"Independently-owned farms" are the exception, these days, not the people. Every single one I've ever seen has at least one guy on there that performs miracles with PVC pipe, a TIG welder and spare bits of iron.

That might be the case for you.

I do all my best programming when I'm driving a tractor. When I stop, I just need to type it all in.

Or, driving my car, for that matter. I just need to get from here to way over there, it's maybe 90 miles, something like a two and a half hour drive, during which time no-one can phone me, no-one can come up and hand me something that's Clearly My Problem Because It Has An Electrical Connector, no-one can ask me what's wrong with the printer in the facilities office, and I can just sit and quietly think. I don't even have to put up with braying adverts on the local radio station.

As a technology startup your root goal would be an exit. So you would work on problem which is in the roadmap for a big company and your wish is, they are not agile enough to build it themselves quickly and would buy out your stuff to beat their competition. So it's kind of contract work, with contract coming after the work is done.

Sometimes, I think that the modern education setup (schools and colleges) is a recruiting and training mechanism. Bright kids from all over the country side are filtered and sucked away to work in the modern factories. Same as army recruitment camps that go to rural side, conduct running competitions and take away all the strong youth from villages.

Ofcourse, they sell education as knowledge or refinement as a person. But the real goal is to create a workforce.

Just a nitpick, but our bodies are meant for labor. You grow ever stronger and more capable over time. Amish, for an extreme example, work exceptionally hard and eschew most modern medicine and healthcare options, yet live very long and healthy lives with substantially lower rates of cancer and various other disease than the general population. * Sitting at a desk for 8+ hours a day, for decades, is what takes an enormous physical toll on the body.

* - I wanted to give a life expectancy here, but it turns out there is no particularly good life expectancy measurement for them. This [1] study is the closest I found, where it looks like the 50% survival rate for men/women who hit at least 30 years of age, is a bit higher than 80 for women, and a bit lower than 80 for men.

[1] - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3526600/

Imagine trying to board a plane with a compass nowaday :)

Or a circle template (rectangular with holes of different sizes). That would aid drawing the small circles, as well as drawing straight edges and right angles. It can be kept in a notebook like a bookmark.

It really sucks, at any age.

I wonder if binding at the top was necessary to be called a tablet? Or perforation to easily tear off sheets?

I was looking to see how long ago marble composition notebooks (which are side-bound) were created and what they were called and it looks like they existed in the mid-1800s but I couldn't find any evidence they were called tablets.

I used those things (the paper ones) for most of my career. I had stacks of them.

“Tablet” is a valid appellation, but we always called them “pads.”