He’s only comparing himself to a pack donkey, the way I read it. It’s self-deprecation coupled with a very vivid description of his own experience, making me boggle at the notion that he’s engaging in advocacy here.
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It’s brilliant marketing because he claims it’s a reference to the universal food ration Soylent, which is so named because it’s made of soybeans and lentils, and as you say everyone knows the film version where Soylent Green is people so it sticks with them because of that, despite the fact that there’s two other colours of Soylent in the film that aren’t people.
It’s a punchy, memorable name which it achieves by being an allusion to something everyone associates with cannibalism that is a portmanteau of two ingredients it doesn’t include. It can be both unimaginative (as it is entirely derivative from the source material) while also being brilliant marketing.
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Me? No.
I’ve always thought that as well. What is a “creepy” person? Is the person sexually aggressive or prone to violence? Too often it’s used to describe people that have atypical mannerisms.
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Yes he’s comparing himself to a donkey. He’s as grating to me as grocery stores are to him, esp with his background of lying to pretend he was a boy genius, so I’m sure I don’t treat him completely charitably.
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I’m kind of wondering how weird my own “normal” lifestyle would sound if I wrote it up in this style:
“Nevermore will I be subject to variable food quality and contaminants from minimum-wage burger flippers, for by purchasing my own low-cost duplicates of catering apparatus, and after installing a ten thousand dollar workspace in my house, I am able to prepare my own food in my own home, whenever I want!”
“It may seem wasteful to lay out a year’s salary on a miniaturised bus that only has five seats and spends 23 hours of the day sitting idle, but it’s worth it to get to work without smelling another person’s farts!”
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Nothing weird about having other people process food for you. The weird part is his apparent belief that food processing requires no energy (as long as it is done where you can’t see it) and food production requires no land or energy or resources (as long as you never see any intermediate steps which are recognisable as grain or animal-based).
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Yeah dude. That is exactly and literally what he said. Excellent summary, he said sarcastically.
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Moral Hannibal Lecter.
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Those of us with non-goldfish memories will remember those arguments in Rhinehart’s earlier claims for the benefits of the Soylent diet.
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I don’t know about Annalee Newitz but here at BB the authors ARE selling something. We got a BB store after all and articles promoting different products.
… and we need a way to convert outrage into an usable energy form - instant solution to the energy crisis. Hamster wheels and punching bags in every home and street corner perhaps?
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I hadn’t realized that Rhinehart was the inventor of Soylent. That makes his oblivious hypocrisy even worse.
The article was going around via this tweet, with a link to a marked-up version of his article:
"If I Can't See It, It Doesn't Exist: How One Tech Bro With The Object Permanence Of A Baby 'Gave Up Electricity' " http://t.co/YVOCmpwmFA
— Andrew Vestal (@avestal) August 3, 2015
Yes, it is in fact literally what he said, in his essay, “How I Gave Up Alternating Current”, in which he says, “So, I embarked on an experiment to see if I could survive without the luxury of alternating current.”
And his entire essay is full of examples where he pays people to do things for him, and pretends that’s somehow not his responsibility. The most notorious part is where he talks about his clothing, about how it’s so cheap to have it custom made and shipped to him that he saves time, money, and resources by not washing it and donating it after wearing it – never mind that other people have to use those resources to manufacture and ship his clothing, and clean it after he’s donated it, and never mind any questions just why labor is so cheap in Asia.
This asshole is boasting how virtuous he is, because he’s hiding the costs of his lifestyle. Others are paying those costs.
Mostly, we’re laughing at this asshole, but we’re angry at him, because he’s an especially absurd example of a common pattern with contemporary entrepreneurs: methodically denying that externalities are their responsibility, when they admit they even exist.
For another example:
One Tweet Shows What Silicon Valley Really Thinks of the People It’s Crushing
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Classy!
I believe @albill is complaining about people who assume undisclosed financial motives behind every post they don’t like, not the existence of our shop or the items promoting its contents.
I wonder if there’s a connection between people who consume soylent and people who think it’s hypocritical for one BB editor to have a different opinion to another BB editor, or to base their opinions on unquantifiable aspects of the thing being opined upon.
“Rotting ingredients” would be a good name for an ironic food blog.
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OK, this has been bothering me for a while now. I have been the target of other peoples outrage like
among others.
Yet when I object to any repeat of this behavior I am somehow the problem?
(sorry for being off topic but this has been really irritating me.)
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I’ve been drinking Soylent for about a year now, and honestly, I don’t know what I did before. Actually I do, I was grumpy a lot, and ate a shitload of peanut butter between meals. I certainly wouldn’t have survived 3 months of a colicky baby with my mind intact. Waking up in the middle of the night many, many times with a metabolism that just won’t quit and a tendency toward frustration and emotional fragility when hungry would have done me in.
Sure. Rob is a weirdo. If a lot of inventors and engineers over the years had had blogs, and lived in our current day “tell us your weird thoughts, everyone!” culture, they’d probably be a turnoff too. Personally, I don’t have to love Rob to appreciate the product. If I thought he were truly evil, sure I wouldn’t give him my buck, but he certainly steers well clear of that. An engineer with a bizarre, cold and antisocial approach to social problems?!? Shocking!! Some of our beloved engineer bbs commentors get a little…strange in the sociopolitical topics here too, doesn’t mean we don’t love them when they’re on point. It also wasn’t Rob’s idea to send dense, tasteless foods to places where people are having food crises, he’s just tried to improve the nutritional profile over the fat-and-protein only options that are currently used for relief. Maybe he’s spun off the rails in his hubris a bit since those early days, but success does weird things to people.
What I respected was that the formula was always open source, people were always encouraged to make their own and Rob experiments on himself. That’s a pretty refreshing ethos for a product line. This makes it worlds apart from Ensure and other heavily-marketed, heavily-sugared “total nutrition” bullshit on the market. It isn’t an alienated commercial product in that sense, so I felt I could trust the thought put into the formulation more so than I otherwise would have.
version 1.4 of the powder had a tendency to get “gluey” in the fridge (it was the first attempt to eliminate having the fats be in a separate little bottle) and was a tad salty, as they tried to add in the daily recommendation of sodium. So, yeah, it ended up a little jizz-like. that was a tough month or so. 1.5 is much improved.
I drink Soylent to replace meals I rushed through anyway, or when I ate a bunch of crap just to take the edge off. Mainly the first part of the day and late at night. I prep-chef for my wife at night for meals that often take two hours to prepare and are fucking dazzling to the palate, especially a palate that’s been chillaxing on near-flavorless beverage most of the day. On those nights where the meals aren’t planned, we’re starving and a meal is still an hour or so away, we split a glass and calmly sit down to talk about what we might make, sans desperation.
You only get gas if you start drinking too much too quickly, and don’t give your biome time to adjust, and if you chug it when you drink it. pretty much like any other food.
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Or a guide to Icelandic cuisine.
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Black Metal Chef’s new band.
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What’s even crazier is when he tried to reduce his water consumption, and among other things, tried to stop defecating by overdosing on antibiotics to kill off his intestinal flora.
Also, he tried to estimate the amount of water he was using indirectly. The supplier of rice for Soylent said they reclaim all the water they use and don’t waste any, so he assumed 0 water usage for growing rice.
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Soylent’s a brilliant name for the product. They could’ve called it something pretentious like “Food 2.0” or made up a new fake word like “FooShake”, but by calling it Soylent, with one word, the product instantly communicates:
- it’s made to replace your food
- it can be your sole food source
- it uses soy as its protein source
- the people behind this are geeks who trust your intelligence enough to name their product after something made from people, and know that you won’t actually think it’s cannibalism
- the folks who made this are self-aware of their product’s nerdiness
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