Now I'm curious if this would actually be a viable business model, if it'd have any legal or practical issues, and if anyone already does it. Like, there exist companies that collect trash already, clearly that part is already viable, so if information could be collected and sold to advertisers for even a little more than the cost to collect that information, then it would be extra profit for the trash company as long as it didn't negatively impact their core business of trash collection. Could be even more insidious and hard to opt out of than actually having someone look through one's individual trash too, for example, if one could, say, sort out the cans from the trash for recycling purposes, one might also try to have a machine look for brand logos on those cans, and store information about which route a given load came from, potentially giving information about what kinds of beverages people in a given neighborhood are more or less likely to buy.
CarbonIceDragon
joined 1 year ago
- sets browser to request the desktop site instead *
I've seen some scientists talk about it, but not as a "mwahahaha, we're going to force these people to eat bugs!" kinda deal like some people seem to imply, but more just as a "this is more efficient for growing protein than traditional livestock, so there would be environmental benefits if we can persuade people to switch to it" sorta deal.
Frankly I feel like a lot of the discussion is kinda silly, advocating that there would be benefits if people try to replace some of their meat intake with insect protein is not the same thing as forcing people to eat bugs. The intention behind advocating that is not malicious, they don't mean just any old bugs but generally farm raised ones, and besides, people already eat bugs anyway. Plenty of cultures throughout the world have dishes involving them in various ways, and beyond that, even in the western countries that a lot of this discussion happens in to my knowledge, people eat very bug-like creatures all the time as long as those creatures live underwater. Shrimp for instance.