Maasai do not have heart disease or cholesterol problems attributed to red meat even though they eat almost exclusively cattle. Leading causes of death include pneumonia and diarrhoea, followed by other diseases not diet related issues.

Yes, people who cut out vegetables like Inuit have issues just like those who cut meat without going to extremes to replace what they're lacking, and most don't. You must be joking using them as an example of fish inclusive diets.
People with diets high in fish like Okinawans (1/2 an American sized serving per day isn't little to me, that's every other day having a full fish meal) that include other meat in moderation and is vegetable based are the healthiest in studies, as I indicated.

that's not a bad price for that meal.

I have access to many White Castle locations. I don't visit regularly, as the food isn't for meals, per se. At 2am, in one of the right states of mind, it is the food of the gods. Particularly the jalapeno sliders and mozz sticks.

Oh, and when they have them, the cheese curds are shockingly good.

You may have some valid academic point to be made about American problems.

That is however completely overwhelmed by your callous disregard for the suffering of people in actual slave labour camps, by likening them to American prisoners convicted by a jury of their peers to a standard of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt who are forced to work for their 3 square meals per day. Your not wrong to point out flaws in the American system, just incredible callous to the vastly worse suffering of others.

I would say you are morally wrong to exploit said people(and weakening concern for their suffering) to champion a separate cause that matters to you more.

Fair points, but this is obviously a prototype.

Ultimately, the price of these will come down and even if you need to swap out the batteries, there's no reason that can't be automated too. Hell, a roomba basically does that now. The point is it doesn't need sleep or meal breaks and it doesn't care about working hours. Or you just leave it connected to a permanent power source (if you can teach it to drywall, you can teach it to avoid the cable).

And yeah, my numbers are obviously estimates, since this isn't commercially available yet, and you'd need to factor in capital investment, maintenance, etc. But you don't have to pay it a salary, it doesn't need medical and it doesn't have to comply with health and safety regs (at least, not for the robots H&S).

I find it difficult to believe that something like this could ever be less cost-effective than a human.

Of course, that's assuming a steady rate of improvement. Bipedal robots (like self-driving cars) have been "90% there" for many years now. It might be that the last 10% is REALLY, REALLY difficult.

My gut feeling is that we will see a tipping point. There will be some really challenging engineering/programming obstacle that stops these going mainstream, but eventually, someone will solve it and then the rate of progress will be exponential.

But you're right in that, that's certainly a few years away yet. I'm fascinated as to how we as a society/civilisation deal with mass automation.

The lizard people, in conjunction with the gay frog alliance, have, under the supervision of the Rand corporation, kidnapped millions of children to sell to the reverse vampires, paving the way for an invasion of the saucer people in a fiendish plot to eliminate the meal of dinner.

We're through the looking glass, people.
Beware the derp state.

I understand how you've come to your conclusion, but let me clear it up:

The word 'vegan' in medicine is exchangeable with plant-based diet. If you look at the PCRM.org they recommend a whole-foods plant-based diet. They simply call it vegan, as that's what other organisations know it as, such as the British/American Dietetics Association. Clearly not recommending vegan icecream and hotdogs :-)

When it comes to prevention of cruelty to animals, the PCRM do it from a medical training/testing stand point. They're not saying don't eat animals because it's cruel, they're saying don't test drugs on animals when there are computer models and lab work that yield more accurate results (although animals costs less....). They're also against surgeons performing vivisection as part of their training. E.g. when my cousin did her training she had to put a perfectly healthy dog to sleep, chop of some of it's legs and re-attach them, as well as causing massive internal wounds to simulate gunshots.... it's messed up, but it's hard for young doctors to say anything because they've trained for a decade at that point, and they're not going to throw it away (and the next person will come along and do it anyway, since it's such a highly competitive industry). This where the PCRM come in, they lobby medical institutions to stop this kind of stuff.


If you're still thinking that they have some kind of vegan agenda / bias, the PCRM is an organisation of 12,000 doctors. If it was just one or two quacks preaching veganism, I'd be suspicious too, but that's clearly not the case here.

Everything they do is based on data. And they're also not the only medical organisation to do it. The Australian Medical Association is also urging hospitals to give patients plant-based diets because of how much faster they recover (and don't return). The President of the American College of Cardiology is 'vegan', and is know for his phrase "Meat kills, processed meat kills you quicker". The World Cancer Research Fund, recommends beans with every meal, no processed meat, and maximum of 350g of red meat a week. That's basically a plant-based diet.

There are now something like 400 studies being published every single year showing how bad animal products are for us. There's a nice graph here actually showing how much more evidence is coming out all the time: https://youtu.be/C5qRXPDNw1E?t=4190 (nevermind the tacky channel, the speakers at this conference are all legitimate medical professionals)

So yes, your doctors are right, eat your fruit and veg, but also whole grains, beans, nuts and seeds. Bean burrito is a perfect combination of these, followed by a banana and berry smoothie

You also have to consider the amount of financial loss various food and pharmacological industries would suffer if most people ate plant-based. So when you look for opinions about the PCRM people are very quick to make PCRM appear as a bunch of hippies in order to protect their earnings. America spends something like 50 billion dollars a year on statins, and 35 billion on stent surgeries, which would pretty much go away overnight if everyone ate plant-based diets. They're not going to let that money go without a fight, which is why there's a lot of opinions about PCRM around. Needless to say though, they don't have any good evidence to back their reasoning, which makes it quite easy to see which ones are likely opinions funded by certain industries.

There is a generally held belief that consciousness is a mystery of science or a miracle of faith; that consciousness was attained instantly (or granted by god), and that one has either attained self awareness or has not.

I don't believe any of that. I believe like all things in biology, consciousness evolved to maximise a benefit, and occurred gradually, without any magic or mystery. The closest exurb1a gets to that is when he says at 6:28:

"Maybe evolution accidentally made some higher mammals on Earth self-aware because it's better for problem solving or something"

We need to know what other people are thinking and this is the problem that consciousness solves. If a neighbouring tribe enters your territory then predicting whether they come to trade, mate, steal or attack is beneficial to survival.

Initially this may be done through simulation - imagining the future based on past experience. A flood approaching your cave is bad news. Being surrounded by lions is not good. Surrounding a lone bison is dinner. Being charged by a screaming tribe is an upcoming fight.

We could only simulate another person's actions, but we had no experience that allows us to simulate another person's thoughts. You may predict that giving your hungry neighbour a meal may suppress their urge to raid your supplies but you still can't simply open their head and see what they are thinking.

Then for the benefit of cooperation and coordination, we started to talk, and everything changed.

Communication not only allows us to speak our mind, but allows us to model the minds of others. We can gain an understanding of another person's motivations long before they act upon them. The need to simulate another person's thoughts becomes more nuanced and complex. Do they want to trade, or do they want to cheat?

Yet still we cannot look into the minds of others and verify our models of them. If we had access to an actual working brain we could gradually strengthen that model with reference to how an actual brain works, and we happen to have access to such a brain, our own!

If we monitored ourselves then we could validate a general model of thought against real urges, real experiences, real problem solving and real motivations. Once we apply our own selves to a model of thought we become much better at modelling the thoughts of others.

And what better way to render that model than with speech itself? To use all of our existing cognitive skills and simply simulate others sharing their thoughts with us.

At 3:15 exurb1a referenced a famous experiment that showed that we make decisions before we become aware of them. This lends evidence to suppose that our consciousness is not the driver of our thoughts, but a monitor - an interpretation of our subconscious that feeds our model of how people think.

Not everybody is the same. We all have different temperaments. Some of us are less predictable than others, and we tend to avoid such people. Some are more amenable to co-operation, others are stubborn. To understand the temperament of one we must compare them to another. If we are to compare the model of another's mind to our own, and we simulate their mind as speech, then we must also simulate our own mind as speech. Then not only are we conscious, we are self-aware.

Add in a feedback loop of social norms, etiquette, acceptable behaviour, expected behaviour, cooperation and co-dependence, game theory and sustainable societies and this conscious model eventually becomes a lot more nuanced than it first started - allowing for abstract concepts such as empathy, shame, guilt, remorse, resentment, contempt, kinship, friendship, nurture, pride, and love.

Consciousness is magical, but not magic.

So something good came from people purchasing crap that had to be patched non-stop beyond the next 2 versions of crap. Interesting.

Seriously, if I pay someone to cook a meal, that doesn't make me a chef.

Your video, A robotic kitchen that can prepare full meals in 3 minutes, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

My gut instinct is to say "how dare you? you're getting free food!"

However, just because someone is living in poverty or is disabled doesn't mean they should have to live on what appears to be among the lowest quality microwave meals.

My daughter is likely going to be wheelchair bound for the rest of her life; and while I have high hopes of her becoming the next Steven Hawking, it's probable that she'll need some gov assistance at some point. I cringe at the thought of her being unable to raise complaints loud enough as this angry black lady. That said, this woman is obviously actually living in poverty, look at the wall socket at around the 2min mark.

It's not the most articulate way to put it, but poor communities will understand "Trump ain't playin shitttttttt --fuck this shit... look at this shit yall... I wanna say Trump fuck you and I am not eatin' yo food!......AND!--- LOOK A'DIS BISCUIT!!! Mm! Done fucked up now. Fuck!" And hopefully not fall for the same 'Man of the people' rhetoric in the future.

Golly sir, I sure am glad you’re here to explain it to me, but just for shits and giggles, let me take a stab at it.

Elon Musk wants to make humanity a multi-planet species, otherwise we are at risk of some kind of planet wide extinction level event. Having looked at the problem, he thinks the fundamental issue is one of economics. If he can get the price per person for a trip to Mars down to $500k, he figures he’ll get enough mad, bad and rich AF people to give forming a colony a go.

But that first step from earth to orbit is motherfucking expensive and aside from crazy unproven tech like a space elevator, thanks to the Tyranny of the Rocket Equation there really isn’t a cheap way to do this in terms of energy expenditure.

Ok, thinks Elon, what’s the other major cost in this whole shooting things into space gig? Hmm, the big fucking rocket costs a lot... be nice if we could reuse that instead of building a new one each time.

So he works on building a reusable rocket, and after many hilarious videos of “rapid unscheduled disassembly”, fuck me if the damn thing doesn’t start to stick the landing!

So now we need to do the same, but with a bigger rocket and a heavier payload. Can’t really risk an actual payload (see previous video of RUD) so what to do?

Well, the sensible, cost effective thing would be just a big heavy weight. But that’s got fuck all viral marketing appeal, so if you’re gonna shoot something into space as part of a multi billion dollar rocket program, what’s a measly couple of hundred k compared to the millions in free advertising for both Tesla and SpaceX this will generate!

Well, look at that. Turns out I do understand this!

But if think sending an expensive sports car into space WASN’T a frivolous waste of money, I invite you to spend time with someone sleeping rough or a family who doesn’t know where their next meal is coming from.

As I said, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it, but don’t pretend this was anything other than a billionaire doing something insanely cool and expensive because he thought it was cool.

Hundreds of unarmed black males are shot to death by police every year and people like dylann roof and Nikolas Cruz are taken into custody, booked and given a warm meal.

Possible, but I don't really think so. I think that the Medical minds of the time thought that physical shock, pressure waves from bombing etc. as you described, were a (or perhaps THE) primary cause of the psychological problems of returning soldiers. So the name "shell shock" came from there, but the symptoms that it was describing were psychological and, I think precisely equal to modern PTSD. Basically, "shell shock" became a polite euphemism for "soldier that got mentally messed up in the war and is having difficulty returning to civilian life".

My grandfather was an Army Air Corps armorer during WWII. He went through basic training, but his primary job was loading ammunition, bombs, external gas tanks, etc. onto P-47 airplanes. He was never in a direct combat situation, as I would describe it. He was never shot at, never in the shockwave radius of explosions, etc. But after the war he was described as having mild "shell shock", manifested by being withdrawn, not wanting to talk about the war, and occasionally prone to angry outbursts over seemingly trivial things. Eventually, he started talking about the war in his mid 80's, and here's a few relevant (perhaps) stories of his:

He joined the European theater a couple days after D-Day. Came to shore on a Normandy beach in the same sort of landing craft seen in Saving Private Ryan, etc. Even though it was days later, there were still LOTS of bodies on the beach, and thick smell of death. Welcome to the war!

His fighter group took over a French farm house adjacent to a dirt landing strip / runway. They put up a barbed wire perimeter with a gate on the road. In one of the only times I heard of him having a firearm and being expected to potentially use it, he pulled guard duty at that gate one evening. His commanding officer gave him orders to shoot anyone that couldn't provide identification on sight. While he was standing guard, a woman in her 20's rolled up on a bicycle, somewhat distraught. She spoke no English, only French. She clearly wanted to get in, and even tried to push past my grandfather. By the letter of his orders, he was "supposed" to shoot her. Instead, he knocked her off her bike when she tried to ride past after getting nowhere verbally and physically restrained her. At gunpoint! When someone that spoke French got there, it turned out that she was the daughter of the family that lived in the farm house. They had no food, and she was coming back to get some potatoes they had left in the larder.

Riding trains was a common way to get air corps support staff up to near the front, and also to get everybody back to transport ships at the end of the war. On one of those journeys later in the war, my grandfather was riding in an open train car with a bunch of his buddies. They were all given meals at the start of the trip. A short while later, the track went through a French town. A bunch of civilians were waiting around the tracks begging for food. I'll never forgot my grandfather describing that scene. It was tough for him to get out, and then all he managed was "they was starvin'!" He later explained that he and his buddies all gave up the food that they had to those people in the first town -- only to have none left to give as they rolled past similar scenes in each town on down the line.

When my mother was growing up, she and her brothers learned that they'd better not leave any food on their plates to go to waste. She has said that the angriest she ever saw her dad was when her brothers got into a food fight one time, and my grandfather went ballistic. They couldn't really figure out what the big deal was, until years later when my grandfather started telling his war stories and suddenly things made more sense.


A lot of guys had a much rougher war than my grandfather. Way more direct combat. Saw stuff much worse -- and had to DO things that were hard to live with. I think the psychological fallout of stuff like that explains the vast majority of "shell shock", without the addition of CTE-like physical head trauma. I'd wager that when the docs said Stewart's father's shell shock was a reaction to aerial bombardment, that was really just a face-saving measure to try to explain away the perceived "weakness" of his condition.

I'm starting a social media campaign to hurt the airline financially because they didn't provide a gluten-free organic lactose-free vegan low-fat meal option for my service rhino. And then I overheard two flight attendants sounding annoyed with my demands so I published the home phone number of the airline CEO. Fucking attention-whores.

Ever read Stephen King's book "The Cell", where people's brains are damaged by cell phones? Look for it in the non-fiction section.