
Our 9000-Year Love Affair With Booze - pepys
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/02/alcohol-discovery-addiction-booze-human-culture/
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tim333
Probably a lot more that 9000 years given animals getting drunk on overripe
fruits [http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/11/151121-animals-
sc...](http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/11/151121-animals-science-
drunk-insects-mammals-drinking/)

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js2
See also: A History of the World in Six Glasses

[https://tomstandage.wordpress.com/books/a-history-of-the-
wor...](https://tomstandage.wordpress.com/books/a-history-of-the-world-in-six-
glasses/)

The book covers: beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea and cola.

It was a fun read.

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stephancoral
Some might say thats a downward trajectory

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Bulkington
Or a bell curve

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Infernal
This is the type of insight that I come to HN for. As someone who is drinking
whiskey now and will be drinking coffee in 12 hours, I couldn't agree more.

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Pica_soO
Hey, it made us a agrarian society. Nothing more willing to settle down then a
alcoholic needing wheat and honey.

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frozenport
Well the Mongolian horde drank a lot but wasn't very agrarian. You can ferment
milk, for example.

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Pica_soO
Got to herd cattle for that, got to travel alot to feed that cattle, got to
fight other tribes to keep the cattle, got to have Kalashnikov and arrows to
keep the cattle, got to trade those techs in with somebody who melts down iron
and digs, got to trade them with food, got to make a long logic chain, to
escape admitting you got a point, frozenport. It was a nice explanation for a
otherwise disadvantages behavior, while it was blasted by he historians that
lasted.

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sethrin
No, the Mongols were nomadic, not agrarian, and the fermentation of alcohol
does not require an agrarian society to produce. In point of fact, it is so
easy to make alcohol that we can hardly keep people from doing so in prisons.
Generally, people make and consume alcohol, whether or not they are interested
in settling anywhere in particular. So, while you are generally correct that
there are a number of factors that make the combination of agrarianism and
alcohol production particularly successful, it's not a causal relationship.

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Pica_soO
Eh, to substain a prison - you need a agrarian society. And yes, its easy to
make- but is it also easy to keep up the supply during winter times? When the
cows stop giving milk, the alcoholics have the civilization monkey on there
back.

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forkandwait
As a Marxist who works for a social service agency, I have become convinced
that the two original sins of civilization are (1) forced labor and (2) the
controlled fermentation of alcohol. At some point, a local entrepeneur figured
out that he could get serfs to stay on the land and give him a cut of their
produce if he bashed a few heads in. Probably at the same time, he figured out
they would less effective at leading a revolution, and a little more content
with their lot in life, if he let them get wasted when the work was done.
Hell, said entrepeneur probably sold them the beer itself... Add a spectacle
like a gladiator fight, and voila! Fast forward to Coors Light, working at a
Target warehouse, and the SF Niners on TV. Plus ca change, plus la meme
chose....

(I think of poor people as the originary arbitrage... Yes, I know what micro
economics says about the existence of arbitrages, that's the point.)

Also interesting that I don't think they mentioned cider (paywall preventing
me from re-reading), which was a huge thing in America at least until
prohibition.

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koverstreet
And what are you going to do if you get rid of capitalism and serfdom and make
everything equal, but in your utopia people still want to get drunk sometimes?

Are you going to bash in heads to keep them from getting drunk?

Congrats, now you're the evil overseer.

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avn2109
"Beware Marx's cure but not his diagnosis."

\- Paraphrasing some wise person whose name presently eludes me

IMHO the GP has a point about alcohol's role in _panem et circenses_.

Obligatory disclaimer: I hate commies with a fiery passion and am the child of
Soviet defectors.

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mastax
Interesting how the graphics in this article are created. It looks like they
use [http://ai2html.org/](http://ai2html.org/) which renders everything but
text to a background image, and then places the text in front. It seems the
only benefit vs. just rendering the illustrator file to a png is that you can
select and copy the text. Perhaps it also allows a future editor to change
figures without needing the source Illustrator file.

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dima55
It also doesn't work without javascript

