This is why going to New Orleans for college was so fun. Though TECHNICALLY illegal to drink until 21, in New Orleans the only penalty for an underage drinker being at a bar is that the drinker gets a small fine (like $50) and the bar gets nothing for letting them in. So, basically, there is no underage drinking law that is enforced.
Oh yeah, and “go-cups” are a thing in New Orleans - no glass out on the streets, but it’s just fine to carry around a plastic cup with booze - even on campus. It was no unusual to see someone drinking in class.
On the one hand, people will have a lot of fun. On the other hand, what happens if the underage person you’ve served alcohol to goes out and crashes their car?
Same thing that happens if they are age of majority and crash their car?
In both cases, the issue is that there was a car involved.
If you want to make sure people who drink don’t drive, that’s been positioned as age-related, but it’s really not. Otherwise we’d have to believe that someone who is 18 years and 364 days in Ontario is to young, but at 19 they magically become responsible.
Unless they go on spring break in Florida, and then they have to wait another two years.
Really the drinking age laws vis-à-vis driving just show up that our driving licence laws are far too lenient.
But if drivers license laws restricted normal people (instead of outgroups such as disabled people and undocumented immigrants) then they’d need public transportation (and if they get it, that’ll probably fuck up someone important’s profits, and we can’t have that).
As George Carlin put it, “If you shouldn’t drink and drive, why do bars have parking lots?”
Well, because the legacy and traditions around cars and asphalt and liquor licenses are older than the current concerns about drunk driving, and there are no forces tying it all together into a combined package that makes any sense.
Society is in wink-wink-nudge-nudge denial about an industry that arranges for millions of people to drink and drive home every night. Nothing is done about it because capitalism. Tens of thousands of employers would be out of business and hundreds of thousands of people would be out of work.
Streetcars and taxis were a pretty viable option as it’s a smaller city to get around. In college we would get 5 girls together and share a cab to a bar; it’d be like $2 a pop for us. It was pretty easy to avoid drunk driving.
I can tell you there is near ubiquitous drinking and driving in Minnerzoda because there is no alternative, unless you live next to one of the new light rail lines.
I think they finally banned the drive through but most of these places I think barely have a place to sit still. When I was in school it was common to go through and get a big bucket for each person in the car.
Including some of the traditions meant to prevent the problem, with dry counties having about triple the alcohol-related crash/fatality rate, since people have to drive (further and spending more time on the road) to other counties to get alcohol.
Somehow I suspect Dalí would be bemused at the lack of imagination shown. The least they could have done is transform him into a rhinoceros or something.
I went to that museum in ca. 1976, I think. It seemed so out of place in Florida.* I don’t remember in detail, but I recall it was awesome. He would have appreciated deep fakes, I bet.
*but then there was an early synth store back then in the same town, run by an associate of Bob Moog.
