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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 Hartree on Tuesday August 04 2015, @10:51PM
What he's doing isn't sustainability but rather exporting the polluting portion to other places.
One nit, among many: Buying new clothes rather than washing them? Let him try that for a whole city or nation worth of people.
He's greenwashing himself as hard as he can and then breaking his arm patting himself on the back.
Finding more efficient ways for large numbers of people to live with less environmental impact is something very desirable, but this isn't it, and is just more marketing for his liquid-diet goop.
(Score: 5, Informative) by c0lo on Tuesday August 04 2015, @11:20PM
Note: if he can fool 2% of the population of LA to do the same, he'd carved a niche good enough to live rich for his entire life*. Because TFA it is pure marketing:
Move him in Alaska and see if he'd be able to pull the same trick.
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3.8M*2%=76k. Say $0.5 profit per each bottle and 2 bottle/day=>$76k/day. Times 365d/y=>$27.74M/year
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2015, @03:14AM
You nailed it on the head: this is why people outside of (Alto) California think people inside California are so batshit-crazy! This article proves beyond a shadow of a doubt! And the worst part is that the vast majority of (interior, urban) Californians think this way!
The rest of us are fed up with their bullshit. IMHO, if they want their own country, by all means let them!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2015, @11:23PM
This comes to mind.
https://www.youtube.com/v/PS6lNDrCi88?version=3&start=55&end=65&autoplay=1&hl=en_US&rel=0 [youtube.com]
I get you are trying to 'lower your usage'. But the epic level of douchebagary here is amazing.
To lower your footprint you buy/make things and then reuse the hell out of them. Then if they break you repair them. Shipping everything from china and driving all over town is NOT it.
This is basically an extreme consumer. Everything is consumed and nothing is created or reused. He is trading dollars for OTHER people to create and use his energy then thinking he is being 'green'. No you are being lazy and cheap.
(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
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2015, @11:42PM
> What he's doing isn't sustainability but rather exporting the polluting portion to other places
I agree. He can't be stupid enough to believe his own patter, so what does he want out of it?
(Score: 2) by M. Baranczak on Wednesday August 05 2015, @12:04AM
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Wednesday August 05 2015, @06:58PM
Ah, the memories.
Saturday Night Live had a blurb on it's faux newscast that the US post office was asking the members of Synanon to please get their snakes in the mail early this Christmas season.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2015, @09:22AM
What he's doing is as laughable as living in a hotel most of the time and saying he's very environmental friendly at home.
He's trolling or trying to get publicity or both.
Get enough publicity and he can sell his crap to more suckers.