Well yes, soylent green _is_ people, but you can't just apply existing homicide laws to a business like ours. The entire humans-as-nutritional-sludge industry would be out of business.
@plexus If we don't get into the human harvesting game, we'll be behind the competition. Good or bad business, that will be even worse, right?
@plexus it's not homicide if they die of natural causes like, say, lack of oxygen. now, did we suck all the oxygen out of those cells, er, rooms? your honor, that is beside the point.
@plexus (as amusing as this is: in the movie and book, soylent green was not people. that would be the new product, soylent brown.)
Shalien
@plexus yup, that’s where they are heading. Personally I’d rather be eaten than eat people, but then I’ve never been faced with the choice.
Yet.
Edited 81d ago
@plexus The movie was based on a book by Harry Harrison called "Make Room!, Make Room!" and was a cautionary tale about overpopulation. In the book, he talks about eating soylent steaks, which are unsurprisingly made from soy beans and lentil beans. Soy + lentil == soylent. Humans have also had to start farming the sea, so they would eat "weed crackers", which were seaweed.
I'm not sure they used much else from the book.
@plexus soylent will improve your business!
Try some!
What do you mean you don't want to
That makes no sense. You'll do better! You'll BE better! It can improve everything!!
What do you mean 'how', try it and you'll see
What do you mean 'why'? It's here, don't get left behind! Try SOYLENT today!!
(we've added some soylent to your lunch, your commute, your drinking water and your dentist's office. They're better now.)
@plexus Isn't the entire Soylent business just based on assisted suicide? If you can't take it anymore, if you don't want to live anymore in a dying world, you can watch films of the Earth as it was before the biosphere began to unravel while drinking the poison that will painlessly end your life. And then the proteins and fats in your body get recycled into Soylent Green.
@plexus @atomicbird Indeed. We're in the process of getting rid of bullshit regulations. This sounds lie a great candidate for debureacratizing.
@plexus Having seen the film, the people were not being killed to make soylent green. The killing was part of a voluntary euthanasia program enacted out of desperation at an extreme resource shortage. The soylent was just a way to dispose of the corpses while claiming back some of the desperately needed nutrition.
The origin of Soylent Green was concealed out of fear the secret could push a barely-functional society into complete breakdown, but the killing was all legal and publicly known.