tjic

I'm a coder, ran my own "startups" (small businesses, no VC, no hypergrowth) from 2000 to 2014, my .emacs is thousands of lines long, etc.

TY for the positive reviews of my books!

I'll be very upfront: homesteading is a money losing proposition. It's a consumption good - it costs more than any (monetary) profit it brings.

And my writing about it is ALSO money losing. I'm a coder. When I write and sell novels, the opportunity cost is huge - at an hourly rate, I lose about 90% of what I could otherwise be making coding.

Writing about homesteading is much better - I only lose about 50% of what I could otherwise be making.

I write because (a) I am more driven to create and share my ideas with people than I am to make a marginal dollar, (b) I am ideologically in favor of people moving to the countryside and living a different lifestyle, so writing is an ideological / political choice.

I didn't "need" $90k to write the book.

I chose to sell copies of a book, at typical book prices. Thousands of people chose to buy the book. That's where the $90k number comes from.

> And the book's photos are black & white ...

"The food is terrible...and the portions are so small".

The wonderful thing about the free market is that those who want to buy a thing can, and those who don't, need not.

Cheers!

Thesis proven!

"1 year sabbatical, backpacked around Asia."

If I saw that on a resume I'd think it was awesome. (...and I've hired dozens of people).

Even if the statistics is accurate.

Even if denying people the right to self-determination is a positive in your ethical system.

Even if X, Y, Z are true... I still have to ask: what about the COST? Pesticides exist because they do something useful - kill off pests. They increase food production and decrease labor.

What if we've saved some lives...but also made 200,000 farmers each spend an extra five hours a week bent over in their fields, picking bugs off leaves? Or made them plant more land in order to harvest the same amount of food?

One person expresses his political opinion.

Unworthy of HN.

If you aren't generating profits, and want someone to work for you, either:

* borrow the money in your own name

* borrow against your house

* don't bring them on

You're the one creating the risk. You've gotta eat it.

Anything else is massively unethical.

I live in NH, I got a well paying contract in MA, and they needed me to work 60 hrs/week to rescue a project.

The 60 hrs/week is key, because it made the ratio of billable hours to wasted hours plausible - 15 hours of commute to 40 of billable is terrible, but 15:60 made some sense.

Those six months (plus the side remote consulting gig I did on the weekend) almost killed me, but they also let me pay off about 1/3 of my mortgage in half a year.