SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Soylent [food replacement] founder Rob Rhinehart shares his thoughts on extreme sustainability.
I am electrically self-reliant. My home life runs comfortably on a single 100W solar panel, which cost $150 and was available on Amazon Prime. I tracked down a few manufacturers in China who all said it costs around $40 to make. The US for some reason leverages massive tariffs on Chinese solar panels, so they ship them through Malaysian customs. Why do the politicians even bother?
For storage a $65 lead acid automobile battery does the trick. It's 12V so can be charged directly from the solar panel, and holds 420Wh, way more than I use in a day. That's $0.15 / Wh so I don't see why everyone is so excited about Tesla charging $0.43 / Wh for the Powerwall, sans inverter and installation.
He got rid of his fridge and other kitchen implements to make it work. What are the biggest energy users in your place? Could you pare things down as much as Rob?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by gman003 on Tuesday August 04 2015, @11:24PM
Not only that, but he's absolutely wrong in several blatantly obvious ways.
He rails against Tesla, because electricity comes from fossil fuels and by his math, a Tesla gets like 20 miles per gallon. His obvious wrong assumption is that all power comes from fossil fuels - he even mentioned nuclear early on, but hydro, solar and wind are common. Particularly in California - they're fifth place in CO2 emissions per kWh by state. His measure of efficiency came purely from some blind assumptions of thermodynamic efficiencies for each stage - calculations he did not do for gasoline vehicles, such as his favored Priuses.
Not that he'd lower himself to own his own car. No, he exclusively uses Uber, because that way it's *other* people using those filthy oil fuels. That's his entire problem in a nutshell right there - he doesn't give a single shit about any of these issues, all that matters is that he looks like a better person than you. His entire post is riddled with logical flaws, misleading calculations and unsupported (or even blatantly counterfactual) assertions.
This man is a fraud. He is a parasite on society, claiming to be a paragon of virtue. He claims to be the epitome of self-sufficiency. Bull fucking shit. I want to have him dropped off in the middle of the Amazon - let's see how his self-sufficiency lasts there, when he doesn't have armies of Chinese laborers to make his clothes, a civilization to cook and house him, and gullible consumers to pay him to blend soy and rice. I'll even drop in alongside him - it's been years since I even went camping, but I'd put even odds on me coming out alive, and I can guarantee I'll last longer than he does.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2015, @11:52PM
> Not that he'd lower himself to own his own car. No, he exclusively uses Uber, because that way it's *other* people using those filthy oil fuels.
Nice rant. But it doesn't seem to be based on what he actually wrote.
(1) He literally wrote "I take the bus often too."
(2) Using Uber results in less waste than owning a car and letting it sit unused 22 hours out of the day.
Stripped of your own self-righteous vitriol, your argument boils down to the fact that he because he's not 100% perfect means any improvements that he's been able to achieve are worthless and so he must be a poser. That is at least as big a logical flaw as anything Rinehart might have written.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by gman003 on Wednesday August 05 2015, @02:17AM
Okay, I'll concede I overstated the Uber usage, and you *may* have an argument on more efficient utilization via collective usage, but preferring a Prius to a Tesla on oil-efficiency grounds is *blatantly* wrong.
And if you think my argument is about discarding marginal improvements, you're as guilty of overstating as I was. Most of what he is doing is not an improvement at all. A Prius is not more efficient than a Tesla, buying new clothes is not more efficient than washing them, eating at restaurants is not more efficient than cooking for yourself. I even suspect that using an EC2 instance as a workstation is less efficient than having a proper local machine. All of these are things he does to appear more environmentally conscious, and the planet is worse off for him having done so.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2015, @04:14AM
> Prius is not more efficient than a Tesla, buying new clothes is not more efficient than washing them, eating at restaurants is not more efficient than cooking for yourself
You say those things has if you have never critically thought about them. For example, a restaurant is another case of better utilization - they centralize shipping, storage, prep and clean-up and do it in volume for economies of scale and minimization of waste and spoilage.
> . All of these are things he does to appear more environmentally conscious
Seems like all of these things appear to be less environmentally conscious to you, someone who has spent less than a thousandth the time thinking about them than he has.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Wednesday August 05 2015, @03:26PM
I would be totally fine with a Tesla getting 20 miles to a gallon of sunlight.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh