Hacker News Reader

When I got to the washing part (I skipped over the Soylent part because I assumed it was just a paid advertisement), I expected him to talk about using a washing board or something.

No, I just buy new clothes. So instead of using a little energy for a spin cycle, I have factories in China spew coal, then have shipping freights (some of the worst environmental offenders) bring it half way across the world for me so I can wear it once, then presumably add it to the land fill.

If he lives in LA he should use good white linen clothes, wash them with a bit of water after every use and whiten / disinfect these with sunlight.

These would look much better than cheap synthetic staff, would not use (child?) slave labor (drones?) in China, would not use resources to make/maintain drones in China, no need to ship these, would not result in the laundry cycle in the charity, etc...

> then presumably add it to the land fill.

He said he donates it, so presumably some charity ends up footing the bill for his laundry

The land fill presumption is still the safest bet.

The author said that he doesn't wash his clothes. By this we can infer that he brings his dirty laundry — for who knows how long — to a donation facility. I've volunteered at enough non-profit donation facilities to know that they don't launder intake. The expense is too high, and amazingly, most people don't bring in dirty clothes. If something is clearly not clean, it goes in to a separate bin for disposal.

Even if it doesn't go the landfill immediately, you're still talking about a lot more clothes that will eventually have to be disposed of. Unless you assume that all the extra dozens of shirts and pants (shorts?) and underwear that he buys would have been manufactured and eventually disposed of anyway. Hard to see that being true.

Most charity donations these days get freighted out to poorer countries.

It's possible that it gets shipped back to China, washed, and resold to him.

>(I skipped over the Soylent part because I assumed it was just a paid advertisement)

This is authored by the founder of Soylent. Slightly different than a paid advertisement but most likely similar content

Not to mention that the crews of most freight cargo boats aren't much more than slave labor.

> then presumably add it to the land fill.

Oh no, he donates his single use clothes. That gives him yet another thing to feel superior about.

Not to mention this:

> I cannot in good conscience force a fellow soul through this gauntlet [of shopping at an American grocery store]

Followed up by this:

> I get my clothing custom made in China for prices you would not believe and have new ones regularly shipped to me.

Unless this custom Chinese clothing is made by robots and shipped to LA via zero-emission SolarDrones, I'm calling bullshit on your conscience.

Not to mention those synthetic fabrics are a direct cause of microfiber pollution, so using them over something biodegradable, like ordinary cotton, is pretty much the opposite of environmentally friendly: http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2014/oct/27/...

> You haven't done anything but say "okay let's see my most carbon producing areas are," and your only solutions are "let's see if someone else can help me reduce my carbon by taking the responsibility off of my own shoulders"

Well, in a sense I can understand how someone can think this way. The entire notion of reducing a person/company's carbon footprint is based around shifting the dirty work somewhere else. Globally, we impose carbon caps on developed nations and let China do whatever it wants. Ergo, production shifts to China. The pollution is still occurring, but hey, at least _we're_ not doing it. On a smaller scale there's this silliness around buying "offset credits", which smells of a modern day religious indulgence-purchase scheme.

I stopped at

>I utilize soylent only at home and go out to eat when craving company or flavor.

right after we found out kitchens are nasty and wasteful. Of course, out of sight, out of mind?

I can spend the money I saved from groceries and take out to buy a friend lunch or dinner

Or you could learn to cook and make a friend a probably better tasting lunch or dinner at substantially lower cost.

What is it with cooking that makes people under-appreciate the value of a good professional? It sounds like those clients who think programming is just pressing a few buttons.

That's actually a remarkably apt analogy, though not for the reasons you think.

As with cooking there's long been a concerted effort to teach everyone basic coding skills. Does that mean everyone will become paid software developers? No. But not everyone becomes a professional chef, either, and yet those basic skills come in pretty darn handy...

I appreciate a good chef as much as the next guy. The problem is that good chefs cost good money. Its simply not sustainable to eat from a gourmet chef every day, or even every week. Typically, people are going to go to a fast-food joint and that ain't too healthy or sustainable either.

The Soylent guy is claiming that his kitchen is "too costly", and yet eats out all the time. The contradiction is obvious.

I wasn't disagreeing with the lower cost, I was disagreeing with the claim that a home made dinner would probably taste better than something made by a chef. Clearly the author isn't talking about going to fast-food joints when he talks about "fine restaurants".

And nowhere does he say that he eats out every day, or even every week. What the Soylent guy eats every day is, presumably, Soylent. Which he claims is cheaper than home cooking (I won't argue either way) and that therefore he has more money to eat out when he wants to.

Upvoted because it's reasonable response not deserving of downvotes.

I do appreciate good chefs. It's probably side effect of the (cheap-ass) restaurants I go to, but I can cook at least as well as most of the people they have back in the kitchen. And I don't consider myself particularly skilled.

His point I think is that collective cooking/eating is more efficient. I don't have the numbers, but it makes sense.

I'm actually all for collectivization and economy of scale, but I didn't see that point anywhere. I could personally come up with the upside of not having a personal kitchen, powerplant, house, but I didn't get that from reading, rather just the dislike of having a kitchen.

True. His motivations seem to be a mix of simplifying his life and lowering the environmental impact. The first one is easy to evaluate (he does feel that he accomplished that, therefore he did), but whether the second is consistent with that remains to be demonstrated in all the cases. Shipping one-use clothes from China seems dubious, for example.