[HN Gopher] My Experience as a Rice Farmer
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My Experience as a Rice Farmer
Author : surprisetalk
Score : 349 points
Date : 2026-04-02 13:53 UTC (5 days ago)
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| anonymous908213 wrote:
| This was mostly a nice read, I do enjoy these kinds of slice-of-
| life blogs. I think it might have been a bit better without
| making claims about the economic future and history of rice
| farming or whatever, if the author doesn't even speak the
| language it's unlikely they have any real insight to offer and
| whatever shallow information they got off a random Youtube video
| is liable to be spreading misinformation that misleads uninformed
| readers than being actually informative. Farming a rice field
| does not a rice economist make.
|
| There is one particularly funny point I'd quibble on:
|
| > This was part of a system to discourage communism initially by
| encouraging ownership of business and preventing absentee
| landlords accumulating large tracts of land where people who work
| the fields would be forced into renting.
|
| I'm dubious about the credibility of this assertion, but it is
| amusing to think that the goal would be to "discourage communism"
| by a policy that is essentially communistic in nature, in the
| true definition of the economic system (ownership of the means of
| production, ie. you own your own labour rather than renting it
| out).
|
| I am, of course, nitpicking. It's rather easier for me to write
| comments complaining about things than praising them at length,
| but I was entertained by the view into the author's experiences
| and anecdotes.
| huijzer wrote:
| > to think that the goal would be to "discourage communism" by
| a policy that is essentially communistic in nature
|
| War is peace,
|
| Freedom is slavery,
|
| Ignorance is strength
|
| The point, as I see it, being that politicians like to make
| contradicting statements. Good for sales you could say. It is
| possible to cut through such lies by using logic, good on you
| for doing that. Unfortunately, many people take such statements
| as true and mostly get confused by it.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| That doesn't seem strange to me at all. You give the people
| some of the things that they want from communism so that they
| will be content without communism. It's exactly what Bismarck
| did in Germany around 1900 (unemployment benefits, retirement
| funds and health insurance) and it was widely considered a
| success. Perhaps that was even an inspiration for Japan
| alech wrote:
| One thing that's worth noting though is that Japan is known for
| having a large degree of small business ownership, and it's
| also a pretty well documented effect that high rates of small
| business ownership = high rates of support for capitalism,
| because small business owners themselves get a taste of
| capitalism and see it's benefits.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| It's true, every small business owner enjoys larping as a
| capitalist until it comes time to declare bankruptcy
| https://home.treasury.gov/policy-
| issues/coronavirus/assistan...
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| You have to remember that in 1950, the US had a tremendous
| influence in Japan, to put it mildly, and also in 1950, the US
| was rabidly, performatively anti-communist. When McCarthyism
| was getting started stateside, we were also carrying out a "Red
| Purge" in Japan.
|
| Anyway, yeah, in this context, Japan passed the Agricultural
| Land Act of 1952, which was intended to turn land owned by a
| few rich landlords into small, independently owned private
| farms. That may sound like the opposite of capitalism, and it
| is, but as I understand it, the idea was to turn what were
| basically serfs into a proper middle class, by redistributing
| the wealth and means of production directly down to them, which
| would then prevent communism from being as appealing. I don't
| know about the logic, but I guess it worked, since Japan isn't
| communist?
| ForOldHack wrote:
| Your choice of adjectives "rabidly" particularly underscores
| the times.
| fer wrote:
| How is that communistic?
|
| The reasoning behind Gentan was that a landless peasantry was
| more likely to revolt. It's not dissimilar to pre-1929 kulaks,
| though the kulaks were encouraged/enabled to become a
| relatively wealthy/middle class peasantry who employed people
| and were directly involved in the production without owning
| large swathes of land, acting as a kind of a social dampener
| against a revolution.
|
| Unsurprisingly the Soviet Union killed the kulak model and
| moved to collective farming[0], which was arguably actually
| communistic.
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization
| kubanczyk wrote:
| > The reasoning behind Gentan was that a landless peasantry
| was more likely to revolt.
|
| So, it was an anti-revolutionary policy. Which at that time
| of history worked as well as an anti-communist policy.
|
| > Unsurprisingly the Soviet Union killed the kulak model and
| moved to collective farming[0], which was arguably actually
| communistic.
|
| Soviet Union, whatever it had preached, implemented _state
| capitalism_ - concentration of the means of production under
| a single owner.
|
| It's important for me to use words precisely. If somebody
| implies, for example, that capitalism is the opposite of
| communism, that's just snatching the words and waving them
| like banners.
| fer wrote:
| >Soviet Union, whatever it had preached, implemented state
| capitalism - concentration of the means of production under
| a single owner.
|
| Lenin _preached_ for state capitalism as a transitory state
| towards socialism. It 's an integral part of the communist
| ideas, part of the direction even if not part of the ideal
| final state.
| orthoxerox wrote:
| Kulaks were the stated problem, the real problem were the
| middling farmers. If you're a smallholder with a surplus of
| land, your production is very elastic.
|
| You can plant cash crops and sell them to buy industrial
| products. Or you can plant crops that boost your quality of
| life directly: fruit, vegetables, tobacco, animal fodder.
|
| The "price scissors" (low price of wheat, high price of
| goods) meant that middling farmers stopped planting wheat
| that the USSR needed to feed the cities and to pay for
| imports. To make the peasants plant wheat again the Soviets
| took away their land in the name of economy of scale
| (collectivization), but the real goal was to limit the size
| of personal plots.
| stereolambda wrote:
| > I'm dubious about the credibility of this assertion, but it
| is amusing to think that the goal would be to "discourage
| communism" by a policy that is essentially communistic in
| nature, in the true definition of the economic system
| (ownership of the means of production, ie. you own your own
| labour rather than renting it out).
|
| You are meant to "own the means of production" not in an
| actual, but more ideal sense. Owning a farm or workshop to the
| exclusion of other people makes you petit bourgeois and this is
| bad. Communism promotes collective farms. AFAIK Poland was the
| only European Eastern Bloc country to tolerate small private
| farms, as a concession to obstinate peasants after the death of
| Stalin.
|
| Promoting small individual farms is a more Georgist, populist
| capitalist or possibly strictly conservative policy. Not
| speaking to its economic sense though.
| numpad0 wrote:
| The non-oral version of the explanation author received is
| likely Nong Di Jie Fang , a postwar US/Allied military led land
| reform.
|
| The core idea of it, I think, is that those landlords must have
| been the mainsails of prewar Japanese military dictatorship
| regime and its expansionism under the strong leadership of its
| emperor, and breaking up land ownership will make it
| complicated for Japan to re-consolidate power and/or to somehow
| become closer to the Soviets.
|
| I guess it did serve its core purpose of keeping China/Russia
| at bay, considering Japan has been extraordinary antagonistic
| to neighboring, and/or openly communist and/or totalitarian
| regimes, despite running on a rather ethnocentric communism-
| from-first-principle political system...
|
| 1:
| https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%BE%B2%E5%9C%B0%E6%94%B9%E9...
| adrian_b wrote:
| The communist policy everywhere was to rob the small farmers
| and small business owners of everything they owned and force
| them to become quasi-serfs.
|
| The socialist/communist economy is the final extreme stage of
| monopolistic capitalism, towards which USA and other Western
| countries have been continuously evolving during the last
| quarter of century. The economy of USA in 2026 is much more
| similar to the economy of one of the former socialist countries
| in 1976 than it resembles the economy of USA in 1976.
|
| Small farmers and businessmen were the main enemies of
| communism, everywhere.
|
| So what Japan enacted was indeed a good anti-communist policy.
|
| Fighting against big companies and supporting small businesses
| is the opposite of communist policies.
|
| There were a lot of great differences between true communism
| and what the communists themselves claimed communism to be.
| There were also a lot of great differences between true
| communism and what communism has been claimed to be in USA.
|
| Source: I have grown up in a country occupied by communist
| invaders, so I know what true communism is.
| Pay08 wrote:
| This mostly seems like an anti-manorialism idea, which falls
| under the umbrella of every modern economic system.
| aurareturn wrote:
| As a child, I grew up in a village in China and our family farmed
| rice. It was mostly my mom who was doing the farming while my dad
| worked in the city.
|
| Some things I remember:
|
| * Seeing hired buffalos tilling our fields
|
| * Playing with frogs and catching tadpoles in the fields
|
| * Someone with a machine that removes the husks would come to our
| village during harvest
|
| * The smell of rice fields. I recently smelled it again and it's
| very comforting.
|
| Now I work in high tech, working on AI, and the fancy stuff.
| There is just something about rice fields that I love - maybe
| just memories, childhood, smell, how serene it looks when it's
| full.
|
| My one hope for AI, robotics, self driving cars, is that they can
| enable more people in cities to migrate back to rural places.
| When I was younger, I used envy those who grew up privileged in a
| big modern city. Nowadays, I absolutely am glad I grew up in a
| little village in a farming community and I consider myself lucky
| to have.
| troupo wrote:
| > My one hope for AI, robotics, self driving cars, is that they
| can enable people in cities to migrate back to rural places.
|
| Why? Honest question.
|
| A kid in a town/city has access to a billion opportunities many
| of which exist only because there are enough people interested.
| aurareturn wrote:
| Why? Honest question.
|
| I don't necessarily think everyone should move out of cities
| to go back to living in rural areas and villages. I want it
| so that living outside of the city more viable than it is
| today because there are very real benefits to living there.
|
| In a village, everyone knows everyone. Kids play with each
| other and run around freely. Every house protects all the
| kids and help each other. Everyone trusts everyone. You never
| feel lonely. Life is slower, much less stressful.
|
| I feel sorry when I see kids today depressed, lonely, and
| distrusts society. This just didn't happen when I was growing
| up in a village. There is a joke that Asian parents don't
| think depression exists. I think part of that mindset is
| rooted in how many of them grew up - depression was just not
| really a thing in a village.
|
| I sometimes hear of people who try to move to the country
| side, only to hate it and want to move back to cities. I get
| it. It's not for everyone. But I think it can be aided with
| technology such as AI+robots helping with your farms or house
| work, self driving cars taking your kids to school a bit far
| away, AI doctors who can do most of the basic healthcare
| work, etc. And if you can build a business with 1 or 2 people
| + AI, then it also makes remote work more viable. Basically,
| I think tech can bring a lot of the city quality of life to
| the country side.
|
| If kids want to move to a town/city for more opportunities or
| networking, they'd be free to do so when they're older. Most
| do. But right now, the cities seem like the only path to
| having a decent quality of life.
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| > In a village, everyone knows everyone. Kids play with
| each other and run around freely. Every house protects all
| the kids and help each other. Everyone trusts everyone.
|
| Seems like a recipe for rampant child abuse.
| aurareturn wrote:
| I never felt unsafe as a kid or abused in any way
| although my mom would make me memorize our village's name
| and location in case I get abducted while playing with my
| friends. We'd often go over to neighboring villages to
| play because some of our friends from school lived in a
| different village. We played until dawn and then went
| home to have dinner.
| sudo_cowsay wrote:
| Doesn't happen that much. Possibly the environment in
| which people grow up in is so free and kind. Sort of like
| Hawaii's aloha spirit (search it up).
| lmm wrote:
| > In a village, everyone knows everyone. Kids play with
| each other and run around freely. Every house protects all
| the kids and help each other. Everyone trusts everyone. You
| never feel lonely.
|
| In Japan that's true in a lot of city neighbourhoods as
| well. The high trust is extremely valuable but villages are
| not the only way to achieve it.
| ncruces wrote:
| > In a village, everyone knows everyone. Kids play with
| each other and run around freely. Every house protects all
| the kids and help each other. Everyone trusts everyone. You
| never feel lonely. Life is slower, much less stressful.
|
| That just means we need to structure cities differently.
|
| I live in a 1 sq km neighbourhood (literally, 1 km square)
| that houses 10k people.
|
| It has almost everything I could wish for at walkable
| distance, schools for all ages, parks, a gym, a pool,
| sports campgrounds, medics, pharmacies, stores, markets,
| etc.
|
| What doesn't exist (e.g. a movie theater, a library) I can
| reach by public transit in half an hour. The city has 2M
| people, there's plenty of stuff to do.
|
| I've lived here all my life, my kids go to school with the
| kids of my school mates. They walk to school from at least
| 10yo, they visit each other's houses. During school breaks
| and weekends, they play in the park with their school
| friends while their parents grab a beer in a nearby kiosk.
|
| You can build communities like this within cities.
| watwut wrote:
| City kids have friends, play outside and go visit friends.
| That is completely normal in most world cities. And yes,
| where public transport exists, city kids do use public
| transport to get to school, to visit friends or to go to
| the gym.
|
| > I feel sorry when I see kids today depressed, lonely, and
| distrusts society.
|
| The weird thing is, rural people show a lot of distrust and
| fear that city people seem to show less. Rural people just
| assume that city means danger and fear.
|
| > depression was just not really a thing in a village.
|
| This is simply not true. If you look at social issues like
| alcoholism, drug use, suicides or domestic violence ...
| villages have plenty of those. They have harder
| availability of psychologists and psychiatrists. That does
| not mean issues do not exist there, they measurably do.
| senttoschool wrote:
| City kids have friends, play outside and go visit
| friends.
|
| Yes, and city kids also eat, poop, and talk. :)
|
| I think it's the degree that matters.
| This is simply not true. If you look at social issues
| like alcoholism, drug use, suicides or domestic violence
| ... villages have plenty of those.
|
| Degree matters here too.
| watwut wrote:
| > I think it's the degree that matters.
|
| City kids do not have less friends then rural kids. They
| do not socialize less. And if their super local turns up
| mistreating them, they have actual option to go
| elsewhere.
|
| > Degree matters here too.
|
| Yes. Small villages have more of these. The rural culture
| of alcoholism and domestic violence acceptance is both
| something very real and traditional. What are we talking
| about here, seriously. You frequently had to drink with
| others, else you was an outsider. And if family situation
| turned out bad, you have literally no where to go. (It is
| not like it would be easy in the city. But you have to
| from village to city to maybe get help.)
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| > I feel sorry when I see kids today depressed, lonely, and
| distrusts society. This just didn't happen when I was
| growing up [wherever].
|
| That is said almost verbatim by every adult in the US,
| including the ones who grew up in cities.
| lukan wrote:
| "A kid in a town/city has access to a billion opportunities
| many of which exist only because there are enough people
| interested."
|
| Most of those opportunities involve getting hit by a car.
| adrianN wrote:
| Cars in rural settings are generally faster and more
| indispensable for their owners. It is much easier to enact
| policy that reduces car traffic in cities than in villages.
| lukan wrote:
| I see. Have you lived with kids in a village and also in
| cities to see the difference in reality?
|
| I did and am moving back to the village now.
| adrianN wrote:
| I grew up in a city and my wife grew up in a village. We
| now live in a city and don't own a car.
| lukan wrote:
| But you don't have kids yet?
|
| It makes a pretty big difference. Yes, the opportunities
| in the city are bigger for everything, but so are the
| dangers. The amount of crazy people. The effort involved
| in getting to a nice and safe place where the kids can
| just run around without you having to watch them every
| second. Those places also exist in some cities, but way
| too few. So great that you don't have a car, (I mean it)
| car free places in cities I do enjoy, there are just not
| many of them.
| adrianN wrote:
| I have two three year olds. Parks where they can run
| around with relaxed supervision are not far. A big park
| is close enough that they can walk the distance and in
| less than half an hour by bike we can reach a forest and
| four or five other parks.
| indemnity wrote:
| I grew up in a similar environment, similar trajectory, but in
| Africa.
|
| Dad was a teacher in a rural school, mum stayed at home.
|
| Until I went to school I would stay outside all day with my
| friends, playing in and around the rivers and dams, making our
| own fun with abandoned cars and rusted out farming equipment.
|
| Our school had one computer, and I was lucky enough to get to
| use it after hours from time to time.
|
| I would study the manual from front to back so I could optimise
| my time while on the computer.
|
| Practiced typing on a typewriter to type in code listings
| faster later (aging myself here ;)
|
| Today I build AI agents and infrastructure to run them for a
| hyperscaler, and my car drives me around. Feels like another
| lifetime ago.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| This is rural Scotland in the late 1970s / early 1980s.
|
| I'd like my small son to have the same opportunities that I
| had, instead of a school where the playground has lots of
| very carefully manufactured play equipment and they get to
| sit and look at iPads instead of working out for themselves
| how to program a BBC Micro.
| sheept wrote:
| > My one hope for AI, robotics, self driving cars, is that they
| can enable people in cities to migrate back to rural places.
|
| Wouldn't it be better, at least for the Earth, for everyone to
| live in cities? This way, more of the world can remain fairly
| untouched by humans, and it could still remain easy accessible
| from the city for recreational purposes.
|
| The solarpunk ideal of living a rural life requires more road
| infrastructure, which cuts off wildlife routes and natural
| drainage, and even with EVs, still pollutes the air from tire
| wear.
| adrianN wrote:
| That is my understanding too, but many people equate rural
| life with ,,natural". Unfortunately the rural environment is
| all but natural. The cultural landscape that has been
| engineered over centuries all but displaced true wilderness
| and is largely devoid of biodiversity. The better we become
| at industrial agriculture, the worse the situation is.
| mlrtime wrote:
| Not everywhere, you are looking at only suburbs vs cities.
| oblio wrote:
| The amount of people that want truly rural environments
| is infinitesimal.
|
| Everyone wants a huge house with lots of land far from
| neighbors.
|
| But then they want the state of the art hospital to be
| close. They want to be able yo reach the closest airport
| in max 1 hour. They want their kids to play with other
| kids, ideally without being chauffeured around endlessly,
| etc, etc.
|
| What I've discovered is that humanity has mastered the
| ancestral art of "having the cake and eating it, too",
| also called delusion and/or hypocrisy :-)
| satvikpendem wrote:
| True rural farming is still bad for nature because the
| land is cleared of biodiversity to make way for farm
| land. It is arguably worse than cities because a lot more
| land per person is cleared.
| vintermann wrote:
| That depends on the rural environment. Especially grazing
| lands, like north European coastal heathlands, may have
| been managed with controlled burns in between grazing for a
| thousand years, to the point that they have their own
| biodiversity, that may get lost if they are disused.
| vkou wrote:
| A very large fraction of land (~50%) is currently used to
| grow biomass to feed 8 billion humans. Nothing about that
| land is 'natural' - it's a carefully engineered environment
| that's quite hostile to animal life.
|
| The land that people _live_ on, whether it 's in a city, a
| suburb, or in a rural manner is a rounding error compared to
| those demands.
| Terr_ wrote:
| This only looks at land mammals rather than plant crops,
| but...
|
| https://xkcd.com/1338/
| oblio wrote:
| We could probably reduced cultivated land by 50% if we
| would stop wanting to eat mid-sized or large animals (cows
| and pigs).
| t-3 wrote:
| It's not that simple. Large herbivores are _necessary_
| for many environments and useful agriculturally even if
| we didn 't eat them. Desertification caused by removing
| trees and grazing without replenishing, nutrients lost
| because sunlight and wind are scraping the bare soil,
| monoculture deserts and insecticides killing off
| pollinators and destroying ecologies... It's the factory
| farming and profit-motivated short-termist resource
| extraction that's a problem, not the cows and pigs. We
| can transition to sustainable methods without decreasing
| food variety.
| oblio wrote:
| I'm fairly sure there weren't 1.5 billion cows in the
| world before humans.
| t-3 wrote:
| There were many other large mammals, but we've destroyed
| a lot of biodiversity already.
| oblio wrote:
| Yes, but there weren't that many large grazing animals
| because most of the world was covered in woods, not
| pastures. Trees are the most successful large creatures
| and we've probably reduced their habitat by 50%.
|
| That's the actual tragedy. Forests contain a lot more
| like per cubic km than pastures do.
| adrianN wrote:
| _some_ ruminants are good because they can turn inedible
| biomass into calories. However the scale at which we farm
| them is orders of magnitude beyond those levels.
| bwv848 wrote:
| And the best way for Earth is we all migrate to Mars aboard
| Elon Musk's spaceship.
| gambiting wrote:
| If you're going to live underground(and you'd have to on
| Mars) you might as well do it here, at the bottom of the
| ocean, or if you're feeling particularily ambitious - even
| on the moon. There is literally zero advantage to doing it
| on Mars, except for the achievement.
| bwv848 wrote:
| What's the difference? All have to live under central
| planning, all have to live with hubris of the rich and
| elites, at least Mars sounds way cooler than living in
| cities.
| oblio wrote:
| If you think Musk doesn't want central planning, you're
| sorely misunderstanding his point of view.
|
| Musk wants to be a founding father. And just as the OG
| founding fathers, his problem isn't necessarily with the
| centralization part in general, but with the centralizing
| being done by others. There's a reason the original
| American voters were all white land owning men (and in
| some cases, slave owning men!).
| bwv848 wrote:
| I agree with your point but you guys really have to take
| a look at what I was replying to and was I being serious
| at all.
| oblio wrote:
| Oooops :-D
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| > Wouldn't it be better, at least for the Earth, for everyone
| to live in cities? This way, more of the world can remain
| fairly untouched by humans
|
| Where's the food going to come from?
| defrost wrote:
| Farms - with a near infinitesimal number of farmers
| compared to the numbers living in cities .. exactly as
| things are trending now.
|
| It's common enough, here at least, to have a small family
| cropping 13,000 old school acres - tilling, seeding,
| waiting, harvesting, etc with big machines and Ag-bots.
|
| eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpNMSSGWnOI
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| So not really "fairly untouched", then.
|
| You're going to need more farms and more farmers, and no-
| one can afford to be shipping food halfway round the
| planet.
| defrost wrote:
| Let's see, I didn't make any claim about untouched -
| although I do have some strong positions on wetlands
| cover, corridors, wild old forrest, et al but that's a
| whole other aside.
|
| I'm just here to point out farming and livestock at
| suprisng to many scales can be operated by fewer people
| than you might expect.
|
| as for: > no-one can afford to be shipping food halfway
| round the planet.
|
| what does the Atlas of Economic Complexity type datasets
| currently say about food volume tonnages and trip
| lengths? I know that our local farmers co-op
| handles handysize to post-Panamax vessel shipments from
| Australia, United States, Canada, South America and
| Europe to key grain markets in Asia, Europe, Central
| America and the Middle East.
|
| ( from: https://www.cbh.com.au/exports-overview )
|
| and there are other grain basins about the globe.
|
| The challenges for grain shipping going forward likely
| fall about getting sufficient production of non fossil
| origin methanol fuel variations for shipping engines.
|
| That and making sure the front doesn't fall off.
| zdragnar wrote:
| And yet, farmers still need roads, and hardware stores,
| and grocery stores, and hospitals, and HVAC and plumbers
| and before you know it, you need villages for all the
| people those people depend on, along with their families.
| defrost wrote:
| Farming communities have already had these things, the
| broad pattern is that fewer and fewer of thiese thigs are
| needed as fewer and fewer people are needed to work the
| same land.
|
| Urbanisation ratios have increased, farm worker
| percentages decreased, average land area holdings
| increased so stores, schools, etc. are closing.
|
| As time passes now, more an more old farm hoses are
| vacant island in an ocean of larger consolidated
| workings.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Fewer people are needed to work megafarms, but the basic
| needs for these services don't go away entirely. As a
| result, moving people to the urban centers still leaves
| you with all the things that you hoped urbanizing would
| get rid of- roads and rural communities.
| defrost wrote:
| Perhaps reread the upstream and pay close attention to
| the usernames and who said what.
|
| > all the things that you hoped urbanizing would get rid
| of- roads and rural communities.
|
| I spoke about the actual real in this moment trend that
| is already happening; increased urbanisation, I said
| nothing about wanting to see the end of roads or rural
| communities - although I'm a big fan of seeing less human
| impact on larger areas of managed land - land that
| includes agriculture, mining, native reserves, cropped
| treelands, etc.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| It is often costlier and worse for the environment to
| ship locally than across the world.
|
| https://www.wpr.org/news/locally-grown-fruits-veggies-
| expens...
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| But it's more ecologically sustainable to eat what grows
| where you live.
|
| We do not have the capacity to ship food halfway round
| the world because picky eaters don't like the idea of
| eating meat and potatoes.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| > But it's more ecologically sustainable to eat what
| grows where you live.
|
| Depends on the food, if you're clearing land for a new
| crop (which many countries have done historically and
| still do today) then it's not sustainable. And if the
| native crops are simply not as good nutritionally as the
| new crop then it's better to eat the new crop even at the
| ecological cost of the native one, e.g. potatoes vs
| barley in Ireland.
|
| I'm not sure what you're referring to in your second
| sentence, not sure why picky eaters wouldn't like meat
| and potatoes or what that has to do with shipping in
| general, not even the fact that we do indeed have the
| capacity and will to ship food halfway around the world
| already today.
| defrost wrote:
| We do have the capacity to ship massive tonnages of
| grains, meat, fruits, livestock around the globe and we
| use it ensure sufficient pipelines to feed a billion+
| global population across all seasons and weathers.
|
| Costs at that scale are large, transcontinental railways
| across mountains, lifting tonnages against graivity in
| addition to rolling friction, braking energy and return
| to steady motion energy repeated for frequent stops and
| loading, transfer, loading times add up.
|
| Per tonne per kilometres costs of floating container
| ships and binned grain ships are easily competitive.
|
| There are points to be made about lower tonnages of picky
| people foods, lobsters, fancy beef, a Bugatti Chiron
| tucked away amidst a cavern of self loading basic
| electric cars .. but there's still an underlying current
| _need_ to transport food from source to demand.
|
| The _costs_ of global shipping transport is iron mining,
| steel formation, build times, fuel production, fuel side
| effects, and so on - fuel side effects are a bit of a
| pressing issue, and have been since at least that 1967
| absolute banger by Syukuro Manabe and Richard T.
| Wetherald they chose to call _Thermal Equilibrium of the
| Atmosphere with a Given Distribution of Relative
| Humidity_
|
| > But it's more ecologically sustainable to eat what
| grows where you live.
|
| Sure, that's Jill says, nice lady, actually a former
| first lady of the state I live in:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UKu3bCbFck
| ssl-3 wrote:
| We've already touched ~all of the arable and non-arable land
| that's near to where people want to live. Forests clearcut,
| swamps (and deltas and the Netherlands) drained, rivers
| rerouted, reservoirs established, plains tilled, roads built,
| mountains conquered: We've been shaping and expanding the
| habitable Earth as it suits us for a very long time.
|
| We're humans. We do that stuff.
|
| And we're natural creatures like the rest of them are.
| mlrtime wrote:
| It would also be better for the earth if there were no cities
| and everyone went back to village farming and local
| communities. I also don't see that ever happening nor do I
| want to ive in a city.
| somenameforme wrote:
| Here's a fun thought experiment for you. If you dug a 1 mile
| cubic square hole. How many humans could you fit into it? The
| answer is not only all of us but about around an order of
| magnitude more on top. I'm not sure if this emphasizes how
| few humans there are, or how massive the Earth is. But it's
| the same point in both cases.
|
| Some human activities can have an outsized impact, but the
| overwhelming majority of those activities remain necessary
| regardless of where people live, and some will have an
| greater impact with widespread urbanity since some things
| like energy/food/water can be relatively cleanly
| decentralized in rural settings, at least partially, but
| require complete centralization in urban settings.
| Johanx64 wrote:
| > I'm not sure if this emphasizes how few humans there are,
| or how massive the Earth is. But it's the same point in
| both cases.
|
| It emphasizes neither!
|
| What you've described is a mass grave.
|
| Quite literally so. If you killed all living humans
| (8.3billion), the mass-grave you'd have to dig to put them
| all in one place isn't quite large indeed!
|
| Plus, humans on earth are affected by gravity, so any
| arrangement of them cubic squares instead of square miles
| is highly unintuitive, unusual and unnatural to begin with.
|
| This doesn't say anything about habitable or fertile
| farmable area (measured in km^2, not in km^3) of the
| planet, or the number of people (that you've conveniently
| reduced by taking a square root of - twice! by packing them
| into a tightly packed cube)
|
| For example, if you took 8 billion people and made them
| hold hands with each other tightly packed (0.5m per person)
| it would wrap the circumference of earth 100 times.
|
| Now this actually says something about size of the earth!
|
| If you divy up the land surface of earth by population, you
| get a rather small parcel of land, something to tune of
| 140m x 140m (this includes deserts and other mostly
| uninhabitable lands!)
|
| Arable land would be a much smaller parcel of land still!
|
| If you measure human land use in terms of arable land and
| living space per person, instead of mass-grave metrics the
| planet Earth is pretty much squarely over-populated and is
| very much stretching of what is sustainable.
| dilawar wrote:
| I grew up in North India, close to Ramganga river (Jim Corbet
| park is on this river). We grew rice in addition to sugar cane.
|
| The smell of paddy (and also of large quantity of cooked rice)
| is absolutely soothing for me and it brings back memory.
|
| During my grandfather time, it was very common for a crab to
| grab your fingers when you are planting the paddy. My father
| would chase turtles and large frogs when he was a kid.
|
| When I was a kid, the crabs and turtles were gone but frogs
| were pretty abundant. In last twenty years, there are hardly
| any frogs left. Earthworms are also under stress.
|
| The Japanese style of planting paddy wasn't very common in
| India before green revolution. Then we had a some new varieties
| that took over almost all old varieties for a simple reason for
| yield. My grandmother used to complain about a lost variety a
| lot. Apparently it had such a strong aroma that whole village
| would know what rice you have cooked. Glad to see more efforts
| preserving old varieties [1].
|
| [1] https://ruralindiaonline.org/article/let-them-eat-rice
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| Honestly the rice varieties in India should be promoted and
| protected more. The diversity and health benefits of these
| varieties is immense.
| srean wrote:
| This is so important. Kerala in particular had a treasure
| trove of varieties, some well suited to low rainfall,
| resistant to local pests. I am sure other states had/has
| such diversity too, I am just not knowledgeable enough.
|
| These genotypes are being lost to industrial mono-cropping.
| The government is doing nothing about it.
| helterskelter wrote:
| > These genotypes are being lost to industrial mono-
| cropping. The government is doing nothing about it.
|
| This is happening worldwide and is one of the tragedies
| of modernity. Mexico for instance has tons of regional
| varieties of peppers that don't grow anywhere else except
| for in a very specific micro climate and they're
| disappearing in large part because of cheap imports that
| makes farming them unprofitable.
| srean wrote:
| So unfortunate. Short term thinking doing its damage.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| There is hope. India's Central Rice Research Institute is
| quite active and is working on some of the problems.
|
| https://icar-crri.in/popular-nrri-varieties/
| seer wrote:
| Is this the "city experience" in general or specifically for
| the United States? It famously has very poor urbanism so might
| not mean the same as in Europe for example.
|
| I have grown up in rural Russia in the 80s and that was also
| similar - a forest started 50m from our house and I would just
| get lost there from time to time - not fun for my parents but
| magical for me.
|
| Then we moved to the middle of a European capital city (Sofia)
| and I _still_ had almost a forest right next to the apartment
| block we used to live in - enough of a forest that as a 10yo
| kid I could find a nook to build myself a small hut with a
| burning fireplace inside it and nobody complained.
|
| There are plenty of big European cities that are 10-20mins
| short unsupervised trip to a wilderness that a kid can do.
|
| For example - Valencia has an uninterrupted bicycle highway
| that gets you from the city center to a wilderness preserve and
| a beach in less than an hour cycling.
|
| To me all of these nature vs city laments are just US car
| dependency. Cities don't have to be this way at all.
| macleginn wrote:
| A lot of areas in Western Europe are either completely
| deforested or have very weird low-density half-dead wooded
| areas, especially Germany. One has to go all the way to
| Poland/Serbia/Bulgaria to get a real forest experience again.
| oblio wrote:
| Some of this is being slowly reverted:
|
| https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/2d
| e...
| macleginn wrote:
| This is very nice, but unfortunately, it will take
| forever (in human-life terms) to bring "real" forests
| back.
|
| (In my previous post, I forgot to mention stunning
| rainforests near Sintra in Portugal.)
| adrianN wrote:
| A good way to destroy real forests is moving a lot of
| people closer to them to have a forest experience near
| their house.
| macleginn wrote:
| Surprisingly, this seems to be not true. Moscow, a city
| of 10+ million people, has huge forests inside or
| adjacent to the city limits. People leave rubbish here
| and there, but unless forests are rezoned and actively
| developed as "recreation zones" or some such, they are
| doing okay. One can easily find more species of birds in
| a large Moscow park than in the whole of Baden-
| Wuerttemberg. The trick is not depleting the ecosystem to
| begin with.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| I think that's a profoundly balanced perspective on a possible
| future wherein automation has successfully dealt with most of
| the mundanities of producing the things we need to live and
| enjoy life.
|
| It allows for supremely-intense end-game levels of automation,
| and also for personal productivity and a resulting increased
| joy, and for at least some aspects of free market economics to
| all work together.
|
| (Can it happen? Perhaps we'll find out.)
| adamjb wrote:
| >My one hope for AI, robotics, self driving cars, is that they
| can enable more people in cities to migrate back to rural
| places
|
| Ah, the perennial dream of the technologist. Here's a Le
| Corbusier quote on the same theme from 100 years ago
|
| > The cities will be part of the country; I shall live 30 miles
| from my office in one direction, under a pine tree; my
| secretary will live 30 miles away from it too, in the other
| direction, under another pine tree. We shall both have our own
| car.
| Tade0 wrote:
| Meanwhile the rest would be housed in "machines for living
| in".
|
| If there is a hell, Le Corbusier is currently in it, eating
| the equivalent in cement to all the monstrosities he
| concocted.
| antisthenes wrote:
| > Ah, the perennial dream of the technologist. Here's a Le
| Corbusier quote on the same theme from 100 years ago
|
| Except this time, the dream is actually real and cheaper than
| ever thanks to small EVs, batteries and solar power. 100
| years ago it was limited to people with large estates who
| owned cars (and probably needed secretaries for their work).
|
| These days it's more affordable than ever (except
| land/housing)
| mathgladiator wrote:
| Some of us are living it. I plan to raise and slaughter
| cattle. Building a house now.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| I grew up in similar environment in rural central India and I
| (half)jokingly say farming was my first real job. We rarely
| planted rice, but I have vivid memory of helping my father
| plant the rice saplings in the muddy puddles in my farm.
|
| I am always skeptical of urban people wanting to move back to
| little villages to do farming. Farming is a back-breaking and a
| tough job. You are exposed to all the vagaries of nature. The
| market forces are also not always in your favour. It is another
| version of "quit-job-and-open-a-coffee-shop" fallacy.
| vintermann wrote:
| Well, those who quit their jobs and open coffee shops almost
| certainly make a bad choice for themselves economically and
| work/ life balance wise... But they do wonderful things for
| their community, and - a questionable benefit to society but
| a huge benefit to some - real estate prices. People love
| these places. They capture a tiny fraction of the value they
| create, if we look at it in cold terms.
|
| That can't really be said for downscaling rice farmers, can
| it? I mean, at best maybe the other rice farmers enjoy having
| them around.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| I meant it as a pipe-dream that people jump into without
| knowing the hidden asymmetries. Farming of any kind is hard
| and learning that specific skillset is necessary to
| succeed.
| hparadiz wrote:
| For most folks it's just an add on. I have grandparents
| in Europe that have a garden where they grew potatoes and
| about 50 other things I'm not gonna list. They make jams,
| pickled things, and various other preserves. It's
| something to do and kept them sharp until they hit their
| late 80s.
| somenameforme wrote:
| Agreed. There's a world of difference between 'farming'
| for personal to small scale production as not quite a
| recreation but also not quite a job, and farming a low
| margin staple at high volume as your primary and sole
| means of earning money.
|
| And I think when most people speak of the dream of
| returning to rural society to e.g. farm, they're speaking
| very much of the former rather than the latter.
| throwup238 wrote:
| That has been my experience as well, having immigrated
| from Eastern Europe to an enclave in the US. We know at
| least a dozen families (including our own) with 2-10 acre
| homesteads and all of them had previous experience with
| gardens and dachas in the Soviet Union that they used to
| grow supplemental produce, so no one came into the deal
| with delusions of making any profit. Everyone gives away
| the excess to neighbors of which there is usually a lot
| because yields are high on hand tended trees (and dutch
| bucket hydro).
|
| The single biggest reason these farms exist is because
| American retail produce is mostly _garbage_. It's so
| economically micro-optimized that all flavour has been
| wrung out of it. The only way many of us immigrants can
| get back the flavors of our childhoods is by growing the
| fruits and vegetables ourselves, if only to have control
| over the varieties, the vast majority of which are not
| sold in stores ( >95%). That nostalgia is what pays the
| margin.
| coffee_is_nom wrote:
| Where is this wonderful community, I would love to have
| neighbors like your described and where I can work in
| tech but still have 10 acre garden.
| hparadiz wrote:
| You don't really need 10 acres. My grandparents made do
| with 1/4 of an acre and would have yields of 350-500 lbs
| of potatoes per season. That's so much that they would
| give it away. I have fruit trees that require almost no
| effort to maintain once established. My neighbors give me
| oranges that fall to the ground and rot otherwise. It's
| not all or nothing. You can have a basil plant in an
| apartment.
| throwup238 wrote:
| We're not neighbors unfortunately because we're spread
| out all over Southern California. By "enclave" I mean the
| area between West Hollywood and Arcadia, where many
| Eastern Europeans immigrated during the post-Soviet brain
| drain, not a dense conglomerate like San Gabriel.
|
| BTW you do _NOT_ want ten acres. That is a back breaking
| amount of work and even with modern technology you 'll
| struggle to cope (it's not enough to afford most heavy
| equipment, but too much to do manually). You want an acre
| or two where you have enough space to plant trees. It
| takes a few years from nursery to fruiting, but they are
| far lower maintenance.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Lots of places have community gardens. Hell, I go to one
| in the middle of NYC, a rooftop garden run by a friend.
| We even grow our own wheat for bread making.
| olalonde wrote:
| I was at my wife's hometown for CNY and it seems her mother
| still does everything by hand. Pretty impressive... not sure
| how long I'd last doing that kind of hard labor. It does smell
| nice.
|
| https://gist.github.com/olalonde/8a905bcd87e3bfcd4f6143a337e...
| aurareturn wrote:
| Yea that rice mill machine is similar to what I remember. Our
| village didn't have one so some guy would show up in harvest
| season to do it for every house in the village.
|
| I can tell by the houses in your wife's village that their
| area was likely wealthier than ours growing up. Our houses
| looked more like this: https://imgur.com/a/Pc9LuKF
|
| When I was a kid, it felt like there were only 2 or 3
| villages total in my area since our parents didn't allow us
| to go too far. As a visiting adult, I found out that there
| were hundreds of similar villages in the region. Most of
| these villages are generally empty nowadays as people moved
| to cities. However, I heard from locals that some younger
| people are beginning to return to villages and raise their
| kids there.
| olalonde wrote:
| Oh, I assumed you meant a powered machine.
|
| I believe it's pretty quiet here too outside of CNY,
| although there is at least one active school nearby. Nice
| to hear some younger people are returning. It must be nice
| for kids to grow up in this kind of environment.
| aurareturn wrote:
| Oh I didn't realize that some people would interpret that
| machine as powered by electricity.
|
| Our village didn't get electricity until the 90s, I
| think. I do remember having electricity growing up, and
| even a small TV. By the time I emigrated, some households
| had refrigerators.
| RataNova wrote:
| It's nice to hear someone who's been on both sides still hold
| onto that appreciation
| binsquare wrote:
| Similar experience!
|
| It's a very unique and fulfilling experience to be one with the
| nature. You get to learn that chickens eat almost anything.
| There's definitely a sense of belonging in nature that I miss
| magicbuzz wrote:
| As someone producing food, it's pretty much a given that
| something in nature will seek to consume what you are producing.
| I was waiting for it, and in this case, wild boar.
| throwaway27448 wrote:
| Not a problem with cassava!
| TurdF3rguson wrote:
| That suitcase of rice story though, I'm finding it problematic
| lol.
|
| - First of all a 95% increase in the price of rice means it less
| than doubled which is no big deal.
|
| - I think maybe you meant it 20x'ed ? If so I will just eat corn
| until it comes down (my house eats 100kg of rice in a month)
|
| - Can a suitcase of rice even get through customs?
| TheDong wrote:
| Indeed it's a roughly 2x increase (5kg supermarket bag from
| 2000 jpy to 4000).
|
| Whether that's a big deal or not depends on the person, their
| finances, how much rice the family eats, etc etc.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Whether that's a big deal or not depends on the person,
| their finances, how much rice the family eats, etc etc.
|
| There's a nasty interaction among those concerns: as the
| basic staple food of the diet, rice is consumed in larger
| amounts by poorer people who can't afford real food, like
| meat.
|
| Which means that a spike in the price of rice is effectively
| targeted at people who can't afford to substitute other
| foods.
| TurdF3rguson wrote:
| Corn is still cheaper. If you're really poor in Asia you're
| eating corn (and complaining about it).
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| If you go into a Chinese supermarket, it will quickly
| become apparent that the default cooking oil is corn oil.
|
| I find this an interesting contrast with the United
| States, where the default cooking oil is Canola oil (if
| you're a person looking to cook your own food; this is
| the sense in which the Chinese default is corn oil) or
| soybean oil (if you're a company looking to sell packaged
| food in grocery stores). As far as I'm aware, traditional
| China would have had sesame oil and maybe soybean oil,
| and certainly not corn oil. The advantage of corn oil
| must be the price.
|
| But if corn oil is so cheap, why does the cheapest oil
| available in the US seem to be soybean oil?
| riskable wrote:
| China has a minimum purchase price of corn that's set by
| the government in order to maintain food stocks. It's
| also part of a larger jobs program (that I don't know
| much about).
|
| China also imports 80% of its soybeans which means it's
| based on the rising/falling prices of oil and whatnot.
|
| In the US, soybeans are a very important crop that's fed
| to livestock and also used in biodiesel production.
| There's _enormous_ soybean "crush" infrastructure in the
| US to support the biodiesel market and the side effect of
| this results in tons of extra soybean oil. It ultimately
| ends up with soybean oil being cheap compared to
| everything else.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Corn??? I don't think corn in bulk is cheaply available
| in Japan at all. There's a mention in Wikipedia of a
| Chinese-Mongolian corn meal porridge thing but it looks
| pretty local.
| TurdF3rguson wrote:
| It's available but it's culturally considered a grain
| that you feed to livestock rather than humans. I mostly
| feel the same way about it TBH.
| numpad0 wrote:
| I think Japanese rice-centric framing of meals is also of
| note, it's not universal across East Asia - I mean,
| allegedly, bowl of rice next to ramen is meme worthy to
| people from China, but it's just a menu item in Japan.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > I mean, allegedly, bowl of rice next to ramen is meme
| worthy to people from China
|
| I can't personally attest to that, but it certainly makes
| sense. Rice meals vs noodle meals are a fairly
| fundamental split in Chinese cuisine.
|
| (It doesn't make rice any less of a staple food.)
| callmeal wrote:
| >rice is consumed in larger amounts by poorer people who
| can't afford real food
|
| Um, rice _is_ real food too, right?
| bgnn wrote:
| Wait. Dod I read this right? Are you saying rice isn't real
| food but meat is?
|
| I understand most cultures over-appreciate meat, but
| treating a premium carb source like rice lowly is a
| surprise.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > my house eats 100kg of rice in a month
|
| What's the maths on that? A cup of rice would seem a fair bit
| for a person for a meal. A cup is about 200g.
|
| That's 500 portions a month. 5.5 people for 3 meals a day?
| TurdF3rguson wrote:
| It fluctuates but on average maybe 5 humans and 10 dogs.
| lostlogin wrote:
| That's an amazing volume.
| PowerElectronix wrote:
| You give rice to the dogs, too?
| callmeal wrote:
| Yup - family dogs eat what we do. Funny story - my mom's
| dog will not eat rice unless there's also fish (leftover
| bones will do). Rice+fish - bowl is cleaned up. Rice+meat
| - only the meat is picked and eaten.
| TurdF3rguson wrote:
| Read the ingredients on a can of dog food, there's either
| rice or corn in it. They prefer rice.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| A lot of Asian households are multi-generational, so the
| maths definitely checks out there.
|
| I'm putting my money on more people (8-10) but eating less
| than 200g per meal (1/2 cup uncooked, ~100g for most people)
|
| EDIT, just saw sibling, that's impressive for 5 people,
| unless the dogs eat a lot of rice too.
| statedin wrote:
| You are a absolutely right the coming generation would have no
| idea about the carming, or wouldnlack to see the real process
| TrackerFF wrote:
| It is probably a nice experience to have, but imagine your body
| after doing this for 50-60 years. You're one serious back injury
| away from being unemployed.
| esseph wrote:
| Much like carpentry, or electrical work, or concrete, or just
| about any of the trades.
|
| Any labor throughout human history.
| knollimar wrote:
| If ypu do those for 15 years you are likely in management
| emptyfile wrote:
| Maybe in hacker news reality, not in the real world.
| esseph wrote:
| Correct. Dozens or hundreds of workers for every manager
| or foreman.
|
| There's also a lot of owner/operator one-man shops.
| knollimar wrote:
| Consider the turnover rate as an geometric series.
|
| Also 1 foreman in the electrical field runs effectively
| 50 guys max if good, and smaller sites might be 10 men to
| a foreman. I currently have 3 foreman running 5 to 6 guys
| each at my current company (2 close sites of 3)
| knollimar wrote:
| I do electrical work and have looked at data for my last
| 3 companies.
|
| 10 years in you should be a foreman or something is
| wrong.
| knollimar wrote:
| Some guys choose to do joruneyman work, but they
| typically have the option if they're not mute or
| something. It's a choice ij my experience (They like OT
| or working alone or hate travel)
| throwaway27448 wrote:
| > Any labor throughout human history.
|
| Sure, but sedentary labor destroys the body through neglect--
| which is ultimately a choice.
| esseph wrote:
| > Sure, but sedentary labor destroys the body through
| neglect--which is ultimately a choice
|
| Huh? It's not clear to me what you're trying to say here.
| throwaway27448 wrote:
| Meaning, you can somewhat opt out of the damage sedentary
| labor does to the body by exercising and using your body.
| It is much more difficult to avoid manual labor from
| damaging the body.
| esseph wrote:
| Sure, which is why many white collar workers look down on
| tradesmen (in the US at least), and tradesmen look down
| on white collar workers as "bullshit email jobs".
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Exercise is optional, labor in a manual labor job is
| mandatory
| elwray wrote:
| I and my wife live in the city for work. While most people flock
| to the city and settle there as an upgraded life, we always felt
| empty here. Our dream is to buy a piece of land at our village
| and come back to our roots. I dont enjoy farming that much but my
| wife does. I however like the bliss of living close to nature.
| There is a river that flows nearby and taking a dip in that fills
| me with so much joy that I could never find anywhere in the city.
| metalman wrote:
| I was prepared to be dissapointed, but I am not. Honest, simple,
| carrys that sense of work is good and doing what needs to be done
| is enough and that you are just another critter.
| aledevv wrote:
| _> Doing a day of manual labour, chatting shit, then going for
| the onsen and some BBQ and beers is far better than grinding away
| at some enterprise SaaS that will probably disappear in a few
| years._
|
| I particularly agree with this statement.
|
| I don't know why _manual_ work has been so denigrated over the
| last century. We believed that office labor was more important
| and healthier than manual labor. I don 't think so.
|
| As a developer, sitting all day typing in a stuffy office,
| without natural light, without sun, without air, is certainly no
| healthier than being outdoors, connecting with nature and other
| people. We come from nature and are made to be active, outdoors,
| and in the sunlight.
|
| Today, with AI, many white-collar jobs are being called into
| question, and perhaps we can go back to loving certain
| traditional jobs.
| sdevonoes wrote:
| I'd love to do manual labor as long as: I have a decent house,
| decent health insurance, can afford decent food/stuff, can
| afford taking sabbaticals, can afford getting sick and not
| losing my income, can afford decent education for kids, etc.
|
| Unfortunately, many of us are chained to the modern way of
| life.
| aledevv wrote:
| @sdevonoes What do you do for work?
|
| ps: Unfortunately I agree with you.
| teruakohatu wrote:
| Don't forget doing only enough manual labour not to get hurt,
| killed or develop a chronic condition.
|
| You can make a lot of money doing many skilled manual jobs in
| my country. Trades are highly paid and there is not enough
| supply. Better money than software development.
|
| They often wreck their backs, or develop other chronic
| conditions. The successful ones stop doing manual work by the
| time they are in their 40s and move to running their own
| businesses employing 20 year olds.
|
| A friend of mine just lost a family member a few weeks ago.
| He slipped on a roof.
| aledevv wrote:
| @teruakohatu Some example of manual labor well payed in
| your country? In Italy, sometime manual labors are more
| safe than others not manual jobs.
|
| This is because often the rules and laws protects still
| human instead the profits.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| You don't have to @ their name here on HN, it doesn't
| work like Twitter. When you reply to them they'll see it
| already.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Only if they go back through their threads.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Or they use something like https://www.hnreplies.com/
| which many do. In any case the @ doesn't work regardless,
| it does not ping anyone.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Is this New Zealand? Don't all the software people migrate
| to Australia for better wages?
| PowerElectronix wrote:
| The push to increase production and leave nothing on the table
| is insidious and will turn every work environment, be it manual
| labor, design, programming or excel factory into shit.
|
| You'll end up burn out and hating the job (no matter the job)
| if the company you work for doesn't give a considerable weight
| to the wellbeing of employees (at the percieved cost of
| productivity and raw revenue).
| throwaway27448 wrote:
| I don't think it's that deep: Obligatory manual labor destroys
| the body (and, often, the mind) and what time you have you
| spend exhausted. Being entirely sedentary _remains_ a choice
| for us office workers--this is why people exercise and spend
| time outside.
|
| Of course, I would like more flexibility in choosing how much I
| and where I do my sedentary labor, so I might devote time to,
| say, gardening. But it's easy to forget that humans have spent
| most of human history _trying to escape subsistence farming_.
|
| I have worked subsistence farming for a small portion of my
| life, and I cannot tell you how hard it is, physically and
| psychologically. That was by choice, as part of essentially
| joining my wife's culture and family. If I were to do that for
| the remainder of my life it would destroy me.
|
| Anyway, I'm going to go happily work from my desk 30 ft from my
| bedroom while drinking coffee likely farmed for about
| ~$0.30/hour while I make a few hundred times that.
| stunseed wrote:
| > But it's easy to forget that humans have spent most of
| human history trying to escape subsistence farming.
|
| Do you define human history as the last ~10k years or last
| ~100k-500k years?
|
| But yes, certainly at least the last 3000 years for most
| humans have been spent farming to a large degree. But if we
| are even moderate in estimations of human origins, farming is
| very recent.
| throwaway27448 wrote:
| History certainly does not predate sedentary farming. It
| seems reasonable to put at around ~8kya.
|
| Certainly, some people _still_ live as hunter gatherers. I
| presume people can deduce I do not refer to them.
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| I think specifying "recorded history" would remove the
| confusion. Human history could refer to the history of
| anatomically modern humans, including before farming.
| throwaway27448 wrote:
| History is a bit of a confusing word that way; I suppose
| I can see it can be used in an informal sense to refer to
| any timeline outside of just historiography, which _does_
| tend to refer to a distinct study from archaeology and
| anthropology. Noted.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| You used the word correctly don't worry. Seems like the
| initial replyer meant prehistory.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| History is recorded, that's the definition of the word.
| Prehistory is not recorded which is what the 500 kya to
| 10 kya refers to.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| History means the time of recorded events, the 10 kya to
| present day, they used the word correctly. Anatomically
| modern humans are prehistory.
| aaarrm wrote:
| It truly is not a choice, as I cannot sustain my family /
| lifestyle with manual labor. Opting into working out for the
| sake of my health is not nearly the same.
| evanjrowley wrote:
| >It truly is not a choice, as I cannot sustain my family /
| lifestyle
|
| Success and failure are choices. Accepting this allows us
| to take responsibility for the worlds we've created.
| Ignoring this is self-destructive act of cognitive
| dissonance and we pay for it years later.
| RataNova wrote:
| AI might shake things up, but I wonder if instead of "going
| back," it'll just blur the lines
| 9rx wrote:
| _> I don 't know why manual work has been so denigrated over
| the last century._
|
| As a farmer, it is funny to see how people react to you based
| on the current profitability winds. When farming is a money
| maker, everyone acts envious and treats you like a king. When
| times are tough, they think you're a slack-jawed yokel.
|
| I expect in that lies the answer to your question: We denigrate
| anything that isn't, as a rule, making a lot of money. Manual
| jobs generally haven't made much money in the last century, and
| humorously the exceptions, like professional athlete, get
| exempted from being considered manual work.
| Pay08 wrote:
| > When farming is a money maker, everyone acts envious and
| treats you like a king.
|
| While I'm not a farmer, from my experience they still call
| you a yokel when it's profitable.
| 9rx wrote:
| Well, yeah, they'd call _me_ a yokel. They 'd also call me
| that when I'm at my tech job. But not the farmers they see
| getting rich and wish they were.
| black3r wrote:
| I hear sentiments about farming from lots of burnout software
| developers.
|
| I always wonder what made them become developers at all. Cause my
| primary motivation for selecting a job was that I explicitly
| didn't want to ever work manually, I knew that since early
| childhood and it still didn't change even after 2 burnouts. My
| secondary motivation was that I liked working with
| machinery/computers.
|
| Also when I started coding, it immediately felt like my passion.
| And the thing I love most about coding is that mostly all changes
| I make have instantly visible results. I couldn't imagine working
| a job where I had to plant a seed and then wait a week to see if
| it sprouts.
|
| Also what I love about development is that with modern
| Docker/Kubernetes setups you can make the environment where your
| code runs pretty predictable. And with proper backups configured
| and backup restore testing you aren't really worried about losing
| the stuff you worked on for months. Meanwhile while farming you
| can't predict how much sun is gonna shine or how much rain you're
| gonna get. And you can't prepare for natural disasters which can
| come anytime and ruin your crops.
|
| So I wonder if it's all just people who never loved software
| engineering and just went into it for money, and now that they
| have money after years of working they start looking for their
| true passion.
| rzkyif wrote:
| I'd say it might be due to external factors such as a bad
| working environment
|
| Someone who originally has coding as their passion, for
| example, might eventually come to dislike it due to overwork.
| And in doing so they overcompensate by imagining that the total
| opposite of office work, e.g. farming, would be a better way of
| life, even though it may not necessarily be true
|
| That said, I think something like a week long course of farming
| targeted towards white collar workers, with all of the "fun and
| refreshing" parts but only educational exposure to the painful
| parts would be a great business idea (or maybe something like
| that already exists somewhere)
| SenHeng wrote:
| Agree. My neighbour is too old to farm and his descendants
| aren't interested. He has offered to let me use his land for
| free but I just can't get interested. Even just taking care of
| a few potted plants is too much for me.
| foobarian wrote:
| I got into software because being an introvert, I always had
| trouble dealing with people and here were computers that always
| unquestioningly and faithfully obeyed all commands and that
| level of control always appealed to me.
|
| Yet I like planting stuff and gardening as well - why? I think
| it's a side effect of growing up with parents and grandparents
| who did that sort of thing as a hobby and I feel it's a bit of
| a comfort zone for me.
| saltsucker wrote:
| Ya i think so. Because i resonate a lot with this comment. I
| workout and such, but i absolutely love this shit.
| alikim wrote:
| Personally I love a lot about software engineering (iterative
| problem solving, sorting through complexities, the
| predictability you mention or at least how things are logical
| and often deterministic, etc) but I also love being outside and
| moving my body. After years of sitting behind a computer all
| day I do day dream about work that fulfills me in other ways.
| I'm sure if I took a different job and spent all day in the
| field I would miss software in a similar vein; time is finite
| and the number of possible ways you can spend it is not.
| matthewkayin wrote:
| I'm someone who started programming when I was in middle school
| and went into this career field for the passion. But my passion
| was and is programming, not corporate office work.
|
| In my career so far, I've spent most of my time troubleshooting
| AWS configs, combing through cloudwatch logs, and wringing
| requirements out of people, and a lot less of my time actually
| solving interesting problems.
|
| The walls of my office are gray, as is the carpet, the desks,
| and the walls of the bullpens. There are awful fluorescent
| lights overhead, and my eyes are dry and tired. I am exhausted
| at the end of the day because of the sensory overload of people
| being on constant teams meetings all around me. They speak with
| their outside voices, like children.
|
| So yes, I love software development, and maybe someday I will
| find a better job in this field that gives me the kind of
| challenging work and problem solving that I signed up for, but
| working outdoors? surrounded by the sounds of nature with the
| sun on my face? I'm sure there's a catch, but it sounds nice.
| RataNova wrote:
| What stood out to me wasn't just the farming process (which is
| fascinating in itself), but how much of it sits at the
| intersection of tradition, family and constraints that don't
| quite make economic sense anymore
| yamamura_thinks wrote:
| Japanese agriculture is in a critical situation. However, many
| urban workers, weary of capitalist competition, dream of a semi-
| agricultural life in the countryside.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| I have tried for a few years to grow rice a little farther north
| than it likes. When learning about rice farming I was surprised
| by Japanese farming machines. In the US our farm machines are
| built for enormous pieces of land and are ungodly expensive.
| Japanese machines are designed for small farms and to be
| affordable. Small machines are something that are seemingly
| missing from the US farm equipment market.
| brainless wrote:
| This is so cool. I have been in software for about 18 years but
| in the last few years I grew tired of the city life. My health
| was already affected by sedentary lifestyle - high blood glucose
| for many years.
|
| I have been living in villages for about 5 years. I started a pig
| farm a month back. I have 16 piglets now. I still write software
| on a daily basis, a mix of client projects and own products. The
| pig farm needs about 2 hours of cleaning each day. I take care of
| cleaning. My business partner takes care of feeding.
|
| I plan to grow the pig farm to a capacity of 100 pigs. It is a
| profitable business with roughly 30% return every 6-7 months. We
| give the pigs a lot more space and care than I have ever seen in
| any of those factory-style livestock business videos. With a 100
| pigs, I will perhaps spend 5 hours a day in cleaning work - with
| more tools and employing a couple local folks.
|
| Feel free to check out (links in my bio) or reach out if anyone
| wants to come and try this out in our little village in north
| eastern India. The village has large farms, growing all sorts of
| things.
| big_toast wrote:
| This is feels like life imitates art (the plot Stardew Valley).
| I hope you and your farm find great success!
| j2kun wrote:
| As an aside, participating in April Cools Club for the last 5
| years has been very fun and invigorating as a writer.
|
| https://www.aprilcools.club/
| vismit2000 wrote:
| Looking at my future given this wave of AI!
| khernandezrt wrote:
| Ah so this is what you do after you work as a senior dev for 22
| years.
| handzhiev wrote:
| I love when between the AI updates and Rust vs C++ wars, HN
| suddenly promotes a post about rice farming in Japan <3
| Pay08 wrote:
| I _wish_ we got more Rust vs C++, instead of the unending AI
| flood.
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