Dispatches from the farm upstate | Hacker News Reader

Dispatches from the farm upstate

lcamtuf.substack.com

129 pointswalterbell51 comments

such a pleasure to read. I've followed lcamtuf's work since the 90s and also now live rurally. this week's project was figuring out how to fell a large dead tree without being killed by its upper limbs breaking from the pressure release, and working on some home sigint tools for doing rural property security, but mostly to justify upgrading the rtl-sdr to an ettus. country life isn't for everyone, but you see the impacts of tech, economics, and cultural change more clearly in the country because they're more stark against the backdrop of natural rhythms and things that change at the pace of seasons.

Same and actually had the pleasure of working with lcamtuf briefly about ten years ago.

>Country life isn't for everyone, but you see the impacts of tech, economics, and cultural change more clearly in the country because they're more stark against the backdrop of natural rhythms and things that change at the pace of seasons.

Couldn't agree more. Aside from a few short stints I've lived in rural locations my entire life and one of the things that encouraged me about the major shift to remote work is that the folks that are shaping so many of these factors also have a better opportunity to experience it first hand.

>working on some home sigint tools for doing rural property security, but mostly to justify upgrading the rtl-sdr to an ettus

Never did upgrade to the ettus but spent lots of time ogling their products. My 'project I'll never do but it's fun to think about' lately has been figuring out a way to watch the behavior of the uplink beam from my starlink with some kind of mesh of detectors/receivers. Seems very doable but the dopamine of finding a viable way will probably be enough for me to let go of it haha.

Interesting that this is a place that is 10 minutes drive from a nearby town and yet requires all year round maintenance. At least in Alaska the government gives citizens tax incentives for simply living there but looks like owning a rural property in US nowadays is very far from homesteading of yesteryear- you have to pay taxes and pretty much need some additional source of income just to get by.

In areas with higher population density, land values are driven by recreation and are thousands of dollars an acre. Not expensive compared to urban land, but a far cry from working the land to earn it.

I agree with both of you, of course, but this means that in order to just break even you have to do something like tourism or similar just to cover your own costs of taxes and plowing.

This is sort of true.

People often mistake convenience for "required cost". An example?

If you have a 1/2 mile private road, you don't actually need to plow it. This is a convenience. A 1/2 mile is not a long distance to walk, regardless of the temperature (if one is relying upon "getting to a car" to be warm, that's not even remotely safe. dress appropriately, your car could break down after all...).

Instead, you can:

* not plow it at all, and hand shovel a small area right by the road

* use a snow blower right by the road

* use a snow blower to make a person wide path to the road, then plow the "at the road" driveway

If you don't buy a truck, and a plow for it, and only clear a small area at the road, as above, a snowblower can do the job cheap and easily. So can a shovel. Yes, I know this for a fact.

I might add that even with frequent snowfalls, walking back and forth to the car is an event of path creation and snow flattening in itself.

And that also, the winter is great because a sled can be pulled by a person with much ease, even with a lot of weight on it. It's why many pull firewood, entire trees out of the forest in the winter, instead of the summer.

One may say "well that's inconvenient". So? That's my whole point. You still have a car, you have mail at the road, and there are even modern super-cheap workarounds such as a remote camera at the road.

In terms of water? Yes, being on a well can suck in the winter. But there are workarounds to generators. Generators aren't cheap, maintaining them isn't either, nor is the fuel for them.

But when buy and build your well infra, you can use a large or a small pressure tank. Modern methods tend to have this super-tiny pressure tank -- no power, no water.

I have a 40 gallon pressure tank, and it retains a lot of pressure for a long time. I also have a super-insulated hot water tank, which means:

* I can take 3 showers, one hot, then warm, then lukewarm with the power off

* I also have at-tank water that has no pressure to drive the taps, but does have 20+ gallons of fresh water at the pressure tank

Is that entirely convenient? No. Well the first part is.

Typically, power outages are less than a day for me. Some are far worse (once 2 weeks!), but for the short outages of < 1 day:

* you just don't flush the toilet.. "if it's yellow let it mellow, if it's brown send it down" is the old adage. This significantly extends water stores.

* you don't need to shower quite as frequently

Now... one can have a small generator, meaning "less expensive, less fuel", to just re-pressurize the pressure tank. Water can be infinite, and I frankly get by a day easily during power outages without needing that generator.

And most people with forests to maintain, tend to do wood heat a bit if they can. Even if it's only ornamental, living room "that looks nice" fireplace, that's plenty to keep you warm during outages.

And of course, our friend 'the sweater" helps too.

But my point is, you can be inconvenienced and live on the cheap. You don't have to plow. You don't have to do a lot of things. And clearing the forest becomes "here's how I heat my house", so the work you do, the costs of the chainsaw, becomes a break even, if not a bit of a savings and also a "here's how I stay warm without power" bonus too.

Anyhow!

The taxes, well.. that's still an issue.

You need to maintain a rural home well enough that you can get out in an emergency, or when you are sick or injured. Or old. Assuming that everyone can always walk half a mile, or shovel by hand, is a dangerous game to play. If you slip, fall, and break a leg during a storm, the ambulance won't shovel your drive to come get you.

I assure you the paramedics will come down your driveway on foot. What kinda weird place do you live in?

So if someone falls in the woods and calls on a cell, you think they won't hike in to help? Really?

As in, if you get hurt off of a road, you're screwed? Come on!

Or you go to sleep, and wake up sick, but it snowed 2 feet over night. Now no one will ever ever come to help?

Your concerns are not based upon reality.

And you can fall in your basement and be just as trapped, right in the city!

You're making your response time worse and sometimes that matters. A lot. Do you need to go out on a stretcher? Life's easier if you've plowed.

How many people, when buying a home, seek out and assess the mean time to response?

Did you buy a home? Or even if you rent, have you checked? Depending upon city neighborhood, average response times vary widely.

Some city areas are hospital adjacent. Some are a mean time of an hour away.

If you haven't purposefully checked, then why not?

Some people live in 6 story buildings with (gasp!) no elevator. What of them? I assure you a stretcher up and down 6 stories is no better than a mere 1/2 mile walk on flat ground.

What of power outages in the city? Did you check to see if your building has a backup generator? Yes? No? What do you do if the power is out, and you're on the 35th floor? Yet many city buildings have no backup generator, even tall ones.

If one is to throw stones, take care not to live in a glass house. Or in this case, an apartment building.

Hmmm...Until recently I had an elderly relative living with me and I _know_ the difference in difficulty in getting them out with cleared snow vs not, and it's a lot.

Does that sort of thing (and hospital proximity, etc) matter to everyone? No. Or certainly it doesn't matter the same amount.

But for some people it will matter a lot.

But for some people it will matter a lot.

Bear in mind I advocated clearing with a snow blower a walking path. This is far cheaper than owning a truck and plow, and can be done very fast each storm.

Note, this is a thread about cost savings in rural circumstances.

But my statements about parallel situations stand. And about people evaluating things ahead of time, they just don't. Rural living has different risks, but city born risks are just as high. IMO, higher.

Just the additional smog and pollution alone are an issue. It's even hotter in a city.

I'm sorry about your incident, but I've seen 6 story buildings with no elevator. People live there to save money too. The stairwells are not conducive to a stretcher either.

So people save as they can.

All that said, how many people move when they get older, so they're closer to hospitals?

I get why you wanted to chime in, with a personal experince though.

> thousands of dollars an acre

Did you mean per square foot?

Well, they did mention Alaska and I did mention that I wasn't talking about urban land. Lots of room between those.

I was thinking of something like rural land in counties that aren't essentially empty (rather than land near LA or whatever).

To me it sounds like the "all year round maintenance" is mostly because they've got a lot of land.

You've got to get the snow off your driveway no matter where you live. If you buy a property with half mile of driveway, you're going to have to shift a lot of snow.

You've got to maintain the trees on your property, no matter where you live. If you buy 20,000 trees you're going to have to maintain a lot of trees. And so on.

The trees… it very much matters where you live. They spend so much time dealing with them because the PNW is a tinderbox. East coast, you just make sure nothing will fall on your house and leave your 50 acre forest to the wilds.

(And of course, a good chunk of the country basically never gets enough snow to need plowing)

This when young the city was fun but when older than mattered less thing does not match with my own experience at all. Having an extended family and running a service business I have known quite a few people getting old and aging into their final years. Having people around and things to do can be critical for maintaining quality of life. It is really common for older people in rural locations to become isolated an unable to access the things that once brought joy to their lives. Seems like a potentially interesting contrast to call out.

Yeah I also find this odd. Especially at my age with children at home, why would I take them away from all the opportunities a city offers? When they are very young and not social you might want them to have a place to just crawl around and taste dirt, but as soon as they are social you need people around, and in later childhood the opportunities in sports, music, dance, and other arts call for at least a fairly large town. I can imagine myself leaving the city after my kids are independent but even so, dispersed living seems to offer little except manual labor. I'd want a town of a least a few thousand so I stand a chance of meeting some new friends of my own age.

A humorous book on the topic of the fact that rural life is mostly just a lot of work, see "Against The Country".

There are life experiences that are impossible for kids in the city ever have and are more valuable than any sport, dance, or academic activity.

I still cherish sports, music, and dance, but the difference in childhood environment is immediately recognizable in adults.

> There are life experiences that are impossible for kids in the city ever have and are more valuable than any sport, dance, or academic activity.

These being?

I grew up in a lot of different places but the impression I get from my own experiences is that the valuable life lessons of being alone in the woods can be acquired part-time. You don't have to relocate there. And since living totally alone in the middle of nowhere, rather than in a small town surrounded by fields, farms, and forests, is a lifestyle that only recently became possible, I doubt the value of extended isolation. Throughout human history people have gathered into settlements of at least the size of a village. Living alone is totally new.

Well, if you're discussing post-agriculture yes. The equation and density changes a lot pre-agriculture.

But regardless, rural != isolated. Children still go to school. This guy lives 10 miles (aka 10 minutes) from a "town", and that town is indeed where people get together.

That's the thing about actual rural living. There are no stoplight (which takes 2 to 4 minutes to cycle) which slows down miles-driven. There are no traffic jams. Everyone is typically doing 60mph. 1 mile per minute. 10 miles is 10 minutes.

I know people that take buses to "do city things", and it takes them > 1 hour to get anywhere. I know others that walk (20+ minutes) or drive (20+ minutes to get a mile away, or to get a few city blocks due to traffic).

"Having houses apart" doesn't mean isolated from other humans. At all. Heck someone with a "few hundred acres" is often within a mile of another house. As a kid, I used to bicycle 10+ miles to see friends in the summer (when there was no school), and why not? And in the winter, you see your friends daily at school.

You're not "living alone" because you're on a 200 acre parcel of land.

A person would need millions of acres to even feel as if they're living alone.

> But regardless, rural != isolated. Children still go to school. This guy lives 10 miles (aka 10 minutes) from a "town"

10 minutes for the grown-ups, who can drive whenever they feel like it.

For the 14 year old who can't drive, and whose parents can't drop everything to play chauffeur? That's 40 minutes each way on a bicycle - along single-lane roads with drivers doing 60mph.

Sounds like a recipe for your kid to spend all day behind a screen, to me.

Source: Direct, firsthand experience. The social isolation and countless screen hours did turn me into a great programmer though, so I've got that going for me.

10 miles isn't much if you're 14 and live in the country, there's horses, dirt-bikes, hitch-hiking (local traffic), riding a push bike (traffic is rarely an issue and there are usually not-road paths to bike on.

Some 14 years olds drive a paddock-basher (unlicensed car) on not-public farm roads.

Source: Did all of that at 14 well deep in the country ( a good 1,000 km away from anything close to a city )

100% this.

I didn't have a farmers license, but I was definitely driving our little S10 up to the supermarket for groceries or gas at 14. Never had a issue. I wasn't a menace on the road until I was officially licensed ;)

In Oklahoma my adolescence was marked largely by the constant undercurrent of people killing themselves with cars. I think this is integral with the rural or semi-rural lifestyle because Wyoming, S. Dakota, and Montana are #1, 2 and 3 for fatal transport accidents among teens. The more a place relies on cars to overcome isolation, the more of their young people they lose to car crashes. Descriptions about how this system works fine come from literal survivor bias.

I can roll off a litany of young farm deaths and injuries over 40 years .. in total at a rate that rivals urban youth deaths from hit by traffic | escalating 'gang' fights | jumping roofs, etc.

Teens take risks and there's a known "acturial hump" for increased risk of death in young adult years.

I grew up in rural farmland of Michigan. Guess what. I rode a bicycle or walked. To and from school (I lived _just_ inside city limits which meant the buses were off-limits to me). To my friends house. To my friends house a township away (15 miles). Chauffeur? LOL. Sure. Sometimes my parents drove me, and yes I did spend time behind a screen (I was on many local BBS's). But I also spent hours each day outside.

Did this change in the winter? Nope. I still often rode my bicycle to school. On days where there was too much snow I'd have to leave earlier to deal with the hike. Sometimes a friend might notice me and pick me up.

I was definitely the weirdo in school (not a out transgender kid in the 1990's no way), but I still had friends. I wasn't isolated in any way.

Source: Direct, firsthand experience. Guess what. In life, your mileage may vary. Just because you experienced something one way doesn't mean everybody else experiences it the same way.

You walked 15 miles to a friend's house? And back again?

No wonder you spent hours each day outside :)

As a kid, you biked alongside cars doing 60mph on 2-lane unseparated highways? Certainly no one I knew growing up was allowed to do that, which limited us to the the hundred or so homes we could reach on slower roads (and zero businesses)

Yes. I did. As did other kids. We had gravel shoulders wide enough for cars to pull fully off, that's where we rode.

We also rode facing traffic. That way you could see a car coming although you can hear one coming for miles. The purpose of seeing was two fold, to see what type of car, and to see of they saw you.

Every kid knew to get over further when a car came, and get over further for wider vehicles.

Yes. As a teenager when I worked at the local Burger King I used to ride my bicycle ~8 miles down farm roads and then up to the highway exit area where the BK was. Often I'd leave work at closing time (after 11pm) and ride home in the _dark_. Guess what. Bicycle lights exist and can be seen for miles on a country road.

Yeah, people saying their kid would be isolated just doesn't ring true with me. There are very few rural areas that are literally an hour+ from anything with nobody else around. Most rural areas have little towns dispersed around them. They may not be big, but locals still gather there and visit there, and there is almost always a public school available. And like you said, the travel distance may be farther but time wise it isn't all that much more.

> I know people that take buses to "do city things", and it takes them > 1 hour to get anywhere. I know others that walk (20+ minutes) or drive (20+ minutes to get a mile away, or to get a few city blocks due to traffic).

I grew up in a rural area, 3 miles from the grocery store & post office, a 40 minute drive to the "big" town (20k). My parents end up driving to the "big" town a couple times a week. I always thought this was nuts and looked forward to living in a city where that wasn't necessary.

Now I live on the SF peninsula... and everybody regularly drives 40+ minutes to do things. Just to get dinner, go to Ikea, or take the dog for a walk in a nicer park. It's a 10 minute drive to BART or to Caltrain, too. Unless you truly dedicate yourself to hardcore SF living, your average middle-class Bay Area resident is driving just as much as my rural parents did.

It’s actually pretty interesting that I had the opposite adjustment moving into a huge city.

Miles became meaningless - nearly everything I go to is within 5 miles. What matters is total travel time since two locations both 2 miles away from me might be 10 minutes or 90 depending on time of day.

I still see the single digit miles on google maps and “go oh that’s close!” a few times a year just out of habit though.

As an example I grew up riding horses every day, and grew to know and understand them very well. That’s not something you’ll experience in the city unless you’re very wealthy.

Granted that horses take a lot of space, but I think the weakness of arcbyte's statement lies in the "more valuable than any sport, dance, or academic activity" part.

My mother is losing her sight and can no longer drive. I’m so glad she lives within close walking distance of downtown with a supermarket so she can maintain her independence.

FWIW the stuff about dealing with the Feds only applies out west AFAICT

There’s lots of rural land in the northeast where you can basically just go to your small town hall and get whatever done without much hassle. Or just don’t tell anyone and nobody cares (if it’s actually rural enough)

Also in the northeast many areas are depopulating due to folks aging out, so there is land available (as long as you avoid the popular NYC and BOS-adjacent areas)

Fair warning you will need to accept that other people may not share all of your “correct” opinions but they will probably still be kind enough to help you IRL with a flat tire or digging your truck out etc :-)

The banned gas equipment is going to cause a lot of fun. PG&E cant maintain the tree canopy as it is.

People will buy it out of state I'm guessing?

I find it odd the fervor with which rural people react against superfluous regulations. I get it that they're ridiculous, asinine, and sometimes even onerous. But the regulations aren't targeted at them, and rural freedom involves being away from the enforcement matrix and maintaining a can-do attitude, no?

Can't buy a new gas powered chainsaw in a store or have it shipped directly to you? Buy used, keep old gear going with new parts, or make a trip out of state for you and your handful of well-known neighbors. The suburbs outright banning the use of gas equipment will mean lots on the used market, too.

Maybe I'm just biased against gas chainsaws since my childhood is full of memories waiting foreeeverrrr to get a chainsaw started. Meanwhile electric is just sitting there always ready to go. I'd feel differently if I were a professional arborist cutting down 40 inch trees, but I, and most other people, are not.

Also, that image captioned "visit from the fun police" is a bit off the mark. I don't like disclaimer labels everywhere either, but this one is at least defensible. Loaders generally use flexible hoses, which can burst suddenly and then the unsupported bucket/load just drops. If you are under it or on it, you will be injured. Hydraulic equipment meant for safety critical situations uses things like pilot operated check/counterbalance valves right on the cylinders.

So ban them in suburbia.

Why do rural folks have to become outlaws to do day to day things just because they're unlikely to get caught?

Anyway, my comment was about future forest fires from the impossibility to do maintenance.

Because government is a very blunt instrument and it's reacting to the harm caused by large scale economic behavior (especially fueled by a debt based system that sucks wealth away from the edges so it's hard to retain the slack required to not turn the screws).

"Outlaw" is a bit overstating it though, don't you think? Is the average motorist an outlaw due to the proliferation of unreasonable speed limits? I get that it's a bit vexing, but once you've got your hands on your illicit chainsaw, nobody is coming to check where you bought it. Personally I'd be more worried about getting called out for felling the type of trees you need a gas chainsaw to cut.

You've got a good point about PG&E being institutionally prohibited from gas chain saws in a way they can't sidestep like individuals can. But much of their right of way maintenance is likely done with heavy machinery or helicopters, rather than solely relying on manual labor with 2 cycle engines.

No one has to check where you bought it, just the manufacturing date which is stamped on the case.

And yes, you are an outside the law, as trivial as it seems. For some of us breaking the law is a big deal; we put a large burden on "unjust law is not law" because we recognize that "stupid" "inconvenient" or even "ruinous" law isn't obviously "unjust"

No, That would be against the law - only tools made before the ban are allowed.

Also PG&E is a company, not a person. It doesn't scale for them to have a chain saw smuggling operation.

On display here is the race towards trying to buy land somewhere before a Californian manages to bail from Silicon Valley and buy it before you. Wish the best to all the young folks enduring this competition currently.

Housing and land prices in metros are crazy and much building should be done. But, rural land like his are abundant. Even a couple hours from Silicon Valley is a house on acres for $300k.

The...shall we say non-uniform distribution of political beliefs in the folks moving from California has also done wild things to the politics in some of these areas.

Its a good thing the US is _huge_. I certainly didn't "displace" anybody as I moved back home to Michigan from California to buy a house in the woods. There are at least 6 houses for sale within a half mile from me right now all for well under $300k. People struggling in California could learn a thing or two by moving.

That doesn't stop people from imagining the "Big Bad Californian" in their minds. For a while, I was looking out-of-state for real estate, and I encountered a non-zero number of realtors informing me that their seller intends to charge a "California tax" to anyone coming from that state, because he doesn't like where I'm moving from.

Just because somebody wants to know where you're from, doesn't mean they are entitled to know that. You are under no obligation to say "I'm from California" when buying a house. Your realtor can do all the discussions. "You're a person buying a house".

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