13 Replies to “Reality Bites”

  1. The school of hard knocks.

    Figure out how to fix it, often with only a hammer, screw driver, crescent wrench (hopefully you have both metric and imperial) and vice grips, or walk back to the yard.

    1. If you have a metric crescent wrench then you probably have metric vice grips, and maybe a metric hammer to go along with the set.

      Let me know where you found them. I can’t find them anywhere.

  2. Smartest guy I ever met was a farm kid who went to the same college as I did. I asked him once where he got all his most thoughtful ideas from. ”You have a lot of time to reflect on the state of the world when you’re combining sixteen hours a day in the Fall.”

    Yeah.

  3. We finished our harvest on thanksgiving evening then sat down together for our last harvest meal. We all discussed what we were thankful for during our dinner. I’ve never been more grateful for the land, nature and family. It’s a great life, I’ve been blessed!

  4. Reality knocks the stuffing out of theory. If a theory can’t survive reality, then it deserves and begs to be put out of humanity’s collective misery. Farmers are up to their neck in reality all of the time. They have no use for theories that don’t work in the real world. And that is why they are so smart because their life demands that they must constantly sift through crap for gems of wisdom or lose their livelihood.

  5. This, by the way, is why so much software is so crappy. There’s no feedback loops. Developers who write bad code, operations engineers who half-ass the hosting, managers who decide to cut corners on security – they’re all isolated from the painful consequences of their decisions.

    I remember when I first transferred from engineering to computer science and the seniors were bitching that they couldn’t call themselves “software engineers”. I was bemused; “I’ve seen your code. Are you saying you want to be personally, legally responsible for bugs found in your code? Because that’s what being an engineer means.”

  6. Delusions of Adequacy..
    We all know them.
    Those who have rubbed up against reality have few of these delusions left intact.

    Those who studiously avoid any contact with reality..now they are truly different..Able to believe six impossible things before breakfast,every day of the week..

    And after years of doing so,they are almost totally oblivious of reality..
    Every logical result of their idiocy is now violent attacks by forces unnamed..
    A vicious Rightwing conspiracy..for true..

  7. A society that pays good plumbers less than bad intellectuals will have leaky pipes and leaky ideas. (anon)

  8. Victor Davis Hanson, a raisin and peach farmer ( and classics professor ) in the Central Valley basically says the same thing. He argues convincingly that the Golden Age of Greece would not have happened without the integrity of an agrarian society – “ farming is the best test of good and bad men “.

  9. “Many of what are called social problems are differences between the theories of intellectuals and the realities of the world—differences which many intellectuals interpret to mean that it is the real world that is wrong and needs changing.”
    ― Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society

    “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.”
    ― George Orwell

  10. Farmers, soldiers, firefighters…

    All of us have seen what happens when untested ideas smack face-first into the real world.
    Get it wrong and Bad Things happn.

    Also, yes…., plenty of time to think.
    In modern times, plenty of time to listen to long-format books and discussions on weighty issues.

  11. As the great economist Thomas Sowell said quite a while ago, “Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.”

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