Programming for fun is great too. Hit a problem that's not something you enjoy? Drop the project and move on.
The "its fun" vs "I don't tolerate these hard problems that come with the skill" is a significant disconnect that people have and one of the things that generates a lot of people starting something (be it a project or a career) and not moving up on it.
http://www.cs.uni.edu/%7Ewallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2018...
> ... Then I went off to college to study architecture... and found that, while I liked many things about the field, I didn't really like to do the grunt work that is part of the architecture student's life, and when the assigned projects got more challenging, I didn't really enjoy working on them.
> But I had enjoyed working on the hard projects I'd encountered in my programing class back in high school. They were challenges I wanted to overcome. I changed my major and dove into college CS courses, which were full of hard problems -- but hard problems that I wanted to solve. I didn't mind being frustrated for an entire semester one year, working in assembly language and JCL, because I wanted to solve the puzzles.
> Maybe this is what people mean when they tell us to "find our passion", but that phrase seems pretty abstract to me. Maybe instead we should encourage people to find the hard problems they like to work on. Which problems do you want to keep working on, even when they turn out to be harder than you expected? Which kinds of frustration do you enjoy, or at least are willing to endure while you figure things out? Answers to these very practical questions might help you find a place where you can build an interesting and rewarding life.
> I realize that "Find your passion" makes for a more compelling motivational poster than "What hard problems do you enjoy working on?" (and even that's a lot better than "What kind of pain are you willing to endure?"), but it might give some people a more realistic way to approach finding their life's work.
On one side is see land cultivators and on the other hand i see animal exploiters. The first do -IHMO- a great job akin to school teacher, the latter do a horrible job akin to a concentration camp commander.
Having one word to describe both is beyond me.
That said, I do find it amazing how these two groups stick together and back each other up in politics!
But since I'm talking to a vegan interlocutor, the response will be "murderer, psychopath, exploiter, rapist, torturer", et cetera. The out-group is wrong and evil, by definition.
So there was a past in which the lines were more blurry and animals were not as hardcore exploited as they are today. I agree. And there was a time in which people in many places needed animal husbandry to survive (nomads, cold climates, etc. -- everywhere away from the habitat of the other primates). I agree.
But what I do not agree on is that these two points make the word "farmer" less "cover two topics at once" in this day and age, were:
1) animals are most commonly being exploited at a massive scale when being "farmed", and
2) we can live really well without animal derived foods/clothes/labour
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41vETgarh_8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MI78WOW_u-Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Za45bT41sXg
Also
You need capital for land (and if you are going to have this capital as a tech person, go invest it and get passive returns, or start your own tech company doing service work) + labor.
Your labor is worth less, and close to third world wages.
The economic value comes from improving the land with labor and tech. Your competition is paying the same wages.
I know 2 people doing this, both are on medicaid.
The classic risk-reward scenario. Tech has the potential for tremendously greater upside, but it is also insanely difficult to succeed in. Farming is comparatively quite easy. Your customer base is essentially guaranteed.
> go invest it and get passive returns
Technically farmland is an investment with passive returns. Other farmers will fall over themselves to rent it from you. If you choose to farm it yourself, you do not lose the passive return. Your farm income should reflect the rent that you would have otherwise paid if it weren't your land. Thus, in effect, you are still paying rent to yourself even if you don't formally account for it.
> Your labor is worth less
My tech job also pays me to farm. Double-dipping will always be worth more. However, even ignoring that, I make more per hour farming than I do in my tech job.
It is not very many hours, though. A hypothetical $10,000 per hour job doesn't get you far if there is only one hour of work per year to do. This is why making a living farming is hard.
Maybe... maybe some things are worth doing not simply because there's a dollar sign in the result. Let's ponder that this Juneteenth.
- declining reliability of seeds
- increasing variation in climate
- Ron DeSantis, according to Donald Trump
I think the temptation of America's artisanal manufacturing and farming is to revive a strong relationship between hard work and value. Maybe you remember beginning in software to help people, but look back at too many sacrifices inflicted on nature and humanity just to game the extractive component of ROI. So, I agree with your philosophy, but I want to say that farmers themselves obsess about ROI. I'm sure you understand their long-term success relies on interfacing with competitive markets right up to physical delivery. I wouldn't call that an American mentality because it affects farmers around the world.