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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1298 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 22, 2025

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What are some interesting contrasts on the same issue in your personal policy views?

For me, I think it should be illegal to sell already cold beer for off premises consumption, because people use it to drink and drive- but also that lowering the drinking age would probably be a good idea.

sell already cold beer for off premises consumption, because people use it to drink and drive

Do you think that the coldness of beer is a large determinant for whether or not people drink and drive?

I figured people were mostly driving to their friend's house, or a bar (or other location, such as fishing), drinking there, and driving home sooner than is a good idea. I've never actually heard of an American drinking in the car. There are lots of signs at parks about not bringing glass bottles, but I don't think I even disapprove of them buying a pack of cold beers, driving to a park, drinking it with their friends, then driving home -- just that they shouldn't be drinking the whole pack by themselves. Authorities clearly don't care about it, since they allow bars to serve not only beer, but hard liquor, in places that clearly need to be driven to, full of people who very obviously drove by themselves, and are not carpooling with a designated driver (nor is there public transport available).

I see, regularly, construction workers(you can tell by the clothes- expensive boots not taken care of, everything else absolutely cheap and dirtier than you'd believe, often with things like sheetrock mud that you can only run into on a construction site. Super casual but very high coverage.) walk into the QT or 7/11, buy a soda and a cold beer, then pour the soda out and put the beer into its cup before getting into their car and driving home. That's not counting those who buy it in a can, open it, and then drive off. Cops tell me they enforce open container laws semiregularly.

It's definitely class and ethnicity coded- lower working class(you can tell by the vehicles) hispanic men are most of the offenders.

Interesting, I wonder if there's any way to tell whether that practice is contributing to crashes very much.

My intuition would be no, in comparison to drinking tequila or vodka at a bar, but maybe I'm wrong.

Hispanic men have a reputation for poor and/or reckless driving at times when the lower working class is going home from work(3:00-3:30 end times are pretty typical), but there's no real indication as to causation- driving in Latin America is notoriously poor(as everywhere else in the developing world) so it might be continuing cultural stuff other than the idea of cracking open a cold one on the way home from work. Presumably if that was the common thread DR twitter would mention the open container violations in their regular noting of an immigrant getting into a wreck in a school carpool line he had no business being in.

My intuition is also that 1) drunk driving accidents are disproportionately from 'not going home from a bar(think friend's house, family get together, etc)' because the barflies a) have a tolerance and b) stay later so there's fewer other cars to get into accidents with, and non-barflies are likely to have a plan for getting home safely from the bar and 2) far less drunk driving is due to straight spirits than you'd think because American heavy drinkers sensitive enough to cost to choose straight hard liquor are also sensitive enough to cost to not be doing their drinking in bars much. IME regular heavy drinkers seem to have a code to stick to beer or mixed drinks in social settings, and there's very strong ethnic patterns to drink of choice to begin with that override maximizing alcohol per dollar.

There is something so grim about driving by a bar just off a highway with a parking lot full of cars.

Also grim in that no one even bats an eye at the implications

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