I come from a working class background in St. Louis. Laborers and factory workers absolutely do drink and smoke on and before the job. They don't necessarily show up wasted -- as you say, how could they? -- but they drink. It's less tolerated than in the past, but it still goes on, and it used to be much worse in recent memory, so I have no trouble believing it was even worse before that.

There's a pretty great scene in Season 2 of The Wire where the dock workers are subject to a checkpoint early in the morning on their way to the docks because of a political battle that has nothing to do with them. They've all just come from the bar, of course. One of the guys says to the cop stopping them, "Oh come on! It's 8 AM! Who would be drunk this early!"

I assure you that's meant to be funny.

You can sweat out a lot of beer doing brute-force manual labor. Especially if it's relatively low-test beer - it's pretty hard to drink it fast enough to get tipsy.

I mean, the daily ration of beer in the Royal Navy, when they were in English waters and not on hard stuff, was one gallon per man per day. And they were scampering around in the mastheads...

> it's pretty hard to drink it fast enough to get tipsy

Exactly.

> was one gallon per man per day.

It'd be interesting to see how it was consumed. I'd imagine most sailors rarely took their entire ration and it'd be after shift as a binge.

I like this quote -

"You mustn't imagine that naval ships were sailed by crews of drunken sailors," says Dr van der Merwe, general editor at the National Maritime Museum. "Everybody drowns if sailors are drunk all the time."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8859000/8859506....

This is like the myth of split sleep, I don't know why people think these things are possible.

We know how we live, we know how really poor people live and these things just don't fit, they are illogical but people still believe them.

> one gallon per man per day

No it wasn't. There was never a time that a whole gallon per day was a normal rum ration. It was a gallon of beer, later a half pint of rum. A half pint of strong rum is still a lot to consume every day, but it's nowhere near a gallon.

Over time it was reduced until it turned into basically a shot, and then even that was stopped.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rum_ration

You just said the same thing as your parent comment (one gallon of beer per day). Please read carefully before disagreeing.

I read that a half dozen times before replying. Not sure how I misread that. Oops

Thanks for pointing out my mistake.

This is the common sense view. But I think it's mistaken, which is what makes the article surprising and interesting.

People can learn and adapt to alcohol consumption and use it to get more work done, especially unpleasant work, just as they do with coffee. Not necessarily their best work, but work nonetheless. Some function very effectively on it, even intellectually e.g. Christopher Hitchens.

Europeans often (typically?) drink during lunch. When I worked in Germany, the company cafeteria had someone serving beer, and bottles of wine were available to take with you.

If there's any cultural abnormality on the subject, it's that American companies consider the slightest hint of job-related alcohol consumption a firing offense.

In the bar & restaurant industry, it's pretty common for workers to drink and get high on the job.

Are you calling the Ballmer Peak a myth?