Comment by khazhoux | Hacker News Reader

Comment by khazhoux | Hacker News Reader

Allow me to dissect the subtle bragging in the opening:

> Excelling at his work, Land said, requires an obsessive focus on it

"I excel at my work."

> But maintaining that passion — especially with his fourth child on the way — means knowing when to detach

"I'm excellent at my job, despite having more kids than average (i.e., probably more family obligations than you). And also, I find time to 'detach'. I'm awesome at my job and find time to chill out."

> relaxing with a glass of wine in the back yard alongside his wife, kids and the family’s 13 chickens and three sheep

"Despite working in Silicon Valley, where a 1100sqft home with no yard costs $2m, I have a wine-worthy backyard with enough grounds even for sheep and chickens."

This just reeks of the I'M ALWAYS WINNING attitude so pervasive in Silicon Valley, buried in an article about chickens ffs.

Please don't use uppercase for emphasis in HN comments, regardless of how annoying something is. It's basically yelling, and the site guidelines ask you not to: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Well, it is supposed to be a hit piece after all. Really, I'm so much less bewildered that these folks have figured out how to raise the simplest of farm animals. The "Raw Water" and high-priced Esselen kookiness bothered me more because they took something that used to be nice (or just safe) and turned it into woo-woo for the stock-option mentally impaired.

Raising chickens can be done in less than 50sq ft pretty much anywhere. It doesn't make a huge amount of sense for most folks and there's a real risk of salmonella, if you're not careful... and don't get a rooster, if you want to have neighbors who like you. But expensive, or time consuming... only if you're trying to put diapers on them.

But hey, these folks discover what it's like to raise the animals they use for food, feed them properly, and protect them from predators, etc. That's good, even if they're douche bags about it. You could do a hit piece on the self important waste of time that is President Carter's Houses for Humanity too, but why bother.

> “Despite working in Silicon Valley, where a 1100sqft home with no yard costs $2m...”

You could buy roughly 667 acres of land here in Lower Michigan for that much money, which provides plenty of room for wine and chickens. ;)

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