How I Gave Up Alternating Current
robrhinehart.com
robrhinehart.com
Some of his more controversial choices (based on the comments in this article) reflect more the later than the former.
It is possible both to prepare (delicious) meals using barely no electricity (and even without burning any fuel), to do the laundry by hand using nothing but water and soap and to dry it at the clothesline. The drawback is that those are very time consuming tasks.
The choice to eat only Soylent and to buy cheap clothes for single use seem to be motivated more by the desire to save time than by the idea of conserving energy.
Both are worthy goals, to save time and energy but IMO it is very important to know how to strike a balance between efficiency and enjoyment. Otherwise we become the very robots we are trying not to be.
Getting custom clothes made in china and shipped frequently is certainly far less environmentally friendly than simply re-using the clothes you already have.
Taking an uber still burns gasoline. A bike would be better.
The average car sits unused (parked) for well over half of its life (I'd say 90%, but I don't feel like research right now, and the concept holds at 50%). If we assume 100 1-hour rides are needed in a day, and each person uses their own vehicle, we need 100 cars, despite the fact that we need 100 car-hours. If we can optimize with a service like Uber, we would only need 5 cars to provide 100 car-hours in a day.
Obviously, trips are not completely fungible, but I think the central concept is clear above.
The second piece is that those 5 cars will be replaced much sooner than the 100 individual cars. That's where the utilization comes in. If everyone drives themselves, then the stock of cars must equal peak demand. If services like Uber combine riders (via UberPool - the typical car has more than 1 passenger seat that is unutilized in the typical commute) and provide utilization for cars at 50% of the day, then the total stock of vehicles would be lower than required for self-driving.
These two effects combine leading to fewer cars.
A washing machine consumes about 100Wh == 360kJ for a load (ref: http://www.rpc.com.au/information/faq/power-consumption/wash...).
The Emma Mearsk, one of the largest container ships around, uses 13 tonnes of fuel an hour to transport 18000 containers, over a distance of (say) 20000 kilometres, which is 1kg of fuel to transport one container 45km (according to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport...), or 450kg for the whole distance.
A 7.5kg washing machine load occupies about 0.00025 of a container, so the fuel requirement to transport that washing machine load is 0.1kg.
The ship's engines use 0.163kg of fuel to generate one kWh, so the energy consumption for just the transport of our washing machine load is 0.6kWh, or 2200kJ.
360kJ of USA residential electricity will cost about $0.015. (Pulled randomly from: http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cfm...)
0.16kg of heavy fuel oil in Singapore will cost $0.05. (From: http://shipandbunker.com/prices/apac/sea/sg-sin-singapore#IF...)
This is, of course, horribly simplified --- e.g. I'm not calculating the cost of washing water, or transport from the container port to the owner's house --- it does at least show that big ship shipping is really, really cheap. While I still think the original author is wrong, they are at least plausibly wrong.
But manufacturing new clothes every time you need new clothes? In China, land of the "who cares about the EPA" coal-laden environmental almost-slave-labor disaster?
Built from synthetics (which are Petroleum-derived) ?
To add insult to injury, he talks about injuries / deaths from HEPPA-regulated American Power Plants without giving a damn about the suicide nets placed outside of Chinese Sweatshops that builds his clothes because he's too lazy to wash them.
He seems concerned about highly-paid Energy Workers in the US who are required (by law) to have safe working conditions (or at least, safe as defined by the law. People still die on the job but at least we try to keep them safe).
And then he turns around and brags about using cheap Chinese workers to sew him new clothes every week. Hypocrisy at its finest.
Rana disaster 2013 http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/death-traps-the-bang...
> Between 25% and 50% of the factories in the region restrict access to toilets and drinking water during the workday.
> The same percentage deny workers at least one day off in seven.
> In more than half of Nike's factories, the report said, employees worked more than 60 hours a week. In up to 25%, workers refusing to do overtime were punished.
Gotta keep those margins. You aren't allowed water because that'd cost the company too much.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1285980/Revealed-Ins...
> Steel wire meshes have been fitted to windows at Foxconn's factory to stop workers jumping after a rash of suicides believed to be due to harsh management practices
-------------------
The worst issue is that Chinese media restricts free speech and labor unions, making it hard to gather statistics of any kind.
In the US, we are required by law to report injuries and accidents on the job. China... not so. And since these injuries are embarrassing to state-owned companies, government censorship exists to cover-up these sorts of accidents a lot. Non-government organizations are subject to crackdowns of course.
When a country doesn't have labor unions fighting for workers rights, these sorts of issues happen.
>> “I work on the plastic molding machine from 6 in the morning to 6 at night,” said Xu Wenquan, a tiny, baby-faced 16-year-old whose hands were covered with blisters. Asked what had happened to his hands, he replied, the machines are “quite hot, so I’ve burned my hands.”
Also, we seem to have killed the US Energy Information and Administration energy prices website. I feel that my day is now fulfilled.
Fixed. Thanks. (Also, why is HN's URL regex matching full stops at the end of URLs?)
I'd like someone to run some more numbers on that. He already addresses the shipping costs, but what about manufacturing as well? I'm not entirely sure I buy that the entire manufacturing process takes less water than laundry, unless he's wearing the same clothes for a very long time before donating them.
Phrases like "I think it was a bit presumptuous for the architect to assume I wanted a kitchen with my apartment and make me pay for it" or "I don’t want to live with red hot heating elements and razor sharp knives. That sounds like a torture chamber" are ridiculous, even if you really try hard to see them as an attempt of making a joke. The continuous references about how many books he has and reads also threw me off.
The best part, so far, is the first Discus comment at the bottom.
In the past you needed AC for the ability to have transformers. These days you can do that in other ways. But you still need a high voltage, meaning you still need that wall wart.
Things could get really interesting if say the EU started incorporating a requirement for things that should essentially run fine on DC to compatible with DC. Universal power supplies (computers, phone chargers, etc) and brushless motors (washing machines) should really only require tweaks of their control circuits. AC motors (fridges/dryers/air conditioners) and microwaves wouldn't be an easy change. They'd either need a local converter or for demand to ramp up for explicit DC versions.
Standby power supplies (the thing that powers the IR receiver and power button while your TV is "off") wouldn't function as-is, since the common method is to use a capacitor+zener across the power line. But changing that to a rectifier + small switcher doesn't seem terribly onerous.
Modern HE washers and dryers along with many other appliances already are in some sense. They have their own high efficiency power conversion built in to drive the motors at variable speeds. Powering current-gen stuff requires two redundant conversion steps, but the conversions don't lose too much.
>I was electrocuted by exposed house wiring as a boy.
No, he was shocked. Electrocution means death.
> I use a butane stove. It is much cheaper and more energy efficient than a Keurig
I doubt that small parcels of butane are cheaper than any electric coffee maker. If he wants to optimize this he needs to look at a rocket stove and a high efficiency pot. http://www.wired.com/2014/07/a-jet-engineer-designs-a-saucep...
>First, I never cook.
Good for him, I guess. That's not a reasonable solution for most people though.
>Next, I switched from beer to red wine.
I'm a little surprised that he doesn't make his own. It's very easy and cheap to make red wine.
>most of them are Priuses which use DC motors so I’m good there
No, they don't, and I'm starting to think he's got a fixation on the names of things.
>I get my clothing custom made in China for prices you would not believe and have new ones regularly shipped to me.
Okay, this is not about reducing waste anymore, there are few things more wasteful than the global clothing/fashion supply chain. I'd bet he gives his used clothing to a thrift... yup. Those clothes get, wait for it, laundered, and then probably baled up and shipped to Africa or Haiti destroying local clothing manufacturing in those areas.
>My apartment came with a Nest but I removed it
He could have just switched it off.
>Traffic and trash and pollution will evaporate,
Nope, just displaced to Asia. Okay, I'm done with Rhinehart's post now, and I can see that most everyone else is as well.
I'm not smart enough to take this apart, but my gut tells me the best-in-class engineers and (tens/hundreds of?) millions of dollars in R&D at Tesla aren't going to be outwitted by Mr. I'm-Repulsed-By-The-Idea-Of-Kitchens. Anyone want to take a swing?
> http://www.powertechsystems.eu/en/technics/lithium-ion-vs-le...
Basically, lead acid have much lower lifespans, and also degrade very quickly if discharged below 50%. So straight off you have to double the size of your battery to not massively shorten the lifespan, so his costs are already closer to $0.30/Wh.
Also, lead acid batteries are larger/heavier per Wh, and even if you never discharge below 50% last less than half the time of Lithium batteries
So that 420Wh battery is most likely designed to actually provide about 21Wh. Past that it's a good assumption it's lifespan is being degraded faster than design.
To match a 7kW powerwall with these figures, he'd need roughly 350 such batteries (nearly $23k) to stay within a 2-5% discharge cycle.
So his setup may be capable of delivering 420Wh cheap. Or it may be capable of lasting 1-2000 cycles. But not both.
(Deep-discharge SLA are available. They're usually marketed as marine batteries rather than car batteries. They'll survive such usage better - a couple of years, rather than a couple of months in this scenario. But still not tesla's claimed 5000 cycles.)
Like most things you can slap together something that works on the surface much cheaper in initial costs than the commercial equivalent.
Well then he does cooking wrong, he could also try to improve himself but in the craft in itself but also add more creativity to it
Makes sense now. It doesn't really speak well for Soylent when his life choices are "Lets go eat out all the damn time" however.
1. Reading hacker news
2. Reading reddit
3. Engaging with people engaging with my brand on Twitter
4. Reviewing my productized consultancy analytics
5. Reviewing my startup numbers and analytics
6. Emailing brand leaders to gauge interest in new startup ideas
7. Posting on hacker news
8. Writing blog posts about the freedom provided from abandoning things like laundry, cooking, cleaning, driving, and other mundane, bullshit tasks
9. Meditating, which I do for 15 minutes daily to center myself spiritually so that I can growth hack better. Growth hacking begins with personal growth.
10. Appreciating the beautiful life I've cultivated for myself, surrounded by dynamic people all focusing on the same beautiful goal as myself.
Cooking is boring and takes way too much skill to do right. Moreover, it is objectively unfun and isn't related to startups, technology, or growth hacking in any way. Why would I waste time learning to cook when I could be learning how to write single-page web apps in Haskell with the latest framework? Do you even test your code?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9903525
>- to meditate
....oh. I guess it's just a new age/woowoo thing. Time to move on I guess. That's really disappointing.
---
Really hope you remove meditation; hokey religions have no place in the modern nudge-engineered world.
a. I do test my code, and I do taste my cooking.
b. I can't say much about growth hacking, but I haven't noticed that cooking gets in the way of appreciating life, however undynamic some of my acquaintances may be.
Generally, lead-acid batteries will sulfate at low levels of charge, which is a hard-to-reverse reaction.
He's not using a high-CCA battery, you can see the model of the battery behind the window in the picture.
I hope this situation changes in 2016 because I'm tired of adding distilled water.
I can appreciate people who can run low powered devices. But new clothes? Just run a washer and hang your clothes if you're in a dry climate. Then you wouldn't even need to buy new clothes because you don't have a machine that slowly turns clothes into lint.
I'll be valued at 15 billion from our initial SF/LA orders in no time.
"Our growth chart was just insane" https://www.fastcompany.com/3045831/from-hobby-to-start-up/t...
"SF tech culture is focused on solving one problem: what is my mother no longer doing for me?" http://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-tech-startups-r...
That way they're not using any electricity.
"the standard six- or twelve-hour automatic shutoff is overridden"
That is not true. They are forbidden from changing electricity. i.e. turning something on or off.
The Sadducees believed like you, that it was forbidden for the fire to be on, but the oral Torah is very clear that only starting (or extinguishing) a fire is prohibited.
http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/484251/jewish/...
And only Jewish humans are prohibited from turning on the fire, machines (timers, etc) are allowed to. So are non-Jews.
Hey, sure, tell that to everyone in the northern states, no need for heat right? I mean when it's 10°F outside you can just shut the windows and be nice and warm, right?
> It had no furnace; instead, the house was heated with a solar heating system designed specifically for Saskatchewan’s extreme Climate.
I understand that the temperature is usually pretty nice in LA, but here in Iowa temperature control isn't an issue of defining our environment to within a single degree Fahrenheit, it is an issue of defining out environment into a livable temperature. Heck, most people I know have up to a ten degree delta between what they keep their home at in summer vs. winter.
However, without temperature control at all in Iowa, people would die. Sub-zero temperatures in the winter and above 100 degree heat in the summer are not mild inconveniences.
Also, the author clearly does not have a baby—or keeps his/her baby naked at all times… :)
I had a wool suit made and it fits me well enough. I've never had a problem finding suits that would fit me off the rack though, so it's mostly a novelty. I also wasn't completely satisfied with the way the trousers fit, but I didn't have time to have them re-made. They are very well-constructed and durable though, and have lasted several years now. The best thing was the shirts, I bought a dozen at about $13 USD each, IIRC. I have long arms and I can rarely find shirts off the racks that have correct-length sleeves and aren't too big everywhere else. These shirts fit well, and are comfortable to wear, and look good. I've worn them a fair amount and they've lasted a few years. The only problem is that the buttons were ruined by the dry cleaners on a couple of the shirts. The buttons were apparently cheap, I chose them myself; but I apparently can't look at a button and judge whether it can withstand dry cleaning/pressing. This happens to some of my store-bought shirts too. I might order another dozen of these shirts, because they were cheaper and much better than anything I've ever bought retail. That is if I get brave enough to do an internet transaction since I have no plans to go to HK any time soon.
>I buy my staple food online like a civilized person.
I'm not sure if going to the grocery store could ever be described as a multisensory living nightmare.
> I think it was a bit presumptuous for the architect to assume I wanted a kitchen with my apartment and make me pay for it. My home is a place of peace. I don’t want to live with red hot heating elements and razor sharp knives. That sounds like a torture chamber. However, it’s not a total loss. I was able to use the cabinets to store part of my book collection.
Or a kitchen as a torture chamber. This guy seems kinda nutty.
Author needs to cheer the fuck up - his life sounds like a chore...
Restaurants don't give a shit about reducing their carbon footprint. And those Chinese clothing manufacturers probably aren't even constrained by local laws about what they dump into the air and soil in making all his new clothes.
Since he is dead, was this article ghost-written?
This is everything that is wrong with the echo chamber that is the Silicon Valley. The hubris etc.
The sad thing is Rob in all likelihood believes whole-heartedly in what he has written and all dissenting opinions as people that just "don't get it".
Sure, you don't have to live like he does. But I find it pretty interesting and actually sort of wish I was in a position to try it out (sans family).
> I have not done laundry in years.
One can only hope.
Don't forget the part where he describes his gaming PC for playing Kerbal Space Program and LoL in detail after that.
I also like how he says:
"My home is a place of peace. I don’t want to live with red hot heating elements and razor sharp knives. That sounds like a torture chamber."
But then seems to not find anything risky about having bare wires attached to a fully-charged car battery on his desk.
While some ideas are delusional, it is refreshing to see someone taking nothing for granted.
I also suspect the timing of the post is there only to generate discussion at the time of Soylent 2.0 release. So it is basically a link bait trying to push people hot buttons. It works superbly.
Moreover, beyond Soylent, Rob's next startup is probably somewhere in there.
The article mentioned Soylent 2.0 several times so I searched and found hours-old news articles about it, and become very skeptical that this whole thing wasn't just a big ad for Soylent 2.0.
In two short sentences, the author describes himself as:
* Mature
* Ecologically sensitive
* Peaceful
* Humble (!)
* Opulent
* Ascetic (!!)
I don't think I've seen a more brilliantly delineated, comically absurd character since A Confederacy of Dunces.
>I have not done laundry in years. I get my clothing custom made in China for prices you would not believe and have new ones regularly shipped to me. Shipping is a problem. I wish container ships had nuclear engines but it’s still much more efficient and convenient than retail. Thanks to synthetic fabrics it takes less water to make my clothes than it would to wash them
>Thanks to synthetic fabrics it takes less water to make my clothes than it would to wash them
>Thanks to synthetic fabrics it takes less water to make my clothes than it would to wash them
I had to double post this again just to make sure everyone read that line correctly. What argument are you even trying to make anymore? You use less water? Weren't we just talking about energy? What hipster madness is this? How about the amount of coal that is being burned to make your 'custom' clothes. I am 100% sure that the process of getting water and electricity to your house is less environment killing than getting new things made from factories that have zero regulations, and fuck everything let's just get some money in my pocket strategies.
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"
This was absolutely craptastic.
>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?
Or you could learn to cook and make a friend a probably better tasting lunch or dinner at substantially lower cost.
The Soylent guy is claiming that his kitchen is "too costly", and yet eats out all the time. The contradiction is obvious.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Oh no, he donates his single use clothes. That gives him yet another thing to feel superior about.
He said he donates it, so presumably some charity ends up footing the bill for his laundry
It's possible that it gets shipped back to China, washed, and resold to him.
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.
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...
This is authored by the founder of Soylent. Slightly different than a paid advertisement but most likely similar content
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 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.
Water is also greenhouse gas...
Anyway nice island setup, for my taste it is too small. I would add a few square meters and perhaps a generator for doing laundry.
And good luck with your diet.
edit: ah, he's the creator of soylent. even less reason to take his seriously. humans are not supposed to live off a drink. I've always assumed it was a joke product, but I'm begining to realise that unfortunately it's not.
Still, he can drink his algea, and I'll keep eating what I eat. Each to their own
This is a hypocritical lifestyle through which the author outsources energy consumption so that he can live a falsely monastic life. A true monk reduces life to essentials but by doing so ends up performing much more daily work. They don't stand around all day enjoying how much less effort it takes to live the simple life. They take on the responsibility of meeting their own needs, usually through physical effort or toil, rather than lay those tasks on others.
This guy is a tourist spouting off about his low-energy hotel while sitting in the first class cabin of a 747. He's not flying the plane. HIS ticket is paid for with eco-bitcoins. We all are the ones killing the planet with our wasteful battery-powered watches.
PS: I hope he has a fuse or two somewhere on that rig. Electrons in combination with lead blocks swimming in acid are not your friends. But maybe he has outsourced that risk via renter's insurance.
How is this getting upvoted at all?