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 and it's very comforting.
Now I work in high tech, working on AI, and the fancy stuff. There is just something about rice fields that I love - maybe just memories, childhood, smell, how serene it looks when it's full.
My one hope for AI, robotics, self driving cars, is that they can enable more people in cities to migrate back to rural places. When I was younger, I used envy those who grew up privileged in a big modern city. Nowadays, I absolutely am glad I grew up in a little village in a farming community and I consider myself lucky to have.
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.
This is rural Scotland in the late 1970s / early 1980s.
I'd like my small son to have the same opportunities that I had, instead of a school where the playground has lots of very carefully manufactured play equipment and they get to sit and look at iPads instead of working out for themselves how to program a BBC Micro.
I know that a part of why I did so well in programming was being forced to think about what to do and how things worked for so long, and it gave me a lot of stamina to brute force my way through problems.
But these days, I'll admit even I reach for an LLM more often than not, and I can feel my mental muscle memory atrophy.
I don't know how to give my son the same experience (currently at age 8, he still does not have any of his own devices, and has highly restricted access to the iPad).
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.
Well, those who quit their jobs and open coffee shops almost certainly make a bad choice for themselves economically and work/ life balance wise... But they do wonderful things for their community, and - a questionable benefit to society but a huge benefit to some - real estate prices. People love these places. They capture a tiny fraction of the value they create, if we look at it in cold terms.
That can't really be said for downscaling rice farmers, can it? I mean, at best maybe the other rice farmers enjoy having them around.
I meant it as a pipe-dream that people jump into without knowing the hidden asymmetries. Farming of any kind is hard and learning that specific skillset is necessary to succeed.
For most folks it's just an add on. I have grandparents in Europe that have a garden where they grew potatoes and about 50 other things I'm not gonna list. They make jams, pickled things, and various other preserves. It's something to do and kept them sharp until they hit their late 80s.
Agreed. There's a world of difference between 'farming' for personal to small scale production as not quite a recreation but also not quite a job, and farming a low margin staple at high volume as your primary and sole means of earning money.
And I think when most people speak of the dream of returning to rural society to e.g. farm, they're speaking very much of the former rather than the latter.
That has been my experience as well, having immigrated from Eastern Europe to an enclave in the US. We know at least a dozen families (including our own) with 2-10 acre homesteads and all of them had previous experience with gardens and dachas in the Soviet Union that they used to grow supplemental produce, so no one came into the deal with delusions of making any profit. Everyone gives away the excess to neighbors of which there is usually a lot because yields are high on hand tended trees (and dutch bucket hydro).
The single biggest reason these farms exist is because American retail produce is mostly garbage. It’s so economically micro-optimized that all flavour has been wrung out of it. The only way many of us immigrants can get back the flavors of our childhoods is by growing the fruits and vegetables ourselves, if only to have control over the varieties, the vast majority of which are not sold in stores (>95%). That nostalgia is what pays the margin.
We're not neighbors unfortunately because we're spread out all over Southern California. By "enclave" I mean the area between West Hollywood and Arcadia, where many Eastern Europeans immigrated during the post-Soviet brain drain, not a dense conglomerate like San Gabriel.
BTW you do NOT want ten acres. That is a back breaking amount of work and even with modern technology you'll struggle to cope (it's not enough to afford most heavy equipment, but too much to do manually). You want an acre or two where you have enough space to plant trees. It takes a few years from nursery to fruiting, but they are far lower maintenance.
You don't really need 10 acres. My grandparents made do with 1/4 of an acre and would have yields of 350-500 lbs of potatoes per season. That's so much that they would give it away. I have fruit trees that require almost no effort to maintain once established. My neighbors give me oranges that fall to the ground and rot otherwise. It's not all or nothing. You can have a basil plant in an apartment.
Lots of places have community gardens. Hell, I go to one in the middle of NYC, a rooftop garden run by a friend. We even grow our own wheat for bread making.
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].
This is so important. Kerala in particular had a treasure trove of varieties, some well suited to low rainfall, resistant to local pests. I am sure other states had/has such diversity too, I am just not knowledgeable enough.
These genotypes are being lost to industrial mono-cropping. The government is doing nothing about it.
> These genotypes are being lost to industrial mono-cropping. The government is doing nothing about it.
This is happening worldwide and is one of the tragedies of modernity. Mexico for instance has tons of regional varieties of peppers that don't grow anywhere else except for in a very specific micro climate and they're disappearing in large part because of cheap imports that makes farming them unprofitable.
>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.
> Ah, the perennial dream of the technologist. Here's a Le Corbusier quote on the same theme from 100 years ago
Except this time, the dream is actually real and cheaper than ever thanks to small EVs, batteries and solar power. 100 years ago it was limited to people with large estates who owned cars (and probably needed secretaries for their work).
These days it's more affordable than ever (except land/housing)
> 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.
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.
That depends on the rural environment. Especially grazing lands, like north European coastal heathlands, may have been managed with controlled burns in between grazing for a thousand years, to the point that they have their own biodiversity, that may get lost if they are disused.
True rural farming is still bad for nature because the land is cleared of biodiversity to make way for farm land. It is arguably worse than cities because a lot more land per person is cleared.
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 :-)
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.
It's not that simple. Large herbivores are necessary for many environments and useful agriculturally even if we didn't eat them. Desertification caused by removing trees and grazing without replenishing, nutrients lost because sunlight and wind are scraping the bare soil, monoculture deserts and insecticides killing off pollinators and destroying ecologies... It's the factory farming and profit-motivated short-termist resource extraction that's a problem, not the cows and pigs. We can transition to sustainable methods without decreasing food variety.
some ruminants are good because they can turn inedible biomass into calories. However the scale at which we farm them is orders of magnitude beyond those levels.
Yes, but there weren't that many large grazing animals because most of the world was covered in woods, not pastures. Trees are the most successful large creatures and we've probably reduced their habitat by 50%.
That's the actual tragedy. Forests contain a lot more like per cubic km than pastures do.
We've already touched ~all of the arable and non-arable land that's near to where people want to live. Forests clearcut, swamps (and deltas and the Netherlands) drained, rivers rerouted, reservoirs established, plains tilled, roads built, mountains conquered: We've been shaping and expanding the habitable Earth as it suits us for a very long time.
We're humans. We do that stuff.
And we're natural creatures like the rest of them are.
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 activities remain necessary regardless of where people live, and some will have an greater impact with widespread urbanity since some things like energy/food/water can be relatively cleanly decentralized in rural settings, at least partially, but require complete centralization in urban settings.
> 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.
I think your intuition of 140m x 140m being a small parcel of land is rather odd. That's a land the length of about 1.5 football fields, in both directions, for each and every person. So for a small family of 4 people, that'd be nearly 3 football fields of space, in all directions, just for themselves. And there's enough space on Earth for literally everybody to have this, including newborn babies as they are part of the population we're counting.
Now factor in larger families and the fact that some people voluntarily will want to live in close quarters (even given a free choice of all options), and you get many football fields of space, again in all directions, for every single person. This is just absolutely massive. And I think calling deserts uninhabitable is quite odd given everything from Nevada to Saudi Arabia. Basically no lands are truly uninhabitable if we want to inhabit them, even including water as the gradually expanding territory of China is demonstrating.
And, as mentioned already, arable lands have nothing to do with population distribution. As you pack people into smaller quarters, you use up just as much arable land, if not more (due to minimizing decentralization possibilities), than you do with wider distribution.
> I think your intuition of 140m x 140m being a small parcel of land is rather odd.
I actually went into google maps/satellite of some very familiar places to me, and drew out a 140m x 140m meter squares just to get a feel how much it is. It's very much a small plot of land.
I rounded up, the actual plot of land given 8.3bil pop is closer to 134m x 134m.
Mind you, 134m x 134m per person IF you include all land area (so deserts, permafrost, high mountains and various unlivable areas), so in practice, it would be significantly less, so 95m squared give or take depending on what you consider "livable".
Of these 134m x 134m arable/fertile land would be only like 10% if I recall correctly.
And arable/fertile land is - ultimately - the bottle neck.
This does not in any shape or form emphasize "how few of people there are on Earth". Quite the opposite actually.
And every new person just makes that small parcel of land ever smaller.
> And I think calling deserts uninhabitable is quite odd given everything from Nevada to Saudi Arabia. Basically no lands are truly uninhabitable if we want to inhabit them, even including water as the gradually expanding territory of China is demonstrating.
And what happens to be the population density of Sahara Desert?
Plus, do you live or want to live in a desert yourself? No? Well then...
Nobody wants to live in "close quarters" in insanely polluted, noisy overpopulated shitholes like Dhaka, Mumbai or Karachi or deserts. Just so you know... people there never had a choice and were just spawned there.
Planet is overpopulated, the overpopulation is simply not evenly distributed. Mind you, as recently as 1950s your plot of land would be 3x larger, when pop of planet was "mere" 2.5bil.
Saudi Arabia is wholly dependent of it's oil reserves to make miracles happen in the middle of the desert.
At current oil consumption rates in the world, the total world oil reserves will last mere 47 years.
Then either some "magical transformation" will happen, or lots of people will end up poured in that square death cube of yours.
And only the fraction of people left alive in Saudi Arabia will go back to riding cammels instead of their sports cars and jeeps.
Betting that a "magical transformation" will happen in 47years is nothing more than wishful thinking.
Unfortunately people aren't really wired for long term planning and reason backwards from the conclusions in their mind as starting point instead.
Rather than derive conclusions from the observable, quantifiable and measurable - even if those conclusions end up being less than pretty.
I don't think you're discussing this in good faith. 134m^2 is well over 4 acres of land for a single person! That's larger than a typical small suburban subdivision for a single person. A minimal immediate family size for a sustainable society is 4 people. That's 16+ acres for every single family, which is just massive. And the overwhelming majority of the Earth's land is perfectly acceptable for habitation. I suspect you think the opposite of arable is inhospitable. It is not. Arable is a very specific definition of land, which land can be turned into through irrigation and other basic technologies. It's not a sort of fixed quality metric.
I'm not really following what point you're trying to make with the example cities. People move to urban areas for economic opportunities. It's thanks to the internet that deurbanization is becoming a more viable reality for more people, vaguely analogous to how vehicles enabled it at a different time in the past. Saudi Arabia existed before oil, so to speak, and will exist afterwards. Part of the reason you find them invested in basically everything stateside, to the chagrin of many, is because they're working to create a more sustainable economy. The nice thing about countries under defacto dictatorship type rules is the ability to carry out longer-term plans, even if they may sometimes be misguided. [1]
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.
Let's see, I didn't make any claim about untouched - although I do have some strong positions on wetlands cover, corridors, wild old forrest, et al but that's a whole other aside.
I'm just here to point out farming and livestock at suprisng to many scales can be operated by fewer people than you might expect.
as for: > no-one can afford to be shipping food halfway round the planet.
what does the Atlas of Economic Complexity type datasets currently say about food volume tonnages and trip lengths? I know that our local farmers co-op
handles handysize to post-Panamax vessel shipments from Australia, United States, Canada, South America and Europe to key grain markets in Asia, Europe, Central America and the Middle East.
The challenges for grain shipping going forward likely fall about getting sufficient production of non fossil origin methanol fuel variations for shipping engines.
And yet, farmers still need roads, and hardware stores, and grocery stores, and hospitals, and HVAC and plumbers and before you know it, you need villages for all the people those people depend on, along with their families.
Farming communities have already had these things, the broad pattern is that fewer and fewer of thiese thigs are needed as fewer and fewer people are needed to work the same land.
Urbanisation ratios have increased, farm worker percentages decreased, average land area holdings increased so stores, schools, etc. are closing.
As time passes now, more an more old farm hoses are vacant island in an ocean of larger consolidated workings.
Fewer people are needed to work megafarms, but the basic needs for these services don't go away entirely. As a result, moving people to the urban centers still leaves you with all the things that you hoped urbanizing would get rid of- roads and rural communities.
Perhaps reread the upstream and pay close attention to the usernames and who said what.
> all the things that you hoped urbanizing would get rid of- roads and rural communities.
I spoke about the actual real in this moment trend that is already happening; increased urbanisation, I said nothing about wanting to see the end of roads or rural communities - although I'm a big fan of seeing less human impact on larger areas of managed land - land that includes agriculture, mining, native reserves, cropped treelands, etc.
We do have the capacity to ship massive tonnages of grains, meat, fruits, livestock around the globe and we use it ensure sufficient pipelines to feed a billion+ global population across all seasons and weathers.
Costs at that scale are large, transcontinental railways across mountains, lifting tonnages against graivity in addition to rolling friction, braking energy and return to steady motion energy repeated for frequent stops and loading, transfer, loading times add up.
Per tonne per kilometres costs of floating container ships and binned grain ships are easily competitive.
There are points to be made about the lower tonnages of picky people foods, lobsters, fancy beef, a Bugatti Chiron tucked away amidst a cavern of self loading basic electric cars .. but there's still an underlying current need to transport food from source to demand.
The costs of global shipping transport is iron mining, steel formation, build times, fuel production, fuel side effects, and so on - fuel side effects are a bit of a pressing issue, and have been since at least that 1967 absolute banger by Syukuro Manabe and Richard T. Wetherald they chose to call Thermal Equilibrium of the Atmosphere with a Given Distribution of Relative Humidity
> But it's more ecologically sustainable to eat what grows where you live.
> But it's more ecologically sustainable to eat what grows where you live.
Depends on the food, if you're clearing land for a new crop (which many countries have done historically and still do today) then it's not sustainable. And if the native crops are simply not as good nutritionally as the new crop then it's better to eat the new crop even at the ecological cost of the native one, e.g. potatoes vs barley in Ireland.
I'm not sure what you're referring to in your second sentence, not sure why picky eaters wouldn't like meat and potatoes or what that has to do with shipping in general, not even the fact that we do indeed have the capacity and will to ship food halfway around the world already today.
> And if the native crops are simply not as good nutritionally as the new crop then it's better to eat the new crop even at the ecological cost of the native one, e.g. potatoes vs barley in Ireland.
Potatoes and barley both grow pretty well in the UK.
The problem with eating things like soya over here is that you can only do it if you burn a city's worth of diesel every single day to power a container ship to bring it, and it's farmed using horribly unsustainable methods.
The stuff I eat (he says, drinking a cup of Colombian coffee, okay okay, hypocrisy) is grown using techniques and ecological impact more-or-less unchanged from the dawn of agriculture. We use Massey-Fergusons now rather than horses or oxen but there would be nothing stopping you going back to horses, and indeed with diesel at nearly two quid a litre it might well be worth looking at that.
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!).
It would also be better for the earth if there were no cities and everyone went back to village farming and local communities. I also don't see that ever happening nor do I want to ive in a city.
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.
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.
Surprisingly, this seems to be not true. Moscow, a city of 10+ million people, has huge forests inside or adjacent to the city limits. People leave rubbish here and there, but unless forests are rezoned and actively developed as "recreation zones" or some such, they are doing okay. One can easily find more species of birds in a large Moscow park than in the whole of Baden-Wuerttemberg. The trick is not depleting the ecosystem to begin with.
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.
Yea that rice mill machine is similar to what I remember. Our village didn't have one so some guy would show up in harvest season to do it for every house in the village.
I can tell by the houses in your wife's village that their area was likely wealthier than ours growing up. Our houses looked more like this: https://imgur.com/a/Pc9LuKF
When I was a kid, it felt like there were only 2 or 3 villages total in my area since our parents didn't allow us to go too far. As a visiting adult, I found out that there were hundreds of similar villages in the region. Most of these villages are generally empty nowadays as people moved to cities. However, I heard from locals that some younger people are beginning to return to villages and raise their kids there.
I believe it's pretty quiet here too outside of CNY, although there is at least one active school nearby. Nice to hear some younger people are returning. It must be nice for kids to grow up in this kind of environment.
Oh I didn't realize that some people would interpret that machine as powered by electricity.
Our village didn't get electricity until the 90s, I think. I do remember having electricity growing up, and even a small TV. By the time I emigrated, some households had refrigerators.
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.
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 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 everyone. You never feel lonely. Life is slower, much less stressful.
I feel sorry when I see kids today depressed, lonely, and distrusts society. This just didn't happen when I was growing up in a village. There is a joke that Asian parents don't think depression exists. I think part of that mindset is rooted in how many of them grew up - depression was just not really a thing in a village.
I sometimes hear of people who try to move to the country side, only to hate it and want to move back to cities. I get it. It's not for everyone. But I think it can be aided with technology such as AI+robots helping with your farms or house work, self driving cars taking your kids to school a bit far away, AI doctors who can do most of the basic healthcare work, etc. And if you can build a business with 1 or 2 people + AI, then it also makes remote work more viable. Basically, I think tech can bring a lot of the city quality of life to the country side.
If kids want to move to a town/city for more opportunities or networking, they'd be free to do so when they're older. Most do. But right now, the cities seem like the only path to having a decent quality of life.
> 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 everyone. You never feel lonely. Life is slower, much less stressful.
That just means we need to structure cities differently.
I live in a 1 sq km neighbourhood (literally, 1 km square) that houses 10k people.
It has almost everything I could wish for at walkable distance, schools for all ages, parks, a gym, a pool, sports campgrounds, medics, pharmacies, stores, markets, etc.
What doesn't exist (e.g. a movie theater, a library) I can reach by public transit in half an hour. The city has 2M people, there's plenty of stuff to do.
I've lived here all my life, my kids go to school with the kids of my school mates. They walk to school from at least 10yo, they visit each other's houses. During school breaks and weekends, they play in the park with their school friends while their parents grab a beer in a nearby kiosk.
You can build communities like this within cities.
> 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 everyone. You never feel lonely.
In Japan that's true in a lot of city neighbourhoods as well. The high trust is extremely valuable but villages are not the only way to achieve it.
City kids have friends, play outside and go visit friends. That is completely normal in most world cities. And yes, where public transport exists, city kids do use public transport to get to school, to visit friends or to go to the gym.
> I feel sorry when I see kids today depressed, lonely, and distrusts society.
The weird thing is, rural people show a lot of distrust and fear that city people seem to show less. Rural people just assume that city means danger and fear.
> depression was just not really a thing in a village.
This is simply not true. If you look at social issues like alcoholism, drug use, suicides or domestic violence ... villages have plenty of those. They have harder availability of psychologists and psychiatrists. That does not mean issues do not exist there, they measurably do.
City kids do not have less friends then rural kids. They do not socialize less. And if their super local turns up mistreating them, they have actual option to go elsewhere.
> Degree matters here too.
Yes. Small villages have more of these. The rural culture of alcoholism and domestic violence acceptance is both something very real and traditional. What are we talking about here, seriously. You frequently had to drink with others, else you was an outsider. And if family situation turned out bad, you have literally no where to go. (It is not like it would be easy in the city. But you have to from village to city to maybe get help.)
>> City kids have friends, play outside and go visit friends.
> Yes, and city kids also eat, poop, and talk. :)
> I think it's the degree that matters.
The degree is easy to measure. What happens on a cold winter night or generally on a day with bad weather when "play outside" and "visit friends on foot" is out of the question?
City kids can still visit friends (because they are not beholden to adults with cars) and can chose about a billion different activities (because, once again, they are not beholden to adults with cars).
Even socially city kids have a greater degree of freedom because they are not stuck with the same group of people for all eternity. A friend's kid has a more varied social life with his basketball friends than with people from his school, for example. And half of the time we don't even know where he is at any given moment because, once again, he does not depend on having an adult to drive him everywhere for any activity that is not "playing outside".
> Kids play with each other and run around freely.
> I feel sorry when I see kids today depressed, lonely, and distrusts society.
I feel like you live in the US where everything is just dysfunctional.
I live in Stockholm. Kids play with each other and run around freely. And they have significantly more freedom because they can get anywhere on their own and not rely on an adult with a car.
> 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 everyone.
I never felt unsafe as a kid or abused in any way although my mom would make me memorize our village's name and location in case I get abducted while playing with my friends. We'd often go over to neighboring villages to play because some of our friends from school lived in a different village. We played until dawn and then went home to have dinner.
Cars in rural settings are generally faster and more indispensable for their owners. It is much easier to enact policy that reduces car traffic in cities than in villages.
It makes a pretty big difference. Yes, the opportunities in the city are bigger for everything, but so are the dangers. The amount of crazy people. The effort involved in getting to a nice and safe place where the kids can just run around without you having to watch them every second. Those places also exist in some cities, but way too few. So great that you don't have a car, (I mean it) car free places in cities I do enjoy, there are just not many of them.
I have two three year olds. Parks where they can run around with relaxed supervision are not far. A big park is close enough that they can walk the distance and in less than half an hour by bike we can reach a forest and four or five other parks.
Then your reply "Most of those opportunities involve getting hit by a car." is somewhat weird. This wasn't the case even in my own backwards country of Moldova in the 90s, after the fall of Soviet Union, much less today, when people are noticeably more civilized.
> 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 developer, sitting all day typing in a stuffy office, without natural light, without sun, without air, is certainly no healthier than being outdoors, connecting with nature and other people. We come from nature and are made to be active, outdoors, and in the sunlight.
Today, with AI, many white-collar jobs are being called into question, and perhaps we can go back to loving certain traditional jobs.
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.
> But it's easy to forget that humans have spent most of human history trying to escape subsistence farming.
Do you define human history as the last ~10k years or last ~100k-500k years?
But yes, certainly at least the last 3000 years for most humans have been spent farming to a large degree. But if we are even moderate in estimations of human origins, farming is very recent.
I think specifying "recorded history" would remove the confusion. Human history could refer to the history of anatomically modern humans, including before farming.
History is a bit of a confusing word that way; I suppose I can see it can be used in an informal sense to refer to any timeline outside of just historiography, which does tend to refer to a distinct study from archaeology and anthropology. Noted.
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.
Tell that to crop failures of sustinance farmers. "Oh you just chose the weather to be bad/a fast soreading disease/a severe drought. Live with your choices".
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.
Don’t forget doing only enough manual labour not to get hurt, killed or develop a chronic condition.
You can make a lot of money doing many skilled manual jobs in my country. Trades are highly paid and there is not enough supply. Better money than software development.
They often wreck their backs, or develop other chronic conditions. The successful ones stop doing manual work by the time they are in their 40s and move to running their own businesses employing 20 year olds.
A friend of mine just lost a family member a few weeks ago. He slipped on a roof.
Forestry is well paid in NZ, the average forester is probably better paid than the average developer. Although the ceiling for software devs is much higher.
But Forestry also has the highest number of industrial accidents.
We have a strong health and safety regime and culture. Most primary industries are heavily automated. Yet it only takes a simple mistake to cause injury.
> 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.
I hear sentiments about farming from lots of burnout software developers.
I always wonder what made them become developers at all. Cause my primary motivation for selecting a job was that I explicitly didn't want to ever work manually, I knew that since early childhood and it still didn't change even after 2 burnouts. My secondary motivation was that I liked working with machinery/computers.
Also when I started coding, it immediately felt like my passion. And the thing I love most about coding is that mostly all changes I make have instantly visible results. I couldn't imagine working a job where I had to plant a seed and then wait a week to see if it sprouts.
Also what I love about development is that with modern Docker/Kubernetes setups you can make the environment where your code runs pretty predictable. And with proper backups configured and backup restore testing you aren't really worried about losing the stuff you worked on for months. Meanwhile while farming you can't predict how much sun is gonna shine or how much rain you're gonna get. And you can't prepare for natural disasters which can come anytime and ruin your crops.
So I wonder if it's all just people who never loved software engineering and just went into it for money, and now that they have money after years of working they start looking for their true passion.
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)
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 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.
I'm someone who started programming when I was in middle school and went into this career field for the passion. But my passion was and is programming, not corporate office work.
In my career so far, I've spent most of my time troubleshooting AWS configs, combing through cloudwatch logs, and wringing requirements out of people, and a lot less of my time actually solving interesting problems.
The walls of my office are gray, as is the carpet, the desks, and the walls of the bullpens. There are awful fluorescent lights overhead, and my eyes are dry and tired. I am exhausted at the end of the day because of the sensory overload of people being on constant teams meetings all around me. They speak with their outside voices, like children.
So yes, I love software development, and maybe someday I will find a better job in this field that gives me the kind of challenging work and problem solving that I signed up for, but working outdoors? surrounded by the sounds of nature with the sun on my face? I'm sure there's a catch, but it sounds nice.
This is so cool. I have been in software for about 18 years but in the last few years I grew tired of the city life. My health was already affected by sedentary lifestyle - high blood glucose for many years.
I have been living in villages for about 5 years. I started a pig farm a month back. I have 16 piglets now. I still write software on a daily basis, a mix of client projects and own products. The pig farm needs about 2 hours of cleaning each day. I take care of cleaning. My business partner takes care of feeding.
I plan to grow the pig farm to a capacity of 100 pigs. It is a profitable business with roughly 30% return every 6-7 months. We give the pigs a lot more space and care than I have ever seen in any of those factory-style livestock business videos. With a 100 pigs, I will perhaps spend 5 hours a day in cleaning work - with more tools and employing a couple local folks.
Feel free to check out (links in my bio) or reach out if anyone wants to come and try this out in our little village in north eastern India. The village has large farms, growing all sorts of things.
It is probably a nice experience to have, but imagine your body after doing this for 50-60 years. You're one serious back injury away from being unemployed.
Meaning, you can somewhat opt out of the damage sedentary labor does to the body by exercising and using your body. It is much more difficult to avoid manual labor from damaging the body.
Sure, which is why many white collar workers look down on tradesmen (in the US at least), and tradesmen look down on white collar workers as "bullshit email jobs".
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)
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)
It's really not the ratio but the turnover. Guys who aren't making it up into leadership self select after 5 years or so.
The ratios seem unbelievable to those in tech, but I'm just saying you're unlikely to make it to 10 years without having at least the opportunity for some leadership.
> make it to 10 years without having at least the opportunity for some leadership.
Maybe if that person is young and hasn't done real work.
The best ICs are often horrible managers, it's a different career. Same applies idea here. Or just don't want to put up with the bullshit, the fights, the showing up drunk to work, or missing tools, etc.
As someone producing food, it’s pretty much a given that something in nature will seek to consume what you are producing. I was waiting for it, and in this case, wild boar.
I and my wife live in the city for work. While most people flock to the city and settle there as an upgraded life, we always felt empty here. Our dream is to buy a piece of land at our village and come back to our roots. I dont enjoy farming that much but my wife does. I however like the bliss of living close to nature. There is a river that flows nearby and taking a dip in that fills me with so much joy that I could never find anywhere in the city.
I have tried for a few years to grow rice a little farther north than it likes. When learning about rice farming I was surprised by Japanese farming machines. In the US our farm machines are built for enormous pieces of land and are ungodly expensive. Japanese machines are designed for small farms and to be affordable. Small machines are something that are seemingly missing from the US farm equipment market.
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
I was prepared to be dissapointed, but I am not.
Honest, simple, carrys that sense of work is good and doing what needs to be done is enough and that you are just another critter.
Japanese agriculture is in a critical situation. However, many urban workers, weary of capitalist competition, dream of a semi-agricultural life in the countryside.
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 misleads uninformed readers than being actually informative. Farming a rice field does not a rice economist make.
There is one particularly funny point I'd quibble on:
> This was part of a system to discourage communism initially by encouraging ownership of business and preventing absentee landlords accumulating large tracts of land where people who work the fields would be forced into renting.
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).
I am, of course, nitpicking. It's rather easier for me to write comments complaining about things than praising them at length, but I was entertained by the view into the author's experiences and anecdotes.
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.
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.
Kulaks were the stated problem, the real problem were the middling farmers. If you're a smallholder with a surplus of land, your production is very elastic.
You can plant cash crops and sell them to buy industrial products. Or you can plant crops that boost your quality of life directly: fruit, vegetables, tobacco, animal fodder.
The "price scissors" (low price of wheat, high price of goods) meant that middling farmers stopped planting wheat that the USSR needed to feed the cities and to pay for imports. To make the peasants plant wheat again the Soviets took away their land in the name of economy of scale (collectivization), but the real goal was to limit the size of personal plots.
> The reasoning behind Gentan was that a landless peasantry was more likely to revolt.
So, it was an anti-revolutionary policy. Which at that time of history worked as well as an anti-communist policy.
> Unsurprisingly the Soviet Union killed the kulak model and moved to collective farming[0], which was arguably actually communistic.
Soviet Union, whatever it had preached, implemented state capitalism - concentration of the means of production under a single owner.
It's important for me to use words precisely. If somebody implies, for example, that capitalism is the opposite of communism, that's just snatching the words and waving them like banners.
>Soviet Union, whatever it had preached, implemented state capitalism - concentration of the means of production under a single owner.
Lenin preached for state capitalism as a transitory state towards socialism. It's an integral part of the communist ideas, part of the direction even if not part of the ideal final state.
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...
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.
That doesn't seem strange to me at all. You give the people some of the things that they want from communism so that they will be content without communism. It's exactly what Bismarck did in Germany around 1900 (unemployment benefits, retirement funds and health insurance) and it was widely considered a success. Perhaps that was even an inspiration for Japan
> Whether that's a big deal or not depends on the person, their finances, how much rice the family eats, etc etc.
There's a nasty interaction among those concerns: as the basic staple food of the diet, rice is consumed in larger amounts by poorer people who can't afford real food, like meat.
Which means that a spike in the price of rice is effectively targeted at people who can't afford to substitute other foods.
I think Japanese rice-centric framing of meals is also of note, it's not universal across East Asia - I mean, allegedly, bowl of rice next to ramen is meme worthy to people from China, but it's just a menu item in Japan.
If you go into a Chinese supermarket, it will quickly become apparent that the default cooking oil is corn oil.
I find this an interesting contrast with the United States, where the default cooking oil is Canola oil (if you're a person looking to cook your own food; this is the sense in which the Chinese default is corn oil) or soybean oil (if you're a company looking to sell packaged food in grocery stores). As far as I'm aware, traditional China would have had sesame oil and maybe soybean oil, and certainly not corn oil. The advantage of corn oil must be the price.
But if corn oil is so cheap, why does the cheapest oil available in the US seem to be soybean oil?
China has a minimum purchase price of corn that's set by the government in order to maintain food stocks. It's also part of a larger jobs program (that I don't know much about).
China also imports 80% of its soybeans which means it's based on the rising/falling prices of oil and whatnot.
In the US, soybeans are a very important crop that's fed to livestock and also used in biodiesel production. There's enormous soybean "crush" infrastructure in the US to support the biodiesel market and the side effect of this results in tons of extra soybean oil. It ultimately ends up with soybean oil being cheap compared to everything else.
Why does the minimum purchase price of corn in China not make corn oil, a derivative product, more expensive?
Why does the low price of soybean oil in the United States not make soybean oil cheaper in China?
If the reason corn oil is cheap in China is that it's imported separately from the grain and therefore immune to the price floor... wouldn't that imply that corn oil is also cheaper outside China?
Corn??? I don't think corn in bulk is cheaply available in Japan at all. There's a mention in Wikipedia of a Chinese-Mongolian corn meal porridge thing but it looks pretty local.
Why? Rice is what you eat if you can't afford anything better. This parallels every other culture - the staple food will keep you alive, but if you have any money, you'll eat something better than that.
You know how "bread and water" is considered a terrible diet that only prisoners eat, and then only because they're not given a choice?
(And how modern prisoners get a much better diet?)
Bread and water is prisoner food, but avocado toast and cream-cheese bagels at the corner bodega are considered mid-to-upper-class fare. Pasta (also wheat) can range from kraft mac-and-cheese (poor-coded) to hand-made pasta with pesto sauce.
Rice and tea (ochazuke) is historically the "bread and water" equivalent in Japan, but people of every socioeconomic class still eat rice and miso soup for breakfast, eat rice balls (onigiri) regularly, and generally eat a diet with a lot of rice.
Even though rice is the staple food of Japan, I'd actually argue that instant ramen is much more poor-coded these days than even ochazuke.
I wouldn't be surprised if the middle class and lower class eat more-or-less identical quantities of rice.
> Bread and water is prisoner food, but avocado toast and cream-cheese bagels at the corner bodega are considered mid-to-upper-class fare.
That's not an example of nuance. An expensive fruit and a heavily-processed cheese are much higher-grade food than bread is.
> Pasta (also wheat) can range from kraft mac-and-cheese (poor-coded) to hand-made pasta with pesto sauce.
Same thing; cheese is a high-grade food, and even pesto is chock full of fat.
> Even though rice is the staple food of Japan, I'd actually argue that instant ramen is much more poor-coded these days than even ochazuke.
And this is a statement that even the poorest people in Japan aren't so poor that they have to subsist on rice. There's no question about which of instant ramen or ochazuke is a better meal. Instant ramen comes with tons of spices, fats, salt, some vegetables, and even a little meat.
It's actually traditionally 1 cup exactly here (scoop a measuring cup out of the rice cooker per plate). Most people in my house are 2-3x daily, I'm 1-2x daily because I didn't grow up eating rice (I prefer bread). We have 2 rice cookers going at dinner because 1 one is for the dogs exclusively.
Yup - family dogs eat what we do. Funny story - my mom's dog will not eat rice unless there's also fish (leftover bones will do). Rice+fish - bowl is cleaned up. Rice+meat - only the meat is picked and eaten.
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 and it's very comforting.
Now I work in high tech, working on AI, and the fancy stuff. There is just something about rice fields that I love - maybe just memories, childhood, smell, how serene it looks when it's full.
My one hope for AI, robotics, self driving cars, is that they can enable more people in cities to migrate back to rural places. When I was younger, I used envy those who grew up privileged in a big modern city. Nowadays, I absolutely am glad I grew up in a little village in a farming community and I consider myself lucky to have.
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.
This is rural Scotland in the late 1970s / early 1980s.
I'd like my small son to have the same opportunities that I had, instead of a school where the playground has lots of very carefully manufactured play equipment and they get to sit and look at iPads instead of working out for themselves how to program a BBC Micro.
This is super hard for me as well.
I know that a part of why I did so well in programming was being forced to think about what to do and how things worked for so long, and it gave me a lot of stamina to brute force my way through problems.
But these days, I'll admit even I reach for an LLM more often than not, and I can feel my mental muscle memory atrophy.
I don't know how to give my son the same experience (currently at age 8, he still does not have any of his own devices, and has highly restricted access to the iPad).
But still...
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.
Well, those who quit their jobs and open coffee shops almost certainly make a bad choice for themselves economically and work/ life balance wise... But they do wonderful things for their community, and - a questionable benefit to society but a huge benefit to some - real estate prices. People love these places. They capture a tiny fraction of the value they create, if we look at it in cold terms.
That can't really be said for downscaling rice farmers, can it? I mean, at best maybe the other rice farmers enjoy having them around.
I meant it as a pipe-dream that people jump into without knowing the hidden asymmetries. Farming of any kind is hard and learning that specific skillset is necessary to succeed.
For most folks it's just an add on. I have grandparents in Europe that have a garden where they grew potatoes and about 50 other things I'm not gonna list. They make jams, pickled things, and various other preserves. It's something to do and kept them sharp until they hit their late 80s.
Agreed. There's a world of difference between 'farming' for personal to small scale production as not quite a recreation but also not quite a job, and farming a low margin staple at high volume as your primary and sole means of earning money.
And I think when most people speak of the dream of returning to rural society to e.g. farm, they're speaking very much of the former rather than the latter.
That has been my experience as well, having immigrated from Eastern Europe to an enclave in the US. We know at least a dozen families (including our own) with 2-10 acre homesteads and all of them had previous experience with gardens and dachas in the Soviet Union that they used to grow supplemental produce, so no one came into the deal with delusions of making any profit. Everyone gives away the excess to neighbors of which there is usually a lot because yields are high on hand tended trees (and dutch bucket hydro).
The single biggest reason these farms exist is because American retail produce is mostly garbage. It’s so economically micro-optimized that all flavour has been wrung out of it. The only way many of us immigrants can get back the flavors of our childhoods is by growing the fruits and vegetables ourselves, if only to have control over the varieties, the vast majority of which are not sold in stores (>95%). That nostalgia is what pays the margin.
Where is this wonderful community, I would love to have neighbors like your described and where I can work in tech but still have 10 acre garden.
We're not neighbors unfortunately because we're spread out all over Southern California. By "enclave" I mean the area between West Hollywood and Arcadia, where many Eastern Europeans immigrated during the post-Soviet brain drain, not a dense conglomerate like San Gabriel.
BTW you do NOT want ten acres. That is a back breaking amount of work and even with modern technology you'll struggle to cope (it's not enough to afford most heavy equipment, but too much to do manually). You want an acre or two where you have enough space to plant trees. It takes a few years from nursery to fruiting, but they are far lower maintenance.
You don't really need 10 acres. My grandparents made do with 1/4 of an acre and would have yields of 350-500 lbs of potatoes per season. That's so much that they would give it away. I have fruit trees that require almost no effort to maintain once established. My neighbors give me oranges that fall to the ground and rot otherwise. It's not all or nothing. You can have a basil plant in an apartment.
Lots of places have community gardens. Hell, I go to one in the middle of NYC, a rooftop garden run by a friend. We even grow our own wheat for bread making.
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
Honestly the rice varieties in India should be promoted and protected more. The diversity and health benefits of these varieties is immense.
This is so important. Kerala in particular had a treasure trove of varieties, some well suited to low rainfall, resistant to local pests. I am sure other states had/has such diversity too, I am just not knowledgeable enough.
These genotypes are being lost to industrial mono-cropping. The government is doing nothing about it.
There is hope. India's Central Rice Research Institute is quite active and is working on some of the problems.
https://icar-crri.in/popular-nrri-varieties/
> These genotypes are being lost to industrial mono-cropping. The government is doing nothing about it.
This is happening worldwide and is one of the tragedies of modernity. Mexico for instance has tons of regional varieties of peppers that don't grow anywhere else except for in a very specific micro climate and they're disappearing in large part because of cheap imports that makes farming them unprofitable.
So unfortunate. Short term thinking doing its damage.
>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.
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.
> Ah, the perennial dream of the technologist. Here's a Le Corbusier quote on the same theme from 100 years ago
Except this time, the dream is actually real and cheaper than ever thanks to small EVs, batteries and solar power. 100 years ago it was limited to people with large estates who owned cars (and probably needed secretaries for their work).
These days it's more affordable than ever (except land/housing)
Some of us are living it. I plan to raise and slaughter cattle. Building a house now.
> 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.
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.
That depends on the rural environment. Especially grazing lands, like north European coastal heathlands, may have been managed with controlled burns in between grazing for a thousand years, to the point that they have their own biodiversity, that may get lost if they are disused.
Not everywhere, you are looking at only suburbs vs cities.
True rural farming is still bad for nature because the land is cleared of biodiversity to make way for farm land. It is arguably worse than cities because a lot more land per person is cleared.
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 :-)
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.
This only looks at land mammals rather than plant crops, but...
https://xkcd.com/1338/
We could probably reduced cultivated land by 50% if we would stop wanting to eat mid-sized or large animals (cows and pigs).
It's not that simple. Large herbivores are necessary for many environments and useful agriculturally even if we didn't eat them. Desertification caused by removing trees and grazing without replenishing, nutrients lost because sunlight and wind are scraping the bare soil, monoculture deserts and insecticides killing off pollinators and destroying ecologies... It's the factory farming and profit-motivated short-termist resource extraction that's a problem, not the cows and pigs. We can transition to sustainable methods without decreasing food variety.
some ruminants are good because they can turn inedible biomass into calories. However the scale at which we farm them is orders of magnitude beyond those levels.
I'm fairly sure there weren't 1.5 billion cows in the world before humans.
There were many other large mammals, but we've destroyed a lot of biodiversity already.
Yes, but there weren't that many large grazing animals because most of the world was covered in woods, not pastures. Trees are the most successful large creatures and we've probably reduced their habitat by 50%.
That's the actual tragedy. Forests contain a lot more like per cubic km than pastures do.
We've already touched ~all of the arable and non-arable land that's near to where people want to live. Forests clearcut, swamps (and deltas and the Netherlands) drained, rivers rerouted, reservoirs established, plains tilled, roads built, mountains conquered: We've been shaping and expanding the habitable Earth as it suits us for a very long time.
We're humans. We do that stuff.
And we're natural creatures like the rest of them are.
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 activities remain necessary regardless of where people live, and some will have an greater impact with widespread urbanity since some things like energy/food/water can be relatively cleanly decentralized in rural settings, at least partially, but require complete centralization in urban settings.
> 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.
I think your intuition of 140m x 140m being a small parcel of land is rather odd. That's a land the length of about 1.5 football fields, in both directions, for each and every person. So for a small family of 4 people, that'd be nearly 3 football fields of space, in all directions, just for themselves. And there's enough space on Earth for literally everybody to have this, including newborn babies as they are part of the population we're counting.
Now factor in larger families and the fact that some people voluntarily will want to live in close quarters (even given a free choice of all options), and you get many football fields of space, again in all directions, for every single person. This is just absolutely massive. And I think calling deserts uninhabitable is quite odd given everything from Nevada to Saudi Arabia. Basically no lands are truly uninhabitable if we want to inhabit them, even including water as the gradually expanding territory of China is demonstrating.
And, as mentioned already, arable lands have nothing to do with population distribution. As you pack people into smaller quarters, you use up just as much arable land, if not more (due to minimizing decentralization possibilities), than you do with wider distribution.
> I think your intuition of 140m x 140m being a small parcel of land is rather odd.
I actually went into google maps/satellite of some very familiar places to me, and drew out a 140m x 140m meter squares just to get a feel how much it is. It's very much a small plot of land.
I rounded up, the actual plot of land given 8.3bil pop is closer to 134m x 134m. Mind you, 134m x 134m per person IF you include all land area (so deserts, permafrost, high mountains and various unlivable areas), so in practice, it would be significantly less, so 95m squared give or take depending on what you consider "livable".
Of these 134m x 134m arable/fertile land would be only like 10% if I recall correctly. And arable/fertile land is - ultimately - the bottle neck.
This does not in any shape or form emphasize "how few of people there are on Earth". Quite the opposite actually. And every new person just makes that small parcel of land ever smaller.
> And I think calling deserts uninhabitable is quite odd given everything from Nevada to Saudi Arabia. Basically no lands are truly uninhabitable if we want to inhabit them, even including water as the gradually expanding territory of China is demonstrating.
And what happens to be the population density of Sahara Desert? Plus, do you live or want to live in a desert yourself? No? Well then...
Nobody wants to live in "close quarters" in insanely polluted, noisy overpopulated shitholes like Dhaka, Mumbai or Karachi or deserts. Just so you know... people there never had a choice and were just spawned there.
Planet is overpopulated, the overpopulation is simply not evenly distributed. Mind you, as recently as 1950s your plot of land would be 3x larger, when pop of planet was "mere" 2.5bil.
Saudi Arabia is wholly dependent of it's oil reserves to make miracles happen in the middle of the desert. At current oil consumption rates in the world, the total world oil reserves will last mere 47 years.
Then either some "magical transformation" will happen, or lots of people will end up poured in that square death cube of yours. And only the fraction of people left alive in Saudi Arabia will go back to riding cammels instead of their sports cars and jeeps.
Betting that a "magical transformation" will happen in 47years is nothing more than wishful thinking.
Unfortunately people aren't really wired for long term planning and reason backwards from the conclusions in their mind as starting point instead.
Rather than derive conclusions from the observable, quantifiable and measurable - even if those conclusions end up being less than pretty.
I don't think you're discussing this in good faith. 134m^2 is well over 4 acres of land for a single person! That's larger than a typical small suburban subdivision for a single person. A minimal immediate family size for a sustainable society is 4 people. That's 16+ acres for every single family, which is just massive. And the overwhelming majority of the Earth's land is perfectly acceptable for habitation. I suspect you think the opposite of arable is inhospitable. It is not. Arable is a very specific definition of land, which land can be turned into through irrigation and other basic technologies. It's not a sort of fixed quality metric.
I'm not really following what point you're trying to make with the example cities. People move to urban areas for economic opportunities. It's thanks to the internet that deurbanization is becoming a more viable reality for more people, vaguely analogous to how vehicles enabled it at a different time in the past. Saudi Arabia existed before oil, so to speak, and will exist afterwards. Part of the reason you find them invested in basically everything stateside, to the chagrin of many, is because they're working to create a more sustainable economy. The nice thing about countries under defacto dictatorship type rules is the ability to carry out longer-term plans, even if they may sometimes be misguided. [1]
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Line,_Saudi_Arabia
> 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.
Let's see, I didn't make any claim about untouched - although I do have some strong positions on wetlands cover, corridors, wild old forrest, et al but that's a whole other aside.
I'm just here to point out farming and livestock at suprisng to many scales can be operated by fewer people than you might expect.
as for: > no-one can afford to be shipping food halfway round the planet.
what does the Atlas of Economic Complexity type datasets currently say about food volume tonnages and trip lengths? I know that our local farmers co-op
( from: https://www.cbh.com.au/exports-overview )and there are other grain basins about the globe.
The challenges for grain shipping going forward likely fall about getting sufficient production of non fossil origin methanol fuel variations for shipping engines.
That and making sure the front doesn't fall off.
> That and making sure the front doesn't fall off.
Well that's not very typical, I'd like to make that point.
And yet, farmers still need roads, and hardware stores, and grocery stores, and hospitals, and HVAC and plumbers and before you know it, you need villages for all the people those people depend on, along with their families.
Farming communities have already had these things, the broad pattern is that fewer and fewer of thiese thigs are needed as fewer and fewer people are needed to work the same land.
Urbanisation ratios have increased, farm worker percentages decreased, average land area holdings increased so stores, schools, etc. are closing.
As time passes now, more an more old farm hoses are vacant island in an ocean of larger consolidated workings.
Fewer people are needed to work megafarms, but the basic needs for these services don't go away entirely. As a result, moving people to the urban centers still leaves you with all the things that you hoped urbanizing would get rid of- roads and rural communities.
Perhaps reread the upstream and pay close attention to the usernames and who said what.
> all the things that you hoped urbanizing would get rid of- roads and rural communities.
I spoke about the actual real in this moment trend that is already happening; increased urbanisation, I said nothing about wanting to see the end of roads or rural communities - although I'm a big fan of seeing less human impact on larger areas of managed land - land that includes agriculture, mining, native reserves, cropped treelands, etc.
It is often costlier and worse for the environment to ship locally than across the world.
https://www.wpr.org/news/locally-grown-fruits-veggies-expens...
But it's more ecologically sustainable to eat what grows where you live.
We do not have the capacity to ship food halfway round the world because picky eaters don't like the idea of eating meat and potatoes.
We do have the capacity to ship massive tonnages of grains, meat, fruits, livestock around the globe and we use it ensure sufficient pipelines to feed a billion+ global population across all seasons and weathers.
Costs at that scale are large, transcontinental railways across mountains, lifting tonnages against graivity in addition to rolling friction, braking energy and return to steady motion energy repeated for frequent stops and loading, transfer, loading times add up.
Per tonne per kilometres costs of floating container ships and binned grain ships are easily competitive.
There are points to be made about the lower tonnages of picky people foods, lobsters, fancy beef, a Bugatti Chiron tucked away amidst a cavern of self loading basic electric cars .. but there's still an underlying current need to transport food from source to demand.
The costs of global shipping transport is iron mining, steel formation, build times, fuel production, fuel side effects, and so on - fuel side effects are a bit of a pressing issue, and have been since at least that 1967 absolute banger by Syukuro Manabe and Richard T. Wetherald they chose to call Thermal Equilibrium of the Atmosphere with a Given Distribution of Relative Humidity
> But it's more ecologically sustainable to eat what grows where you live.
Sure, that's very much what Jill says, nice lady, actually a former first lady of the state I live in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UKu3bCbFck
> But it's more ecologically sustainable to eat what grows where you live.
Depends on the food, if you're clearing land for a new crop (which many countries have done historically and still do today) then it's not sustainable. And if the native crops are simply not as good nutritionally as the new crop then it's better to eat the new crop even at the ecological cost of the native one, e.g. potatoes vs barley in Ireland.
I'm not sure what you're referring to in your second sentence, not sure why picky eaters wouldn't like meat and potatoes or what that has to do with shipping in general, not even the fact that we do indeed have the capacity and will to ship food halfway around the world already today.
> And if the native crops are simply not as good nutritionally as the new crop then it's better to eat the new crop even at the ecological cost of the native one, e.g. potatoes vs barley in Ireland.
Potatoes and barley both grow pretty well in the UK.
The problem with eating things like soya over here is that you can only do it if you burn a city's worth of diesel every single day to power a container ship to bring it, and it's farmed using horribly unsustainable methods.
The stuff I eat (he says, drinking a cup of Colombian coffee, okay okay, hypocrisy) is grown using techniques and ecological impact more-or-less unchanged from the dawn of agriculture. We use Massey-Fergusons now rather than horses or oxen but there would be nothing stopping you going back to horses, and indeed with diesel at nearly two quid a litre it might well be worth looking at that.
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.
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!).
I agree with your point but you guys really have to take a look at what I was replying to and was I being serious at all.
Oooops :-D
It would also be better for the earth if there were no cities and everyone went back to village farming and local communities. I also don't see that ever happening nor do I want to ive in a city.
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.
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.
A good way to destroy real forests is moving a lot of people closer to them to have a forest experience near their house.
Surprisingly, this seems to be not true. Moscow, a city of 10+ million people, has huge forests inside or adjacent to the city limits. People leave rubbish here and there, but unless forests are rezoned and actively developed as "recreation zones" or some such, they are doing okay. One can easily find more species of birds in a large Moscow park than in the whole of Baden-Wuerttemberg. The trick is not depleting the ecosystem to begin with.
Some of this is being slowly reverted:
https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/2de...
This is very nice, but unfortunately, it will take forever (in human-life terms) to bring "real" forests back.
(In my previous post, I forgot to mention stunning rainforests near Sintra in Portugal.)
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...
Yea that rice mill machine is similar to what I remember. Our village didn't have one so some guy would show up in harvest season to do it for every house in the village.
I can tell by the houses in your wife's village that their area was likely wealthier than ours growing up. Our houses looked more like this: https://imgur.com/a/Pc9LuKF
When I was a kid, it felt like there were only 2 or 3 villages total in my area since our parents didn't allow us to go too far. As a visiting adult, I found out that there were hundreds of similar villages in the region. Most of these villages are generally empty nowadays as people moved to cities. However, I heard from locals that some younger people are beginning to return to villages and raise their kids there.
Oh, I assumed you meant a powered machine.
I believe it's pretty quiet here too outside of CNY, although there is at least one active school nearby. Nice to hear some younger people are returning. It must be nice for kids to grow up in this kind of environment.
Oh I didn't realize that some people would interpret that machine as powered by electricity.
Our village didn't get electricity until the 90s, I think. I do remember having electricity growing up, and even a small TV. By the time I emigrated, some households had refrigerators.
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
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
> 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.
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 everyone. You never feel lonely. Life is slower, much less stressful.
I feel sorry when I see kids today depressed, lonely, and distrusts society. This just didn't happen when I was growing up in a village. There is a joke that Asian parents don't think depression exists. I think part of that mindset is rooted in how many of them grew up - depression was just not really a thing in a village.
I sometimes hear of people who try to move to the country side, only to hate it and want to move back to cities. I get it. It's not for everyone. But I think it can be aided with technology such as AI+robots helping with your farms or house work, self driving cars taking your kids to school a bit far away, AI doctors who can do most of the basic healthcare work, etc. And if you can build a business with 1 or 2 people + AI, then it also makes remote work more viable. Basically, I think tech can bring a lot of the city quality of life to the country side.
If kids want to move to a town/city for more opportunities or networking, they'd be free to do so when they're older. Most do. But right now, the cities seem like the only path to having a decent quality of life.
> 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 everyone. You never feel lonely. Life is slower, much less stressful.
That just means we need to structure cities differently.
I live in a 1 sq km neighbourhood (literally, 1 km square) that houses 10k people.
It has almost everything I could wish for at walkable distance, schools for all ages, parks, a gym, a pool, sports campgrounds, medics, pharmacies, stores, markets, etc.
What doesn't exist (e.g. a movie theater, a library) I can reach by public transit in half an hour. The city has 2M people, there's plenty of stuff to do.
I've lived here all my life, my kids go to school with the kids of my school mates. They walk to school from at least 10yo, they visit each other's houses. During school breaks and weekends, they play in the park with their school friends while their parents grab a beer in a nearby kiosk.
You can build communities like this within cities.
> 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 everyone. You never feel lonely.
In Japan that's true in a lot of city neighbourhoods as well. The high trust is extremely valuable but villages are not the only way to achieve it.
> 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.
City kids have friends, play outside and go visit friends. That is completely normal in most world cities. And yes, where public transport exists, city kids do use public transport to get to school, to visit friends or to go to the gym.
> I feel sorry when I see kids today depressed, lonely, and distrusts society.
The weird thing is, rural people show a lot of distrust and fear that city people seem to show less. Rural people just assume that city means danger and fear.
> depression was just not really a thing in a village.
This is simply not true. If you look at social issues like alcoholism, drug use, suicides or domestic violence ... villages have plenty of those. They have harder availability of psychologists and psychiatrists. That does not mean issues do not exist there, they measurably do.
I think it's the degree that matters.
Degree matters here too.> I think it's the degree that matters.
City kids do not have less friends then rural kids. They do not socialize less. And if their super local turns up mistreating them, they have actual option to go elsewhere.
> Degree matters here too.
Yes. Small villages have more of these. The rural culture of alcoholism and domestic violence acceptance is both something very real and traditional. What are we talking about here, seriously. You frequently had to drink with others, else you was an outsider. And if family situation turned out bad, you have literally no where to go. (It is not like it would be easy in the city. But you have to from village to city to maybe get help.)
>> City kids have friends, play outside and go visit friends.
> Yes, and city kids also eat, poop, and talk. :)
> I think it's the degree that matters.
The degree is easy to measure. What happens on a cold winter night or generally on a day with bad weather when "play outside" and "visit friends on foot" is out of the question?
City kids can still visit friends (because they are not beholden to adults with cars) and can chose about a billion different activities (because, once again, they are not beholden to adults with cars).
Even socially city kids have a greater degree of freedom because they are not stuck with the same group of people for all eternity. A friend's kid has a more varied social life with his basketball friends than with people from his school, for example. And half of the time we don't even know where he is at any given moment because, once again, he does not depend on having an adult to drive him everywhere for any activity that is not "playing outside".
> Kids play with each other and run around freely.
> I feel sorry when I see kids today depressed, lonely, and distrusts society.
I feel like you live in the US where everything is just dysfunctional.
I live in Stockholm. Kids play with each other and run around freely. And they have significantly more freedom because they can get anywhere on their own and not rely on an adult with a car.
> 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 everyone.
Seems like a recipe for rampant child abuse.
Doesn't happen that much. Possibly the environment in which people grow up in is so free and kind. Sort of like Hawaii's aloha spirit (search it up).
I never felt unsafe as a kid or abused in any way although my mom would make me memorize our village's name and location in case I get abducted while playing with my friends. We'd often go over to neighboring villages to play because some of our friends from school lived in a different village. We played until dawn and then went home to have dinner.
"A kid in a town/city has access to a billion opportunities many of which exist only because there are enough people interested."
Most of those opportunities involve getting hit by a car.
Cars in rural settings are generally faster and more indispensable for their owners. It is much easier to enact policy that reduces car traffic in cities than in villages.
I see. Have you lived with kids in a village and also in cities to see the difference in reality?
I did and am moving back to the village now.
I grew up in a city and my wife grew up in a village. We now live in a city and don’t own a car.
But you don't have kids yet?
It makes a pretty big difference. Yes, the opportunities in the city are bigger for everything, but so are the dangers. The amount of crazy people. The effort involved in getting to a nice and safe place where the kids can just run around without you having to watch them every second. Those places also exist in some cities, but way too few. So great that you don't have a car, (I mean it) car free places in cities I do enjoy, there are just not many of them.
I have two three year olds. Parks where they can run around with relaxed supervision are not far. A big park is close enough that they can walk the distance and in less than half an hour by bike we can reach a forest and four or five other parks.
You can always spot an American by statements like this.
It's not a slight against you personally. It's a reflection of how completely dysfunctional United States are.
Well, I am european though and never have been to the US.
Then your reply "Most of those opportunities involve getting hit by a car." is somewhat weird. This wasn't the case even in my own backwards country of Moldova in the 90s, after the fall of Soviet Union, much less today, when people are noticeably more civilized.
Today are way more cars on the streets than in the 90s in a former east block state.
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> 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 developer, sitting all day typing in a stuffy office, without natural light, without sun, without air, is certainly no healthier than being outdoors, connecting with nature and other people. We come from nature and are made to be active, outdoors, and in the sunlight.
Today, with AI, many white-collar jobs are being called into question, and perhaps we can go back to loving certain traditional jobs.
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.
> But it's easy to forget that humans have spent most of human history trying to escape subsistence farming.
Do you define human history as the last ~10k years or last ~100k-500k years?
But yes, certainly at least the last 3000 years for most humans have been spent farming to a large degree. But if we are even moderate in estimations of human origins, farming is very recent.
History means the time of recorded events, the 10 kya to present day, they used the word correctly. Anatomically modern humans are prehistory.
History certainly does not predate sedentary farming. It seems reasonable to put at around ~8kya.
Certainly, some people still live as hunter gatherers. I presume people can deduce I do not refer to them.
I think specifying "recorded history" would remove the confusion. Human history could refer to the history of anatomically modern humans, including before farming.
History is recorded, that's the definition of the word. Prehistory is not recorded which is what the 500 kya to 10 kya refers to.
The wikipedia for "Recorded history"[1] draws the distinction this way:
- Before writing: prehistory
- After writing: recorded history
- Both together: human history[2]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recorded_history
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_history
History is a bit of a confusing word that way; I suppose I can see it can be used in an informal sense to refer to any timeline outside of just historiography, which does tend to refer to a distinct study from archaeology and anthropology. Noted.
You used the word correctly don't worry. Seems like the initial replyer meant prehistory.
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.
> Success and failure are choices.
Tell that to crop failures of sustinance farmers. "Oh you just chose the weather to be bad/a fast soreading disease/a severe drought. Live with your choices".
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.
Don’t forget doing only enough manual labour not to get hurt, killed or develop a chronic condition.
You can make a lot of money doing many skilled manual jobs in my country. Trades are highly paid and there is not enough supply. Better money than software development.
They often wreck their backs, or develop other chronic conditions. The successful ones stop doing manual work by the time they are in their 40s and move to running their own businesses employing 20 year olds.
A friend of mine just lost a family member a few weeks ago. He slipped on a roof.
@teruakohatu Some example of manual labor well payed in your country? In Italy, sometime manual labors are more safe than others not manual jobs.
This is because often the rules and laws protects still human instead the profits.
Forestry is well paid in NZ, the average forester is probably better paid than the average developer. Although the ceiling for software devs is much higher.
But Forestry also has the highest number of industrial accidents.
We have a strong health and safety regime and culture. Most primary industries are heavily automated. Yet it only takes a simple mistake to cause injury.
You don't have to @ their name here on HN, it doesn't work like Twitter. When you reply to them they'll see it already.
Only if they go back through their threads.
Or they use something like https://www.hnreplies.com/ which many do. In any case the @ doesn't work regardless, it does not ping anyone.
Is this New Zealand? Don't all the software people migrate to Australia for better wages?
Many do go overseas. They would definitely get paid more in Australia. But New Zealand is a pleasant place to live.
@sdevonoes What do you do for work?
ps: Unfortunately I agree with you.
You don't want manual labor that you unfortunately cannot do due to being "chained to the modern life".
You want a modern life with some light manual labor on the side as a hobby.
AI might shake things up, but I wonder if instead of "going back," it'll just blur the lines
> 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.
> 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.
Well, yeah, they'd call me a yokel. They'd also call me that when I'm at my tech job. But not the farmers they see getting rich and wish they were.
I hear sentiments about farming from lots of burnout software developers.
I always wonder what made them become developers at all. Cause my primary motivation for selecting a job was that I explicitly didn't want to ever work manually, I knew that since early childhood and it still didn't change even after 2 burnouts. My secondary motivation was that I liked working with machinery/computers.
Also when I started coding, it immediately felt like my passion. And the thing I love most about coding is that mostly all changes I make have instantly visible results. I couldn't imagine working a job where I had to plant a seed and then wait a week to see if it sprouts.
Also what I love about development is that with modern Docker/Kubernetes setups you can make the environment where your code runs pretty predictable. And with proper backups configured and backup restore testing you aren't really worried about losing the stuff you worked on for months. Meanwhile while farming you can't predict how much sun is gonna shine or how much rain you're gonna get. And you can't prepare for natural disasters which can come anytime and ruin your crops.
So I wonder if it's all just people who never loved software engineering and just went into it for money, and now that they have money after years of working they start looking for their true passion.
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)
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 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.
I'm someone who started programming when I was in middle school and went into this career field for the passion. But my passion was and is programming, not corporate office work.
In my career so far, I've spent most of my time troubleshooting AWS configs, combing through cloudwatch logs, and wringing requirements out of people, and a lot less of my time actually solving interesting problems.
The walls of my office are gray, as is the carpet, the desks, and the walls of the bullpens. There are awful fluorescent lights overhead, and my eyes are dry and tired. I am exhausted at the end of the day because of the sensory overload of people being on constant teams meetings all around me. They speak with their outside voices, like children.
So yes, I love software development, and maybe someday I will find a better job in this field that gives me the kind of challenging work and problem solving that I signed up for, but working outdoors? surrounded by the sounds of nature with the sun on my face? I'm sure there's a catch, but it sounds nice.
Ya i think so. Because i resonate a lot with this comment. I workout and such, but i absolutely love this shit.
This is so cool. I have been in software for about 18 years but in the last few years I grew tired of the city life. My health was already affected by sedentary lifestyle - high blood glucose for many years.
I have been living in villages for about 5 years. I started a pig farm a month back. I have 16 piglets now. I still write software on a daily basis, a mix of client projects and own products. The pig farm needs about 2 hours of cleaning each day. I take care of cleaning. My business partner takes care of feeding.
I plan to grow the pig farm to a capacity of 100 pigs. It is a profitable business with roughly 30% return every 6-7 months. We give the pigs a lot more space and care than I have ever seen in any of those factory-style livestock business videos. With a 100 pigs, I will perhaps spend 5 hours a day in cleaning work - with more tools and employing a couple local folks.
Feel free to check out (links in my bio) or reach out if anyone wants to come and try this out in our little village in north eastern India. The village has large farms, growing all sorts of things.
This is feels like life imitates art (the plot Stardew Valley). I hope you and your farm find great success!
It is probably a nice experience to have, but imagine your body after doing this for 50-60 years. You're one serious back injury away from being unemployed.
Much like carpentry, or electrical work, or concrete, or just about any of the trades.
Any labor throughout human history.
> Any labor throughout human history.
Sure, but sedentary labor destroys the body through neglect—which is ultimately a choice.
> Sure, but sedentary labor destroys the body through neglect—which is ultimately a choice
Huh? It's not clear to me what you're trying to say here.
Meaning, you can somewhat opt out of the damage sedentary labor does to the body by exercising and using your body. It is much more difficult to avoid manual labor from damaging the body.
Sure, which is why many white collar workers look down on tradesmen (in the US at least), and tradesmen look down on white collar workers as "bullshit email jobs".
Exercise is optional, labor in a manual labor job is mandatory
If ypu do those for 15 years you are likely in management
how many managers would have to exist per worker? especially given the demographics these days, with fewer and fewer children being born.
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)
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)
50:1
10:1
Big range, but still a lot of workers for every foreman.
(Father in law did 35yr in carpentry and teaching job corps)
It's really not the ratio but the turnover. Guys who aren't making it up into leadership self select after 5 years or so.
The ratios seem unbelievable to those in tech, but I'm just saying you're unlikely to make it to 10 years without having at least the opportunity for some leadership.
> make it to 10 years without having at least the opportunity for some leadership.
Maybe if that person is young and hasn't done real work.
The best ICs are often horrible managers, it's a different career. Same applies idea here. Or just don't want to put up with the bullshit, the fights, the showing up drunk to work, or missing tools, etc.
As someone producing food, it’s pretty much a given that something in nature will seek to consume what you are producing. I was waiting for it, and in this case, wild boar.
Not a problem with cassava!
I and my wife live in the city for work. While most people flock to the city and settle there as an upgraded life, we always felt empty here. Our dream is to buy a piece of land at our village and come back to our roots. I dont enjoy farming that much but my wife does. I however like the bliss of living close to nature. There is a river that flows nearby and taking a dip in that fills me with so much joy that I could never find anywhere in the city.
I have tried for a few years to grow rice a little farther north than it likes. When learning about rice farming I was surprised by Japanese farming machines. In the US our farm machines are built for enormous pieces of land and are ungodly expensive. Japanese machines are designed for small farms and to be affordable. Small machines are something that are seemingly missing from the US farm equipment market.
As an aside, participating in April Cools Club for the last 5 years has been very fun and invigorating as a writer.
https://www.aprilcools.club/
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
I love when between the AI updates and Rust vs C++ wars, HN suddenly promotes a post about rice farming in Japan <3
I wish we got more Rust vs C++, instead of the unending AI flood.
Ah so this is what you do after you work as a senior dev for 22 years.
I was prepared to be dissapointed, but I am not. Honest, simple, carrys that sense of work is good and doing what needs to be done is enough and that you are just another critter.
Looking at my future given this wave of AI!
Japanese agriculture is in a critical situation. However, many urban workers, weary of capitalist competition, dream of a semi-agricultural life in the countryside.
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 misleads uninformed readers than being actually informative. Farming a rice field does not a rice economist make.
There is one particularly funny point I'd quibble on:
> This was part of a system to discourage communism initially by encouraging ownership of business and preventing absentee landlords accumulating large tracts of land where people who work the fields would be forced into renting.
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).
I am, of course, nitpicking. It's rather easier for me to write comments complaining about things than praising them at length, but I was entertained by the view into the author's experiences and anecdotes.
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.
It's true, every small business owner enjoys larping as a capitalist until it comes time to declare bankruptcy https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/coronavirus/assistan...
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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
Kulaks were the stated problem, the real problem were the middling farmers. If you're a smallholder with a surplus of land, your production is very elastic.
You can plant cash crops and sell them to buy industrial products. Or you can plant crops that boost your quality of life directly: fruit, vegetables, tobacco, animal fodder.
The "price scissors" (low price of wheat, high price of goods) meant that middling farmers stopped planting wheat that the USSR needed to feed the cities and to pay for imports. To make the peasants plant wheat again the Soviets took away their land in the name of economy of scale (collectivization), but the real goal was to limit the size of personal plots.
> The reasoning behind Gentan was that a landless peasantry was more likely to revolt.
So, it was an anti-revolutionary policy. Which at that time of history worked as well as an anti-communist policy.
> Unsurprisingly the Soviet Union killed the kulak model and moved to collective farming[0], which was arguably actually communistic.
Soviet Union, whatever it had preached, implemented state capitalism - concentration of the means of production under a single owner.
It's important for me to use words precisely. If somebody implies, for example, that capitalism is the opposite of communism, that's just snatching the words and waving them like banners.
>Soviet Union, whatever it had preached, implemented state capitalism - concentration of the means of production under a single owner.
Lenin preached for state capitalism as a transitory state towards socialism. It's an integral part of the communist ideas, part of the direction even if not part of the ideal final state.
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?
Your choice of adjectives "rabidly" particularly underscores the times.
This mostly seems like an anti-manorialism idea, which falls under the umbrella of every modern economic system.
> 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.
That doesn't seem strange to me at all. You give the people some of the things that they want from communism so that they will be content without communism. It's exactly what Bismarck did in Germany around 1900 (unemployment benefits, retirement funds and health insurance) and it was widely considered a success. Perhaps that was even an inspiration for Japan
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You are a absolutely right the coming generation would have no idea about the carming, or wouldnlack to see the real process
That suitcase of rice story though, I'm finding it problematic lol.
- First of all a 95% increase in the price of rice means it less than doubled which is no big deal.
- I think maybe you meant it 20x'ed ? If so I will just eat corn until it comes down (my house eats 100kg of rice in a month)
- Can a suitcase of rice even get through customs?
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.
> Whether that's a big deal or not depends on the person, their finances, how much rice the family eats, etc etc.
There's a nasty interaction among those concerns: as the basic staple food of the diet, rice is consumed in larger amounts by poorer people who can't afford real food, like meat.
Which means that a spike in the price of rice is effectively targeted at people who can't afford to substitute other foods.
I think Japanese rice-centric framing of meals is also of note, it's not universal across East Asia - I mean, allegedly, bowl of rice next to ramen is meme worthy to people from China, but it's just a menu item in Japan.
> I mean, allegedly, bowl of rice next to ramen is meme worthy to people from China
I can't personally attest to that, but it certainly makes sense. Rice meals vs noodle meals are a fairly fundamental split in Chinese cuisine.
(It doesn't make rice any less of a staple food.)
Corn is still cheaper. If you're really poor in Asia you're eating corn (and complaining about it).
If you go into a Chinese supermarket, it will quickly become apparent that the default cooking oil is corn oil.
I find this an interesting contrast with the United States, where the default cooking oil is Canola oil (if you're a person looking to cook your own food; this is the sense in which the Chinese default is corn oil) or soybean oil (if you're a company looking to sell packaged food in grocery stores). As far as I'm aware, traditional China would have had sesame oil and maybe soybean oil, and certainly not corn oil. The advantage of corn oil must be the price.
But if corn oil is so cheap, why does the cheapest oil available in the US seem to be soybean oil?
China has a minimum purchase price of corn that's set by the government in order to maintain food stocks. It's also part of a larger jobs program (that I don't know much about).
China also imports 80% of its soybeans which means it's based on the rising/falling prices of oil and whatnot.
In the US, soybeans are a very important crop that's fed to livestock and also used in biodiesel production. There's enormous soybean "crush" infrastructure in the US to support the biodiesel market and the side effect of this results in tons of extra soybean oil. It ultimately ends up with soybean oil being cheap compared to everything else.
OK... but I have followup questions.
Why does the minimum purchase price of corn in China not make corn oil, a derivative product, more expensive?
Why does the low price of soybean oil in the United States not make soybean oil cheaper in China?
If the reason corn oil is cheap in China is that it's imported separately from the grain and therefore immune to the price floor... wouldn't that imply that corn oil is also cheaper outside China?
Corn??? I don't think corn in bulk is cheaply available in Japan at all. There's a mention in Wikipedia of a Chinese-Mongolian corn meal porridge thing but it looks pretty local.
It's available but it's culturally considered a grain that you feed to livestock rather than humans. I mostly feel the same way about it TBH.
Wait. Dod I read this right? Are you saying rice isn't real food but meat is?
I understand most cultures over-appreciate meat, but treating a premium carb source like rice lowly is a surprise.
Why? Rice is what you eat if you can't afford anything better. This parallels every other culture - the staple food will keep you alive, but if you have any money, you'll eat something better than that.
You know how "bread and water" is considered a terrible diet that only prisoners eat, and then only because they're not given a choice?
(And how modern prisoners get a much better diet?)
It's much more nuanced than that.
Bread and water is prisoner food, but avocado toast and cream-cheese bagels at the corner bodega are considered mid-to-upper-class fare. Pasta (also wheat) can range from kraft mac-and-cheese (poor-coded) to hand-made pasta with pesto sauce.
Rice and tea (ochazuke) is historically the "bread and water" equivalent in Japan, but people of every socioeconomic class still eat rice and miso soup for breakfast, eat rice balls (onigiri) regularly, and generally eat a diet with a lot of rice.
Even though rice is the staple food of Japan, I'd actually argue that instant ramen is much more poor-coded these days than even ochazuke.
I wouldn't be surprised if the middle class and lower class eat more-or-less identical quantities of rice.
> It's much more nuanced than that.
> Bread and water is prisoner food, but avocado toast and cream-cheese bagels at the corner bodega are considered mid-to-upper-class fare.
That's not an example of nuance. An expensive fruit and a heavily-processed cheese are much higher-grade food than bread is.
> Pasta (also wheat) can range from kraft mac-and-cheese (poor-coded) to hand-made pasta with pesto sauce.
Same thing; cheese is a high-grade food, and even pesto is chock full of fat.
> Even though rice is the staple food of Japan, I'd actually argue that instant ramen is much more poor-coded these days than even ochazuke.
And this is a statement that even the poorest people in Japan aren't so poor that they have to subsist on rice. There's no question about which of instant ramen or ochazuke is a better meal. Instant ramen comes with tons of spices, fats, salt, some vegetables, and even a little meat.
>rice is consumed in larger amounts by poorer people who can't afford real food
Um, rice is real food too, right?
> 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?
A lot of Asian households are multi-generational, so the maths definitely checks out there.
I'm putting my money on more people (8-10) but eating less than 200g per meal (1/2 cup uncooked, ~100g for most people)
EDIT, just saw sibling, that's impressive for 5 people, unless the dogs eat a lot of rice too.
It's actually traditionally 1 cup exactly here (scoop a measuring cup out of the rice cooker per plate). Most people in my house are 2-3x daily, I'm 1-2x daily because I didn't grow up eating rice (I prefer bread). We have 2 rice cookers going at dinner because 1 one is for the dogs exclusively.
It fluctuates but on average maybe 5 humans and 10 dogs.
You give rice to the dogs, too?
Yup - family dogs eat what we do. Funny story - my mom's dog will not eat rice unless there's also fish (leftover bones will do). Rice+fish - bowl is cleaned up. Rice+meat - only the meat is picked and eaten.
Read the ingredients on a can of dog food, there's either rice or corn in it. They prefer rice.
That’s an amazing volume.