Actually, especially for smaller breweries, carbon filtration is extremely common. It still removes chloramines, pesticides, and other off-flavor compounds, and is much cheaper than an RO system. It's true that it won't change the hardness of the water, but if you have naturally soft water you can just add minerals, if needed for the style
Activated carbon will remove the larger chain PFAs, but is not as effective as removing the smaller ones. From the paper:
> Conventional water treatment employed at municipal
drinking water treatment plants have been shown to be nearly
ineffective at removing PFAS. This can leave the burden
and cost of implementing more sophisticated water treatments
to brewers unless public water suppliers implement tertiary
treatment to remove PFAS from finished water prior to
distribution. Anion exchange and activated carbon treatments
have been shown to more effectively remove longer-chain
PFAS and PFSAs but were less effective in removing PFCAS
and the alternative shorter-chain PFAS and PFECAs.
Reverse osmosis treatment showed significant removal of
PFAS of different chain lengths in drinking water, but can be
prohibitive due to high operational costs and energy usage.
In areas with known contamination, beers from macro-
breweries were less likely to have detectable PFAS than craft
beers brewed at a smaller scale, potentially due to more
effective and expensive filtration of tap water at larger
breweries.
Because then parents couldn't just shove a screen in front of their child's face and then proceed to ignore them anymore. Half-kidding, but there are real liability concerns. How much supervision is reasonable? My parents definitely didn't police my every moment on the internet. Actually, quite the opposite
Everyone knows that hackers exist and exploit security lapses. Everyone. You might not know the details and such, but you should responsible enough to at least ask if you are taking people's money. I just don't think the ignorance card is plausible here
> Musk seems to be censoring Twitter all over, support for Israel is boundless but speak up for Palestine and ICE detains you... If "absolute free speech" is curbed by whatever the government likes, then what's the point?
The existence of imperfections isn’t a reason to abandon the principle. Things take time to work thru the courts and such.
At one point, Russia decided to enact anti-extremist legislation similar to your enlightened European hate speech laws. It criminalized hateful speech directed at "identifiable social groups".
Then we found out that "identifiable social groups" include the corrupt police and members of parliament.
Once you open the door to criminalizing ideas, even vile ones, you risk that power being misused later in ways no one intended. Defending the principle of free speech isn’t the same as defending the content of the speech. It’s about protecting the framework that allows us to challenge bad ideas rather than bury them.
And once you open the door of vile ideas being treated as valid information, you risk them becoming the norm.
"Your knowledge is as valid as my ignorance" is a scocietal disease every country is facing right now to varying degrees of severity because bad ideas spread fast.
The thought that bad ideas can be challenged fairly in an open marketplace is a utopia. Most people are not interested in truth. They would rather touch themselves.
Vile ideas are not automatically accepted as 'valid information'. You're assuming that society can't handle challenging ideas while ignoring the possibility that free speech is what allows for those ideas to be openly criticized, debated, and disproven. A robust system of free speech is what actually ensures bad ideas are not given a free pass but are subject to critique and debate
Hard disagree, and I wonder how you can say that when we live during times when society in general is definitely is unable to handle "challenging ideas". Also, far too many times past societies accepted vile ideas as valid information with terrible results.
You are very optimistic that unshackled free speech will ensure that bad ideas are not given a free pass, but in reality bad ideas very often smother the discussion when people adopt a stance of "my ignorance is as valid as your knowledge".
By the way, you applied a suspicious change of rhetorical focus when the original terminology was "vile ideas" and you switched that to "challenging ideas". I'll consider that an accidental slip instead of malice.
> Hard disagree, and I wonder how you can say that when we live during times when society in general is definitely is unable to handle "challenging ideas".
A century ago, mainstream society openly embraced racial hierarchies as scientific fact. Three centuries ago, slavery was not only legal, but morally justified by churches and universities. In 17th-century New England, people were executed for witchcraft based on superstition and mass hysteria. Well into the 20th century, eugenics was considered respectable science across Europe and North America. So I don't think these current times are any worse than they were before in terms of bad ideas existing in the mainstream, at least from a historical perspective. In fact, I'd probably argue it's better.
> Also, far too many times past societies accepted vile ideas as valid information with terrible results.
This is true of any society. The key difference is that they are easier to challenge in a place with strong free speech protections. Bad ideas will always exist, but it's better to test them out in the open rather than let them fester in dark.
> You are very optimistic that unshackled free speech will ensure that bad ideas are not given a free pass, ...
You're right, I am. I believe in a marketplace of ideas because it's better than any alternative that involves gatekeeping truth. The notion that "my ignorance is as valid as your knowledge" is a cultural problem, not a legal one. I trust free speech over any system that relies on a sanctioned arbiter of truth. And I think that protection of people from bad ideas often backfires (see European history and the Catholic Church, McCarthyism, Nazi propaganda, Soviet censorship, etc.)
> I trust free speech over any system that relies on a sanctioned arbiter of truth. And I think that protection of people from bad ideas often backfires (see European history and the Catholic Church, McCarthyism, Nazi propaganda, Soviet censorship, etc.)
I choose to believe that a democratically elected government with proper functioning institutions can regulate speech properly instead.
Absolute freedom is not possible nor desirable to live in a society. And cultural problems should be addressed with regulations. If it was cultural norm to engage in revenge killings, I would very much expect government to step in and stop that, not to take a wishy-washy stance "eh, it is a cultural problem" and handwave it away.
I see unshackled free speech as much more dangerous than that of a democracy being overzealous in speech, as the first can absolutely undermine democracy if enough imbeciles decide to believe in.... erm... "challenging" ideas (and I use those quotes very sarcastically).
A proper democracy being overzealous can be fixed by the democratic process.
> A proper democracy being overzealous can be fixed by the democratic process.
The democratic process can only work if citizens are fully informed on the issues, which is precisely what censorship prevents. It allows complete excision of some viewpoints from political discourse and even actual voting (if parties can be banned on the basis that their platforms contain such and such). Imagine for a moment what happens that your democratic society decides that advocating against hate speech laws is itself hate speech.
> The democratic process can only work if citizens are fully informed on the issues, which is precisely what censorship prevents.
Ah yes, if only citizens could speak that the Holocaust didn't happens and could call black people monkeys, then they would ve fully informed to do Democracy.
> Imagine for a moment what happens that your democratic society decides that advocating against hate speech laws is itself hate speech.
This is some outlandish claim, that would need some serious argument to support how it might come to pass.
A proper democracy with functioning institutions has a lot of checks and balances to avoid outlandish bullshit to become law.
> I choose to believe that a democratically elected government with proper functioning institutions can regulate speech properly instead.
Abuse of free speech has almost always been justified by those very "proper institutions" that you place so much faith in. I'd say you're being a wee bit optimistic about them. One embarrassing example that comes to mind was during the Troubles [1]
> I see unshackled free speech as much more dangerous than that of a democracy being overzealous in speech, as the first can absolutely undermine democracy if enough imbeciles decide to believe in.... erm... "challenging" ideas (and I use those quotes very sarcastically).
> A proper democracy being overzealous can be fixed by the democratic process.
You assume a “proper” democracy won’t go too far, and if it does, democracy will fix it. Yet, speech is what allows people to challenge, protest, and critique. So regulating that speech undermines the very tools needed for democratic correction. Also, free speech is often what prevents overstepping in the first place.
> If it was cultural norm to engage in revenge killings, I would very much expect government to step in and stop that, not to take a wishy-washy stance "eh, it is a cultural problem" and handwave it away.
Indeed, so would I! But there is a difference between violent actions and bad ideas, and there can be laws for violent actions without needing to suppress discussion about them. We don’t need to outlaw speech in order to outlaw violence. Ultimately, I think robust free speech doesn’t undermine democracy but protects it, even if um "challenging ideas" (I'm smirking) are uncomfortable to hear
So add another layer that has to be maintained/debugged when you don't have to?