I was not aware until this time that he was particularly nuts.
[quote=“xeni, post:1, topic:63094”]How long before the delicate veil of civilization turns to savagery with no light nor heat nor refrigeration?[/quote]He’s not suggesting that at that time the procurement and storage of Soylent will become any easier, is he?
the ‘rotting ingredients’ comment reminded me of a Vice report from like a year ago, they said (at least some of) the components/minerals which go into soylent were sitting out in piles in his warehouse. his response to it was “This was one of several important discoveries from the beta program and prompted us to utilize more robust packaging.” perhaps this has something to do with the 2.0 version being a premixed liquid.
This guy strikes me as someone who was affected by early poverty and food-scarcity. I grew up in a food insecure household, and it affects you in ways you don’t fully understand until much later. I’m not a hoarder per se, but I do have a lot of dry goods on hand. Lots of beans, rice, lentils, pastas, TVP, soup mixes, spices, etc. Dry things that will last a long time because you just never know when fresh food is going to stop coming into the house.
The way he talks about rotting ingredients, power outages, and food, feels “familiar” to me.
Creepy, yes. But part of me actually wants some ‘robot horse cheetahs’.
Not completely sure where to keep them or how to care for them, but they sound quite cool.
Your vision for the loss of civilization doesn’t include the continuance of convenient shipping and online shopping?
I’ve got this guy beat - I am the newest breed of human, the self-cannibal. All of my dietary needs is achieved by consuming myself - I am rich in the essential human food groups, as represented by the inverted masonic seal - from the top to the bottom: The dead skin on the bottom of feet group, the more tender cuticles on fingers group, the blood and personal semen group, and finally the delicious and slightly spicy boogers and eyedust group. Sometimes in the interest of dietary variety I grow different fungal cultures on my body parts that I scrape to make delicious smoothies. I am often naked in the streets in order to share the cornucopia that is my body with the world.
Robots? Why waste existing resources?
Isn’t it more semeny than spermy?
It seems like you based your opinion on him by reading an article that has a blatantly biased title, then posting a link to the guy’s blog for CYA purposes.
He’s obviously someone who has made some pretty extreme choices for his life, but I don’t see how he’s worse than any of the positively promoted BB subjects who’ve played with magnets
written about outsourcing all of their day-to-day tasks,
or brought up issues with our energy grid
His choice to eliminate cooking and solid food from his environment is extreme and fascinating, but not completely bonkers, especially given that he’s in LA, where the food outside your door is endlessly varied and interesting if you look around. I know plenty of guys who loathe cooking and who only use their fridge for beer and whose only appliance is a microwave. If your goal is low power consumption, getting rid of a fridge would definitely be priority one.
But then he goes off into Rich Boy Crazy Land, talking about avoiding laundry day by having all of his clothes custom made and then donating clothes he’s worn for weeks to charity without washing them, and I have to wonder what Soylent 2.0 does to one’s logic circuits.
So the guy doesn’t like cooking. What’s creepy on that? The fluid is a good backup for the days one doesn’t feel about to order in or cook. Long shelf life helps with easing logistics.
Mildly crazy, yes, but creepy? What’s NOT creepy then? What exactly is “creepy”, anyway?
There’s quite a difference between the cities breaking down into hunger-caused chaos in 2-3 days vs 2-3 months. A lot more of infrastructure breakdown can be repaired in longer time. A storable food that does not require preparation is handy for that.
The adjective was apparently chosen on the basis of appearance. Which covers everything emulsion-based, including condensed milk or cream (nom). Good for sensation-mongering and click-baiting, otherwise rather uninformative.
As of DC power, if we connect together ten (twelve, to correct for the RMS AC vs rectified-filtered DC) 12V batteries in series, we get DC good enough for switching power supplies. Stock power supplies for computers and phone chargers and all other sorts of mains-powered gear will be able to run from that directly. Which can be pretty handy for always-ready standby power - no switching is needed, no DC-AC conversion; many breaking-prone parts are eliminated.
…and as of implanting magnets, that’s on my todo list for years.
So setting aside the nutritional issues, which seem to be about par with any other “meal replacement” liquid product on the market, let us address the portion of the essay where the creator wishes to address hunger as secondary to poverty.
Rather than working to make good-tasting nutritious food available to everyone, his solution is to create a nearly tasteless liquid food replacement for the poor folks to use as fuel. And of course for the futurist cyborg minority who will wish to partake as well.
This product is novel only because of the publicity and name. There are similar products all over for those who desire meal replacement shakes, and none of them are a solution to poverty.
Meh, I still like Soylent. It does what it’s supposed to do: provide an adequate food substitute if/when you need it. I lived on it exclusively for 15 days with zero ill effects.
And the Annalee Newitz article is terrible. Makes me almost think she’s shilling for someone. If it’s not that, then she’s just a bad journalist: see the comments debunking her exaggerated claims about her own supporting evidence.
I’m fascinated by the rest of the comment thread for her article as well. Soylent seems – for some reason – to invite everyone on the Internet with a strong desire to police other people’s food choices (but why?) to hold forth at great length. I guess that’s one way to burn calories.
Meanwhile, this very morning I answered the queries of a friend who was asking about Soylent, and now he’s going to try it too.
To all the voluble Soylent naysayers: hey, I’m glad you “care” about Soylent users enough to try and police them (“Love the foodie, hate the food,” I guess). But it sure looks like woolly-headed, misdirected energy to me.
Personally I hope to transcend the limitations of a meat body by downloading my consciousness into a custom-grown biological robot complete with its own neural supercomputer running on but a few watts of power. It will have chemical, vibrational and photonic detection capabilities, and be able to discriminate between energy sources which are poisonousness or harmful in other ways.
None of this icky ‘human’ business cluttering up my future just the clean aesthetic curves and solid bio-structure of my replicant future.
My essential fluids will be pure!
You are correct but the guys is still pegging my creep-o-meter.
Always the refrain around here. “I didn’t like this piece so the author must be selling something.”
I have to say, the Internet’s reaction to that blog post is fucking disgusting. I’m not shocked to see BoingBoing jumping on the band wagon, but I am a little sad.
I recall reading one of Rob’s first posts waaay back in the day before Soylent existed and he was just a dude screwing around with alternate forms of getting nutrition. He was still screwing around with the formula by himself and had already given himself a nutritional deficiency at one point because he had missed a nutrient that humans need. The guy was and still is clearly an obsessive experimenter. He looks at a problem and then tries to attack it from a new angle. He is also pretty happy to attack a problem half-cocked, as he proved when diving into making Soylent with bothering to get the 4 years nutritionist degree.
Like any good experimenter, he posted his method and results, including how he had failed. People pointed out where he done fucked up, and a little latter he would come back with an update based upon what he had learned and the flaws others had pointed out. Roll it forward a couple of years later and you have Soylent. There is no credible evidence that Soylent anything other than a perfectly fine meal replacement. It isn’t for everyone to be sure, but it doesn’t have to be.
Now, being obviously a self experimenter, he is doing the same thing with his own impact on the world. Has he fucked up? Probably. I wouldn’t be even a little bit shocked to learn that some of his efforts to reduce his impact are counter productive. That isn’t the point though. The guy is experimenting and sharing his results. Like with Soylent, I imagine he will probably listen to people who point out where he has screwed up and adjust accordingly.
What I find so fucking pathetic is how pissed people are at him. The guy shared his results, made no fucking demands of you, but no, everyone has to be personally offended by his sharing. Fuck off. Nowhere in the article is a demand that you, American, the world, or anyone follow him. He is telling you about his personal experimentation.
You people are assholes. It is no surprise we live in a world that worships dull conformity. Fail to conform and someone will take it as a personal attack on their own boring as shit lifestyle. Share the results of your own personal experimentation and some fuck head is going to angrily attack you for your failures.
Seriously, look at the fucking coverage of this. It isn’t a discussion or doing the math to figure out if his claims are true or pondering how it could be done better; it is repulsive personal attacks on a guy who was just sharing what he personally is doing.
You people make me sick. Sharing personal experimentation in alternative lifestyles is totally creepy; happy fucking mutants indeed.
No one cares what you eat, but preaching that it’s some sort of panacea is going to get derision no matter how much you like it.
