[rsync]

"To them it's no different than trying not to land on your ass trying to pin an implement to the tractor in the mud. Going into a silo or grain hopper is not a dangerous task to them."

I have been on HN since 2012 and this comment is the dumbest shit I have ever seen posted here. By a fair margin.

If you climb into an enclosed space with both burial and dust explosion hazards and your internal alarms aren't going off loud and strong ... you are, sadly, an idiot.

Most of the people I know who handle tasks like this are not idiots.

[phkahler]

Um yeah, because when I was a kid my grandfather let us ride in the grain collection cart. That was basically a large hopper on wheels with a funnel shape on the bottom to feed the grain elevator in the barn. We rode out to the fields. When the harvesters were full they'd come and "pour" a load into the wagon with kids in it. Buried my brothers from the waist down IIRC. Fun stuff. Safe and smart thing to let kids do? Nope.

There are a lot of people with lower standards for safety like the PP indicated. They're not all wrong.

[david-gpu]

> I have been on HN since 2012 and this comment is the dumbest shit I have ever seen posted here. By a fair margin.

Since you've been in HN so long, it may have been a while since you last had a chance to look at the guidelines. Here's a quick friendly reminder:

"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

Thank you for contributing to this community.

Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[jcims]

Come on man, you don't need to be this rude about a disagreement. You didn't even attempt to contest the primary claim, that farmers aren't going to flock like lemmings to a product that sells safety as its primary benefit.

'Dangerous' is contextual...if the risks of a task can be mitigated with some basic safety process, is it still dangerous? Getting into a grain bin is like rock climbing...go commando and you're playing with death, go in with the right process and gear and you'll be fine. Is it still 'dangerous' then?

[rsync]

"'Dangerous' is contextual...if the risks of a task can be mitigated with some basic safety process, is it still dangerous? Getting into a grain bin is like rock climbing...go commando and you're playing with death, go in with the right process and gear and you'll be fine. Is it still 'dangerous' then?"

I think this is a flawed analogy.

Although I don't do much rock climbing, I do take part in some other high consequence recreational activities. I agree that some of these risks can be mitigated with equipment and safety measures and, in fact, I don't feel like I'm courting death.

The difference here is that these are activities I have tens of thousands of reps of. Further, I am regularly practicing these activities in totally safe environments. Finally, I have mental models of thousands of different routes and locations and conditions and settings upon which to draw.

Contrast this with (for instance) entering in, and working on, a grain silo. You will not have had thousands of reps of this activity. You will not have entered thousands of different grain silos. You will not have trained for decades in practice grain silos. This is a very high consequence activity that you will have very shallow mental maps of.

I think that's an important distinction.

It suggests that regardless of equipment and processes, one should enter into (high consequence activities one has shallow mental maps of) on very high alert.

[perl4ever]

Instead of using the word "idiot", I think it's probably better to describe people who refused to give up small scale farming over the course of the 20th century as...very stubborn, used to doing everything themselves to save money and ignoring risks (to themselves and family) that a big employer can't possibly get away with today.

If you've ever read "Farmer Boy" about Almanzo Wilder, there's a bit where his father is telling him, he can go and live in the city, apprentice to someone and make a good living, but be dependent on other people, or he can be a farmer, take more risks with the weather and everything else, but be independent.

[rsync]

"Instead of using the word "idiot", I think it's probably better to describe people ..."

Please re-read - I said:

"Most of the people I know who handle tasks like this are not idiots."

I was disputing my parents assertion that "... (things like this are) not a dangerous task to them." I think my parent is incorrect.

[perl4ever]

It's very common for (family) farmers to die in accidents like the article hints at. Not specifically related to grain bins, but in general due to working with hazardous equipment and chemicals and having no regard for labor and safety laws.

So, even if you didn't mean to, I think you called a lot of people idiots.

I was just trying to reframe it as, people who work for themselves rather than a corporation tend to take a lot more risk and settle for a lot less pay.

So if you know people like that, you'd know about the consequent misfortunes.

I'm not trying to be critical, really, what it comes down to is that if "most of the people [you] know" wouldn't take the risks that I associate with farmers, then it makes me wonder what sort of people they are. What context you are coming from.

My grandfather was a farmer. I don't know the details, but he died after a mishap cleaning something with gasoline. Not immediately. I read a news item once where a farmer was overcome by something with toxic fumes, and the whole family died in succession, each one going in to rescue the other. There was another about someone who got their arms ripped off while working alone and managed to get help.

[celticninja]

I agree. The first paragraph of the article contains their reasoning behind creating it. An experienced farmer asked them to create something so that he (and his children) never had to expose themselves to that risk again. They know it is dangerous, they may manage that risk but you are a fool if you think they would prefer to run the risk rather than find a safer alternative.

[mustacheemperor]

There is a post on the front page of reddit[0] today about the risks of grain entrapment, and that thread is also full of people with firsthand experiences of friends or relatives dying on farms from it.

[0]https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/nwmect/til_t...

[Krasnol]

Interesting timing.

[exporectomy]

This thread is a hilarious game of "I'm better than you because I know real farmers". For some reason, certain occupations seem to bring out a sanctimonious attitude in people that nobody can understand it if they're not personally doing it themselves, combined with a failure to recognize that those occupationists are diverse and one person's personal friends might feel differently from another group or even the majority.

[baryphonic]

I must say, I find this response a bit odd. Just for reference, a billionaire US presidential candidate last year said[0]:

> I could teach anybody—even people in this room so no offense intended—to be a farmer. It's a process. You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn.

I've seen this kind of attitude toward lower-status occupations from fellow engineers and other educated professional types, and I find it distasteful. Unlike some other occupations which also provoke a "sanctimonious attitude" (such as, say, education, despite almost all of us having extensive experience with it as a consumer or product or something), farming seems like a blind spot for almost all educated professionals. I know I'm profoundly ignorant of how all of the different types of food I eat are produced. Everything I learn about the field - and I'm not naturally interested in it - makes me feel even more uninformed about all of the factors that go into producing and distributing food. That indicates to me that farmers, whom we depend on, absolutely deserve some respect and deference. When a common sentiment among this class is that farming can be reduced to simply putting some dirt over a hole with a seed inside, knowing an actual farmer is probably pretty valuable, even if that farmer isn't representative of farmers as a whole. Farming seems to be one of the few occupations where this "sanctimonious attitude" seems justifiable.

[0]https://www.newsweek.com/mike-bloombergs-elitist-farming-com...

[celticninja]

It's not "I know..." It's "you are making stupid assumptions" and you haven't read the article.

[bombcar]

They’re already running the risk vs other safer alternatives - even if just smaller silos.

Sure if you give it away for free they’ll be there - but if you’re trying to sell it you need to convince them (or more likely get it illegal to not use one).