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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • They need to do better at wording the titles of articles like this. It should read something like “34 dead after drinking tainted/poisoned liquor”. Contrary to popular belief, brewing does not produce enough methanol to be toxic, and distilling does not concentrate it relative to the ethanol to a point where moonshine could be toxic. Media likes to portray like you have to be careful not to produce methanol, when really, you would have to intentionally make it. Here’s a good writeup about it.

    Methanol toxicity only really occurs when people deliberately add methanol to alcohol, either as a deterrent to keep you from drinking it (e.g. hardware store “denatured alcohol”), or to counterfeit real drinking alcohol. I can guarantee you this is a case of someone dumping a bunch of cheap, industrial methanol into watered down real booze to increase profits.


  • I think it really goes back through history. Finland was a possession of Sweden and then Russia. The nobility would have spoken either of those languages depending on who was in charge, and ethnic Finns were essentially pawns for the larger powers, and the finnish language wasn’t even written down much.

    This changed when Russia started to crack down on Finnish culture, leading to a surge in pro-Finnish sentiment. People even changed their names from Swedish versions to finnish versions, and went from using “Christian” names to names from finnish mythology or culture. Actually, it’s somewhat similar to how black Americans changed naming conventions in the Civil rights era. The very concept of finnish-ness was somewhat of a working class concept. This, combined with a similar law of jante type belief meant there was and is much more of a focus on the collective good than in other countries.

    During the Russian revolution, a Civil War erupted between left wing and right wing, with the right wing wanting a German aristocratic monarchy over finland. The right wing actually won, but it was very short lived because Germany lost WW1 right aftwards, and a liberal democracy was formed. Finland was super poor, but started to build itself up as it’s own country.

    When WW2 rolled around, most people are familiar with the Winter War where they held their ground against a Russian invasion. Most people aren’t as familiar with the Continuation War against Russia, where they (with the support of germany) continued to fight against Russia, or the Lapland war, where they actually had to fight against Germany to kick them out of the country. The Germans actually used scorched earth on finland as they retreated, knowing they were losing WW2.

    After all of that, a huge swath of finland was destroyed by the Germans, or annexed by the Russians, leaving many homeless. Finland had to provide for those people, so homes were rebuilt rapidly throughout the country. Since they were in the soviet sphere of influence, but they weren’t a Warsaw pact country, they didn’t get any assistance from the eastern bloc (and they actually had to pay reparations as an axis country). They were also not included in the Marshall plan that helped provide recovery to western Europe.

    They survived as a people by taking care of each other, and they are very proud of that. If you go to a Finnish museum, next to works of art and science, you’ll see things like the baby box, or other displays about the establishment of the welfare state. Many countries have a welfare system, but treat it like a dirty secret, while they celebrate what they were able to accomplish.

    One last thing I think is really cool is that they are not afraid to experiment with policies. Many governments will do little trials of policy here and there, but not many go to the point of actually doing scientifically rigorous studies.




  • This is an area of law governed at the state level. Some states are much better than others. Personally, I have not lived in a state that has a 3rd party hold the money (and I’m not sure if any do that). I did rent in a state where any charges that the landlord claims that they shouldn’t is met with triple damages. So if they keep $200 instead of the $100 of actual cost to repair something you broke, they owe you $300. It really incentivizes landlords to only charge accurately (e.g., not for standard wear and tear), and generally deposits were much lower there than in other states I’ve rented.

    Lots of states also charge interest on any deposit money not immediately given back to the renter.


  • They gave me an itemized receipt where carpet cleaning was the only item on the receipt when I moved out of a place with wood floors. I actually recorded the whole final walk through with the person from the company walking through saying that it was perfectly clean and that I should get my whole deposit back.

    When I complained, they said that it wasn’t carpet cleaning, it was just regular cleaning billed as carpet cleaning. I said I would take it to small claims court, but I never told them about the recording.

    They decided to refund me just enough that the money they kept was equal to the cost of filing a small claims suit.









  • Thanks for looking through all of this. If I’m understanding right, it seems like Congress is asking NHTSA to do a task that is probably not possible, but they are required to at least go through the motions to try?

    It seems like they just told nhtsa to use technology to fix drunk driving so they can wash their hands of the situation and claim they tried to do something, but nhtsa couldn’t figure it out. Why didn’t they tell the NIH to eliminate the cancer while they were at it.

    I do believe the technology to detect BAC is too erroneous to inflict on innocent drivers, and technology that could detect impairment through driving characteristics, while possible for individual drivers could never work on a population level. There’s going to be a lot of overlap between impaired drivers and just naturally bad drivers.