Trying Olipop Orange Squeeze fizzy tonic

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On a recent Buff Dudes they had the sponsor Olipop, the soda alternative sounded interesting so my wife and I got some at Fresh Thyme when we were doing our groceries, here’s my impressions on their Orange Squeeze.

Video subtitles:

Hey youtube what's going on um I was watching another youtube creators account the other day uh buff dudes it's I guess it's two brothers and a dad their mom runs their merch and stuff for them but they, they have some interesting sponsors sometimes they'll have like this super expensive cereal that's you know low carb high protein or whatever and I'd love to try it but it's fantastically expensive uh then this week their sponsor was Olipop - and grab yourself a crisp refreshing Olipop - so

First I'll say if you go on their website this stuff comes out to like three dollars a can shipped and that's a lot for tonic water or soda sparkling tonic is what they call it. It's unique because, at least it's unique as far as I know, it's a prebiotic you know it's got botanicals and plant fiber it's not joking about the plant fiber. What I found interesting was in this can of orange squeeze which I'm about to try for the first time it contains 45 calories but nine grams of fiber, five grams of sugars, and then zero grams of protein. It's 160 percent of your daily vitamin C in a can. Now, my wife and I found this at fresh time yesterday uh you can go on lollipops website, this isn't sponsored or anything, I've just decided when I try something unique uh I'll share it with you guys so you don't have to waste your money or so you can be like well hey he liked it so maybe I will like with the solo stove which I haven't done another fire with yet. I was going to this weekend but yesterday we got a lot of rain, snow, rain, snow, rain, snow, and it's snowing right now so I didn't get around to that but let's uh let's check this can out. Again, I found it on the buff dudes, it was one of their sponsors, they're not sponsoring me. I'm nobody, as you can tell by my subscriber count, and the three of you that are watching this but it claims to support digestive and immune health you know whatever but it's plant-powered and microbiome approved - I'm not sure what the certifying body for that is and you know they make the proud claim that it's non-GMO, I don't care if something's genetically modified in a lab within reason before it's introduced into the wild and I don't think eating GMO crops is necessarily bad, it might kind of reduce the fiber and up like the carbohydrates with you know things like corn or whatever where they're trying to get the most bang for the buck, but I think some things are important like genetically modified rice. If we could get it to grow in different conditions and, um, you know we could we could really go a long way with world hunger and you could get it to synthesize vitamins and stuff inside while it's growing so that's cool. So I don't really care about the non-GMO part of it but it's an interesting thing. So the ingredients in this can uh they have several different flavors and they're all a little different, I know the cola one contains caffeine this does not, the cola one gets its caffeine from um green tea extract this one though, however, is carbonated water and then OLISMART which is cassava root fiber, chicory root inulin, jerusalem artichoke inulin, nopal cactus, calendula flower, kudzu root, hey a beneficial use for kudzu really bad invasive species, marshmallow root, slippery elm bark, that's all in their OLISMART, and then you have lemon juice, apple juice concentrate, mandarin juice concentrate, cassava root syrup, clementine juice concentrate, rosehip, uh acerola cherry, stevia leaf for the sweetness, Himalayan pink salt it does have you know 35 milligrams of sodium which is kind of on par with regular soda, and then natural orange flavor extract. It appears to be manufactured for Olipop in Oakland California, it doesn't say where but it wouldn't surprise me if it's regional, um one thing that is interesting is the can here, it's not printed on the aluminum it's definitely some kind of plastic wrap on just a bare aluminum can, uh yeah. Oh, it's gluten-free, it's vegan-friendly, it's paleo-friendly, but that's why you're paying $2.65, $2.70 I think we paid at fresh time and they only had three different kinds and a couple of cans each. I imagine it's not a super high volume sales product for them but it does sound like they're kind of new too so you know let's try it, my wife wanted to try it off camera so we're going to pour this in a glass

Oooh nice hiss, Steve would approve. MRE Steve, check him out.

Well, right away,

right away it smells like McDonald's orange juice, I don't know if they still have it but if you're a child of the 80s or 90s you'll remember it. It was kind of pulpy and had a very distinct orange juice taste, and we're definitely carbonated, you know it's a, it's a soda, it just looks like any number of energy drinks or something but there's no, no stimulants in this so let's give it a taste

It kind of tastes like Sprite

Yeah, it has a decidedly Sprite taste, I like that uh, at 250 to three dollars a can I'm not gonna rush out and get it but I may actually order some more of this just to have a treat. Um I've had two diet cokes this year it's january 30th or 31st when I'm recording this prior to that I was doing two or three Diet Cokes a day and when I ran out at the end of December I just decided not to buy anymore, um got a couple you know at the gas station or whatever when we were out and about and I wanted something to drink but yeah, that's that's pretty good, um I really should have prepared better and have a list of the flavors - they do have a root beer one I'd like to try assuming it's uh, not caffeinated like Barq's and some root beers are, I doubt it is but I'm just trying to stay away from the caffeine - it's uh, it's been surprisingly easy, I used to be a very heavy coffee drinker back in the day and you know, I would drink a pot, pot and a half of coffee a day and then I switched to Diet Coke and now that I've given it up I find generally I don't need it anymore. I miss the taste of the Diet Coke which is what interested me about these but, yeah, I was never a big fan of Sprite but I would drink it sometimes. I'm sure you've all had Sprite when you were sick to the stomach you know mother's wisdom and all that but it's not exactly Sprite it's...

It um, it's kind of like Sprite if it was watered down a little, eh, that's not fair because it doesn't taste bad it just tastes "light" I guess but yeah, probably want to go on their website and order a case of it you have to order like a whole bunch of it and the shipping makes it expensive plus it's winter so coming to me would probably freeze but go to their website it's drinkolipop.com I think, I'll have the link in the doobly-doo. Again not sponsored, if they'd like to send me some I'd gladly take it to try the other flavors, but I'm nobody so Ii don't that's gonna happen, but yeah look it up see if they have it in a store near you and just try it. It could be a nice little treat every now and then, uh, I might drink one or two of these a week some of the other flavors sounded interesting, I believe they had strawberry vanilla or cherry vanilla, I wish they had like a vanilla cola without caffeine. That I can get behind, but yeah, I'm gonna look for more of these. Uh sorry for you know not doing a fancy video today, I'm just kinda, it's winter don't really have a lot of great ideas just going to try stuff share it with you my wife and I have been doing plant-based, whole food plant-based, for a while we're going to probably share some of that with you as, uh, as we try it. Why not, and uh, yeah I'm gonna stop rambling now this is probably going on for like 19 minutes or something and I intended it to be a 45-second video so cheers! Like, comment, subscribe, dislike, check out the Patreon so I can get more weird stuff like this, uh tell me you hate my guts, that's been Ryan Mercer - uh, you guys have a nice one!

Firing up the Bonfire fire pit by Solo Stove, an honest review

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Last year I saw a Facebook ad for Solo Stove. Having bought a house last year and not wanting to dig a firepit until I’ve decided where all of the garden beds will go, I went ahead and bought the Bonfire model. Here’s my first impressions.

Video subtitles:

- Hey, YouTube. What's going on? Sorry I didn't do a video in a few days or a couple of weeks, actually. I did my fathers funeral, I think I put that up last Sunday. That was kind of neat. We found the cassette. My mom had it for the almost 23 years since my father passed. I think it's 23 years. Yeah. '98 to 2021. Yeah. 23 years. And we'd never played it or anything. So it broke when I was trying to digitize it. And that was fun. Before I even got to really hear any of it, I had to repair it, but I got that done and got it up. And that was neat. Four copyright strikes, four, for song hymns, because Sony has to make their buck off the video. But I don't care. It's my father's funeral. I was just trying to preserve it digitally. But today I have something called the Solo Stove Bonfire for you. Some of you may be familiar, I really should've gotten mine out as a prop, I'll show it to you in a little bit. There are these little camp stoves that are about this big and you put twigs and stuff in, and as the fire burns the wood, you get gas off the wood. So there's little jets that run around the perimeter of the cylinder and they funnel that gas, and then you get nice flames off of that too. This thing works the same way. I saw it on a Facebook advertisement and when I was scrolling, I normally don't go for stuff like that. I have a couple of things. There's some soap and stuff that I've bought that I've been pretty pleased with, but mainly the stove cried out to me because we had a fire pit when we moved into the property and I'll show you that, it's just stupid. It's right next to a utility pole. There's, there's one of the giant, not capacitors. You know what I mean, transformers, right up the pole next to the smokestack, maybe three feet off of the little smokestack. And it's adjacent to the power lines. So I took a hammer to it and when we first moved in so I wouldn't be tempted to use it. And I had been kind of trying to think out where I wanted to do a fire pit on the property. Well, we've got a lot of trees and stuff, and I'm not sure where we're going to be planting stuff because I still have to get a good idea of where the spring and summer sun comes in. So I didn't want to take a fire pit yet. And we have clay soil and that adds a little difficulty to it. Sorry, the neighbors looking at me like I'm insane. The joys of YouTubing, right? So we've got, no good place for a fire pit identified yet. So this thing just seemed cool. It's basically a much larger version of those. It gasifies the wood a little, you get the flames, it looks pretty, it's stainless steel. It's a little pricey. And my biggest complaint so far was their demand has been so high, I guess 'cause of stimulus money and stuff, that it did take 7, 8, 9 weeks to show up. I ordered it in November and it came in January. So not the most ideal situation but it's because they're selling a lot of them and I've actually ran into some people in some of the subreddits I frequent that have got the Bonfire specifically, too. And they've been happy with it. So yeah, let's get it out. I'll show you the box here in a second. And then we'll go out setting this up and doing the first fire together. All right, as I promised, here's the box. It's the Solo Stove Bonfire. Portable backyard fire-pit, easy to use, low smoke, 3 0 4 stainless steel, mesmerizing flame, lifetime warranty. I highly suspect the lifetime warranty because it automatically tells you not to store it outside, not to let it get wet because, even though it's stainless, it's still gonna rust to some extent and pit and stuff. But I imagine this thing has a decade of casual use in it, but eventually even the stainless steel is gonna get fatigued and stuff, but it comes in this giant box and it tells you over here this is how to do the perfect flame. So you don't have wood stacked up out of it. And I guess a common thing is, it's got a ring on top, that I'll show you. And it kind of directs those flames up. People put it on upside down and it's a common complaint. So they put that on the box. But yeah, it's just a boring box. It shipped well. It did have Styrofoam on top and bottom to keep it from bouncing around. So I didn't notice any dings or anything, which was nice. Some companies would have just thrown it in the cardboard box. So yeah, let's go and get this thing out and get a fire going. So like I said, here's the fire pit we already had and you can probably hear the hum from the transformer up there. So not really a good location. Oh, real quick, I said, I would show you the little junior version of this that I've had. This is Lagzada. There's a bunch of different Chinese-ium clones of this on Amazon and eBay. But same principle. You get your air coming in here, underneath this ring. It's just like this ring that I just removed. You have all these, and then you have a little tray, not unlike this, that you drop in and then it does it's thing in there. I'm not gonna light that one because, breaking sticks down that size is just gonna be a pain. Normally, you just use twigs when you're camping or whatever, but I am gonna go and get this thing going. And yeah, I'm probably only gonna burn this much wood today. Maybe not even that 'cause I'm just testing it and I have things to do, but I thought I'd show you guys. All right, so to get this going, I don't know how well you can see this and I'm sorry about the sound, there's a dump truck right over here on the road idling. I think he went inside his house real quick. So try to get in the sun here. I've just gotten a little bit of pine pitch on here. Like, just pine sap, straight pine resin. I'ma try these, to get this thing going. I've got some smaller ones down here. If not, I'll go inside and get something better. But I just want to try these and I figure I'd try them with you. You can't see it, but these took off good. So I'm going to get to this. So I'll show you real quick. See, you can't see it. Oh, I guess you can see it. We've got a nice little fire going. I love these things. I'ma make a bunch more of them. So I'm gonna get to this real quick and we'll jump forward to when I've got a good fire going. I don't think you can see this well on camera 'cause of the sun. Hopefully, I'm blocking it so you can see it a little. Obviously, I have it stacked out really high. Not ideal. And even just dropping that in, I singed some hairs 'cause that's pretty hot. The wood gasification is working. I can see it already. I got carried away with my initial burn, but yeah, I'm gonna give this thing a thumbs up. Like I said, I wish it was a little wider. I don't even know if I'm in the frame. Sorry if I'm not. Ooh, gettin' a little toasty, let's get back a little. But yeah, I'm happy with my purchase. I think I paid like $220, $250 for this and it did seem a little shocking at first, but it is stainless steel. I didn't have to dig a fire pit. I'm using two edging pavers. If you can't tell. I'm going to get away from this though. It's popping a lot. There's a lot of smoke on here even this was supposed to be smokeless, but it's 'cause I put a bunch of pine in there and now I see the camera's in the smoke cloud so this probably looks terrible. I'm gonna move the camera and we'll get some more footage of this. Okay. Yeah. Here, I'm behind it. And let me open my coat up. You can see the flames much better there. It'd be nicer if I did this in the evening and maybe I'll show you that eventually, but for the time being this is the Solo Stove. Yowza. Yeah, I'm pretty happy with it. I'm gonna let this burn out. I don't think I'm gonna put any of this on and that'll be the video for today. Links in the dudally-do. Patreon in the dudally-do. Give to me, don't, I don't care. I'm just doing this for fun. This is something I bought and I thought I'd show it. I'm about to get resined on here, I think, so I'm gonna get out of the way. But yeah, not sponsored, not promoted. Just, I paid the money for it. I thought I'd create some video content in case someone else was interested in buying it. Maybe my opinion will change over time with this. You can't leave it outside. That's why I'm doing this so early in the day. Yeah. I'm gonna let this burn out. Thanks for stopping by. Like, comment, subscribe, dislike. Tell me you hate my guts, whatever. See you guys.

A week with the Amazon Halo Band

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UPDATE December 14th, 2020: I can no longer recommend this device. It’s December 14th, 2020 and after 87 days with the device I just can’t recommend it. A few weeks ago the device stopped charging, and after a a support request via the website where I was told to “try another charging cable, like from your phone” (it has a proprietary clamp-connector…) Amazon sent me a refurbished unit (correct, they sent me a refurbished unit on an invite-only device) several days later. The refurbished replacement was placed into a plastic zip bag and dropped into a plastic mailing envelope with zero protection whatsoever. I then had trouble trying to get it to pair with the app, my backups wouldn’t actually restore so I lost all of my previous data, and the refurb was regularly failing to detect large portions of my sleep claiming it must have come loose or I was sleeping on it. Don’t do it.

——-

Original review September 25th, 2020:

The Amazon Halo Band is a new fitness tracker Amazon has brought out. Basically it’s a movement tracker, has a heart rate monitor, and… a microphone to analyze your conversations…

I’ve had mine for a week now and overall I’m fairly satisfied with it. My previous experience with activity tracking is fairly limited, I had a Striiv that clipped to my waistband and then a Gen1 Apple Watch but I have no knowledge of other current-gen products. Here’s my Black + Onyx Amazon Halo Band (don’t worry, that’s a salt lamp out of focus):


Amazon Halo Band Black + Onyx

My only real complaint is the band took a few days to get used to, the material… is a bit abrasive. The material exists in a world between industrial carpet and that carpet-like material used on automotive speaker enclosures that let you thump that 808 drum in your trunk at stoplights.

I’m getting about 30 hours of battery life until I drop to the 20% range, obviously over the course of a year this is probably going to start to drop off some but honestly the recharging is fast. I’ll take it off in the evening when I sit down to read for 45 minutes or so and it charges fully in less than that, you also get a notification on your phone letting you know that it is charged. As of writing this it has been 11 hours since a full charge and I’m at 85%, mind you nearly 7 of that I was sleeping.

Here are some examples of the activity tracking

IMG_4129.jpg
Amazon Halo Band activity 1
Amazon Halo Band activity 3
Amazon Halo Band activity 4

What I found interesting is how many points the cycling registered, my guess here is because it is more of a steady-state/constant pedaling thing that my heart rate was consistently elevated in a moderate range whereas with my lifting as a strength athlete I've got a lot of heavy stuff in a brief window then my rest period where I'm making my heart rate go back down as quickly as possible through breathing and general lack of movement but then the elliptical (a Precor EFX 835) which is much more high intensity (just shy of all out, high resistance), thus a far higher heart rate, than the cycling barely registered any points in comparison.

Sleep tracking, the band itself isn’t annoying or abnormally noticeable in bed. As for the tracking, the results I’m receiving are wholly believable so I don’t doubt them. Here are my “best” and “worst” (this night I definitely tossed and turned a lot, oh the stress of attempting to buy a home) nights so far

Amazon Halo Band sleep tracking
Amazon Halo Band sleep tracking 2

As far as recording you throughout the day for the “tone” I personally have no use for it but I have enabled it and have it set to the most frequent setting. I could absolutely see where this could be a useful tool for various people that have issues with public speaking, dealing with a co-worker/manager/direct report, are fighting with a sibling/parent/spouse etc to help them become more aware of how they are personally participating in conversations but I mean… I really don’t as I’m working from home for almost 6 months now due to Covid and if i’m being honest my wife and I don’t have a whole lot of heated conversations so a lot of this is me just thinking out loud at work-related things, at a podcast I’m listening to with my earbuds, or muttering to myself as I read a Reddit thread. What is captured here in the example below is the frustration of this home buying process and the varying levels of incompetency we are experiencing with every single party involved. The notable moment captured in the screenshot here is actually me talking to myself, completely alone, about the general state of my Minecraft village on a survival server I play on, the 11:50 AM is again me completely alone talking out loud as I was having VPN password sync issues with work and was unable to do anything, the 5:10 pm was me telling my wife goodbye as she left to go back to work to work concessions at a middle school sportsball event and the 6:30 pm was, again, me talking to myself as a friend and I were messing around in a contest on the Minecraft server. Man, I talk to myself a lot.

Amazon Halo band tone voice tracking
Amazon Halo band tone voice tracking 2
Amazon Halo band tone voice tracking 3


As far as the body fat/composition feature… it is clunky at best. You have to prop your phone up nearly completely upright then walk back and forth under ideal lighting until it is happy and then make 1/4 turns at which point it generates an image that basically looks like someone ran you through an app filter with decade-old image processing. And, at least on me, it rounded off some of my muscle… it shaved maybe 1/3 off of my traps and deleted part of my right calf. Another curious thing, I have a quite long beard and it didn’t’ seem to know what to do with it and gave me a weird chin that looks more like an odd adam’s apple.

amazon halo band body scan 1.jpg

As far as the labs… they’re all crap, some of which is even based on questionable science like “Listen to Isochronic tones to reduce stress” and “Improve sleep with binaural beats”. Some other random ones:

  • Block out negative noise at night for smoother sleep

  • Reduce bedtime stress with a bedtime story

  • Wake up refreshed with a 10-minute meditation

  • 4 Weeks to a Leander, Stronger You

  • 150-minute fix

  • 30 Day Lengthen and Tone

  • Intermediate Barre

  • No Props, No Problem

  • Meditate to bring more gratitude into your world

Uhhh… yeah, no thanks Labs tab.

Find the product page for the Amazon Halo Band here

22AD (After Dad), letter to my father 2020

in

In 9 days you'll have been dead 22 years.

mark+mercer+hitchiking+at+indy+500.jpg

No developments in my professional life, no lotteries won, no exciting vacations or trips. I'm getting married race weekend (maybe, I'll get to that) so there's that. Can't say I ever imagined a world where that would happen but wow it is!

Aaron's mom died of cancer, rather quickly, last year. I didn't even know she was sick. Little Billy's mother died of cancer just after Thanksgiving, he got to spend her last moments with her like I did you and I hate that he had to go through that. A friend from high school, Marcus, apparently overdosed and died last year leaving behind a woman and several children both step and biological A few weeks later someone else I went to high school with, Jeff, also overdosed and died on heroin and I later found out the same guy sold to both of them and may have been present when at least one of them overdosed and did nothing to help.

Mom's health is up and down, mostly down. She's supposed to have more surgery on the 10th and be released on the 11th... I don't like that timing. At all. Not one bit. She’s been waiting to have that surgery for quite a while now though so I guess that’s just how it has to be.

A previously unseen virus has been making its way around the world. As I write this letter there have been 89,832 confirmed cases worldwide with the true number believed to be much higher. 3,061 confirmed deaths are attributed to the virus with the first 2 in the United States happening this past weekend. 10-11 days ago South Korea had 33 cases, as of right now they have 4,335 cases... that gives an idea as to how this thing is spreading. As a result of the virus the stock market has fallen sharply and likely entered a correction, cargo ships have been leaving China nearly empty for weeks now, shortages for things like toilet paper and hand sanitizer have in multiple countries and the runs on groceries and supplies started in the United States this weekend.

People have been advised, or in some cases forced, to self-quarantine for a minimum of two weeks. I can feed mom and I for a few months if need be but if she gets this virus it will most likely kill her. Given my past respiratory issues with bronchitis and pneumonia I'm not so certain that it wouldn't kill me either. We share desks at work so I've been liberally using hand sanitizer and using sanitary wipes every morning on my desk. As I write this though I hear someone coughing, is it the normal flu or is it Covid-19?

Oh! Roger Penskey bought the Indianapolis Motor Speedway!!! If this year's race happens it should be very interesting. He's been doing a lot of work at the track as a fan trying to improve the experience for fans and teams both. Abby has a podcast... um a podcast is like a radio show but it is released on the internet and can be listened to on-demand, where her and her co-host talk about racing. They've become friends with Doug Boles, the President of IMS, and get a lot of cool access. It's neat that she has that opportunity and that Roger bought the track. I really hope the virus doesn't mess with this year's race but events are being cancelled all over the world, this weekend the Louvre museum in Paris closed due to the virus. The Pope may also have the virus, he's been sick and cancelling appearances for several days now after meeting with those that did have the virus. Who knows if the race will happen, nearly 3 months is a long time.

We've scheduled to get married the Saturday before the race, the virus could change that though. We may have to adapt on the fly and are trying to have a contingency plan for a worst case scenario. She's fun, she's a high school teacher currently living in Missouri and has a big family. As soon as her teaching year is up she'll be coming here, that's why the wedding is race weekend, it's the first weekend she'll be done with her teaching year.

This year will be interesting I imagine. Hopefully the virus burns out quickly and doesn't have much of an impact on the world but it definitely has the potential of doing damage similar to the Spanish Flu. The economic impacts alone are already pretty noteworthy.

Bun is well, he's definitely entering his dotage but I'll figure out a way to prolong his life.

Do not stand at my grave and weep,
I am not there, I do not sleep.
I am in a thousand winds that blow,
I am the softly falling snow.
I am the gentle showers of rain,
I am the fields of ripening grain.
I am in the morning hush,
I am in the graceful rush
Of beautiful birds in circling flight,
I am the starshine of the night.
I am in the flowers that bloom,
I am in a quiet room.
I am in the birds that sing,
I am in each lovely thing.
Do not stand at my grave bereft
I am not there. I have not left.

Past letters.

Wren, Medieval Indulgence and YOUR Carbon Footprint

So, there's this startup called Wren, they are effectively a subscription service where you pay them a monthly fee (which they immediately pocket 20% of per their FAQ) and then attempt to offset your carbon footprint. Most people will immediately think "hey that's awesome, sign me up" but whoa whoa whoa, pump the brakes there.

I saw someone liken this to the Catholic Indulgence of the Middle Ages, you would sin, and the Catholic Church would tell you how many coins to toss in the coffers to make everyone good with God to avoid temporal punishment. This is how I see Wren.

As I told two of their champions recently when they tweeted/retweeted the company to try and drive awareness to it for the three founders

"Planting trees isn't even a bandaid; it's like cutting your arm off and then gently blowing in the gaping wound. To offset our current CO2 production, you need to add more than 31 million square miles, nearly 16% of the earth's land, of new forest, assuming a healthy density of 40-60 trees per acre."

The figure above is conservative. Add to that the fact we're losing forest at an estimated 28,125 square miles annually... do you realize how many customers you'll have to get to even combat 28,125 square miles annually? The best trees can manage about 48lbs of CO2 per year, and healthy forest is 40-60 trees per acre, that means you're going to need to plant a billion-plus tree a year to even hope to combat current forest loss. A BILLION trees... and I'm not talking twigs, I'm talking 10ft+ trees, in healthy soil, with robust fungal networks (the fungi that work in symbiosis with trees aid considerably in the carbon sequestration and overall tree health).

Seriously, do the math. Don't take my word for it.

I honestly have no idea why Y Combinator selected this company and chose to fund it. Perhaps the 20% off the top of every subscription and banking on the fact that people will feel guilty about climate change and happily fork over money on a subscription model.

In an exchange on the website Hacker News, a site owned and run by the tech accelerator that invested in Wren, some future methods for lowering carbon footprint where mentioned… specifically, one of the founders pointed me to the Project Drawdown (not related to Wren) website.

Well, let's take a look at some of Project Drawdown's ideas (although why would I pay Wren to pocket 20% when I could give Project Drawdown 100%…):

  • Electric bikes (going to be powered by, fossil fuels mostly)

  • - Electric cars (going to be powered by, fossil fuels largely, and will remain cost-prohibitive for 95% of the world's population, if not more)

  • Mass transit takes years or decades to roll out, when funding can even be secured, and all zoning challenges can be met

  • Alternative cement, this will be great if someone can make a breakthrough, but there has been next to zero progress made on anything that is remotely feasible or even scalable

  • Bioplastic, while this takes petrochemicals out of the equation, it is still pretty energy demanding and is still not good for the environment, biodegradable does not inherently mean safe.

  • Recycled paper, or how about doing away with paper as much as possible instead of making recycled paper that requires obscene amounts of toxic chemicals. Why not get legislation passed to outlaw mass mailing, do you know how much mail I throw away each week that is advertisements and solicitations that I never even look at?

  • Industrial recycling, aside from aluminium and CLEANED glass recycling is mostly a farce. Don't believe me, do your homework, planet money even had an episode on this recently. Plastic is mostly just taken to landfills, even when sent to recycling because unless it is cleaned, it is considered contaminated. In years past, China would happily take this but will no longer buy it to recycle it because of a loss of cheap labor and the pollution recycling it causes.

  • Autonomous vehicles, multinational companies are having trouble with this and even if they do pass it you likely have years of legal hurdles to get them legal and a decade or more to get people to begin to accept and adopt them in numbers sufficient enough to make them more efficient than human driving as you'll have to remove the bulk of human drivers from the road.

  • Building with wood is already happening, but it adds considerable cost and still has significant height limits, which still require more land to be turned from green spaces to tarmac and building. Not to mention this wood isn't always sustainably farmed.

  • Direct air capture is almost certainly never going to happen, barring multiple miraculous inventions. The closest person to doing this is Dr. Klaus Lackner, and even his research has it not being viable, even if you capture in a method like his (a polymer that you then 'wash' the material you still have to sequester it somehow).

  • Hyperloop, pure fantasy. This will never happen for traveling vast distances. Traveling large distances is one of the problems anyway. Commercial aviation fuel usage has gone up 33% in 9 years.

  • Refrigerant management, this will help with new appliances but the billion-plus refrigeration/freezer units out there already...

  • Industrial hemp will just require more land to be planted as farmland won't be sacrificed it, and cotton will be farmed until at least the current generation of farmers dies, farmers don't like change.

  • Living buildings, they look great in concept art but aren't practical and won't have any meaningful impact. They'll likely take decades just to offset the CO2 emissions from manufacturing the concrete that went into the building's foundations.

  • Ocean farming and marine permaculture, coastal waters absolutely need kelp and seaweed 'forests' re-established. There are some women in/around the Bay Area working on this - Tessa Emmer, Catherine O'Hare, and Avery Resor. What they are doing needs to be done up and down every last square mile of water with proper depth in the entire world.

  • Smart grids, if you mean in the United States good luck. This isn't something you are going to be able to have any influence on whatsoever. You'll have to get every single power company in the United States and Canada to voluntarily replace perfectly functioning, costly equipment over a decade or more, and even if you did, they'd pass the cost on to the customer.

  • Solid-state wave energy, at any scale this is likely to have any number of unforeseen consequences for marine life (probably sound-induced stress for starters) and be quite costly due to the corrosive nature of oceans.

I suspect, based on personal experience, that the vast majority of human beings haven't put 1 minute of thought into global warming, in fact it wouldn't surprise me if there were billions of human beings walking around today that have never even heard of global warming or climate change, aside from noticing each year getting hotter and hotter and weather getting a little more extreme.

We don't need startups taking a 20% vig via a subscription service for a feel-good "I did my part by giving money" company. We need to present the facts, as unbiased as possible, to the masses and get people to start questioning the topic. We need people to start going, "Oh, wow, we did that?" we need them to start thinking, "well, how can I minimize my impact myself?".

More than a third of the world's population lives on less than $2 a day. Do you think that 2.5 billion people can afford to scrape together even $2 a month to offset the CO2 from their cooking?

The median annual household income worldwide is $9,733, do you think that families can afford to pay $10-20 a head worldwide? Do you believe that 1/3 of the world's population can realistically afford that? Do you think by the time that Wren backs out 20%, then the non-profits/NGOs/companies they turn around and give the money to backs out their operating costs, that that amount of money (probably 50% or less of the original contribution) will make even a 10% reduction in last year's CO2 emissions and that it will not only be able to keep pace with the increase, but also continue to increase to the point of getting us not just carbon neutral, but removing 10+ gigatons more than we produce each year to try and restore us to levels of even the 1980s in any reasonable amount of time?

I don't. I think this company is just going to be away for those individuals with a little disposable income, that believe in climate change and feel guilty about driving their car and flying everywhere for vacations, to buy themselves a little 'feel good' or a little peace of mind. Most will probably think they're actually making a difference and that all will be fine.

Even if Wren manages to generate 5 billion dollars a month, and ends passing 4.95 billion down the chain (instead of pocket 1 billion as per the 20% in their FAQ), it's unlikely to even result in sequestering 10% of last year's levels annually. Seriously, run the numbers yourself, everyone that's going to downvote this comment like you are my others, RUN THE NUMBERS, please. You'll see that this isn't going to be the solution, nor is it likely to lead to one. It is the wrong approach to the problem as is.

This is Silicon Valley being clueless and/or overly optimistic as usual with these sorts of markets/challenges, just like YC wanting to turn half of the Sahara into shallow algal pools (which would result in the rainforest losing massive amounts of fertilization and cause a potentially catastrophic change in global weather patterns, not to mention such a project would require more electricity than the plant currently produces).

So, what do we do?

The giving pledge has more than a trillion dollars pledged as of right now, certainly at least one of those individuals or couples has an interest in climate change. With an incredibly small amount of that trillion dollars of pledges, we could gather data and educate people.

- Ask a healthy sampling of random people if they know what global warming is, do they believe in it, have they seen signs of it, is it affecting their life (talk to farmers, ranchers, amusement park operators and owners of tourist destinations, wildfire firefighters, etc. as well as random people).

Then find out what misconceptions there are, what fears there are, what falsehoods people believe.

- Talk to experts: climatologists, entomologists, financial market experts, marine and wildlife, biologists, agricultural sciences types. Find out what effects are being seen right now, get the data from all the fields, get video interviews with them saying who they are - what they do - what they see happening - why it concerns them - if the changes continue what are the probable outcomes in the next 5/10/15 years. Start a campaign, edit this stuff, and start putting it on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram as short clips.

You do this to build awareness. You create plenty of resources that people can use to educate themselves, and you drive interest by raising awareness. The only way we are EVER going to tackle climate change, other than just struggling to adapt to the changes, is by educating people and getting them personally interested.

Go ask 50 random people you know "So, what do you think about global warming", you're probably going to be surprised when several flat out think it's made up and others are along the lines of "I don't know, it might be true, but I can't do anything about it".

We're not going to make changes by paying to protect the Amazon rainforest. We're going to make changes by convincing people they really don't need to take their 4th international vacation in as many years, nor do they need their 3rd iPhone in 5 years, that their year and a half old MacBook is perfectly fine. They don't need the newest model just because it now has ultra holographic flurm instead of super holographic flurm because all they do is watch YouTube and write emails with the damn thing.

People can make small changes that add up to significant changes when you get widespread adoption.

People will illegally harvest lumber as long as there are trees, there are people literally stealing entire BEACHES, lumber (especially exotic hardwoods) sell for way more money than sand. But what if we can convince people to make some small changes:

  • Do you like meat? Eat chicken instead of beef, it is an order of magnitude better per pound of meat as far as greenhouse gas emissions, not to mention land use

  • 71F is a wonderful temperature for that AC, but is 72F so bad?

  • So, you want to fly a bunch of founders out to the Bay Area for in-person interviews for your tech accelerator batch? Seriously, can't you use skype? Sure it's slightly annoying with the delay, but it'll save a couple of tons of CO2 per person.

  • You live alone, do you need four lights on in the kitchen and your bedroom when you've been in the living room for the past six hours? And why is your tv and soundbar on, you've had headphones on listening to classical music while you stare at your laptop screen playing GorkaMorka 27 or trying to finish some code.

You have to educate the masses if you want to make a change. Just because you, or I, or that guy over there recognize climate change at varying levels, does NOT mean that the majority of people do.

And you know what happens when you start to get the masses interested? You actually stand a chance out getting legislation passed that can begin to put pressure on companies. Lobbyists carry a lot of weight, but if you can sway enough voters to acknowledge climate change is an issue, then you stand a much better chance of putting pressure on existing politicians, or removing them during voting cycles and installing politicians that do care and start to create a legal framework to force change. Change in community planning, change in tax incentives, change in legal requirements, make it illegal for HOAs to tell homeowners they can't have PV panels "because they hurt property values and ruin visual appeal!".

You know encouraging people to eat locally grown food, instead of eating exotic fruit like bananas and coffee and oranges, year-round that get shipped from halfway around the world will have more impact than giving 20$ a month to "protect the amazon". Yes, we should protect rainforests because of the incredible biodiversity, but ehhhh, a subscription service to wash the guilt from your conscience (not unlike the Medieval Indulgence system) is not a realistic solution, at any meaningful level anyway.

Under their current model, for every 1$ you give Wren, they pocket 20 cents and then hand 80 cents off to another organization (of their choosing) with, as far as I can tell from their site, zero information on how your money is being applied, who exactly they are giving it to, if that organization is for or non-profit and how much they are spending on overhead before actually doing something with the money, etc. Right now, there are vague mentions of stopping illegal logging, and that's it. Doesn't say what company, what organizations, what countries, how or who.

What they do document well, is their roadmap... how they want to spend your money internally, not directly to some sort of carbon sequestration efforts.

They want to:

  • make it easy to unsubscribe from Wren

  • increase site performance internationally

  • add sharing features

  • add how to change your subscription to their FAQ

  • handle declined card errors

Great, but what are you doing with the other 80% of the money someone gives you?


I am an oddball, a tale of the Eloi and Morlocks.

A comment on the Y Combinator website Hacker News made me vent a little steam. I’m going to post my reply here as well, and add to it.

I'm an oddball on Hacker News,

No, I'm an oddball. No degree, no STEM background, no interest whatsoever in CS as a career. Still quite interested in building a better future for humanity, though.

However, it seems tech companies/VC firms/think tanks/philanthropic entities forget (or outright ignore) the fact that it requires more than coders and degree holders to make society happen. sigh.

In the past few years, I've come to be incredibly shocked as I discover more and more how myopic the tech-leaders/teach-wealthy/younger philanthropists are, whether intentionally or unintentionally. A significant percentage come from families where education was stressed, where the families were financially comfortable if not wealthy, a lot of them started working when they began their first startup in college or their first job was out of grad school, people that went to k-12 schools in privileged areas or went to varying levels of private schools, went to top-tier colleges to either drop out when they became millionaires or to graduate and go on to become billionaires long before their peers even finished paying off their crippling student loans. The companies, and empires, they run after obtaining a modicum of success almost entirely require a minimum of a 4-year degree for entry-level positions with most wanting to see at least one major accomplishment or project under your belt even to get a Skype interview. They want people of a specific mindset; they want people with a particular background; they want people with specific accomplishments. Even those that go on to help those that are underprivileged via their philanthropic efforts, just look for the cream of the academic crop, they look for those that have somehow defied the odds and are still already exceptionally bright on paper, to help them get their de facto dues card (a degree) so they can have yet another like-mind to join their ranks.

But those of us that have different experiences? We get told things like (these are actual quotes from rejection emails to me in the past year and a half):

"You obviously have many of the skills we're looking for. However, for the Customs Brokerage role we require a BA/BS degrees" at the time, I had 12 years of experience doing the job, but no 4-year degree in ANYTHING, so wasn't good enough for an interview.

"We know that our process is far from perfect, so please take this primarily as a statement that we have limited interview bandwidth, and must make hard choices. We'd welcome another application in no fewer than 12 months - the best way to stand out is to complete a major project or produce an important result in that time" thank you for comparing me to bits and stripping me of all humanity, also what 'major project' or 'important result' should I produce for an entry-level position in a field where I'd literally be assisting in creating the initial framework for AI policy research? I mean, must everyone that helps with AI policy be a CS type? Should the common man not be consulted when deciding how our future robot overlords will rule us, and how are personal data may or may not be used by such projects?

I am the oddball. I'm John Q Public, not C. S. Programmer.

I want to see a better future for myself and our species. I can't write fancy code, nor do I have any desire to. I'm not going to be the guy that creates the first AI or the first cyborg prosthetic indistinguishable from a human limb. I'm not going to crack cold fusion or bring C4 rice to market. I can sit back and go "that's a good idea BUT here's 17 ways I can exploit it in its beta phase, if you get it fully functional and the company scales I can exploit it even more ways and use it for personal gain and to cause great pain and suffering to individuals or the masses, maybe we should stop and think about this, and these 3 features are all but guaranteed to be used more for bad than good" I can go "so explain to me exactly what you are trying to do... oh, hey, yeah so I know your world is only CS, but this was done by such and such in 1973 and I know I've read about it in a few books, let me check my Evernote references... ah yes so here's a science fiction story where it was done but here is where some students did something similar, does this give you any ideas for getting past your current roadblock?" and I can go "man, you look burnt out, you need a break, come on let's go walk for a few minutes and talk about something else so you can come back with a new point of reference".

I am the oddball.

I think that society is rapidly forking. Compare us to the Eloi and the Morlocks from H.G. Wells' 1895 novel The Time Machine.

The Eloi lived a banal life of ease on the surface of the Earth in the year AD 802,701 - the Eloi are the path the tech types are going down. The industry prioritizes grand accomplishments, fancy degrees, snazzy CVs with lots of exciting experience and projects. Many that excel in this industry (but by no means all) had financially comfortable childhoods, had solid k-12 educations with lots of opportunities, many that go on to became worth many millions or billions of dollars also went on to either sell their first company while at a prestigious college and drop out or obtained multiple degrees from such institutions before jumping into a career with minimal 'mundane' working experience prior.

Then we have the Morlocks that dwell underground. The Morlocks clothe and feed the wealthy upper class...er... I mean, the Eloi. My kind are the Morlocks. Many of us have lackluster childhoods, in my instance my father died 12 days before my 13th birthday, and we went from a comfortable lower-middle-class 2-income house to a lower-middle-class 1-income family and had it not been for the life insurance things would have much rougher than they were, and as someone that had his father die at this age I obviously didn't go "gee golly, I'd better buckle down and start thinking about college now" instead I thought "well this is bullshit, what the hell". Many of us Morlocks are working as soon as we can; in my case around 11, I started delivering papers for 3 cents a newspaper, cutting lawns, shoveling snow, hitting stores on Main Street asking if they needed any errands run for tips, just to bring some more money in. By 16, as a Morlock, I was working the maximum number of hours I could get a week by law. By 18, I was working at least 40 hours a week.

As Morlocks, we have a wide variety of jobs under our belts. In my case I delivered papers, worked fast food, buried people for a living as well as cut grass, also cut grass and did other odd jobs for a realtor, worked multiple retail jobs, finally got a 'good' job doing data entry as a contractor for a whopping 10$ an hour before ending up at my current job which after 13 years on the job last week pays me a little over 1$ more than San Francisco's minimum wage, ha!

I've spent the better part of 3 years trying to get a job at a company that is actively trying to improve the lives of humans now, and striving to make a better future for our species. Every single person I've talked to or cold machine-like email I've received has said the same things. 'Get a degree' - 'We want a degree' - 'Minimum requirement is a degree' - 'We didn't see where you listed your degrees' - 'What major project have you complete' - 'what projects have you worked on' - 'what major breakthroughs have you made' - 'Looking at your CV I'm not sure why so and so wanted me to talk to you' basically - go away Morlock, we only hire Eloi.

The world needs people with different backgrounds, different experiences, different abilities to work optimally. Tech companies, philanthropic endeavors, think tanks, even venture capital firms need to stop trying to hire people with Master's and Doctorate degrees for every single position and start seriously considering looking at people that might have a wholly different perspective from an entirely different life experience that can not only add racial or cultural diversity but go "hey, that thing you're trying to invent, it's stupid" or "hey, that thing you're stuck on, it's kinda like this thing that I know about/do let me explain it to you and maybe it'll give you an idea" or even "hey, uh, folks, what you're creating is called a wheel and, um, it already exists" or even "ha, I can't think of 17 ways to rip someone off with that without even putting some thought into it, and that feature right there ohhhh boy people are going to have a fun time using that to social engineer customer service and then users".

But hey, what do I know, I don't make the big bucks. I'm not a CEO, CIO, CTO, CFO, COO. I'm not a billionaire looking to shape the world after my designs. I'm just one of the 7.5 billion Murlocks that makes the world run for the Eloi.

A table of principal aloys

A combination of zinc and copper makes bell metal.

A combination of copper and tin makes bronze metal.

A combination of antimony, tin, copper and bismuth makes britannia metal.

A combination of copper and tin makes cannon metal.

A combination of copper and zinc makes Dutch gold.

A combination of copper, nickel and zinc, with sometimes a little iron and tin, makes German silver.

A combination of gold and copper makes standard gold.

A combination of gold, copper and silver, makes old standard gold.

A combination of tin and copper makes gun metal.

A combination of copper and zinc makes mosaic gold.

A combination of tin and lead makes pewter.

A combination of lead and a little arsenic, makes sheet metal.

A combination of silver and copper makes standard silver.

A combination of tin and lead makes solder.

A combination of lead and antimony makes type metal.

A combination of copper and arsenic makes white copper.

Where is God in this?

Someone asked yesterday, "Where is God in all of this?" stating that everywhere they look, they see struggle and suffering, that wherever they look, they do NOT see the divine. My off-the-cuff reply was

Go outside, look up. Day or night:

  • See the atmosphere? It's the only breathable one in our solar system and the only breathable one we know of in the universe, which likely contains 2 trillion or more galaxies, each galaxy containing tens to hundreds of billions of stars. Most of those stars probably harboring planets.

  • See stars? The nearest one is Proxima Centauri at 4.24 light-years away. Voyager 1 is traveling at a rate of 17.3 km/s, it's the fastest spacecraft to date. If it were pointed at an intercept with Proxima Centauri, it would take over 73,000 years to arrive. That's the closest star, 4.24 light-years. The farthest star we've directly imaged (MACS J1149+2223 Lensed Star 1) is 5 billion light-years away. You exist, I exist, on this tiny blue marble in an effectively infinite space. That's where God is.

  • See the moon? It has given us the 24 hour day we know so well. It gives us the tides that likely helped make life prosper on Earth. It was probably made from a cataclysmic impact where something likely a twin to the Earth at the time collided with us and ejected it violently from the collision. That moon you see, men have been there, they got there with less computing power than a modern car has. They got there launched on a controlled explosion atop the most complicated machine made to date. They went to a barren, hostile, sterile world and looked back and saw the majesty that is Earth. The local rarity that is Earth. The only known body in the solar system to harbor any form of life, let alone intelligent life. That's where God is.

Now, look in the mirror. You see reflected radiation that allows you to see you. Through an evolutionary miracle, that is the eye, something that modern cameras still can't replicate even a decent approximation of. That reflection you see, you, more than 37 trillion cells make up you. Those cells are made up of 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms that is roughly 2/3 hydrogen, 1/4 oxygen and about 1/10 is carbon in composition. Those seven billion billion billion atoms comprise a living, breathing, sentient entity that can not only live and reproduce but has the capability of creating technology that allows the splitting of atoms, that allows for complicated repair (surgery) of similar organisms, that can contemplate existence, that could build the most complicated machine ever to put man on the moon. That's where God is.