Dampening Hype

Maybe we should look forward to the time when most people can print out their kids' braces at home, feed them alternative meat produced right in the kitchen and thanks to smart and connected everything have hours of time freed up to do things they had never done before. It would be instructive to see what good use this bounty of time is put to.

This story about the "real" environmental footprint of lab-cultured meat is just as expected as this one about security gaps in blockchain technology. Once the hype rises to a certain level of illogic, irrational bordering on insanity, such writing follows next - to temper the craziness to a commonsense level. The handwringing around meat consumption and the harm caused by it can be addressed perhaps by portion size and variety in diet. Michael Pollan had summarized it in just one line "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants."

In parts of the world, where eating meat regularly is an option for a majority of people - maybe each of us should think about eating enough but not in excess. For those of us who have a yard where it is possible to grow food - maybe we should do that instead of planting and maintaining grass. Pushing yet another product on the population to consume conspicuously does not seem to be the right solution for the problem.

I have been watching the blockchain business from the sidelines for years now - and how everything changes now. Could not have summarized my thoughts any better than this author who correctly points out that it is not much innovation but a lot of stupidity. But the hype got to a point where even commonsense folk started to second guess themselves - was there something there we needed to understand that we are failing to. Such is the case with fake meat, printed braces that will fix crooked teeth for nothing and so on.