9 comments

  • bsimpson 16 minutes ago
    Do this one next:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzales_v._Raich

    The Supreme Court somehow held that the feds can regulate what you do in your own home (in this case, growing marijuana for personal use) because it could have a butterfly effect on the interstate price. (Constitutionally, the feds can only regulate _interstate_ commerce.)

    • swiftcoder 11 minutes ago
      I'd imagine one wants to litigate Wickard v. Filburn in its entirety, rather than just the downstream Gonzales v. Raich
      • mothballed 5 minutes ago
        That would also invalidate the civil rights act, as the (similar) 19th century CRA was already struck down because the 14th amendment binds against discrimination by public not private actors. The reason why the modern CRAs weren't also struck is because they rested on the laurels of Wickard v Filburn declaring the CRA (this time) is about regulating "interstate" commerce.
        • bombcar 3 minutes ago
          fixing the interstate commerce clause is one of those things that needs to be done eventually, but will likely never be done - even if just to "fix" it so everything remains the same but is based on simpler allocation of powers than through a "loophole".
  • semiquaver 25 minutes ago

      > [Judge Edith Jones] also said that under the government’s logic, Congress could  criminalize virtually any in-home activity
    
    Well, yeah. This is essentially the holding in Wickard v. Filburn, which seems to be in tension with this decision (overturning that would be great but it’s not the role of the circuit courts of appeal to do preemptively)
  • jcims 7 minutes ago
    Bought and rigged up a 'hand sanitizer plant' about five months into COVID. Populated the thing with thermocouples, load cells and automation with nodered on raspberry pi and a bunch of esp32s flashed with tasmota doing sensing and control. Everything talked over mqtt. Great little architecture and having it highly automated allowed me to focus on the parts that were less easily controlled for.

    Dashboard: https://imgur.com/a/so7iZJX

    Sanitizer run: https://imgur.com/a/iWDlNfb

    Quite a lot of fun actually.

  • ryandamm 53 minutes ago
    Missed in the previous discussion: methanol is irrelevant. Grain based ferments have essentially zero methanol.(And methanol risk is a function of its concentration relative to ethanol — the treatment for methanol poisoning is… ethanol!) even fruit based fermentations with significantly higher pectin concentrations only produce trace methanol, and it’s not all that well concentrated in a distillation due to azeotropes (which also says that throwing out the heads doesn’t help that much).

    Methanol poisoning stories in the news almost exclusively result from people trying to sell denatured or industrial alcohol. The biggest risk in home distilling is fire.

    • delichon 11 minutes ago
      > the treatment for methanol poisoning is… ethanol!

      My grandpa drank a shot of schnapps every night and called it his medicine. He never once got methanol poisoning. I thought it was a euphemism but apparently he was actually taking an antidote prophylactically.

    • gostsamo 28 minutes ago
      As someone living in the Balkans, home brewing is a national passtime for every nation around. When every family has its own recipe for brewing alcohol, killing ourselves would've been achieved many centuries ago if it was a real concern. Methanol is an issue when some dumbshit decides to cell chemically produced trash on industrial scale instead of buying the expensive ingredients.
    • cucumber3732842 47 minutes ago
      Was it missed or intentionally downplayed/ignored because people came into the discussion with priors that they were eager to maintain?

      Seems like these sorts of "yes it could be unsafe in theory but the reality of physics and incentives make this mostly irrelevant" type things get missed far too often certain parts of the internet to be coincidence.

      That said, the fact that it dropped on a weekend did it no favors the first time around.

      • ch4s3 36 minutes ago
        Speaking as a brewer, I can tell you that tons of people who should know better actually believe the methanol thing and will even quote some sciency words to make their argument. I think its a case of bad information coming from black market distilling being propagated uncritically. People who know better (licensed distillers) have no incentive to argue against it.
  • GenerWork 13 minutes ago
    It's been way too long since I've taken a political science course, but does this mean that the ban is struck down for the entire country, or just the area that the 5th Court of Appeals covers?
    • malfist 7 minutes ago
      Prior to this year, the entire country. Today, thanks to SCOTUS shenanigans, it likely only applies to the states involved in the lawsuit, LA. But who knows, hard to keep up with the game of calvinball the SCOTUS is playing.
      • dcrazy 4 minutes ago
        You seem to be confusing precedent-setting decisions with nationwide injunctions.
    • gmiller123456 5 minutes ago
      Appeals court decisions generally only apply to their own jurisdiction. But they obviously hold a lot of weight when cited in others.
  • joshstrange 1 hour ago
    • ckemere 1 hour ago
      Wasn’t great. Would love a second attempt focused on distilling not individualist v collectivist or immigration.

      (Except for relevant connections around sharing your creations with neighbors and/or internationally inspired novel spirits.)

      • wing-_-nuts 26 minutes ago
        I am not really a fan of liquor, but I do like the idea of having skills which are universally valuable.

        If you air dropped me into a random village in Africa I doubt I could 'code for cassava' but I could almost certainly make a living if I knew how to set up a basic pot still and safely create booze.

        • a_conservative 13 minutes ago
          You could sanitize and disinfect with that alcohol! You could also make extracts of any plants nearby that were useful. Whiskey and vanilla beans are sufficient to make vanilla extract!
  • ChrisArchitect 28 minutes ago
  • user20180120 25 minutes ago
    [flagged]