miend

Due to how cultural values vary, I'm not surprised that many HN readers are repulsed to some degree by the idea of not preparing and consuming a traditional meal. It's just a kind of conservatism, a recognition of traditional values that help us find another way to enjoy life.

In my own time growing up, my family had traditionally prepared meals almost every day together, and yet even as a child I had little patience for it. I was endlessly curious, wanted to explore the world, play with dad, tinker with my computer, read something, write something, draw something, make something. My life was incredibly full of worth and value to me, and I enjoyed it immensely -- and yet, meals were only ever a distraction, merely one of the lesser chores I had to take care of to keep enjoying the rest of my life.

This sentiment is still largely with me today. Today, meals either serve as a mechanism for me to guarantee people I want to spend time with will be in the same place at the same time, or else I'm alone, in which case I simply see no point in all the bother. There are still many things much more interesting and spiritually fulfilling to me than preparing, consuming, and cleaning up after a traditional meal. Gladly would I accept a solution that successfully meets all of my nutritional needs while also allowing me to do any of those other things instead.

One possible angle for explanation is that if you're already missing these things, there's only upside. Additionally, it seems most who use soylent don't use it to replace all meals, but only some where time savings is the primary consideration. Anecdotally, I searched for bars that would do the same thing some years ago, because I had no patience for cooking anything, no friends or family to enjoy it with, and always something more interesting to use my time for.

That's still largely true today. Cooking anything more than a very simple meal is a big indulgence, and will leave me questioning why I spent all the time I did preparing it. When cooking these days, usually I will prepare a few days' worth of food at a time, sacrificing time in the short-term for savings later without feeling pressured to eat something quick and unhealthy (and potentially expensive).

Soylent -- the idea, not necessarily any particular product -- seems very attractive in this case.

In fact, in most cases it "just works" these days, but the range of hardware I attempt it on isn't great. I've had trouble with a low-end Toshiba of a friend's in the past, and even on the Thinkpad I'll sometimes have issues with rarer configurations - namely a complicated multi-display setup using the Lenovo dock/port replicator.

It certainly isn't the Apple "don't make me think" experience I would love to present people with, but it's been far from a nightmare for years in my experience.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/13/eric-schmidt-go...

https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/

If I could put into as few words as possible, I still want some (initial) cleanliness in my aesthetic, but I don't want my devices to evoke safety and invitation -- I want them to look capable and daring. I want them to say "I'm a weapon against your obstacles. I will help you achieve whatever it is you do -- faster, better, more completely." My intuition tells me, however, that this might not be well received by a market, even if I knew how to cause such a thing.

Of course I'm a big fan of the cyberpunk aesthetic(s) as well. I would occasionally feel a dull sadness that the world doesn't seem to be turning out to be nearly as colorful as I'd hoped for as a kid, that when it comes to everyday objects, the world had apparently just "given up" and accepted a fate of bland uniformity. There is little market for deviant design.

Open Whisper Systems' Signal is an open-source, end-to-end encrypted messaging client which can handle your regular SMS/MMS traffic, as well as (better) encrypted text communication between any number of Signal users, and encrypted voice calls. It not only encrypts content in transit, but stores it encrypted on your device as well. It has clients for iOS and Android. It also has a beta desktop app in the form of a Chrome app which can sync with your phone.

https://theintercept.com/2016/06/22/battle-of-the-secure-mes...

1. First-past-the-post/winner-take-all voting system. This essentially guarantees that third party candidates will never be chosen (due to the presence of the Spoiler Effect), and that the winning candidate will rarely represent more than a small fraction of the actual voting population. Even if asses were forced out of seats, they will likely feel unable to vote for the candidate who matters to them. The problem of the voting system must be resolved.

2. "Statistical" insignificance. Not referring to actual statistical insignificance, a reasonable person can calculate the difference between the time/resources spent going to vote and expected rewards from that activity (chance that their vote will decide the election + chance of the outcome having a significant positive impact according to their initial political preferences), and the time/resources spent, for example, playing the lottery. If their resource:reward ratio in playing the lottery is more favorable than the same ratio in a general election, you can be sure many people would feel like the general election is at least as pointless -- if not more so -- for the same reasons. The problem of insignificance must be resolved.

3. Gerrymandering. For huge segments of the US, your vote literally does not matter for the general election even in that tiny statistical sense. This is because the US is divided up into voting districts, where the majority of votes in a district decide the entire district's "vote". This means that depending on how the districts are carved up (which they are, into abominable, exploitative patterns), these majorities can be greatly manipulated. If you're a Democrat in many areas of Texas, or a Republican in many areas of California, your vote will have a net effect of zero by default if you live in a district with a different majority. You could have 40% of a country's population be conservative, and 60% progressive, and as long as the districts are drawn such that this 60-40 ratio is preserved in all of the districts, every district vote will come up progressive, leaving almost half the nation entirely unrepresented. Obviously, if your vote does not even matter because other people in your local area happen to think differently to you, this can and will contribute to a feeling of pointlessness. You have to solve the problem of gerrymandering.

4. Even assuming people aren't dissuaded by the feeling of general insignificance, by the seeming impenetrability of the winner-take-all voting structure, or by the awful reality of gerrymandering, there is still another big problem to overcome, and that is the problem of voter ignorance. There is a real argument to be made that without an amount of education and diligence far outweighing the expected benefits of a perfect democratic election (one which lacks all of the aforementioned issues), voters will still not be able to make a truly rational choice, or a choice in their own best interests. The way to exemplify the reality of this problem is by asking any given person "What are the last votes that your congressional representatives made?" I will be stunned if they could answer for either state or national-level politics unless they work in politics or political media themselves (maybe not even then). But far beyond this, in order to make a decision not out of ignorance, they need solid personal knowledge on a wide variety of topics like economics, technology, ethics/philosophy, many of the sciences, current events, etc. Things which the average person justifiably does not believe they can afford to learn. But if they know just enough to be aware of what they don't know, they will probably feel that it is pointless. You have to solve the problem of voter ignorance.

There are certainly a number of other factors involving the inscrutability of government processes and bureaucracies, impenetrability of hegemonic power blocs, and general corruption that add to this overwhelming sense of pointlessness. Many people simply seem to believe, understandably, that the deck is stacked entirely against them. As an average citizen, the more deeply one examines the government and the political world, the more fruitless it feels.

Make it not seem pointless.

That just sounds like another building block in the surveillance Panopticon, psychological assurance that you'll never become dissentious because your continued existence in the economy essentially depends upon the state's grace. It changes the way people act, and even the way they think. It's the disturbing new reality that Snowden, Greenwald, et al. have sought to do something about, and here Swedes seem to be embracing it openly.

It sure sounds like this service could offer some great conveniences to daily living, but is it worth such a heavy price? The erosion of the will to dissent, and the power of the individual over their own lives? Are these an acceptable trade for the comfort of never having to see a coin again?