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Comment by zkmon | Hacker News Reader

Growing up on a farm with access to minimal technology provides a perfect setting for producing finest minds. It provides beautiful challenges, minimal resources and full of freedom.

And the reward (or punishment) would be to move to city life or to Western countries. That's a pity. Modern life puts you into a grove to move in. You are a caged animal or a micro-managed worker. There are no problems and no freedom. Can't even have the option to use or not to use AI at work. We are cells in a larger creature. Cells are not supposed to do thinking.

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Density/proximity are far better incubators for innovation than people being bored and isolated on farms. Also not sure where the idea that 'freedom' is associated with farms comes from? How free are you if you must wake up at 4am and work for 12 hours to barely make a profit?

There are exceptions. They are notable for being exceptions.

Independently-owned farms aren't slave factories. Sometimes you'll be doing consecutive months of 13hrs/day labour, sometimes you'll have 75% of the day free, every day, for a few weeks. Guess what those with a low budget and an engineer's mind tend to get up to in their free time.

"Independently-owned farms" are the exception, these days, not the people. Every single one I've ever seen has at least one guy on there that performs miracles with PVC pipe, a TIG welder and spare bits of iron.

> Sometimes you'll be doing consecutive months of 13hrs/day labour, sometimes you'll have 75% of the day free, every day, for a few weeks.

That depends greatly on the farm in question. I grew up on a dairy farm, and there was no such thing as a break from work unless we hired someone to take care of the cows for us. They are fairly constant in the amount of work you have to put in (I imagine other livestock are similar but that's outside my experience).

Dairy farming is arguably the single most intensive form of farm/ranch work that there is. It's not really comparable to other stuff.

Freedom as in randomness that was allowed and available in those settings and in those times. I grew up on a farm in the 70's. Observed how mills work. I could simulate and notice a gear error in a complex machine drawing in my engineering class. The teacher had to abandon the class to think it over.

Also, constraints, survival struggle, a bit of wilderness (lack of regulatory reach), forced alertness, exposure to vast variety in the context - they are all ingredients or a green field for innovation. It's like a camping or trekking adventure every day.

> Density/proximity are far better incubators for innovation than people being bored and isolated on farms.

That might be the case for you.

I do all my best programming when I'm driving a tractor. When I stop, I just need to type it all in.

Or, driving my car, for that matter. I just need to get from here to way over there, it's maybe 90 miles, something like a two and a half hour drive, during which time no-one can phone me, no-one can come up and hand me something that's Clearly My Problem Because It Has An Electrical Connector, no-one can ask me what's wrong with the printer in the facilities office, and I can just sit and quietly think. I don't even have to put up with braying adverts on the local radio station.

Loneliness and boredom are good ingredients as well. Some physical isolation helps with that. I lived in a neighbourhood where I was the only kid. That made me bored frequently and drove me to habits that still serve me well.

The freedom of a farm is that you don't have a boss telling you what to do (if it's your own farm). It's also harder for the government to know what is going on in the middle of nowhere meaning they can't enforce the law as well.

Farm work was grueling, lasted pretty much from dawn till dusk, took an enormous physical toll on the body, and you never know when a bad crop or unfavorable weather might mean you starve.

I'm descended from farm folk. I have relatives living who still are. I'm proud of that heritage, but let's not romanticize things. There's a reason the song doesn't go "How ya gonna keep 'em down in Paree after they've seen the farm?"

The song goes that way because Paris is attractive to young men compared to the American farms. But being attractive may not mean good. Candy is attractive too, to children. And that hard work in farms doesn't necessarily mean being less happier than your modern life, as happiness is more dependent on expectations than what you have. Paris experience raised expectations for army folks.

Sometimes, I think that the modern education setup (schools and colleges) is a recruiting and training mechanism. Bright kids from all over the country side are filtered and sucked away to work in the modern factories. Same as army recruitment camps that go to rural side, conduct running competitions and take away all the strong youth from villages.

Ofcourse, they sell education as knowledge or refinement as a person. But the real goal is to create a workforce.

> took an enormous physical toll on the body

Just a nitpick, but our bodies are meant for labor. You grow ever stronger and more capable over time. Amish, for an extreme example, work exceptionally hard and eschew most modern medicine and healthcare options, yet live very long and healthy lives with substantially lower rates of cancer and various other disease than the general population. * Sitting at a desk for 8+ hours a day, for decades, is what takes an enormous physical toll on the body.

* - I wanted to give a life expectancy here, but it turns out there is no particularly good life expectancy measurement for them. This [1] study is the closest I found, where it looks like the 50% survival rate for men/women who hit at least 30 years of age, is a bit higher than 80 for women, and a bit lower than 80 for men.

[1] - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3526600/

As it alludes to in the first paragraph, farmers actually have to do a lot of engineering work.

Farming in Western countries is the absolute pinnacle of science, technology and yes even business. The Netherlands even has a world class university for agriculture.

Farmers are not simple minded yokels in touch with nature...

> There are no problems and no freedom.

It's so telling that you have not even considered the possibility of starting your own business -- something that is much easier to do in a city, and which allows you the freedom to use AI as much or as little as you want.

What problems are left for starting a business? I see only solutions searching for problems. Maybe come up with a competing solution to an already solved problem?

As a technology startup your root goal would be an exit. So you would work on problem which is in the roadmap for a big company and your wish is, they are not agile enough to build it themselves quickly and would buy out your stuff to beat their competition. So it's kind of contract work, with contract coming after the work is done.

You could attempt to produce crops or live stock for less than you can sell them for later.

Well said.

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