Minimizing teen drinking is all very well, but I despise the permission-seeking society we've ended up with with you have to show ID in all kinds of places and beg for permission to exist.
Last winter my wife was ill with a cold. I stuck my credit card in my pocket and went to the drugstore to buy a box of Theraflu, an over-the counter decongestant. They wouldn't sell it to me without ID and when I protested this they grabbed the box and told me to get out of the store or they would call over their armed security guy. This was a corporate change, I had bought the same product many times before without ever being asked for ID.
People are forced to ask permission far more today than a few decades ago, and everyone is treated like a suspect if they object. I don't know who's more contemptible, the petty authoritarians or the people meekly giving up their privacy and dignity to get permission to engage in the most ordinary activities.
If it was the “real” Theraflu, which contains pseudoephedrine, then it happened because all sales of products that contain pseudoephedrine are tracked. It’s to prevent it from being used in bulk as a raw material to make meth.
Most stores sell non-pseudoephedrine versions of the same medications that usually have phenylephrine which does not require showing and tracking your ID. But anyone whose taken it know that phenylephrine is a poor substitute and barely acts as a decongestant.
The worst I've encountered of this type of head-in-the-sand logic was in NZ. They have a law that if a person buys alcohol with companions, the clerk will check the IDs of all of them, not just the buyer's. Presumably this is to stop underage kids having an older friend buy them booze. In reality obviously, teens without IDs just wait outside and literally 100% of the times this law is applied is when an over-age-but-without-ID is accompanying someone shopping for some dinner wine. Like me and my ex gf...
I couldn't agree more and I see that this is more prevalent in the US than most other countries.
I've lived abroad for sometime now and last time I went home to California to visit, I went to a restaurant to have a beer and dinner with my dad.
I've been gone for so long, I no longer have a drivers license or ID except for my passport, which I don't carry around with me.
I tried to order a beer and they refused. I was very upset as I'm 35 and obviously not a kid. I was just trying to have a beer and catch up with my dad.
Just a huge lack of sensibility in the US these days. They would never do this in 90% of the world. Unless of course you're obviously young.
I would suggest that the problem here is corporatism rather than authoritarianism. The store will always have made a judgement call over whether you were responsible enough to be sold certain medications. What seems to have changed is the removal of that authority from the local shop workers, which has been centralised into a bureaucratic process. Scenarios like this are one reason why I believe we should proactively bias our economy against large organisations and in favour of smaller ones.
I do find it funny that many US-Americans online joke about the UK having TV licence by asking if we "have a loicence" for various unrelated things, while the US seems obsessed with providing driving licences for all sorts of every-day activities.
UK resident here, and I'm pretty sure I've only ever once been asked for ID for alcohol -- and that was at a private work event where everyone was definitely over 18 (and I was 38 and not drinking).
I've never been asked for ID for either OTC or prescription medicine, and while I obviously need to present a passport to travel internationally, the airline doesn't need to see it. And all my recent travel has been domestic, and not needed ID.
(Since I turned 18, the government scheme for when to ask for ID for alcohol has ratcheted up from nothing to "Think 21" and on to "Think 25" so a younger me would probably have needed to show ID at least a bit. But I don't think that's entirely unreasonable)
It's gotten ridiculous. The drinking age here is 19. Anywhere that sells alcohol is required to ID anyone that appears to be 30 or under. By the time you're 30 you haven't been 19 for 11 years.
I've been refused for having expired ID, despite the picture very obviously being me, and my age very obviously being well over the legal age.
My wife's been refused because apparently her federally issued citizenship card, with a photo that showed she was well over age wasn't apparently good enough.
I actually remember one time when i was fairly young, early 20's, I'd let my license expire because I wasn't driving and couldn't be bothered to renew it at the time. I got refused at the liquor store and there was an old guy behind me. He just started ranting at the cashier about how I'm obviously legal age and how you don't need a license to drink and all this stuff. The cashier actually relented and sold it to me after, but that old guy's rant always stuck with me since.
And, it's made me notice how more and more, it's not even about how old you are, it doesn't seem to be about protecting minors, it just seems to be a way of training people to provide ID any time regardless of the reason.
A store, at least a sane one, would never refuse from making a sale and wouldn't make it hard to make such a sale.
What the store is doing is not preventing teens from buying Alcohol or Tobacco, it's simply covering its ass. There is a certain liability with certain transactions. In that case, the store covers. If it can't cover, it doesn't make the transaction as the liability is too high for whatever profit there is.
I'd encountered a similar incident some years ago. I was fine with showing an ID, but when the clerk then tried to take it from my hand, I held it firmly.
I left my purchase at the counter and went elsewhere to buy herbal teas.
Subsequent research suggests that few cold remedies are effective at all (though decongestants can improve breathing). Teas with slippery elm and eucalyptus seem at least somewhat effective, don't require IDs, and are not meth precursors.
On why / how older generations may be primed to object: I remember reading a science fiction story in the late 1970s / early 1980s, a short in a compilation (likey a Hugo or similar award collection), in which a data system with universal identification system, with one of the designers of the system being given the opportunity to opt out.
There’s no world without identity, reputation, and trust. It’s just that they’re either systematized and scalable, or informal. Systematized has a lot of things going for it over informal; for example, the pharmacist isn’t checking “do I know his family and is their reputation in the community a good one?” or “does he have the skin color, facial features, and clothing of an upstanding citizen?” It is very specifically, how much pseudoephedrine have you already purchased? I call that progress.
I don't consider myself a conspiracy theory type of guy but I can see why people are quoting Revelation 13:16 more and more as e-payments and e-id becomes harder to avoid.
The most ridiculous example of this is that I was forced to show ID to buy alcohol-free beer… To be fair the cashier also thought it was ridiculous but she couldn’t proceed without scanning some sort of ID in the system.
I was in a hotel today, where I was staying with my family, in a small 20sqm room.
When we went to the restaurant to have breakfast, they adamantly refused to remove the clear plastic partition dividing the table in two.
We couldn’t move it to the side, we couldn’t move it anywhere else. It had to physically separate my wife and I. To what purpose, I have no clue.
Oh, we’re both vaccinated. But it is corporate policy, so nothing we (or the staff) can do, even though anyone with a brain could see that it was pointless.
Some advice you never asked for: in that situation, protesting often makes things worse. Learning a little bit of negotiation and sales is an invaluable investment in life.
A simple you seem concerned about selling this to the wrong people / I'm about to make your day a little bit more difficult / you probably think I'm being unreasonable / is it absolutely impossible for me to come home with the medication my wife expects me to? / I don't want you to do something you're uncomfortable with / how can I explain this to my wife? can go a long way.
I worked at a project on automated border gates a while back and those automated scanners are really interesting.
They usually scan the document in several stages using different light sources to check UV/ IR / visible light features and sometimes illuminated from different angles but usually with a fixed camera position.
This leads to the interesting effect that you could present different images in quick succession to show the correct image for each spectrum even if you don't have a document that can appear correct in all spectral ranges at once.
You can't obviously do that by hand but we ended up using a display (even a high dpi smartphone) that synced up to the scanning process for security testing.
The thing that gets me is that in order to get one of these dandy IDs with the holograms, micro lettering, and laser cutting is a birth certificate and an electric bill. My birth certificate is hand typed on an IBM Selectric typewriter on common security paper and the only real security feature is the embossed emblem of the rural county of the rural state I was born - and unless you have a sample to compare with you really can’t validate. Most utility bills are printed on cheap lightweight paper by a common laser printer and the only security feature might be a bit of color or a slightly non-standard size. Once you have a drivers license you are only a fee payment away from a passport.
Granted I might get a lot more scrutiny if I walk into the DMV wearing an El Tri t-shirt and speaking with an accent but barring that it seems a very low bar to turn a crappy hand-typed 50s birth certificate into a modern secure ID.
When I was in college, the laws were not quite so strict as they are now: in that state, persons over 18 could purchase 3.2 beer (3.2% alcohol by volume). Still, a fraternity or fraternities would bring in a fake-ID manufacturer every fall. Somebody on the student paper wanted to do an article on it. But his boss or bosses had had such a fake id. The article never ran.
Let me add that the age of drinking was set to 21 across the country because the Reagan administration did not wish to make airbags mandatory. It was argued that raising the drinking age would produce an equivalent or greater savings in life compared to mandating airbags in new cars. The Department of Transportation could withhold funds from any state that allowed those under 21 to purchase alcoholic beverages.
Those of you younger than I am will know how much effect raising the drinking age really had. My impression is, Not much.
This author is almost as skilled as the staff at my local AMC Theatre, where I was a bystander to a woman getting denied a beer on account of her Washington, D.C. driver's license not being a "state-issued ID".
Why do bouncers in the US enjoy looking at IDs so much, even for OBVIOUSLY adult people? In Austria and Germany, you don't usually get asked for your id, unless you look underage AND the clerk/bouncer is in the mood to check.
When I was clubbing in New York, the bouncer would even control my id very closly when I went back in after a smoke. It was cold, he saw me leave, he saw I wasn't wearing more than a t-shirt in the cold night. Yet he took 20 seconds to check my passport. People tell me I look like 35.
I'm in the UK and it always perplexed me why the USA drinking ID laws are quite so strict. Surely people are going to get booze one way or another, and the idea is that by having some level of ID you're stopping most people from drinking underage in a bar? Most people over here start drinking in parks with mates around 13-16 and it's not big deal, if anything in my opinion it's safer they drink in pubs and bars where people can keep an eye on them.
I Reveal My Attributes (IRMA) proves things like age without giving up SSN or whatever. I don't know the details but I've been hearing about it from nerds for years so I'm assuming there's a solid signature scheme behind it or some way to prove you're not carrying your of-age friend's phone.
Doesn't seem like anyone's interested in rolling this out though... something something proof of vaccination in the EU without compromising privacy, perfect solution mumble mumble...
This would be great and all, but all parties who are in a position to choose to implement this kind of system or to keep the status quo are already motivated to keep (and expand) the existing systems, for any number of reasons. Everybody (except the end users) loves to keep that juicy metadata and incidental logs of everything.
The biography “Genius” has a picture of Richard Feynman’s New Mexico drivers license from WWII. Under name it just shows “Engineer #123” (can’t remember actual number) and address is “Special List”.
The sooner we use PKI for identification in some oauth2 like system (where we can choose to redact irrelevant information such as our name or address) the better.
Brisbane Australia scans ID cards on entry to nightclubs (I think there’s a control where if you’re booted from one club you’re barred from all for the night). I’m all for a safe nightlife, but good luck asking a bouncer what their data retention, data privacy, and operational/technical security are without getting laughed out of the cue.
I've left parties because they go to clubs that scan your ID and take your photo before you can enter on several occasions. Cryptographically verifiable identification is not a good idea, regardless of intentions.
The German ID card works something like that. The fields you as a vendor are approved for, you can make either required or optional server-side. The user can then choose what they want to add or to abort process. It can be read either with a pin that's printed on it, or with your Personal six digit pin, depending on use case.
You can tell it to just do an age check (has completed nth year) or a place check (lives in community with x ID) and it'll just return yes or no. There's also a pseudonym function that returns a unique ID per card+vendor combination (so the same vendor can tell it's the same ID again, but a different vendor would receive a different ID).
I can't see it used in night clubs though. There's a staggering amount of requirements you have to meet in order to receive certification to go to one of the handful of service providers that meet even more requirements to run a secure server that are connected to the PKI allowed to talk to the ID card.
The item you referred to as "fake passport" is a Swedish national ID card. While not a passport, it will double as one when traveling within the European Union. How did you come across it?
When I was a kid, we would make fake IDs using a huge poster board. We used pinstriping meant for cars to make the "grid" that all the text went into, rub-on letters for all the text, and a highlighter to draw "see through" stuff like the state seal. Then, you cut out the space where your photo went and actually held it in front of your face. A friend takes photos from various distances, then you pick the photo that's closest to the size of an actual license. They worked, even with the obvious flaws they had, because the bouncers really just wanted plausible proof that they had checked.
Having read this, I went and found my Global Entry[1] card. It has remarkably few of the security features mentioned: it's clearly machine cut and has visible laminate layers, and the raised features are incredibly easy to miss. I've used this card to enter and leave the United States multiple times, but every bartender thinks it's fake.
Oh, and my picture on it is laughably bad. I distinctly remember the border agent using a consumer Logitech webcam to take it.
It's interesting to observe the process of bartenders or club bouncers in USA verifying foreign driver licenses, esp. if someone looks like they are in their 30s or older.
A person turns the driver license around a few times, too quick to read anything on it and gives it back to you, or they ask you where the birth date is and quickly check whether the four-digit number you pointed them to is smaller than whatever the current cut-off date is.
This was how it was done in 2008 at least, when I bartended. Our bouncers were very, very good at identifying fake ID’s from almost any state. Sometimes when they confiscated them, the people would call the police and the police would look at the ID and hand it back (there’s not a lot of verification that can be done in the field). This is despite that the ID was, in fact, 100% fake - often our friends who were staff at other bars who were drinking as “regular” customers could confirm that they admitted in private it was fake afterwards.
Depending on the night we’d instruct the bouncers to be either more strict or less strict about checking ID’s. Everyone’s paycheck came from the tips so if it was too quiet then staff might not be able to pay rent. If it was too crazy, staff might get hurt.
Yes, technically serving minors is “strict liability” but the city police didn’t enforce it that way. If someone had a reasonable quality fake ID it would let us off the hook as far as the usual cops were concerned. Obviously it wouldn’t help us if the alcohol enforcement agency specifically showed up that night (very very rare) or if an underage drinker died in a drunk driving accident (never happened thank god).
Our bouncers were better than police at checking fake ID’s because:
1) they check many orders of magnitude more ID’s than cops ever do
2) part of our on boarding is to give the new bouncers a pile (200+) of fake ID’s to study which we had because we confiscated them. These included real ID’s which we confiscated because they were being used by not-the-owner of the ID. Then 1-3 months later they are tested against a different set of fake/real ID’s and needed to get some absurdly high % correct.
They get huge fines from the state alcoholic beverage office. This is strict liability, and punishment can be gigantic fines and revocation of the alcohol selling license. So, intent doesn’t matter in most states and no matter how real an id appeared, selling underage creates these consequences.
I mean really the objective is to show that you put in an effort that was good enough for the state inspector. Most places that check ID don’t care if it’s actually fake just that an effort was made
When I was 19, I had a perfectly valid California ID card for my 23 year old cousin who kinda looked like me. A bouncer in Seattle confiscated it because "every California license I've seen says 'driver's license,' not ID card."
Weird that ID's still don't have, say, QR-codes or something similar with a cryptographic-signature to verify that the info's accurate. Or chips like with credit-cards. Lots of different ways stuff like that could be done.
Most folks don't want to share the roads with drunken teenage drivers.
Don't get me wrong -- some teens are probably more than responsible enough to be trusted with controlling their own drinking. However, it's those that aren't that're the concern.
Parents generally don't want to have to worry about bars being allowed to serve their kids, either. Maybe not all parents feel that way, though I'd guess that those who'd be against their kids drinking would tend to have stronger feelings on the topic than those who'd be okay with it.
Here in the US you need to be 17 to enlist in the armed forces. If a 17 year-old is mature enough to go to war, to potentially kill and be killed, then they're old enough to drink.
[+] [-] anigbrowl|4 years ago|reply
Last winter my wife was ill with a cold. I stuck my credit card in my pocket and went to the drugstore to buy a box of Theraflu, an over-the counter decongestant. They wouldn't sell it to me without ID and when I protested this they grabbed the box and told me to get out of the store or they would call over their armed security guy. This was a corporate change, I had bought the same product many times before without ever being asked for ID.
People are forced to ask permission far more today than a few decades ago, and everyone is treated like a suspect if they object. I don't know who's more contemptible, the petty authoritarians or the people meekly giving up their privacy and dignity to get permission to engage in the most ordinary activities.
[+] [-] koolba|4 years ago|reply
Most stores sell non-pseudoephedrine versions of the same medications that usually have phenylephrine which does not require showing and tracking your ID. But anyone whose taken it know that phenylephrine is a poor substitute and barely acts as a decongestant.
[+] [-] air7|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kilroy123|4 years ago|reply
I've lived abroad for sometime now and last time I went home to California to visit, I went to a restaurant to have a beer and dinner with my dad.
I've been gone for so long, I no longer have a drivers license or ID except for my passport, which I don't carry around with me.
I tried to order a beer and they refused. I was very upset as I'm 35 and obviously not a kid. I was just trying to have a beer and catch up with my dad.
Just a huge lack of sensibility in the US these days. They would never do this in 90% of the world. Unless of course you're obviously young.
[+] [-] nicoburns|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JackFr|4 years ago|reply
https://www.deadiversion.usdoj.gov/meth/#sales
[+] [-] MatthewWilkes|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewaylett|4 years ago|reply
I've never been asked for ID for either OTC or prescription medicine, and while I obviously need to present a passport to travel internationally, the airline doesn't need to see it. And all my recent travel has been domestic, and not needed ID.
(Since I turned 18, the government scheme for when to ask for ID for alcohol has ratcheted up from nothing to "Think 21" and on to "Think 25" so a younger me would probably have needed to show ID at least a bit. But I don't think that's entirely unreasonable)
[+] [-] grawprog|4 years ago|reply
I've been refused for having expired ID, despite the picture very obviously being me, and my age very obviously being well over the legal age.
My wife's been refused because apparently her federally issued citizenship card, with a photo that showed she was well over age wasn't apparently good enough.
I actually remember one time when i was fairly young, early 20's, I'd let my license expire because I wasn't driving and couldn't be bothered to renew it at the time. I got refused at the liquor store and there was an old guy behind me. He just started ranting at the cashier about how I'm obviously legal age and how you don't need a license to drink and all this stuff. The cashier actually relented and sold it to me after, but that old guy's rant always stuck with me since.
And, it's made me notice how more and more, it's not even about how old you are, it doesn't seem to be about protecting minors, it just seems to be a way of training people to provide ID any time regardless of the reason.
[+] [-] csomar|4 years ago|reply
What the store is doing is not preventing teens from buying Alcohol or Tobacco, it's simply covering its ass. There is a certain liability with certain transactions. In that case, the store covers. If it can't cover, it doesn't make the transaction as the liability is too high for whatever profit there is.
[+] [-] dredmorbius|4 years ago|reply
I left my purchase at the counter and went elsewhere to buy herbal teas.
Subsequent research suggests that few cold remedies are effective at all (though decongestants can improve breathing). Teas with slippery elm and eucalyptus seem at least somewhat effective, don't require IDs, and are not meth precursors.
On why / how older generations may be primed to object: I remember reading a science fiction story in the late 1970s / early 1980s, a short in a compilation (likey a Hugo or similar award collection), in which a data system with universal identification system, with one of the designers of the system being given the opportunity to opt out.
He does.
I think of that story often.
[+] [-] closeparen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] no_time|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vincentmarle|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aeolun|4 years ago|reply
When we went to the restaurant to have breakfast, they adamantly refused to remove the clear plastic partition dividing the table in two.
We couldn’t move it to the side, we couldn’t move it anywhere else. It had to physically separate my wife and I. To what purpose, I have no clue.
Oh, we’re both vaccinated. But it is corporate policy, so nothing we (or the staff) can do, even though anyone with a brain could see that it was pointless.
[+] [-] throwdc2021|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whoooooo123|4 years ago|reply
If you think it's bad now, wait until they roll out vaccine passports.
[+] [-] deviledeggs|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] kqr|4 years ago|reply
Some advice you never asked for: in that situation, protesting often makes things worse. Learning a little bit of negotiation and sales is an invaluable investment in life.
A simple you seem concerned about selling this to the wrong people / I'm about to make your day a little bit more difficult / you probably think I'm being unreasonable / is it absolutely impossible for me to come home with the medication my wife expects me to? / I don't want you to do something you're uncomfortable with / how can I explain this to my wife? can go a long way.
[+] [-] Igelau|4 years ago|reply
- Does not have any raised lettering
- Has weird edges around my hair from the shadows that look just like the ones the author called Photoshop evidence
- The hologram looks like crap. Nice to see that Massachusetts doesn't skimp on it the way $STATE does.
- The aspect ratio of the picture is squished because they just used my last photo. COVID, you know.
- Clearly says "NOT FOR REAL ID PURPOSES" which I know refers to "RealID", but still makes me laugh.
[+] [-] blensor|4 years ago|reply
They usually scan the document in several stages using different light sources to check UV/ IR / visible light features and sometimes illuminated from different angles but usually with a fixed camera position.
This leads to the interesting effect that you could present different images in quick succession to show the correct image for each spectrum even if you don't have a document that can appear correct in all spectral ranges at once.
You can't obviously do that by hand but we ended up using a display (even a high dpi smartphone) that synced up to the scanning process for security testing.
[1] if you are interested
[1] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/6975597
[+] [-] zxcvbn4038|4 years ago|reply
Granted I might get a lot more scrutiny if I walk into the DMV wearing an El Tri t-shirt and speaking with an accent but barring that it seems a very low bar to turn a crappy hand-typed 50s birth certificate into a modern secure ID.
[+] [-] cafard|4 years ago|reply
Let me add that the age of drinking was set to 21 across the country because the Reagan administration did not wish to make airbags mandatory. It was argued that raising the drinking age would produce an equivalent or greater savings in life compared to mandating airbags in new cars. The Department of Transportation could withhold funds from any state that allowed those under 21 to purchase alcoholic beverages.
Those of you younger than I am will know how much effect raising the drinking age really had. My impression is, Not much.
[+] [-] mshroyer|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Traubenfuchs|4 years ago|reply
When I was clubbing in New York, the bouncer would even control my id very closly when I went back in after a smoke. It was cold, he saw me leave, he saw I wasn't wearing more than a t-shirt in the cold night. Yet he took 20 seconds to check my passport. People tell me I look like 35.
[+] [-] antihero|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gorgoiler|4 years ago|reply
I don’t want to be identified. I just want a beer.
[+] [-] Aachen|4 years ago|reply
I Reveal My Attributes (IRMA) proves things like age without giving up SSN or whatever. I don't know the details but I've been hearing about it from nerds for years so I'm assuming there's a solid signature scheme behind it or some way to prove you're not carrying your of-age friend's phone.
Doesn't seem like anyone's interested in rolling this out though... something something proof of vaccination in the EU without compromising privacy, perfect solution mumble mumble...
[+] [-] teddyh|4 years ago|reply
This would be great and all, but all parties who are in a position to choose to implement this kind of system or to keep the status quo are already motivated to keep (and expand) the existing systems, for any number of reasons. Everybody (except the end users) loves to keep that juicy metadata and incidental logs of everything.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26538052#26560821
[+] [-] JackFr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hsbauauvhabzb|4 years ago|reply
Brisbane Australia scans ID cards on entry to nightclubs (I think there’s a control where if you’re booted from one club you’re barred from all for the night). I’m all for a safe nightlife, but good luck asking a bouncer what their data retention, data privacy, and operational/technical security are without getting laughed out of the cue.
[+] [-] markzzerella|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zeeZ|4 years ago|reply
You can tell it to just do an age check (has completed nth year) or a place check (lives in community with x ID) and it'll just return yes or no. There's also a pseudonym function that returns a unique ID per card+vendor combination (so the same vendor can tell it's the same ID again, but a different vendor would receive a different ID).
I can't see it used in night clubs though. There's a staggering amount of requirements you have to meet in order to receive certification to go to one of the handful of service providers that meet even more requirements to run a secure server that are connected to the PKI allowed to talk to the ID card.
[+] [-] axiosgunnar|4 years ago|reply
All PKI can do is „this photo matches this information“ perfectly.
It cannot do „this person matches this photo“ perfectly.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] StopHammoTime|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daneel_w|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elygre|4 years ago|reply
https://euagenda.eu/upload/publications/untitled-96809-ea.pd...
[+] [-] tyingq|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] woodruffw|4 years ago|reply
Oh, and my picture on it is laughably bad. I distinctly remember the border agent using a consumer Logitech webcam to take it.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Entry
[+] [-] jagrsw|4 years ago|reply
A person turns the driver license around a few times, too quick to read anything on it and gives it back to you, or they ask you where the birth date is and quickly check whether the four-digit number you pointed them to is smaller than whatever the current cut-off date is.
[+] [-] gumby|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] runnerup|4 years ago|reply
Depending on the night we’d instruct the bouncers to be either more strict or less strict about checking ID’s. Everyone’s paycheck came from the tips so if it was too quiet then staff might not be able to pay rent. If it was too crazy, staff might get hurt.
Yes, technically serving minors is “strict liability” but the city police didn’t enforce it that way. If someone had a reasonable quality fake ID it would let us off the hook as far as the usual cops were concerned. Obviously it wouldn’t help us if the alcohol enforcement agency specifically showed up that night (very very rare) or if an underage drinker died in a drunk driving accident (never happened thank god).
Our bouncers were better than police at checking fake ID’s because: 1) they check many orders of magnitude more ID’s than cops ever do 2) part of our on boarding is to give the new bouncers a pile (200+) of fake ID’s to study which we had because we confiscated them. These included real ID’s which we confiscated because they were being used by not-the-owner of the ID. Then 1-3 months later they are tested against a different set of fake/real ID’s and needed to get some absurdly high % correct.
[+] [-] catillac|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rdtwo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dpifke|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _Nat_|4 years ago|reply
Holograms and such seem like a clumsy strategy.
[+] [-] internet2000|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _Nat_|4 years ago|reply
Don't get me wrong -- some teens are probably more than responsible enough to be trusted with controlling their own drinking. However, it's those that aren't that're the concern.
Parents generally don't want to have to worry about bars being allowed to serve their kids, either. Maybe not all parents feel that way, though I'd guess that those who'd be against their kids drinking would tend to have stronger feelings on the topic than those who'd be okay with it.
Reference: https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/fact-sheets/minimum-legal-drinki...
[+] [-] kibwen|4 years ago|reply