‘He passed the bee baton on to me’: people who inherit hobbies | Hacker News Reader

‘He passed the bee baton on to me’: people who inherit hobbies

theguardian.com

62 pointspseudolus32 comments

I had ham radio passed down to me. This turned out, ironically considering it’s a communications hobby, to be isolating and a rather nasty bubble. Sort of like an aether 4chan full of bigots, racists and status chasing money spenders. Explained my father entirely.

There are some niches in it which are still manageable (QRP, SOTA) but I don’t want to become associated with the rest of them.

YMMV but I would encourage people to find their own interests and try and look for more progressive ones without a perpetually ageing demographic.

I found photography, hiking, travelling to be a better social outcome.

There is a saying about radio amateurs here: 99% of radio amateurs ruin the reputation of the rest.

Every hobby has this though. I felt fortunate to have discovered SWL, GMRS, Amateur Radio, etc. long after learning the same lesson with everything from Trail maintenance work to Disc Golf to Drones to Pickleball.

If association and its ah...trappings are important to you, it's far easier to manage down your inner critic by exploring a nuanced approach to association in context than it is to find a hobby that's more/less immune to such problems.

(This is doubly true if you are interested in the broader topic of interests and hobbies)

The ratio of cranks and weirdos to normal people is 9:1 with ham radio. It’s usually the other way round with other hobbies.

The thing that gets me with ham radio is some see it as a social responsibility even here in the UK where its totally unnecessary from an emergency comms perspective.

> The ratio of cranks and weirdos to normal people is 9:1 with ham radio.

Not sure what "weirdos" is meant to mean in context but with regard to disagreeable people, this has not been my experience at all unless I go looking for it. YouTube comments, specific freqs in 80m band come to mind, but again, not where I typically go to look for anything interesting.

Local friends and meetups, classes, and even the academic side of the hobby are pretty amazing. Emergency drills at the local hospital are fun and I've connected with really nice people in and out of the hobby that way.

> totally unnecessary from an emergency comms perspective.

Completely different over here I guess. I've assisted people in wildfire emergencies and cell outages due to fiber optic cuts.

I've also had some close calls while hiking in e.g. sudden lightning storms in remote areas and had people on the radio asking how I was doing, if I needed assist, etc.

Seems what you shared is more about your local and family experience though? If so, don't let my take on the situation yum your yucks...

The academic side is less bananas I will give you that. And your comment about 80m is spot on. The problem we have here in the UK, is that it's pretty easy to get a 2m HT and a license to use it. Huge swathes of amateurs never progress past that or take a technical interest at all. I've lived in 3 separate areas where the local 2m nets are full of people with very defective personalities. The sort you'd find in a flat-roofed pub. And they're the guys who actually go to the clubs and the hamfests here.

It's pretty not exciting here as far as emergencies go. So our emcom network (Raynet) are limited to dressing up like police offers as far as they can legally do it and managing the car park at public events. The real emergency services here are very well equipped to handle this themselves with cross service commercial radios. And there's very few places you can't get a 4G signal now, even in the middle of bloody nowhere.

I did enjoy working CW QRP and chasing miles-per-watt to some degree. It was also difficult to be an asshole on CW so people didn't bother. SSB / FM is just urgh.

> YMMV but I would encourage people to find their own interests and try and look for more progressive ones without a perpetually ageing demographic.

I'm of the opposite mindset: responding to unpalatable elements of a given subculture by abandoning it entirely only reinforces those unpalatable elements. Better to persist - and in doing so, encourage others of your mindset to persist alongside you.

I don't blame people for choosing to abandon subcultures entirely rather than persist within them - persistence is exhausting, after all, and it's unreasonable to demand that people exhaust themselves for minimal reward - but I do think persistence produces the best outcome for everyone long-term.

Why do you think that ham radio is that way? Is it that a large number of the hobbyists are trying to be outside the system?

Having met a lot of people I think the license gives some kind officialdom and status which they are otherwise lacking and desire. This is an attribute demanded by a large number of people with defective personalities.

Granted a chunk of people go in for the technical interest (I did ultimately) but the other folk rub off on a lot of them and it normalises into the amorphous bubble of defective personalities.

I’m currently in the middle of maple syrup season. I’ve got 75 taps in on my property with room for maybe another 25 more if I wanted to add to the workload. There’s no chance at profit on this scale but it’s a nice relaxing hobby and keeps you and your friends and family stocked with the best syrup you can find all year long. Last year I planted about 50 more sugar maples and I intend to plant about 100 more this year. It takes 30-40 years for a tree to mature to the point that it can be tapped, so it’s not likely I’ll ever tap those trees myself, but hopefully I’m setting up my descendants with a potential maple syrup kingdom.

Are your descendants interested in a syrup-kingdom?

Only time will tell.

As someone tasked with unwinding a grandparent's ultimately-less-than-economical dream, please check in with your descendants before binding them into a sticky situation.

One of the greatest gifts you can give your heirs is freedom. (and an organized will/estate)

What's the scale at which you could turn a reasonable profit for the work involved?

The tricky answer is, it depends.

Making maple syrup is interesting in that getting started is easy. You can typically use inexpensive or homemade equipment and if you have access to lots of firewood, then boiling is easy. The reduction of sap to syrup is 40:1, so collecting about 40 gallons of sap will leave you with a personal supply of syrup for the year. Beyond that is where the variables come in.

The cost of spiles, hosing, and collection containers for tapping is cheap. Stainless evaporation pans are expensive (roughly $1K new). My goal for this year is to collect about 400 gallons of sap, which means I'll burn through about 2 cords of firewood (that's a significant amount but you would never use propane because of the sheer cost). So do you buy your firewood or cut it yourself? That alone is a lot of work. Many (no, all) large operations use reverse osmosis filtering systems to concentrate the sugar content of the sap before boiling. This can cut your evaporation time (and fuel needed) in half, which is also significant. You can buy a ready-to-go RO system for drinking water off Amazon for a couple hundred dollars but the membrane capacity will be small and slow you down. An ideal RO system for my current scale is in the $3K range.

The weather plays a huge role in sap collection as you need below freezing temps at night and above freezing temps during the day for the sap to flow. This limits the season to just about a month. Today I'm doing absolutely nothing as the high for the past two days has been 25F and all my taps are frozen. Non-cooperative weather can shorten the season and limit how much sap you can collect.

So my 400 gallon goal should yield me about 10 gallons of syrup under ideal conditions. I bottle the syrup into 12oz bottles that could sell for about $15 each. Roughly 100 bottles means a potential gross revenue of ~$1500; not great considering the cost of the bottles and my labor alone have nearly wiped that out.

I would estimate that a sugarbush of at least 150 trees, a professional RO system and evaporator, plus no additional labor costs could start to see a small profit if you either acquired your equipment for free or amortized the cost over at least 5 seasons. The requirements for bottling for retail are relatively easy where I'm located so you would just need to find a viable market for sale. The alternative is to collect and RO sap which you can then sell to an industrial processor for a reasonable price, which could move your profitability timetable up as your equipment and labor costs would be roughly cut in half.

But that's just some back of the envelope calculations. I don't know any local producers who do it for profit. The real key to turning this into a business is owning a viable and mature sugarbush. Anyone who has 50 or more sugar maple trees on their property in close proximity to one another and is not tapping them has no idea what a fantastic resource they are sitting on.

Can the RO and evaporation be outsourced? I feel like 400 gallons would fit on a trailer truck. Or do you evaporate it through the month because it's perishable/to reuse the collection containers.

Outsourcing those steps is basically selling the sap to a processor. I'm not personally aware of anyone who does private label processing/bottling with the sap you provide, but it might exist. Raw sap can last for up to two weeks under the right conditions, which is keeping it refrigerated below 40F. Sap that has been run through an RO system has a much shorter shelf life - refrigerated up to 5 days at most. In a typical RO process you would keep the permeate (water that has gone through the membrane and been filtered) and discard the waste, which is a solution of water and whatever could not pass through the membrane. However in syrup production you do the opposite, discard the permeate and keep the waste. But in addition to raising your sugar concentration from ~4% to as high as 12%, you've also concentrated the bacteria, which gives the shorter shelf life. It is believed that the fresher your sap is when evaporated, the better the final product will taste. This is why you should evaporate as fast as you collect.

These have been a great couple of comments from you; I feel like I just read a good niche book/article or watched a really condensed documentary

How we spend our free time matters: research suggests that having hobbies can enhance mental and physical wellbeing and offer greater life satisfaction. From team sports to crafts classes, they can also be a means to meaningfully connect with others.

IMO to take this benefit to a bit of a higher level, it also helps to have enough interests to bounce around between them. Especially when one interest may become annoyingl or irritating with too much focus.

I also noticed there's a very risky delay in the subjective monitoring/signaling loop which maintains conscious interest in a hobby.

If the original, reliable interest signal isn't really there anymore, but one acts as if it still is, the result can be a burnout/workaholic effect with hobbies, and it can be more devastating there than at work.

The mind will additionally tend to try to switch between blaming self and blaming hobby, as it reconciles precious identity and social signals and so on.

This in spite of the fact that it could just be that the person who previously enjoyed the hobby didn't take enough breaks.

That's news like breathing can extend your life expectancy.

Yet we have people who don't really have anything you could call a hobby.

That's their choice, isn't it?

Maybe, or maybe they're overworked and overstressed and don't have the time or mental capacity to pursue a hobby they would otherwise enjoy

Not always. Hobbies generally require one or more of money, equipment, space and most of all free time, all luxuries that a large chunk of people around the world cannot afford.

It seems to me there are numerous distractions that compete for our time and attention. hackernews, social media, television, sports, and even drugs can all draw us away from pursuing our hobbies. Moreover, the limited time we have available to devote to our hobbies is further challenged by the prevalence of sophisticated, A/B tested platforms that are designed to capture and hold our attention.

We HN folks are basically selling crack and making people unhappier in exchange for their time and money.

> hackernews, social media, television, sports, and even drugs

Aren't these also hobbies, just not very esteemed ones?

great point! and.. you can be addicted to a hobby to a point where it becomes detrimental.

seems there are some similarities between the two. both hobbies and addictions involve engaging in an activity, seems a key differences lie in the level of control, balance, and well-being.

Not if it's not entirely freely made.

Gardening is my new thing after moving to the country side, i started growing all sorts of things now on the 3rd year we have 4 different gardens producing 80% of what we eat in the summer, its super rewarding and it gives me a break from those harder problems and suddenly after a few hours in the sun i can figure out what my issue was.

I took chess from my father and passed it to my son…

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