Be Excellent To Each Other

I'm more in favour of beating the living shit out of stupid drunken twats. Preferably to death.

I'm more in favour of beating the living shit out of stupid drunken twats. Preferably to death.

what's the current definition of 'binge' these days? isn't it something silly like 3 pints or more?

I think for binge you should have to at least surpass the idiocy seen on any episode of Booze Britain.

I wish alcohol was more fatal.

From a business perspective, I really respect pub owners and have no problem with happy hours or other promotions. Time-based offers and discounts for bulk buying are prevalent in ALL forms of business. Why should it be restricted for the sale of alcohol?

Pub owners are merely capitalising on a market with huge demand. It's a free economy and in my eyes totally legal and fine. Nothing would be sold in such a way if there was no demand for it. They're just being businesses, it's legal to consume alcohol, so what's the problem?

Seperate to all that, getting drunk all the time is a stupid, twatworthy thing to do. Fools and their money deserve to be parted, and good on the fucking pubs for taking advantage of all the thick cunts who are more than willing to stump up all their cash on a night out.

I like it, it keeps poor, stupid people poor and stupid. Society needs balance, if everyone scrubbed up and started being intelligent, respectable people, the world would be chaos. Go Darwin!

what's the current definition of 'binge' these days? isn't it something silly like 3 pints or more?

It is also quite acceptable for people to have a complete sense of humour malfunction as far as excessive drinking is concerned when personal circumstances have soured your view of the hard stuff, but it's best not to rain on the parade of the majority who would never dream of saying boo to a goose unless it was a lyric in a song they made up with their friends whilst off their tits on booze.

Also, harsher penalties for pubside GBH and sexual harassment. Broke a shop window? Pay for it, plus some. Screamed drunkenly at passing women? Off to the clink you go. Twatted someone on the way home from the pub? Death.

The six unit thing (for homies, not bitches) is basically down to how much you can throw at your liver in an evening without damaging it. 6 units and you are beginning to kill cells

Also, harsher penalties for pubside GBH and sexual harassment. Broke a shop window? Pay for it, plus some. Screamed drunkenly at passing women? Off to the clink you go. Twatted someone on the way home from the pub? Death.

We've been hearing this "alcohol is more affordable now than it has ever been" thing for a while now. It certainly doesn't ring true based on our own experience of buying booze - which is fairly extensive. So where's the number from?

Actually from the NHS, as it turns out, and the figures behind the assertion can be seen here in pdf. It's interesting stuff.

In fact, as anyone who regularly buys alcohol could tell you, booze is hugely more expensive than it was in 1980. Its price has almost quadrupled, increasing by 367 per cent.

But surely that's true of all prices? Perhaps everything else - food, fuel, other stuff - has increased by an even huger margin, leaving booze comparatively cheap. Maybe that's why the neo-prohibitionist tendency argue that liquor is too affordable?

Well no, actually. Retail prices in general have gone up, but not the way booze has - overall, prices are up by 309 per cent. Alcohol has increased in price substantially more than most things have.

So how in the world is it more affordable than it used to be?

Well - so goes the thinking - it's because we have more money. While on average the price of stuff has tripled since 1980 in pounds and pence, on average we have about six times as many pounds and pence in our household disposable income as we did then - our real household disposable income has effectively doubled. Thus we can afford more stuff than we could back then - more booze, if we choose, though mainly we don't. Percentages of household budget spent on booze are down by a third, indicating that in real terms household expenditure on booze is stable or increasing only slightly.

Still, by rather convoluted logic, alcohol is 69 per cent more affordable - to householders - than it was in 1980. But that's because all retail products are more affordable - most of them much more so than alcohol. Using this sort of ridiculous economic voodoo, any ordinary retail product has become a hundred per cent more affordable than it was in 1980, as opposed to liquor which is up by only 69 per cent.

Hell - let's play this game ourselves. Booze has failed to increase in "affordability" at the same rate as other retail products. It has actually lagged in relative affordability compared to other products.

Yes, you read it here first, people. Booze is not only hugely, inflation-bustingly more expensive than it was: it has actually fallen behind 30 per cent in affordability compared to other retail products since 1980.

I like how he's phrased that as two totally different factors making booze an expensive con, rather than just one number written two different ways.

Yeah, sure, there's a difference between having a quiet pint with a mate or two, and regularly going out purely to get smashed with a view to boasting about the extent to which you were 'hammered' the previous night. My venom is largely reserved for the latter.

Most alcoholics I work with go out of their way not to cause trouble, they just want to have their booze and not bother anyone.

The six unit thing (for homies, not bitches) is basically down to how much you can throw at your liver in an evening without damaging it. 6 units and you are beginning to kill cells.

Most people who cause shit in the high street would do so on half a shandy if that was all they could afford.

The unit thing was set because it sounded good, not because of any medical fact...

Real ales although very tasty are normally a lot stronger.

Entirely true. As was the "five a day" thing for fruit and vegetables.