Farmer Boy
The first in the 'Little House' books. Describes Almanzo Wilder as a child growing up on a farm in rural New York from the time he is around 8 years old. Introduces all of Almanzo's family - parents, brothers and sisters.
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What Hacker News says
- A long time ago I listened to "The Bell Curve" on tape. One of valuable ideas I got from the book was that we should strive to create a valuable place for everyone in society. Everyone, whether young or old, intelligent or not, should feel that they are contributing something of value. No one should feel that they have nothing to give and that society would be better off without them. Furthermore, we should encourage everyone to give their best to society. Thus, if the best effort a man with an IQ of 80 can do is sweep the streets, then we should give him job as a streetsweeper and not replace him with a robot.
To me, this idea, that everyone should have a valuable place is society, explains what's wrong with adolescence. We as a society do not allow adolescents (young adults) a valuable place in society; we should be encouraging them to do the most useful work they can do; instead we discourage them. Sure, there is encouragement for being a scholar and for excelling in sports, but only a few adults are gifted in those areas: those few who will later go on to be teachers, professors, writers, and professional sports players. The rest of them are forced to do work which they are not good at, which they don't value, and which society doesn't value. Is it any wonder they become bored and turn to other things?
A better system is described in an old book I recently re-read, "Farmer Boy" (http://www.amazon.com/Farmer-Little-House-Ingalls-Wilder/dp/...), not long ago which describes the life of a boy on a farm in New York in the 19th century. He was given as much work and responsibility on the farm as he could handle and he grew to the challenges. At school he learned to read and write and do arithmetic, and at home on the farm he learned to do useful work, negotiate, and spend wisely. When he was about ten or eleven, a wagon-maker offered to apprentice him. In return for several years of work, the boy would get room and board and training in the whole business of wagon-making with the likelihood that at the end of the period, he would buy the business which employed about 50 men. His father preferred that the boy become a farmer like he was, but he let the boy decide, saying to his mother, "We can keep him here on the farm by law til he's twenty-one, but he won't do any good if he's wanting to go."
Such a system worked very well in the past because it efficiently transitioned young people from a state of dependence on their parents to independence and it's accompanying responsibilities. A possible problem with that system is that it offered young people few opportunities beyond what was available to their parents. However, even then adults had a lot of opportunity to improve their situations by working harder at their jobs and by educating themselves. Today, there are many more opportunities. The job market is global: if you're not getting paid what you're worth, it's easier than any other time in history to find someone who will pay you more. Educational opportunities abound: books are relatively cheap, there are lots of libraries where you can read for cheap or for free, the Internet has lots of educational resources, and there are many institutions offering formal education. In addition, the number of work hours needed to survive is smaller than ever. So the argument that young adults need to be restrained from working and confined to public schools for several years because they won't have an opportunity to educate themselves later is unconvincing.
- “… you never take an 'easy profit' deal from someone who is in the business of making money from them while in their own domain…”
Laura ingalls wilder said it best, in Farmer Boy:
“never bet your money on another man’s game”
- Article: "Icehouses never became fashionable for anyone but the most elite. Few except kings or governors would have the resources—money, labor, space, materials, time—to construct a building just for freezing or storing ice harvested from the mountains."
However, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_house_(building) talks about Zimri-Lim's famous icehouse, but also says:
In Texas, former ice houses are a cultural tradition. Ice merchants diversified to sell groceries and cold beer, serving as early convenience stores and local gathering places. The widespread 7-Eleven chain of convenience stores in the U.S., first known as Tote'm Stores, developed from ice houses operated by the Southland ice manufacturing company in Dallas and San Antonio in the 1930s.^[12] Many Texas ice houses have since converted into open-air bars. In central Texas, southeast Texas (especially the Houston area), and the Texas Hill Country, the word "icehouse" has become a colloquialism for an establishment that derives the majority of its income from the sale of cold beer.^[13]
Laura Ingalls Wilder's novel Farmer Boy https://archive.org/details/farmerboy00wild_0 decribes her husband's New England childhood; one chapter is a story of how he and his father filled their family icehouse with ice bought in the winter from the Frenchmen who cut up the river ice. His father was a prosperous farmer, one of the richer men in town, with several horses and many cows and pigs, but he was no king or governor; his son got up at 5 AM every morning to milk the cows. While Farmer Boy, like her other books, is fictionalized, she did try to remain broadly factual in what she described; and, more generally, she is fairly reliable about what kinds of things people of her time considered normal.
The late modern history of the ice trade is really quite remarkable, and it's unfortunate that the article gives it such short shrift. Starting in the 01700s, ships carried ice from Scandinavia and the Great Lakes all the way around the world, until the invention of practical heat pumps (implicit in Carnot's 01824 heat engines) in the late 01800s made it cheaper to produce ice locally anywhere on Earth's surface with a steam-engine. The key to this was "chimogene", a fraction distilled from petroleum that boils at or below 0°; now we call it propane and butane. But it wasn't until after 01900 that the last ice ship sailed, and daily ice delivery for home iceboxes was common in the United States until the 01950s. The Amish still practice it today.
Even today, in the United States, air conditioning systems are rated in "tons"; a "five-ton air-conditioner" provides as much cooling as a daily delivery of five tons of ice.
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The fundamental physical phenomenon that makes icehouses possible is Galileo's square-cube law. A one-meter cube of ice weighs about a tonne and has six square meters of surface area through which heat can enter to melt it, 6 m²/tonne. A ten-meter cube of ice weighs a thousand tonnes but has only 600 square meters of surface area, 0.6 m²/tonne.
So, with a little straw around it, it can remain frozen throughout spring, summer, and fall. Water's humongous enthalpy of fusion of 333.55 kJ/kg is 333.55 MJ/tonne or about 300 MJ/m³, so such an icehouse can soak up 300 GJ from its environment before it loses all its wares. For a seasonal thermal store, that's about 10–15 kilowatts, depending on how long winter is. Dividing by dry straw's thermal conductivity of about 0.05 W/m/K, we get 190 kilokelvin meters; divided by 600 m², this gives us a maximum thermal gradient of 300 K/m.
So, if the outside of the icehouse averages 30°, 100 mm of straw is enough.
Nowadays many building air conditioning units use the same principle on a shorter timescale, freezing water when electricity is cheap and using the ice to cool the building all day long. And similar principles apply to other phase-change energy storage systems, whether using sal mirabilis, its eutectic with halite, or the aqueous eutectic of sylvite; though I expect thermochemical energy storage using muriate of lime and perhaps magnesia to make most of these obsolete, in part because they need no such insulation.
- 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.
