The author seems to be conflating two different things in his choice of lifestyle under the same umbrella, one being energy conservation and the other a form of secular asceticism with the purpose of saving time and reducing life complexity.
Some of his more controversial choices (based on the comments in this article) reflect more the later than the former.
It is possible both to prepare (delicious) meals using barely no electricity (and even without burning any fuel), to do the laundry by hand using nothing but water and soap and to dry it at the clothesline. The drawback is that those are very time consuming tasks.
The choice to eat only Soylent and to buy cheap clothes for single use seem to be motivated more by the desire to save time than by the idea of conserving energy.
Both are worthy goals, to save time and energy but IMO it is very important to know how to strike a balance between efficiency and enjoyment. Otherwise we become the very robots we are trying not to be.
I was thinking the same things. When camping we use a simple water agitator to wash clothes, and we can bake bread in the noon day sun and a solar oven. But it does take time, but if that is how you choose to spend it (as we do while camping) then its great.
Interesting, but it seems like a lot of the lifestyle choices are just pushing the carbon/climate impact to someone else where the author doesn't have to think about it.
Getting custom clothes made in china and shipped frequently is certainly far less environmentally friendly than simply re-using the clothes you already have.
Taking an uber still burns gasoline. A bike would be better.
Agreed on the shifting the consumption down the line. However, the primary energy advantage of Uber-like car services is that it reduces the high cost of energy to produce a car by reducing the pool of cars through optimizing their use (meaning, instead of a majority of cars sitting around doing nothing, using a pool of cars working most of the time would mean fewer cars needed overall). If all cars end up being full time service vehicles (through self driving?), one car would hopefully be able to service 20 people and replace all those cars. If the carbon foot print of gas/electric consumption is 12% of a car's total (the rest going to manufacture), then moving to a full shared service model would be a huge gain (and loss of the auto industry)
I don't know that it's even clear that using Uber-like services reduces carbon footprint. I mean wouldn't a car wear out a lot faster if 20 people were using it as opposed to 1? Sure, some components in a car are mileage independent, but generally not the most critical ones like the engine and transmission...
We are not at this point now, but I'll share my understanding of what the grandparent post meant.
The average car sits unused (parked) for well over half of its life (I'd say 90%, but I don't feel like research right now, and the concept holds at 50%). If we assume 100 1-hour rides are needed in a day, and each person uses their own vehicle, we need 100 cars, despite the fact that we need 100 car-hours. If we can optimize with a service like Uber, we would only need 5 cars to provide 100 car-hours in a day.
Obviously, trips are not completely fungible, but I think the central concept is clear above.
The second piece is that those 5 cars will be replaced much sooner than the 100 individual cars. That's where the utilization comes in. If everyone drives themselves, then the stock of cars must equal peak demand. If services like Uber combine riders (via UberPool - the typical car has more than 1 passenger seat that is unutilized in the typical commute) and provide utilization for cars at 50% of the day, then the total stock of vehicles would be lower than required for self-driving.
The Emma Mearsk, one of the largest container ships around, uses 13 tonnes of fuel an hour to transport 18000 containers, over a distance of (say) 20000 kilometres, which is 1kg of fuel to transport one container 45km (according to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport...), or 450kg for the whole distance.
A 7.5kg washing machine load occupies about 0.00025 of a container, so the fuel requirement to transport that washing machine load is 0.1kg.
The ship's engines use 0.163kg of fuel to generate one kWh, so the energy consumption for just the transport of our washing machine load is 0.6kWh, or 2200kJ.
This is, of course, horribly simplified --- e.g. I'm not calculating the cost of washing water, or transport from the container port to the owner's house --- it does at least show that big ship shipping is really, really cheap. While I still think the original author is wrong, they are at least plausibly wrong.
But manufacturing new clothes every time you need new clothes? In China, land of the "who cares about the EPA" coal-laden environmental almost-slave-labor disaster?
Built from synthetics (which are Petroleum-derived) ?
To add insult to injury, he talks about injuries / deaths from HEPPA-regulated American Power Plants without giving a damn about the suicide nets placed outside of Chinese Sweatshops that builds his clothes because he's too lazy to wash them.
My post was less about the energy usage and more about the Sweatshop workers's working conditions.
He seems concerned about highly-paid Energy Workers in the US who are required (by law) to have safe working conditions (or at least, safe as defined by the law. People still die on the job but at least we try to keep them safe).
And then he turns around and brags about using cheap Chinese workers to sew him new clothes every week. Hypocrisy at its finest.
> Between 25% and 50% of the factories in the region restrict access to toilets and drinking water during the workday.
> The same percentage deny workers at least one day off in seven.
> In more than half of Nike's factories, the report said, employees worked more than 60 hours a week. In up to 25%, workers refusing to do overtime were punished.
Gotta keep those margins. You aren't allowed water because that'd cost the company too much.
> Steel wire meshes have been fitted to windows at Foxconn's factory to stop workers jumping after a rash of suicides believed to be due to harsh management practices
-------------------
The worst issue is that Chinese media restricts free speech and labor unions, making it hard to gather statistics of any kind.
In the US, we are required by law to report injuries and accidents on the job. China... not so. And since these injuries are embarrassing to state-owned companies, government censorship exists to cover-up these sorts of accidents a lot. Non-government organizations are subject to crackdowns of course.
When a country doesn't have labor unions fighting for workers rights, these sorts of issues happen.
>> “I work on the plastic molding machine from 6 in the morning to 6 at night,” said Xu Wenquan, a tiny, baby-faced 16-year-old whose hands were covered with blisters. Asked what had happened to his hands, he replied, the machines are “quite hot, so I’ve burned my hands.”
Not sure about China, but in Bangladesh where most clothes are made, it is dire. Building collapses, fires, environmental pollution (leather processing), worker injuries. Really bad.
That would save electricity...but would probably waste more water. IIRC, a German study into handwashing of dishes found that <1% of people actually managed to use less water than a dishwasher. I'd bet it's a similar usage profile for clothes.
Hand washing dishes consumes massive amounts of water because people tend to leave the tap running while they wash. Laundry is typically done in a basin with a fixed amount of water for wash and rinse. I wouldn't place any bets that it uses less water than a high efficiency front loader, but I would venture that you can come close. Remember, we're not talking law of averages here. We're talking about a single person dedicated to the task of reducing water consumption.
This does assume that the custom made clothes are being slow shipped from China on a cargo boat instead of being shipped via air. Running clothes single use with a 2-3 week lead time for ocean freight sounds a bit tricky.
Until a shipment gets delayed by weather and he can't go outside because he has no more clothes. Though he'd probably consider that a positive development.
I don't see why he doesn't just stop bathing and stop changing his clothes altogether, if this is his goal. (After all, this is the same guy who drank a potent antibiotic to keep himself from defecating in order to save water; that wouldn't be the craziest thing he's done, and it would make more sense than buying new clothes every day.)
> I have not done laundry in years. 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
I'd like someone to run some more numbers on that. He already addresses the shipping costs, but what about manufacturing as well? I'm not entirely sure I buy that the entire manufacturing process takes less water than laundry, unless he's wearing the same clothes for a very long time before donating them.
It's crazy. If you were really committed to not using AC, you could still put some bleach + detergent + cold water in a basin with your clothes to manually agitate, and then air dry.
I have long wanted to fully switch to DC in my life and would love to see common appliances designed for a DC world. It's a shame that the opportunity to discuss this is lost in this post because of the pedantic tone of the author.
Phrases like "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" or "I don’t want to live with red hot heating elements and razor sharp knives. That sounds like a torture chamber" are ridiculous, even if you really try hard to see them as an attempt of making a joke. The continuous references about how many books he has and reads also threw me off.
The best part, so far, is the first Discus comment at the bottom.
Just what practical options are currently available? With roof-mounted solar panels becoming commonplace (at least where I live) it seems like 12V DC is a practical target, but it irks me that it gets converted to AC before being reconverted back to DC by a wall wart a few meters away.
80V DC might work, but 12V DC means the wires would be far too thick to be practical.
In the past you needed AC for the ability to have transformers. These days you can do that in other ways. But you still need a high voltage, meaning you still need that wall wart.
That's the problem, there are not many (some fridges designed to be operated from car plugs, camping gear, things like that) and often is just an appliance that has a converter inside, so it is as inefficient as you'd expect. Not sure if there's a way to design stoves, fridges, ovens and washing machines powerful enough just using DC, though.
For stoves/ovens, just up it to 240V DC. They're just big resistors and will work basically the same (although mechanical power switches will wear out quicker, and now that I think more, triac-based ones may not turn off at all).
Things could get really interesting if say the EU started incorporating a requirement for things that should essentially run fine on DC to compatible with DC. Universal power supplies (computers, phone chargers, etc) and brushless motors (washing machines) should really only require tweaks of their control circuits. AC motors (fridges/dryers/air conditioners) and microwaves wouldn't be an easy change. They'd either need a local converter or for demand to ramp up for explicit DC versions.
Standby power supplies (the thing that powers the IR receiver and power button while your TV is "off") wouldn't function as-is, since the common method is to use a capacitor+zener across the power line. But changing that to a rectifier + small switcher doesn't seem terribly onerous.
>I have long wanted to fully switch to DC in my life and would love to see common appliances designed for a DC world.
Modern HE washers and dryers along with many other appliances already are in some sense. They have their own high efficiency power conversion built in to drive the motors at variable speeds. Powering current-gen stuff requires two redundant conversion steps, but the conversions don't lose too much.
Good for him, I guess. That's not a reasonable solution for most people though.
>Next, I switched from beer to red wine.
I'm a little surprised that he doesn't make his own. It's very easy and cheap to make red wine.
>most of them are Priuses which use DC motors so I’m good there
No, they don't, and I'm starting to think he's got a fixation on the names of things.
>I get my clothing custom made in China for prices you would not believe and have new ones regularly shipped to me.
Okay, this is not about reducing waste anymore, there are few things more wasteful than the global clothing/fashion supply chain. I'd bet he gives his used clothing to a thrift... yup. Those clothes get, wait for it, laundered, and then probably baled up and shipped to Africa or Haiti destroying local clothing manufacturing in those areas.
>My apartment came with a Nest but I removed it
He could have just switched it off.
>Traffic and trash and pollution will evaporate,
Nope, just displaced to Asia. Okay, I'm done with Rhinehart's post now, and I can see that most everyone else is as well.
"For storage a $65 lead acid automobile battery does the trick. It’s 12V so can be charged directly from the solar panel, and holds 420Wh, way more than I use in a day. That’s $0.15 / Wh so I don’t see why everyone is so excited about Tesla charging $0.43 / Wh for the Powerwall, sans inverter and installation."
I'm not smart enough to take this apart, but my gut tells me the best-in-class engineers and (tens/hundreds of?) millions of dollars in R&D at Tesla aren't going to be outwitted by Mr. I'm-Repulsed-By-The-Idea-Of-Kitchens. Anyone want to take a swing?
Car batteries simply aren't designed for deep-discharge. It actually damages (sulphates) them. They're designed to provide thousands of cycles at 2-5% discharge. Using them for deep discharge, you're likely to see them increasingly unusable (or at least, holding nowhere near the designed charge) after 30-150 cycles.
So that 420Wh battery is most likely designed to actually provide about 21Wh. Past that it's a good assumption it's lifespan is being degraded faster than design.
To match a 7kW powerwall with these figures, he'd need roughly 350 such batteries (nearly $23k) to stay within a 2-5% discharge cycle.
So his setup may be capable of delivering 420Wh cheap. Or it may be capable of lasting 1-2000 cycles. But not both.
(Deep-discharge SLA are available. They're usually marketed as marine batteries rather than car batteries. They'll survive such usage better - a couple of years, rather than a couple of months in this scenario. But still not tesla's claimed 5000 cycles.)
That battery has very poor deep cycle and recharging characteristics. Standard lead acid car batteries don't like being discharged below ~50% like others have pointed out. Because of this the battery is going to lose most of it's capacity quickly and need to be replaced long before practically any other choice, there are lead acid batteries called deep-cycle that are designed to be drained and recharged.
Like most things you can slap together something that works on the surface much cheaper in initial costs than the commercial equivalent.
Basically, lead acid have much lower lifespans, and also degrade very quickly if discharged below 50%. So straight off you have to double the size of your battery to not massively shorten the lifespan, so his costs are already closer to $0.30/Wh.
Also, lead acid batteries are larger/heavier per Wh, and even if you never discharge below 50% last less than half the time of Lithium batteries
He's also the creator/founder of Soylent, and even if he were a good cook, he'd likely continue to live off of his creation if only to say "look, I do this!" which will probably get more people to buy his product.
I see, and as mentioned in others comments it's probably more marketing than anything else. But the argument "doing X is for robots" is quite flawed when X can be improved in a lot of ways
Who the fuck wants to do that? Here are 10 things I could be doing besides slaving over a stove (the seventh might surprise you):
1. Reading hacker news
2. Reading reddit
3. Engaging with people engaging with my brand on Twitter
4. Reviewing my productized consultancy analytics
5. Reviewing my startup numbers and analytics
6. Emailing brand leaders to gauge interest in new startup ideas
7. Posting on hacker news
8. Writing blog posts about the freedom provided from abandoning things like laundry, cooking, cleaning, driving, and other mundane, bullshit tasks
9. Meditating, which I do for 15 minutes daily to center myself spiritually so that I can growth hack better. Growth hacking begins with personal growth.
10. Appreciating the beautiful life I've cultivated for myself, surrounded by dynamic people all focusing on the same beautiful goal as myself.
Cooking is boring and takes way too much skill to do right. Moreover, it is objectively unfun and isn't related to startups, technology, or growth hacking in any way. Why would I waste time learning to cook when I could be learning how to write single-page web apps in Haskell with the latest framework? Do you even test your code?
Um, this isn't satirical. If you're not meditating, I really encourage you to take it up -- you feel really refreshed and rededicated afterwards in a way that makes development much more of a focused, mindful process and enables you to hack your metrics for more of a lean, competitive edge. It's much like static typing.
I quite rapidly change every position in my life. I don't even sit in my chair the same way for long. If I don't find a good fit right away, I immediately pivot to something that delivers more value.
b. I can't say much about growth hacking, but I haven't noticed that cooking gets in the way of appreciating life, however undynamic some of my acquaintances may be.
Oh my goodness. I re-read the AC current one after reading the dating one, and yeah, I'm pretty sure now that this one is just an even dryer, more subversively satirical piece. There are probably real elements in it (likely the author does use a solar-powered NUC as his dev machine), which are then extrapolated ad absurdum.
Lead-acid batteries can't be used effectively for energy storage, especially not vanilla car batteries that are optimized for cranking amps but will only last a few cycles of charging and discharging.
Generally, lead-acid batteries will sulfate at low levels of charge, which is a hard-to-reverse reaction.
Deep cycle lead-acid batteries are still the go-to battery for off-gridders. They're recyclable and fairly affordable for the amount of energy storage.
He's not using a high-CCA battery, you can see the model of the battery behind the window in the picture.
I hope this situation changes in 2016 because I'm tired of adding distilled water.
I can appreciate people who can run low powered devices. But new clothes? Just run a washer and hang your clothes if you're in a dry climate. Then you wouldn't even need to buy new clothes because you don't have a machine that slowly turns clothes into lint.
If you're in a dry climate, it still seems like a bad idea to run a washer. Since he seems to be OK with high shipping costs, he could send his clothes somewhere that has more water to be washed.
Reminds me of Shabbat lamps. Since observant Jews are forbidden from using electricity ("starting fires") on Saturdays, what they do is turn on the lamp on Friday and just keep it on the entire time.
> Since observant Jews are forbidden from using electricity
That is not true. They are forbidden from changing electricity. i.e. turning something on or off.
The Sadducees believed like you, that it was forbidden for the fire to be on, but the oral Torah is very clear that only starting (or extinguishing) a fire is prohibited.
That's not true at all. The translation is "Ye shall kindle no fire throughout your habitations upon the sabbath day." Literally, you cannot light fires (which many have extended to electricity use). Nothing about work involved at all.
> Even in less temperate locales I wonder if we really need to define our environment to within single degree Fahrenheit.
Hey, sure, tell that to everyone in the northern states, no need for heat right? I mean when it's 10°F outside you can just shut the windows and be nice and warm, right?
This guy is going to be really sad when he learns that the dc-dc converters in most of his devices are actually dc-ac-dc converters. Evil ac must be purged.
> Even in less temperate locales I wonder if we really need to define our environment to within single degree Fahrenheit. I am not so controlling, but I do want to take back the rooftops from those horrible HVAC units.
I understand that the temperature is usually pretty nice in LA, but here in Iowa temperature control isn't an issue of defining our environment to within a single degree Fahrenheit, it is an issue of defining out environment into a livable temperature. Heck, most people I know have up to a ten degree delta between what they keep their home at in summer vs. winter.
However, without temperature control at all in Iowa, people would die. Sub-zero temperatures in the winter and above 100 degree heat in the summer are not mild inconveniences.
I guess the author is also comfortable with wearing new clothes without washing them. Personally, I wash most clothes before wearing them (except for outerwear).
Also, the author clearly does not have a baby—or keeps his/her baby naked at all times… :)
You can get nearly anything custom tailored for cheap. If you ever go to Hong Kong, walk down Nathan Road. You'll be pitched to by about a hundred or more Bangladeshi immigrants to come and have a fitted suit and some shirts made. They'll measure you, you give them a day, then come in for a second fitting, pick your new duds up the third day. The price will be comparable to Marshall's or TJ Maxx or deeply discounted (like clearance priced) US retail, if you don't negotiate hard. If you're a good negotiator, you can do much better. Nathan Rd. in Hong Kong is the most well known; there is a shop named Sam's that is world famous, but the prices are much higher. Beijing also has a similar area or two where the quality is the same and the prices are even cheaper, one of them is near the pearl market. I've never been to Shanghai, but I'd bet anything they have the same kind of thing. The ones in Beijing are like any other Beijing market, hundreds of independent vendors in one complex. The tailors in HK are usually in little store-fronts adjacent to Nathan Rd. If you know your measurements, you can send them to one of these shops and they will mail you the clothes, assuming you can find a trustworthy one and not a scammer.
I had a wool suit made and it fits me well enough. I've never had a problem finding suits that would fit me off the rack though, so it's mostly a novelty. I also wasn't completely satisfied with the way the trousers fit, but I didn't have time to have them re-made. They are very well-constructed and durable though, and have lasted several years now. The best thing was the shirts, I bought a dozen at about $13 USD each, IIRC. I have long arms and I can rarely find shirts off the racks that have correct-length sleeves and aren't too big everywhere else. These shirts fit well, and are comfortable to wear, and look good. I've worn them a fair amount and they've lasted a few years. The only problem is that the buttons were ruined by the dry cleaners on a couple of the shirts. The buttons were apparently cheap, I chose them myself; but I apparently can't look at a button and judge whether it can withstand dry cleaning/pressing. This happens to some of my store-bought shirts too. I might order another dozen of these shirts, because they were cheaper and much better than anything I've ever bought retail. That is if I get brave enough to do an internet transaction since I have no plans to go to HK any time soon.
>I have not set foot in a grocery store in years. Nevermore will I bumble through endless confusing aisles like a pack-donkey searching for feed while the smell of rotting flesh fills my nostrils and fluorescent lights sear my eyeballs and sappy love songs torture my ears. Grocery shopping is a multisensory living nightmare. There are services that will make someone else do it for me but I cannot in good conscience force a fellow soul through this gauntlet.
>I buy my staple food online like a civilized person.
I'm not sure if going to the grocery store could ever be described as a multisensory living nightmare.
> 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. My home is a place of peace. I don’t want to live with red hot heating elements and razor sharp knives. That sounds like a torture chamber. However, it’s not a total loss. I was able to use the cabinets to store part of my book collection.
Or a kitchen as a torture chamber. This guy seems kinda nutty.
"Nevermore will I bumble through endless confusing aisles like a pack-donkey searching for feed while the smell of rotting flesh fills my nostrils and fluorescent lights sear my eyeballs and sappy love songs torture my ears."
Author needs to cheer the fuck up - his life sounds like a chore...
And by putting it in a place where he can't see it, he has no idea how much environmental damage he's doing.
Restaurants don't give a shit about reducing their carbon footprint. And those Chinese clothing manufacturers probably aren't even constrained by local laws about what they dump into the air and soil in making all his new clothes.
Man, I aspire to that level of efficiency though probably could not reach it since I enjoy cooking and eating dead meat too much. I do think there are huge benefits to simplifying life, and relying less on all these time-consuming habits domesticated humans have invented. Even if we can easily afford to pay for big box groceries, and coal power, not relying on these things might free up a lot of mental space I would imagine.
This is from the founder of Soylent[0], so likely not.
While some ideas are delusional, it is refreshing to see someone taking nothing for granted.
I also suspect the timing of the post is there only to generate discussion at the time of Soylent 2.0 release. So it is basically a link bait trying to push people hot buttons. It works superbly.
Moreover, beyond Soylent, Rob's next startup is probably somewhere in there.
The article mentioned Soylent 2.0 several times so I searched and found hours-old news articles about it, and become very skeptical that this whole thing wasn't just a big ad for Soylent 2.0.
As the creator of Soylent, Rob has probably had access to 2.0 for many years now. It's well known the military keeps civilian Soylent technology years behind what they're using.
I can only assume it's a work of sublime satire. Consider: "As I mature I find myself optimizing for peace instead of posturing, conservation over consumption. Opulence in asceticism."
In two short sentences, the author describes himself as:
* Mature
* Ecologically sensitive
* Peaceful
* Humble (!)
* Opulent
* Ascetic (!!)
I don't think I've seen a more brilliantly delineated, comically absurd character since A Confederacy of Dunces.
As another user hinted at, this article is completely back-asswards.
>I have not done laundry in years. 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
>Thanks to synthetic fabrics it takes less water to make my clothes than it would to wash them
>Thanks to synthetic fabrics it takes less water to make my clothes than it would to wash them
I had to double post this again just to make sure everyone read that line correctly. What argument are you even trying to make anymore? You use less water? Weren't we just talking about energy? What hipster madness is this? How about the amount of coal that is being burned to make your 'custom' clothes. I am 100% sure that the process of getting water and electricity to your house is less environment killing than getting new things made from factories that have zero regulations, and fuck everything let's just get some money in my pocket strategies.
You haven't done anything but say "okay let's see my most carbon producing areas are," and your only solutions are "let's see if someone else can help me reduce my carbon by taking the responsibility off of my own shoulders"
When I got to the washing part (I skipped over the Soylent part because I assumed it was just a paid advertisement), I expected him to talk about using a washing board or something.
No, I just buy new clothes. So instead of using a little energy for a spin cycle, I have factories in China spew coal, then have shipping freights (some of the worst environmental offenders) bring it half way across the world for me so I can wear it once, then presumably add it to the land fill.
If he lives in LA he should use good white linen clothes, wash them with a bit of water after every use and whiten / disinfect these with sunlight.
These would look much better than cheap synthetic staff, would not use (child?) slave labor (drones?) in China, would not use resources to make/maintain drones in China, no need to ship these, would not result in the laundry cycle in the charity, etc...
The land fill presumption is still the safest bet.
The author said that he doesn't wash his clothes. By this we can infer that he brings his dirty laundry — for who knows how long — to a donation facility. I've volunteered at enough non-profit donation facilities to know that they don't launder intake. The expense is too high, and amazingly, most people don't bring in dirty clothes. If something is clearly not clean, it goes in to a separate bin for disposal.
Even if it doesn't go the landfill immediately, you're still talking about a lot more clothes that will eventually have to be disposed of. Unless you assume that all the extra dozens of shirts and pants (shorts?) and underwear that he buys would have been manufactured and eventually disposed of anyway. Hard to see that being true.
Not to mention those synthetic fabrics are a direct cause of microfiber pollution, so using them over something biodegradable, like ordinary cotton, is pretty much the opposite of environmentally friendly: http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2014/oct/27/...
> You haven't done anything but say "okay let's see my most carbon producing areas are," and your only solutions are "let's see if someone else can help me reduce my carbon by taking the responsibility off of my own shoulders"
Well, in a sense I can understand how someone can think this way. The entire notion of reducing a person/company's carbon footprint is based around shifting the dirty work somewhere else. Globally, we impose carbon caps on developed nations and let China do whatever it wants. Ergo, production shifts to China. The pollution is still occurring, but hey, at least _we're_ not doing it. On a smaller scale there's this silliness around buying "offset credits", which smells of a modern day religious indulgence-purchase scheme.
What is it with cooking that makes people under-appreciate the value of a good professional? It sounds like those clients who think programming is just pressing a few buttons.
That's actually a remarkably apt analogy, though not for the reasons you think.
As with cooking there's long been a concerted effort to teach everyone basic coding skills. Does that mean everyone will become paid software developers? No. But not everyone becomes a professional chef, either, and yet those basic skills come in pretty darn handy...
I appreciate a good chef as much as the next guy. The problem is that good chefs cost good money. Its simply not sustainable to eat from a gourmet chef every day, or even every week. Typically, people are going to go to a fast-food joint and that ain't too healthy or sustainable either.
The Soylent guy is claiming that his kitchen is "too costly", and yet eats out all the time. The contradiction is obvious.
I wasn't disagreeing with the lower cost, I was disagreeing with the claim that a home made dinner would probably taste better than something made by a chef. Clearly the author isn't talking about going to fast-food joints when he talks about "fine restaurants".
And nowhere does he say that he eats out every day, or even every week. What the Soylent guy eats every day is, presumably, Soylent. Which he claims is cheaper than home cooking (I won't argue either way) and that therefore he has more money to eat out when he wants to.
Upvoted because it's reasonable response not deserving of downvotes.
I do appreciate good chefs. It's probably side effect of the (cheap-ass) restaurants I go to, but I can cook at least as well as most of the people they have back in the kitchen. And I don't consider myself particularly skilled.
I'm actually all for collectivization and economy of scale, but I didn't see that point anywhere. I could personally come up with the upside of not having a personal kitchen, powerplant, house, but I didn't get that from reading, rather just the dislike of having a kitchen.
True. His motivations seem to be a mix of simplifying his life and lowering the environmental impact. The first one is easy to evaluate (he does feel that he accomplished that, therefore he did), but whether the second is consistent with that remains to be demonstrated in all the cases. Shipping one-use clothes from China seems dubious, for example.
sorry, but I can't take someone who doesn't cook because soylent is more efficient seriously.
edit: ah, he's the creator of soylent. even less reason to take his seriously. humans are not supposed to live off a drink. I've always assumed it was a joke product, but I'm begining to realise that unfortunately it's not.
Still, he can drink his algea, and I'll keep eating what I eat. Each to their own
Reading this article I half expected the author to forgo vaccines to reduce his water consumption.
This is a hypocritical lifestyle through which the author outsources energy consumption so that he can live a falsely monastic life. A true monk reduces life to essentials but by doing so ends up performing much more daily work. They don't stand around all day enjoying how much less effort it takes to live the simple life. They take on the responsibility of meeting their own needs, usually through physical effort or toil, rather than lay those tasks on others.
This guy is a tourist spouting off about his low-energy hotel while sitting in the first class cabin of a 747. He's not flying the plane. HIS ticket is paid for with eco-bitcoins. We all are the ones killing the planet with our wasteful battery-powered watches.
PS: I hope he has a fuse or two somewhere on that rig. Electrons in combination with lead blocks swimming in acid are not your friends. But maybe he has outsourced that risk via renter's insurance.
So he eats out all the time to "save money" because he's too lazy to learn how to cook himself. He buys new clothes all the time because washing old clothes is wasteful.
this and the Ustream debacle points to a16z being in the snakeoil business, backing weirdos with massive money. and if this is true for these clear cut cases of BS, what does it mean for their overall method of investing?
Some of his more controversial choices (based on the comments in this article) reflect more the later than the former.
It is possible both to prepare (delicious) meals using barely no electricity (and even without burning any fuel), to do the laundry by hand using nothing but water and soap and to dry it at the clothesline. The drawback is that those are very time consuming tasks.
The choice to eat only Soylent and to buy cheap clothes for single use seem to be motivated more by the desire to save time than by the idea of conserving energy.
Both are worthy goals, to save time and energy but IMO it is very important to know how to strike a balance between efficiency and enjoyment. Otherwise we become the very robots we are trying not to be.