Soylent - the end of food

other than becoming homicidal

yeah the only friend that I know who had ordered a bunch has been pretty bummed out / annoyed that the shipments are so so so slowwwwwww

"“These heavy metals accumulate in the body over time and, since Soylent is marketed as a meal replacement, users may be chronically exposed to lead and cadmium concentrations that exceed California’s safe harbor level (for reproductive harm). With stories about Silicon Valley coders sometimes eating three servings a day, this is of very high concern to the health of these tech workers.”"

oh no they wont be able to reproduce :(

http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/08/18/2137612/why-soylent-is-a-dangerous-cult/

It'd be really good to see more (any) articles by people about the health risks, as written by people who don't hate the whole idea anyway?

(I've been on a Euro soylent-clone for two meals a day for a couple of months and its great, like KM upthread I've always just felt like an alien when people talk about food as an intense and central pleasure)

http://i.imgur.com/jd2WUTA.jpg

http://www.gstatic.com/tv/thumb/dvdboxart/8782/p8782_d_v7_aa.jpg

https://m.reddit.com/r/soylent/comments/3soonx/how_i_currently_feel_about_soylent_20_as_a_new/

In which some people defend the company knowingly selling moldy products and not throwing it out.

lolling at the impassioned arguing style of "SoylentFarts"

SOYLENT_IN_MY_ANUS

Grocery stores wouldn't be able to operate with your desires.

did anyone post the inventor's blog in here? he seems unhinged. takes uber everywhere under the argument that it's more environmentally friendly. justifies every action he takes in like amount of kilojoules of energy expended or something

Our new roommate drinks this stuff, there are several depressingly blank-looking bottles of it in the fridge right now. I came here to worry about this but if ILXors I respect like Karl Malone are down then maybe I should adjust my assumptions. Though I do believe the people who created this product are alien monsters, if only to the extent that their statements convey a horrifying Randian techbro sensibility (life's pleasures are inefficiencies in the eyes of the very narrow subset of pro silicon valley coder types who voluntarily choose a nightmarish career; well surely this idea would appeal to the average person unless they're a foolish sheep-type; also I bet this could solve all the big world problems that we surely understand better than anybody else, now where's my Ted Talk?) that I don't find in anybody's post itt. Jury's out on the roommate though.

I never ended up trying it! I was kind of at a low point upthread in terms of frustration with weight issues. I am still not where I'd like to be (and not getting better), but I'm done struggling with it. For now, at least. "Fuck it".

I agree that the creator is probably counting down the days until he can upload himself onto the transhumaninternet and finally rid himself of his nagging human bodily desires and requirements for maintenance, and that people who drink this stuff are probably farting a lot and introducing new problems for plumbers. But I still think at least some people would have a legitimate use for Soylent (or some equivalent) and that it might really improve their lives, and I feel bad that something that is a solution for some people is just ridiculed as a joke by others.

is it really substantively different from those diet shakes other than the fact some bottles have mold in them?

I mean, it IS funny on many levels and it's not reasonable to expect people not to laugh at it. I get that now (more than I did upthread). I guess I just tend to sympathize with the subset who don't deserve it

Soylent 3x day + treadmill desk + sleep in a truck in the employee parking lot at Google HQ = the perfected life

Google's Soylent-using employees switching to truck-sleeping would be a real boon to people trying to rent an apartment in San Francisco. Oddly enough, none of these nightmare people seem to take their Matrix brain-in-a-tube dream lifestyle perfection in that direction.

http://www.businessinsider.com/why-google-employees-live-in-the-parking-lot-2015-10

S. Daniel Abraham expresses his delusions of grandeur through trad bazillionaire philanthropy instead of composing essays about his Uber usage - I think that's the main difference between this and Slimfast

is it really substantively different from those diet shakes other than the fact some bottles have mold in them?

giggling like a fiend at this

Dear Jesus

See Also

A Google employee living in a truck in the company parking lot is saving 90% of his income — here's what he does with that money

A 23-year-old Google employee lives in a truck in the company's parking lot and saves 90% of his income

A Google employee lives in a truck in the company's parking lot — here's what his family and friends think

yeah that is basically making me never want to even walk past a Google campus

ok wow i legit didn't know that this parking lot thing was a thing

yeah, it is... not hypothetical

http://robrhinehart.com/?p=1331

The Soylent guy is kinda...special.

It's one thing to be the type of person whose personality type is such that they want to treat real-life with the same impulse as if they were min/maxing their MMO/Final Fantasy stats.

It's quite another that there's a sizable chunk of Silicon Valley sycophantic press treating this as this glorious ultimate behavioral goal disrupting everything, as opposed to being a manifestation of deeper issues.

thinking outside the box while living out of amazon.com boxes

there is definitely no .com 2.0 bubble though
the new valley boom is based on real advances in humanness

like "bulletproof coffee"

gosh, google. bring back the 90s cyberdelic global village hippie types

i guess this is basically the same thing

https://i.imgur.com/dqydfuu.gif

Of course, solar would have been prohibitively expensive and complicated had I not reduced my consumption to a fraction of what the average home uses. Here is how I did it.

Kitchen

Kitchens are expensive and dirty. This home manufacturing center has been by far the most liberating to eliminate. They are the greediest consumers of power, water, and labor and produce the most noise and garbage of any room. Moreover, they can be made totally unnecessary with a few practical life hacks. First, I never cook. I am all for self reliance but repeating the same labor over and over for the sake of existence is the realm of robots. I utilize soylent only at home and go out to eat when craving company or flavor. (...) Next, I switched from beer to red wine. I buy with Saucey so I don’t have to use awful retail stores. (...) I think it was a bit presumptuous for the architect to assume I wanted a kitchen with my apartment and make me pay for it. (...)

Transportation

Public transportation is leagues more efficient and I love trains. Still, the energy costs are substantial and the infrastructure requires a lot of maintenance. I take Uber around the city and to work (most of them are Priuses which use DC motors so I’m good there). I take the bus often too. It’s pretty good in LA. Runs on CNG. (...) The streets were originally made for people. The automobile’s takeover has destroyed more than millions of lives (cars have killed far more Americans than war and AIDS combined), it has trampled the prime conduit of community in our cities and exiled us to the indoors to sit in front of televisions. I hope the next generation of transportation technologies will give us back the streets.

For today though, Uber works pretty well. (...)

This guy is so fascinatingly right at this cusp point where all of his admittedly niche lifestyle values could, but don't, fall over into collective solutions. Mass transit is sorta good but, ehhh, the infrastructure takes maintenance, fuck it, I'm taking Uber until there are robot cars. Or take the argument about the inefficiency and cost of individual kitchens, something that's been noted many many times before, including by architects and most notably by turn-of-the-century socialist-feminists who saw the future in replacing individual kitchens with collective kitchens for each apartment building. Obviously that idea would raise lots of the same hackles Soylent does, but it's telling that it's not even on this guy's radar. Note also that if any collectively-shared service requires human employees (power stations, transit) that's treated as a huge negative; if his fantasy world comes true and all those people are out of a job (not to mention never able to afford the robot cars in the first place) that's not his problem. I realize that I'm going after a ridiculously easy target in the most obvious ways but every few months I brush back up against these people and it drives me up a fucking wall.

oh man i just got to the clothing section

Clothing

I enjoy doing laundry about as much as doing dishes. I get my clothing custom made in China for prices you would not believe and have new ones regularly shipped to me. Shipping is a problem. I wish container ships had nuclear engines but it’s still much more efficient and convenient than retail. Thanks to synthetic fabrics it takes less water to make my clothes than it would to wash them, and I donate my used garments.

The overwhelming majority of clothing Americans buy is made overseas anyways. I just buy direct. And container ships are amazingly efficient.

It bothers me immensely that all clothing is hand made. Automation is woefully absent from the textile industry, but I don’t think it always will be.

i mean, god damn. one of the commenters points out that elsewhere in the same article he declines the idea of using a grocery-shopping service since he "cannot in good conscience force a fellow soul through" that "multisensory living nightmare." but chinese sweatshops are okay - for prices you would not believe! to be fair his opening line is "The walls are buzzing. I know this because I have a magnet implanted in my hand and whenever I reach near an outlet I can feel them," so i should probably not be wasting my day on this.

wait so he doesn't wash his clothes and just gets new ones

????????

that is what he is claiming, yes.

these people must be stopped.

not only does he not wash his clothes but he donates them DIRTY

you're not saving water if you just treat it as a negative externality for poor people

that he is an "engineer" who thinks nuclear engines would be an improvement over diesel is also a good diagnostic for loose screws

remember, he thinks bottled grey sludge is an improvement on eating

it's hard to fix that in your mind in its full significance because who would even

I don't think they container ship the clothes to his door.

theres something kinda liberating/fulfilling abt the work all the time outsource yr life lifestyle. when i was working crazy hours this summer i would sometimes sleep at work and never cooked and sent all my laundry to a service and took lots of ubers everywhere and it was kind of easier. like i only had to think about my job, spent most of my time at my job and had no real stress. its clarifying to just be doing this one thing and trying to do it well i guess? idk i guess i get why that lifestyle is appealing for certain kinds of ppl

There's a lot of "missing the point" with these guys. You pour endless energy into scraping away any possible drag or entropy loss on the absolute barest amount of energy/time/cognition cycles expended in order to do....what? What other aspect of your life does all this newly created surplus of time & energy & processing power allow for? At least in WoW or any JRPG, min-maxing the pinnacle utmost character means you could be demonstrably stronger, faster, richer, better at playing the game which is the equivalent of living in the game's universe.

Here, other than I guess pouring yourself into work(which is possibly why start-up types flock to this behavior and/or horse semen-like food replacement), what aspects of life is benefited by this process? Or is this process just the end-result in and of itself because you have nothing else to fill that space?

more time to spend installing new apps is my guess. or blogging about them. tbf i wouldn't be surprised if some of them at least would argue that it frees up time for the things that they think make life worth living, some of which might be things most ilxors would be down with, like reading their favorite books or spending time with friends. it's just everything else about the attitude and how they get there that just seems crazy. for others i suspect more work/productivity probably is the "point" in some freaked out hyper-protestant ethic of we-were-put-on-earth-to-accomplish-things thinking or something.

Yeah, it's all well and good and actually GREAT that the Internet keeps letting out-there people find each other and share their tips n' tricks for navigating life while out-there, it's the proselytizing nature of it that drives you up the wall. Like, dude, you did not achieve an objectively better existence than others because you figured out how to spend more time on devops with Docker. You just figured out how to trade off food truck sandwich time and laundry folding time to, uh, write fresh devops scripts. That's it.

I'd guess that Rhinehart would totally object to characterizing his blogs as evangelizing his particular life choices to others, but he totally is. It would probably be nice if more people like him recognized that.

see when you buy new clothes? they're not clean

people like this are a useful cautionary tale for those who are overly proud of their work ethic, burrowing to nowhere with maxiumum efficiency

conrad has hit on the innocuous detail that bugs me the most about this

Like, dude, you did not achieve an objectively better existence than others because you figured out how to spend more time on devops with Docker. You just figured out how to trade off food truck sandwich time and laundry folding time to, uh, write fresh devops scripts. That's it.

I wish I could fit this on a t-shirt