Bay 12 Games Forum

The study you found involved buying a bunch of cheap mouthwash, performing NMR on it, and then looking at the reported acceptable daily intake (ADI) of whatever compounds they found; they did no actual toxicology at all. It's a stretch to say that the ADME (absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion) characteristics of the denaturants aren't going to be impacted by the simultaneous alcohol consumption, particularly chronic consumption of the levels you'd need for any kind of significant profit margin, and ADIs are computed with fairly arbitrary safety factors anyway; what you want are human NOAELs, which are the actual levels at which adverse effects don't show up.

Not sure if you read more than the abstract, but they referenced both ADI and NOAEL values (when they computed the margin of exposure). Yes, this does not consider the possible interaction between ethanol and the additives (which is important and a good point), but you're dismissing highly relevant information entirely while pretending to be an expert.

At any rate, we need not speculate about hypothetical chemical compounds. Formulating mouthwash to be sold in the US is going to involve compliance with the Code of Federal Regulations, Title 27, Chapter I, Subchapter A, Part 21; in particular, as a Specially Denatured Alcohol it must have denaturants added per one of formulas 37, 38-B, 38-D or 38-F. If you can find something on that list that is safe to drink chronically in large quantities, cheap to buy pure, and not totally abominable-tasting, I suppose you could start competing in the mouthwash-as-gutter-booze market.

What, this list? I see almond oil, cinnamon oil, clove oil, lavender oil, pine oil, rosemary oil... Listerine gets away with 27% alcohol by volume by including menthol (mint), thymol (thyme), methyl salicylate (wintergreen), and eucalyptol (eucalyptus extract). That's it, that's all they need to add for it be classified as denatured ethanol in the US, and these are the sorts of compounds whose minutia of toxicity we're discussing.

Reminds me of that case where sixty-odd Russians died of drinking "Totally just bath oil".

Again, this is an issue with methanol, which nobody in their right mind would deliberately include in any mouthwash, let alone one they're covertly intending to be consumed. It's a product of terrible production practices and no quality assurance (though you can certainly bet that Russia would be market #1 for my hypothetical "Plasterine").

I mean shit, looking into it, some mouthwashes already have up to 27% alcohol by volume, more than fortified wine. Maybe you could sell the mouthwash packaged with antacid tablets that also happen to contain a chemical that neutralizes the denaturing chemicals in the mouthwash completely, so by the end you have a bottle of peppermint schnapps that's higher proof and half the cost.

I'm writing a function to simulate the Ricardian Law of Rent for part of an EU4 mod (something for fun), and think I've reached an acceptable solution but am not positive that all the steps I took are sound. The units of the final rent function seem to check out and it exhibits the properties that I would expect, but I still have doubts if it's conceptually correct.

In the mod, there is a function labor(x) which represents the amount of labor necessary to produce a unit of goods in some industry as a function of x, land. Less productive land requires more labor to produce the same unit of goods, and it's assumed that the most productive land will be used first. So for example the excellently-situated 0.1th unit of land may require 15 people to produce a bushel of turnips in a month, but to make that same bushel of turnips on the crummy 7.8th unit of land may require 50 people, and that's what this function represents. I'm using simple polynomials to model the labor function composed of one x variable and two constants 'a' and 'c', e.g. labor(x) = a*x + c, labor(x) = a*x^2 + c, or more generally as labor(x) = a*x^n + c.

The function I want to arrive at is the total amount of rent (in money) that would be appropriated under these conditions given the total amount of land in production and the labor function. The Law of Rent suggests that the amount a landlord can charge in rent for producing on their land is limited by the difference between the amount a laborer can produce on that land compared to the amount the same laborer could produce if they were working on the best rent-free land available (or take everything beyond subsistence if no land is available or they are forcibly prevented from moving). I took the following steps to try and reach a function of that rent value from the labor function:

1) The difference in the amount of labor to produce one unit of goods on a unit of land 'x' compared to the final unit of land in production would be given by labor(x) - labor(T), where 'T' is the total amount of land in production. The units of this would be in labor.

2) The difference in the amount of money a laborer could produce on a unit of land compared to the last unit of land would be P*s/labor(x) - P*s/labor(T), where 'P' is price (money per goods) and 's' is general productivity of all units of land (goods per land). The units of this function would be in money per land per labor. This function could be factored to P*s(1/labor(x) - 1/labor(T))

3) Since the above is the difference per laborer, to get the difference per unit of land I think I need to multiply the function again by labor(x). I'm not positive if this step actually makes sense conceptually, and this is where most of my doubts come from, but the result after some simplification is r(x) = P*s(1 - labor(x)/labor(T)), in units of money per land.

4) From there by taking the integral from 0 to T with respect to x of r(x), I should get a function R(T) that I think represents the total rent appropriated in units of money. Substituting back in the labor function -- labor(x) = a*x^n + c -- the integral results in a nice and clean function R(T) = P*s (n*a*T^(n+1) / ( (n+1)(a * T^n + c) ) in units of money. This function is attractive because it exhibits all the behaviors I would expect, can be computed with simple arithmetic, and appears to be in the correct units, but I just don't know if it's logically consistent with the Law of Rent and actually represents the amount of rent that would be appropriated under those conditions.

So what I'd like to ask is, if anyone actually made it to the bottom of this post:

1) Did I goof the math
2) Does the logic seem consistent with what I'm trying to model?

Something occurred to me while reviewing some of Paradox Interactive's terrible mod policies that I think may be an additional argument against paid mods.

Companies are currently able to regulate the content of mods (or add rules for their distribution) within services that they own or have authority over, like a forum, website, client, the steam workshop, etc, but at least on PC there exist external places for people to share and distribute mods that companies do not exert control over. Third parties may issue a cease and desist to these sites over copyright violations, but generally the company owning the game will never consider it worthwhile to police the content of mods distributed elsewhere that violate their "home rules".

If that company were selling paid mods, however, they would suddenly have a need to police people taking the very easy step of copying a paid mod and distributing it for free somewhere else, something far easier for people to do than illegally distributing a DLC, for example. So an almost necessary subsequent step of a company selling paid mods (if it ever makes serious revenue) is also putting in place resources and a protocol towards policing the whole public internet where the mods may be distributed, like they already do for piracy. If they do this, the inordinate amount of control they already claim but fail to enforce over the content of mods could then be applied anywhere.

Paradox Interactive, for example, forbids modders accepting donations, forbids using or sharing any kind of license for their work or portions of it (such as music), and forbids distributing the mod outside their approved services, but are barely willing to enforce this even within their own services while there isn't any money in it (I've personally broken the license and distribution rules for years now with no problem). They even for many years forbade modders from using an external public forum to discuss and develop their mod in, as if they have any control or legal basis for that. If there were money in it, then any hypothetical company could get away with enforcing whatever silly or even illegal rules they want by throwing C&Ds around on third party distributors. The companies already often claim that they own the copyright on any mods created entirely, they could shut mods down for whatever reason they like if they feel it's impinging on profits (real or imagined).

Just an additional point for why paid mods may introduce unpleasantness.

What should be expected, wasn't it the illegality of the of the thing that was driving up prices in the first place, what would having a high demand but a low supply?(at least to the consumer?)

What constricts the supply are the numerous additional costs associated with producing/smuggling marijuana illegally (at all levels of production, transportation, distribution, etc), along with another interesting factor in that marijuana production must compete with the black market rate of profit of other goods (which is far higher than the open market rate of profit, though the money earned is less valuable and there are obviously risks).

But in areas where it is legalized, there are still major legal constrictions that add costs to and limit production, with severe limits on how much can be grown and so on (at least here in Colorado I know that's the case). If it were fully legalized and entered full industrial production, the price would drop like a rock and illegal weed wouldn't even be competitive in price at cost, let alone profitable compared to a comparable black market rate of profit. Though for one more interesting side-point, by making it legal but with major restrictions on legal production, the relaxation and difficulties of enforcement have likely made it much, much cheaper to produce and distribute illegally, so even though prices will continue to decline the illegal profits may currently be higher than ever. Edit: So for example, drug dealers and smugglers may be getting "laid off" as it becomes easier to sell illegal weed openly in places where it's partially legalized, but the cartels themselves might end up earning more than they were before (despite lower prices) as they absorb a larger cut. But this can only last while the prices stay at their current relatively astronomical levels, only possible through the legal restrictions. I.e. "we're killing good local well-paying working class drug dealing jobs, and the cartels are taking the profits!"

Didn't even bother glancing at it in Northern Colorado, but the crescent shaped leaf shadows were neat and a few minutes of partly overcast weather is always welcome in August.

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Since America is so mixed, they have to go one step up to the less well-defined "white people."

That group started with British aristocracy and has slowly encompassed every group of ethnically Caucasian immigrants that has come to this country since. They've in turn shit on each other until another, more easily marginalized group appeared. British, German, Irish, even to a lesser extent Italians, have all been victimized and in turn victimized newly arriving groups.

So yeah, while their slogan may not be as specific or well defined as your garden variety European white nationalist, I don't think they have to stretch very far, especially as Americans define race. We tend to forget out core heritage after enough generations have passed, leaving only the question of whether you're white, or not white.

I don't think they're worth taking seriously. What I find funny about it is that there's no way for the "white nationalists" to possibly conceal the racist nature of their movement with a name like that, so at least that particular part of the alt-right seems doomed to irrelevance. Typically ethno-nationalist groups (in countries where their ethnic group is the majority) are able to flit around denying racist motives with plausibility, while separatist ethno-nationalists who are a minority can often gain sympathy abroad regardless of political affiliation and with no implications of racism (e.g., Kurdish nationalists). But here in the US, having it be all about generic "white people" makes it completely impossible for them to claim it's about anything other than racism, and get sympathy from people who are not already way on the fringe.