Somehow this seems like an American thing or maybe people in other places make less of a spectacle of it?
Always having too little time, always working and being proud to plan every minute of every day (recently Marissa Mayer and Bill Gates and someone else from the US said in interviews they have every minute of every day planned; sounds like pure hell but he) seems very American. This Soylent thing fits in there.
Why would someone want to work that much unless you want to become a billionaire which, again, seems a drive in media coming from the US?
Maybe it is just the media I read though, but here there is no vibe like that and when I meet (very successful/rich) entrepreneurs in Asia/Aus/EU they seem to be always eating elaborately so they do not give of that vibe either. Again the press distorts but posts here on HN and a thing like Soylent support that press.
> Somehow this seems like an American thing or maybe people in other places make less of a spectacle of it?
I think there is more acceptance in certain cultures, for example, to skip lunch because it's a busy day. Having worked globally and in multiple industries, I don't believe it's an American only thing although probably more common there. I see it as more of an industry thing, and each industry seems to have it's own use case for a product like Soylent. i.e. the programmer 'in the zone' and not wanting to stop for dinner or the investment banker running on a few hours of sleep due to an upcoming pitch.
> Always having too little time, always working and being proud to plan every minute of every day
I'm not sure how that was implied, but that does not represent the typical American workforce in my view.
> entrepreneurs in Asia/Aus/EU they seem to be always eating elaborately
I would be surprised to hear these types of individuals don't deal with skipped meals or lack of time based on what's going on in there life/work like their counterparts in other countries do.
People here imply that people consume Soylent either because they cannot get enough calories in with normal food to not lose weight (what a luxury that must be), or, in most cases and as the direct parent writes, that they do not have time to eat 'normally'. That seems to mesh with the whole culture of fast food and minute day planning; I for one could not tell you if I have time for an elaborate meal or a quick meal at lunch today and I would not want to know if I do either. I'll see what happens when I get hungry.
> but that does not represent the typical American workforce in my view.
Not typical workforce; I'm citing some famous and very rich US business people. Just noting that these people seem proud of it while I don't hear the same stories (in the press) from anywhere else. And others (especially on HN) seem desperate to copy it (which is, I assume, were Soylent came from in the first place); people who cite this (time-hacking/life-hacking/whatever-hacking it is called) as a great feat are all from (=living in currently) the US when I check their profiles.
Particularly when you are inundated in valley slave culture, being busy all the time is a sign of your importance - you're busy disrupting the market getting ready to IPO, and if you have 10 spare minutes a day in which to regain some semblance of health or sanity, clearly you aren't a 10x developer. It's absolute hogwash and sadly a good number of brilliant young engineers are going to burn out, suffer health consequences, quit the field, etc. over it.
But having employees willing to sacrifice their actual wellbeing for the pipe-dream of getting "rich" is quite beneficial if you're say, a VC, so of course they foster this culture. "Look at how busy you are, you must be doing such important work!"
It's an old tradition, too: there are accounts from the early days of the United States talking about how reading is treated as labor rather than the enjoyable affairs which visitors from England, France, etc. were accustomed to.
2400 calories per gallon, well balanced between protein, fat, and carbs (you might say that it is ideally formulated to feed large mammals :P). The best part is that it is readily available every where and super cheap (< $3 per gallon).
It is, but it's still significant. 13% for whites in the US but rising to near 90% for some ethnic groups.
Europe varies greatly, with by far the highest level of tolerance in Northern Europe (I'm Norwegian, and I didn't even know about lactose intolerance until I was in the 20's - it just wasn't something that became a subject until we were exposed to more immigrants as while it existed in Norway before that it was <5%), with lactose intolerance increasing to well above 20% in many other European countris.
In any case the advice to down vast quantities as milk isn't universally applicable anywhere.
That is not a careful reading of the statistics given.
The full quote:
"Approximately 65 percent of the human population has a reduced ability to digest lactose after infancy. Lactose intolerance in adulthood is most prevalent in people of East Asian descent, affecting more than 90 percent of adults in some of these communities. Lactose intolerance is also very common in people of West African, Arab, Jewish, Greek, and Italian descent."
I've dropped the idea that IGF response is something I need in my life. Milk is ideally formulated to feed babies that need to grow into gigantic beasts.
It is also a very inferior product made with zero genetic engineering. Just silly crossbreeding until the cow has big enough milk gains.
Don't see how it's, from a nutritional or health perspective, superior to Soylent.
Milk is also super cheap because it's heavily subsidized through taxes. I'm not saving idiot entrepreneurs by buying their unsustainable products.
So you prefer a diet engineered by humans (who, with our rather limited understanding of nutrition, can't even decide on whether carbs are a good thing) to a diet engineered and field tested by evolution over millions of years? Not the bet I would make, but to each their own, I guess.
Several other points:
1. The OP was remarking that they had a hard time maintaining weight. Anybody who has done GOMAD (gallon of milk a day) can tell you that large quantities of milk will head off the possibility of weight loss.
2. Is there any reason to believe that the agricultural inputs to something like Soylent aren't just as heavily subsidized as you claim milk to be?
Never said I consider a Soylent only diet proper. I have no opinion on that.
Milk is in our diet for several thousand years, not millions.
1. There's also a lot of people who ate balanced meals and kept weight. Drinking that much milk has some unwanted stuff in it - like IGF-I - which can cause cancer in those huge amounts.
2. Maybe soy, but that's a side-effect of the dairy that uses it not for the sake of human consumption. But it's highly likely the soy used is the one for human consumption, which would remove the necessary subsidies.
Your comment that San Diego, Orange County and LA should not have to pay for infrastructure work in San Francisco presupposes that the Bay Area is contributing less to state taxes then it's receiving. I'm interested to understand stats on geographic collection/distribution of taxes in CA, and how you know the Bay Area is a net beneficiary. I'd venture that the national trend of wealthy cities paying more state/federal taxes then they receive applies within CA.
Also, suggesting that state taxes should not be unevenly distributed among the state misses the point of state taxes. It's fine to argue where the funds should best be used, but not that a county should only get the proportion it contributed. Why not just have local governments be the primary collectors/distributors of taxes then?
BTW, I love southern CA and think you're awesome :)
Thank you, I go to San Francisco every year. I had no problem with financing the Oakland Bridge but the subway a subway has present danger and high costs.
GDP Distribution per Brookings Institute numbers:
Los Angeles: $860-billion
San Francisco: $331-billion
San Diego: $202-billion
San Jose $173-billion
I've used the iOS SDK for both in beta deployed apps, and prefer Flurry due to their more flexible custom events. With Google, a custom event has four fields (string, string, string, number), limiting how much you can capture for an event. Flurry allows up to ten, with data types of your choosing.
