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Alcohol is a duretic, that is no myth. Vasopressin/ADH inhibition is well documented and studied. You are talking out of your ass about hydration by alcohol. Even miniscule amounts of alcohol increase duresis via supression of ADH.

https://x.com/tony_breu/status/1034891346069413888

I too have heard about the theory about how alcohol was safer to drink than water, however, a lot of literature also points to the fact that aclohol was consumed mostly for inebriation.


Alcohol being a diuretic is not a myth. All Alcoholic drinks being enough of a diuretic to dehydrate you is. A small beer that is less than 1% is definitely not going to net dehydrate you. The alcohol is still a diuretic, but it does not offset the fact that you’re also consuming a large amount of water in the drink.

Your reference to “literature” is not correct. The drinks being discussed here were incredibly weak, and were often given to folks like workers and children. Definitely not to get drunk. That is not to say there wasn’t other alcoholic drinks that people consumed for the purpose of getting drunk.


It has nothing to do with alcohol though. Unfiltered and unpasteurized weak beer will go bad in a few days even if you have a fridge.

It was boiling that kills the bacteria and people knew that it improved the “quality” of water that wasn’t safe to drink.

I wonder if people in a few hundred years will think that we drank so much coke/etc. because tap water was dirty an polluted with lead. Because that sounds about as silly as this myth..


Ambiguous. Smaller ABV will still have some effect. Small beers were typically started at 10% ABV and brought down. Other alcohols were typically made strong and then diluted with plain water. Boiling is of course good.

Also, people regularly drink bottled beverages to avoid unsafe water conditions. A light Beer is actually one of the very safest things you can drink because the carbonation makes it very unlikely that they’re not giving you a refilled bottle while traveling


> A light Beer is actually one of the very safest

It doesn’t have much in common with premodern/medieval light table beer.


Is it really a theory rather than a hypothesis or mere speculation?


At the root of all this is a philosophical problem that encompasses all we do: unsustainable growth. We're culturally obsessed with the concept of "more". More value. More money. More features. More, more, more. This is where it gets us: over the verge of ecological catastrophe. Unsustainable systems prone to breakage. Enshittification of everything. Planned obsolescence and yearly phone upgrades, natural resources be damned!

If we are to survive, we need to slow down and instead of making "more" make "better". Follow Unix philosophy. Embrace "good enough" and learn to stop.

Who am I kidding, we're doomed.


people with autobrewery syndrome come to mind immediately.


... by watermarking the generated content.


... with a proprietary algorithm, the details of which we will not say a word about


They are providing this tool for users to run. Eventually someone will just use this tool en mass, then use this data to create a local model that will detect stuff with Google's watermark.


> They are providing this tool for users to run

Where? From what I see in https://deepmind.google/technologies/synthid/#:~:text=Where%... , it is not a tool, it is an "undescribed algorithm". Otherwise people will immediately:

1) build an algorithm which slightly modifies few pixels to break SynthID.

2) apply SynthID to real images to imitate tampering made "allegedly" by specific people


you have no idea what "psychology" is, do you?


I have a similar point of view as acchow, so it's possible I don't understand psychology either. Could you enlighten us about what it actually is?


it is a positivistic science, i.e. it studies observable phenomena using the scientific method. The days of Freud and Jung where you could just smoke cigars and fart out ideas about collective unconsciousness and anal fixation are long over. Experiments are conducted, confounding variables controlled, and hypotheses (including H0) are tested. Granted, it's not as easy as in physics where you just drop a ball repeatedly and note down the results, buf it doesn't in any way make it a "softer" science. To equate psychology with self-help books is akin to equating LLMs with Markov chains.


hahaha yes. This kind of a layoff is actually winning the lottery.


AI is tipping the scales not to the favour of the proletariat. "The means of production" is in the hands of the powerful few, and I foresee a very bloody revolution.


This funny old narrative of a revolution in that direction sounds pretty misplaced if we're talking about a future where you won't need humans to get stuff done...


you know what is really funny? the neoliberal narrative of free markets and trickle-down economies and billionaires being valuable members of thr society. If humans are not needed to get stuff done, what's the use for those humans, mmmm?


you are not alone


always upvote damninteresting.


Maybe at some size corporations _should_ become public entities to avoid dragon disease and only those corporations having the means of production. After all, they did grow enormously big by consuming public resources and labor.


Neither the resources or the labor are public.


So these companies exist in a different reality where they draw their resources and labor from somewhere else? Where else would labor come from if not the public?


"the public" and "public" are two different things. the labor and resource markets are private, not public.


The markets maybe. Markets aren't the thing though.


Neither are the things in question, the resources for movie making are not public, crew isn't public, actors aren't public. It's not a public resource in any way.


money is a public resource.


Money isn't consumed and it only has value when used.


that's true. Therefore billions should return into circulation and/or otherwise return to the public.


Believe it or not billionaires are part of the public and those billions are in circulation. There are no dragons sitting on hoards of gold.

More importantly: money that is not in circulation doesn't affect you or me, it has the same weight on the economy as all the gold still not mined.


It sure don't look this way to me. I guess we'll agree to disagree on most points here.


How can we disagree on facts? There are no billionaires just sitting on billions. They are in circulation.


your facts: billionaires not sitting on billions. My facts: homelesness exists.

Also moving money from your left hand to your right is not circulation. It should "trickle down". Wonder where I heard this.


It is clear you're arguing from an emotional, not logical, standpoint where facts don't matter.


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