That option has a few problems -
1. It's not very cheap. The price of land is really high and if it is fertile land it is even that much more expensive. Not to mention the cost of raising animals and plants isn't free.
2. Specializing is much more efficient than trying to do everything yourself, requiring at least a basic economy.
3. Do you like healthcare? Trying to move to the countryside while affording healthcare(at least in the US) and actually having access to it are considerable hurdles.
4. Providing your own power isn't cheap and getting it from others certainly requires something.
And this is to just name a few - definitely not an exhaustive list.
We, as a society, have moved on from subsistence living with small groups of people and with the ratio to the number of people in the world to fertilel and it isn't a serious option for large numbers of the population. I love the dream of it and I do think we could make a big shift to move towards food independence, even through urban gardening, etc, but I don't really see it going there unless there are some pretty large societal/environmental/economic shifts that happen.
What really needs to happen, in my opinion, is a shift to the idea that we live in a time of abundance. We have the means to supply all of our needs to everyone, it is 100% a political choice to let people suffer in order for a few to thrive at levels that have never been seen. We should have food security, access to healthcare, and housing as a human right and we should do it in an efficient way (and we can!). Unfortunately we are in a time where power is once again being concentrated to the hands of the very few. There will always be work that needs to be done, but who determines what work is actually completed and who benefits from it can and has changed many times throughout our history.
Design docs are great for high-level orientation. If you are laying out all your code structure around it, you are doing it wrong. It's great to use the for what patterns will be used (using a facade pattern for example). It gives eng's a guide to how to implement at a high level and it should identify points of non-functional requirements; speed requirements, monitoring, security, etc. Throwaway code doesn't even touch on that. It should also put in scope some of the architecturally significant decisions that need to be made. While throwaway/prototype code can address some of that, it doesn't always identify it and talk about _why_ it is important.
In short, doing both is the best thing you can do and you should scope your design docs correctly.
And this is to just name a few - definitely not an exhaustive list.
We, as a society, have moved on from subsistence living with small groups of people and with the ratio to the number of people in the world to fertilel and it isn't a serious option for large numbers of the population. I love the dream of it and I do think we could make a big shift to move towards food independence, even through urban gardening, etc, but I don't really see it going there unless there are some pretty large societal/environmental/economic shifts that happen.
What really needs to happen, in my opinion, is a shift to the idea that we live in a time of abundance. We have the means to supply all of our needs to everyone, it is 100% a political choice to let people suffer in order for a few to thrive at levels that have never been seen. We should have food security, access to healthcare, and housing as a human right and we should do it in an efficient way (and we can!). Unfortunately we are in a time where power is once again being concentrated to the hands of the very few. There will always be work that needs to be done, but who determines what work is actually completed and who benefits from it can and has changed many times throughout our history.