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Soylent now accepting Bitcoin for preorders

blog.soylent.me

151–160 of 178 posts

Re: Soylent now accepting Bitcoin for preorders

#151
post #47

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?

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?

Re: Soylent now accepting Bitcoin for preorders

#152
post #2

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 healt…

http://examine.com/blog/soylent-is-made-from-hype/

Re: Soylent now accepting Bitcoin for preorders

#153
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was that an attempt at a pun, or a serious comment? I'm not sure I understand exactly what you're saying.

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.

Re: Soylent now accepting Bitcoin for preorders

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marketers have used the fake "experts" card so extensively, that it diminished the value of the opinion of the expert to near zero. He chooses fundamentally pure approach of giving the actual details of the product to you to judge. The information is there, read it, analyze the books used by the medics and nutritionists and judge by yourself. If you feel the need of an opinion of an expert, you are willingly trusting…

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 hav…

> 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.

Re: Soylent now accepting Bitcoin for preorders

#155
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm willing to take the risk and test it for a conservatives like you.

But that's useless unless it's a large, controlled, randomised, double blind, trial. 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?

For me at least it would not be useless, because soylent wold be 10x better food than what I eat now.

Re: Soylent now accepting Bitcoin for preorders

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"just learn to eat a healthy and balanced diet". 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 kil…

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.

Re: Soylent now accepting Bitcoin for preorders

#157
post #2

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 healt…

The 1st question for me is still this one: 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?

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Re: Soylent now accepting Bitcoin for preorders

#158

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…

>Most people I know have terribly unhealthy diets and almost anything that anyone put any thought in will be better for them.

Do you have any evidence to suggest that Soylent is better for 'most people' or are you just going on gut instinct?

Re: Soylent now accepting Bitcoin for preorders

#159
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm willing to take the risk and test it for a conservatives like you.

But that's useless unless it's a large, controlled, randomised, double blind, trial. 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's not useless. It will shake out any number of "obvious" problems.

It is just not sufficient to deem the product generally safe as a food substitute for everyone and/or for prolonged use.

Re: Soylent now accepting Bitcoin for preorders

#160
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hashi…

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.…

> 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.

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