I work at a farm that produces live feed, mostly for pet stores and zoos. I've been working there full-time for a year-ish, amd I have experience with the production of Tenebrio spp. (mealworm beetles), Galleria spp. (waxworm moths), and Acheta spp. (house crickets). This includes every stage of the life cycle: egg + larva + pupa + adult for the "worms", and egg + nymph + adult for the crickets. The "worms" are sold as larvae for optimum nutritional value and trophic return-on-input, whereas the crickets are sold as adults. My job is one of the "dirty jobs" at the farm. Well, everyone's job there is dirty, but I'm one of the ones scooping feed, breathing clouds of bug shit, handling the product and sometimes having it crawl all over us, being swarmed by moths and beetles and flies, and dodging cockroaches. It's not as terrible as it might sound but it's definitely not clean.

This is a throwaway account that I'll be checking as much as I can today and tomorrow and maybe Monday too. I do not do push notifications or phone notifications and I'm not extremely online enough to respond to everything within 5 minutes, but I'll be logged on at least once an hour for this today. I will respond to every single question if I can, it just might take awhile. If you know or have an inkling of what my main is, shh, plz dun dox. After this AMA is complete I may abandon this account, I only made it for this (plus the bit).

To clear a few things up, YES, I have eaten the product, and YES, I do have a deep hatred for the careerist, corporate-ladder-climbing administrative class. Any other resemblences to a similar username are coincidental.

-WwF

  • Mardoniush [she/her]
    ·
    3 years ago

    To clarify, most people would say a long term future full of people having a massively good time is something to aim for, at least in a vague sense.

    Longtermists say that having uncountably more people living a life just very very veeeery slightly better than death could be even better as long as you breed enough people for it to make the total amount of pleasure higher.

    I'd like to point out many transhumanists, even very radical ones do in fact find this an abhorrent conclusion, and really only Robin Hanson and assorted silicon valley vampires take it seriously...

    • wax_worm_futures [comrade/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Once you reach a certain number of people, it becomes harder and harder for them to have a really good time while being fully cognizant beings.

      Consider the Tinder effect, where the more people you have access to, the less likely you are to make deep connections with people.

      This sentiment often gets taken the wrong way, but I really believe we should limit how many there are of us. Unlike eco-fascists, though, I think we should equitably taper off population growth and then have a fertility rate of 1.6-1.9 until the population shrinks back down to 2 or 3 billion, before bringing it back up to 2.01 (or whatever trajectory might be needed for a transhuman species).