One who is aware of this could check up to 10 drinks for their friends.

Yeah, if those ten friends don't mind you sticking your finger in their drinks. If you don't explain, you might get unpopular very quickly. If you do explain, why aren't you just using a paper strip or something?

That this silly invention is taken seriously at all is a testament to moral panic.

Sorry for what you went through man, but this is a great example of a case where this would not have worked. Assuming this nail polish existed, and no one would think twice about a man wearing it, would you have dipped your finger in the kool-aid?

There's a very narrow use case for this nail polish, and that's when you expect there's a good chance someone will try to drug you, but you still aren't sensible enough to stay the hell away from that place.

Any social structure that diminishes personal responsibility is suspect.

I agree. It follows from this that alcohol use in itself is suspect, though, even more so than frat boys. Temporarily and selectively evading personal responsibility for your actions is the reason people get drunk in the first place.

There are a thousand laws where "lack of interest amongst the general population" was no obstacle to getting them passed.

Many of us use it because it's simply more productive to do so.

You feel more productive, but the usability research showing mouse navigation is faster, and non-modal editing is faster, is older than vi. Xerox PARC found it in the seventies, Apple confirmed it in larger studies in the early eighties.

What happened to "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool"?

Yeah, illustrates nicely why it's not a good solution.

Of course, how we do things is largely a matter of habit and standards. Not entirely - for instance, there was solid usability research coming out of Xerox PARC showing that mouse-based editors were better than keyboard-only ones, and nonmodal editors were better than modal ones. Emacs was made in part in response to that research. But for the most part, one way of doing it is as good as any other.

It's just that vi and emacs (and wordstar!) lost that battle ages ago. Your browser, your IDEs, your widget libraries, your anything-that-isn't-actually-vi-or-emacs, use a standard based on IBM's CUA standard + Microsoft's defaults for cut-copy-paste (inherited from Apple). Odds are this very web from supports the old IBM shortcuts for cutting and pasting, (ctrl-insert, shift-delete, and shift insert), even though no one ever uses them.

You can keep forcing them to conform to obsolete standards with plugins if you must, but that is IMHO creating more trouble for yourself than it's worth,

The reason that power is cheap there in the first place, is that it isn't easy to transport elsewhere and they have more of it than they can use for other things.

It was overturned with good help from Australia's coal lobby, not quite the same as "didn't work".

It looks like Georgia has a lot of hydro power. It's probably a good share of the power production too. Anywhere power is cheap (and they wouldn't be mining bitcoins there if it wasn't) they probably use renewables, because coal and natural gas have more or less the same price everywhere.

Citation needed, huh? Why not start with the first hit on google.

Oh no, East Germany was less economically oppressive than the Soviet Union, but it still was a planned economy with a few market elements. The outputs of the economy as a whole was dictated by government plans and quotas. Even at its most socialistic, that was never the way it worked in the west.

EU laws dictate that free market rules and no state interference is tolerated.

Mwhah ha.

There was little scarcity actually threatening day to day living in East Germany. They were the most productive eastern bloc economy by far, maybe because they experimented with some market pricing and even permitted some private enterprise.

What there was, was really invasive spying and political censorship, and bad coffee.

Fascism was the one from Italy, remember? It was the nazis with the gas chambers. The fascists were content with torture chambers, executions and shipping the "undesirables" to other countries to do the dirtiest work.

But don't worry, you're not in the torturable class, so it makes little difference for you.

Like the ethnically homogenous Switzerland, I suppose?

A discussion on democracy is usually two idiots disagreeing on which sheep shit to eat for dinner.