We planned on being co-founders all along, but he came in slightly later after the legal was initially done -- then it took a while longer than I hoped to raise the seed due to COVID. He wouldn't appreciate me reneging on that, especially since he's been equally integral to the business as myself.
It's a hobby project rather than a income source. I have been around the F&B industry for a while (including my current job) but I never worked as a chef.
I am an ethical meat eater. I would rather eat grass fed beef and lamb than see the additional suffering of hundreds/thousands of rodents (let alone the tens of millions of insects) that me adopting a vegetarian diet would induce. Being poisoned or shredded in a harvester is not a cruelty-free way to die.
On a more philosophical note, I think it is better to have lived and died than to not have ever existed. Given very few cattle and sheep would be born if it wasn’t for meat/dairy production then a case can be made that meat eating is the more ethical option. I do admit that this view is incompatible with my first opinion as there would be many more animals born if I adopted a vegetarian diet.
Massive amounts of grain are fed to livestock, and vast acreage is cleared for grazing livestock. If everyone went vegetarian, I'm fairly certain the amount of crops grown and land we use for agriculture would be significantly less. Turning grain into meat is highly inefficient.
When everyone stops eating meat and turns to "healthy" meals like corn based vegetarian burgers I think we are all worse off.
Variety, locally grown produce, locally raised animals is the best way to keep diversity and quality. The vegetarian food available now is good because it's not as mass produced.
There's a third aspect to that. Or maybe it's another ecology problem.
While I don't have the numbers, I strongly suspect there's not enough grass to feed all the humans the amount of meat they would like to eat right now. At least based on observing the prices of intensive vs grass fed, or watching the numbers for intensive production alone.
So if we want grass fed as the new normal, we're either going to have to intensify it back again, or we'll end up eating respectively less meat. That's near-vegetarianism or bust.
Yes this is true - there is not enough grasslands to feed the current demand for meat - actually there is not enough feedlots to feed the demand for meat on a global scale. Many poor people around the world would eat more meat if it was cheaper.
The solutions to let the market solve the problem - if there was only grass fed meat available the cost would be very high and meat would become a luxury again.
Assuming this is an honest question and not a lame attempt at a gotcha: as more people switch to a vegan diet we will gradually stop breeding them in the first place, so there are no animals for something to "happen to."
I like meat too and won’t give it up unless decent lab grown meat comes around but this comment is the most dissembling nonsense I have heard in a while.
It is no more nonsense that the OP’s argument. If you do an analysis on animals killed per calorie, grains kill many more animals than say grass fed cattle. I think many people are unaware how many rodents are killed every year growing and harvesting grains.
I don’t think this is a very good reason to eat or not eat meat.
This PDF is a flyer on pest control, presumably targeted at growers of grain. Nowhere does it contain anything resembling the "analysis on animals killed per calorie" you referred to.
I certainly do like eating meat and I don’t think there is any ethical problem with eating meat. The problem with trying to use ethics to justify a position is there is little agreement on what is ethical or not.
Some people are not comfortable killing an animal to eat it. To them it's not an ethical choice. I have no problem killing an animal for food. I also have no problem with someone else finding it unethical.
Each person has their own beliefs that govern their ethics. As long as we all find a way to live peacefully together there is nothing wrong with that.
Cattle eat more plant calories than the resultant meat. All those plant calories include the “vegetarian suffering.” Purely grass fed meats with no farming will be too inefficient to provide meat to everyone.
Sure meat might become more of a luxury than it is now, but in a calorie to calorie trade off grains have a higher animal kill rate than grass fed meat. I don’t many people are aware how many rodents are killed harvesting and storing grain.
> On a more philosophical note, I think it is better to have lived and died than to not have ever existed.
Would that not lead to a desire to create as many "lives" as possible? I don't think I've met many people optimising for that, although I won't rule it out.
This incredibly stupid take is actually pretty common on HN whenever vegetarianism comes up. I don't know whether they're simply mocking the serious thought many people have put into the ethics of eating animals or what, but it's manifestly false and patently ridiculous to claim that eating plants kills more animals than eating animals.
Some people have a hard time engaging with ideas that might cast them in a negative, ethical light. I’ve had people abruptly stop me from explaining ethical vegetarianism, even though they initiated the conversation haha
On a side note, I never followed the project very closely but I was really hopeful for soylent. What happened? Is the technology just not there? Do we not know enough about human physiology? What is missing to take the soylent idea — which I understood as automate most (boring) meals — and make it a reality?
I saw a quora answer which says we simply don’t know enough about the science behind food but to me it implies that maybe some day our knowledge will get there?
People laugh but the idea of “bachelor chow” from futurama makes sense to me.
I don’t know enough about the topic of ethical vegetarianism to criticize it. I eat meat. In fact, I had fish for dinner last night. I just don’t think about the ethics of it.
Now I may sound hypocritical when I say this because I’m against policy action through taxation (make taxes as simple as possible by eliminating all income tax credits and deductions). However, I know I’ll continue to eat meat (including milk, eggs, chicken, pork) unless it is either too impractical or too expensive.
I want to believe that if push comes to shove I’ll be able to adjust my eating habits and that my current eating habits are not a part of my identity.
I don’t really have a point to make here except that something like soylent would go a long way toward making me vegetarian at least for the meals I eat alone.
I really liked it as an occasional meal replacement, for much of the reasons above. But then they switched from rice to soy or pea protein. I have a peanut allergy. While I can eat soy/peas by themselves, the hydrolyzed proteins give me hives. Otherwise I'd still be eating it.
The taste/quality/mouthfeel definitely went up since v1.
The soylent thing always struck me as a bizarre Silicon Valley fad with very limited appeal. I haven’t done a study but I would be very confident that most people simply enjoy eating food.
I’m actually in the middle of a bad GI flare-up, and soylent is a god send. I forget to eat, solid foods are hard to digest, I oversleep and miss meal times, etc. A bottled soylent helps me get back on track quickly.
Some people don’t think there is any ethical problem with eating meat and rather than get into an argument with a vegetarian prefer to end the conversation. I am not one of these people.
Take that number and at minimum ADD the cows to it. It's not like they feed of thin air while they live.
In addition to that, every step up the food chain requires 10x the amount of energy so for every kg of beef produced you need equivalent of 10kg plants just to raise the cows. It's not like the cows feed freely in the grass and carefully avoid stomping on insects all the time, this is often also harvested with machines killing rodents exactly the same way, just multiplied by 10x.
Meat eater myself here, occasionally and in moderation, but at least i'm not making up nonsense about rodents to feel better for myself.
Edit: To add some data into the discussion, see https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/i2vx78/the... for example. It shows more than 10x land usage for cattle and even more for water and energy, sources and their bias discussed in the comments over there. There is also some interesting links stating that purely grass fed beef can only provide half the cattle on same unit of land.
Ok what if your telephone or internet company decided the same thing? We will listen in to your private conversations and if you say something we don’t like we will terminate your contract.
Some services are so large and entrenched that they have become natural monopolies that need to be regulated. We place restrictions on what natural monopolies can do because of the effects on society as a whole.
The question that needs to be debated is if YouTube has reached the status of a natural monopoly or not. I think it probably has, but I am open to evidence on the other side.
I’m not seeing a parallel, here. Your example is mixing in a whole bunch of “invasion of privacy” which doesn’t exist in the real situation being discussed, and is going to vastly impact people’s emotional reaction.
Why not use the more natural example? “What if a television network decided the same thing? We will watch your publicly broadcast television show and if you say something we don’t like we will cancel your show.” It’s a lot closer to what’s actually happening in this case, right? And it doesn’t needlessly mix in the hot-button topic of privacy violations.
So what happens when you have a group phone call? Should the telephone company be able to listen in and censor those as it wishes?
The parallel is phone companies in the past did listen in to people’s conversation, but this was recognised as an abuse of a monopoly power. Regulations were introduced to stop this sort of activity.
What we should be discussing is how to regulate natural monopolies like YouTube, not if they should be able to just do whatever they like. Like all regulation there will need to be a balance, but society has a vested interest in ensuring natural monopolies are not abusing their power.
Even if YouTube is not abusing its power, the fact it can is a concern.
As a former angel investor (I am too busy these days) it is not that angel investors give bad advice, just advice that matched their experience. Good advice, wrong situation.
The advice I have given that seems to have been most useful is not around product or market fit, but how to resolve internal conflicts. Human nature seems to have not changed much.
Isn't the quality of advice categorically contextual? It doesn't make sense to call inappropriate advice good, any more than cutting your arm off is good advice because there are some situations where it is warranted.
I would tend to categorise bad advice as advice that is always bad, while good advice that just doesn’t fit the situation is on a different level. In some ways this sort of advice is more dangerous since it can make a lot of sense and seem logical, but it just is not the right for the exact situation.
Anyway my experience is very few people are looking for advice, they are looking for validation and cover to do what they wanted to do before speaking to you.
Some angel investors are in it for the short term - flippers so to speak. I have seen them give bad advice to new founders. And since they control the money the bad advice is followed in spite of good counsel otherwise.
Yes I can imagine this sort of advice is always bad, but most of the angel investors I have worked with have not fallen into this group - I don’t want to co-invest with them either.
Thalidomide wasn’t a failure of chemistry, but of medicine.
CFCs were an amazing breakthrough as they stopped people getting gassed by their refrigerator and killed (ammonia was used before). Once a problem was identified then changes were made. Similar with asbestos (not actually chemistry), leaded fuel and DDT.
As for the others you have concentrated on the tiny percentage of bad outcomes rather then the millions of positive. Chemistry has been such an overwhelming good over the last 200 years that it takes a very special mind to see it in such a negative light.
Unnecessary ad hominem with the 'special mind' but I will try to bring it back to the actual discussion point.
All the points I mentioned were massive breakthroughs and improvements in their primary application. The point is they had massively wide scale secondary effects which Humans at the time were unable to predict.
You say a small percentage of outcomes but many of those small percentage of occurences have had a negative effect on the whole of Humanity and even a Planetary negative effect. Just because the are few applications it doesn't make their magnitude small.
The original argument from GGP was that we as a species have failed to forecast these secondary effects on Chemical compounds which are theoretically less complex systems than Biological ones (by simpler I don't mean with less merit).
If we fail to predict theses effects on a Chemical level, it follows that the claim that we can confidently make such changes on a Biological system without secondary effects is very weak.
In my comment I was not arguing that the last 3 centuries of Chemistry are a failure or that we should stop developing, I am providing supporting evidence that even a 'simple' field as Chemistry is already vastly more complex than we can currently predict, it follows that changes to a more complex Biological field will very likely introduce more complex secondary effects which we once again will fail to predict.
I find it rather ironic that someone with the handle “DoingIsLearning” is arguing against doing new things.
Everything we do that is new has risks. History has shown us that the benefits of innovation far outweighs the costs. This does not mean progress comes with no downsides, but that the good is vastly better than the bad.
Many people seem so scared now of the possible risks that they are afraid to do anything really new. Living is risky, progress is risky, and not doing is even more risky.
> I find it rather ironic that someone with the handle “DoingIsLearning” is arguing against doing new things
(On top of trying to twist my words) I think this is where we diverge, I am not arguing.
I really mean this in a non snarky way, you should check the guidelines section 'In Comments' [0]. There is nothing wrong with pushing arguments like this, they just don't contribute anything to anybody else reading this.
If you want this kind of polarizing discussion, Twitter is probably a better platform.
I love when I find I have cognitive dissonance as it means I have found something I believe to be true is actually false. Once I know something is false then it is easy to just stop believing it. Progress.
