Yeah, his manifesto reads like he wants all the positive parts of say living off the land in a cabin in Alaska, but completely ignoring the externalities that come with being a social hipster in LA. Don’t want a fridge? Plant a modern victory garden/urban guerilla garden and learn to can.
Home canned beans ($0.50 per pint), home grown microgreens ($0.75 per bowl), two cups of rice ($0.04), and an apple ($0.35) is $1.70 a day. And why not, enjoy an avocado as well ($1.00).
Compared to $9 a day for soylent?
Eta
Can’t forget hot sauce. I consume at least twelve liters of hot sauce a day, so my budget may be… Skewed.
“…Then they laughed to us…”
Where would we be without all those mildly crazy guys who did things The Mainstream disapproved of?
He’s likely wrong in some parts. But he is also quite right in many others. And while I consider giving up a fridge to be somewhat silly, I also want someone to walk that path to figure out how to go without, just in case.
It’s comical to watch how all the naysayers latch onto some less-important claims and are all happy to gnaw on the innovator’s ankles. Talking the talk is easy, walking the walk then is less so; it deserves more respect, however crazy it may be, than the yapping from the peanut gallery.
His primary claim is that he completely elimated his use of AC power from the grid. He didn’t. He just pays other people to do work for him that requires AC power and other resources.
As far as I can make out, the only significant claim he makes that isn’t debunked is that he set up a low-power computer that runs off DC from a car battery, that is charged by a solar panel. That’s good, but it’s a much more modest accomplishment than what he claims.
I missed a single important claim. Also, I don’t see Rhinehart as an innovator so much as a marketer. He got y-combintor funding for a startup, it failed, and he pivoted to marketing an unoriginal product to a new demographic.
(this may be veering a tad off course, but i like to tell stories, so you’re stuck with it :D)
a couple years ago i decided to try and figure out how to live on a ‘hundred mile diet’. that is a phrase that is bandied about by a lot of people that have good intentions… but don’t really know what it means. when i started breaking down all the implications, i really started to appreciate why certain things 500 years ago were worth their weight in gold. let’s start at the beginning.
water: i lived on a well, and next to a river, so i was good there. not everyone is.
salt: 75 miles away from the ocean, and i purposely didn’t count gas in this experiment. otherwise… uh oh.
wheat: i found a miller 15 miles away, his flour was superb
yeast: luckily i know how to harvest wild yeast from spring to autumn
cow: yikes, if i was a homesteader you buy a whole one and dry/preserve for the season. but i didn’t have the room, so because of practical reasons it was out
tomatoes, celery, onions, potatoes: quite possible if you are on top of it, but i started in fall (bad planning)
most spices: no way, not gonna happen in Oregon
fruit: abundant and easy to can, but again you have to be on top of it
rice: forget about it
beans: sorta, but not really
pasta: sure, but not anything italian
oil: ha! unless you are talking about butter, lard, or suet, forget about it (unless you are me)
so on and so forth. i have the spreadsheet somewhere. it made me intensely grateful for roads, trucks, refrigeration, sanitation, and efficiencies of scale.
i don’t knock people for ‘farming out’ externalities, they certainly can scale quite well. it is when they are ignored or dismissed that i personally get a little peeved. (still gonna buy some soylent :D)
Interesting article about how “tolerating intolerance” might actually be good for our online communities
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/
He eliminated his direct use. Quarreling about indirect uses and if he did or did not mean that is just annoying timesinking lawyering.
Not only that, there were apparently mice in the warehouse.
That’s what iterative development is for. Mistakes happen in every project. The art is not in not making them, but in not making them so much in the next version.
Mice are in almost every facility, you have to work quite hard to keep them out. One of our office buildings is next to a field, and every autumn they are crawling into the warmth in droves. (Hint: design stuff in a way that’s mice-resistant. They tend to crawl into equipment racks, and piss on the boards, and fry or at least corrode them and cause costly failures. Our PBX vendor had stories…)
“But if I want Self-Criticism Virtue Points”
Ugh.
Oh sure, I had the same problem at my last job. One even made a home in my trash can and surprised me one morning. I think that there is a huge difference though between having a warehouse full of widgets and then one full of ingredients that people are going to put into their body!
I think I got the quip, but explaining it would take more words than Ellison used.
I’m not being facaetious here. Can’t figure out how to explain it, but I get it. Techno-libertarian brain-cooked-by-pressure warriors tilting at psychosomatic digital windmills or something. Deluded, led astray, so not Quixotic, because at least that’s personal. War-Boys, because they’re got a chromed-ring in their nose, but don’t know it.
Not very succinct, and wandering dangerously off his vague map, that feels clearer in my head, if still a bit nebulous. It’s not a thesis, though – bound to be bitvague.
You must never have been to a Wegman’s. We’d go there after the poetry-cafe closed to get sushi, then drive around and look at the stars while the people in the back seat got drunk and puked up the fish.
Uh, anyway. Wegman’s is nice to wander around it.
I got so tired of shooting people that I hired a private militia. I haven’t had to shoot a single person since!
I highly recommend that you all do the same.
I’m assuming you did not plant an olive grove and cold-press your own oil?
shuffles feet, looks embarrassed
You shoot, and bullseye. Those suckers are temperamental in zone 7
Not mice, rats.
My friends in a startup shared that place with him. It wasn’t a warehouse. It was an industrial building in Oakland’s Chinatown.
My father was an engineering contractor, and his specialty was bulk food handling systems. He worked in food processing facilities all the time. Vermin in a facility wasn’t something they’d just shrug about; it would be a major systemic failure.
I’m not arguing otherwise. My friends found it disgusting, crawling all over the supplies.
I know; that was a follow-on, not a disagreement.
Mom has a job story about a mouse chewing a cable to her mouse (and leaving droppings all over the documents, which identified the culprit).
The latter need more care. But the problems are common and date back to ancient Egypt. There’s a reason why cats were revered as gods. (And they never forgot that.)
We survived for millenia despite mice in the warehouses. While they are admittedly a problem, I wouldn’t say it is The Major One.
