No, really, they are. Hipster libertarians are the new street mimes, so enjoy them while you can before everyone gets tired of them. The latest example is this silicon valley entrepreneur, Rob Rhineheart, who has written a paean to his lifestyle. It starts with a complaint about the horrors of alternating current.
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. I can feel fortresses of industry miles away burning prehistoric hydrocarbons by the megaton. I can feel the searing pain and loss of consciousness from when I was shocked by exposed house wiring as a boy. I can feel the deep cut of the power bill when I was living near the poverty line. I can feel the cold uncertainty of the first time the power went out due to a storm when I was a child. How long before the delicate veil of civilization turns to savagery with no light nor heat nor refrigeration?
This summer, I met an electrical engineer who also had a magnet implanted in his hands. It sounded useful in his occupation — he could tell when a wire was live without actually touching it, which is a good ability to have when you’re poking around electrical gadgets. If you’re just using it to stoke your paranoia about electricity in the walls, well, I’m sure there’s nothing anyone could do to prevent you from being silly.
Rhineheart’s claim to “fame” is that he’s selling a product called “Soylent”, which is supposed to be a complete liquid replacement for regular food. This kind of thing has been around for a long time — when my grandfather was recovering from cancer surgery that removed his entire lower jaw, he got by on Ensure. He didn’t enjoy it. I can’t quite imagine wanting to eliminate all flavor and texture and variety from my diet that way voluntarily, but apparently someone thinks there’s a market for tastelessness (they probably aren’t wrong.) But making the case for Soylent in environmental terms is absurd, and adding a nice dollop of privileged elitism on top makes it revolting.
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. This eliminates a panoply of expensive tools and rotting ingredients I would need to spend an unconscionable amount of time sourcing, preparing, and cleaning. It also gives me an incentive to explore the city’s fine restaurants and ask friends out to eat. In fact, I find soylent has made me more social when it comes to food. I can spend the money I saved from groceries and take out to buy a friend lunch or dinner. When soylent 2.0 reached private beta, I was thrilled to learn that thanks to aseptic processing the product does not require refrigeration, and will still keep its nutrition for at least a year. It tastes better cold but I think it’s fine warm. Getting rid of my fridge was one of the greatest days of my life. Nevermore will I listen to that damn compressor moan.
After all his babbling about going off the grid and the disgraceful wastefulness of coal plants and public power, his answer is to just buy his weird processed liquid food (which, apparently, requires no energy to make or transport!), and go out to fine restaurants to eat, which in turn must be entirely solar powered and are synthesizing their food by fixing CO2 directly out of the atmosphere.
In what universe do you save money by buying processed food in a bottle and going out to restaurants all the time, rather than cooking from fresh ingredients in your home? This is completely contrary to a lifetime of experience, and makes no sense whatsoever. But the entire essay is a bizarrely disconnected fantasy. He loves Uber, that capitalist wet dream that outsources all the labor from a business that profits the owners exclusively.
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.
Perhaps a cross between a subway car and an automobile: some sort of self-driving electric pod that carried a dozen people in a UberPool model would improve on this. Either that, robot horse cheetahs, or drone multicopters.
Robot horse cheetahs. This is my new catch phrase to perfectly capture the delusions of Libertarians. All our problems will be solved by Robot Horse Cheetahs that will be constructed by 3-D printers, no labor involved, and that will run entirely on DC current beamed to them by the beneficent sun, with the all-knowing love and guidance of Holy St Tesla.
One more fragment of elitism:
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.
Yes. You can save energy and money and the environment by throwing away your clothes when they get dirty, and having new ones shipped to you from China. And it’s OK, because when his t-shirts get sweaty and dirty, rather than washing them himself and wasting water, he gives them to poor people, who will wash them for him, apparently without using any water.
I’m actually kind of impressed. Silicon Valley is breeding a whole new class of uniquely clueless asshole.
Interesting philosophy. Let’s extrapolate. Does he wipe his ass?
Donate to my kickstarter campaign— I’m raising money to develop an army of robot horse cheetahs ridden by pygmies + dwarfs.
Ah yes, the wet dream of the hipster liberal: a bubble of apparent independence. To hell with the system. Anything outside my bubble doesn’t exist. I’m looking at you China. I mean, NOT looking at you.
You gotta check out the company website with the hipster guzzling that shit all over his hipster beard.
Each bottle has 1/5 of your daily calories and micronutrients (no full-sized nutrients?). Please to enjoy at least 5 bottles a day.
This throbbing paean showed up on Ars Technica, where the headline touted his independence from the electrical grid. I skimmed down for that part, and (wisely it seems) skipped the rest. I’m all for simplifying one’s life but not to the point of living an ascetic Gernsbackian fantasy of food pills, magical transportation, and throwaway clothes. (And some of us don’t have startup billions to toss at our perceived problems.)
Oh but come on, robot horse cheetahs would be awesome.
———-
I kind of get the appeal of Soylent. One of the problems for many people trying to lose weight is managing addiction to certain (usually high-carb) foods. The ultimate goal of most addiction-breaking is to do away with the substance entirely (cigarettes, alcohol, heroin, etc), but you can’t just quit food cold-turkey.
I often think I could more easily be anorectic than follow a weight-loss diet; Soylent might be a safer means of doing that.
Yes, I would doubtless get bored of it in three days and be craving real food. But I would be willing to give it a try if my health situation deteriorated to “Lose weight NOW or DIE.”
Without looking, I image he wants all his gizmos connected to the so-called IoT (Internet of Things, one of the current mad schemes where, basically, everything is connected to the Internet, including your toilet, doorbell, and comb). In which case I look forward to the the inevitable security glitch, allowing a prankster to gain remote control of robohorseeths, and make them all frolic in the grass, running backwards, and screaming “I am not a number!”
Wait, does he think that if , Soylent will just keep on conveniently appearing at his doorstep?
What the hell is his problem with A/C?
I think I’ll just stay fat.
The great poet of the North, Robert Service, wrote about the whole electricity in the walls thing, over a hundred years ago, in The Ballad of Pious Pete.
“But I killed the galoot when he started to shoot electricity into my walls.”
The pictures I’ve seen of powdered Soylent look rather like the stuff I put together to grow yeast and bacteria in the lab. I hope it at least smells a bit more appetising…
He’s a strange guy, but it’s not clear to me that his strangeness has anything to do with Libertarianism?
So far the commentary I’ve heard on this is about one third “He’s being facetious to make a point”, one third ” He’s just saying outrageous things so he can sell his Soylent glop”, and one third “Holy cow this guy is nucking futz!”
And Nemo @12, he’s a techbro from Silicon Valley…it can be assumed with a very high level of probability that he’s a ‘libertarian’.
Nightjar, the Soylent factory is powered by Electric. It will last forever. We’re not sure exactly what ‘Electric’ is but it’s the good kind of Electric that doesn’t make the magic rock in Master’s palm angry.
Re: blf #6
I’d say that’s almost a given. For one, the IoT has been overhyped for years now so it’s probably a must-have for people like this guy on that basis alone. And any army of robots taking over transport would pretty much have to be online,* making the whole thing an Internet of Things one way or the other.
As for the security glitches: Type ‘botnet refrigerator’ into google. This is the shape of things to come, or so it seems. So enjoy your 16-hour cheetah ride from form, let’s say one end of New York to the other, while the virus-ridden, bot-infested creature tries to sell you genitalia-enhancing medication. You may also have to enter your credit card number to get it moving again midway.
*And have, among fiftythousand other vital things, a working satellite network to navigate. But it still beats trains, which are filthy, inefficient and veeeeery complicated.
Not only do they externalize ALL costs associated with labor, they also externalize the capital ownership and maintenance costs! This is not even capitalism, it’s post-capitalism, where capitalists don’t even need to control the means of production to exploit labor to extract a profit, just the information infrastructure, allowing them to exploit other people’s labor and capital to extract a profit.
Also, his solution for low-resource transportation independence is Uber? Fucking Uber? That highly-connected grid-reliant system that send hydrocarbon-powered (he seems to think that the Prius runs entirely on electricity, and to again not realize that the vast majority of our electricity doesn’t come from renewable sources anyway) vehicles to any and every individual person for door-to-door service? Not, say, a bicycle, or his own two feet?
@komarov #14:
I love you.
Ugh, Uber is trying to get into the market here. Luckily, unless they find a loophole, they won’t be able to operate thanks to legal restrictions.
@frog, #5: Medical replacement foods for people on doctor-supervised very low calorie diets have been around since the 1950s. Anyone who is interested in that kind of thing would be better advised to work with a doctor, who will recommend a meal replacement designed and prepared by an actual company staffed with professionals.
Soylent sounds gross, but I can imagine doing that if you preferred eating out/getting pre-cooked food all the time versus cooking.
@John Horstman
Wait, so you’re objecting to the fact that Uber leaves the means of production in the hands of the drivers, so to speak, instead just providing a platform for drivers to offer their services and connecting them with customers? Do you also think that book publishers should forgo publishing deals, only hiring writers on as full-time employees producing books for a fixed salary?
I don’t. Uber’s not like the fast food franchises or the various MLM schemes – they only make money when the drivers using their system actually provide rides. Those same drivers can walk at any time without consequence, and stack up as many hours at whatever time that they want to. You know, like how small/individual businesses working with wholesaling merchants have done for literally centuries.
Although that sentiments like this are common is a sign of how much American opinion on the economy has evolved over time. When the first big companies started showing up in the 19th century, the big fear was the loss of autonomy – that workers would end up as peons working for plutocrats instead of themselves as farmers and self-employed folks. Now we complain when the companies don’t bring the workers on board as full-time peons, claiming they’re “outsourcing risk”.
The Prius has A/C drive motor not DC.
Alternating currents magnetic fields will not harm you by the way.
But the drivers are treated as independent contractors and must pay for gas, repairs, insurance, and pay taxes on their wages still. So while they crow about how much money you can ‘make’, the reality is that these people make exceedingly little at the end of the day. It’s pure exploitation.
Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk- @ 9 : That is my current strategy. I like cookies.
Julia Sullivan @ 18: I have no doubt. But you’re assuming most dieters do so under a doctor’s supervision to begin with, which I suspect is not a good assumption.
I have no idea what his problem with AC is, so maybe we better not tell him that there is essentially no such thing as a DC motor. All motors require reversing magnetic fields which require reversing electric currents. A DC motor uses a gizmo called a commutator to make its own alternating current, or else it uses an electronic circuit to convert DC to AC.
Rowan vet-tech@21, You might not be aware of if, but there is a recent court ruling in California(?) that Uber
slavesdrivers are employees, not contractors, and hence entitled to the full range of the usual benefits. The Uberkleptoroyalty is fighting that ruling, of course…@15: I thought Silicon Valley types (even the business-side) would at least be competent engineers with some understanding of how the infrastructure that enables any given service works, and that the costs (measured in money, megajoules, tons of carbon emitted, or whatever) of that have to be figured into the equation. Disappointed to learn that’s not true (though I should know better).
My main beef with Uber is its disingenuous marketing of itself as “just random people offering strangers a ride, but the passengers pay for it and we have this whole dispatch system set up over the internet and smartphones. But really, we’re just a high-tech form of hitch-hiking.” Yeah, right. But I know nothing about it beyond that. (I speak as someone who both owns a car, and has a good local transit service, so I almost never take taxis).
My first thought on reading the OP: “Does soylent come in green?”
Rob may be wacky (didn’t know he was libertarian), but I’ve been using Soylent for a year now and I love it. Works as advertised.
Probably also shouldn’t tell this nutter that his WiFi or mobile phone uses electromagnetic radiation, which is also A/C, albeit typically at much higher frequencies that the power grid. Which means the wavelengths are shorter, which means… (opens door to numerous conspiracy theories and plain bad “science”…)
Never get your transportation ideas from repeated watchings of Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle.
@Rowan vet-tech
That’s not really different from any sort of small business or franchise set-up, or (as I mentioned) a book deal with a publisher. You pay all the expenses on your side, in exchange for not being an employee who is under the direct control of the company and who contributes only labor to the firm. You might not be making a lot of money above expenses, but I suspect that’s true for a lot of smaller businesses.
My favorite part of this is the idea that it’s more efficient to have his clothes shipped new, as he needs them, from a factory in China that makes them for really low wages. Imagine how efficient it would be if everyone were to do that!
I mean, there would be ways of streamlining the process. Instead of custom-making garments for one person, you could make them all to a generalized template. And since multiple ships carting the stuff as people ordered would rapidly become prohibitively expensive, it makes sense to just have regular large shipments coming from China. Of course, it’d suck to order a shirt and then have to wait until the next shipping window to get it, so people should pay when they pick it up. And that means there would have to be centralized distribution locations where you could pick up the shirt and pay for it. Of course, if the people making these shirt orders are all around the country, we’d have to have a number of localized distribution centers. Naturally that’s going to come with some overhead to pay people to stock maintain the distribution centers and take people’s money, so there would have to be some cost markup to account for that. Small price to pay for efficiency, though, right?
Now what would we call these locations where clothing is stored until people pick up their purchases?
It kind of reminds me of a co-worker who has friends who homeschool. Since there are a bunch of kids from different families, there’s a rotating group of parents who take them. Since different parents have different specialties, the kids get different lessons from different people. It’s such a great system; the only issue is that you have to shuttle around to different people’s houses each day. If only there were a single, centralized building they could go to each day to get the same result. Like homeschooling, but not at home, you know? I wonder why no one’s ever thought of it before.
How do I con this doofus out of some of that money he has lying around?
PZ!
Hey, take it easy on the Holy St Tesla. He had nothing to do with this.
An apology is in definite order.
I suppose one can technically survive without that.
But…
….does he breathe?
And he’s calling his liquid food replacement SOYLENT??!!
I suppose we should be thankful he didn’t think to dye it green.
Apparently this guy isn’t a Poe. I just have a hard time believing that any reasonable market research would pass “Soylent” as the name of a food product. All he needs is one competitor taking out an ad that says “Soylent (green) Is People!”
As for the DC vs AC thing, dollars to donuts he’s one of two kinds of people. First, the ones who are ‘sensitive’ to WiFi and all sorts of electric fields. Second, one of the people who think that Nikolai Tesla would have given us all free energy if only that evil Edison hadn’t ruined him.
His belief that his lifestyle somehow has a lower environmental impact is staggering in its stupidity. He reminds me of the (apocryphal) story of the woman complaining that a neighbor was growing tomatoes in dirt. “Why doesn’t he go to the store and buy clean ones?”
It’s Nikola, not Nikolai
I guess my only question has to be: Is Soylent people?
He certainly seems like an odd guy. But I do like Soylent. Not for every meal, of course, but it makes a great breakfast.
I see someone’s never dealt with public school administrators.
beaten tuit. [I’ve got a Round TUIT somewhere] I was anticipating referencing the Soylent Green.
I wonder if that was some kind of hipster move to attach an ironic name to his super nutrition liquid (with zero calories, I assume, or some kind of distinction between ‘healthy calories’ v. ‘toxic calories’)
before the bit about Soylent, I can truly empathize with his experiences with AC power being dangerous. To dismiss all its benefits, because it can be misused is “jumping to conclusions” (bordering on paranoia). I too, having experienced AC power first hand (euphemism for a mild form of electrocution), am very wary of AC power and question Europe’s standard of 220VAC vs US 120VAC. 220VAC will kill with just a brief touch, while 120VAC takes a little longer. So that makes me empathize, a little, up to a point, which he seems to have gone beyond.
Stop smearing Silicon Valley. This dude is LA [all the way], which is really, nowhere near Silicon Valley. yeah he’s a technophile, even though ACphobic, he deserves all the ridicule individually, just leave the Bay Area (ie Silicon Valley) to wallow in its own forms of nonsense to be mocked elsewhen.
Soylent seems cool for things like going camping, or dealing with a vegan who needs calorie supplementation (say, they lost their appetite due to chemotherapy). Eating it at home — some people don’t really have a taste for fresh food, so sure. I bet it’s a bad idea to rely 100% on it for any extended periods.
The name is *obviously* riffing from the movie. And what a brilliant marketing decision to take.
Robot horse cheetahs… Cool, in the future we’ll ride Fuzors!
Rhinehart was on Colbert last year.
@Beatrice
Oops!
Hah, I convert my solar DC into AC so I can feel its power coursing around the walls to give me a warm buzzy feeling. This guy just sounds like a lazy slob.
@slithey tove
AFAIK, a brief touch of 220v DC will kill you just as dead. I’m not an EE but I doubt that DC is manifestly safer than AC at similar voltages and current.
Sad to say, yes, he is L.A. Sadly, so is Mike Cernovich who also markets dubious supplements and comes off as a pretentious git. I read some of Reinhart’s other blog posts. Sounds like a guy who is very impressed with himself. Woo hoo… he hacked the Tinder API.
“Robot horse cheetahs. This is my new catch phrase to perfectly capture the delusions of Libertarians.”
That’s one hell of a straw man you’re burning there. How exactly does chugging instant breakfast, waxing on poetically about electricity, and mentioning (yes mentioning – I didn’t see any obsessive love there) Uber have to with Libertarianism? He didn’t extol the virtues of a free market unburdened by central government nor go on about legalizing this or that. I think you are just grandstanding to your own doctrine and stretching Rhinehart’s essay to fit your argument.
“He loves Uber, that capitalist wet dream that outsources all the labor from a business that profits the owners exclusively.”
I’m confused. Are you saying that Uber outsources labor from another business? Or that Uber simply outsources its own labor? I’m guessing the latter, but if we restructure your statement, it looks like this:
“He loves Uber, that capitalist wet dream that outsources all the labor from Uber that profits the owners exclusively.”
Or is the business to which you refer the taxi business in general? I take issue with your statement that Uber profits the owners exclusively. Do you mean “Exclusive” in the same way that most people use the word “Literally”? Because in order for the owners of Uber to exclusively profit, drivers would be working for free. Again this is a case of you remolding the material to fit your biases.
In general, I think it’s quite ironic that you attack Rhinehart for being self-satisfied and smug when your arguments against him are just as arrogant. Here’s what I got from the article in all:
-Rhinehart has delusions of grandeur.
-Rhinehart likes Soylent.
-Rhinehart likes Uber.
-Rhinehart is overall an eccentric.
-You hate Libertarians.
-You hate Uber.
-You hate Tesla.
I really have to wonder about your type. I’ve seen the same smug dismissals of Uber and Tesla over and over, and I can’t quite figure out what to root of it all is. Apparently you all love traditional taxis and don’t like new technology in electric cars in the vein of Tesla. Is there some meeting you all go to or something? Will you all not be satisfied until cars run on pixie dust? Because oil is obviously evil, and so is frakking, but now suddenly Tesla and Elon Musk must be mocked as well. It’s funny, given that the automotive industry by proxy of the oil companies is usually the first to heap on Tesla, so am I to believe that the hacky sack kicking, red flag waving, bleeding heart wringing leftists have entered into an alliance with the baby-eating, kitten punting, wage stealing, monocle wearing villains of Corporate America? Apparently it’s not capitalism you all hate – just new ideas and realistic alternatives. Have fun in your echo chamber with all your super cool friends though, praying for Tesla’s fall.
No. He has eliminated food and also eliminated elimination:
I’m not sure how long that experiment lasted but the fact that he even tried that makes it very, very clear that this is not a person anyone should be consulting about health and safety issues.
#50, Nutella:
Holy shit. Really? Why would he do that?
I discovered his blog a few days ago… he’s a strange one. I guess he did some good work on Soylent, but I’m not sure I’d trust his judgement on much else. Or Soylent, for that matter, had I seen this blog before I saw reports of actual people being happy with it.
…so he’s literally full of shit.
Robot horse cheetahs. The Realistic Alternative.
*sigh* I was referring to electric cars. Granted, I’d like a coal-free electric grid to accompany it, but I do see electric cars as a realistic alternative. Though if the robot horse cheetahs were electric too, I wouldn’t object. What if you got to have a robot squid for transportation? Nothing’s wrong with a little flair.
redrockrun
No one was bashing Tesla the car. Some were bashing the horse-shit worship of Tesla the person by ‘futurists’ and other people who think anything and everything that comes out their ass can be good science or feasible technology.
Fair enough, though I do think Nikola Tesla was a cool guy. I get that revisionist amateur historians have written him as a martyr for science however. I’m still sympathetic to futurists though so long as the science is feasible or the ideas at least are good. There has been a lot of science fiction which has gone on to become real after all. I suppose I err on the side of idealism when it comes to these things.
Truly, his genius is staggering. Maybe he could demonstrate the utility of his philosophy and take a break from that particular repeated labor for a while.
#51, PZ
The digestive system needs to be disrupted, I guess.
It makes a more dramatic story than “Hey, I invented a trendy, modern thing that’s exactly the same as Boost and Ensure (that stuff your grandma drinks) because I’m so trendy and modern.”
Ensure isn’t vegan, so clearly, Soylent isn’t identical to it. I’m sure there’s a bajillion other kinds of powders that are largely equivalent though.
re ArtK@48:
actually, EE here, Yes. sorry. my discussion of 220VAC was intended to refer to the magnitude only, with VAC added in just for completeness. Did not intend to use it to isolate VAC as the dangerous bit. that being the most significant difference between European electricity and Murican tricity. (60Hz vs 50Hz AC is basically insignificant when time is irrelevant)
DC is even worse than AC [ack, DC (geographically) is even double worse], when touched. DC will lock the muscles, maintaining grip on the wire; AC will make the muscles lock&unlock (in tune with the Hz; ie convulse), so one will typically drop the wire releasing one from the current.
While basically irrelevant at the low frequencies of 60 or 50Hz, AC has “skin depth”; meaning at high enough frequencies the current will remain on the surface and penetrate not much. DC has infinite skin depth. [ie: depth = k/freq.] Frequencies in the tens have enough depth to penetrate the entire depth of a human body, so no effective difference from DC.
Adding some unasked-for trivia: when forced to manually manipulate a wire that might be energized, with no way to verify, only use the right hand and keep the left hand from touching anything. Current flow is the important factor to consider. If the current flows from the right hand across the chest and exits through the left hand, the current will pass across the heart, usually resulting in infarction. If the current passes through the right arm and down the right leg, exiting through the right foot: it will sting, but bypass the heart.
[ugh, sorry. I was just showing off, to verbally self-corroborate my EE cred. trust me. why would I lie? (make up such an elaborate falsehood)]
Eh, from my understanding, this is incomplete, insofar as AC has a stronger tendency to screw up cardiac rhythms even at currents too small to be dangerous otherwise.
Killing your gut flora is not a good idea.
some much of this guys idea’s are wow it is as if he does not really like living with people or being people nor looking at the whole of anything.
I thought the main benefit of AC was it’s ability to be transported longer distances with less lose than DC.
It is all dangerous or can be if it is strong enough (high current), a little 12Vdc wall wart is one thing a 12 V car battery is another.
I guess he may find a niche market for soylent but I would suspect that with the popularity of cooking shows on TV and stores like whole foods that the big money is headed for more fresh and better quality ingredients for cooking not some kind of ‘space food” even on NASA likes to supply people with a richer and more sensual diet, turns out it is good for people in more than just nutrition.
uncle frogy
uncle frogy
Having been stuck on a liquid diet a couple times, I would much prefer a dry kibble like Futurama’s ‘Bachelor Chow’. Just pour the unflavored kibble into a bowl, then add whatever extras you want to get the flavors and consistencies you desire.
AC versus DC
AC was great when there were no power semiconductors as all it needs to shift voltage is two coils of wire wrapped around a common ferrite core. So, it is easy to turn 20kVAC into 120VAC then into 12VAC just by having a simple fixed ratio of the number of turns on input and output wrapped around the common magnetic core.
It is quite a bit harder to shift a DC voltage, so they used to have to use the relatively safe household voltages throughout the entire distribution system leading to higher losses than the easily shifted, multi-level AC distribution system. HVDC has really only been possible since the development of high-voltage, high-power semiconductors that can operate at high-ish frequencies while turning DC into AC and/or rectifying AC into DC, and has since been used in quite a few high power links (especially underwater links between countries, or between 50Hz and 60Hz systems like in Japan).
DO NOT MASSACRE YOUR INTERNAL BACTERIA.
…that’s it, really.
I like the idea that this “genius” listened to the one guy who he’s hired to study the flora and fauna of the gut and said
“I’ve seen things you bacteria wouldn’t believe. Colons on fire ascending Orion. I watched S-beams clog in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time… like tears in rain… Time to die.”
We were invented as a way to carry bacteria around. They’ll get him. They’ll eat him. One way or another.
@49 redrockrun: The tell is the complete obliviousness to any external costs associated with his way of life.
@64 unclefrogy: Pretty much correct. If you can use higher voltages, you need less current for the same power. Line losses are current times resistance, so lower current = less loss = higher efficiency. AC is easy to step up and down in voltage, transformers are simple and reliable. For long distance transmission you also use three phase (the AC sine waves are phased 120 degrees apart). The loads are close enough to balanced that the phases cancel out, needing only a very small return (neutral) wire. Notice large transmission towers have wires in sets of 4 – three fat and one thin. The thin is the neutral, and ends up only having to carry enough current to make up any imbalances in the loads on the three legs. So that’s even more efficiency gains.
The primary difference between your 12v wall wart and 12v car battery is source resistance. Wall warts or flashlight batteries have fairly high source (internal) resistance, if you put the contacts across your tongue you’ll drop the voltage to maybe a couple volts. So correspondingly less current. A car battery is designed to have very low resistance in order to run a powerful starter motor, putting that across your tongue would not lower the voltage much at all (and may well cause your spit to boil with the resulting current). BTW that internal resistance is why, if you short the terminals of a car battery by accident, it can explode. The internal resistance heats up the acid electrolyte so fast it can flash into steam.
@#6, blf
Well, 1. Practically all “Internet of Things” devices are insecure right from the start, so there would be no delay at all beyond the delay it would take for hackers to figure out where the holes were, and 2. chances are that hackers who are going after Internet of Things-enabled devices are going to be much less humorous than that. More likely, the robohorseeths would trample their owners, wait until they were being ridden and then ride into a brick wall, or drag their owners to whatever location was specified by the highest bidder.
(Why would anyone trust a simple device which has had Internet access added to it? Have these people never seen a computer? Computers are actually designed to do Internet stuff, and they break in terrible ways all the time; what sort of person would say “gee, I wish my HVAC system were just as vulnerable to remote exploits as Windows is?” The Internet of Things is motivated by the same type of thinking that gave us an e-mail transmission protocol without any authentication — SMTP — and then was surprised when spam started showing up.)
I saw the sweet nothings being whispered into Uber’s ear, and wasn’t impressed, then I saw the bit about getting his clothes made on the cheap in China, and I was actually horrified, in spite of absolutely wanting a robot riding cheetah as soon as someone invents them. Or a unicorn. Either or.
But is he actually *advocating* slavery? Or does it not count as slavery when the sweatshops are somewhere far away?
The Vicar (via Freethoughtblogs) wrote:
That is not necessarily true. Even on vulnerable devices, there’s a big difference between an IoT device that can merely report things versus one that can change things. A refrigerator that can alert you when the door is ajar for far too long, or when the interior temperatures get too high is perfectly fine. Even if hacked, all it does is start reporting wrong data. A refrigerator that does all that, and lets you modify its “coldness” setting, run device functions or tweak any other parameters about how the device runs is incredibly dangerous.
The problem here is not the technology itself, but the fact there is little to no self-discipline in the tech industry, and a deep aversion to regulations that might prevent this kind of shit before someone has to die from it. Stuff like the hackable Jeeps should never have happened, but the combination of laziness and lack of standards made it possible.
Well of course: the more stitches, the less riches. Smarts like that is what one expects from an alpha, I’d enjoy a round of electro-magnetic golf with that chap sometime.
stevem @41,
Having worked for some years with Australia’s 240VAC mains, I can confirm anecdotally that it will not (necessarily) kill with a brief touch. I’ve had a few inadvertant zaps over the years, and I’ve also been belted by 90VDC, which hurt a hell of a lot more.
I don’t know the cost of soylent, but it’s unwise to assume all ‘real’ food is cheaper. I cook with as many fresh ingredients as I can, but it’s not cheap to do. Our supermarkets in the UK don’t like the hassle of handling all this crushable stuff in odd shapes with different shelf lives, so they add markups reminiscent of street dealers in recreational pharmaceuticals (the actual producer is usually screwed). It’s almost always cheaper to fill up with processed crap nowadays, so we have a growing problem of our poorest families managing to be malnourished but obese.
Bonzaikitten @#70
QFT
Prius’s are hybrids. The battery for the DC motor is charged by the petrol motor… which in turn, funnily enough, runs on petrol. One of those fossil fuels he hates so much. “True” electric cars, with no petrol motor to charge the battery, are charged up by plugging them into the electrical grid… the evil, AC electrical grid, which runs on power generated by fossil-fuel driven power plants.
This guy’s an idiot.
@ Nutella #50
He deliberately destroyed his own gut flora? What the fuck?
I stand by my diagnosis: common idiocy.
re gut flora:
I think techbro should see this by Munroe.
remember, your body is a team, teams can’t operate with a single member, the gut flora you decimated is your team. quite rude to expel them to save you from poopin.
Did you ever read the book Everyone Poops? Recommended.
re me@78:
edit to clarify:
I’ve been drinking Soylent since it was first released.
I also drank Ensure exclusively for over a month after my jaw surgery.
There is very little comparison between the two. Soylent is far superior.
I know nothing about Rhineheart and his bonkers Libertarian views, and I really don’t care to know them. Soylent has proven to be about the only consistent food item I can eat that won’t make my stomach and intestines revolt in undiagnosable, IBS-esque, gastrointestinal paroxysm.
For the record, it has a very neutral taste that you can flavor however you want. I prefer maple flavoring.
Uh huh. This isn’t a matter of “I never cook”, it’s a matter of “I don’t have the slightest idea of how to cook”.
Perhaps a properly working refrigerator wouldn’t moan, eh?
I thought you drank your nutrition and didn’t cook…so wherefore dirty dishes?
Wait, so you’re objecting to the fact that Uber leaves the means of production in the hands of the drivers…
No, dumbass, we’re objecting to Uber because it leaves the COSTS of production in the hands of drivers.
Those same drivers can walk at any time without consequence, and stack up as many hours at whatever time that they want to. You know, like how small/individual businesses working with wholesaling merchants have done for literally centuries.
Yeah, that’s what people say about temporary employment, and just about every other form of labor where employers try to shaft their employees wherever they can: “they can quit anytime, so that makes it all OK.”
I really have to wonder about your type. I’ve seen the same smug dismissals of Uber and Tesla over and over, and I can’t quite figure out what to root of it all is.
The reason you can’t figure it out, is that you’re not paying attention, and ignoring facts and experiences that don’t fit your worldview. If you had been paying attention, you’d know that our objections to Uber are not based on “smug dismissals,” they’re based on both well-known concepts of fairness and the documented experiences of Uber drivers.
As for whether this particular techbro is really a libertard, all I can say is that his delusions, his self-importance, his lack of common sense (he didn’t even understand the real benefits of the product he praised — we needed Leslee @80 to explain that!), and his eagerness to get everything for free, regardless of the consequences for others (yes, he’s really endorsing slavery on “efficiency” grounds, just like the Economist did), all fit the pattern of libertarian “thought” I’ve been seeing since 1978.
Throughout the challenge I did not defecate.
He just made up for that by posting all this raw sewage about his wunnerful lifestyle.
@Raging Bee
So what? This isn’t the same thing as contingent labor, dumbass – unlike a temp worker, Uber’s drivers actually do own the means of production. They don’t own the intermediary, but that’s no different than any sort of whole-sale arrangement that’s been around forever.
Like I said, it’s like a small business, or a publishing deal. Most of the costs of producing the product/service are on the drivers’ side, but they also own the means of making money and can set their hours or jump between different platforms (and they do).
I for one welcome our Uber, paste eating, magnet sensing, robot horse cheetah riding, DC cyborg overlords.
Honestly, the idea of Soylent resonated with me. For some reason. I think I might see food as difficult to prepare and inefficient (and I eat way too much of it, so I guess I also see it as addictive).
However, this guy is a clown. The throwing away of clothes and buying new clothes instead of washing, in the name of efficiency, may be the stupidest I have ever heard that wasn’t creationism.
Also, this article on the same subject is hilarious: http://gizmodo.com/rob-rhineharts-latest-attempt-to-make-you-buy-soylent-i-1721852606
Since someone asked, Soylent works out to about $9/2000 calories.
You can divide that into a per-meal basis depending on whether you have meals, or whether you just snack on it during the day.
I got it because I prefer not to think about food during the work day, and then cook a nice meal for dinner. Still working out the balance, and I admit to a knee-jerk urge to cancel my subscription after this article. We’ll see about that.
As to Reinhart’s fixation on Tesla, it’s not very surprising. Reinhart clearly has a high opinion of his own intellect and inventiveness, but he’s also aware that there are a lot of “unusual” things about his personality. So his personal hero is someone famous for both of those things, which probably encourages him to feed his eccentricities.
He seems to have lost touch with reality somewhere along the way, though…
…but they also own the means of making money…
No, they don’t: Uber controls the means of taking customer calls and informing drivers where to find them. Without that information, the drivers’ cars are simply NOT a means of making money.
…and can set their hours or jump between different platforms…
Wrong again: yes, you can choose when to work, but — like a temp worker — you can’t choose which hours the paying customer actually wants you.
Seriously, stop repeating the same old talking-points from the same old script, and read what actual Uber drivers have said about their actual experiences. Yes, a few of them really like it — but the same can be said of Amway distributors.
I am all for self reliance but repeating the same labor over and over for the sake of existence is the realm of robots.
Can’t he at least get an inflatable doll, plug it into the Internet of Things, and let it give him new recipe ideas on a regular basis? Seems a clever new-ideas-guy like him could make that work, and get both a sex-toy and a better diet out of the deal.
Of course, he could also just look up recipes on the Internet while looking at porn, but I guess that’s too old-school for him. And where do you find the “foods that keep on killing all your gut flora so you won’t have to poop” site anyway?
They don’t own the intermediary, but that’s no different than any sort of whole-sale arrangement that’s been around forever.
Typical libertarian doubletalk: one moment they’re gushing about how Uber is a brand-new way of doing something that’s breaking molds and shifting paradigms all over the place; next they’re saying it’s “no different than any sort of whole-sale arrangement that’s been around forever.” What a fucking joke. Do you guys have any clue how obvious your scam really is?
Seeing as how Bad Religion were namedropped on the Kropotkin thread, I thought this was apropos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZN6kCgMUjFw
All together now!
“I’m a 21st Century digital boy/ I don’t know how to live but I’ve got a lot of toys…”
Actually, Cat, 21st-century digital boys have lots of very useful gadgets — they just don’t have enough common sense, or enough incentive, to use them as anything other than toys.
I saw that line on Twitter with the caption “Libertarian techbro re-invents the concept of the bus.”
Pretty much sums it up.
The Soylent stuff he makes could probably be useful for people who are suffering from starvation or malnutrition if it actually is capable of sustaining a person and doesn’t need to be refrigerated, except that it has to be mixed with potable water, right? Which is a huge problem in a lot of the world. Otherwise this is SlimFast with hipper marketing.
Hipster libertarians are the new street mimes, so enjoy them while you can before everyone gets tired of them.
Too late.
“Libertarian techbro re-invents the concept of the bus.”
…then condemns it as commie collectivism.
Rinehart’s manifesto certainly shades well into kook-dom, and that is sad. However, several responders above have obviously not read it, and have leapt briskly to unwarranted conclusions.
Rinehart is clearly not a fan of the IoT. In the article he says explicitly, “My apartment came with a Nest but I removed it.” Nest is the paradigm of an IoT product, a wifi-enabled thermostat.
Rinehart did not eliminate A/C power out of fear; he did it to get his apartment completely off the utility grid. “I am electrically self reliant. My home life runs comfortably on a single 100W solar panel… For storage a $65 lead acid deep cycle 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 may be extreme — to get down to a 420Wh budget he has eliminated a lot of devices most of us think essential — but it isn’t nuts.
He is also clearly not a fan of Tesla, either the secular saint or the company. Of his solar setup he says, “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.” The reference is to Elon Musk’s “Powerwall”, basically the battery pack from a Tesla car bolted to the side of your house to back up a solar power installation.
As for the “Libertarian” charge, I don’t see evidence of it in that blog post. The whole “do with less, get off the grid” ethos he is praising seems to me to be straight out of the Whole Earth Catalog hippie revival of the 1970s. Based on this one article, if Rinehart is a Libertarian, then so is Stewart Brand!
He’s not espousing a “do with less, get off the grid” ethos — buying things from countries that use tyranny or slave-labor to keep prices low is not “doing with less,” it’s just taking an opportunity to PAY less. And buying more clothes than you need just to avoid having to wash them for reuse is not “doing with less” either.
Also, if you’re buying things from China, and subscribing to a mass-produced “food” product, that’s not “getting off the grid” either. It’s starting to look like you’re the one who didn’t read the article.
I think this is the first time I’ve seen criticism of this stuff. Thanks PZ.
Can you direct me to a “bad dieting” web site where a dietitian explains all the bad thinking and ideas about what a proper diet should look like? I’m COMPLETELY ignorant on the subject of what food particles to shove in my mouth hole and I don’t even know how to filter the good from the bad without someone like you or the bad astronomer, but for diet. My current tactic is to completely ignore absolutely everything about diet I’ve ever heard, aside from “don’t drink antifreeze”.
@slithey tove
Thanks. The only reason I brought it up was the context of Reinhart’s “AC bad – DC good” theme.
Killing your gut flora — that’s monumentally stupid. I’m a bit surprised that it stopped him from defacating. If anything, your gut flora help metabolize stuff that would otherwise just pass through you. I’m really, really dubious about his claim that the bulk of feces is dead bacteria — does anyone have a citation for that? For someone who promotes a nutritional supplement/replacement he seems to know less than nothing about human biology.
That’s consistent, though, with his understanding of just about everything else. It seems extremely shallow. As long as he’s not directly using water or electricity, it’s all good. The fact that there’s a coal-fired generator providing the power for the sweatshop making his disposable clothes is lost on him. His bit with buying new clothes and donating the dirty ones reeks of privilege. Do the donees have to touch their forelock and say “Thanks, massa, I’z shore grateful for dem dirty clothes”? Even donating, he’s causing more clothing to be made than necessary — he’s trading his convenience and a bit of water and energy for a lot of water and energy to make the clothes and eventually dispose of them. Not to mention the increase in landfill usage.
I’d love to find out about the manufacturing process for Soylent and how much energy and water go in and how much waste there is. Does his soy source farm without pesticides? Do they hand water each plant to avoid over-spray? Do they harvest by hand and carry the beans to the factory in backpacks to avoid fossil-fuel powered trucks?
@Dark Jaguar
The two best pieces of advice that I’ve heard are: 1) All things in moderation; and 2) Don’t take in more calories than you burn. #1 is why any product that claims to be able to replace all other nutrients is suspect. Barring medical necessity, of course. In truth, unless you’ve got some medical reason (and are medically supervised) most diets are bunk. If they promise “cleansing” or “going back to our origins,” they’re certainly bunk.
Oh, one other piece of advice: Avoid the FoodBabe. She doesn’t know her ass from a hole in the ground. That goes for just about anybody who posts hysterical screeds about how things that people eat every day are killing us all. It’s likely you’ve seen the “What happens when you drink a Coke” meme that’s been floating around the last few days. When BuzzFeed debunks you, you know you’ve gone too far. Five Cokes a day is probably bad for you; one or two a week isn’t. With all things, the dose makes the poison.
Rob Rinehart has just posted a follow-up post to the one PZ critiqued here. In it he responds to a some of the points that were raised in this series of comments, calling Soylent “perhaps the most ecologically efficient food ever created”, and further defending the economics and morality of one-time use of clothing sourced from China. Those who are interested might want to read it and
flambée itquietly analyze it further.As we’re fond of saying, [CITATION NEEDED]. Somehow I doubt that he’s going to tell us the details of his manufacturing process. We’ll just have to take it on faith, because he’s an alpha techdudebro, that it is.
Anybody have a copy of the nutritional label on Soylent? I didn’t see that data in a casual perusal of his web site.
Soylent 1.5 powder nutritional label (PDF).
This one doesn’t even get to the [CITATION NEEDED] stage. [DEFINITION NEEDED] is more like it. What the hayhay does “ecologically efficient” even mean? Ecologies are not, typically, quantifiable in units of energy, for one thing….
Well, for fairness, regarding the nuking of his own gut flora thing, he DID apparently employ a “Soylent microbiome consultant” who advised against it.
Too bad he didn’t listen. So you spend the money to hire an expert, but then you don’t listen to his or her advice? How efficient is THAT?
You know what will ultimately happen with this guy, though?
He’ll throw crazy idea after crazy idea out there, until one of them turns out to be somewhat ok, probably in a modified form with an application wholly different from what he originally envisioned….
…and then he’ll claim that one success as a complete vindication of everything else he has ever tried or said.
@99 – read Taubes. Failing that, “eat real food” is decent advice.
This guy is…a product of his milieu, for sure. That said, I do eat around 8,000 calories per week of Soylent-esque human chow, and it’s tremendously helpful. (I have neurological issues, so I eat nearly 80% of my calories as fat, which is actually kind of difficult. Now I eat normal-ish dinners and don’t have to sweat the rest.)
dole yeast
Amphiox: you’re probably right. The first rule of false prophets and can-artists is, KEEP TALKING. Sooner or later you’ll say something more or less right, and with a good PR campaign, everyone will forget all the raw sewage that gem just popped out from. Case in point: Jeane Dixon.
ArtK @ 101 & Dark Jaguar
On #2, just no. The human body is not a bunsen burner. Metabolism is a complicated system that is not fully understood and people who repeat this idea of “calories in < calories out" reinforce a diet culture that ignores the massive pile of evidence that this is not true. Many many people burn more calories than they consume and are still fat or even gain weight depending on the type of activity, absorption, insulin activity, fat retention, gut bacteria, and on and on.
Dark Jaguar @ 99 – Fat Nutritionist might be a good place to start: http://www.fatnutritionist.com/
@71 ck, the Irate Lump
I think this under-sells the problem by quite a bit. First, insecure devices on a network are a means of hacking into *other* insecure devices on the same network. A sensor may not be inherently dangerous (I disagree but more on this later), but it can be a point of ingress for accessing systems that control actuators (which is more traditionally considered dangerous). Tire pressure monitoring systems are an example of this, and are used as a means of ingress for hacking into car networks. Even the Jeep hack you link to starts out inside the head unit. All the head unit can do is control the music you listen to; hardly a danger. But by controlling the head unit, a hacker can access everything else and control nearly every function of the car.
This is why defense-in-depth is so insanely critical. Almost every system in operation today was designed with the assumption that devices are not trying to harm each other. The head unit is not going to send a malicious packet to the ECU. That assumption is completely wrong, of course.
As far as “sensors just read wrong and that’s no big deal”, that assumes that the sensor readings aren’t used for anything automatic. As soon as the sensor readings are used in an automatic system, sensor readings can be just as dangerous as direct control, because in a control system, they practically are. If I can control the output of the refrigerator’s temperature sensors, I can destroy all the food inside (fix the output of the temperature sensor to just below the set point; the compressor never turns on) or destroy the compressor (fix the output of the temperature sensor to above the set point; the compressor runs constantly until it burns out. Or flip the compressor on and off repeatedly in a way that damages it. See Stuxnet for an example of software destroying physical control systems). Likewise the sensors in a car could be used for mischief: fix the output of the “brakes activated” sensor and the “cruise cancel button” sensor to OFF, and fix the speedometer value below the cruise set point. The car will continuously accelerate, because it thinks it needs to do so in order to reach the set point.
Every single machine that can think and talk needs to be designed with high security. If it can think, but not talk, it’s mostly safe, especially if concealed underneath a locked automotive hood or inside a locked home, although this is by no means proof against powerful agents like nation-states. There is no converse, because talking implies thinking. So if it can talk, it needs to be high security. Period.
In other words, computers are just as susceptible to gas-lighting as people.
mythogen, Yes. (Disclaimer: My work involves secure devices in hostile environments, albeit not the IoT. Think ATMs or POS “financial” terminals.)
I keep pounding away at the theme of defense-in-depth, or as I call it, “multiple orthogonal (robust) barriers(/protections/integrity)”. If an attacker can penetrate or circumvent one barrier, there’s another to stop it. As a (simplified) example, the POS (Point-of-Sale terminal, the unit that reads your smartcard & PIN) is a sealed case and also a Faraday cage. Penetrate or open the case/cage, and the system within erases its encrypted storage within nanoseconds. Try freezing the unit first to slow or stop the erasure, and the temperature detector(s) trigger the erasure. Breaking into (that is, hacking into (attacking the software)) the running system won’t necessarily trigger a response, but it’s impossible to run a program of your own because it “can’t” be properly cryptographically signed/sealed. Running an older, buggy, version of a properly signed/sealed program won’t work as its on a blacklist. The blacklist can’t be erased (write-once), and if corrupted, everything is blacklisted. There are randomly-inserted dummy and false cycles, another Faraday cage (built into the chip), and other countermeasures. And on and on…
An interesting point is the goal isn’t to make a “perfectly secure” system, but one that the costs of successfully attacking significantly outweigh the benefits from a successful attack. As a rule of thumb, attackers are divided into several classes: Hobbyists (maybe skilled, some equipment, lots of time, but mostly interested in, e.g., getting “free” cable or internet); Students / Researchers (lots of time, skilled & smart, access to high-quality equipment, not much money, and mostly attacking for fun or in order to write a publishable paper); Mafia (not much time, lots of money but have a budget, high-quality equipment, willing to commit other crimes (e.g., kidnapping), and doing it for profit); and Teh Government (lots of time, skill, money, high-quality & specialist equipment, possibly corrupt, …). For POS systems, it’s the mafia you must stop, so your up against a ruthless, clever, motivated, rich, enemy / attacker. And you have to keep your own costs low, since the POS, etc., is being sold, at the end of the day, for a profit.
Tricky. And absolutely critical.
@114 blf
That is a butt-ton of security! I hope the people responsible for your network stack are as methodical as you are :)
I’m not a professional in security, just a run-of-the-mill software developer, but I’m trying to shift my career into a more security-oriented direction, because it’s a very interesting topic (moreso than business software by a long shot), and because I think that part of the industry is going to grow massively in the next decade and I’d like to get in on that growth.
I think your emphasis on making sure security is “right-sized” so to speak is a very good point. Physical security is rated in terms of how long it should take to crack a safe or pick a lock, and that’s really the only coherent way to think about security. Anything is breakable with enough time and enough money. The problem right now for infosec is that the value of the prize is rapidly rising, as well as increased availability of tools and procedures for monetizing it (can you imagine when the kidnappers hook up with the car hackers?) but the strength of the security is not being increased. At least partly because few people outside of the criminal circles who are doing the monetizing and the researchers who work on this stuff, most people can’t conceive of the value there. Most people still think they themselves are unlikely to be targeted, because they’re not very interesting. And there’s a lot of conflation between different levels of security, too. People think they pick a password to keep their cube-mate out of their computer, when in many cases that password is protecting them (or not) from a whole-life-compromise of all their important accounts. And they worry about the NSA reading their email (and that there’s nothing they can do because the NSA is all-powerful), when what they need to be worrying about is an identity theft ring (which can be stopped fairly easily).
Bruce Schneier has written about security needing a different mindset from engineering. The engineer thinks about how to make it work, but the security professional thinks about how to break it. The engineer is done once it works; the security professional is never, ever done. We need to be training our engineers to think like security people, at least for a little while before they release their new toys.