I could use a how-to on spotting fake vaccine records or passports, especially after they open the border to Americans.
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Very informative. More like this please.
Well if you havent had your code beeped you havent lived!
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If you need special forensic training to spot these counterfeits, wouldn’t it be easier to just carry on being fooled? I never got the impression that bouncers have any problem turning away people they don’t like, regardless of age.
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True enough, from a legal standpoint.
…
I think that legalizing it period would make it less alluring.
The Lure of Forbidden Fruit, & all that.
Same for cannabis, etc.
On another topic entirely, I, for one, don’t remember any brouhaha re: voter i.d. back then.
Perhaps someone should bring this up, the next time one of the Fascists chooses to rant about the subject.
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Buying booze for minors is a spectacularly stupid idea. Car gets wrapped around a tree, you are f-u-c-k-e-d.
We had many creative–some would say, aggressive, ways of buying booze without a valid ID. But the fake ID that cannot be questioned, this is the Golden Ticket. I never had one of those, and now I know why.
Welp…that article is out of date. In my state we have been issued the new Real ID license which is very different from the old licenses. For example, the hologram is the black and white photo of your face on the license.
This is all great - but it doesn’t tell me where to get undetectable ID for when I have to elude the authorities. Wandering the earth like Cane or Dr Banner.
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I had a very good fake for it’s time, from a state a few hundred miles away from where I lived, so people were familiar with them, but not too familiar. I was able to buy at any of the local stores, even the ones that had the reputation for being hard carders.
I made the mistake of driving closer to that state on a holiday (thank you New England blue laws for closing liquor stores here on holidays) and they spotted it immediately.
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It wasn’t the cigar and receding hairline?
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Oh yeah, we got your code beeping right here.
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The legal age in the UK for buying beer and cider used to be 14, if you were with an adult and bought it with a meal. I think it is 16 now. The legal age for drinking any alcoholic drink in a non-public space is five. I’m still almost certain that if you give a 6 year old a bottle of vodka it is child abuse, but giving them a sip of beer or wine, or watering it down, is OK.
I used to buy this when I was a kid.
You could technically get drunk on it, but you would need a bladder the size of a beachball.
For anyone in the US, the British lemonade that is used in shandy is closer to 7up or Sprite than it is to cloudy lemonade.
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That would make shandy more of a Radler than an Alsterwasser.
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One problem is that the US has become “zero tolerance everything”, and that the penalties are ridiculous; not befitting the “crime” in the least.
And the “one age fits all” nature of the laws is equally stupid in dealing with all kinds of kids who reach maturity at vastly different ages.
Not that I think drinking is the wisest pastime, but we can easily see evidence from The War On Some Drugs just how shittily stupid the idea of prohibition is. And drinking age is just another failed implementation of prohibition, one we inherited from intolerant bigots raised with horseshit insane ‘morals’.
How about ending these abusive laws and leaving this job to the parents? Sure, some parents are horrible and will always do the wrong thing for their children, but not all (and honestly, they’re not my problem.) And some kids are stupid assholes; again, not all, and again, they’re not mine to parent, either. But whatever this current “drinking age” thing is that drags bartenders, cops, and courts into what should be a private family issue is 100% shit across the board.
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As someone who grew up in the era when the federal government used highway funds to force all states to raise the drinking age to 21, the drinking age in the USA is set as it is because of the drunk driver media hype of the time, and the blame going on drunk teenage drivers. And the rural nature of many states meant that they felt having a driving license at a young age meant keeping beer out of the hands of those young ruffians. Kids gotta use the car to get to high school, you know.
In Europe, cars were not seen as much as a necessity as they were in the USA, so the crackdown on drunk driving concentrated on blood alcohol levels. You also couldn’t get a driver’s license until 18, so the motor vehicle was considered the biggest factor in the threat.
I’ve also seen articles comparing US and UK cultural approaches to alcohol compared to continental European attitudes, and many have argued that the European approach of not treating alcohol as a rite of passage but gradually easing your children into drinking beer and wine avoided binge drinking. I think it’s been refuted and revised, and attitudes do change, but it is an interesting aspect to look into.
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Honestly, the “European method” worked for me. As I child, I’d get occasional sips of my parent’s drinks, and maybe half a glass of wine at some Christmas family dinners, as I got older. So alcohol wasn’t a big mystery to me (and I wasn’t crazy about the taste of it, in most cases. My uncle-by-marriage got offended when I told him his fancy blackberry liquor tasted like cough syrup. Oh well, he was a pompous jackass.) I never really understood some of my high-school classmates’ fascination with getting drunk, and I didn’t go crazy with drinking once I was of legal age. (Plus I was way too straight-arrow as a teen to even consider a fake ID, and I wouldn’t have known where to get one if I’d wanted one.)
I’m still careful with drinking, even now, because there’s alcoholism in my family tree, and I’ve seen how easy it can be to lose control. But knowing where my limits are, I do indulge sometimes, and so far, so good.
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There’s the fat that low quantities of ethanol are killing the cholera virion, and the production of beer kills the cholera germ, and the alcohol acts a preservative. So giving kids low grade beer was a really good idea in pre-vaccine and pre-antibiotics era.
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Spotting fakes can be the easy part. Because, then what?
I was working at a convenience store in NC the day they started issuing modern plastic cards. I have to assume that some notice went out to everyone with a liquor license. I wish I’d seen a copy of said notice before some kid tried to buy a blunt with his shiny new driver’s license. In the end he had to settle for my assurance that I did actually believe him, but you can’t roll much with that assurance.
Years later in a different job I found myself with the title of Registrar, which made it my responsibility to ensure that the students in our database were actually the students in our database (among other things). It wasn’t a problem if someone didn’t have valid ID, it just meant that the ID card we issued them would have a limited status, with big red letters warning of such. Essentially, we were affirming that the student in the photo claimed their name was this, and definitely passed these courses on these dates.
In most common circumstances, most people wouldn’t double down and argue when called out on a fake ID. But in this circumstance, it seemed like almost a weekly occurrence that someone figured they could out-willpower some annoying bureaucrat. I wish I could claim to have thought of this, but it was somebody at our SC location that started doing this to shut down bullshit that only ever resulted in us starting class late: She would swipe the ID between rows of her commodity Dell keyboard (which was behind the counter, just below the student’s sight line) repeatedly, saying, “Sure, I believe you, but it just won’t scan. You should talk to the DMV about it.”
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