This is going to sound like I'm over generalizing and maybe even a bit... racist? and I already apologize for it, it's not my intention. I hope I can pass the actual message I'm trying to pass. So, let's go.

Doesn't Finland, like the other Nordic countries, have a long history of alcohol abuse and pushing against it (like, with draconian prices)? Isn't maybe just that policy "winning"? Also, couldn't this be yet another case where the Nordic are seen as "one step beyond" the rest like it was the case when fully digitalizing schools, only then to backpedal realizing it's not all so good and there are drawbacks that were not considered?

I say this to connect with the second part of your post, to which I fully agree: alcohol is not generally good for health and it can be abused but also small quantities here and there won't probably hurt you in a serious way and will give some social benefits like the ones you mentioned. (and the same applied to other light drugs as well!)

In the US the reverse happened. Although people drink less, you do get offered alcohol everywhere. I don't remember it being present at places like zoos, kids indoor playgrounds, state fairs, etc. I was even at a birthday at a public park at 10am Sunday morning and saw some White Claws being passed around.

People drink less but there is less stigma around alcohol and obvious other once illegal drugs.

Genuinely feels like we're optimising for a less human way to interact with each other in pursuit of some nicer statistics (hooray people live two tenths of a year longer). Why even have children if everything surrounding them has to be miserable these days.

I do have a feeling that the social structures, and perhaps even biology, have evolved over centuries with alcohol present to grease the wheels. It can allow a higher baseline of introversion / neuroticism (which facilitates higher performance in some areas but worse socialising), with the ability to drink to boost the social aspect when needed. Chesterton's beer, in other words.

This is sad to hear.

On the whole I think it's a terrible thing that people have started taking themselves too seriously.

My guess is that you're in the US. Here in the Netherlands, while there's plenty to criticize or laugh about, HR is also responsible for pensions, benefits, workplace safety, reintegration from sickness, ensuring that staff is well trained for their role, etc.

At my org they also organize the Thursday evening drinks session :)

HR is a powerful organization for a reason. Companies everywhere operate in a legal environment, and 90% of what HR does is keep the company from getting sued.

The only problems with that reasoning is that women have been in the workplace for hundreds of years (domestic service, textiles, etc), and human resources started appearing in about 1900, approximately 50 years before mixed workplaces were common.

No you can't just give people free rein to sexually harass the female staff.

I'd be very surprised if a full review didn't reveal that early HR more often existed to protect high position males against females in the workplace.

Behaviors and cultural norms don't change overnight, and HR is ultimately subordinate to leadership, especially in private companies with partnership structures, etc.

Modern HR feels like a better balance, with the caveat that it will usually protect the company from any employee.

Lol I would love to see how he argues that alcohol increases creativity. This is one of those things that sound plausible but very debatable if true or not.

I suspect that alcohol was a technology invented to protect the society from psychopaths. The psychopaths do not have instinctive empathy, but they can pretend. Alcohol ruins their ability to keep control, so when they get drunk, they will say or do something crazy that you will remember the next day.

It would make sense that when psychopaths get the power, they will eliminate the detectors.

While I don't agree or disagree, we had a rule with my grad school colleagues and prof that we couldn't have certain discussions if four people had a pint in hand and the fifth was there drinking water, taking notes lol.

> the reason you drink with people is it's more likely their true self comes out and you can more easily find out if they are trustworthy and worth doing business with.

This doesn't work when you're a person being encouraged to drink in an asymmetric power dynamic and it turns out the people you're drinking with are monsters. You end up in a tragic story like what happened in the Dartmouth Predator Professor Gang and perhaps the recent Cornell case as well.

Not in the UK from what I can see, there's stories about it in the news but try actually going to hackney on a saturday - it's full of 22 year olds drinking (and also often smashing loads of bag...).

Maybe that's not a representative sample but young people still want to socialise and at that age you can get away with it so why not.

Having said that, the UK is absolutely a nation of pissheads, the US has always has that puritanical streak

There's a pretty strong observation bias when it comes to college drinking. The social gatherings of basically anybody who does drink ends up involving drinking, which pushes out the non-drinkers, until you end up with two completely distinct social circles. To add to the effect, alcohol is wildly useful in socializing with strangers, so the non-drinkers know far fewer people.

Thus, if you ask someone who does drink they'll probably say "everybody drinks, except for a few people", and if you ask someone who doesn't, they'll assume most people don't, except for the minority of people getting loudly drunk in public. That was true even where I was at school, where polling found that 70% of the student body was drinking on the weekends.

BS. They just replaced alcohol with weed and a bit of amphetamines.

I'm pretty sure the causality is backwards. People aren't drinking less because they hear people saying it's poison, people are more willing to tolerate people calling it poison because they're drinking less. People have preached about the evils of drinking to excess as far back as we have records of people discussing stuff. It just got ignored, because it's a crucial social lubricant, and thus everybody imbibes anyway. With the rise of addictive social media and gaming, we've seen a decrease in socialization in meatspace, and that's where people drink. If you're missing out on the positive aspects of alcohol anyway, then it's a lot easier to listen to people talking about the negative aspects. And then those voices get amplified to justify not doing the thing you weren't doing anyway.

Alcohol is bad for you, but it's only "red meat" bad, not "smoking cigarettes" bad.

However, you have to weigh that cancer risk against the benefits of alcohol. Plenty of people wouldn't exist if their parents had never drunk.

It's probably a combo of the legit science that there really is no safe/good level of drinking from a health perspective (and previous studies saying otherwise are bunk), and all the podcasters/influencers extolling the virtues of not drinking.

Why We Sleep really impacted my view on drinking. It really does mess with your sleep, so I keep my drinking to occasional and on the light side.

Wearables also play a role in this. I had two beers between like 5:30-7:00 on Saturday and my sleep data was messed up. We are talking two 5.5% beers at dinner on a 220 lb man.

It's much harder to ignore the fact that alcohol has all these negative effects.

Still, I think drinking occasionally while socializing is a good thing, and that people becoming hermits is a huge negative.

Yes, but many of those wineries import their grapes from California (or other places). My wife and I participate in this boycott and were drinking a sparkling white from Mission Hill Winery which is one of the biggest BC wineries. We noticed the label said something like "Produced in Canada" and then listed grapes imported from California.

Wines that are produced from 100% BC grapes are labelled "BC VQA" and only 19% of the wines in BC are BC VQA.

I have a bottle of Niagara icewine downstairs I'm very much looking forward to!

The wine from Canada is not good, unless you like dessert wine/icewine. Maybe there are some exceptions for riesling but it's too cold to grow nice vines there.

Even Ontarians don't speak kindly about wine from Ontario lol

Exactly. Nobody was buying US wine, even the experienced winos and wine distributors for fancy dining that i've met here in Italy probably have never drunk US wine. Maybe new zeland, australia, south america, but i've never heard of somebody drinking an US wine.

And they weren't boycotting it, it's just not a good enough deal to buy from our prospective, even when people are looking to spend good money, there is better stuff to buy from elsewhere.

When looking at the actual wine export-volume as factual reasoning [0], it draws a different picture and shows a drop of almost 50% from 2020 to 2025.

Export volume (millions of gallons):

  2025: 53.4
  2024: 66.9
  2023: 57.6
  2022: 77.3
  2021: 89.4
  2020: 99.1

Noted elsewhere, Canada accounts for more than a third of US wine exports [1], so the trade-war with Canada in 2026 surely wasn't helpful either to keep export-volume at 2025-levels...

[0] Association of California wineries: https://wineinstitute.org/our-industry/statistics/us-wine-ex...

[1] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-08-26/california...

Apart from the inflation mentioned above, there are a multitude of factors at play that cannot be determined by just looking at aggregated numbers. The price of some goods, for example, has skyrocketed due to general scarcity (electronics, oil...). Fx got worse for the dollar vs other currencies. And are numbers only for goods, or do they include services?

It is definitely a reality that certain goods have seen localized boycotts, like alcohol in Canada, and some services have had to change (data sovereignty in Europe got a lot of traction).

I think comparing by tonnage would be more apt than comparing dollar figures which are subject to a lot of external factors, including currency exchange rates and inflation.

I don't find your general data on US exports very convincing for this case.

Is there any way to separate US exports of consumer products (which would be affected by consumer boycotts) vs. US exports for industrial products or capital goods (which I wouldn't expect to be affected by these boycotts)?

It is entirely possible that specific consumer-focused industries (wine, tourism, etc.) are being strongly affected by international boycotts and having decreasing exports, even while industry/capital-focused exports (petroleum, plastics, weapons, medical equipment, telecom equipment, data centre electronics, etc.) are increasing at a faster rate which would hide the consumer boycott effect in total export $.

This is an incredibly disingenuous and specious argument.

The discussion is about US wine production and consumption. You present the aggregate total vale of all US exports in US dollars to 6 significant digits. Does the variance of the volume of wine exports in litres even show up in those 6 signifcant digits?

Consider: (1) is six significant digits of precision justified, or is it insignificant accurancy? (2) Do those aggregate numbers take into account inflation? (3) Do those aggregate numbers take into account the (not insignificant) devaluation of the US dollar? (4) Do those aggregate numbers include both goods and services?

No, if you were to make an honest argument by quoting US exports, you need to limit it to the volume of US wine exports in litres. Misdirection can be a great tool of propaganda but is not a useful contribution to interesting intellectual discourse.

My sleep tracker registers terrible deep sleep and sometimes I jolk awake after the buzz wears off.

Get yourself checked for sleep apnea.

Interestingly this was basically what started it for me. Empty calories and research showing it literally inhibits muscle gain irregardless of the caloric effect since your body basically switches to "get this shit the fuck out" before continuing to be normal.

Secondary benefit for me was all the other stuff. Now I find that the once or twice in the entire year where I might have one drink it only takes like one drink to already feel it.

I'd be surprised if any one selling tobacco products were swimming in cash. Single use vapes are expensive compared to cost but there are tons of sellers. If you buy vape juice you can get something like the equivalent of 100 packs of cigarettes for $15. Vape shops jack up all the prices but there are 5 shops on every street and they always seem empty and I'm convinced they are mostly just laundering money.

> Zyn and vapes

Those don't contain tobacco, nor nicotine derived from tobacco. I'd be surprised if tobacco farming was still lucrative, except maybe the fine stuff for cigars, but that was always a relatively small market compared to cheap cig tobacco.

Agreed. Synthetic nicotine has been around for awhile as well, which is much cheaper than sourcing the old fashioned way.

I had the same realisation but before COVID. I had a friend who didn't drink, but he was always the most fun person to be around. I realised you didn't need alcohol, or any drugs, to have a good time. Without alcohol I was funnier, had more and better sex, slept better, and had no hangover the next day. I never looked back really.

Nowadays I'm older and not looking for sex so don't take part in that scene. I would say a few years ago when I would go out there was still some peer pressure to drink and I was considered odd going for non-alcoholic options. But nowadays it's not weird at all and the alcohol-free options are much more numerous and varied. Lime and soda was my go to for years but now I'll partake of an alcohol-free beer or cider.

> People are still drinking less but it's because pints cost >£6 now in a lot of places, nothing to do with an outbreak of temperance.

Yep, same over here in central europe/balkans.

Covid came, bars were closed, bars reopened with limited seating, prices went up, tourism restarted, our city center became a tourist trap, prices went up, and higher prices then radiated outside the tourist traps, and well... it doesn't add up anymore.

Sure, college students and highschoolers can buy cheap wine or booze and drink in parks, even in below freezing weather, but sitting in a bar has become very expensive.