Utah Mulls a Database of Bar Customers 623
sundancing alerts us to a political dustup in the state of Utah, which doesn't have bars like the rest of the country does. Instead, "private clubs" require you to fill out an application and pay a fee if you want to have a drink outside the home. While there is pressure to reform this arrangement — one argument is that it's bad for tourism — the head of the state senate recently floated a proposal to create a database of every bar patron's visits. Now Utah's governor has called that idea "almost Orwellian," adding that "it's very difficult to legislate adulthood," and its supporters seem to be backing off. The idea of requiring bar patrons to swipe their drivers licenses as proof of age is still on the table, though.
Holy moly... (Score:2, Interesting)
*boggles*
Bad for what tourism? (Score:3, Interesting)
Out of curiosity (Score:2, Interesting)
I checked out a database on violent crime broken down by state. Utah's overall violent crime rate is less than half that of the nation, and murder rate 1/3 of that of the nation as a whole.
So while I don't like the "big brother" mentality, the moral code does have concrete benefits.
Re:Yeah... Ok (Score:5, Interesting)
Utah still has(Had) a firing squad as method of execution until not long ago IIRC
What's wrong with that? If you believe in the death penalty then I don't see firing squads as being any worse than lethal injection. Hell, I'd actually prefer the firing squad myself -- I'm afraid of needles. If you don't believe in the death penalty then it seems that you shouldn't be limiting your criticism to Utah.
Combine with RealID and... (Score:5, Interesting)
Say what?!?!?
Ok...this is really getting scary. Why should I have to swipe my drivers license (remenber, it was given as proof of driving certification, tax..etc) to get a drink? And why the hell should anyone know when I go to a bar (or anywhere else for that matter)?
Now...I'm thinking...if the RealID thing does finally come to fruition, well now...this national database would have some good data to throw in it. Let's cut benefits on (possibly coming) your national healthcare. Since you drink, and are exposed to smoke (well, you still can at most bars I go to)...you are a health risk and we the govt. won't pay as much for you. Or even with private insurance, I'm sure they'll get ahold of this sooner or later.
Amd..once the populace accepts swiping for bar entry...well, I'm sure they won't mind swiping for entry into drug stores, that would help gather your meds usage. How about grocery store for purchases, that way we can track your unhealthy eating habits.
And then of course...no need for EZPass...your nifty new drivers license will have RFID...so, that will make it easier for you....we can track your travels.
Ok, some of this sound far fetched? It might not be....the govt. lawnakers start small enough, but, pretty much every law passed has been expanded or abused.
In discussions yesterday, I recalled that when they first started passing seatbelt laws, they stated emphatically that the cops could NOT pull you over for not wearing one, but, if they pulled you over for something else, like running a stop sign, and saw you weren't wearing one....they could cite you.
Well, a few years later, once that was agreeable....they changed it, to being able to pull you over if they see you without one.
A funny story about private bars (Score:1, Interesting)
This story is at least 3rd-hand...
Back in the mid-20th-century, Houston, Texas, was dry. Hotels could have "members only" bars for their guests.
Well, a Baptist preacher was staying at a hotel with a bar. Back in those days Baptist preachers were anti-alcohol, and this preacher was no exeption.
For reasons I don't remember, another person, let's call him Joe, asked him why he was a member of a private bar.
Well, the preacher was incensed. He would never do something so un-Christian as to join a private booze club.
Joe said "I'll prove it" and had the hotel bar show the preacher the membership list. His name was on it.
The Reverend was fit to be tied. He demanded that his name be stricken from the book immediately.
There was one slight problem:
By law, the bar membership list included everyone on the hotel registry. He was a guest at the hotel.
I heard this story decades after it happened. It's still funny.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Phelps poll (Score:5, Interesting)
I saw an amusing poll on ESPN about Michael Phelps, who recently admitted to using pot.
Across the country about 75%-90% said they thought no less of the best swimmer in the world for using a recreational drug.
Except in Utah where almost 50% said they thought less of him. They are very detached from the mainstream.
actually (Score:4, Interesting)
Lethal injection is considered humane because no pain is felt.
There's a fair bit of debate in this point, leading to a Supreme Court case. Lethal Injection Potentially Not Painless [newscientist.com]
Re:Yeah... Ok (Score:5, Interesting)
Lethal injection is considered humane because no pain is felt.
Says who? If you believe the anti-death penalty crowd it's horrible agonizing pain. I don't really know who to believe as every side has an agenda and we can't exactly ask the people who were executed what it was like. I suspect the reality is probably somewhere in the middle of the 'no pain' and 'worse than being burned alive' arguments.
I know it's not manly and tough but...
*shrug*, for me at least it doesn't have anything to do with that. I'd honestly rather be shot than strapped to a table and killed with a needle. A head shot would be even better and probably painless (the brain is destroyed faster than the pain receptors can fire) but I'd still take the shots to the heart over the needle. To each their own I guess....
Civilized societies have long moved towards executions that are as respectful of life as possible, as opposed to some societies which still publicly rape and stone to death.
Raping and/or stoning would be cruel and unusual punishment. Being shot isn't, IMHO.
Re:Yeah... Ok (Score:3, Interesting)
In the present state, firing squad is probably actually more humane, in terms of intensity and duration of suffering. It is a lot messier, so it looks more barbaric; but anybody who measures humaneness by how queasy the bystanders are is Doing It Wrong.
Re:Yeah... Ok (Score:5, Interesting)
Societies that have an executioner who takes them into a room where no one can see and makes the person disappear are the barbaric ones, while those societies where the citizens stone the person to death are the civilized ones. It has nothing to do with the pain suffered by the dying, and everything to do with the pain suffered by the living.
Killing people doesn't make you manly and tough. But hiring someone else to do it for you does makes you cowardly and small.
Re:Out of curiosity (Score:1, Interesting)
So while I don't like the "big brother" mentality, the moral code does have concrete benefits.
And yet the murder rate in state of Utah is still almost twice that of say, the province of Quebec in Canada, which has one of the most liberal societies in North America
In 2007 the murder rate in Utah was 2.2 per 100K people in Utah versus 1.2 per 100K in Quebec. For comparison, Quebec has three times the population of Utah.
Re:Holy moly... (Score:5, Interesting)
This is only true if either A) the "club" is otherwise totally empty, or B) you are such a complete and total douchebag that nobody would want you to come into the bar. The reason is because there is a provision in this stupid law that allows any club member to sponsor you as a guest, apparently for free. And while I am not a member of any such clubs so I don't know exactly how small the "membership fee" is, I am told that at many such clubs the fee is laughably small. The more exclusive ones (the fun clubs in Park City, for example) charge a higher fee because they can.
I live in Utah, and while I am not a frequent bar patron, I do go on occasion. The first time I went out to a bar after moving here, I was shocked to find out that I would not be allowed to enter without a membership or being sponsored by a member. Then the door girl explained that you just ask anybody to sponsor you, and they will. She asked the next guy in for me. "Hey, will you sponsor this guy?" He replied, yeah sure, like it was an everyday thing.
There are social benefits to this. Since frequent bar patrons have an incentive to become members of their favorite "club", the clubs seem to gravitate a certain type of person far more than in other places I have lived or visited. In other words, the cool clubs really are cool, and are often completely lacking in douchebags which is a welcome change from just about anywhere else in the world.
I may be wrong on this, but I believe if there is an event at the club on any given night, the membership requirement is waived. The dance clubs capitalize on this by hosting "events" every night of the week with a cover charge, so they essentially circumvent the law.
It's unfortunate that the Utah state legislosers play such a tremendous role in perpetuating oddball stereotypes about this state. In reality, most Mormons are very nice people, and most non-Mormon Utahns, in their ever-increasing numbers, do a great job of being non-Mormons.
Re:Out of curiosity (Score:1, Interesting)
Try living here. I'm born and bread as a Utahn, albeit non-Mormon. The military and another opportunity has led me away, but I'm back again. Each time I have returned, it becomes more difficult. Adults here are treated like children and although on the surface it seams a "Clean" and "Moral" place, much is not published or is covered as to not tarnish the "Faith's" reputation. If you do live here and DON'T belong to "The Club", you are surely a cast out as are your children. And by creating this division, the rebellion is abnormally strong and over the top. Do a little research on "Straight Edgers" and then quote your databases.
Re:Solutions (Score:3, Interesting)
If smart card chips (not RFIDs, per se) were less reliable that might work. The reality is that they're highly reliable and durable, so just about the only way to make one cease functioning is to deliberately destroy it.
That being the case, if they decide to require chip-based age verification, the law will just state that allowing an individual to drink in a bar without having electronically-verified his age is an infraction -- one that might result in withdrawal of the establishment's liquor license.
A related anecdote: About 10 years ago I attended the CardTech SecurTech conference, where the attendee badges were smart cards that were used for various purposes. Among them, if you'd paid for the full conference and were entitled a copy of the conference proceedings, that information was stored in your chip. When you retrieved your copy, that fact was also stored, so you could only get one (yeah, it was mostly a gimmick). Well, I decided to test the system. After having gotten my copy of the conference proceedings, I planted both thumbnails in the center of the chip contact and bent sharply to break the chip underneath (not hard to do, but there's really no way to do it unintentionally). Sure enough, they apologetically gave me another copy of the proceedings.
A couple years later, I tried the same thing, but they had been clued in. The guy just looked at me and said "Busted your chip, huh? Sorry, only one copy per person."
Re:Holy moly... (Score:5, Interesting)
Social gatherings in any place outside homes and bars (say, an art show) is limited to ONE glass of Wine per person, only 3x a year. We have something called the gallery stroll (through the downtown art galleries) and they cannot serve alcohol other than those 3x a year.
Bars and clubs also MUST buy liquor from the state, too. So bars cannot get a volume discount from say, jack daniels, and they pay the same price that any local pays for alcohol, with the high taxes and all.
Then, we have the limit on the amount of alcohol in a drink. you can only have 1 oz of hard liquor in a drink, mixed with 1.5 oz of non-alcoholic flavoring. As far as I know (I don't go out to drink here, it's too expensive/hard) you cannot mix alcohol types, so essentially, no Long Island Ice Teas or any other multiple spirit drinks.
The most frustrating thing about the database was reported in the news as "The Latter day saints church has no problem with changing the laws to make a database". That's not news! It's an incidental, not the reason, but it's well known that state legislators always meet with Church leaders before making changes like this.
Re:Phelps poll (Score:3, Interesting)
I think much less of Michael Phelps for apologizing. He did absolutely nothing wrong.
Re:Yeah... Ok (Score:3, Interesting)
The three drug cocktail used in executions can be abused, horrifyingly, by the person administering it to cause terrible suffering. Some executions take an hour or two to complete. There certainly exist sickos who would just love to inflict this kind of horror; and then there also exists others I'd still call sickos who think engaging in an hour or two of horrible torture is something that the convicted justly deserves.
Obviously I'm not accusing all executioners of being monsters. But I see no reason for anything that can be "played with" to be part of executions. A single drug, a highly potent long acting barbiturate, for example, that is administered in overwhelmingly large overdose and that would have the convict unconscious in seconds and dead in a very very few minutes would take away this three-drug sicko game.
I believe that a recent US Supreme court decision said something like there was not enough proof that anything horrible was going on, and so they didn't order any change to lethal injection as a form of execution.
How willfully blind.
The fact that it's *possible* to turn the three-drug regimen into something horrible guarantees that the sickos will try.
Suddenly the firing squad option seems pretty humane by comparison!
Ever bought a drink in Utah? (Score:4, Interesting)
I have, and it's a puzzling experience. I was there on IT business for a week, about a year before they hosted the Olympics.
In the area around Park City, you didn't need to join the "private club." At a casual Italian place, we all wanted to order a beer. You couldn't say to the server, "What do you have on tap?" She replied by bringing a beer menu because it wasn't appropriate (perhaps illegal?) for her to actually discuss the alcoholic beverages with us.
We did the "private club" thing at a very good steakhouse in Salt Lake City. I believe it was $10 for the "membership." If you ordered a mixed drink--any mixed drink--the server automatically said, "Would you like a sidecar with that?" (A sidecar being an additional measured shot of whatever booze was involved.) Martinis arrived in glasses only 3/4 full because the hooch was so precisely measured.
The freakish thing about it was that, because it was a "private club," it was perfectly OK to smoke anywhere--right at the table, right next to a table that might or might not have been hosting smokers. No problem. So the other big Mormon no-no, tobacco, is apparently not quite as regulated.
My observation over the week were that the Mormons among our hosts had no problems at all with our ordering a drink, beer, or wine at dinner. The company hosted us at a very nice private dinner party on our last evening, and alcohol was readily available. I chose not to drink that evening to conform to their sensibilities, then screwed up by ordering an iced tea.
Re:A serious question... (Score:2, Interesting)
I can address the "which tourists would join a club" question. I used to be a sales rep in the outdoor industry, for tents, backpacks, boots, whatnot. The industry's twice-yearly trade show was in Salt Lake City, so I would spend the greater part of a week in SLC twice a year. During that time, it's really nice to be able to grab a beer with your partners, or your clients, or your friends from the other side of the country you only see twice a year...
fwiw, we rarely got hassled to "join" a club. I don't know if they relaxed the rules during those weeks in the face of thousands of heathens coming in from the outside, or if they tired of hearing each of those heathens saying, "Private membership club wot wot?" but only once that I recall did we have to sign up as members. And that was actually pretty funny - my buddy is a smartass, and went on a riff about what benefits we could expect, when do they mail the newsletter, is there a profit-sharing option, and so on - the waitress was lost.
Some oddities did exist, though: iirc, you could not order pitchers of anything, only individual drinks. You could only have one drink at a time, so if you ordered "another round", the server could not set the new drink down in front of you until you drained the first one or gave it to the server. And all the beer was 3.2, which is basically beer for people who like to pee a lot.
Re:Yeah... Ok (Score:5, Interesting)
STAHL: If someone's in custody, as in Abu Ghraib, and they are brutalized, by a law enforcement person - if you listen to the expression "cruel and unusual punishment," doesn't that apply?
SCALIA: No. To the contrary. You think - Has anybody ever referred to torture as punishment? I don't think so.
STAHL: Well I think if you're in custody, and you have a policeman who's taken you into custody-
SCALIA: And you say he's punishing you? What's he punishing you for? - When he's hurting you in order to get information from you, you wouldn't say he's punishing you. What is he punishing you for?"
Evolution in Action (Score:3, Interesting)
From a Canadian viewpoint, one of the fascinating things about the U.S. is that, in many ways, it's composed of a few dozen political experiments, all going on at once. Each succeeds to the extent that people choose to live in a particular state and thrive there.
Utah is not New York. They could be on different planets, and yet they are both populated by people who call themselves Americans. The opportunities for comparative anthropology are immense.
Re:Ob (Score:2, Interesting)
Seriously, if somebody gets all huffy about somebody cracking a joke about their religion, they must not be that secure in their beliefs.
Well, at the end of the day, most of the believers are not sure at all on what they believe. This is not the question.
I have a problem with taxes exemption, circumcision of babies (they cannot consent), and all this crap. If we are allowed to make fun of it, maybe people will start to realize how crazy these beliefs are.
My opinion is that we (the whole secular world) should stop giving religion a high status. They are business, and should have to follow the rules.
Re:Phelps poll (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes.
I too would like the identity of the "squealer" to be exposed.
It's at least as valid a news story as printing the photo was.
It has the feel of a real pipsqueak seeking disproportionate revenge.
Hey, isn't that the same psychology that those Virgina Tech/Columbine etc.
tragedies have in common?
Maybe the school where this photo was taken really DOES need to investigate.
You're All Detached from the Mainstream (Score:3, Interesting)
I've yet to come across any youthful geek-goth-emo-indy-gamer-progressive-wirehead-gearhead whatever who views him or herself as "the mainstream." Everybody is just too cool for the room, proud to be part of that hip 10% who think or do something a different way. To criticize the people of Utah for being "detached from the mainstream" is the height of hypocrisy.
In fact, in a nation of talkers, nobody walks the walk like the Utah folk. You may not agree with the way they live their lives -- in fact, that's kinda the point, ennit? -- but you gotta respect their capacity for shaping their world into their worldview. I mean, they carved out a goddam state for themselves, they make the laws, and if you don't like it, stay the fuck out. Let's see the Gays, Catholics, Muslims, Libertarians, Han-Shot-Firsters try that and succeed.
I may not agree with every aspect of their lifestyle or beliefs, but I do like the way they get things done.
Re:Ob (Score:3, Interesting)
Dallas (Score:1, Interesting)
A few days ago I walked into a sport bar in Dallas. I was asked to show my driver license at the entrance, which seemed reasonable. Then the guy swiped my card, without asking permission. Then he handed me a print-out with my name and address and asked me to sign that I promise to be well behaved while inside the bar, or something of the sort.
We walked out and found a more reasonable bar.
Re:Wait... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Yeah... Ok (Score:4, Interesting)
Because animals are usually put down with a massive overdose of pentobarbital, which effectively turns their brain off. I had to have one of our cats put down last year - she was unconscious before the vet had completed the injection and dead less than 15 seconds later, with no signs of any discomfort.
This business of using a cocktail of drugs to paralyze and ultimately stop the heart of the condemned is just ridiculous. I don't know that pentobarbital overdose in humans works the same way as it does in animals, but there's got to be a better way. It's not pretty, but frankly a gunshot to the back of the head seems a lot more humane than most execution methods used in the US today.
Re:Ever bought a drink in Utah? (Score:3, Interesting)
>then screwed up by ordering an iced tea.
So very complicated.
Iced tea isn't okay because it's still tea. But Doctrine & Covenants 89:9 specifically says "And again, hot drinks are not for the body or belly." Cold tea isn't listed: it's been included by association with hot tea. But at the same time, Doctrine & Covenants 89:12 says "Yea, flesh also of beasts and of the fowls of the air, I, the Lord, have ordained for the use of man with thanksgiving; nevertheless they are to be used sparingly" -- and you try and find a vegetarian Mormon movement, or even a leaning that way in Utah.
I guess all religions are masses of selective enforcement (look at mainstream Christianity's dismissal of homosexuality, while they ignore similar prohibitions against cutting their hair) but the Latter Day Saints have some particularly odd-looking bits of rulemaking, at least to my eyes.
Re:Ob (Score:4, Interesting)
Or they're just not assholes like you. (Score:2, Interesting)
Seriously, if somebody gets all huffy about somebody cracking a joke about their religion, they must not be that secure in their beliefs.
That or they hold their beliefs sacred and important. Perhaps there is nothing in your life worthy of reverence or respect, but there are some people on the planet that wrap their time around more important things than just their work and their favorite Monday night tv shows. Finding your mockery of their lives' foundations to be rude, disrespectful, and distasteful isn't insecurity on their part, it's complete inconsideration on yours. Have you ever had the balls to tell someone "Dude, that's not funny." or do you take your lessons from 14-year-olds on what is and is not appropriate? What kind of a man has to make fun of someone else's belief system? Seriously?