Soylent - the end of food

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 The streets were originally made for people.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

Soylent offers vomiting customers refunds on nutrient bars: https://twitter.com/vicenews/status/786650723274547200

Weird, that article seems to have disappeared. Here's another one:

http://gizmodo.com/soylent-customers-search-for-answers-after-barf-bar-fia-1787747966

I feel bad for these folks though.

eat larabars instead, they taste good and dont make u vomit

nobody should ever eat bar-shaped food except when it's candy

hmm wow strong if inconsistent opinion re food shape

Stick shaped food is a totally different story

20% of my diet is clif bars.

food should be cylindrical and heated on metal rollers

gotta love soylent's ongoing commitment to disrupting the food space tho: first their drink made you ill slowly with dangerously high levels of cadmium and lead and now their food just straight-up gives you the rusty-water shits

finding new efficiencies by closing the loop, since iirc the latter is actually one of the core ingredients in their signature product

the reports that it smelled/tasted like bleach or soap makes me think... people were eating food machine sanitizer

xp next step is a food replacement pill that kills it's users stone dead instantly. No more need for food!

SOYLENT GREEN IS PURELL

http://www.heavymetal.com/v2/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/SoylentGreen.jpg

maintaining normal food safety standards is exactly the kind of drag on innovation that characterizes the old fashioned brick and mortar economy. they're disruptive, get with the program.

facebook is always recommending huel to me

can i buy vomit inducing soylent bricks w bitcoin this is important

i got banned from seeing huel's ads on facebook cuz I kept trolling them about whether their product was as dangerous to human health as soylent

one of my proudest achievements tbh

kudos

SOYLENT GREEN IS PURELL

― doo-doo diplomacy (bizarro gazzara), Sunday, October 16, 2016 12:34 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol

i'm hesitant to out myself here, but i feel like soylent doesn't deserve half the shit people give it (excluding puke bars of course). i drink a soylent 2.0 once a week as a meal replacement on the gym night where i have to go after dinner cuz i don't like having food in my stomach. i looked into slimfast or carnation meal replacements but they don't have enough calories. also i like the taste of soylent (somewhere in between pancake batter and cheerios)

sure the rhetoric about food 2.0 and the idea of replacing all your meals with it is completely insane, but i think it has some merit as a good meal replacement option.

by posting your tolerance of soylent here, you have made all other food taste bad for other people and also permanently enlisted yourself into the new revolution alien spacefood corporation army, which is on a collision course with the the normal food-eaters of earth and must be destroyed before their 1.15x productivity bonus compounds enough to overwhelm the old-timers that retain the ability to enjoy the taste of a well-cooked meal

i still have never tried soylent

your new name is D502_copy

yeah i mean youre just using soylent like a meal replacement/protein shake which is basically what it is which is why it really doesnt justify all its bs marketing and vc funding which is what ppl r making fun of it for xxp

fwiw this is the best tasting prepackaged protien shake ive had

http://i.imgur.com/y8FFTAk.jpg

whats funny is because soylent is vc funded by ppl who usually invest in apps its doomed to go out of business once those ppl realize theyve invested in a protein shake not an 10000000x multiplier unicorn

i mean there are a fuckload of similar products available mostly made by experienced food companies, but only one of them has super creepy marketing and frequent contamination issues