Hacker Cinema
Clarkson's Farm
2021 · TV series · 5 seasons
Follow Jeremy Clarkson as he embarks on his latest adventure, farming. The man who on several occasions claims to be allergic to manual labour takes on the most manually labour intensive job there is. What could possibly go wrong?
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12 comments on Hacker News
See also: Clarkson's Farm [0], for some of the messy reality of running an actual modern farm in England (though edited for entertainment value). I suspect the current AIs are not quite up to doing this - but I firmly beleive it's only a matter of time.
[0]https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10541088/
When I click "subscribe" on my TV it gives me three options, all with adverts
Maybe I could subscribe and take a risk that I could then buy something again, but it tells me they don't want people paying money, they want people watching adverts.
As such the rare amazon exclusives (mainly clarkson's farm) I will get elsewhere.
Compared to say Paramount, which I once again subscribed to through apple-tv a couple of months ago. I watch new Star Trek and South Park episodes, then unsubscribe, suits me fine, far cheaper than how I used to watch Star Trek in the 1990s.
Likewise I'll subscribe to Apple when for all mankind and morning show come back.
If they want me permamently subscribed, they should go back to making 26 episodes a year.
Worth noting that Clarkson's farm would have been a catastrophic failure but for the money pumped into it by the TV show.
I think when tech people think of becoming a farmer they're thinking of doing something small like this https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-series/gourmet-farmer and maybe something like Clarkson's Farm (Series on Amazon Prime) rather than going to build and manage a modern industrial farm.
In some ways this idea of becoming a farmer can be thought of as rich people cosplaying at being a farmer rather than actually running a for-profit farm. For some this might work out and be an actual career that they are good at, but for others it might just be a hobby.
Though both the TV shows I mentioned show how much hard work there is in actually running a farm and producing food.
To give a visceral example- There's an episode of Clarkson's Farm where the customers that parked in the grass at his farm shop need to get their cars pulled out of the mud by a tractor.
My dad pretty much went from "doing well" to "dropping it and getting different job while selling land to development" within the span of my childhood and teenage years.
Small farming was viable few decades ago, now you'd have to make some speciality fancy food there to be profitable, not anything mass market.
Small vinery? Sure you might have some chance. Potatoes and wheat ? Good fucking luck.
> It's one of the reasons I LOL hard whenever I hear tech people saying they will "retire and become farmers", these people have no idea what it is like to work on a farm for real.
Clarkson's farm is essentially a documentary about that lmao. Rich man invests a lot and with ton of help earns less than a thousand a year from quite a lot of land.
Even when you own the land it's hard to get anything built. Planning permission, legal disputes, nimbys, nimbys, nimbys. Developers take on a lot of risk when they do this; they might end up owning a very pretty parcel of land that is a pile of shit in business terms, because they effectively aren't allowed to do anything profitable with it. Therefore, in the cases where it does work out, the profit is high. It has to be, to justify the whole thing. That's what "risk-adjusted rate of return" means.
Btw this is why it's always "big developers" in the first place; they have to be big, because they have to spread out this risk over a large number of ventures, and have easier access to credit. Planning restrictions drives consolidation in the construction/real estate industry because it raises the level of risk above what smaller companies can endure.
That's why it's so maddening to hear nimbys say they're opposed to profiteering big developers, and that loosening of planning regulations would be some kind of handout to them. Precisely the opposite is the case. They're unwitting agents of regulatory capture.
Jeremy Clarkson's farm show is an accidental documentary about this. See here: https://twitter.com/NuclearBeacon/status/1630617164536332303
> If hackers and nerd idealists are worth anything, it's for trying to solve all this against a background of constant push-back. I sometimes wonder if the most important thing I could possibly do is try to depict this larger picture in such a way that people got it.
Thinking about this, it actually reminds me of season 2 of Clarkson's Farm. He might not be what you think of when you think of a prototypical hacker, but Clarkson actually is one. In the series he constantly found loopholes to evade the tyrannical council although they sadly ended up winning in the end. Although it makes you think that if someone with his influence and resources can't find a way through the bureaucratic minefield to open a restaurant in an disused barn in the middle of a field on his own property what hope do the rest of us have.
Just finished watching Clarkson's Farm; Jeremy got some sheep for this purpose. Recommend watching.
Have you ever watched Clarkson's farm? It's a comedy show about Jeremy Clarkson from top gear trying to actually farm his land himself instead of paying someone to do it. Everything is fiendishly complex. Nothing looks simple at all. His tractor (granted it's a top end Lambo) has more controls than the Enterprise in JJ Abram's Star Trek. I don't think a small startup is taking that on anytime soon.
He has to call out someone to show him how to drive it and has no idea how to get it hitched. All coming from a man who has driven more cars of different types than probably anyone on the planet. Granted, it is a comedy, buy I think if you watch the first episode, you'll get the idea as I did.
It's an oddity of UK tax law that farms are exempt from inheritance tax and so a sensible investment for old rich people who want to pass stuff on. Clarkson's farm was bought for the similar reasons some years before they decided to do a TV show. You don't need odd legal structures - just buy a farm.
+1 for Clarkson's Farm. What a delightful show. They do a fantastic job of taking you through the emotional highs and lows of farming. It punched a hole through my common techbro day dreams of leaving MegaCorp1 and buying some land out in the country to farm.
Although, I do still secretly think about raising cattle.. at least until season 2 of Clarkson's farm shows that that is also ungodly amounts of work for little return.