Earlier quoted context omitted.
Egg synthysizers exist and they're shaped exactly like chickens.
Now do it without a nervous system that can experience suffering
and without losing 90% (or was it 99%?) of the input energy to heat.
A growing number of young Americans are leaving desk jobs to farm
201–210 of 441 posts
Re: A growing number of young Americans are leaving desk jobs to farm
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
Questions to someone with more economics knowledge than me: I understand the sentiment and intuitive reasoning behind this argument (I find myself thinking it every week when I go to the local farmers' market!), but is there evidence that "buying local" actually increases the local standard of living? And a followup: if it does increase the local standard of living, would this behavior, if duplicated in all communiti…
Gains from trade is maximized when traders specialize in their most productive work. When profit is reinvested, it raises the standard of living. - Econ 101 If for any reason, you truly value your neighbourhood chicken farmer Bob's livelihood though, there's no better means of buying Bob's well-being than giving money straight to Bob. You would have to reimagine the idea of "a high standard of living" to include the…
You might be taking spherical cows too far.
Re: A growing number of young Americans are leaving desk jobs to farm
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here's a question about adjustment to rural life, because I have been daydreaming about this for a long time: Are you now isolated from existing friends and family? That's really my one big worry. I'm super burned out on software, and currently facing all the same concerns it sounds like you did before, it just frightens me the idea of being further removed (geographically) from the few family and friends we have lef…
my guess is that it depends on what kind of person you are and how good you are about keeping in touch. your mileage will vary. if you live like you essentially died instead of simply moved, then you'll have no friends. but if you invite friends over and actually make it a priority to meet up at least once every X weeks/months, then i'm sure you'll be fine
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Re: A growing number of young Americans are leaving desk jobs to farm
#204We did this. My wife has a masters in microbio, and I worked at IBM on their C++ and for Fortran compilers for about 8 years (yay std::atomics). I still do remote contract work to help pay for upgrades to the farm. Would be nice to get one of my side-projects finished and start pumping out some income streams, but it's not a big rush anymore. I have a point of sale system built with React and Haskell that integrates…
>Modern life is a dystopic hellscape from this perspective.
Amen, brother.
Re: A growing number of young Americans are leaving desk jobs to farm
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
It only intuitively makes sense -- there are quite a few assumptions. The local product is typically more expensive because it's production is less efficient (if it wasn't, it would just compete with the non-local product at regular market conditions). Being less efficient means using more inputs per output, so what is the local farmers inputs, and -- crucially -- where are those inputs made? Is he using his not-loca…
> The local product is typically more expensive because it's production is less efficient I agree with the gist of what you're saying, but I think you're leaving out some details. We know that other non-local products can be made cheaper because they are in localities that are lax on labor laws and environmental protection. So the notion that it's simply about efficiency is in my opinion a bit reductionistic. As an e…
You should at least qualify your arguments with words like, "some", "a few", or even "many", when you make accusations about the global agriculture trade system as running on slave labor.
Otherwise you'd sound like the reductionist simpleton you're attempting to correct.
Re: A growing number of young Americans are leaving desk jobs to farm
#206We did this. My wife has a masters in microbio, and I worked at IBM on their C++ and for Fortran compilers for about 8 years (yay std::atomics). I still do remote contract work to help pay for upgrades to the farm. Would be nice to get one of my side-projects finished and start pumping out some income streams, but it's not a big rush anymore. I have a point of sale system built with React and Haskell that integrates…
> Why take on the stress?
As a precaution against hitting a bad spell. Money in the bank is an excellent anti-dote against all kinds of mishaps.
Re: A growing number of young Americans are leaving desk jobs to farm
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gains from trade is maximized when traders specialize in their most productive work. When profit is reinvested, it raises the standard of living. - Econ 101 If for any reason, you truly value your neighbourhood chicken farmer Bob's livelihood though, there's no better means of buying Bob's well-being than giving money straight to Bob. You would have to reimagine the idea of "a high standard of living" to include the…
You might be taking spherical cows too far.
I don't know what you mean.
Re: A growing number of young Americans are leaving desk jobs to farm
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I am planning on purchasing drones to calculate NDVI and other useful stuff As someone who works at a company that uses Drones to do NDVI, look into EVI. And getting a proper calibration plate, or a light sensor you understand, will allow you to make the results much more accurate.
thanks, I looked at NDWI too http://openweathermap.org/news/post/ndvi-ndwi-differences-an... "NDWI in comparison with NDVI is more accurate indicator of plant humidity. NDWI is calculated with the help of water absorption band which is more closely connected with moisture than chlorophyll whose light-absorbing properties are used in calculation of NDVI. " I'm not familiar with EVI
Granted I'm just a software developer, we have a whole processing team of GIS people that can go into more detail. And we are focused on vineyards.
Here's a blog post we made to explain the difference, the jist is NDVI can change throughout the day while EVI is more stable: https://skysquirrel.ca/2017/07/evi-vs-ndvi-whats-difference/
Re: A growing number of young Americans are leaving desk jobs to farm
#209We did this. My wife has a masters in microbio, and I worked at IBM on their C++ and for Fortran compilers for about 8 years (yay std::atomics). I still do remote contract work to help pay for upgrades to the farm. Would be nice to get one of my side-projects finished and start pumping out some income streams, but it's not a big rush anymore. I have a point of sale system built with React and Haskell that integrates…
Yeah, I spend each winter contracting for funded startups and the vision of new tractor implement or some new gizmo makes it easier to work on the stuff. I guess the big part of better lifestyle is just giving up on ambitions. You know that you are not building next billion dollar company and you also know that you are not going to buy new BMW every year anyway so there is no pressure in keeping with Jones.
You don't actually have to become a farmer to adopt the latter viewpoint and reap all the resulting life benefits.
Re: A growing number of young Americans are leaving desk jobs to farm
#210We did this. My wife has a masters in microbio, and I worked at IBM on their C++ and for Fortran compilers for about 8 years (yay std::atomics). I still do remote contract work to help pay for upgrades to the farm. Would be nice to get one of my side-projects finished and start pumping out some income streams, but it's not a big rush anymore. I have a point of sale system built with React and Haskell that integrates…
> Modern life is a dystopic hellscape from this perspective
Hellscape, yes, but that hellscape also has funded your farm and that is something that I'd keep in mind. It is pretty big luxury to be able to (financially) go and live on the countryside, doing farming more as a lifestyle rather than means to livelihood.