[!@#$%!]

i feel like getting stoned and pretending i'm an anthropologist in star trek.

unfortunately i haven't gotten stoned in ages, but i'm going to pretend anyway.

[Cunt]

Originally Posted by foreverasskiss

dumpster diving used to be a great past-time with me and a girlfriend. i can't imagine and begin to guess the shit i've found like ultra cigar poker playing dogs type of shit, but maybe not as cool.

like a dirty crackhead kitsch lifestyle. now it's just loto tickets, but thats a great way to meet chicks.

i have stacks of classics VHS's i've got for free. fun times. i miss it.

i love this man.

[A Thousand Threads]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

i feel like getting stoned and pretending i'm an anthropologist in star trek.

unfortunately i haven't gotten stoned in ages, but i'm going to pretend anyway.

well, virual participant observation is da shit for all the space age ethnologists...

the fiberglass bough.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by Cunt

Papist.

i have this theory that people of catholic background tend to be more forgiving of minor transgressions, but maybe it doesn't apply here.

or are english papists different from the rest of us? (i mean, i was raised catholic, though i'm a complete apostate).

[foreverasskiss]

Originally Posted by Cunt

i love this man.

i'm not smart enough to lie. we would scrounge for change just to buy some of that cheap jewish red wine. it would fuck me up hard then the fights began.

[SuchFriendsAreDangerous]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

i have this theory that people of catholic background tend to be more forgiving of minor transgressions

(i mean, i was raised catholic

I think that nullifies your theory right there

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by A Thousand Threads

well, virual participant observation is da shit for all the space age ethnologists...

the fiberglass bough.

ha ha yes.

klingons vs. ferengis

 

[foreverasskiss]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

i feel like getting stoned and pretending i'm an anthropologist in star trek.

unfortunately i haven't gotten stoned in ages, but i'm going to pretend anyway.

star commander fleet to mad razzie awards...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AB3uVARNhmM....


GO!!!!!

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by foreverasskiss

star commander fleet to mad razzie awards...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AB3uVARNhmM....


GO!!!!!

i think you meant ENGAGE! or wait… was that picard only?

anyway yes-- worst cover ever ha ha ha ha.

[foreverasskiss]

edit: scratch GO and insert ENGAGE!!! my bad! i guess ha.

are your particules feeling any different now? like somehow more slanted?

[!@#$%!]

like mccoy, i don't like getting into that transporter

speaking of mccoy, he was also from georgia.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MULMbqQ9LJ8

[foreverasskiss]

^^lol. fucking rep.


"im a doctor not a brick layer".

you know, just to add. my daughter loves Star Trek original shit. what happened???.. i know.

[!@#$%!]

i can eat waaaaaaay better for way cheaper than this:

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/...slurp-it-down/

[dead_battery]

better? no. cheaper - yes, but in a few years when the market is flooded with soylent clones then the prices will go down.

you cant eat better because any "natural" food you chose will have levels of nutrients that are all over the place and it won't match up to the daily rda.

cue a chorus of people going on about how nothing tastes better than "real" food and soylent is bland corporate sludge blah blah blah.

soylent like products will be a godsend to the poor and anyone else who wants the maximum quality of nutrition.

your body doesn't have a computer in it that tells you that its low on potassium, but science is way ahead of our primitive introspective sense apparatus.

[Genteel Death]

Some more devastatingly... BORING opinions from dead_battery. For a change.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by dead_battery

better? no. cheaper - yes, but in a few years when the market is flooded with soylent clones then the prices will go down.

i can put in more nutrients across the whole spectrum, with much better taste, for way way waaaay less than $3 per individual meal. i can do it for about 1/3 of that.

it's called "basic life skills."

Originally Posted by dead_battery

you cant eat better because any "natural" food you chose will have levels of nutrients that are all over the place and it won't match up to the daily rda.

the daily rda is well and good as a rule of thumb but it's a coarse statistical mean that is not in tune with my individual body/activity/DNA/immune system/etc.

i get it as an emergency and/or convenience meal replacement though. there's definitely a place for that in life. like military rations. but seems expensive for everyday meals.

Originally Posted by dead_battery

cue a chorus of people going on about how nothing tastes better than "real" food and soylent is bland corporate sludge blah blah blah.

i don't think it's "corporate" (yet, anyway), and i haven't tasted it, but it DOES sound bland by the description. i mean, nobody here is arguing for its gourmet qualities, are they?

and yes while the thing covers basic nutritional needs i think it ignores the deep psychological and social dimensions of food gathering, preparation and consumption, which run deep in humans.

Originally Posted by dead_battery

soylent like products will be a godsend to the poor and anyone else who wants the maximum quality of nutrition.

i think that's a bit of an idealized technofetish. take rice, extract the protein, mix other things, add a lot of packaging-- seems like a lot of processing which is money. but it looks like a healthier alternative to taco bell for sure.

some of the criticisms mentioned in the article are worth noting. this one is really a big one for me:

some, like author Ruth Reichl, have gone so far as to say that Soylent could potentially undermine and erode the food traditions of developing cultures, displacing heritage recipes and methods of food preparation with convenience, and ultimately pushing the world in a direction where poorer peoples and countries subsist on Soylent while the developing world eats whatever they’d like.

i think "the poor" might be better off developing a measure of food self-sufficiency than becoming dependent on an industrial commodity they must purchase. i get that this is already the case in urban areas anyway, but even urban areas can accommodate small gardens (roof, balconies, buckets), and even small livestock operations (look up urban chickens). though i get this might not be an option for overworked isolated individuals, for example. but for most people the solution can be found in basic social cooperation as an alternative to capitalist distribution of labor ($ for commodities).

Originally Posted by dead_battery

your body doesn't have a computer in it that tells you that its low on potassium, but science is way ahead of our primitive introspective sense apparatus.

errr…. yes it does. it's called "the brain." just because it doesn't always operate at a conscious level it doesn't mean it's not there. i can verbalize things like "i really really feel like eating some cooked greens right now" or "fuck, i'm craving oranges". cravings are a way for your brain to communicate the bodily need for an ingredient to its own executive functions.

you feed that "computer" data by eating a variety of things, by exposing yourself to new foods (part of our genetic heritage as nomadic hunter-gatherers), then your body learns what's what, and how & where to get it.

if you have never eaten a fresh vegetable though, your "computer" might not realize it needs one. if you've made your body addicted to toxins, it might need time to reprogram. GIGO.

[!@#$%!]

ps - i like this website

http://www.urbanorganicgardener.com

[dead_battery]

none of the points im making are meant in an argumentative way.

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

i can put in more nutrients across the whole spectrum, with much better taste, for way way waaaay less than $3 per individual meal. i can do it for about 1/3 of that.

it's called "basic life skills."

you can't. you don't know the exact nutrients your body needs, and you do not possess the ability to go out to any food selling place that exists and pick them off the shelves just by looking at the produce and guessing what it contains. no doubt you can eat well, cook meals that look and taste far better than soylent, and no doubt you can host intensely enjoyable evenings around them. still, whatever you make will be technically worse than soylent nutrition wise because nature just doesn't grow a single source of food that gives the body everything it needs.

think of it this way - what is a potato? it's a collection of smaller parts. it's a composition of ingredients. you can't see them. you can see fat, the rest our brains can't process without technical apparatus.

what is soylent? it's a composition of ingredients, only soylent is created from data based on the body itself and our best empirical data on what it requires to function maximally. a potato is not.

soylent like foods simply have to be the staple of the future because there is just no point in creating foods with random levels of nutrients based on our primitive understanding of what they were. we are working from the flawed assumption that a banana tastes good because it is a banana. it's healthy because its like, natural and from the sunshine and or something.

the future will be products like soylent serving as the base nutrition of the day, and expertly engineered supplements and flavourings providing the taste, pleasure, experience and social dining aspect.

if you're telling me that in the future people will engineer a substance to consume that has the exact ingrediential profile of a standard potato of today, then you're making an absurd argument. in the future people will demand and expect meals that are made to serve their body, not labels like "banana" or "potato" that we cling to out of some primitive romantic conception of what food is.

Originally Posted by symbolicus

the daily rda is well and good as a rule of thumb but it's a coarse statistical mean that is not in tune with my individual body/activity/DNA/immune system/etc.

i get it as an emergency and/or convenience meal replacement though. there's definitely a place for that in life. like military rations. but seems expensive.

it's hardly coarse. nonetheless, what you've said here is an argument FOR soylent and the inevitable future of food technology. soylent is the first step towards being ABLE to attune food to the exact requirements of your body. google glasses feeding you real time stats - soylent like systems producing your meals based on that data?

and it doesn't stop there at the level of maximal functionality - the potential for experimentation, with chemicals and substances that go beyond simple utilitarian value - psychedelics, nootropics etc. all of this is massively augmented by soylent like technology.

also, as i already said, the fact that the price is $5 a day NOW - when the product isn't even in stores yet - that indicates that within years or decades soylent like products might be unbelievable cheap. considering their superior value to anything else you can eat - its exciting.

military rations - of course, and why not prison meals? why not hospital meals? again, noone is saying you can't a banana or a bar of chocolate after you've had your soylent.

i also suspect survivalists will be big on soylent. their larders could be MASSIVELY reduced in size.

foodbanks too - i hope some forward thinking people are already considering this.

Originally Posted by symbiosis

i don't think it's "corporate" (yet, anyway), and i haven't tasted it, but it DOES sound bland by the description. i mean, nobody here is arguing for its gourmet qualities, are they?

yes, the taste is bland and chalky. but within a few years there will be a multitude of flavourings, there's no limit on what it could taste like.

also, on something like soylent, you can afford to eat tasty foods because the basics of your diet are covered.

Originally Posted by symbo

i think that's a bit of an idealized technofetish. take rice, extract the protein, mix other things, add a lot of packaging-- seems like a lot of processing which is money.

?

Originally Posted by symbol

some of the criticisms mentioned in the article are worth noting. this one is really a big one for me:

i think "the poor" might be better off developing a measure of food self-sufficiency than becoming dependent on an industrial commodity they must purchase. i get that this is already the case in urban areas anyway, but even urban areas can accommodate small gardens (roof, balconies, buckets), and even small livestock operations (look up urban chickens).

poor indian farmers drink their pesticides to commit suicide because corporations like monsanto gouge them. they patent their seeds and make you purchase new ones each year. markets are rigged so US farmers get heavy subsidies and african ones cannot compete. the "free market" is rigged against them.

the poor don't have much room to grow gardens or raise chickens. the time these things take, the amount of food you actually get from them - it's obscene. a years supply of soylent can easily fit in a cupboard and does not go out of date.

and agriculture itself is a serious problem. forget about the space it takes up, the ridiculously long growth times, the pest problems - its one of the single largest sources of carbon emissions. soylent is the first step into a post agricultural world. that's terrifying for many, and will end entire ways of life. its also progress. it is simply archaic to grow things in fields for months using the sun when we can do it in labs and totally engineer the process.

we're talking about efficiency and progress. people will complain, they will cling to the phantasmagorical fetish object called "nature" because the brain doesn't like complexity and risk and imagines it can sustain itself from a "pure" and "unspoiled" source that does not really exist.

you call me a technofetishist - in fact, today nature fetishists are the majority. they fantasize about cutting away at consumer modernity and restoring a non existent space that is supposedly free and pure. they are deluded. it's very natural to go out in the woods and pick up a mushroom, consume it, then die slowly in agony as you're poisoned. that mushroom will look, taste and smell in a way that's very very appealing. nature wants you dead. consumer capitalism wants to harvest you for profit. consumer capitalism is harder for people to process since its going to sell you things for profit then when you get sick maybe you can sue it or maybe its too late.

and only people such as we who are so utterly detached from the reality of "nature" could imagine it as a pure, untampered with, safe and benevolent space that just wants to feed us.

and again, noone is forcing anyone to buy soylent, noone is forcing the poor to chose to take it. all these arguments that it will hurt them are fucking absurd.

the poor would be much better off learning the science of how their bodies work, learning how to synthesize and create chemicals, and disseminating the knowledge that the corporate power structures will use to addict, impoverish and ensnare them on p2p networks.

telling them to cling to peasant nature because of fetishized notions of its purity and dignity serves only to disempower, stupefy and hurt them in the long run. not that growing vegetables is bad, not at all. it's just not enough.

i feel strongly that this retreat back into nature is a betrayal of the poor and the greatest single mistake the left and anyone on the side of the individual is making right now. it's the opposite of the direction we should go in. there are obvious reasons why it's a horrendous idea, and why it enables the poor to be exploited by advanced systems of instrumentalized techno rationality. the future is scary, daunting, complex and difficult to understand, but progress is unstoppable. it goes in only one direction and we either keep up or we don't.

[dead_battery]

Originally Posted by symbo

errr…. yes it does. it's called "the brain." just because it doesn't always operate at a conscious level doesn't mean it's not there. "i really really feel like eating some cooked greens right now" or "fuck, i'm craving oranges" is a way for your brain to communicate the need for an ingredient to its own executive functions.

you feed that "computer" data by eating a variety of things, by exposing yourself to new foods (part of our genetic heritage as nomadic hunter-gatherers), then your body learns what's what, and how & where to get it.

if you have never eaten a fresh vegetable though, your "computer" might not realize it needs one. GIGO.

the brain, without technical aids, cannot scan objects and detect potassium, it doesn't realise the levels of the elements in the things around it, it doesn't know the composition of the foods it eats. it is on a clock running down the caloric energy expenditure from the last meal, looking for another one. it is primed by evolution to get whatever it can quickly. we can trick ourselves that we are rational supermen who can just make time and get beyond all this - hows that working out? obesity skyrockets and what is the solution of the majority of people bar scientists and the soylent crowd? moralizing, self help pep talks, shame, confusion, magical thinking, blah blah blah, meanwhile the public health crisis is getting worse. but i bet if we just keep doing the things we're doing people will make different choices right? who cares if they get ill and die young, we get the sad pleasure of telling them what their doing wrong and how easy it would be for them to just chose to do differently, (with zero knowledge of the neuro/bio-mechanics driving their actions. we get to profit from them AND punish them for letting down our teams delusion of the omnipotence of free will. if what we were doing right now was gonna work, it would have worked already. you can say that it doesn't work because people don't want it to, but that's not true.

i find no problem with someone who wants to be healthy and attractive but also wants to eat junk food. the idea that we should moralize and tell them they're bad people is absurd. we already have the data that explains their decisions. the fact that its neuro-chemical and there's no homunculus in their heads pulling the levers frightens us. but we're also fucking idiots who have been dragged kicking and screaming to a point where no matter what people want to believe, they've been humiliated into shutting the hell up in the face of the science. this is a good thing.

if you want to argue that YOU personally don't need soylent, i don't really care. noone will be forced to consume it.

the brain - it basically wants sugar fat and salt. it doesn't magically "know" the other things it needs. when it doesnt get them it makes substitutes which takes a heavy toll on the body. we evolved from a situation where our prerogative was to get that fucking bison dead right now, get the fucking fire lit, and eat that shit before a tiger comes along and chases us into the water. little time to think.

also - convenience and junk food - anyone that wants to make people feel ashamed about this, about the urge to just consume what you need quickly and simply - well, they know how i feel about them.

anyone who wants to condescendingly lecture exhausted working people about their dietary habits, well...

or how about - gasp - people who just don't want to bother.

who might have better things to do. or who just don't care.

anyone who wants to tell me this is bad is blowing smoke.

[!@#$%!]

i see your arguments and i can't quote and respond to all right now, but generally speaking they form a tunnel of confirmation bias and paranoia. it's all upside without tradeoffs, and anyone who doesn't see that is… an enemy or something.

please note, i'm not against soylent, i'm open to actually buying & consuming it provided is not too repulsive (i do already use whey as a supplement and emergency ration and it's not exactly tasty), and i can see all manners of use and value to soylent, but i just find hard to believe the visions of the earthly paradise that it will bring about. that's just a lot of wishful thinking.

but that's not to say that maybe 50 years from now you won't be proven right. you might be totally correct in your predictions, but i'll only believe them when i see them become reality.