Hacker News Reader

Comment by valuearb | Hacker News Reader

The FDA first slows down the distribution of desperately needed hand sanitizer by forcing distilleries to denature the alcohol. Then it hits those trying to help with large surprise fees.

Sure glad we have those regulators protecting us from the perils of the free market and personal choice.

View on HN

The free market got us methanol-laden hand sanitizer the second demand rose and the regulators looked away for a second.

Don’t mistake your broken government as an argument against government in general.

One of the primary ways to denature is by adding methanol. The free market had nothing to do with methylating the alcohol used in hand sanitizer.

The FDA does a lot of stuff that is great, but the institutional paranoia about someone, somewhere being able to recreationally consume alcohol isn't one of them.

To be fair, if it wasn't denatured then it wouldn't just be someone, somewhere. It would be hoards of underage kids. Heck if I use the self-checkout lane at the supermarket to buy cough medicine the attendant has to come over and approve the purchase because that's abused by underage kids as well.

That said, I won't claim to know precisely where the line should be drawn, but would say that in a sanitizing product shortage during a pandemic the line should be somewhere in the area of "hey how about we make it easier to make more sanitizing products right now"

Would it? Would it be hoards of teenage kids? Perhaps we should try to figure out why hoards of teenage kids would drink cough syrup or hand sanitizer. Perhaps the problem is that we pay to much attention to underage kids. Maybe if there wasn't an age limit, underage drinking wouldn't be so taboo. And underage drinking would not be a problem and binge drinking might go down.

I agree with everything you said, but in our society as it is right now, I still believe it would be hoards of teenage kids. Maybe it's a local problem, but there are stores near me that put cough medicine behind the counter for this reason. So you're right, there are underlying dynamics that contribute to this behavior, but the behavior does exist.

That's likely less to do with alcohol and more to do with the fact that it's pretty easy to "make" other psychoactive substances using it.

In particular, you can spin robitussin rapidly to separate the dextromethorphan.

https://erowid.org/chemicals/dxm/

Unrealistic, teenagers can still get trashed on vanilla extract from the grocery store but very few do

Maybe this reflects a lot more on the environment & social circle I grew up in? In that context though:

I think if the alcoholic nature of extracts were more widely known to teenagers, more would take advantage. But it also doesn't come in a convenient "party" format. If you could walk into Walmart, buy a half-gallon of sanitizer for $10 (well, pre-covid you could get those sizes for cheap, now not so much) and mix it with a gallon of fruit punch, then you've basically got the ingredients for a typical small 4-8 person Everclear & Fruitpunch highschool basement party without the hassle of tracking down that >= 21 friend.

Downthread someone has managed to cite the FDA specifically telling manufacturers not to include methanol.

The FDA forced distilleries to add methanol to the hand sanitiser, despite that causing significantly higher costs and delays.

I'm not sure you could have have this story more backwards.

I don't think this is correct. While it's accurate that the FDA requires industrial alcohol to be denatured, they specifically said "methanol cannot safely be used as an ingredient, or as a denaturant, in hand sanitizer"[1]. A few alternative alcohols are allowed to be used as denaturants under the emergency sanitizer guidance instead, e.g. isopropyl, tert-butyl. I don't think those are safe to drink, but I think they are safe for skin unlike methyl.

[1] https://www.fda.gov/media/136118/download

I replied in haste, and was incorrect. Mea culpa.

Having bought multiple hand sanitizers made by distilleries, I can report all of them used isopropyl, not methanol -- which certainly suggests the FDA did not require them to use methanol. And, someone else replied to you with the chapter and verse from the FDA explicitly saying the opposite of what you are.

Somebody may have this story backwards, but I don't think it's the person you're replying to. Where did you get your information?

I said nothing of the FDA or the US.

I'm in Canada. Health Canada not only did not require methanol to be added to sanitizers, it explicitly forbids it and forced recalls on many products that manufacturers tried to sell containing it.

> Don’t mistake your broken government as an argument against government in general.

An accident vs the government purposely poisoning American’s alcohol: https://slate.com/technology/2010/02/the-little-told-story-o...

I'm sure you would have taken a free market, non-FDA approved vaccine as well.

If you died of the unregulated vaccine then the market would correct the situation by incentivizing grieving families to choose a more reliable vaccine from a competitor.

I really wonder if I'm getting downvoted by free-market enthusiasts, the poor attempt at humor, or because it wasn't completely clear it was meant in sarcasm. Or maybe all three? I don't really care about internet points, but I'm always curious about such things.

You could add a /sarcasm to it for clarity, instead of posting a follow up comment

I think /sarcasm takes something away from it. If I put that there, people don't have to actually think about the comment and what I meant, or their own reaction to it. Using /s tells them automatically, and allows a reflexive response for/against the comment that short-circuits actually thinking about it. I'll risk the downvotes, they don't bother me.

But I am curious about why people downvote, hence my follow up. Clearly some people will downvote a thing they disagree with, or is flame bait. But will they downvote a thing they might agree with, but it also worded as flame bait? That sort of thing. I really am curious about the various behavioral patterns involved in awarding internet points.

/sarcasm is needed on the internet. Not everyone is a native English speaker, and even those who are have very different ideas around humor and written verbal queues.

Good points! I'll keep that in mind in what I hope is already a relatively cautious approach to that sort of comment. On the other hand, ditching all/most idiomatic English and subtleties is probably not the right approach either, or avoiding all cultural references because others might not understand-- I don't think you're suggesting that, it's just my observation that this issue exists on a spectrum and not a binary.

Edit: You're in AI-- what's the landscape look like for improving automated translation to detect sarcasm? As a problem domain, it seems like it would be a subset/cross-section of sentiment analysis & word-sense-disambiguation.

These days the biggest issue is getting a decent labelled dataset.

Once you have that you just fine-tune a BERT-dervived transformer neural network.

See https://paperswithcode.com/task/sarcasm-detection/codeless for some examples and datasets.

I wasn’t sure it was sarcasm to be honest! I’ve seen more insane comments on HN posted with 100% seriousness and conviction.

I tried to keep it right on the edge... I find that provokes more critical thought than letting people "off the hook" with a more obvious comment they can automatically agree/disagree with. It's easy to dismiss examples as "absurd" when a concept is taken to its logical conclusion. It's the ones that walk right up to the edge, to the gray area boundaries of someone's conceptual framework, that make them consider what those boundaries are or should be.

Your comment is the same superficial “hey I’m just asking questions!” deflection that a lot of lazy intellectualism resorts to. “Maybe eugenics is a good idea because we can create a biologically superior human, we should at least discuss it!”

No, his post require thought, which is not immediately obvious. Thus it gets ignored or dv.

It's just a reaction to the free market magical chimp thinking out there.

Considering it's a form of economics that a sizeable portion of HN think is best, it is not at all equivalent to randomly bringing up a topic that has long been held by most of society to be a bad idea and saying "just asking the question!".

It is broaching the topic in a way that doesn't automatically get upvoted by people who agree with it, or automatically downvoted by those who disagree.

I also wasn't asking a question. I was giving an actual example of the consequences of the economic system many HN'ers believe in.

as another aside, this seems to be a problem with modern discourse in general. In multiple arenas I see pendulums swinging so far to one side or another that what might have been seen as satire or parody not long ago now has to be considered as someone's serious commentary on a topic.

Pendulums can't keep swinging further & further without destabilizing the entire fulcrum & structure. To stretch the metaphor further, I hope as they're on the down stroke this time around we can put a little bit of equal & opposite force against their inertia.

People post comments like yours and mean it, so sarcasm like that does not work in many places on the internet.

So yeah I'd guess that the reason is mainly 1 and 3.

Do people post comments worded that way and mean it?

"incentivizing grieving families"

It's usually dehumanized into something like "the market will adjust its behavior to reward manufacturers of higher quality products"

I did not try to say that it's impossible to identify the sarcastic nature of the comment, of course :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com