• 8 Posts
  • 165 Comments
Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: October 14th, 2025

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  • All those components are set up so that they function a certain way, more dangerous versions are restricted

    TY for making my point for me, it was really nice of you. Legalization is what allows those manufactured safeguards to exist. Without legalization, there is no way a company is going to sell a still that meets a UL safety metric. Which in turn causes anyone who wants to do this to use a cobbled together rig that’s probably leaking fuel or gases.

    Lots of things that are dangerous are banned or restricted

    And lots of things that are dangerous are not banned or restricted, and are in fact extremely normalized. I could go buy fireworks in a tent on the side of the road, without needing to provide my age or any sort of training – and fireworks are VASTLY more dangerous than distilling.

    Dude distilling 5 gallons of wash with no understanding of how it works, the danger to him or his neighbours, no regulation of the parts or ingredients that go into his setup is a menace and an accident waiting to happen.

    Again, this is a product of prohibition and not having access to safe equipment or information. The cost/barriers to entry for home distilling are also very high. There is a minimum amount of research that you would need to do in order to understand what the procedure is and what equipment you would even need.

    Finally, I will once again state that the dangers of home distilling are extremely overblown. When New Zealand legalized home distilling there were zero reports of methanol poisoning from home-distillation, caused 0.14% of residential fires, and 0 deaths. 1 2 3.

    Someone is literally more likely to have a fire and/or die from an unattended candle.





  • Actually no: there are no courses, licensing, rules, or regulations for a hobbyist (which is who this ruling affects) on the majority of the things that I listed (cars, RC/drones, canning, making kombucha, and even to a certain extent guns. We trust adults to be adults and learn the skills required to do these things because the risk is almost entirely to them.

    If we had to ban everything that had a chance of causing harm to people, shouldn’t we ban gas stoves? Those could cause an explosion if someone was careless and left the gas running.

    A dude distilling 5 gallons of wash in his backyard for his own personal consumption is not the same as a distillery processing 1000 gallons of wash.


  • This is the biggest win for homebrewers since Jimmy Carter.

    Everyone in this thread talking about how people are gonna blow themselves up, but … okay? It’s up to the individual to make sure that they’re being safe and following adequate procedures. It’s not like working on cars, RC/drones (lithium batteries), flying planes, and guns are all perfectly safe hobbies, and those are all very normalized.

    In terms of safety surrounding unwanted product, like methanol, it’s again the person’s responsibility. Much like how it’s up to the canner to make sure they’re not giving people botulism or a kombucha to have only the wanted bacteria.




  • Yes but also no. I agree that steam is only looking out for its own bottom line

    However, they definitely do not fall into the “every action is done to keep profits up” since they’re private they’re not legally required to stay on the ~shareholder value~ train

    Hence why they invested all that money into proton and then open sourced it 🤷 any company that makes meaningful investments in open source is good in my book