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Farmers always worked from home

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Re: Farmers always worked from home

#171

Post by [deleted] »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #167
Retric wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t disagree, however most people really didn’t have much stuff in preindustrial societies and it generally lasted a very long time. Having say a separate bed for your children was a sign of relative wealth. American plantation owners are the equivalent of local nobility not farmers. Similarly, food preparation generally involved minimal ingredients and as little effort as possible. Women where often working in f…

But what they did have was astronomically expensive. Prior to the invention of a spinning wheel (late medieval), it took somewhere around 100 hours of labor to create a square yard of fabric. At minimum wage, that would make a shirt using 2-3 yards of fabric cost about $1,400-2,100. Imagine if the cheapest clothing available was Gucci and you were making minimum wage, and that would be almost as bad as medieval peasa…

[deleted]

Re: Farmers always worked from home

#172

Post by Retric »

watwut wrote: post #168
Retric wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was done yes. Did they all wash their outer clothes every month let alone every week, no.

I don't wash my jackets or jeans that often either. Laundry was not "extremely uncommon" thing. It was thing that needed to be done in every household. The switch to washday as in once a week washing cloth happened in period we talk about - after 1800. That is when you would spend one whole day in the week doing laundry. Before that, you still had to do it, less often, but it took even more work due to lack of soap.

1800 was post industrial, the steam engine had been around for 100 years at that point. The spinning wheel invented around 1030 and slowly spread to Europe after that caused a 5x increase in cloth production. Even that was recent, almost 20,000+ years of slowly improving drop spinning where cloth was rare, then a seemingly ever increasing explosion of cloth production.

Really for most of human history washing clothes wasn’t that time consuming for average people. To the point where people today likely spend more time on it.

Re: Farmers always worked from home

#173

Post by enumjorge »

andrew_ wrote: post #86
enumjorge wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re the 3rd person to mention being a farmer. Do we have a bunch of farmers on HN? That’s really interesting. What brings you here?

Please see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27973320

You guys are reading too much into these comments. I’m not surprised that farmers use science or technology. I know they do. I’m surprised they’re hanging out specifically in HN.

Typically the perspective I see in HN is from people with a primarily IT background, with an emphasis on FAANG-like or Silicon Valley-type companies. I know that HN’s audience is broader than that though, and it’s refreshing to come across a different point of view. I would have had the same reaction if several comments mentioned they were microbiologists. It’s just not what I normally see, and I’d be curious how they landed here too.

Re: Farmers always worked from home

#174

Post by [deleted] »

imtringued wrote: post #160
kvgr wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if the subsidies stopped and some farmers quit, then the producers would have to pay more. And farmers would return. I don’t get this constant subsidies to farmers everywhere. We take your taxes and shove it to farmers so you can have cheap corn and get fat. Maybe if some products werent so heavily subsidiest farmers would other, better food.

You can't eat bank notes. Money can be stored, most foods spoil very quickly. This asymmetry results in inflation once your farms are gone. Just look at Zimbabwe. So the obvious strategy is to support your farmers, help them get through the bad years and make sure there is always some slack. If you cut subsidies then the free market will trim agriculture for efficiency, meaning producing exactly enough food and not a…

[deleted]

Re: Farmers always worked from home

#175

Post by pueblito »

TaupeRanger wrote: post #8
pueblito wrote: post #2

This article is ridiculous. I’m a farmer and clearly I have time to surf the internet, and separating work from life is absolutely something I do - and my fathers before me. Grandma would’ve never put up with shop talk at the dinner table.

A farmer on Hacker News? Please tell me more.

I’m a farmer in southern Colorado. Currently we grow marijuana and potatoes. I’m on HN because because I’m a long time Linux user (20+ years) and free software advocate and this is where a lot of the old bofhs still lurk

Re: Farmers always worked from home

#176

Post by xg15 »

I find this a weird take. Farmers were "working from home" long before the concepts of "workplace", "working time" and "spare time" were invented - those are (to my knowledge) products of the industrial revolution and its estranged, highly structured factory work.

You might as well ask how the medieval world managed to maintain such a stellar CO2 balance.

Re: Farmers always worked from home

#177

Post by [deleted] »

ericmay wrote: post #83
NationalPark wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no mention of all the government assistance in terms of loans, infrastructure, subsidies, welfare programs for employee healthcare and retirement, etc. Maybe if other industries had as many entitlements they would make fodder for disillusioned urban bloggers as well.

Yea you mean subsidies like 401ks, office building tax subsidies, welfare and food stamps for baristas and janitors instead of living wages, subway systems, and people getting stimulus checks to work from home? Or do you just mean the subsidies for a group you happen to want to make a snide remark about? C'mon. You think Wal-Mart and Starbucks aren't being subsidized by welfare programs so they can keep wages low?

[deleted]

Re: Farmers always worked from home

#178

Post by [deleted] »

ericmay wrote: post #83
NationalPark wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no mention of all the government assistance in terms of loans, infrastructure, subsidies, welfare programs for employee healthcare and retirement, etc. Maybe if other industries had as many entitlements they would make fodder for disillusioned urban bloggers as well.

Yea you mean subsidies like 401ks, office building tax subsidies, welfare and food stamps for baristas and janitors instead of living wages, subway systems, and people getting stimulus checks to work from home? Or do you just mean the subsidies for a group you happen to want to make a snide remark about? C'mon. You think Wal-Mart and Starbucks aren't being subsidized by welfare programs so they can keep wages low?

[deleted]

Re: Farmers always worked from home

#179

Post by [deleted] »

ericmay wrote: post #83
NationalPark wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no mention of all the government assistance in terms of loans, infrastructure, subsidies, welfare programs for employee healthcare and retirement, etc. Maybe if other industries had as many entitlements they would make fodder for disillusioned urban bloggers as well.

Yea you mean subsidies like 401ks, office building tax subsidies, welfare and food stamps for baristas and janitors instead of living wages, subway systems, and people getting stimulus checks to work from home? Or do you just mean the subsidies for a group you happen to want to make a snide remark about? C'mon. You think Wal-Mart and Starbucks aren't being subsidized by welfare programs so they can keep wages low?

[deleted]

Re: Farmers always worked from home

#180

Post by matkoniecz »

Retric wrote: post #114
matkoniecz wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-... "So, 7 hours for sewing, 72 for weaving, 500 for spinning, or 579 hours total to make one shirt. At minimum wage - $7.25 an hour - that shirt would cost $4,197.25. And that's just a standard shirt. And that's not counting the work that goes into raising sheep or growing cotton and then making the fiber fit for weaving." https://acoup.blog/2021/03/19/coll…

That’s quite regional and within a fairly narrow window. “Between 1315 and 1545 and cloth produced per capita increased five-fold (the English population declined during the period due to the Black Death).” https://acoup.blog/2021/03/19/collections-clothing-how-did-t... A lot of artwork is post spinning wheel which dramatically changed the economics of owning cloth. This gets into some major differences over time. Le…

> That’s quite regional

AFAIK this was very similar worldwide

> and within a fairly narrow window.

it applies for entire timespan since cloth weaving was invented till invention of spinning wheel and other that came really late.

For most of human history it applied.

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