Just as Soylent is disrupting the traditional food industry
Huh?
I've asked this before and never got an answer. How is Soylent different from Ensure Complete? Is it cheaper? Better made? Easier to order? Tastes better? Better for me? Higher quality?
Because if it isn't really any different then what Soylent will need to do is market better than those other companies. Because I'd definitely trust Abbott with my health over random start up with indistinguishable product.
You see I'm actually interested in things like this as a 'meal replacement'. I quite often drink chocolate milk instead of eating lunch and I can buy nutritionally complete things like Ensure Complete. So, what makes Soylent special?
tldr; There's room in the market for more than one non-solid dietary product, the goal of Soylent is to be a complete alternative that supports an active life rather than something that just lets you survive, ensure is expensive and low calorie.
Yes, I've read that in the past and without being rude I do not consider that to be 'thoughtful'. It's a repetition of what he's said a number of times about his goals for Soylent, but it does not answer my question.
He mentions Ensure as follows: "I considered Ensure but found it much too expensive, low calorie, unpalatable, and an ingredient make up that was far from complete or optimal." That does not tell me anything about Soylent.
Sure, he wants to make it cheaper. Can he? About a month ago I posted this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5875246 The pricing is very close between Soylent and Ensure Complete. Abbott claims you can live long term on it etc.
My suspicion is that he's comparing Soylent with the common consumer "Ensure" product which is relatively low-calorie etc.
4 bottles of Ensure Complete would only be 1400 Calories/day, vs. 2200 Calories for Soylent. You'd have to drink 6/day, making it $66.43/wk for Ensure Complete (cheapest Amazon price) vs. $52.88/wk for Soylent.
Of course, you said that you considered $73.48/wk to be "very close to Soylent pricing". Sure it's in the same order of magnitude, but a 40% increase is nothing to sneeze at.
The response is definitely worthwhile, and a bit of it seems to be that the use case is different. It would be a bit expensive to replace a majority of one's diet with Ensure Complete. A 16-pack of 8oz Ensure Complete is 5600 Calories for $42, so eating for a day costs $15. The preorder price of 1 week of soylent is $9.29/day, but worryingly we don't know how many Calories that is...
A quote from Vice on the crowdfunding page indicates that it should be about 700 Calories/day[1] (making it several times as expensive as Ensure), while Rob Rhinehart's blog indicated that he was consuming a reasonable number of calories earlier this year (2629 C/day)[2].
"More expensive per Calorie" is not necessarily "more expensive" for the target audience. The classic "2000 Calories per day" assumes some level of physical activity. If you don't have any physical activity, you're better off consuming fewer Calories per day, as long as you get all the other nutrients you need.
This is an important consideration. The target audience of Soylent likely has some wild variation in desired caloric intake, perhaps 4-6x between people who want to drop some pounds and people who lift as a hobby.
Yeah. The creator of Soylent makes a point of saying that it should be tuned for the person using it. Hopefully in the long-term they'll offer versions with varying calorie content. Alternatively, they could offer a two-component system with nutrients and minimal calories in one and pure calories in the other, to make it easy to tune that one variable for your target calorie consumption.
Not everything can be thrown under it, only.. marketing can. Sure, marketing may be why Ferrari sell cars, but that doesn't mean that marketing is the only difference between a Ferrari and a Ford.
Just because marketing lets people know about a product's advantages doesn't mean every improvement can be labelled as marketing.
And it certainly doesn't make a product whose only improvement is marketing something worthy of equal attention to a product that actually improves some other aspect.
I wanted to compare the ingredients and their amounts but I can't seem to find the formula for Ensure Complete. If you know where to find it, please post a link. If not, I guess that would be one reason why Soylent is preferable to Ensure Complete.
Those are the ingredients, not the formula. Without the formula, there's no way of knowing whether the amounts of vitamins and minerals actually make sense.
It seems like marketing mostly. Maybe I'm just too old to understand all these crazy kids these days, but I don't see the appeal in drinking my meals. I really don't think this is going to work out.
Do you believe generally that Big Food makes healthier products than independents? I believe the reverse is usually true in the US.
You can trust Big Food to pump their products full of sugar because testing shows it makes consumers buy more. Sugar is second on Ensure's ingredient list (http://ensure.com/products/ensure-complete-shakes) while Soylent is not sweet.
Sorry, but I don't trust anyone who uses the phrase "Big ______". Your argument isn't even coherent. You're just making a fallacious appeal by putting the scary capital-B "Big" in front of a random noun and acting like that's supposed to mean something. Who makes up "Big Food"? Who controls "Big Food"? Why does "Big Food" necessarily make less healthy products than "independents"? I agree that a lot of mass produced food is unhealthy and probably excessively seasoned and sweetened to improve market appeal, but that isn't really an argument for why Soylent is better or worse than Ensure.
He's not allowed to say "Big", but you can say "mass produced"? Those are pretty close.
Why does "Big Food" necessarily make less healthy products than "independents"? I agree that a lot of mass produced food is unhealthy and probably excessively seasoned and sweetened to improve market appeal
Take out that hedgey "necessarily" and you've answered your own question.
that isn't really an argument
To say that Ensure is excessively sweetened to make people buy more, while Soylent isn't, sounds like an argument to me.
> He's not allowed to say "Big", but you can say "mass produced"? Those are pretty close.
No, because "Big _____" is a Progressive catchphrase that is normally used to villify whatever their target is and rationalize taking away some freedom from the marketplace, wheras "mass produced" just means "mass produced."
Of course, some people might use "Big _____" in a useful way, but it's definitely like a code smell but for English.
My interpretation of what he meant was "when the original post under discussion used the phrase Big Foo, the intent was to villianize the topic under discussion by the use of a recognized catch phrase for abusive and villainous scheming, and that moving the phrasing to the more neutral mass produced helped establish an honest baseline for discussion."
Actually, it wasn't particularly. It was intentionally written in very plain, common English, in a way that refers to concrete things, not big ideological abstractions.
Properly "Big X" refers to the biggest players in the X industry, particularly with regard to trade groups and lobbying. It's useful because often this section of the industry will have unique qualities compared to the industry as a whole or other industries (such as how much they spend on lobbying, how much innovation they are responsible for, etc)
It is true that people will often use it as a lazy and fallacious way of vilifying but please note this is not exclusively a progressive phenomenon. Many of these groups lobby for things like govt subsidies, laws which restrict personal freedoms in ways that help their industry, etc...many conservatives aren't thrilled with such behavior.
In a brief non scientific survey of a few subreddits (r/libertarian, r/socialism, etc) phrases like "big oil" appear roughly comparably.
People on both ends of the political spectrum are (perhaps rightly) displeased with some of the actions of such groups and vilify them - they just disagree about what the root cause is and how to prevent such behavior.
The fallacy comes in when people use some particular actions of some players in an industry to invalidate everything that comes out of it. (such as implying that anything produced by a startup is ipso facto healthier than something produced by a large pharmaceutical company)
> He's not allowed to say "Big", but you can say "mass produced"? Those are pretty close.
"Big Food" is a meaningless scare phrase. It literally means nothing in the context of the comment I was replying to. On the other hand, "mass produced" has a very clear and well-established general meaning that I'm pretty sure most HN readers understand (and one that can easily be found online or in a dictionary; when I try Googling "Big Food", I just get a lot of random sites that use it as a buzzword without ever bothering to define clearly what they're fighting against).
> Take out that hedgey "necessarily" and you've answered your own question.
The question was rhetorical, and the point was to illustrate how absurd the phrase "Big Food" is. My statement about mass produced food was intended to show that I'm not defending major corporations that produce unhealthy food, but pointing out a rhetorical and logical flaw in tlb's post.
> To say that Ensure is excessively sweetened to make people buy more, while Soylent isn't, sounds like an argument to me.
tlb didn't include any sourced information about Soylent (other than "it's not sweet", which means nothing about its sugar content), so that's irrelevant. My point, again, was that calling anything "Big Food" is a meaningless, bullshit scare tactic and I was calling it as a saw it.
I trust Abbott far more than some random startup with zero experience in long-term production of food supplements and replacements.
I'm sorry, but living off of a concoction for a few months and then claiming that it is better for you than X is crazy.
Look, Soylent may not kill you. It might actually be good for you. But until there have been multiple, years-long studies, this just isn't going to fly. Hell, get some actual nutritionists (PhDs) and doctors (MDs) on board and maybe you have a shot at convincing people.
Say what you want about Abbott, but they produce baby-formula. Baby-formula that has been around for decades, so they have a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn't.
Abbott would be the first to tell you not to try and use Ensure as a substitute for food. Some YC kid thinks you can live off his stuff, hope he doesn't kill too many people.
VC-funded startups have exactly the same kind of incentives that result in Big Food not producing healthier products than health-over-maximizing-profits oriented independents.
Sure, they are going to want to differentiate from existing Big Food products (so do new Big Food products), but otherwise, the trust factors are pretty much the same.
Actually, startups have worse incentives. Startups have the idea that they can be bought out be someone. At which point any legal liabilities(form say inaccurate advertising as a meal replacement/health claims/long term health consequences/ death) are the buyers problem.
Say what you will about "big food," but they will be around to be sued in 20 - 50 years. It means they have incentives to actually careful about what they to do people.
Just because I sell something doesn't make me exempt from the legal consequences of my actions prior. If I negligently claim that a product will make you healthier and it cripples you, then you can sue me regardless of whether I still own the product. Similarly, I could be prosecuted for dishonest advertising type offences (which aren't wiped clean simply by selling a business!).
You might be talking about a products liability type claim.
Only an incompetent acquirer would take liability for any latent claims in a target acquiree. Most likely they will get strong warranties from the seller about the existence of claims and rely on their own due diligence to ensure they aren't buying a product which is likely to cripple people in the future.
In 90% of cases the seller will retain liability for incidents which pre-date the sale of their business.
No, the founders are personally responsible for their own actions.
The corporate veil may protect them from liabilities of the company (barring fraud/breach of directors' duties), however in this particular instance we have a founder, Rob Rhinehart, who seems to have done most of his marketing and made most of his claims personally. That is, Rob, not Soylent Nominees Ltd, made the statements.
Therefore, if he has breached laws, civil penalty provisions or acted negligently in doing so, he is personally liable.
Source: I recently acted for a home owner who sued her (incorporated) builder in negligence (for building a house which fell down). The company was unfortunately insolvent. Luckily, the founder/director of the company made a number of claims about the expertise and abilities of the building company on the company website (which he hosted personally). We sued the director personally.
> Just because I sell something doesn't make me exempt from the legal consequences of my actions prior.
Actually, yes, selling your stake in the corporation that was the legally-responsible actor does mean that you are no longer at any financial risk for the actions of the corporation prior to you selling it, at least not in the main way that you were prior to selling it (that the consequences imposed on the corporation would reduce the value of your equity stake.)
If you manage to sell the corporate entity to a third party without making any warranties about latent claims, you will not be concerned about the corporation's liability. And the purchaser of that corporation is pretty foolish.
However you are still responsible for your own personal liability when you operated the company. Did you breach your directors' duties? Did you commit fraud? Did you sign a guarantee for the obligations of the corporation?
There are three ways to become personally liable off the top of my head. I'm sure there are several more.
I suspect that the interest comes from the radical branding. "Ensure" is associated with hospitals and the aging population, whereas "Soylent" is historically associated with dystopia and recently with some ambitious kids. One exit would be to create an energy drink-like (young target market) product that's just a re-branded Ensure.
But if you're currently using Ensure, perhaps you know of other ways to improve on it? They're both basically ramen for the well-off.
(And +1 to tlb: simply removing sugar is an improvement in my eyes.)
> I suspect that the interest comes from the radical branding. "Ensure" is associated with hospitals and the aging population, whereas "Soylent" is historically associated with dystopia and recently with some ambitious kids.
Soylent sounds like it's made of soy, but the name essentially means cannibalism. I'd expect the former to kill enthusiasm from the energy drink market (where the cannibalism angle makes it sound more extreme) and the latter to put off everyone else.
The literary evocation is far more powerful than the word-part "soy". Even so, given soy's ubiquity I suspect that no one would seriously be turned off by it at this point. The name doesn't "essentially mean cannibalism", it refers to a fictional future company that makes the bulk of the worlds' food in the form of Soylent Red and Soylent Yellow. In the movie Soylent introduced a new product Green that you refer to, which means that the only people who are disturbed by the name are those who take things too seriously and also didn't actually watch the movie.
I haven't seen Soylent Green in a long time and all I remember is "Soylent Green is people". I'd guess that many people who haven't seen the movie know that line and nothing else.
Have you tried Ensure Complete? I got so impatient while waiting for my Soylent order to arrive that I actually did. First of all, it's loaded with sugar, and lacks Soylent's heavy dose of fiber to balance out the glycemic index. Result: sugar rush followed by a nasty crash. Secondly, it lacks some of Soylent's extras like creatine and MCT fats. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it's expensive: it would be almost $465/month, or $15/day to get 2400 calories from these ( http://www.walmart.com/ip/Ensure-Complete-Chocolate-Nutritio... ). Whereas the Soylent team is working to get the price down to ~$200/month, or ~$6.50/day.
Soylent will be not only one of the highest-quality products in its category, but also perhaps the first one that isn't "for the well-off." I anticipate that it will shrink my food budget substantially. Not to mention the future savings on food-related things like dishes and silverware. Hell, if I really switch to it full time, I might even be able to save on electricity by unplugging my refrigerator!
> heavy dose of fiber to balance out the glycemic index. Result: sugar rush followed by a nasty crash
Good God, man, that is not at all what fiber does, and has nothing to do with the role of fiber in diet. Please stop consuming this before you hurt yourself, and please stop talking about it before you hurt others.
Oh, you're one of the people that believe that a perceived "sugar rush" has something to do with diabetic glycemic excursions? They're entirely different phenomena. Dismissed. But thanks for the irrelevant link!
I'm going to answer your first question with a question: what do you think he means by "nasty crash"? Because I guarantee it's not what happens post-excursion.
There's no difference -- postprandial excursions are a diabetic phenomenon, and have nothing to do with what non-diabetic individuals think of as the effect of sugar and fiber on their health and mood.
I've been having Glucerna for breakfast every day for the past two months and it hasn't left me hungry. I don't know how well it works out as a complete meal replacement, but at least as a breakfast it's filling (and I'm normally a heavy breakfast eater whose very sensitive to hunger).
Serious comment. I meant, skipping breakfast in the morning ain't all that hard, if you can endure a few days of hunger in the morning until your body adapts.
Fasting in any form is something you get better at with practice.
As someone who recently moved to Paris, I can confirm. Parisians don't eat breakfast. It's weird, and I miss my big north-american breakfast, but I'm getting used to it.
At $200 a month I wonder how Soylent would compare to, say, beans and rice. If Soylent wants to market itself as an affordable product, it should be at least comparable to a home-cooked diet that can be had for $100 a month (which should also be able to include fruits, vegetables, and occasional meat [1]).
A promise to open source their ingredients list, and if I remember correctly, their sourcing and supply chain, is tremendous. Not to mention the last I heard they were going full vegan.
The last time I had an ensure I noticed it had 200 calories. Yes you read that right. Id have to drink ten of them to replace a days meals at $3 each that would be $30 a day or $900 a month to feed just one person.
One way its different is that it was on Fox News yesterday and millions of people had a chance to hear about it. Versus, until you told me, I never heard of Ensure before.
If I understand correctly, Ensure is not meant to be a whole-diet replacement, and Soylent is. However, I have not studied this, and I caution you to not take me too seriously here.
A bad idea run by someone who has no clue about what he's doing combined with another bad idea supported by people who have no clue about what they're doing? Sign me up.
2. Bitcoin can be "attacked" (for some vague notion of what it means to attack a system that has no security definition) in polynomial time.
3. The economics of Bitcoin are extremely suspect and based on a poorly developed economic model, supported by neither the Austrian school nor by modern monetary theory. This is probably the underlying cause of the lack of a security definition, as the security definition of a digital cash system will almost certainly be driven by the system's economic model.
These issues have been covered ad nauseam by many people, and have been largely dismissed by the Bitcoin community. All the while we have seen increasing amounts of energy sunk into Bitcoin mining, we have seen a major block chain fork that left transactions in question, and we have seen wild fluctuations in the value of Bitcoin currency.
2. Countries can be attacked too. I don't know what your point is here. If bitcoin survives its infancy, it could become more resilient than any other currency.
3. Could you explain it in practical terms? Because as long as it works, why should I care about what theorists say? Bitcoin's creator said himself that it was an experiment, and rightly so, we have never seen anything like Bitcoin taking off before. Seems like he nailed it on his design.
Yeah, I have seen a lot of people raging. How is that evidence of anything, other than fear of the unknown?
Typically cryptographers will define a security goal in rigorous terms, then prove that their system meets that goal (at least for "cryptomania" type applications like digital cash). There are good reasons for doing this:
1. It makes proofs of security possible, which make us a lot more confident about cryptosystems.
2. It allows us to be clear about what it means to "break" a system. If we are not clear about this, someone could claim that their system cannot be attacked by simply defining security to be the exact behavior of whatever they created. This is analogous to having a falsifiable hypothesis in a scientific experiment.
The original Bitcoin paper did not have such a definition. I am aware of one attempt at making such a definition, but it resulted in a very weak notion of security that placed unrealistic restrictions on what an attacker could do (basically, the authors were trying to find some definition that Bitcoin could satisfy; see point 2 above). In general, Bitcoin's security is highly suspicious, since by design the honest parties must scale their work in proportion with the work done by the attacker.
"Countries can be attacked too. I don't know what your point is here. If bitcoin survives its infancy, it could become more resilient than any other currency."
If you are admitting the possibility that an army might attack a country, then you are allowing Bitcoin to be fractured by an army destroying the outgoing Internet connections of a country. In the past, countries have been cut off from the Internet by accident (e.g. anchors being dropped on undersea cables). You could keep an attacking army outside of your territory and still wind up unable to communicate with the rest of the Bitcoin network. This is not a highly convincing argument.
Of course, this is all irrelevant, because a polynomial time attack is not the same as an act of war. There are a lot of organizations with the resources needed to perform the "51% attack" on Bitcoin and no compelling reason to think that a faster attack is not possible. You could attack Bitcoin by performing a lot of computation locally, without ever needing to step foot out the door. Bitcoin also does little to prevent attacks based on sending malicious messages into the network, despite the fact that cryptographers began developing techniques for dealing with that decades ago and despite the fact that almost all that work is freely available.
"3. Could you explain it in practical terms?"
Sure. Let's start with a thought experiment: I have something very rare, which has no practical uses but which is easy to give to others. Will you give me your car for a big pile of it?
Unless you are crazy you would not give up your car. The reason is that you are receiving something that is useless in exchange, and that you would have to go find some other person willing to take a pile of useless (but rare) items. Would your landlord accept some of these rare items as a rent payment? Would the bank accept some as loan repayment? Would the government accept it as a tax payment (let's just pretend that you are a law-abiding citizen who pays their taxes)?
How is Bitcoin any different? A lot of hype was generated about it, but at the end of the day you will not be able to pay your taxes with it, banks are unlikely to accept it for loan payments, and the majority of businesses that claim to accept Bitcoin payments actually accept payments in fiat currency via a Bitcoin exchange. Bitcoin currency has no practical uses (it is basically an energy sink) so the Austrian school does not support it, and it is not legal tender nor is it accepted for tax purposes by the government so modern monetary theory does not support it either.
"why should I care about what theorists say?"
For the same reason you should care about what cryptography theorists, physicists, and doctors have to say.
"we have never seen anything like Bitcoin takin...
> Sure. Let's start with a thought experiment: I have something very rare, which has no practical uses but which is easy to give to others. Will you give me your car for a big pile of it?
How does the success/value of gold not completely destroy this line of reasoning?
I'm not saying it is destined for success or failure, just that this is not a coherent argument against Bitcoin.
This line of reasoning is inane, and comes up every time gold or Bitcoin is mentioned.
Gold and Bitcoin are merely stores of value. Just like your paper bills with dead presidents on them. Or stocks or bonds. Which has next to nothing to do with how you pay for something. You can easily barter for an item, or pay with credit cards. Some places still do not accept American Express. Some places don't accept any credit cards. That doesn't take away from the fact that they are convenient. Likewise, I can see that Bitcoin could eventually become very convenient for micropayments, since credit cards charge merchants a fee. AFAIK, Bitcoin transfers are cheap or entirely free, thus making micropayments possible.
Currencies are not just stores of value. Real estate is a store of value also, but nobody uses land or buildings as currency.
Once upon a time, gold was used as currency. Merchants would have scales, weights, and other equipment needed to deal in gold. That is not how gold is used in today's world; there are only a few highly niche markets where gold is used as currency, and everywhere else you have either fiat currency or currency that is backed by gold (with fiat currency being vastly more popular these days).
It is also wrong to separate printed money from the rest of the money supply when you are talking about fiat currency. Paper money is just a representation of the currency; the value of a dollar bill is equal to the value of four quarters and equal to the value of a bank account with one dollar in it. Fiat currency is an abstraction created by laws, which is implemented in various ways (paper money, coins, electronic transactions, etc.).
The Yen and the Pound are currencies in certain markets. Lumps of gold are used as currency only in highly niche markets. I did say that gold is a currency in such markets, but it is not generally used as currency in most of the world.
> There are a lot of organizations with the resources needed to perform the "51% attack" on Bitcoin and no compelling reason to think that a faster attack is not possible.
I'm aware of that. There are also lots of organizations with the power to kill you, yet you won't lose your sleep, because they have nothing to gain from that, so you are pretty sure that it won't happen. It could be argued that the central banks have a lot to lose to Bitcoin, so they should attack it. But after giving it a bit of thought, I remembered that most people just try to pass the current problems to the next guy (think of presidents, bankers, etc), so why would they bother? Right now, Bitcoin is not big enough to be a threat to anyone. It will keep growing as a threat, but everyone will pass the problem to the next guy, until Bitcoin becomes too big to be stopped. If there is a future that makes sense, this is it. Bitcoin takes over because lazy politicians don't do what they have to (in this crazy world, where their function seem to be to ruin everything), and ironically, that will be the best for everyone.
> For the same reason you should care about what cryptography theorists, physicists, and doctors have to say.
I was thinking about economists mostly (which in many cases will have vested interests), but still, if it works it works. Many theorists have spoken against the phone, the internet, the email, the aeroplanes, etc, and see what happened. I'm no cryptographer, but Bitcoin doesn't seem like something that would require one to begin with since all its crypto was done at the user level, it's pretty simple. Satoshi didn't try to create his own hashing algorithm or anything like that.
> You are calling the informed opinions of dozens of experts in cryptography and economics "raging" because they are saying that the system you love and support is based on dubious technical and economic ideas. It sounds more like you started out believing that Bitcoin is the future and are not willing to accept any argument that concludes anything else.
There are quite informed people on the other side too. So what do we do about them? Ignore them? I said raging, because Bitcoin has this crazy effect on a lot of people. They will hate Bitcoin for no reason, spread outright lies, and try to convince everyone that it is a scam. Why? We still don't know what causes it, so we just call it fear of the unknown.
"Satoshi didn't try to create his own hashing algorithm or anything like that."
No, he tried to create his own digital cash system, and digital cash is a cryptography problem that has been extensively studied by cryptographers (and had been studied for decades prior to Bitcoin). Bitcoin is also a system that involves multiparty computation, and secure multiparty computation has also been studied extensively by cryptographers, also going back decades. It is a mistake to think that the only relevant cryptography in Bitcoin are digital signatures and hash functions.
This is really the crux of the issue here. Bitcoin is not a hash function. It is not a digital signature system. The security of hash functions and digital signatures is not in question here; Bitcoin could be vulnerable to attack even if it is built using secure hash functions and secure signature systems. The point of having a security definition is to be clear about these things. We need to be clear about what the meaning of "security" is in the case of Bitcoin if we want to make any statements about whether or not Bitcoin actually achieves that security goal. It is not hard to see that the definition of security for a hash function or a digital signature system is not what we want for Bitcoin; what is not so clear is what we actually do want.
4. Last time I checked, gold was still very valuable. And it has been used for what... Thousands of years? The economies of the world did just fine without forced inflation and consumerism.
5. Printing paper money wastes way more resources. And how is using energy to create something of value a bad idea anyway? Bitcoin doesn't even require that you use a contaminating type of energy, for all I know you could be hashing with solar energy.
Gold being valuable isn't the point. In fact, I think calling bitcoin deflationary indicates the belief it will actually be more valuable in the future.
Question for you regarding your reference to forced inflation and consumerism: Do you believe there would be even a temporary economic collapse if the world were to suddenly move to a deflationary currency? If so, how many months/years would the collapse have to last before you would say that the transition to a deflationary currency isn't worth it?
The reason I ask is because while fundamentally I have a lot of problems with our financial system, I've come to the conclusion that historically there were periods of recession that lasted hundreds of years. I just don't feel that my lifetime in a bad transition economy is worth the sacrifice of moving to a "better" financial system. I'd rather just keep the status quo as it slowly degrades to something worse and worse since I think that's the best outcome for me. It's a selfish outlook, but I have to believe it's the outlook of most people and that's why we are where we are right now.
Most transactions now do not involve cash, and credit card transactions are in fact far more energy-efficient than bitcoin transactions. And it is not just using energy to "create something of value"--it is an artificial waste of energy barrier.
Furthermore, there will be an energy cost to transactions even after no substantial number of bitcoins are mined, since just verifying transactions requires wasteful hashing.
The solar energy part is totally irrelevant--if you happen to have a solar panel sitting around, you could just as easily use it for actual work (and offset coal burning) rather than computing hashes.
> credit card transactions are in fact far more energy-efficient than bitcoin transactions
Huh? You seriously think Visa/Mastercard are using less energy than Bitcoin?
> Furthermore, there will be an energy cost to transactions even after no substantial number of bitcoins are mined, since just verifying transactions requires wasteful hashing.
You can call it wasteful all you want, but if you don't see the value in creating/maintaining a global framework for storing and exchanging value, then I don't know what to tell you. Besides, you are comparing apples to oranges. Bitcoin is a currency. You can build things like Visa around Bitcoin.
re: 4. Deflation is bad for the asset rich, but good for the asset poor. Inflation is good for the rich and bad for the poor. Those who usually spout the 'inflation is better than deflation' argument are the rich.
The argument that inflationary expectation is better than deflationary expectation because during period of deflation purchasing stops because 'it will be cheaper tomorrow' is flawed because such periods of deflation are short lived, and the market returns to a price where people are willing to re-enter the market and purchase to gain utility from the goods and services.
Just be careful believing people who "know anything about money" without thinking it through.
You absolutely have 4 backwards. Deflation is good for those rich enough to have money sitting around, and who can make money just by sitting on it and not investing it. Inflation is bad for the rich because suddenly they have to DO something with the money, or it disappears.
Inflation is good for the rich's income. Deflation is good for the rich's savings. Seems like they win in both cases? Though I would argue they win more in the first case, since inflation don't necessarily force them to do something with the money. Eg: They could just sit on gold or real estate if they wanted to. But most rich people didn't get there by doing nothing, so they tend to do something anyway, no need to force them.
No, deflation is bad, period, for the economic actors who depend on deflationary currencies, and this is verified simply by looking at pretty much any historical instance of deflation.
I'm not against Bitcoin per se, but all this anti-inflation crap is, quite simply, at odds with historical data to the point that it has become essentially "views differ on shape of planet". If economics is to be useful at all, it has no choice but to be empirical, and everything we've ever measured has always told us that deflation is bad.
Perhaps Satoshi simply felt it was easier to implement finite Bitcoins than a constantly increasing supply. I don't think he can be blamed for that. Bitcoin is, if nothing else, certainly intriguing.
> No, deflation is bad, period, for the economic actors who depend on deflationary currencies,
USD (or GBP or AUD etc) are deflationary relative to technological items, such as computers. By your theory, no-one should buy such items. In reality, they do.
A deflationary currency can be a bad idea as a monopolistic currency.
But adding a deflationary currency to an ecosystem that also contains inflationary currencies isn't the same thing as having a deflationary currency be the only currency available.
It's hard to downvote a thoughtful comment from a smart person, but you're just plain, flat out wrong.
Bitcoin is a heuristic for Byzantine concensus that requires 50% + epsilon of mining hash power to subvert.
This is not explicitly stated in the original paper, but the original paper comes very close.
I don't know what else you would want.
Regarding economics: All you need for a functioning currency is a supply of speculators who will bet on its future value and thus prop it up. That is only sustainable if the currency is the best at what it does for some meaningful niche (e.g. untrusted digital transactions). This is not part of any proir school of economics, but it's close to common sense, and is strongly supported by the success of bitcoin thus far.
You are already giving an unclear definition when you use terms like "mining hash power." What rigorous definition can you give for that term? What sort of model of computation are we working with (or is the definition based on information theory?)?
For comparison, consider the definition of security used in this recently published paper:
The definition is long, but very clear. Probabilistic polynomial time Turing machines are used as a model of computation; the adversary is given more power by being allowed to be non-uniform (i.e. the adversary can be a different machine for different security parameters). The security properties are clearly defined in terms of this model of computation, and a construction is given and proved to meet the properties (under certain hardness assumptions).
Note that there is no possible way that Bitcoin could meet the security definition given in that paper, because that definition requires the existence of a bank that issues the cash. This is true of previous work on digital cash as well, including the work that preceded Bitcoin. That is why it is necessary to develop a security definition that makes sense for systems like Bitcoin -- digital cash systems in which there is no bank. That is the complaint I have: no satisfactory definition has been given.
"This is not part of any proir school of economics, but it's close to common sense, and is strongly supported by the success of bitcoin thus far."
Economics often defies common sense, so I would be wary of using common sense as the basis for a currency.
If bitcoin circulation is, in practice, much lower than it's generally believed to be -
“We isolated all the large (≥ 50,000 Bitcoins) transactions which were ever recorded in the system, and analyzed how these amounts were accumulated and then spent. We discovered that almost all these large transactions were the descendants of a single large transaction involving 90,000 Bitcoins which took place on November 8th 2010, and that the subgraph of these transactions contains many strange looking chains and fork-merge structures, in which a large balance is either transferred within a few hours through hundreds of temporary intermediate accounts, or split into many small amounts which are sent to different accounts only in order to be recombined shortly afterwards into essentially the same amount in a new account.”
- Dorit Ron and Adi Shamir, Quantitative Analysis of the Full Bitcoin Transaction Graph.
Then the perceived value and the actual value would be off significantly.
So, while I might not phrase it in quite as strong terms as the person you're responding to does, I do find reason to be somewhat cautious about the whole enterprise.
Don't recall who said it, but powerful disruptive innovations are overhyped in the short term but under-hyped in the long term.
That's how I feel about Bitcoin. Circulation might not be a lot, and signs probably show that is not a lot, but it is disruptive. You also have to consider that perceived value is always reckoned into the 'actual' price. It depends on what market theories you ascribe to, but it is generally accepted that current prices reflect the market's capability to guess (and judge) futuer value. So, perceived value is often difficult to 'divorce' from the actual value, especially in the case with something like Bitcoin, where it is seen as both an asset and currency.
Another thing is the continuing trend of providing off-chain transactions (through companies such as Coinbase en Inputs.io).
Study wasn't done in 2010. That's just when that transaction shell game showed up from the perspective of the study. Do you have an up to date statistical analysis of the bitcoin transaction record to share?
Both nutrition and pecuniary economics are far more complex then Soylent and Bitcoin allow for -- additionally, the history of both of these fields is seeded with innumerable failures to couch each of their fundamentals in terms of simple concepts (for nutrition: protien/fats/carbs, vitamins, micronutrents, and so on -- for economics, Smith, Marx, Keynes, Laffer, et cetera). The idea that either, as a phenomenological consequence of human interaction, has a simple solution is technically possible but foolhardy.
I don't deny that there may be a food that is easy to make but perfect for humans; or that there may be such a currency as well. But for any rational actor to believe it would require not only extraordinary evidence, but specific refutations of the previous failed attempts (rather, the theory would provide those refutations). Such a failure to both acknowledge and rebut historical failures in the same vein is strong evidence of crankism/crankitude/crankosity/I Can't Believe They're Not A Crank.
Somewhat ironically, the foodstuff I might be most inclined to believe would satisfy this requirement is exactly what "soylent" should be -- complete raw human. Om nom nom.
I have a lot to learn from the whey protein industry. They've managed to convince people who have never stepped foot in a gym to drink the old whey and maltodextrin concoction and call it a revolution.
Last I heard they were removing the whey protein in favor of non-animal products. Also, the idea is that you can literally never eat anything other then Soylent, and have complete nutrition for an active lifestyle.
Sorry, but I can never trust something made for human consumption by the guy who wrote this: http://robrhinehart.com/?p=572 (especially the Hormones, Antibiotics and Processed Food section).
Basically the formula is supposed to be customizable. Ie. more protein for body builders etc.
If it becomes big, which, I guess is possible, it only makes sense for the Soylent community to hack away. Im thinking it may evolve into few solid recipes that can be mass-distributed and then for those who want fine grained control they can get the separate ingredients/supplements themselves and either modify an existing recipe or create one from scratch.
This whole thing would be pretty stupid-er if it was only going to be one recipe.
I guess I'm going to write up an explanation and justification based on my review of nutrition research at some point. But it's not like it's monetizeable, so I lack motivation.
There's always money that can be made, even if it's a "commodity" by being a knowledge person / service provider. By open sourcing, that's a signal of so much confidence on a mfgr's part that people would stick with a particular brand the existence of a recipe which can be easily replicated. Most people aren't going to bother. Knock-offs can come in and try, but probably aren't going to dent brand-affinity.
Many people, especially high income people, would gladly pay for the convenience of ready-to-go product.
> Many people, especially high income people, would gladly pay for the convenience of ready-to-go product.
I'll second this. I've used the linked formula off and on, but there's not a significant difference in convenience between using it and getting food elsewhere. The mixture seems to change within a few hours of being made in a way that has not encouraged me to continue consuming it, so I have not tried preparing it in bulk. Assuming there isn't a way to make it remain appetizing for a few days after making it, it seems to be only about as convenient as weekly bulk cooking of chicken/rice/eggs/veggies/dishes that combine these things.
If nazgulnarsil has made large batches of it, though, I'd love to hear about it :)
Every time I see a Soylent article on HN I hope that it's all just a sick joke that will soon be revealed as an elaborate hoax and forgotten about. Why the hell would anyone in their right mind base their entire diet off of some liquid concoction made up by some random guy who is clearly not a nutritionist? Why don't you guys just learn to eat a healthy and balanced diet?
I'd tend to expect that as this becomes more popular, they'll get some nutritionists on board. That doesn't mean it's completely insane for people to try it before that point.
Personally, I don't want to be an early adopter of this (I don't like to mix "bleeding edge" and health), but I'm quite interested. And to answer your last question: the hope is that this is a healthy and balanced diet.
Blegh, maybe eventually, but I doubt it. We can already eat healthy and balanced diets today. No need to wait until they perfect some formula.
I know some people might want to use this just for a quick bite (er, slurp?) when they're in a rush, but the creator's original post indicated that he was consuming soylent for every meal because, for some reason, he found the act of chewing to be somewhat tiresome. Are soylent fans just so busy that they don't have time to eat a good meal each day? If so, you may want to rethink your choices in life. Slow down, take things easier, enjoy life's simple pleasures. Building that game-changing app or chasing VC money can wait until after dinner.
Sounds like you're not in the target market, then, because you're attached to the concept of a meal. Don't assume that anyone who is in the target market has something wrong with them and needs to "rethink [their] choices in life".
The issue isn't "so busy", it's "better things to do with that time". Total up the amount of time you spend shopping for food, preparing food, storing food, and eating food. Are you saying you can't think of any better uses for that time?
Also note that making meal consumption optional doesn't prevent you from partaking in it as a social occasion whenever you want.
But in general, the target market for this considers the need to consume food, much like the need to sleep, an annoying biological requirement rather than a feature. Patches welcome.
Can anyone recommend an authoritative compendium of what that is please? Preferably linking to multi-year statistically significant studies that take into account the obvious externalities ( local weather, amount of exercise, genetics, time of eating etc). I don't really want to make nutrition research another time-consuming hobby, but I don't want to unnecessarily kill myself faster either.
I see comments like this a lot, and I think it's pretty disingenuous to jump from the garbage diet most people have and claim the only worthwhile improvement is one supported by rock solid conclusive scientific support. Nutrition science is in a pretty bad state, but that doesn't mean you should continue eating baconators.
well, without solid scientific support I am loath to enact major lifestyle changes with an uncertain gain long into the future. especially when there are so many competing mutually exclusive theories of which lifestyle change is 'correct', so I'd have to decide on what was the best theory at the time. and then I might go through years of misery and _still_ not get any gain. I make some effort to favor variety of fruit & veg, favor drinking water before eating, don't binge eat. Other than that, I'm just not willing to make that lifestyle change unless you can show me this isn't the modern equivalent of witchcraft superstition. and even then, the research would just give me a more informed opinion and I decide to eat baconators and accept a 10% increase in heart disease.
You've made some changes based on the most well supported bits of systematic reviews of epidemiological and intervention studies. Is the place you have stopped optimal in terms of effort:reward? You're going to be eating daily for the next several decades at least, small amounts of effort amortize pretty well.
The body is a machine, it takes the good and throws away the bad. That's simple enough... but arguing against something that is aiming to be healthy while eating a bigmac and sucking on a coke isn't a convincing argument to me. He might have something.
I wouldn't eat a pure Soylent diet.... but 20% of my diet... maybe?
Why would you assume I eat bigmacs and drink coke? I don't eat fast food unless I'm traveling. My diet consists mostly of rice, vegetables, and lean meat. You're putting up a false dichotomy here, i.e. Soylent vs. Standard North American Diet.
I didn't mean YOU personally.. I'm currently eating a fatty bigmac, fries and drinking coke made with high-fructose corn syrup... I don't pretend it any more or less healthy than Soylent.
... electrical engineering, computer science and entrepreneurship ... Industrial and Systems engineering. He has worked in finance, procurement, and logistics ...sales, finance, and marketing.... early stage technology companies ... Big Data ... operations and sales ... drives the sales channels ... sales engineer in the desktop video conferencing market ...
...and that's it. So I'm supposed to upend the foundations of my health & body based on the... "research" of a bunch of 20 something electrical engineers & marketers? I don't want my body to be "disrupted", I don't wish for my health to "fail fast." This is not a photosharing app you're building.
I find it profoundly bizarre and irresponsible that these people are recommending a total dietary replacement and they don't have single nutritionist or even anyone with a medical background on staff. Soylent team: you are MARKETERS, not nutritionists! Go disrupt something that either a) has fewer potential disastrous consequences or b) you actually know something about.
on the other hand USian diets in many quarters are so bad that this stuff can't be much worse. :) But seriously, even for the veneer of legitimacy, hire a nutritionist! The lack of one makes me think you couldn't find one who would touch the project with a 10 foot pole.
Are you really concerned about health of people who otherwise eat food that is PROVEN to be extremely unhealthy, or the idea of drinking nothing but one-of-a-kind liquid is so alien to you that you can't believe it could actually work?
I find it surprising that so many people here are reluctant to try soylent and afraid to "risk their health" because it is made by "a bunch of 20-something computer scientists".
Do you really think the traditional food industry as it is is looking out for you? Most people I know have terribly unhealthy diets and almost anything that anyone put any thought in will be better for them. I'm not saying Soylent is perfect or doesn't cause any long term ill-effects, I'm just saying that it can't be much worse than a lot of "normal" diets.
What do you mean traditional food industry? If you buy natural ingredients and cook them yourself, who are you depending on to look out for you? I'm pretty sure the people afraid of "risking their health" are not the ones who eat processed foods for every meal.
At least the traditional food industry continues to be in the business of producing stuff that is mostly food. This is a radically different concept, as it is synthesized from the raw nutritional components.
Whether it is safe or not, this is a great case study for nutritionists. But I don't want to be a guinea pig.
Experts have spent years studying their field. Sure, the information and books are all there for you to learn from. Hell, if you spend enough time at it, you might be an expert too. But do you really expect someone to sit and spend the time required to truly grok nutrition, health, medicine, etc? Oh, and how do you sift through the information to determine what is true and what isn't?
The information that experts have is probably available to most anyone, but where experts really have the advantage is that they have the proper context and training to correctly interpret and apply that knowledge.
It's one thing to try this stuff out on your own body. When you start convincing others to try it too is when it gets dangerous.
> Oh, and how do you sift through the information to determine what is true and what isn't?
Regarding nutrition studies, it is not possible not only to regular person, but also to nutrition experts themselves, because there are many contradicting results from different studies in this field. That's why for this startup he uses mostly plain biology and chemistry, which is far less contradicting, and only fills some gaps with nutrition studies. I'd say nutrition studies are the weakest source of information available, compared to chemistry and biology.
So you call this thing dangerous when others attempt it? If this is dangerous, how would you call mass consumption of junk food and trans fats? It should be called a genocide, if you call this experiment dangerous.
I would love to believe in this product, but there are just so many sketchy statements on the homepage alone that I doubt the ability of the team. People are literally going to entrust their lives to this product and the best third-party assurances they have are completely un-cited quotes such as:
"The taste is awesome."
"As a Biologist/Chemist I approve of Soylent and really want to start using it."
"My mood experience! It has improved a lot lately. And by a lot, I mean A LOT."
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[ 23.9 ms ] story [ 5566 ms ] threadHuh?
I've asked this before and never got an answer. How is Soylent different from Ensure Complete? Is it cheaper? Better made? Easier to order? Tastes better? Better for me? Higher quality?
Because if it isn't really any different then what Soylent will need to do is market better than those other companies. Because I'd definitely trust Abbott with my health over random start up with indistinguishable product.
You see I'm actually interested in things like this as a 'meal replacement'. I quite often drink chocolate milk instead of eating lunch and I can buy nutritionally complete things like Ensure Complete. So, what makes Soylent special?
http://discourse.soylent.me/t/comparing-soylent-to-existing-...
tldr; There's room in the market for more than one non-solid dietary product, the goal of Soylent is to be a complete alternative that supports an active life rather than something that just lets you survive, ensure is expensive and low calorie.
He mentions Ensure as follows: "I considered Ensure but found it much too expensive, low calorie, unpalatable, and an ingredient make up that was far from complete or optimal." That does not tell me anything about Soylent.
Sure, he wants to make it cheaper. Can he? About a month ago I posted this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5875246 The pricing is very close between Soylent and Ensure Complete. Abbott claims you can live long term on it etc.
My suspicion is that he's comparing Soylent with the common consumer "Ensure" product which is relatively low-calorie etc.
Of course, you said that you considered $73.48/wk to be "very close to Soylent pricing". Sure it's in the same order of magnitude, but a 40% increase is nothing to sneeze at.
You don't want the high calorie versions because people are going to be chugging this stuff to avoid feeling hungry.
A quote from Vice on the crowdfunding page indicates that it should be about 700 Calories/day[1] (making it several times as expensive as Ensure), while Rob Rhinehart's blog indicated that he was consuming a reasonable number of calories earlier this year (2629 C/day)[2].
[1] https://campaign.soylent.me/soylent-free-your-body
[2] http://robrhinehart.com/?p=474
More popular and prominent in certain demographics. Which is what "disrupt" implies, versus "improves upon."
And it certainly doesn't make a product whose only improvement is marketing something worthy of equal attention to a product that actually improves some other aspect.
Click the [+] to expand ingredients etc.
You can trust Big Food to pump their products full of sugar because testing shows it makes consumers buy more. Sugar is second on Ensure's ingredient list (http://ensure.com/products/ensure-complete-shakes) while Soylent is not sweet.
Why does "Big Food" necessarily make less healthy products than "independents"? I agree that a lot of mass produced food is unhealthy and probably excessively seasoned and sweetened to improve market appeal
Take out that hedgey "necessarily" and you've answered your own question.
that isn't really an argument
To say that Ensure is excessively sweetened to make people buy more, while Soylent isn't, sounds like an argument to me.
No, because "Big _____" is a Progressive catchphrase that is normally used to villify whatever their target is and rationalize taking away some freedom from the marketplace, wheras "mass produced" just means "mass produced."
Of course, some people might use "Big _____" in a useful way, but it's definitely like a code smell but for English.
This all sounds much more ideological to me than the comment to which you are objecting.
It is true that people will often use it as a lazy and fallacious way of vilifying but please note this is not exclusively a progressive phenomenon. Many of these groups lobby for things like govt subsidies, laws which restrict personal freedoms in ways that help their industry, etc...many conservatives aren't thrilled with such behavior.
In a brief non scientific survey of a few subreddits (r/libertarian, r/socialism, etc) phrases like "big oil" appear roughly comparably.
People on both ends of the political spectrum are (perhaps rightly) displeased with some of the actions of such groups and vilify them - they just disagree about what the root cause is and how to prevent such behavior.
The fallacy comes in when people use some particular actions of some players in an industry to invalidate everything that comes out of it. (such as implying that anything produced by a startup is ipso facto healthier than something produced by a large pharmaceutical company)
"Big Food" is a meaningless scare phrase. It literally means nothing in the context of the comment I was replying to. On the other hand, "mass produced" has a very clear and well-established general meaning that I'm pretty sure most HN readers understand (and one that can easily be found online or in a dictionary; when I try Googling "Big Food", I just get a lot of random sites that use it as a buzzword without ever bothering to define clearly what they're fighting against).
> Take out that hedgey "necessarily" and you've answered your own question.
The question was rhetorical, and the point was to illustrate how absurd the phrase "Big Food" is. My statement about mass produced food was intended to show that I'm not defending major corporations that produce unhealthy food, but pointing out a rhetorical and logical flaw in tlb's post.
> To say that Ensure is excessively sweetened to make people buy more, while Soylent isn't, sounds like an argument to me.
tlb didn't include any sourced information about Soylent (other than "it's not sweet", which means nothing about its sugar content), so that's irrelevant. My point, again, was that calling anything "Big Food" is a meaningless, bullshit scare tactic and I was calling it as a saw it.
I'm sorry, but living off of a concoction for a few months and then claiming that it is better for you than X is crazy.
Look, Soylent may not kill you. It might actually be good for you. But until there have been multiple, years-long studies, this just isn't going to fly. Hell, get some actual nutritionists (PhDs) and doctors (MDs) on board and maybe you have a shot at convincing people.
Say what you want about Abbott, but they produce baby-formula. Baby-formula that has been around for decades, so they have a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn't.
So far we have people selling stuff telling us "it's okay".
I'd be really interested to see what the FDA has to say about Soylent. Have any of the Soylent team got legal advice?
It is just not sufficient to deem the product generally safe as a food substitute for everyone and/or for prolonged use.
Sure, they are going to want to differentiate from existing Big Food products (so do new Big Food products), but otherwise, the trust factors are pretty much the same.
Say what you will about "big food," but they will be around to be sued in 20 - 50 years. It means they have incentives to actually careful about what they to do people.
Just because I sell something doesn't make me exempt from the legal consequences of my actions prior. If I negligently claim that a product will make you healthier and it cripples you, then you can sue me regardless of whether I still own the product. Similarly, I could be prosecuted for dishonest advertising type offences (which aren't wiped clean simply by selling a business!).
You might be talking about a products liability type claim.
Only an incompetent acquirer would take liability for any latent claims in a target acquiree. Most likely they will get strong warranties from the seller about the existence of claims and rely on their own due diligence to ensure they aren't buying a product which is likely to cripple people in the future.
In 90% of cases the seller will retain liability for incidents which pre-date the sale of their business.
The corporate veil may protect them from liabilities of the company (barring fraud/breach of directors' duties), however in this particular instance we have a founder, Rob Rhinehart, who seems to have done most of his marketing and made most of his claims personally. That is, Rob, not Soylent Nominees Ltd, made the statements.
Therefore, if he has breached laws, civil penalty provisions or acted negligently in doing so, he is personally liable.
Source: I recently acted for a home owner who sued her (incorporated) builder in negligence (for building a house which fell down). The company was unfortunately insolvent. Luckily, the founder/director of the company made a number of claims about the expertise and abilities of the building company on the company website (which he hosted personally). We sued the director personally.
Actually, yes, selling your stake in the corporation that was the legally-responsible actor does mean that you are no longer at any financial risk for the actions of the corporation prior to you selling it, at least not in the main way that you were prior to selling it (that the consequences imposed on the corporation would reduce the value of your equity stake.)
If you manage to sell the corporate entity to a third party without making any warranties about latent claims, you will not be concerned about the corporation's liability. And the purchaser of that corporation is pretty foolish.
However you are still responsible for your own personal liability when you operated the company. Did you breach your directors' duties? Did you commit fraud? Did you sign a guarantee for the obligations of the corporation?
There are three ways to become personally liable off the top of my head. I'm sure there are several more.
However, the enumeration of those other avenues to liability is valuable.
I guess Soylent can say whatever they want in their marketing spiel. Some people may even believe it.
But if you're currently using Ensure, perhaps you know of other ways to improve on it? They're both basically ramen for the well-off.
(And +1 to tlb: simply removing sugar is an improvement in my eyes.)
And people. It's associated with people.
Soylent sounds like it's made of soy, but the name essentially means cannibalism. I'd expect the former to kill enthusiasm from the energy drink market (where the cannibalism angle makes it sound more extreme) and the latter to put off everyone else.
I actually know many more people that would be turned off by the word part "soy" than by the literary reference.
Soylent will be not only one of the highest-quality products in its category, but also perhaps the first one that isn't "for the well-off." I anticipate that it will shrink my food budget substantially. Not to mention the future savings on food-related things like dishes and silverware. Hell, if I really switch to it full time, I might even be able to save on electricity by unplugging my refrigerator!
Good God, man, that is not at all what fiber does, and has nothing to do with the role of fiber in diet. Please stop consuming this before you hurt yourself, and please stop talking about it before you hurt others.
Wouldn't want to actually stfw or anything.
What is the difference between a diabetic glycemic excursion (what you said) and a postprandial glycemic excursion (what I linked)?
There's no difference -- postprandial excursions are a diabetic phenomenon, and have nothing to do with what non-diabetic individuals think of as the effect of sugar and fiber on their health and mood.
It left me hungry.
Reportedly, Soylent doesn't do that.
I also tried Ensure very briefly, and got the same impression, but I'm only like 98% sure that, like Boost, it will also leave me hungry.
Fasting in any form is something you get better at with practice.
Edit: In fact, if I eat an early enough breakfast, I will need a snack before lunch hour to be able to remain focused.
Depending on diet and training, you can get over this (not that you have to).
1. http://www.onehundreddollarsamonth.com/mondays-with-mavis-ho...
Since none of this has happened, this is a pattern of not following through.
You be the judge.
http://www.amazon.com/Ensure-Nutrition-Powder-Vanilla-Flavor...
One way its different is that it was on Fox News yesterday and millions of people had a chance to hear about it. Versus, until you told me, I never heard of Ensure before.
Why on earth should I not eat natural and unprocessed foods?
It seems to me that this is what our bodies are trained to process. Why change that?
2. Bitcoin can be "attacked" (for some vague notion of what it means to attack a system that has no security definition) in polynomial time.
3. The economics of Bitcoin are extremely suspect and based on a poorly developed economic model, supported by neither the Austrian school nor by modern monetary theory. This is probably the underlying cause of the lack of a security definition, as the security definition of a digital cash system will almost certainly be driven by the system's economic model.
These issues have been covered ad nauseam by many people, and have been largely dismissed by the Bitcoin community. All the while we have seen increasing amounts of energy sunk into Bitcoin mining, we have seen a major block chain fork that left transactions in question, and we have seen wild fluctuations in the value of Bitcoin currency.
2. Countries can be attacked too. I don't know what your point is here. If bitcoin survives its infancy, it could become more resilient than any other currency.
3. Could you explain it in practical terms? Because as long as it works, why should I care about what theorists say? Bitcoin's creator said himself that it was an experiment, and rightly so, we have never seen anything like Bitcoin taking off before. Seems like he nailed it on his design.
Yeah, I have seen a lot of people raging. How is that evidence of anything, other than fear of the unknown?
1. It makes proofs of security possible, which make us a lot more confident about cryptosystems.
2. It allows us to be clear about what it means to "break" a system. If we are not clear about this, someone could claim that their system cannot be attacked by simply defining security to be the exact behavior of whatever they created. This is analogous to having a falsifiable hypothesis in a scientific experiment.
The original Bitcoin paper did not have such a definition. I am aware of one attempt at making such a definition, but it resulted in a very weak notion of security that placed unrealistic restrictions on what an attacker could do (basically, the authors were trying to find some definition that Bitcoin could satisfy; see point 2 above). In general, Bitcoin's security is highly suspicious, since by design the honest parties must scale their work in proportion with the work done by the attacker.
"Countries can be attacked too. I don't know what your point is here. If bitcoin survives its infancy, it could become more resilient than any other currency."
If you are admitting the possibility that an army might attack a country, then you are allowing Bitcoin to be fractured by an army destroying the outgoing Internet connections of a country. In the past, countries have been cut off from the Internet by accident (e.g. anchors being dropped on undersea cables). You could keep an attacking army outside of your territory and still wind up unable to communicate with the rest of the Bitcoin network. This is not a highly convincing argument.
Of course, this is all irrelevant, because a polynomial time attack is not the same as an act of war. There are a lot of organizations with the resources needed to perform the "51% attack" on Bitcoin and no compelling reason to think that a faster attack is not possible. You could attack Bitcoin by performing a lot of computation locally, without ever needing to step foot out the door. Bitcoin also does little to prevent attacks based on sending malicious messages into the network, despite the fact that cryptographers began developing techniques for dealing with that decades ago and despite the fact that almost all that work is freely available.
"3. Could you explain it in practical terms?"
Sure. Let's start with a thought experiment: I have something very rare, which has no practical uses but which is easy to give to others. Will you give me your car for a big pile of it?
Unless you are crazy you would not give up your car. The reason is that you are receiving something that is useless in exchange, and that you would have to go find some other person willing to take a pile of useless (but rare) items. Would your landlord accept some of these rare items as a rent payment? Would the bank accept some as loan repayment? Would the government accept it as a tax payment (let's just pretend that you are a law-abiding citizen who pays their taxes)?
How is Bitcoin any different? A lot of hype was generated about it, but at the end of the day you will not be able to pay your taxes with it, banks are unlikely to accept it for loan payments, and the majority of businesses that claim to accept Bitcoin payments actually accept payments in fiat currency via a Bitcoin exchange. Bitcoin currency has no practical uses (it is basically an energy sink) so the Austrian school does not support it, and it is not legal tender nor is it accepted for tax purposes by the government so modern monetary theory does not support it either.
"why should I care about what theorists say?"
For the same reason you should care about what cryptography theorists, physicists, and doctors have to say.
"we have never seen anything like Bitcoin takin...
How does the success/value of gold not completely destroy this line of reasoning?
I'm not saying it is destined for success or failure, just that this is not a coherent argument against Bitcoin.
Which is awkward.
Gold and Bitcoin are merely stores of value. Just like your paper bills with dead presidents on them. Or stocks or bonds. Which has next to nothing to do with how you pay for something. You can easily barter for an item, or pay with credit cards. Some places still do not accept American Express. Some places don't accept any credit cards. That doesn't take away from the fact that they are convenient. Likewise, I can see that Bitcoin could eventually become very convenient for micropayments, since credit cards charge merchants a fee. AFAIK, Bitcoin transfers are cheap or entirely free, thus making micropayments possible.
Once upon a time, gold was used as currency. Merchants would have scales, weights, and other equipment needed to deal in gold. That is not how gold is used in today's world; there are only a few highly niche markets where gold is used as currency, and everywhere else you have either fiat currency or currency that is backed by gold (with fiat currency being vastly more popular these days).
It is also wrong to separate printed money from the rest of the money supply when you are talking about fiat currency. Paper money is just a representation of the currency; the value of a dollar bill is equal to the value of four quarters and equal to the value of a bank account with one dollar in it. Fiat currency is an abstraction created by laws, which is implemented in various ways (paper money, coins, electronic transactions, etc.).
I'm aware of that. There are also lots of organizations with the power to kill you, yet you won't lose your sleep, because they have nothing to gain from that, so you are pretty sure that it won't happen. It could be argued that the central banks have a lot to lose to Bitcoin, so they should attack it. But after giving it a bit of thought, I remembered that most people just try to pass the current problems to the next guy (think of presidents, bankers, etc), so why would they bother? Right now, Bitcoin is not big enough to be a threat to anyone. It will keep growing as a threat, but everyone will pass the problem to the next guy, until Bitcoin becomes too big to be stopped. If there is a future that makes sense, this is it. Bitcoin takes over because lazy politicians don't do what they have to (in this crazy world, where their function seem to be to ruin everything), and ironically, that will be the best for everyone.
> For the same reason you should care about what cryptography theorists, physicists, and doctors have to say.
I was thinking about economists mostly (which in many cases will have vested interests), but still, if it works it works. Many theorists have spoken against the phone, the internet, the email, the aeroplanes, etc, and see what happened. I'm no cryptographer, but Bitcoin doesn't seem like something that would require one to begin with since all its crypto was done at the user level, it's pretty simple. Satoshi didn't try to create his own hashing algorithm or anything like that.
> You are calling the informed opinions of dozens of experts in cryptography and economics "raging" because they are saying that the system you love and support is based on dubious technical and economic ideas. It sounds more like you started out believing that Bitcoin is the future and are not willing to accept any argument that concludes anything else.
There are quite informed people on the other side too. So what do we do about them? Ignore them? I said raging, because Bitcoin has this crazy effect on a lot of people. They will hate Bitcoin for no reason, spread outright lies, and try to convince everyone that it is a scam. Why? We still don't know what causes it, so we just call it fear of the unknown.
No, he tried to create his own digital cash system, and digital cash is a cryptography problem that has been extensively studied by cryptographers (and had been studied for decades prior to Bitcoin). Bitcoin is also a system that involves multiparty computation, and secure multiparty computation has also been studied extensively by cryptographers, also going back decades. It is a mistake to think that the only relevant cryptography in Bitcoin are digital signatures and hash functions.
This is really the crux of the issue here. Bitcoin is not a hash function. It is not a digital signature system. The security of hash functions and digital signatures is not in question here; Bitcoin could be vulnerable to attack even if it is built using secure hash functions and secure signature systems. The point of having a security definition is to be clear about these things. We need to be clear about what the meaning of "security" is in the case of Bitcoin if we want to make any statements about whether or not Bitcoin actually achieves that security goal. It is not hard to see that the definition of security for a hash function or a digital signature system is not what we want for Bitcoin; what is not so clear is what we actually do want.
4. Bitcoin is inherently deflationary, which is an awful idea if you talk to anyone who knows anything about money
5. Bitcoin is fundamentally backed by pointlessly wasting CPU cycles and wasting energy trying to reverse hashes.
5. Printing paper money wastes way more resources. And how is using energy to create something of value a bad idea anyway? Bitcoin doesn't even require that you use a contaminating type of energy, for all I know you could be hashing with solar energy.
Question for you regarding your reference to forced inflation and consumerism: Do you believe there would be even a temporary economic collapse if the world were to suddenly move to a deflationary currency? If so, how many months/years would the collapse have to last before you would say that the transition to a deflationary currency isn't worth it?
The reason I ask is because while fundamentally I have a lot of problems with our financial system, I've come to the conclusion that historically there were periods of recession that lasted hundreds of years. I just don't feel that my lifetime in a bad transition economy is worth the sacrifice of moving to a "better" financial system. I'd rather just keep the status quo as it slowly degrades to something worse and worse since I think that's the best outcome for me. It's a selfish outlook, but I have to believe it's the outlook of most people and that's why we are where we are right now.
Furthermore, there will be an energy cost to transactions even after no substantial number of bitcoins are mined, since just verifying transactions requires wasteful hashing.
The solar energy part is totally irrelevant--if you happen to have a solar panel sitting around, you could just as easily use it for actual work (and offset coal burning) rather than computing hashes.
Huh? You seriously think Visa/Mastercard are using less energy than Bitcoin?
> Furthermore, there will be an energy cost to transactions even after no substantial number of bitcoins are mined, since just verifying transactions requires wasteful hashing.
You can call it wasteful all you want, but if you don't see the value in creating/maintaining a global framework for storing and exchanging value, then I don't know what to tell you. Besides, you are comparing apples to oranges. Bitcoin is a currency. You can build things like Visa around Bitcoin.
The argument that inflationary expectation is better than deflationary expectation because during period of deflation purchasing stops because 'it will be cheaper tomorrow' is flawed because such periods of deflation are short lived, and the market returns to a price where people are willing to re-enter the market and purchase to gain utility from the goods and services.
Just be careful believing people who "know anything about money" without thinking it through.
For more: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/guest-post-if-you-want-help-po...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflation#Historical_examples
Notice how nothing good ever comes of deflation? That should be a hint. I would be highly suspicious of the unsourced "In Ireland" section:
http://byline.timetric.com/2010/11/25/ireland-deflation-debt...
though there were some upsides: http://marketmonetarist.com/2012/08/14/good-deflation-the-ca...
I'm not against Bitcoin per se, but all this anti-inflation crap is, quite simply, at odds with historical data to the point that it has become essentially "views differ on shape of planet". If economics is to be useful at all, it has no choice but to be empirical, and everything we've ever measured has always told us that deflation is bad.
Perhaps Satoshi simply felt it was easier to implement finite Bitcoins than a constantly increasing supply. I don't think he can be blamed for that. Bitcoin is, if nothing else, certainly intriguing.
USD (or GBP or AUD etc) are deflationary relative to technological items, such as computers. By your theory, no-one should buy such items. In reality, they do.
I think this shows your theory is wrong.
But adding a deflationary currency to an ecosystem that also contains inflationary currencies isn't the same thing as having a deflationary currency be the only currency available.
Bitcoin is a heuristic for Byzantine concensus that requires 50% + epsilon of mining hash power to subvert.
This is not explicitly stated in the original paper, but the original paper comes very close.
I don't know what else you would want.
Regarding economics: All you need for a functioning currency is a supply of speculators who will bet on its future value and thus prop it up. That is only sustainable if the currency is the best at what it does for some meaningful niche (e.g. untrusted digital transactions). This is not part of any proir school of economics, but it's close to common sense, and is strongly supported by the success of bitcoin thus far.
For comparison, consider the definition of security used in this recently published paper:
http://eprint.iacr.org/2013/443
The definition is long, but very clear. Probabilistic polynomial time Turing machines are used as a model of computation; the adversary is given more power by being allowed to be non-uniform (i.e. the adversary can be a different machine for different security parameters). The security properties are clearly defined in terms of this model of computation, and a construction is given and proved to meet the properties (under certain hardness assumptions).
Note that there is no possible way that Bitcoin could meet the security definition given in that paper, because that definition requires the existence of a bank that issues the cash. This is true of previous work on digital cash as well, including the work that preceded Bitcoin. That is why it is necessary to develop a security definition that makes sense for systems like Bitcoin -- digital cash systems in which there is no bank. That is the complaint I have: no satisfactory definition has been given.
"This is not part of any proir school of economics, but it's close to common sense, and is strongly supported by the success of bitcoin thus far."
Economics often defies common sense, so I would be wary of using common sense as the basis for a currency.
“We isolated all the large (≥ 50,000 Bitcoins) transactions which were ever recorded in the system, and analyzed how these amounts were accumulated and then spent. We discovered that almost all these large transactions were the descendants of a single large transaction involving 90,000 Bitcoins which took place on November 8th 2010, and that the subgraph of these transactions contains many strange looking chains and fork-merge structures, in which a large balance is either transferred within a few hours through hundreds of temporary intermediate accounts, or split into many small amounts which are sent to different accounts only in order to be recombined shortly afterwards into essentially the same amount in a new account.”
- Dorit Ron and Adi Shamir, Quantitative Analysis of the Full Bitcoin Transaction Graph.
Then the perceived value and the actual value would be off significantly.
So, while I might not phrase it in quite as strong terms as the person you're responding to does, I do find reason to be somewhat cautious about the whole enterprise.
That's how I feel about Bitcoin. Circulation might not be a lot, and signs probably show that is not a lot, but it is disruptive. You also have to consider that perceived value is always reckoned into the 'actual' price. It depends on what market theories you ascribe to, but it is generally accepted that current prices reflect the market's capability to guess (and judge) futuer value. So, perceived value is often difficult to 'divorce' from the actual value, especially in the case with something like Bitcoin, where it is seen as both an asset and currency.
Another thing is the continuing trend of providing off-chain transactions (through companies such as Coinbase en Inputs.io).
I don't deny that there may be a food that is easy to make but perfect for humans; or that there may be such a currency as well. But for any rational actor to believe it would require not only extraordinary evidence, but specific refutations of the previous failed attempts (rather, the theory would provide those refutations). Such a failure to both acknowledge and rebut historical failures in the same vein is strong evidence of crankism/crankitude/crankosity/I Can't Believe They're Not A Crank.
Somewhat ironically, the foodstuff I might be most inclined to believe would satisfy this requirement is exactly what "soylent" should be -- complete raw human. Om nom nom.
The only half-way valid point is on organic greenwashing.
I mean, would soylent be enough for people going to gym frequently? would it be too much for people always working at home?
If it becomes big, which, I guess is possible, it only makes sense for the Soylent community to hack away. Im thinking it may evolve into few solid recipes that can be mass-distributed and then for those who want fine grained control they can get the separate ingredients/supplements themselves and either modify an existing recipe or create one from scratch.
This whole thing would be pretty stupid-er if it was only going to be one recipe.
I guess I'm going to write up an explanation and justification based on my review of nutrition research at some point. But it's not like it's monetizeable, so I lack motivation.
Many people, especially high income people, would gladly pay for the convenience of ready-to-go product.
I'll second this. I've used the linked formula off and on, but there's not a significant difference in convenience between using it and getting food elsewhere. The mixture seems to change within a few hours of being made in a way that has not encouraged me to continue consuming it, so I have not tried preparing it in bulk. Assuming there isn't a way to make it remain appetizing for a few days after making it, it seems to be only about as convenient as weekly bulk cooking of chicken/rice/eggs/veggies/dishes that combine these things.
If nazgulnarsil has made large batches of it, though, I'd love to hear about it :)
Store-brand ingredients and nutrition info: http://screencast.com/t/KhqgkXT73Ofe
Major-brand: http://screencast.com/t/KhqgkXT73Ofe
http://screencast.com/t/4dRnEZuw
Personally, I don't want to be an early adopter of this (I don't like to mix "bleeding edge" and health), but I'm quite interested. And to answer your last question: the hope is that this is a healthy and balanced diet.
I know some people might want to use this just for a quick bite (er, slurp?) when they're in a rush, but the creator's original post indicated that he was consuming soylent for every meal because, for some reason, he found the act of chewing to be somewhat tiresome. Are soylent fans just so busy that they don't have time to eat a good meal each day? If so, you may want to rethink your choices in life. Slow down, take things easier, enjoy life's simple pleasures. Building that game-changing app or chasing VC money can wait until after dinner.
The issue isn't "so busy", it's "better things to do with that time". Total up the amount of time you spend shopping for food, preparing food, storing food, and eating food. Are you saying you can't think of any better uses for that time?
Also note that making meal consumption optional doesn't prevent you from partaking in it as a social occasion whenever you want.
But in general, the target market for this considers the need to consume food, much like the need to sleep, an annoying biological requirement rather than a feature. Patches welcome.
Can anyone recommend an authoritative compendium of what that is please? Preferably linking to multi-year statistically significant studies that take into account the obvious externalities ( local weather, amount of exercise, genetics, time of eating etc). I don't really want to make nutrition research another time-consuming hobby, but I don't want to unnecessarily kill myself faster either.
I wouldn't eat a pure Soylent diet.... but 20% of my diet... maybe?
...and that's it. So I'm supposed to upend the foundations of my health & body based on the... "research" of a bunch of 20 something electrical engineers & marketers? I don't want my body to be "disrupted", I don't wish for my health to "fail fast." This is not a photosharing app you're building.
I find it profoundly bizarre and irresponsible that these people are recommending a total dietary replacement and they don't have single nutritionist or even anyone with a medical background on staff. Soylent team: you are MARKETERS, not nutritionists! Go disrupt something that either a) has fewer potential disastrous consequences or b) you actually know something about.
on the other hand USian diets in many quarters are so bad that this stuff can't be much worse. :) But seriously, even for the veneer of legitimacy, hire a nutritionist! The lack of one makes me think you couldn't find one who would touch the project with a 10 foot pole.
(where succeed means "accrue money and and mind-share")
Do you really think the traditional food industry as it is is looking out for you? Most people I know have terribly unhealthy diets and almost anything that anyone put any thought in will be better for them. I'm not saying Soylent is perfect or doesn't cause any long term ill-effects, I'm just saying that it can't be much worse than a lot of "normal" diets.
Whether it is safe or not, this is a great case study for nutritionists. But I don't want to be a guinea pig.
Do you have any evidence to suggest that Soylent is better for 'most people' or are you just going on gut instinct?
Corresponding HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6115114
The information that experts have is probably available to most anyone, but where experts really have the advantage is that they have the proper context and training to correctly interpret and apply that knowledge.
It's one thing to try this stuff out on your own body. When you start convincing others to try it too is when it gets dangerous.
Regarding nutrition studies, it is not possible not only to regular person, but also to nutrition experts themselves, because there are many contradicting results from different studies in this field. That's why for this startup he uses mostly plain biology and chemistry, which is far less contradicting, and only fills some gaps with nutrition studies. I'd say nutrition studies are the weakest source of information available, compared to chemistry and biology.
So you call this thing dangerous when others attempt it? If this is dangerous, how would you call mass consumption of junk food and trans fats? It should be called a genocide, if you call this experiment dangerous.
"The taste is awesome."
"As a Biologist/Chemist I approve of Soylent and really want to start using it."
"My mood experience! It has improved a lot lately. And by a lot, I mean A LOT."