Hacker News

I grew up in a similar environment, similar trajectory, but in Africa.

Dad was a teacher in a rural school, mum stayed at home.

Until I went to school I would stay outside all day with my friends, playing in and around the rivers and dams, making our own fun with abandoned cars and rusted out farming equipment.

Our school had one computer, and I was lucky enough to get to use it after hours from time to time.

I would study the manual from front to back so I could optimise my time while on the computer.

Practiced typing on a typewriter to type in code listings faster later (aging myself here ;)

Today I build AI agents and infrastructure to run them for a hyperscaler, and my car drives me around. Feels like another lifetime ago.

I grew up in similar environment in rural central India and I (half)jokingly say farming was my first real job. We rarely planted rice, but I have vivid memory of helping my father plant the rice saplings in the muddy puddles in my farm.

I am always skeptical of urban people wanting to move back to little villages to do farming. Farming is a back-breaking and a tough job. You are exposed to all the vagaries of nature. The market forces are also not always in your favour. It is another version of "quit-job-and-open-a-coffee-shop" fallacy.

I grew up in North India, close to Ramganga river (Jim Corbet park is on this river). We grew rice in addition to sugar cane.

The smell of paddy (and also of large quantity of cooked rice) is absolutely soothing for me and it brings back memory.

During my grandfather time, it was very common for a crab to grab your fingers when you are planting the paddy. My father would chase turtles and large frogs when he was a kid.

When I was a kid, the crabs and turtles were gone but frogs were pretty abundant. In last twenty years, there are hardly any frogs left. Earthworms are also under stress.

The Japanese style of planting paddy wasn't very common in India before green revolution. Then we had a some new varieties that took over almost all old varieties for a simple reason for yield. My grandmother used to complain about a lost variety a lot. Apparently it had such a strong aroma that whole village would know what rice you have cooked. Glad to see more efforts preserving old varieties [1].

[1] https://ruralindiaonline.org/article/let-them-eat-rice

>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 direction, under another pine tree. We shall both have our own car.

> 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 infrastructure, which cuts off wildlife routes and natural drainage, and even with EVs, still pollutes the air from tire wear.

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 city (Sofia) and I _still_ had almost a forest right next to the apartment block we used to live in - enough of a forest that as a 10yo kid I could find a nook to build myself a small hut with a burning fireplace inside it and nobody complained.

There are plenty of big European cities that are 10-20mins short unsupervised trip to a wilderness that a kid can do.

For example - Valencia has an uninterrupted bicycle highway that gets you from the city center to a wilderness preserve and a beach in less than an hour cycling.

To me all of these nature vs city laments are just US car dependency. Cities don’t have to be this way at all.

Similar experience!

It's a very unique and fulfilling experience to be one with the nature. You get to learn that chickens eat almost anything. There's definitely a sense of belonging in nature that I miss

I was at my wife's hometown for CNY and it seems her mother still does everything by hand. Pretty impressive... not sure how long I'd last doing that kind of hard labor. It does smell nice.

https://gist.github.com/olalonde/8a905bcd87e3bfcd4f6143a337e...

I think that's a profoundly balanced perspective on a possible future wherein automation has successfully dealt with most of the mundanities of producing the things we need to live and enjoy life.

It allows for supremely-intense end-game levels of automation, and also for personal productivity and a resulting increased joy, and for at least some aspects of free market economics to all work together.

(Can it happen? Perhaps we'll find out.)

It's nice to hear someone who's been on both sides still hold onto that appreciation

> 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.

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.

The push to increase production and leave nothing on the table is insidious and will turn every work environment, be it manual labor, design, programming or excel factory into shit.

You'll end up burn out and hating the job (no matter the job) if the company you work for doesn't give a considerable weight to the wellbeing of employees (at the percieved cost of productivity and raw revenue).

I’d love to do manual labor as long as: I have a decent house, decent health insurance, can afford decent food/stuff, can afford taking sabbaticals, can afford getting sick and not losing my income, can afford decent education for kids, etc.

Unfortunately, many of us are chained to the modern way of life.

> 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 a lot of money. Manual jobs generally haven't made much money in the last century, and humorously the exceptions, like professional athlete, get exempted from being considered manual work.

AI might shake things up, but I wonder if instead of "going back," it'll just blur the lines

Personally I love a lot about software engineering (iterative problem solving, sorting through complexities, the predictability you mention or at least how things are logical and often deterministic, etc) but I also love being outside and moving my body. After years of sitting behind a computer all day I do day dream about work that fulfills me in other ways. I'm sure if I took a different job and spent all day in the field I would miss software in a similar vein; time is finite and the number of possible ways you can spend it is not.

I'd say it might be due to external factors such as a bad working environment

Someone who originally has coding as their passion, for example, might eventually come to dislike it due to overwork. And in doing so they overcompensate by imagining that the total opposite of office work, e.g. farming, would be a better way of life, even though it may not necessarily be true

That said, I think something like a week long course of farming targeted towards white collar workers, with all of the "fun and refreshing" parts but only educational exposure to the painful parts would be a great business idea (or maybe something like that already exists somewhere)

I got into software because being an introvert, I always had trouble dealing with people and here were computers that always unquestioningly and faithfully obeyed all commands and that level of control always appealed to me.

Yet I like planting stuff and gardening as well - why? I think it's a side effect of growing up with parents and grandparents who did that sort of thing as a hobby and I feel it's a bit of a comfort zone for me.

Agree. My neighbour is too old to farm and his descendants aren't interested. He has offered to let me use his land for free but I just can’t get interested. Even just taking care of a few potted plants is too much for me.

Ya i think so. Because i resonate a lot with this comment. I workout and such, but i absolutely love this shit.

This is feels like life imitates art (the plot Stardew Valley). I hope you and your farm find great success!

Not a problem with cassava!

Much like carpentry, or electrical work, or concrete, or just about any of the trades.

Any labor throughout human history.

One thing that’s worth noting though is that Japan is known for having a large degree of small business ownership, and it’s also a pretty well documented effect that high rates of small business ownership = high rates of support for capitalism, because small business owners themselves get a taste of capitalism and see it’s benefits.

How is that communistic?

The reasoning behind Gentan was that a landless peasantry was more likely to revolt. It's not dissimilar to pre-1929 kulaks, though the kulaks were encouraged/enabled to become a relatively wealthy/middle class peasantry who employed people and were directly involved in the production without owning large swathes of land, acting as a kind of a social dampener against a revolution.

Unsurprisingly the Soviet Union killed the kulak model and moved to collective farming[0], which was arguably actually communistic.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization

The non-oral version of the explanation author received is likely 農地解放, a postwar US/Allied military led land reform.

The core idea of it, I think, is that those landlords must have been the mainsails of prewar Japanese military dictatorship regime and its expansionism under the strong leadership of its emperor, and breaking up land ownership will make it complicated for Japan to re-consolidate power and/or to somehow become closer to the Soviets.

I guess it did serve its core purpose of keeping China/Russia at bay, considering Japan has been extraordinary antagonistic to neighboring, and/or openly communist and/or totalitarian regimes, despite running on a rather ethnocentric communism-from-first-principle political system...

1: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%BE%B2%E5%9C%B0%E6%94%B9%E9...

You have to remember that in 1950, the US had a tremendous influence in Japan, to put it mildly, and also in 1950, the US was rabidly, performatively anti-communist. When McCarthyism was getting started stateside, we were also carrying out a "Red Purge" in Japan.

Anyway, yeah, in this context, Japan passed the Agricultural Land Act of 1952, which was intended to turn land owned by a few rich landlords into small, independently owned private farms. That may sound like the opposite of capitalism, and it is, but as I understand it, the idea was to turn what were basically serfs into a proper middle class, by redistributing the wealth and means of production directly down to them, which would then prevent communism from being as appealing. I don't know about the logic, but I guess it worked, since Japan isn't communist?

> I'm dubious about the credibility of this assertion, but it is amusing to think that the goal would be to "discourage communism" by a policy that is essentially communistic in nature, in the true definition of the economic system (ownership of the means of production, ie. you own your own labour rather than renting it out).

You are meant to "own the means of production" not in an actual, but more ideal sense. Owning a farm or workshop to the exclusion of other people makes you petit bourgeois and this is bad. Communism promotes collective farms. AFAIK Poland was the only European Eastern Bloc country to tolerate small private farms, as a concession to obstinate peasants after the death of Stalin.

Promoting small individual farms is a more Georgist, populist capitalist or possibly strictly conservative policy. Not speaking to its economic sense though.

The communist policy everywhere was to rob the small farmers and small business owners of everything they owned and force them to become quasi-serfs.

The socialist/communist economy is the final extreme stage of monopolistic capitalism, towards which USA and other Western countries have been continuously evolving during the last quarter of century. The economy of USA in 2026 is much more similar to the economy of one of the former socialist countries in 1976 than it resembles the economy of USA in 1976.

Small farmers and businessmen were the main enemies of communism, everywhere.

So what Japan enacted was indeed a good anti-communist policy.

Fighting against big companies and supporting small businesses is the opposite of communist policies.

There were a lot of great differences between true communism and what the communists themselves claimed communism to be. There were also a lot of great differences between true communism and what communism has been claimed to be in USA.

Source: I have grown up in a country occupied by communist invaders, so I know what true communism is.

> to think that the goal would be to "discourage communism" by a policy that is essentially communistic in nature

War is peace,

Freedom is slavery,

Ignorance is strength

The point, as I see it, being that politicians like to make contradicting statements. Good for sales you could say. It is possible to cut through such lies by using logic, good on you for doing that. Unfortunately, many people take such statements as true and mostly get confused by it.

Indeed it's a roughly 2x increase (5kg supermarket bag from 2000 jpy to 4000).

Whether that's a big deal or not depends on the person, their finances, how much rice the family eats, etc etc.

> my house eats 100kg of rice in a month

What’s the maths on that? A cup of rice would seem a fair bit for a person for a meal. A cup is about 200g.

That’s 500 portions a month. 5.5 people for 3 meals a day?