegitimate: not authorized by the law; not in accordance with accepted standards or rules
The website is basically admitting that they’re using your data maliciously, intentionally, by having this distinction.