Unless they try to make booze from woodchips, they'll be fine. Using fruit or grains or potatoes makes it really hard to end up with enough methanol to be dangerous.
Methanol is dangerous. But you are simply misinformed about the risk of methanol showing up in your homebrew spirits. It's not your fault: this has been a propagandized issue. But methanol poisoning was only a thing during the prohibition because the feds started poisoning the fuel ethanol supply with it, and people either served it to people unwittingly, maliciously, or tried and failed to separate out the ethanol.
In real homebrew, you are not at risk of methanol poisoning. If you brew some beer (step 1 to making yourself whiskey), the alcohol makeup ends up being in a 1:1000 ratio of methanol to ethanol. Distilling does not create any more methanol, it merely concentrates it. Let's play out the worst possible scenario here, where you're targeting azeotropic ethanol, and specifically targeting methanol with your cuts. In order to end up with a 100ml of methanol, you would need to be running a batch of targeting 100L (26 gallons) of ethanol, which means starting with 2,000L (530 gallons) of beer. That is wildly outside the range of casual home distilling.
And keep in mind in order to hit that worst case scenario, the distiller needs to know enough to be making cuts, but not know to discard the first cut, which is done normally even without methanol concerns simply because it contains a bunch of really disgusting aromatics.
"But you are simply misinformed about the risk of methanol showing up in your homebrew spirits."
I did not say that. I'm sick of being misquoted (at least twice to this story).
I well know that methanol only appears in trace amounts in drinking spirits (also naturally in trace amounts in one's gut/body sans drinking—it's even in fruit juice). That is not what I was talking about. What I said was:
"Many ways exist for methanol to enter the food chain both accidentally and through deliberate substitution for ethanol…"
In that paragraph I made no mention of homebrew spirits and it's clear I was referring to methanol manufactured in industry on an industrial scale. Industrially-manufactured methanol has found its way into the food chain and has killed people.
You should read my reply to reisse where I make it clear how methanol could enter the food chain (right, I also mentioned it earlier).
It's pretty obvious to me that if a large cultural rush/sudden fad to homebrew spirits were to happen (assuming the decision is upheld) then things will in all probability go wrong unless there's a broad reeducation about the potential for methanol substitution coupled with regulations covering sales especially through third parties.
I'm specifically referring to the US here, the entrepreneurial nature of business being what it is this decision will be seen by some (and a few is too many) to run amok and start trading HB spirits in ways traditional homebrewers would never (or very rarely) do
It's also worth reading the link on methanol poisoning in my reply to pessimizer.
Because the other big expense in a datacenter: electricity. Texas has really cheap electricity compared to the rest of the country, sitting at second cheapest after North Dakota.
This site is Neo-nazi propaganda. Dude's trying to sell his "courses" (read: podcast) where he espouses a... concerning list of philosophers.
Plato (like every philosophy discussion in the western world, nothing too bad yet...)
Nietzsche (thanks to his sister, very associated with the Nazis)
Heidegger (literally a Nazi, as in, card-carrying member of the Nazi party)
Strauss (close ties to the Nazi party, acting as their head of the Reich Music Chamber)
Schmitt (literally a Nazi, as in, card-carrying member of the Nazi party, and part of the government at the time)
Dugin (Nazi sympathizer, extreme far right asshole, in bed with Putin)
That's the entire list. If it was 1 or 2 of those, mixed in with a bunch of other philosophers who weren't Nazis, I wouldn't be so confident in calling it fascist. But it's not. The list of philosophers that Millerman espouses are basically a complete list of literal Nazi-aligned philosophers.
Literally the entire purpose of the law California passed, which Linux is responding to, is to preempt such laws: If someone says "we need identity verification because think of the kids looking at porn", it's now trivial to say "we already solved that problem, without deanonymizing everyone on the internet".
It's theory. The concern is for avoiding a (likely, IMO) scenario where the only real indication that someone cracked QC is one or more teams of researchers in the field going dark because they got pulled into some tight-lipped NSA project. If we wait until we have an unambiguous path to QC, it might well be too late.
To avoid the scenario where for a prolonged period of time the intelligence community has secret access to QC, researchers against that type of thing are incentivized to shout fire when they see the glimmerings of a possibly productive path of research.
> one or more teams of researchers in the field going dark
If the intelligence community is going to nab the first team that has a quantum computing breakthrough, does it actually help the public to speed up research?
It seems like an arms race the public is destined to lose because the winning team will be subsumed no matter what.
It's the same logic as any offensive technology: maybe the world would be a better place if we never invented the technology, but we can't risk our enemies having it while we don't, and even if they never develop it maybe it'll help us, and we're the good guys.
Luckily, in this particular arms race, all we the public need to do is swap encryption algorithms, and there's no risk of ending global civilization if we mess up. So we get the best of both worlds: Quantum computing for civilian purposes (simulations and whatnot), while none of the terrifying surveillance capabilities. We just need to update a couple of libraries.
This is true in this case, but in general complicated in the US. Since the executive branch is responsible for diplomacy, but only Congress can pass laws, there's a weird wiggle room where the Executive branch is completely on board with signing some treaty, but then when it comes time to actually implement it in any way that actually binds, Congress can refuse to do so.
It's one of the reasons why for a lot of the "everybody joins" treaties, a bunch of countries sign with a statement that they don't recognize the US as a signatory.
Shirts used to be expensive, but "nice clothes" expensive in today's money, not "1st/2nd most expensive thing most people own" type expensive. $200-$1000 in today's money, scaling to wages.
reply