[dhosek]

Not to mention that with AI, the pleasure is going out of it, at least for me. I enjoy the crafting of code at least as much if not more than the actual results of the code. For almost 20 years, I’ve been declaring myself ready to leave tech behind and buy a chicken farm, but now I’m pretty much there emotionally and financially. I likely won’t actually raise chickens (maybe a couple backyard chickens for eggs), but I’ll be pretty much opting out of economic productivity and just doing things for the pleasure of them instead. Unless, of course, the economy crashes and my retirement savings turn to dust and I end up having to continue being a cog in the machinery of capitalism until I die.

[hermitcrab]

Why a chicken farm? The medium to large scale ones I have seen videos of look like terrible places, for both the chickens and the human workers. I expect they smell even worse.

[dhosek]

It’s more a rhetorical thing than a reality. The appeal to me of raising chickens for eggs is not having to slaughter them,¹ but reality is much uglier than that, of course.

⸻

1. Back in the 00s, I would buy our weekly supply of eggs from a woman who sold eggs at the Beverly Hills farmer’s market. She had photo albums of the chickens at the farm. One Sunday morning, I overslept and arrived towards the end of the market. The egg lady had no eggs, but was selling whole chickens out of a cooler. I was relieved to discover that she’d just sold out of eggs and the chickens she was selling as meat weren’t the hens who laid the eggs (although still, chickens were slaughtered to make meat). And yes, I’m the kind of urban hypocrite who is happy to eat meat as long as he doesn’t have to think about how it transformed from an animal into a food.

[hermitcrab]

>The appeal to me of raising chickens for eggs is not having to slaughter them,

Doing that in your backyard with a few chickens sounds great.

>but reality is much uglier than that, of course.

Much uglier at any sort of commercial scale.

[socalgal2]

> I end up having to continue being a cog in the machinery of capitalism until I die.

Vs what exactly?

[dhosek]

Living off savings/investments and not having to do things because they will generate money.