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My Experience as a Rice Farmer

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Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#91

Post by Tade0 »

adamjb wrote: post #57
aurareturn wrote: post #5

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…

>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 dir…

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.

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#92

Post by bwv848 »

gambiting wrote: post #76
bwv848 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the best way for Earth is we all migrate to Mars aboard Elon Musk's spaceship.

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.

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.

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#93

Post by [deleted] »

aledevv wrote: 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…

[deleted]

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#94

Post by oblio »

mlrtime wrote: post #75
adrianN wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not everywhere, you are looking at only suburbs vs cities.

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 :-)

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#95

Post by oblio »

vkou wrote: post #37
sheept wrote: 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…

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.

We could probably reduced cultivated land by 50% if we would stop wanting to eat mid-sized or large animals (cows and pigs).

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#96

Post by oblio »

bwv848 wrote: post #92
gambiting wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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!).

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#97

Post by throwaway27448 »

aledevv wrote: 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 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.

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#98

Post by oblio »

macleginn wrote: post #61
seer wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Some of this is being slowly reverted:

https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/2de...

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#99

Post by ErroneousBosh »

defrost wrote: post #47
ErroneousBosh wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

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

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.

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#100

Post by RataNova »

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
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