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Comment by throwup238 | Hacker News Reader

> I wonder what happened though, and how kids managed to study constantly drunk.

They learned early how to be functional alcoholics. Drunk kids these days just don't know how to handle their liquor and society has been going down the drain because of it.

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I wouldn't consider functional alcoholism to be a good thing for anyone. It's especially bad for brain development under age ~25, before the prefrontal cortex is fully developed.

https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/alcohol-and-adolescen...

Drinking contaminated water could kill you for most of the first half of the 20th century.

So, it's probably an unclear tradeoff, historically.

I’ve recently read that the idea that pre moderns drank alcohol as an alternative to contaminated water is a myth. See https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ol1h45/comme...

This gotta be the most alarmist, out-of-touch with reality comment I've read this year.

Yeah, but it's only mid January...

How out of touch with reality do you need to be to take an absurd "kids these days" joke seriously?

You should be alarmed!

Literally anything you post on this website someone will take literally. Ask me how I know.

How do you know?

Upto half a liter isn't much, especially considering that most traditional brews were lower alcohol content than the typical stuff today. So they probably weren't drunk, but who knows how that might have affected them in the future.

Half a liter is ⅔ of a standard bottle of wine. Even if it is only 11% ABV, this still equates to 55 ml of ethanol. An average 14 year old male weighs 112 lbs, about 70% of an adult’s size.

So if we extrapolate linearly, 55 ml of ethanol would be equivalent to 78 ml of ethanol for an adult, which is 6.5 shots, assuming a 1 oz shot

Yeah, but the wine was supposedly watered down for the children too. And that would be the maximum limit too.

Everything you're saying is true, but the wine was watered down. I grew up in (Eastern) Europe and I used to have a glass of wine with my parents at dinner time when I reached my teens pretty much every time they did (we had a small vineyard, like most people, and wine was plentiful). However, I was mixing it with mineral water (50-50) and with a heavy meal, I never got drunk from that.

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