Death of a Programmer, Life of a Farmer

I can remember sitting on my grandfather's lap, riding on his John Deere two-cylinder (it was called a Johnny Popper.) Pre-school? I went to pre-farming. I was probably 3 years old the first time I rode a tractor.

By the time I was 8, I was driving that popper while two of my grandfather's farm hands tossed hay bales onto a flatbed trailer. We drove back to the barn, and I scampered up to the second floor and waited as those guys tossed those hay bales up through a huge opening. I had to stack the hay bales, and had to run my ass off to keep up. Then, we'd do it all over again until the barn was full. I was exhausted every day, but my grandfather allowed me to drink my first beer with those guys when we were finished. It sounds awful, but it was an amazing experience.

I'm no longer out in the field. For me now, the feeling of working on something with my hands is cathartic. Some of my best days for relaxing involve doing simple yardwork around our house.

The farm life works for some people, but not for others. What is great is that no one need debate whether that choice is right -- it only matters to yourself. Good for this guy, I think he made a great choice for himself.

Realistically, a person walking at 3 mi/h won't walk more than 0.5 miles to visit the local shop, and a person bicycling at 12 mi/h won't go more than 3. They won't, unless they are combining trips. If the shop is on the way to somewhere else, or a very short distance beyond their primary destination, they might go further overall.

But pedestrian and bicyclist infrastructure is practically nonexistent anywhere in the US except for a bare handful of cities and suburbs. Many places don't even have sidewalks. Nearly everyone uses an automobile for personal transport.

As such, the "local shop" is right there at the gas station. We call them "convenience stores". They are most often placed at the intersection of arterial roads. So if you are lost in the back streets of suburbia, you will never see one.

It doesn't make sense from a planning perspective, but it does from a money perspective. When a developer subdivides a large property, they reserve commercial lots next to the arterial road, and build access roads past those into the residential lots. In theory, once the houses are 80% built, all that residential traffic will be flowing past the commercial lots at least twice per day, and a business will build there.

In practice, the developer exits after 95% of the houses are built, dumps the remaining 5% and the commercial lots on a strawman company, moving on to the next subdivision, and those businesses never actually get constructed.

So you end up with huge areas of houses and very few businesses. There might be one strip mall every 3 miles, filled with businesses that usually last a few months before failing from lack of customers. (The exception is the pizza delivery, which will be absolutely thriving.)

Residential buildings simply have a higher profit margin. Think about that before you decide to trust the developer's "phase IV" plans, when you're buying in "phase I".

I've made the first steps to more working at home (just asking my boss). I'll start with 1 day a week and I'm already feeling great about that tiny shift.