A tip from PJH by email gives this graphic. Oh, the Puritans will seize on the ‘ UK beer costs below the world average’ but there are an awful lot of countries below us.
Strong beer is not cheap in the UK. Look at the prices in your local supermarket. Compare, say, Duvel with a standard beer, and remember to take account of the bottle volume. Duvel comes in small bottles for a reason.
And yet in Ipswich (Hmm, I’ve heard of that town before somewhere. It’s where ‘normal for Norwich’ lives, I believe), off licences and supermarkets have agreed not to sell strong beer because ordinary plebs drink it.
Alkies don’t. Alkies drink cheap sherry which is stronger per unit cost than any beer.
The best part?
Under the voluntary scheme, 53 of the 130 off-licences in the town will be super-strength-free.
Fifty-three off-licences will die by their own hand. If there is a real problem with loads of people buying strong beers, and if those places don’t sell it, loads of customers will go elsewhere. For everything, not just for their Tennent’s Super fix. They will buy their tobacco and wine and vodka and whisky in the other shops too.
Eventually the Righteous 53 will cry ‘Unfair’ and the voluntary scheme will be compulsory. Then, shops outside Ipswich will see a boom in trade. Then the ‘voluntary’ scheme will spread faster than the imaginary disease it pretends to prevent…
It’s how the Righteous work. Remember Denmark’s fat tax? Didn’t work, everyone just did all their shopping over the border and Danish retail business suffered. So they scrapped it. The EU watched this closely and found a solution. An EU-wide fat tax, so you can’t drive over to Finland to escape it any more.
Those other EU countries can expect to see their tobacco prices belt skywards soon, to stop the Brits buying it on the cheap. They’ll blame the UK because they are dim.
What is happening in Ipswich will be spread by the mindless drones who support all forms of prohibition. They will claim it is about health but it’s not, not really.
It never was. None of it. Eventually, even the drones will notice but then it’ll be too late.
underdogs bite upwards 
::sigh:: Too bad I’m allergic to beer! Y’only have to work five minutes here in Philly to drink as much as 15 minutes of work in the UK!
:>
MJM
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XX Too bad I’m allergic to beer! XX
Me too. Ten pints and I start falling over.
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It’s the fact they claim it’s to ease the burden on the public services that annoys me. Doesn’t it ever occur to them there’s an easier way to do that that doesn’t entail collective punishment?
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They just like collective punishment. Keeps the proles in their place, especially those who think it won’t apply to them.
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This is what’s known as “introducing a level playing field”. Find the lowest common denominator, and then make everyone conform to it.
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It’s also known as ‘blinkered stupidity’. Brewing strong beer or even wine isn’t hard to do at all. They’ll find that out soon enough.
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XX Alkies don’t. Alkies drink cheap sherry which is stronger per unit cost than any beer.XX
White lightning and Buckies (In the same GLASS FFS!!??!!) was the tipple of choice in West Lothian.
Liverpool it was Yates’ “Ozzy whites”, with the areas “White lightning” equivalent, (again in the SAME bloody glass!) The posh ones, or those who had fiddled a “deccorating grant” out of the dole, or something, played with “Ozzy whites” and “Gold label.” (can’t remember the brewery name. But quarter liter bottles of barley wine).
The main point here, being that cheap BEER played virtually NO role in the process.
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The strong beers aren’t cheap. Plain old John Smith’s is about £3.50 for four cans. Gold Label comes in much smaller cans – four of them cost £7. More than double the price.
Yes, the dedicated boozers will just move on to the next strong + cheap combination. They don’t care what it tastes like, they’d suck the alcohol out of medical swabs given a chance. All they want is oblivion and as long as they do it quietly, I don’t see any reason why they can’t have it.
If they cause trouble, arrest them for causing trouble. There’s no need to punish those of us who can reach oblivion without anyone else even noticing.
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I’m sure I’ve made this point before, that super-strength beers aren’t especially cheap in terms of pence per alcohol unit, although broadly in line with the mainstream. But they have the ideal strength/volume ratio for rapid inebriation, which is why they are popular with the street-drinking community.
See this post which goes into the issues in more detail.
One commenter reports Belgian tramps necking Chimay Bleu from the bottle!
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Ewww! That has yeast in the bottom. I remember that one, we used to get the blue, white and red here and I even have a couple of very nice Chimay goblets. They vanished from shelves shortly after Oily Al and the Spiteful Nasty Puritans took power. We really should have seen the rest of it coming at that point.
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XX they’d suck the alcohol out of medical swabs given a chance.XX
They DO.
Quite often the local hospital has to throw people out trying to nick the swabs and “disinfection spirit.”
I have also seen tramps sucking those glasses cleaning things that come in individual foil wraps as well.
On Liverpool docks the favorite was nicking the alcohol from lifeboat compasses, and mixing Brasso with milk. In fact, that’s why the Royal navy use (or used, don’t know of they still do) brown sauce to clean the brassworks instead of Brasso.
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I have heard that once it became common knowledge that the hospital handwashes were alcohol based, apparent usage increased enormously.
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They are starting to change to a “non alcohol” disinfectant now. BUT, only because, as if previously they did not know, the muslims now refuse to use it.
And that includes so called “medical staff”!
They use the “Alky” as an excuse. But “insider informants” know differently.
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Heh. Muslims refusing to disinfect their hands was all over the news here. Then it changed to ‘alkies are drinking it’ (they probably were, but I doubt there were many). It’s only the nutcases who would refuse to wash in the stuff. Sensible Muslims know that they are only disallowed from drinking it, not from handling it. Just like all those Muslim-run corner shops who make a great deal of profit from late-night boozers and smokers. No problem handling it.
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But, according to the graphic, we’re pretty much right at the top of the list for developed first-world nations. And the comparison is invidious anyway, as by definition beer is going to be cheaper in countries that, per capita, are better off. It really should be done in terms of purchasing power parity.
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It’s statistics. I once proved, with statistics, that bacteria don’t exist because no set of bacterial count data is ever significantly different from zero.
Statistics really only works properly within a fairly narrow range of numbers and when applied to what it was designed for. Bacteria are present in such huge numbers that running a statistical analysis will always end up with a range of possibilities that includes zero. That’s why we take the log values. Statisticians call it a ‘transform’ which is math-speak for ‘a fiddle’.
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That graphic is misleading! Our beer is actually the second most expensive and it is calculated using a median hourly wage (Not the average hourly wage).13 minutes to earn £3.65 (approx) implies that the median hourly wage (the Indian example in the article implies after tax) is £16.84/hour (3.65/13)*60 include taxes at say 30% (20 + 10 N.I.) for easy numbers and you get £20.21 an hour… A quick google indicates the average UK salary is £11.05 after tax. That would put us precisely on the average in that chart at 19.8 minutes…Hmmm, statistics, statistics!
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XX it takes a German earning the national median wage just under seven minutes of work to purchase half a litre of beer at a retail outlet. XX
Take it that average pay is €12 per hour. Is what 20 cents per minute. You can get beer 45 to 50 Cents per 0,5 liter, that make 2,5 minutes per 0,5, NOT seven minutes. (UNLESS any of you out there can improve my maths! :-)) )
Even the chart shows it to be 1,90, and not 7 minutes.
Do these arseholes even LOOK at the graphs before writing?
(UNLESS they have taken the “minimum” wage (which we do NOT have here,) as the “average, which is €8 per hour. And the more expensive beers.)
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When I worked in Oddbins in Brighton the same alkies would be there every morning for thier Tennents Super four pack. Some of them were a bit smelly and thier faces were more blood vessel than skin but they were friendly, harmed nobody and we vallued their custom as much as anyone else. Why can’t people just accept that some folks have different aspirations for they way thier day should unfold.
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I’ve come to the conclusion that the banners and puritans are essentially solipsists. Unlike normal humans they have no true theory of mind and are simply unable to comprehend the notion of other people having different needs and desires from themselves. They may, like psychopaths have learnt to appear normal but it’s an act. Take your comment for example, the bansturbators would look at that and the first thing that would strike them is this ; “we vallued their custom as much as anyone else.” That would immediately be seized on as evidence of self interest (projection ) and a desire to profit from immorality. Whereas most people would take in the whole thing ; “Some of them were a bit smelly and thier faces were more blood vessel than skin but they were friendly, harmed nobody and we vallued their custom as much as anyone else.” Which is
the ability to empathise with another human, something the puritan moraliser is incapable of doing.
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I think you must be right about the solipsistic universes the righteous inhabit. They all possess the same never ending delusion that the things that they disaprove of must be disaproved of day and night without any respite. It is no less than a small corner of Hell these lunatics inhabit. An eternity of defining and shaping their entire existence around the things that they hate.
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“Why can’t people just accept that some folks have different aspirations for they way their day should unfold?”
That should be on a T-shirt. And tattooed on to the head of every self-important busybody out there.
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Why won’t these people just leave us alone? do they want the hospitals full of people living longer with all the illnesses and dementia old age brings? I just cannot see the logic of their position.
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They bump us off when we get too old to squeeze for tax.
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