It's not that hard to believe. Here [1] is a somewhat e-famous example of a three-person family whose annual spending is around ~$25k.

[1]: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2015/01/16/exposed-the-mmm-fa...

To be fair, I believe all of MMM's calculations exclude housing, since they own their house outright.

that's an extreme case you linked. he specifically called out it wasn't because he was frugal.

Just conjecture, but I imagine that he got tired of the mods accusing him of trolling (in his uniformly high-quality and civil commentary) due to his non-standard political views.

It's exactly a hylomorphism. Here's a possibly more familiar-looking Haskell form:

    {-# LANGUAGE DeriveFunctor #-}
    {-# LANGUAGE LambdaCase #-}

    import Data.Functor.Foldable
    import Data.List.Split

    data QuadTreeF a r =
        NodeF r r r r
      | LeafF a
      | EmptyF
      deriving Functor

    builder :: [a] -> QuadTreeF a [a]
    builder = \case
      []  -> EmptyF
      [x] -> LeafF x
      xs  -> NodeF a b c d where
        [a, b, c, d] = chunksOf (length xs `div` 4) xs

    consumer :: QuadTreeF a [a] -> [a]
    consumer = \case
      EmptyF            -> []
      LeafF a           -> [a]
      NodeF ul ur lr ll -> concat [ll, ul, ur, lr]

    rotate :: [a] -> [a]
    rotate = hylo consumer builder

We even felt it up in Auckland. It woke my partner and I up and made the building creak and flex a bit.

Discussions on this kind of thing probably largely settle into opposing "yay Soylent!" and "boo Soylent!" sides. When I look at this as a tidbit of news, however, it doesn't seem to say very much to me.

"Small percentage of consumers report dissatisfaction with product - company investigating."

More like "many cases of violent reaction to food product reported, no substantive action taken by company and blame deferred."

The code that defines the contract is publicly viewable on the blockchain. [1]

[1]: https://etherscan.io/address/0xbb9bc244d798123fde783fcc1c72d...

How does that help, when the code is super shitty but people are still signing up?

I contributed, and I know what I know by virtue of playing with the technology, keeping up with the news in r/ethereum, etc. The usual kind of thing one does in smaller tech communities.

Same here. For those who have been keeping up with Ethereum developments, the DAO has been in the works for a long time, and people already have a general idea of what it is. There's been a lot of previous discussion about it dating back years[1].

I think the problem with the website is the people who created it are so deep into this stuff that they think it does a sufficiently decent job of explaining it. They've forgotten just how much of a learning curve there is for someone outside of the Ethereum community, much less anyone unfamiliar with blockchain technology. They may have not even planned for the website to explain it to such people, thinking they would be uninterested or unable to figure out how to participate anyway.

[1] https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/05/06/daos-dacs-das-and-more-...