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My Experience as a Rice Farmer

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181–190 of 226 posts

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#181
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

>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.

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#182
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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…

> 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.

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If ypu do those for 15 years you are likely in management

Maybe in hacker news reality, not in the real world.

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.

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#184
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe in hacker news reality, not in the real world.

Correct. Dozens or hundreds of workers for every manager or foreman. There's also a lot of owner/operator one-man shops.

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)

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe in hacker news reality, not in the real world.

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.

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)

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#186
post #174
post #46

> 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 d…

> 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…

> 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.

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#188
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 infr…

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…

> 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.

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#189

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 misl…

This mostly seems like an anti-manorialism idea, which falls under the umbrella of every modern economic system.

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It fluctuates but on average maybe 5 humans and 10 dogs.

You give rice to the dogs, too?

Read the ingredients on a can of dog food, there's either rice or corn in it. They prefer rice.
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