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If squirrels can't be fitted with jetpacks

DREADCO tried this years ago. Burned the tails off the squirrels. The ATS (Asbestos-Tailed Squrl) project never got off the ground because the tails were too heavy to move without the jetpack.

I don't want to live on this world any more.

Soylent have an opening for you. Email them and ask about their "green" recruitment programme ; they'll get back to you with your collection point. No hand or hold baggage allowed.

They stopped doing that around the time VICE's video was finished shooting. Soylent manufacturing is contracted out to other facilities:
https://faq.soylent.com/hc/en-...

NGREDIENTS: Soy Protein Isolate, Corn Syrup, Rolled Oat, Canola Oil, Glycerine, Whole Algal Flour, Isomaltooligosaccharide, Isomaltulose, Maltodextrin, Water, Dicalcium Phosphate Anhydrous, Soy Lecithin, Natural and Artificial Flavor, Salt, Tapioca Starch, Sunflower Oil, Dipo- tassium Phosphate, Modified Food Starch, Po- tassium Chloride, Choline Bitartrate, Mixed Tocopherol, Sucralose, Mono & Diglycerides, Magnesium Oxide, Ascorbic Acid, dl-alpha-To- copheryl Acetate, Tricalcium Phosphate Anhy- drous, Ferrous Sulfate, Vitamin A Palmitate, Nia- cinamide, Zinc Oxide, Copper Gluconate, D-Calcium Pantothenate, Manganese Sulfate, Pyridoxine Hydrochloride, Potassium Iodide, Riboflavin, Thiamine Mononitrate, Vitamin D2, Chromium Chloride, Folic Acid, Biotin, Sodium Selenite, Sodium Molybdate, Phytonadione, Vitamin B12. Contains: Soy

hmmm... exactly how much glycerin are they using?

Ingredients ... are obtained from genetically engineered sources

OH GOD NOES! RUN FOR THE HILLS! SCIENCE!

If this is accurate, nothing immediately alarming.
Some of the metal compounds at the end look like odd choices, but I haven't compared it to a box of Total or anything else that proclaims such a wide range of dietary minerals.

The only indigestible ingredient I quickly recognized was sucralose, but it takes a lot of sucralose for most people to have disruptions in their digestive system.

The biggest and best arguments against GMO crops and other genetic engineering is that we just don't know what the long-term results will be.

That's a dogmatic argument: it's made by people who don't understand. I could give a long rebuttal about how GMO is more-predictable than all other methods in use, but the Soylent people have done it right, so I'll just put that here.

We could potentially significantly improve the lives of future generations, but at the cost of treating some number of our current generations' babies essentially the same way we treat lab mice. And that's just not a trade-off we're willing to make in our current society.

I tend to call out ethics as bullshit in a world where we define morals, ethics, and values separately. The word "ethics" comes from the greek word "Ethos", which means "Habit"; and I present, on occasion, the argument that ethics gives you a habit in the form of a bureaucratic definition of right and wrong. That is to say: whatever the situation, whatever the nuance, an ethical rule tells you a certain action is necessary or forbidden regardless of whether that action is helpful or harmful, even if you know with 100% certainty that the ethical thing to do is the wrong thing to do. People often reason this away by claiming that humans will recognize and adjust to the situation; and bureaucracies look upon those humans doing such reasoning and slap them with sanctions, license revocations, and incarceration because ethics systems are there to tell you that we've all figured out what's right in a world where people disagree over that.

From that viewpoint, why not just experiment on poor people?

Some countries have long-standing, currently-unresolvable economic problems such as poor access to nutritious food. The genetic modification I described eliminates a consequence of that situation: it ensures an absolute abolition of vitamin C deficiency. That particular edit is safe, in that it modifies a gene which is currently broken, and would mix with general population by giving you a random chance of having that trait; whereas editing out the atherosclerosis thing would be a complex genetic task involving multiple genes, thus higher-risk when bred back into population. Fortunately, this safe edit is also the one most relevant to these poor countries.

You have a choice, then. You can avoid such experimentation on people who are prone to malnutrition and its deleterious effects on health by the millions; or you can give them a chance to lead the world into a better life, at the cost of some risk for a few people who don't get to volunteer because they're reworked from embryo. One choice *will* leave millions suffering and hundreds of thousands dying of disease; the other will probably not hurt anyone, but *could* hurt dozens.

Machiavelli had an incomplete philosophy. The ends justify the means if and only if all other means of lower moral cost end in increased suffering beyond those you save. When the bodies pile up taller than your moral high ground, you fucked up.

Naturally or via radiation, which both entail shitloads of risk and have produced toxic results in the past.

There are no dietary needs that cannot work on a vegan diet, because chemically, it is possible to extract all necessary nutrients from plants and bacteria. Ok, but how realistic is that? Well, for a lot of people, you can just buy such things. Suppose one in ten thousand cannot practically be vegan for some true physiological reason, and one in ten cannot be vegan for some socio-economic reason. Is that really an argument against others going vegan?

The wild plants thing is irrelevant, because we invented this thing called agriculture.

The EPA recommends no more than .001 mg/kg/day of cadmium in food. The average male adult in the US weighs 195 lb (88.5 kg). For that person the limit translates to .09 mg/day.

It is an open question whether that is really a safe long term limit, as these things do tend to accumulate in the body.

Soylent 1.5 has 21.39g (.021 mg) of cadmium per 500 calorie serving. So, as per the EPA standard, if that person ate mostly soylent, 4 servings per day (2000 calories), you would have .084 mg of cadmium, right below acceptable limit.

Note the definition of mg/kg/day is how many mg of something you can consume per kg of body mass. The soylent guy's google spreadsheet reports mg/kg of the toxic substances in the soylent itself, which is irrelevant. This suggests that he doesn't understand what he is talking about. What a surprise.

They do warn people, its on their site and everything: https://faq.soylent.com/hc/en-...

So why are these heavy metals in the stuff? Is it ayurvedic medicine or something??

As a chemist, I can tell you that heavy metals are everywhere. If you don't expect that in your food, you are not good at chemistry. It is the concentration that matters. Even table salt at too high concentration is toxic. I don't care much about the California's safety standard.

Here's the chart that shows the levels.

For perspective, the EFSA Panel on Contaminants in the Food Chain has set 2.5 micrograms/kg body weight as a tolerable weekly intake for humans. If you eat soylent for every meal, you have exceeded the recommended intake unless you weigh 400 pounds or something.

They do warn people, its on their site and everything: https://faq.soylent.com/hc/en-...

Congratulations on losing 6 stone.

I've always found counting calories to be an impossible task. Remembering to note down the number of calories after everything eaten or drunk. It's easy to let that slide, and then you don't know where you are.

And cooking becomes impossible - weighing out every ingredient and looking it up. And how many calories in a spread of this or a glug of that or a spoon of the other.

I got interested in the concept of Soylent. Just stop with the eating choices all together - a single satchet each day gives a calorie count, and gives all the nutrients needed.
  https://www.soylent.com/

I'd do it, only they don't have it yet in my country.

They do have other meal replacements, such as Slim-Fast and Complan, but they come with disclaimers that they should be part of a diet with other foods. They are not nutritionally complete, and pack too much sugar.

So here's my compromise. I stock the cupboard with diet products (shakes and bars)and other items with fixed portion size and labeled calories (Cereal portions, baked beans, tiny portions of raisins etc) Then I make up a bag for each day of the week that contains approximately my target calories. 2000 for now. I use a spreadsheet to tot the up.

Then each day it's just a matter of picking up the day's bag, and I know I can eat anything in that bag. If there is something I eat that's not in the bag, then I see how many calories in, and remove items adding up to approximately the same from the bag, and return them to the cupboard.

If there's anything not eaten at the end of the day, I put it in a box. And I know that I can eat things from that box any time I like because the calories have already been accounted for. The box becomes a float from one day to the next that can cover me for days when I'm more hungry.

I also take a multivitamin for insurance.

It's only been a week so far, so it's too early to say really, but it seems simple and doesn't need much willpower, and I haven't been hungry yet.

My plan is to stick with the calorie per day number so long as I'm losing weight. But when I hit the inevitable plateau, to steadily reduce the number of calories until I'm losing again.

Hope I am as successful as you have been.

I'm interested in what your recipe is. Is it available on diy.soylent.com?

With all due respect, I'd rather eat Ramen and take a vitamin pill than consume the current Soylent formulations and fart all night long.

According to an Ars Technica review the extreme farts are gone with the latest versions.

If you don't like the real thing, there are a bunch of DIY recipes that you can try for yourself.

Is it for real? Does their product go by the distasteful name of SOYLENT, like that gimmick in a movie that was made of people?

As I posted earlier: According to the FAQ Why is it named Soylent?

Our name was inspired by Harry Harrison's 1966 science fiction novel Make Room! Make Room!, which explores the impact massive population growth could have on world resources. In the book, "soylent" is made of soy and lentils and is a new food source used to accommodate overpopulation.

Regardless of company name, choosing to name a new oddball food product Soylent (as in Green) ...

Not as in "Green". According to the FAQ Why is it named Soylent?

Our name was inspired by Harry Harrison's 1966 science fiction novel Make Room! Make Room!, which explores the impact massive population growth could have on world resources. In the book, "soylent" is made of soy and lentils and is a new food source used to accommodate overpopulation.

It would be much more sensible to create a domain of non-kid-"safe" content.

It's called Soylent dot com. Home of Rotten.com, Bonzai Kitten, Gaping Maw, Boners, Brutal, and Jerk City... i.e. all the good stuff.