The shareholders don't care about any of that if they think the board did a decent job of propping up the stock price.
Firing a board is generally risky, and the shareholders probably haven't fired them because even though the board has, almost objectively, not been good - firing them is likely even worse for the stock short term, and there aren't a lot of long-term, active investors left in the world.
The myth that shareholders largely care about short-term returns has been disproved empirically over the last 30 years. Every mammoth stock exploded due to assumptions about revenues far, far into the future (dotcom stocks, FATMANG stocks, crypto.) And this should come as no surprise: company valuations are the discounted value of future returns after all.
More often, companies shill bullshit, inestimable long-term growth (AI-bullshit for example) to pump price. Tesla is the poster-child of this strategy.
In contrast, short-term thinking/marketing is a sure fire way to annihilate a stock. Why would the next buyer pay a premium for a squeezed orange?
The dark reality is that most things we customers and employees complain about as “short-term thinking” are tremendously profitable over the long run.
But an assumption about long term gain can still deliver short term returns. Would shareholders behave the same if long term returns were the only returns available?
Based on your first sentence, it seems that by "returns" you mean increases in stock price. Given that, I don't think there's a clear dividing line, since investors are always forward-looking.
I could see only long-term earnings being available but that's something quite different. Shareholders are often willing to put up with that situation, as long as they believe the long-term story (and see that other investors believe it).
A situation that could make short-term share price increases unlikely is if the stock is just way overvalued for its likely earnings in any reasonable timeframe, in which case shareholders will happily take profits rather than try to make the company change anything.
Combining growth momentum from a past net-value-positive offering with revenue from a net-value-negative product change to project a future that will disappear when your users find your first competitor is an example of that strategy playing out that is difficult for shareholders to catch. Another is laying off and mistreating your employees while claiming that you're going to stay on the cutting edge.
It's not in the interest of shareholders to buy into tactics that pump up share price at the end of a quarter but we're talking about an information disadvantage; the seller is rearranging their books with respect to intangibles to deceive the buyer.
Stockholders don't even have that much influence. Because of all the index investing, board votes are often decided by say Vanguard/Blackrock, not mom and pop investors
It is only after stocks suffer severe shocks, does private equity spring into action, and discipline executives via the threat of acquisition & firings.
So its is actually executives that can be shortsighted, not an ultra-long-termist passive investment dominated US investor base.
Tragedy of the commons is why short term is all that matters and will ever matter to non-ideological investors.
If an action that hurts the stock short-term but will help int he long-term needs to be performed why would you as an investor enact it or even stay for the ride?
You are better off either opposing it or selling your stock and then waiting to see if someone will enact the changes, then you have the "insider" information to know that the short-term stock drop was a good thing for the long-term and rebuy the shares cheaper.
Since investors are forward-looking, I don't think there are many situations where a change that's good for the long-term value of the company will necessarily drive down the share price in the short term.
You might drive down the share price if earnings go down, but that's not necessarily the case if the long-term value is clear. An example would be any company reinvesting earnings in a new factory.
>If an action that hurts the stock short-term but will help int he long-term needs to be performed why would you as an investor enact it or even stay for the ride?
Yes and this underpins what most consider the disgusting trait of being excessively greedy, not just executives, doctors specialties like dermatology, anything.
The doctor who wants the ultra high paying medical specialty sometimes cares nothing about becoming rich. Fear. Fear of being crushed by all that student debt. Doing everything possible to avoid that. Planning to start a family, fear of homeless, etc. Fear of being unable to retire. Excess, irrational fear. Then, it passes, and now we have what seems in retrospect, simply a greedy bastard with now an excessive amount of money.
Same with executives, the thought may not be "let me cheese short term gains as hard as possible" but "let me hedge against short term losses as much as possible".
Aggression from sheer greed is human human thought modality. Predatory. Aggression when cornered, anxiety / fear response, arguably a more vicious and nasty aggression, is another very much different type of aggression because it is not predatory. The difference is predatory feels more voluntary and fear is about whether I should risk being super aggressive or not. In defense-of-self aggression, fear as already there plenty, so a person can do about any hyper aggressive evil thing in the name of defending from a perceived threat - such as lay off half the work force, destroy customer relationships, etc. In this way a good leader must have a steady hand and outlook with regards to fear.
> Tragedy of the commons is why short term is all that matters and will ever matter to non-ideological investors.
Tragedy of the commons was an ideological essay designed to justify privatization of public goods. It was disproven by data before it was published. I am sure there are some hyper specific examples where it has happened as described, but as a “fact” about the world and as a justification for any course of action, it’s highly suspect.
I don't disagree that it was an ideological "essay" but I dunno why you're linking that when it's most associated with Aristotle, in particular:
"What is common to many is taken least care of, for all men have greater regard for what is their own than for what they possess in common with others."
Maybe you're suggesting that that essay popularized the phrasing? But I'm pretty sure even as a coined "term" it was around before then
This is the first I've heard that it's false; however it seems like many times in my life I've observed something suffering, seemingly from lack of ownership despite being a common good.
What do you call that if you can't call it a tragedy of the commons?
On HN I’ve seen regular claims that “tragedy of the commons has been disproven”. I’ve not yet identified which social bubble propagates this or what it is based on but there seems to be some niche in which people are being taught that it is categorically proven to be an invalid concept.
That persons argumentation is awful, however. Another patient soul took the time to challenge the idea with logic, and there wasn’t much actually supporting the idea in response.
> I am sure there are some hyper specific examples where it has happened as described, but as a “fact” about the world and as a justification for any course of action, it’s highly suspect.
You read that and understood “categorically proven to be an invalid concept”?
People cite the tragedy of the commons to discourage sharing of resources. The idea that common land should be divvied up into private ownership to prevent them falling into ruin. When really shared resources just need accountability between the people who make use of them. It’s just basic game theory:
If there is no cost to abusing your opponent, that strategy will get used. But if you’re going to be playing long term with the same people, systems will form to deter abuse.
Tragedy of the common is a concept dating back to ancient times that has extremely broad empirical support throughout history. The essay you mention took the name from all this real world experience, and even if the essay is bad, the concept is anything but.
A simple search finds more examples and references to literature than you can likely read in years.
Dating back to ancient times - specifically Aristotle. Aristotle also believed that women are deformed men. That some people deserve to be enslaved. That deaf people are incapable of reason.
So, just because it’s old doesn’t mean it’s true. Just like “kids these days” or “seems like nobody wants to work anymore” some bad ideas are evergreen.
When the UK enclosed their fields so that they were privately controlled crop yield immediately went up 20%. Theres overwhelming empiric evidence of tragedy of the commons being real.
it’s a specific viewpoint that chooses to measure success in terms of crop yields, rather than quality of life…
The tragedy of the commons didn’t claim that crop yields are slightly depressed. The claim is that the commons will be overused to the point of threatening to destroy it.
The board's goal was to lock-in maintenance with computer security, which failed catastrophically. All previous generations of Deere tractors have on-board electronics that can be jailbroken.
Their business is booming. That significantly overwhelms the concern you're raising.
They have gone from $4.3b in operating income to $14.5b in three years, while their sales nearly doubled. That's an old industrial company boom the likes of which is almost never seen by those types of companies.
By comparison what you're calling catastrophic is entirely trivial. It's not even in the room as a consideration compared to the soaring profits. Nobody is removing a whole board with that kind of profit growth.
> If Deere is so bad buy from competitors, of which there are many.
I somewhat agree with your earlier comment, but this bit is ignoring the systemic issues involved.
Deere is a leader in much of the efficiency technology that allows large-scale farming operations to reach the economy of scale needed to farm the huge multi-thousand (tens of thousands of acres in many cases) grain operations that are slowly but surely taking over food production in the US.
This trend, unabated, is a weird form of monopoly power for lack of a better word. If one manufacturer is more or less the sole-source for the largest corporate farms, and those farming operations are putting smaller ones out of business due to cost pressure - eventually - and likely sooner than later it becomes a too big to fail situation and a systemic national security risk.
This is starting to get into the realm of arms manufacturing. If these trends continue for another decade or three, and then Deere has say a massive IT failure, planting and harvesting operations literally grind to a halt for the top-end equipment entirely reliant on the automation and data harvesting these machines require to operate. People will be at risk for starvation in the event of an extended outage. Farming as a Service has a hidden cost to it many are not seeing in these comments.
I don't agree with disbanding Deere and nationalizing it - however this really needs to be looked at much more than a simple competition issue. It's rapidly becoming a winner-takes-all market, which is subsequently running the smaller operations out of business and putting the US food supply at a systemic risk if nothing is done.
Of course a competitor could somehow battle through the patent forest and capital requirements, but I wouldn't bet our lives on that.
This post appears to be complaining that John Deere didn't do a good enough job DRM'ing their tractors? We should fire them and fine even worse dictators, who will draw even more ire & rage?
This does seem like capitalism at work. Still, I really want to hate the players and the game. This has been brutal extractive malevolence against an industry supporting the very base of the pyramid of needs: John Deere is hurting the world incredibly badly.
Well, yeah, putting thousands of pedestrians in a spot that was designed for, essentially, zero pedestrians is a good way to get them killed. The fatality was a dude was hit by a motorist(who was found not at fault) as he walked in the darkness across a street. It's not like John Deere called the Pinkertons in to bust heads and the fatality happened that way.
Hope Deere gets what's coming to them and this sets a precedent for other companies. Next on the list should be devices remotely disabled when they're discontinued, which would have otherwise continued to work perfectly fine (like the Spotify car device).
Would also like to see a ban on firmware updates and programming tools locked behind a dealer (or support contract) portal and a ban on time-restricted software licenses for hardware.
In line with remote-bricking discontinued hardware, these policies only serve to generate eWaste.
If you sell programmable hardware, or really anything with embedded software, you should be required to make all the tools and software available to end users (doesn’t have to be free, but shouldn’t require a subscription or support contract either) in perpetuity.
Licenses to enable additional hardware features are fine, but they must be granted for the life of the device (i.e. as long as it can be kept working), not an arbitrary “we think the life of this thing is 5 years”. You should never have to keep paying to use a device you already bought.
For instance, I believe every car is actually running full self drive software in simuation mode. But if you pay $8k it can actually control pedals/steering.
Indeed, driving a Tesla is collecting training data for the company whether you benefit from it or not. (The idea you can own a Tesla is laughable, you might have the title but Elon can brick it and refuse to activate it.)
They're also well-known for artificially capping battery capacity unless you buy an unlock. There have been a few stories before about them unlocking the expanded capacity for free during emergencies.
The most upsetting version of this is when you actually have to remove hardware. “Upgrading” the machine entailed removing a certain screw from under the hood to double the performance.
When you pay for goods or services, you should expect to receive something. If you pay extra for leather seats, you’re getting leather seats. If you pay for DLC as part of a game, you’re subsidising the cost of the developer adding more stuff to the game. The pricing of digital products and add-ons may not always be fair but you should be getting access to something valuable that you didn’t already have, i.e. something that costs money to develop and/or host.
In this case, you already bought and paid for the additional RAM. The manufacturer is refusing to let you use it until you pay additional money, even though you theoretically own it already. That’s not providing a service, it’s just extortion.
If you could somehow prove that the additional RAM was not factored into the original cost of what you bought then this might be fair (albeit wasteful) - but I doubt it…
You may be right, I’ve no idea. For me it’s the principle more than the specific amount. I can’t understand why a manufacturer is entitled to charge you to use something that you supposedly own. Car manufacturers charging to unlock seat heating is a good example.
The VIN requirement may be due to part (version) differences between vintages. Most automakers make few changes during production of (one year’s) model, whereas Tesla seems to make changes all the time.
Legacy car industry has a life cycle for a model of about 6-8 years with a "refresh" in the center, so usually you can get by with model variant code(s) and construction mm/yy to find a specific spare part. Designs are locked in-between and you can't just go and swap suppliers or whatnot, which is what almost broke the neck of the entire industry back in the heyday era of covid - there was no flexibility, even if there were alternative suppliers for missing parts. Everything is solidly locked with multi-year long contracts on both sides.
Tesla however, they change stuff alllll the damn time because they make so much of their stuff in-house, the vertical integration eliminates the need for rigid contracts. You absolutely need the VIN because for some differences even knowing the week of the production doesn't give sufficient resolution.
By the way, legacy car makers are also shifting to that model, BMW for example doesn't deliver paper-printed sheets for which fuse in the fuse box does what for a few years now, you have to use an online service. The logistics for printing the sheets for all the variants became too complex.
This is absolutely not true, other manufacturers refresh their models all the time. They just use a simple approach - part numbers to track what goes where. Funny how you call THEM "legacy", not a company that can't do that.
> Tesla however, they change stuff alllll the damn time because they make so much of their stuff in-house, the vertical integration eliminates the need for rigid contracts. You absolutely need the VIN because for some differences even knowing the week of the production doesn't give sufficient resolution.
Sounds like a maintenance nightmare. Who decides when parts go EOL?
All of that fuckery is not going to help you or the technician when your car breaks.
I guess this suggests what kind of people should be buying Teslas (buying new cars every 1-3 years) and what their resale value should quickly become (disposable cars).
Interestingly in an 80's Toyota I worked on there were some minor revisions part way through a given model year. Most of the vehicle stayed the same, but I recall in some cases you needed to know year and month rather than just year in order to find the correct part or wiring diagram. I'd have to answer the question: Do I have the early version or the late version in this case?
>Would also like to see a ban on firmware updates and programming tools locked behind a dealer (or support contract) portal and a ban on time-restricted software licenses for hardware.
Won't happen. Feds find the status quo too useful to let every tom dick and harry start wrenching on these things
I'm pretty familiar with what's going on at CAT. A large part of the way all the emissions stuff that everyone (I'm talking about the customers, dealers, OEMs, the people who actually pay for things, not the online peanut gallery) hates gets enforced is that the OEM threatens the dealers that they'll cut them off from the software if they don't run a tight ship and their techs are too frequently caught doing things like plugging into vehicles outside the scope of their job, working on deleted equipment and whatnot. The dealers roll this downhill to their employees. I assume Deere is similar.
Basically removing the dealers and therefore the OEM's stranglehold on software would take the teeth out of emissions enforcement.
In a world where rolling coal[1] is a thing that people do voluntarily, I submit that emissions enforcement (as it stands) is a failed experiment. It's time to rethink it from first principles.
How would you implement that though? As soon as you push a law in a single state, the company will move states, over a single country and the company will move countries, and you’re not gonna get this law passed somewhere like China
Yes, but we should also be honest about the fact that this protectionism will have a cost. In the case of farm equipment, it means that everyone who buys food will be paying more to subsidize the protected industry.
I'm not making a judgment on whether it's worth it or not, I think that depends on a lot of details, but when people throw out tariffs they are rarely honest about the fact that it's a tax that flows downstream to the end user. In some cases multiple ways, like farmers who pay higher cost for equipment due to tariffs, so production of their soybeans (or whatever) are higher, so then they needs USDA subsidies to make them price competitive for export, so there's multiple layers of taxation there to make it work.
Even low-tech anti-features are insidious. They make the windows in a 3D "bubble" type shape so when you break one, they can charge you more, or use it as leverage to scare you into paying for a support plan that "covers" broken windows. If they were made out of flat panels, 3rd parties could make them, farmers could make their own, and they would be cheaper.
I don't think it's going to happen. Too many shares of automotive companies locked up in influential institutions. The same reason Microsoft is untouchable.
If you buy a device, the manufacturer should retain no control over it whatsoever. There should not be technical provisions to make such control possible. Otherwise, it should be considered a rental and made very clear to you before you commit to it.
Hahaha I hadn’t seen that they’re discontinuing that already. It seemed like such an obvious dud when I saw them announcing it. What a waste of resources.
I'm not and do not know American farmer so I'm asking a genuine question, why did they keep buying Deere tractors ?
I know for a fact that there are competitors, in Europe we have many other brand of tractors. It would make no sense to buy something that you know you can't repair.
JD has a good reputation for reliability, and at least in the area where my family farms, green tractors retain their resale value better than most. Also a well built-out dealer network for support. A key factor for my brother's operation is that a large regional JD parts depot is a 20 minute drive away. With any other brand, the mechanic might tell you: "Well, we can have the part here in two days." versus "If you drive to the depot now and pick up the part, I can have you running by the end of this afternoon." During spring planting and fall harvest, that is a big deal.
So despite their big flaws (repairability), they still are better than their competitor ?
I know a few farmer in Europe, despite being better if you tell them they can't repair their engine, they would get very angry and never buy this brand again.
When things break its faster to repair themselves because they already repaired it many times.
But here farms are much smaller than in the us, so it might be a matter of priority. If you have so much land than loosing a day on repairing something makes you lose more money, it makes sense to go with John Deere.
On the other hand, these farmers all have several tractors and old equipment like 40 years old so that when a thing break they can still use another even if less efficient to do the job.
It was the bait and switch - it's the end of most incredibly successful capitalist corporations. The reputation JD built was very well earned so they defacto became the everyman's tractor and for good reason.
At some point all corporations start to trim expenses or generate new revenues from existing avenues - so that reputation was used to get everyone kinda trapped in their JD world that was essentially made "unrepairable" overnight.
This is the same thing Monsanto did with seed, Dow chem with Roundup and Microsoft with windows for a non farm example.
Once you envelop an ecosystem of products and services the people within that system are largely at the mercy of it. Apple and their batteries intentionally being made to fail scandal a few years back is another great example.
It's just the numbers are much bigger in the agricultural world than the consumer tech world. The tractor that has essentially a SaS contract/required yearly operating expense for maintenance and upkeep might cost millions in the first place. Many farmers have machine shops that are plenty capable of repairing tractors - bc they've always done so.
JD is trying to fundamentally change the game - it's not the farmers fault for being a loyal customer for 10-40+ years, as many farmers today inherited farms that already had JD equipment from their fathers/grand fathers.
JD is exploiting that and their supply chain to make tractors and farm equipment glorified rentals.
I am a farmer, although one that isn't big enough to buy new equipment. Essentially, what happens is that only the big operators buy new – or more likely lease new – where they only keep it for a season or two. They aren't apt to be too worried about right to repair as the machine will be under warranty the entire time they keep it. Once it goes onto the used market, well... You're at the mercy of what is on the used market.
As sibling comments have said, wide availability of parts and specialists is a big part of it. Big time ops can have people on staff, but most mom and pops will lean on the service shops. Either way though, you need to have parts physically nearby so you can be back up and running in hours rather than days. When your hay is down and rain is in the forecast, waiting days instead of hours can be the difference between a great harvest and a field full of ass grass. In the north american west, when your irrigation is broken and it's July/August, you may only have a day or two before crops start drying and wilting. If you're lucky, you'll get it back up before permanent damage starts.
In many rural areas, John Deere is the closest and/or only option, so you have to choose between freedom and inconvenience, or technological slavery and safety. As we've seen with the general public, most people will go with the latter. Your insurance premiums are certainly cheaper that way.
I guess I don't really understand this argument in an age of near-overnight shipping. I am not a farmer, but I have maintained EOL equipment like refrigerators, fancy stoves, a MB 240D, chainsaws in a small mountain town (ie, far from parts sources). I tend to have the next obvious replacement parts on the shelf already. So for instance I have brake pads for a 2001 Toyota Tundra on the shelf.
Though I am not a farmer I have spent time with the spouse's family out in W Minnesota and all of them were farmers. I did not get the impression that they were useless around a wrench, welding rig, or electrical circuits.
An argument I could buy about Deere's brand loyalty is that (I know nothing about this beyond farmer hearsay) the current generation of farmers seems to really like the GPS automation. Grandpa can go a lot more years these days, is the point. I'd be curious about the accuracy of that anecdata.
Farmers like the automation bc it's increasingly a single farmer running a family farm and even corporate farms can't find people to employ - hence the widespread employment of illegal immigrants, it's practically and functionally necessary for the agricultural industry in the United States today to have access to cheap, off books and unregulated labor.
I live near a farmer that owns a several thousand head dairy, the company that transports the milk to the creamery that he also owns and the brands that creamery sells to local business - he just keeps buying farms as soon as they go up for sale, anything in the area.
He rips out the homestead and leaves only building that he will use immediately and plows the entire acreage - not a tree in sight. Those trees between fields exist bc of the dust bowl in the 30s - we literally already kno what happens when people do that, he doesn't care at all.
The land he owns is larger than the estates barons of old would rule over - larger by a lot.
Once he automates and all the land outside the cities are owned by him and ppl like him - it can stay that way indefinitely... much like the dark ages. That's their goal - a permanent divide between the rural and urban populations.
This seems like a tangent but it's not - the family farms are being pushed and bought up by the farmers that willingly play JD's games bc they kno only so many can.
JD doesn't want millions of repair contracts with farmers - they want to consolidate that into something more controllable.
> I tend to have the next obvious replacement parts on the shelf already
What I was going to say, moreover when you have a tool that is critical to your job, you get a second one. It doesn't have to be a great one, it can be the old one that kept failing so you decided to buy a new one, whatever but just good enough to save your life Incase your critical equipment fails.
I'm not a farmer, just friends with some. Driving through tiny towns in rural America you often see small-time John Deere dealerships and repair shops. They are very very well established. I've heard that they have trade-in and financing programs that are very attractive; for many farmers their only option is to go with what is local and has the minimum down up front.
Ahh, IBM - another great example of a company that attained a near universal adoption by setting the standards of quality - literally established what we thought a computer was and then just went to shit.
IBM couldn't get their supercomputer/AI that McDonalds funded to correctly run a drive thru - the project was literally shelved. It can play chess tho ;)
The specialist machinery that Deere makes is really well refined and good at what it does and the fact that farming in the US has consolidated a lot over the decades so the median tractor is bought by some "large enough that they don't really care" business of a farm who doesn't really care because they'll be buying aa maintenance contract and getting rid of the thing in X years anyway.
Ya, I got the same ad. I wonder if (1) they believe that the ad will reduce the bad-pr generated by the article, or if (2) it’s just triggering because it matches some keywords (e.g. “John Deere”). The linked page looks like it’s intended to generate good will, so I think it’s case 1. But it really comes off as tone deaf to me
I think all those targeted ad algorithms are effectively just really dumb. Whenever you look through the comments of a YT video criticizing a product/company you are almost guaranteed to find a dozen comments saying they got an ad from that company when the video started.
But then again, what are they supposed to do when practically every corner on the internet only mentions John Deere in a negative context.
> all those targeted ad algorithms are effectively just really dumb.
They are. I've had a gmail account for almost 20 years. Hell, I worked for Google for 10 years. They know who I am. They've seen me search the internet and watch YT videos for effectively eons. Yet the YT ad targeting algorithm is so stupid that it apparently doesn't know that I'm male. I get pre-roll ads for feminine hygiene products and bras all the time.
BTW, ad gods: please don't make it smarter. I don't want ads. When I start to see ads, I block them. If I can't block them, I will just use the product less. How do you not know this? Or maybe that's by design...
I just left the industrials space. All the other manufacturers are racing to implement AI and the John Deere model. Of course, most of them don't command the control over their customers like JD but they are definitely planning to lock things down. A major concern is the capabilities and availabilities of technicians. The techs as a whole do not have a good reputation for being competent so they are looking to provide remote diagnostic services with the help of AI...again, looking at JD as the exemplar.
I don’t know where a “bright line” needs to be drawn here wrt jurisprudence, but akin to Monsanto, I have _zero_ doubt that Deere has been crossing it for decades.
The Feds are coming, and I hope they keep going and going until there isn't a single product or service left that dares dictate what you can do after the transaction is complete.
I've been rolling the idea around that perhaps if a product is encumbered by a subscription then it's not a first sale and the product counts as inventory. And gets taxed as such.
I don't know the first thing about such things, but I'll bet if companies were pushed on this they'd suddenly start asserting that it's a lease, which I think is typically taxed similarly to a sale.
I hate the "everything's a subscription" business model that's taking over everything. We'll achieve peak serfdom when the air we breathe, water we drink, and food we eat is bought on a subscription model.
Food sometimes is, and honestly a more centralised food subscription system could drive down the cost of food by making demand more predictable and enabling better economy of scale.
If it were feasible to charge you for your own heartbeats, companies absolutely would. Infinite growth is a poison pill idea - it brought us to where we are today, and would drag us to the future you outlined, unless the folly is abandoned.
Nothing wrong with growth,it's natural. The population grows and so does the money supply in turn. This is good. What is not good is when a particular company is trying to retain ALL growth of certain segments for themselves through abusive leverage.
A principle that stuck out to me as a child was that our society prioritized lower prices for consumers as a whole over the prosperity of any one company or industry.
We let companies grow to the point where they now subvert the will of the people.
Not in real estate. There is technically no difference between leasing and renting, other than the things that are colloquially associated with. A lease agreement (or rental agreement) may or may not have a clause offering the borrower an opportunity to take ownership.
Rent might also refer to the price portion of a leasing agreement (or rental agreement). So in shorthand usage, “the lease” might encompass all terms of borrowing something, including the price, but “the rent” might just refer to the price.
Does it work that way for ISPs that "lease" their modems? This is the first time I've ever considered this idea that the hardware would still be inventory. Does inventory get taxed annually or monthly? Seems like the monthly lease fees would more than cover that.
That's a perfect example. They demand it back at the end of your contract, there's not even an option to keep it, let alone modify it.
I remember reading that, back in the 50s or 60s, the phone company owned "your" phone. It was permanently attached to the wall, and you weren't allowed to do anything to alter it. Did AT&T pay taxes on those phones as inventory?
If one was not returned, they charged what it cost to replace it.
Wish I knew about inventory. My guess is yes! They would have to do accounting on all the modems anyway. Service, where they are all at, serial numbers and more.
When one went bad, it usually involved either a visit to the ISP, or a tech shows up with a new one and a few records get updated and the modem ends up home.
Cable TV boxes are another example!
I do know those were inventoried. A friend went to work as a tech for a local cable company. (Yes, they did tell me how to enable decryption on all channels for at least one model...) They fixed the incoming boxes and those units went right back out to homes.
The units were purchased a few times per year to balance subscriber growth and attrition. Good repair metrics saved a TON of money. The units were from one to a few hundred dollars a pop!
Rental was $7.99 / month at one point I could remember.
Say the box was $150, at that rental rate the box becomes a minor profit item after a year and a half, right?
Well, most cable boxes got used a decade or more, especially when the company did not have to change its encryption tech.
That is a 4 to 5x return on the purchase price. Maybe 3x return after attrition, failed returns and repair costs get woven in.
Not a bad deal for them. And as the user, not many worries, but also basically zero options.
An example from cable boxes was serial ports and input and output ports either disabled or nerfed to the point of poor usability really sucked for anyone wanting to use the gear technically, or as part of an automation of some kind.
They did! And the not so nice part of that was being stuck with the phones they supply. Now, as simple phones, I liked them. Audio quality was great, the device did not break easily and all that. No worries. But, if you wanted to do anything connected to that phone, or the line, that was off limits!
The nice part was it being their phone, they took care of it. Service was a call away and the service tech could do what it takes and have few worries.
Begin sidebar:
Our wall mounted phone was surrounded by phone numbers and other bits of information. I started it one day writing the name of a burger joint we used to call all the time by the phone.
Mom was pissed, but Dad liked it! Next time we went to call the number was right there!
And so it began...
When I left home for the last time, I looked at that phone and wall for a long time. Many years of our lives were there. Friends, family, businesses, other things like EMS, poison control, various hotlines were all there organized fairly well given the organic way it started.
I wish I had taken a picture!
Seeing that happen and being a part of it all is probably one of the more potent reminders, to me of course, of what the pre-digital times were like.
That's a bit hyperbolic. It was just hung on the wall. If it was permanent, they wouldn't be able to take it back. Thanks for the reminder that we're to the point in time that "kids today" honestly have no memory of land line phones.
But yes, the phones were only available from Ma Bell, and you did have a monthly fee for them. They did have table top versions as well, so it wasn't just wall mounts. They were heavy solid well built devices. Once it was opened for anyone to make, they became cheap light weight plastic pieces of crap.
- If a consumer buys a car with heated seats and an option to activate the heated seats as a subscription, but the consumer elects not to subscribe, do the inactive heaters still count as inventory? If so, what if the car or heaters get destroyed but the automaker doesn't ever learn about the destruction?
- Would this apply to e-books and media? In today's market, if I buy an e-book or media from a streaming service, I'm not buying a copy, but rather a revocable license with a one-time fee. It seems like that e-book or media is inventory for the book seller.
IMHO it should be on the automaker to learn about the destruction. They should have to carry it as inventory just like anything else. There should be real expenses to it, not just the ability to throw it out there with some tech that blocks it unless a user registers and pays the subscription, and not have to do anything about it. I think they should also be required to pay for repairs if/when it breaks. If they want to retain ownership of the heated seats so they can charge a subscription for it, then they need to own (pun intended) the responsibilities of ownership.
While I do think that's fair, my personal hope is that such a requirement would make them stop this asinine practice.
When I buy something I must pay sales tax to the government. Later, if it turns out I never owned it and ownership is revoked, can I get the sales tax back?
Regarding right to repair, you can watch the Youtuber "Louis Rossmann" [1]. He repairs Macbooks and extensively talks about the importance of "Right to repair" in his Youtube channel.
Government regulation is critical to a healthy market economy. No economy should be totally unregulated as it will end in a monopoly. Instead you need a moderate level of regulation to prevent people from abusing positions of power. That's what this is. They're purposefully making their products impossible to repair without them, and using their market dominance to enforce it. You're welcome to disagree, but every stable economic theory relies on some regulation.
They get away with it because of their dominance in the market, that's why the gov't needs to take action. They're so huge there are no real competitors for customers to turn to.
This is a frustratingly bad take. Bad repair practices are gradually taking over the entire market and they clearly represent a failure of said market to provide good products, ie the strategy consists of making the product irrefutably worse in order to make a bit more money. Every major phone manufacturer, for example, has followed in apple’s footsteps to make independent repair more difficult purely to extract more profits. In other words, how does the corporate shoeshine taste?
Except you can't because they abuse the shit out of the paten system. The paten system was a great idea when it protected up starts from being destroyed by the competition, but now it's used by incumbents to stifle markets.
Incredibly short sighted. Extrapolate this to the point where all of the manufacturers use DRM / abuse the legal process to prevent an owners right to repair their own devices. Where's your "free market" now?
It's a captured market. Free markets are where no one has extreme market power like with a mono/duopoly or monopsony or whatever. A free market would be one where Deere is broken up by antitrust action. Making right to repair rules is the soft-touch approach to curbing their abuse.
It isn't a free market. It is a regulated market and that regulation benefits both innovation and the producers and consumers in the market.
What public interest is served by allowing companies to engage in anti-competitive and anti-consumer practices like locking people into proprietary systems?
The world is a better place because regulators mandate things like interoperability in phones or requirements that auto manufacturers supply parts for 3rd party mechanics to fix vehicles.
Are you saying John Deere makes farm equipment that by design makes people physically sick? And if that is not your opinion, what was the point of your question?
In the past, the free market deliberately produced formula that didn’t nourish babies and then lied to their mothers. It’s hyperbolic, but not really a bad question to test op’s logic.
Almost exactly a half-century ago, Nestle sent sales girls dressed like nurses into Africa to convince women to stop breastfeeding. They gave them free trial samples that lasted long enough to stop natural lactation, and the women were forced to rely on formula.
Problem was, the water wasn't suitable for giving babies that young, resulting in some babies dying.
It kinda is. The FDA regulates food and drugs - the FTC does the same thing for unhealthy market configurations. You can claim up and down that other options exist in both cases ("don't want to eat rat feces? buy something else!") but the regulation of unhealthy practices overall improves the quality of market options while also making businesses (rightfully) fear exploiting their customers.
In this instance, it's not like John Deere is using their position to improve the status quo of their product for everyone involved. They are explicitly demanding money for nothing - not only is it anticompetitive, but it's not promoting healthy market development. Deliberately designing malnutritional formula is really not that different from deliberately designing a tractor it's owners can't own. The mechanism for regulating both issues is pretty similar as well.
Farming.. The ultimate form of corporate welfare..
"This is all a bit misleading. Farmers don’t want to repair their own equipment. They want to be able to call someone on a Sunday when something breaks to come fix it. Which they can’t do today due to restrictions on John Deere’s IP that limits 3rd parties from offering that service."
For what it's worth, if they bought the tractor I also think they should be able to call a third party on a Sunday to repair the tractor if it breaks. That is sort of how ownership is supposed to work.
"The main complaining about Deere and other brands are the guys that get mad they hacked the code for the ecu and allowed the engine to rev higher and provide more horsepower. Thus lowering the life of the engine and bypassing certain things like DEF. Then something breaks, and the dealer denies the warranty cause it's obvious they messed with the code. So then they go ape shit and say they should be able to customize their vehicle however they want. I know this cause I used to work at a dealer and this happened every season. They read up on some forum how to bypass stuff and boom, I'm replacing their engine."
It's ironic that farmers (traditionally thought of as less technical people, "workers of the earth", etc) and hackers (highly technical nerds writing operating systems and engineering compatibility parts) are so connected by this issue. Some of the farmers I've talked to understand the importance ownership and right to repair better than even many engineers.
That said, I think John Deere is just the asshole willing to weaponize the legal system to enforce their dreams. The real problem is laws that protect IP like the DMCA and the patent system. I'm not saying we should just delete all those, but they are in bad need of reform and enable a tremendous amount of abuse. The abuse is only going to get worse unless we treat the cause(s) rather than just the symptoms.
I'm glad the feds are giving John Deere some attention, but I really hope they are going to fix the lopsided system instead of just try to bully or micro-regulate John Deere into "voluntarily" allowing more repair. If we stopped unleashing the lawyers on people for modifying or interfacing with devices they purchased, it would shift the balance of power more toward the center (whereas currently the power is almost entirely on the side of the companies).
Even if you have no interest in repairing or "tinkering" with your own stuff, you should be on the side of right to repair.
Many people (including comments on hacker news!) have called farmers the original hackers. The amount of bespoke problem solving needed is tremendous. Uniformity in farming is an extremely recent phenomenon.
OpenSourceEcology has the mission to create open source versions of 50 technologies they consider fundamental to "human civilization". One of the few technologies they've actually succeeded in open sourcing is a tractor
most of the named countries that are recognized today, were founded by hunting groups (defined by spoken language) that sought control over farmers and definitely over migrants.. oddly, farming itself is cited as a major driver of armed conflicts
Oh I know, a relative was bio-chem at monsanto related to corn... but I normally avoid telling people that because of the stigma it carries (unfair considering the global impact to yield)... now he works tirelessly to reduce invasive species to reduce coastal erosion.
The Monsanto stigma is well-earned by its legal teams, much to the chagrin of its many Monsanto biochem employees that saw (and see) the company as a creator of good in the world.
this purposefully blurs the distinction between pairing natural breeding versus invasive engineering.. often repeated by people in favor of invasive engineering
Because "invasive engineering" is just systematized "natural breeding".
People that don't understand this think that the production of GMO crops is done by scientists gene splicing scary chemicals into food products.
What is actually done is scientist get a genetic profile of crops, look for genes in crops that behave in a way they like, and bread crops with those genes. Exactly what "natural breeding" does, except for maybe the fact that it can be far more targeted with the genetic information.
There is a downside to this, it often results in highly homogeneous genetics in plants. However, that's a problem we already have with "natural" processes (see: bananas and most citrus fruits).
GMO is different. It involves the laboratory isolation of genes, and techniques to introduce said genes into an organism such that its DNA is altered. These technique do include gene splicing.
Golden rice is one well known example. It is a GMO plant which has been modified with genes taken from daffodils and a bacteria called erwinium uredovora. It's not just breeding existing species for good qualities.
Yes this is why eg the French bombard seeds with extraordinary amounts of radiation to get desired sets of random mutations, it’s much more natural and less invasive.
> traditionally thought of as less technical people
You've never met a farmer. Admittedly no one in my family is a farmer, but half of them are loggers, diesel mechanics, or heavy equipment operators. Most of them are ridiculously intelligent and able to fix anything that moves.
Agree with this. I do come from a family of farmers and they could do anything it seemed! Phone line repair, diesel repair, welding/fabrication, plumbing, hydraulic repairs (very dangerous), all manner of home repairs, light vet work, and the list goes on and on. BTW, the description I just gave was for a specific guy that dropped out of school in sixth grade.
What a stupid thing to say. Not only do you not know anything about me (I am myself a small-time/part-time farmer, and my neighbors are all farmers. My 14 acres is the smallest lot in my area. My neighbor/friend across the street farms 80 acres and sells his crops as some of the highest quality produce to top buyers. I also grew up with farmers as family members and friends. I think I've probably met a farmer before), but you clearly didn't even read my comment before replying to it or you would know that you're opening salvo is quite wrong. A quote from my comment that you replied to:
> Some of the farmers I've talked to understand the importance (sic) ownership and right to repair better than even many engineers.
It seems to me that logically, it's hard to have talked to people, while simultaneously having never met them.
After such a sloppy and unnecessarily assumptive (and incorrectly assumptive) response, it's hard to give any credibility whatsoever to anything else you say. I agree with it, but (as many of us rural livers/farmers) like to say, "even a stopped clock is right twice a day".
Also, I never said they aren't intelligent or able to fix anything that moves. If something I said suggested they weren't intelligent or capable, please point it out to me. Such a thing would be absurd - all the farmers I know are quite handy and can fix just about anything (that big corporations don't actively engineer to prevent, hence the hullaballoo over right-to-repair).
What I said was that they don't usually care about political fights like right-to-repair. And I stand by that, many of them don't. It's not a direct relation with intelligence level or handiness, it's more about personality and individual interests. Most of them just think John Deere are assholes but have no idea about the right-to-repair movement. They don't realize how deep the poison goes. More and more are getting into it, but it's still pretty unusual.
It's a free-ish country so you can do as you please, but I would recommend that you read and think a little more carefully before replying to people, especially when you're going to insult them by loudly proclaiming that they are an ignorant liar like you did to me.
To the topic in question, Republicans want to abolish most regulations (see: Project 2025). And so far the only states to pass right-to-repair laws are Democraticly-controlled (NY, MN, CA, OR, CO).
More to the point, it's not really acceptable to accuse people of being stupid based on how they vote. Reasonable people can disagree on things. I strongly disagree with the political views of some of my family members, but that doesn't make them stupid or anything... we just see things differently.
> More to the point, it's not really acceptable to accuse people of being stupid based on how they vote.
"I've been voting XXX all of my life, and my state has been ruled by XXX over the last 20 years, and the life is still shitty. It's totally a failure of YYY, they want to destroy America"
No, people who engage in insurrection and election fraud are literally destroying our country... or trying their hardest to. We are lucky that they're such idiots, but there is no reason to expect our luck to hold indefinitely.
In any case there are other venues where this type of conversation is better held.
Farmers are - and have been for most of history - some of the Most technical people on the planet… probably more so then your modern “hacker” that probably couldn’t actually disassemble and repair most of the things they own and use.
I spent a summer working on a 3rd generation family farm, and it was one of the most technically competent workplaces I’ve ever seen. The owner had a degree in agricultural engineering, and dozens of patents from farming equipment he initially invented for his own use. Much of the equipment they used day to day was designed and built on site and they had a full machine shop, electrical shop, etc. Modern equipment like combines are so complex, automation heavy, and unreliable that they are usually operated by master mechanics that also weld, code, and are otherwise primarily technical people. When those multi-million dollar machines break- which happens daily- they are losing money fast and need to fix it immediately, right there in the field.
The idea of farmers as uneducated non-technical people is an ignorant stereotype held by urban people that have no clue what farms are really like.
Can you blame them? If you drive through farm country you see crazy Trump effigies everywhere and Trump/Vance signs in every yard.
So it's difficult to know that these people don't care about Trump at all and think he is just as ridiculous as you do. They just hate the Democrats so much that they will do anything they can to stop them. The reasons are numerous and valid, btw.
Indeed the situation isn’t as simple as it seems on the surface. The 3rd generation farmer/inventor I mentioned above is an environmentalist and many of his inventions are focused on improving the long term sustainability and environmental impact of farming- he liked to talk about how he wants the farm to be sustainable to pass down for many more generations by protecting the soil quality, water table, etc. Yet he also has massive signs all over his land supporting conservative politicians. Most likely not because he really likes or agrees with them on much, but because he believes their opponents are actively trying to shut his farm down. I couldn’t say more, because I actively avoid having political discussions with my boss.
it's not a hard guess even if you don't share the opinion ; nearly every movie where 'farmer' is a plot point demonstrates a rural-living poorly educated family living in dust-bowl conditions and barely scraping enough resource by to feed the animals.
grapes of wrath, wizard of oz, of mice and men, o brother where art thou, ballad of buster scruggs -- yes it's a stereotype , but it's a common one in movies and literature.
Maybe I haven't noticed this since I got inoculated against this notion by the reality of farmers early on.
It still seems surprising to me that this idea can survive more than five seconds of thought. Farmers own tracts of land, lots of equipment, and have to navigate the market for their product, financing, capital allocation, weather patterns, all sorts of random events. They frequently have dozens of employees, and constantly have to negotiate with those, and with customers, and with vendors.
All of this is in addition to the actual growing of crops.
It seems like the most natural thing in the world that this type of person won't take kindly to being dictated to by John Deere (doesn't mean it doesn't happen anyway) and would try their hand at a bit of hacking if needs must.
The mass media likes to portray farmers as straw-chewing hicks. It's the farmer stereotype.
I even saw a conversation on here a few months back where someone on here not-so-nicely corrected a user that the big industrial farmers are smart but the rest of them are backwoods hicks that barely know what electricity is.
I saw a comment recently on HN about how farmers exemplified unsophisticated investors who would never be able to understand complicated financial instruments.
I pointed out that futures trading was literally invented by farmers.
It's endemic to urban areas of the US, where "rural" has the connotation of ignorant, backwards, stupid, inbred, etc., and "farmer" is the epitome of rural. Bog-standard xenophobia and classism.
It’s an interesting form of classism because I’d bet the average farmer is vastly better off than the average cubicle slave, in addition to being masters of their domain.
It would probably be easier to describe where one would not get this stereotype. Pretty much every city person (which as many sibling comments have pointed out, control essentially all media and pop culture) holds and perpetuates that stereotype.
Pretty much only people who are or know farmers know the reality behind it.
But I do think it's important to point out that farmers are a very diverse group, just like many other professions. There are geniuses and there are morons. You can't take a sample size of n <= 5 and extrapolate characteristics of millions of people.
We're already seeing another dark cloud on the horizon with Deere. They're almost done with the work to move to single-pair Ethernet on their vehicle bus and leave the traditional CAN/ISOBUS connector behind.
We have a number of things that sniff the traffic for important implement data and state and Deere is going to lock it all up. You'll be left with minimal data on the J1939 connector like the automakers did with OBD2.
There’s such a dark cloud for automotive too, usually there’s a gateway between the diagnostic port/ bus and the vehicle network (usually CAN, LIN, Flex-ray) where you can still see traffic. They’re moving towards ethernet(100base-T2), although it’s easier to analyze the traffic the authentication is more complex and in many cases it requires “personalized login” which of course means paying a fee on top of your diagnostic tool subscription. In most cases re-programming used control modules is not permitted “for safety reasons”. Some brands sell a short time subscription but others (like Mercedes Benz) do so in the EU but not in USA/ CAN, there you need to buy a yearly subscription for around $4.5k plus taxes and fees and on top of their “approved tool” (another $2-4k).
> It's ironic that farmers (traditionally thought of as less technical people
I see you’ve never met a farmer. The exact opposite of what you claim is reality.
Farmers are highly technical and have come up with plenty of ingenious solutions to problems on their farms, any labor saving device they can dream up can save them lots of time and money. Repairing equipment quickly is an important skill to have when something shits out during harvest, the weather isn’t going to wait..
A farmer can work miracles with a welder, hammer, wrench, and pliers since they’re generally put in the middle of nowhere and need to keep equipment operational.
More evidence that people really shouldn't trust their first, shallow reactions to things. You know nothing about me and yet have jumped to an absurdly wrong conclusion, ironically while trying to correct what you think was an incorrect conclusion of mine. For more information, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41887807
> The exact opposite of what you claim is reality.
Please read it a little closer. I'm not claiming any such thing. I'm pointing out that it is a popular conception - and it is. That the popular conception is wrong does not mean it isn't a popular conception. That's quite the logic error. And for someone to point out a popular conception does not mean they agree with it, and even if they did, it certainly does not mean they've never met a farmer (lol). This has so many fallacies in it, it's actually funny.
The feds are not in charge of key legislation like the DMCA, and their power to regulate things has been severely curtailed by the supreme court in recent months. If we want these things to change, we need to seek out all of the individuals in the House and Senate who oppose these things and mount systematic campaigns to replace them. And do the same thing at the state level. Demanding that the feds "do something" without clear legislation is not going to work anymore.
> The real problem is laws that protect IP like the DMCA and the patent system.
That is A problem, but that is not the problem seen here. The problem here is trade secrets. Specifically electronic secrets that prevent third parties from fully servicing their own equipment. Like HP inkjet electronic restrictions that prevent people from refilling their own ink cartridges. This is still a problem without patent law, without copyright law, and without lawyers.
> The real problem is laws that protect IP like the DMCA and the patent system.
system created to protect inventors and authors from being abused by more powerful people(investors, corporations, publishers) is actually used to abuse everyone except powerful groups then yeah - it is a horrible system that needs to go.
I hope the feds are looking at a right to repair software too, Deere is in violation of the GNU GPL due to withholding Linux kernel source code, which means you can't fix bugs in your tractors.
Following the Reagan era, the GOP had a period of wanting to reign in the federal government, but I don't think that's quite true now. Folks like Trump or DeSantis are not pro-small-government, they just want to use it to advance different social policies. In the fight between farmers and Deere, I doubt they'd side with the company.
> Under Project 2025, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) would be eliminated, and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) would be privatized
> The Department of Education would be eliminated and oversight of education and federal funding for education will be handed over to the states
> The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) would be eliminated and moved to the Department of Interior or the Department of Transportation if combined with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)
> The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s many regional labs and entire offices of enforcement and compliance and scientific integrity and risk information would be eliminated.
> The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is to “privatize as much as possible” and close many hospitals and clinics.
> The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) would be taken apart and send much of its work to states and other agencies
> The Department of Justice (DOJ) would lose its independence and be under control of the President
> The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) would be drastically reduced and split into two entities: one gathering scientific data and one making public health recommendations and policies.
> > Folks like Trump or DeSantis are not pro-small-government
> Alternative data points
Presenting that list as a counter suggests that "leave it to the states" necessarily means "more freedom for individuals", which is very questionable. Look what just happened to abortion rights.
The ur-example in American history would be literal slavery.
> The Department of Justice (DOJ) would lose its independence and be under control of the President
Hold up, is this "big government" as measured by employee count, or is this "big government" as measured by oppressive power?
A dictatorship can get away with far fewer public-employees than a democracy, yet it's not the kind of "small government" anybody should want.
> the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) would be eliminated
The DHS was created in the wake of 9/11 by GW and has furthered the security/police state. They fail pretty hard at securing the border as wlel.
> the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) would be privatized
The TSA is a jobs program for rude/mean people who also steal/assault passengers. It did not exist pre-2001. Privatizing it makes sense. Its workers form unions that extort the taxpayer.
> The Department of Education would be eliminated and oversight of education and federal funding for education will be handed over to the states
Good. All the DoE does is service loans and hand out free money to the broken higher education system. They don't set curriculum. Every state has its own DoE as well. Every educational metric has declined under the DoE as well. Its essentially a jobs program for bureaucrats.
> The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is to “privatize as much as possible” and close many hospitals and clinics.
As a Vet, the VA is a total mess. I can't see how it could get worse by becoming private. Lets shake things up.
> The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) would be taken apart and send much of its work to states and other agencies
HUD is probably the worst landlord in the country. States have public housing agencies already as well.
Vance literally wrote the forward to an upcoming book by Heritage Foundation President Kevin D. Roberts, the organization responsible for Project 2025. It is absolutely relevant.
I associate and even am friends with all kinds of people I don't agree with. Implying that I endorse their views just because I associate with them would be to assign motivations to me that I don't have.
Writing an introduction to someone's book, as a public figure, is lending your reputation to them - that's the point, to put your name and reputation behind them, and so they can show that off for credibility.
Trump’s VP nominee also completely flipped his views in the last few years to join the ranks of conservative grifters feeding off anti-immigrant and anti-“woke” sentiment. I wouldn’t trust anything he says.
The Trump/Vance admin will support whichever side they believe will benefit them financially, which won’t be the farmers.
The second statement does not follow from the first statement. You're suggesting that Trump will surround himself with sycophants based on him choosing as his running mate somebody who has publicly criticized him in the past.
If the incumbent conservative party loses the presidency in a few weeks, the lack of meaningful right to repair regulation over the past two decades is most certainly one of the problems that has contributed to our society being so brittle, which will amplify the destructive effects of the populist reactionaries. Really the only way out of the current pickle is to fix the longstanding problems that the reactionaries are using to rally around while also keeping them away from power so they can't pull the self destruct levers.
I don't get the point you're making in regards to my comment? It's great that things are starting to change, and perhaps all the recent attention will have affected the market in a decade. But that doesn't really change where the power dynamic is right now, and its being part of why so many people feel the authoritarian boot on their necks but have been primed to blame it on the de jure government while ignoring all of the other entities exercising coercive power. And with this topic, unfortunately I don't see how it can be fixed any way but government regulation, similar to laws about building codes, unauthorized access, breach of fiduciary duty, etc.
It was made public because HAI filed a motion on Thursday to quash the FTC’s subpoena. Do you think HAI did that intentionally to bolster Lina Khan’s and the FTC’s public image?
This will be a tough fight. I'm assuming warranty and second sale transactions will be much more complicated in some futures. In big purchases, I'd assume it would be a lot like Title Insurance on real estate?
I'm curious where this will ultimately go. Feels like the best path would be a "minimal capability" set that machines need to support at basically a mechanical level? Probably gets a lot more complicated on some of the more advanced gear. Which, really doesn't help the narrative, as people try and show the basic tractors as the only thing impacted.
> second sale transactions will be much more complicated in some futures
I recall a story of a person who bought a used Tesla which erroneously had some feature or another enabled -- sold by the second-hand dealer and purchased by the customer with the understanding that the car came with the feature -- until the feature was remotely disabled when someone at Tesla discovered the error.
Some of the features that are gated by cars are just silly, such that I'd want to know more about the feature before really having an opinion on this. Is why I would think a "minimal feature set" would be key.
Even in this scenario, though, I would expect you'd need something like the Title Insurance to really protect people?
It would definitely not fall under such a feature set given that it's something that seemingly can be reasonably disabled and only otherwise increases the value of the vehicle. I recall that the buyer thought they were buying the thing with the feature and the seller thought they were selling the thing with the feature when someone uninvolved with the transaction (the original manufacturer, Tesla in this case) changed the deal after-the-fact. It seems a bit moot how one feels about the feature itself when they can observe that the people transacting seem to agree on the value of the feature.
Ostensibly, I could see some "autopilot" like stuff relying somewhat on a central server. That said, I would also expect some form of local only capability to be available. Devil would be in the details.
There was also a fatality in the last workplace strike.
Deere seems to have bad relations with their employees, customers, and regulatory bodies.
The shareholders should remove the board of directors.
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/money/business/2021/...
The shareholders don't care about any of that if they think the board did a decent job of propping up the stock price.
Firing a board is generally risky, and the shareholders probably haven't fired them because even though the board has, almost objectively, not been good - firing them is likely even worse for the stock short term, and there aren't a lot of long-term, active investors left in the world.
The myth that shareholders largely care about short-term returns has been disproved empirically over the last 30 years. Every mammoth stock exploded due to assumptions about revenues far, far into the future (dotcom stocks, FATMANG stocks, crypto.) And this should come as no surprise: company valuations are the discounted value of future returns after all.
More often, companies shill bullshit, inestimable long-term growth (AI-bullshit for example) to pump price. Tesla is the poster-child of this strategy.
In contrast, short-term thinking/marketing is a sure fire way to annihilate a stock. Why would the next buyer pay a premium for a squeezed orange?
The dark reality is that most things we customers and employees complain about as “short-term thinking” are tremendously profitable over the long run.
But an assumption about long term gain can still deliver short term returns. Would shareholders behave the same if long term returns were the only returns available?
Based on your first sentence, it seems that by "returns" you mean increases in stock price. Given that, I don't think there's a clear dividing line, since investors are always forward-looking.
I could see only long-term earnings being available but that's something quite different. Shareholders are often willing to put up with that situation, as long as they believe the long-term story (and see that other investors believe it).
A situation that could make short-term share price increases unlikely is if the stock is just way overvalued for its likely earnings in any reasonable timeframe, in which case shareholders will happily take profits rather than try to make the company change anything.
Combining growth momentum from a past net-value-positive offering with revenue from a net-value-negative product change to project a future that will disappear when your users find your first competitor is an example of that strategy playing out that is difficult for shareholders to catch. Another is laying off and mistreating your employees while claiming that you're going to stay on the cutting edge.
It's not in the interest of shareholders to buy into tactics that pump up share price at the end of a quarter but we're talking about an information disadvantage; the seller is rearranging their books with respect to intangibles to deceive the buyer.
> company valuations are the discounted value of future returns after all.
Yes, future earnings are worth far less than current earnings - especially in a non-ZIRP world.
Stockholders don't even have that much influence. Because of all the index investing, board votes are often decided by say Vanguard/Blackrock, not mom and pop investors
It is only after stocks suffer severe shocks, does private equity spring into action, and discipline executives via the threat of acquisition & firings.
So its is actually executives that can be shortsighted, not an ultra-long-termist passive investment dominated US investor base.
Tragedy of the commons is why short term is all that matters and will ever matter to non-ideological investors.
If an action that hurts the stock short-term but will help int he long-term needs to be performed why would you as an investor enact it or even stay for the ride?
You are better off either opposing it or selling your stock and then waiting to see if someone will enact the changes, then you have the "insider" information to know that the short-term stock drop was a good thing for the long-term and rebuy the shares cheaper.
Since investors are forward-looking, I don't think there are many situations where a change that's good for the long-term value of the company will necessarily drive down the share price in the short term.
You might drive down the share price if earnings go down, but that's not necessarily the case if the long-term value is clear. An example would be any company reinvesting earnings in a new factory.
>If an action that hurts the stock short-term but will help int he long-term needs to be performed why would you as an investor enact it or even stay for the ride?
Yes and this underpins what most consider the disgusting trait of being excessively greedy, not just executives, doctors specialties like dermatology, anything.
The doctor who wants the ultra high paying medical specialty sometimes cares nothing about becoming rich. Fear. Fear of being crushed by all that student debt. Doing everything possible to avoid that. Planning to start a family, fear of homeless, etc. Fear of being unable to retire. Excess, irrational fear. Then, it passes, and now we have what seems in retrospect, simply a greedy bastard with now an excessive amount of money.
Same with executives, the thought may not be "let me cheese short term gains as hard as possible" but "let me hedge against short term losses as much as possible".
Aggression from sheer greed is human human thought modality. Predatory. Aggression when cornered, anxiety / fear response, arguably a more vicious and nasty aggression, is another very much different type of aggression because it is not predatory. The difference is predatory feels more voluntary and fear is about whether I should risk being super aggressive or not. In defense-of-self aggression, fear as already there plenty, so a person can do about any hyper aggressive evil thing in the name of defending from a perceived threat - such as lay off half the work force, destroy customer relationships, etc. In this way a good leader must have a steady hand and outlook with regards to fear.
> Tragedy of the commons is why short term is all that matters and will ever matter to non-ideological investors.
Tragedy of the commons was an ideological essay designed to justify privatization of public goods. It was disproven by data before it was published. I am sure there are some hyper specific examples where it has happened as described, but as a “fact” about the world and as a justification for any course of action, it’s highly suspect.
https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false...
I don't disagree that it was an ideological "essay" but I dunno why you're linking that when it's most associated with Aristotle, in particular:
"What is common to many is taken least care of, for all men have greater regard for what is their own than for what they possess in common with others."
Maybe you're suggesting that that essay popularized the phrasing? But I'm pretty sure even as a coined "term" it was around before then
This is the first I've heard that it's false; however it seems like many times in my life I've observed something suffering, seemingly from lack of ownership despite being a common good.
What do you call that if you can't call it a tragedy of the commons?
On HN I’ve seen regular claims that “tragedy of the commons has been disproven”. I’ve not yet identified which social bubble propagates this or what it is based on but there seems to be some niche in which people are being taught that it is categorically proven to be an invalid concept.
It's more than one person - it happened in a recent comment I made: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41758008
I suspect some popular blog/YouTube channel made some waves around it.
That persons argumentation is awful, however. Another patient soul took the time to challenge the idea with logic, and there wasn’t much actually supporting the idea in response.
I’d just like to note that i disagree with your summarization. They defend their perspective quite well imo
> I am sure there are some hyper specific examples where it has happened as described, but as a “fact” about the world and as a justification for any course of action, it’s highly suspect.
You read that and understood “categorically proven to be an invalid concept”?
I hope it was clear to most readers of my comment that I was talking about a general line of rhetoric rather than this specific post.
However, from the parent comment I keyed in on your quote less, and much more on:
> It was disproven
FWIW.
Lack of accountability.
People cite the tragedy of the commons to discourage sharing of resources. The idea that common land should be divvied up into private ownership to prevent them falling into ruin. When really shared resources just need accountability between the people who make use of them. It’s just basic game theory: If there is no cost to abusing your opponent, that strategy will get used. But if you’re going to be playing long term with the same people, systems will form to deter abuse.
Tragedy of the common is a concept dating back to ancient times that has extremely broad empirical support throughout history. The essay you mention took the name from all this real world experience, and even if the essay is bad, the concept is anything but.
A simple search finds more examples and references to literature than you can likely read in years.
I’d recommend starting here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
Dating back to ancient times - specifically Aristotle. Aristotle also believed that women are deformed men. That some people deserve to be enslaved. That deaf people are incapable of reason.
So, just because it’s old doesn’t mean it’s true. Just like “kids these days” or “seems like nobody wants to work anymore” some bad ideas are evergreen.
When the UK enclosed their fields so that they were privately controlled crop yield immediately went up 20%. Theres overwhelming empiric evidence of tragedy of the commons being real.
it’s a specific viewpoint that chooses to measure success in terms of crop yields, rather than quality of life…
The tragedy of the commons didn’t claim that crop yields are slightly depressed. The claim is that the commons will be overused to the point of threatening to destroy it.
The board's goal was to lock-in maintenance with computer security, which failed catastrophically. All previous generations of Deere tractors have on-board electronics that can be jailbroken.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/16/john_deere_doom/
Just for that failure, they should all likely be gone.
Their business is booming. That significantly overwhelms the concern you're raising.
They have gone from $4.3b in operating income to $14.5b in three years, while their sales nearly doubled. That's an old industrial company boom the likes of which is almost never seen by those types of companies.
By comparison what you're calling catastrophic is entirely trivial. It's not even in the room as a consideration compared to the soaring profits. Nobody is removing a whole board with that kind of profit growth.
> Their business is booming. That significantly overwhelms the concern you're raising.
Yes their profit is up, no it is unrelated to the concerns
The company is acting in a way that luts the whole food system at risk
They should be disbanded, by force. I recommend replacement with a farmer cooperative
Countries that act so ignorantly of consequences or little regard for private property never end well.
If Deere is so bad buy from competitors, of which there are many.
> If Deere is so bad buy from competitors, of which there are many.
I somewhat agree with your earlier comment, but this bit is ignoring the systemic issues involved.
Deere is a leader in much of the efficiency technology that allows large-scale farming operations to reach the economy of scale needed to farm the huge multi-thousand (tens of thousands of acres in many cases) grain operations that are slowly but surely taking over food production in the US.
This trend, unabated, is a weird form of monopoly power for lack of a better word. If one manufacturer is more or less the sole-source for the largest corporate farms, and those farming operations are putting smaller ones out of business due to cost pressure - eventually - and likely sooner than later it becomes a too big to fail situation and a systemic national security risk.
This is starting to get into the realm of arms manufacturing. If these trends continue for another decade or three, and then Deere has say a massive IT failure, planting and harvesting operations literally grind to a halt for the top-end equipment entirely reliant on the automation and data harvesting these machines require to operate. People will be at risk for starvation in the event of an extended outage. Farming as a Service has a hidden cost to it many are not seeing in these comments.
I don't agree with disbanding Deere and nationalizing it - however this really needs to be looked at much more than a simple competition issue. It's rapidly becoming a winner-takes-all market, which is subsequently running the smaller operations out of business and putting the US food supply at a systemic risk if nothing is done.
Of course a competitor could somehow battle through the patent forest and capital requirements, but I wouldn't bet our lives on that.
I work for a direct JD competitor (the, um, orange one...) and I'm happy to say that JD's behavior does drive a lot of customers our way. :)
And the Deer example is sorta nice in that I don't have to explain to management why that sorta DRM is a horrible idea. They already know.
Why do you seem so opposed to regulating away this kind of behaviour?
Like what's bad about fixing this growing issue with regulation?
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This post appears to be complaining that John Deere didn't do a good enough job DRM'ing their tractors? We should fire them and fine even worse dictators, who will draw even more ire & rage?
This does seem like capitalism at work. Still, I really want to hate the players and the game. This has been brutal extractive malevolence against an industry supporting the very base of the pyramid of needs: John Deere is hurting the world incredibly badly.
Well, yeah, putting thousands of pedestrians in a spot that was designed for, essentially, zero pedestrians is a good way to get them killed. The fatality was a dude was hit by a motorist(who was found not at fault) as he walked in the darkness across a street. It's not like John Deere called the Pinkertons in to bust heads and the fatality happened that way.
Lots of people had to die for rights
Ludlow Massacre, 1914 - 21 people - men including their wives and children were killed
there are more
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Hope Deere gets what's coming to them and this sets a precedent for other companies. Next on the list should be devices remotely disabled when they're discontinued, which would have otherwise continued to work perfectly fine (like the Spotify car device).
Would also like to see a ban on firmware updates and programming tools locked behind a dealer (or support contract) portal and a ban on time-restricted software licenses for hardware.
In line with remote-bricking discontinued hardware, these policies only serve to generate eWaste.
If you sell programmable hardware, or really anything with embedded software, you should be required to make all the tools and software available to end users (doesn’t have to be free, but shouldn’t require a subscription or support contract either) in perpetuity.
Licenses to enable additional hardware features are fine, but they must be granted for the life of the device (i.e. as long as it can be kept working), not an arbitrary “we think the life of this thing is 5 years”. You should never have to keep paying to use a device you already bought.
> You should never have to keep paying to use a device you already bought.
You think that's bad? I bought a "RAM upgrade" over the phone from HAAS for a CNC machine back in 2016ish. The upgrade was from 1mb to 16mb of RAM.
The technician on the phone told me to go to the machine and punch in a series of keys followed by a 21 digit code. That was my ~$2,000 RAM upgrade.
The RAM was always there. It was just locked away as "reserve value" for the manufacturer.
tesla does this stuff.
For instance, I believe every car is actually running full self drive software in simuation mode. But if you pay $8k it can actually control pedals/steering.
also OTA performance boosts, etc.
Indeed, driving a Tesla is collecting training data for the company whether you benefit from it or not. (The idea you can own a Tesla is laughable, you might have the title but Elon can brick it and refuse to activate it.)
They're also well-known for artificially capping battery capacity unless you buy an unlock. There have been a few stories before about them unlocking the expanded capacity for free during emergencies.
Jailbreak time when?
Jailbreak is a cat and mouse game, which you shouldn't have to play if buying something so expensive.
The best thing to do is to not buy it in the first place.
The most upsetting version of this is when you actually have to remove hardware. “Upgrading” the machine entailed removing a certain screw from under the hood to double the performance.
I don’t see the problem with this?
When you pay for goods or services, you should expect to receive something. If you pay extra for leather seats, you’re getting leather seats. If you pay for DLC as part of a game, you’re subsidising the cost of the developer adding more stuff to the game. The pricing of digital products and add-ons may not always be fair but you should be getting access to something valuable that you didn’t already have, i.e. something that costs money to develop and/or host.
In this case, you already bought and paid for the additional RAM. The manufacturer is refusing to let you use it until you pay additional money, even though you theoretically own it already. That’s not providing a service, it’s just extortion.
If you could somehow prove that the additional RAM was not factored into the original cost of what you bought then this might be fair (albeit wasteful) - but I doubt it…
16 megs of ram was ~free by 2016.
You may be right, I’ve no idea. For me it’s the principle more than the specific amount. I can’t understand why a manufacturer is entitled to charge you to use something that you supposedly own. Car manufacturers charging to unlock seat heating is a good example.
This is the market not working.
> ban on firmware updates and programming tools locked behind a dealer
Tesla won't let you buy parts unless you enter the vehicle vin. I believe some other things you have to order through the tesla app.
I think those kinds of requirements should be disallowed too.
The VIN requirement may be due to part (version) differences between vintages. Most automakers make few changes during production of (one year’s) model, whereas Tesla seems to make changes all the time.
Other manufacturers manage just find without this kind of block, there's really no need to jump at corporate defense like this.
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Legacy car industry has a life cycle for a model of about 6-8 years with a "refresh" in the center, so usually you can get by with model variant code(s) and construction mm/yy to find a specific spare part. Designs are locked in-between and you can't just go and swap suppliers or whatnot, which is what almost broke the neck of the entire industry back in the heyday era of covid - there was no flexibility, even if there were alternative suppliers for missing parts. Everything is solidly locked with multi-year long contracts on both sides.
Tesla however, they change stuff alllll the damn time because they make so much of their stuff in-house, the vertical integration eliminates the need for rigid contracts. You absolutely need the VIN because for some differences even knowing the week of the production doesn't give sufficient resolution.
By the way, legacy car makers are also shifting to that model, BMW for example doesn't deliver paper-printed sheets for which fuse in the fuse box does what for a few years now, you have to use an online service. The logistics for printing the sheets for all the variants became too complex.
This is absolutely not true, other manufacturers refresh their models all the time. They just use a simple approach - part numbers to track what goes where. Funny how you call THEM "legacy", not a company that can't do that.
> Tesla however, they change stuff alllll the damn time because they make so much of their stuff in-house, the vertical integration eliminates the need for rigid contracts. You absolutely need the VIN because for some differences even knowing the week of the production doesn't give sufficient resolution.
Sounds like a maintenance nightmare. Who decides when parts go EOL?
Yet another reason to not buy a Tesla.
All of that fuckery is not going to help you or the technician when your car breaks.
I guess this suggests what kind of people should be buying Teslas (buying new cars every 1-3 years) and what their resale value should quickly become (disposable cars).
Interestingly in an 80's Toyota I worked on there were some minor revisions part way through a given model year. Most of the vehicle stayed the same, but I recall in some cases you needed to know year and month rather than just year in order to find the correct part or wiring diagram. I'd have to answer the question: Do I have the early version or the late version in this case?
Model year and engine config (e.g. cylinder count) has usually been enough for auto parts for decades.
Vehicle manufacturers don't typically re-source parts in the middle of production, nor would they do this several times in one year.
Tesla does. They're constantly changing parts out.
>Would also like to see a ban on firmware updates and programming tools locked behind a dealer (or support contract) portal and a ban on time-restricted software licenses for hardware.
Won't happen. Feds find the status quo too useful to let every tom dick and harry start wrenching on these things
I'm pretty familiar with what's going on at CAT. A large part of the way all the emissions stuff that everyone (I'm talking about the customers, dealers, OEMs, the people who actually pay for things, not the online peanut gallery) hates gets enforced is that the OEM threatens the dealers that they'll cut them off from the software if they don't run a tight ship and their techs are too frequently caught doing things like plugging into vehicles outside the scope of their job, working on deleted equipment and whatnot. The dealers roll this downhill to their employees. I assume Deere is similar.
Basically removing the dealers and therefore the OEM's stranglehold on software would take the teeth out of emissions enforcement.
In a world where rolling coal[1] is a thing that people do voluntarily, I submit that emissions enforcement (as it stands) is a failed experiment. It's time to rethink it from first principles.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal
> Basically removing the dealers and therefore the OEM's stranglehold on software would take the teeth out of emissions enforcement.
I don't buy that. This strangehold is the only way that VW managed to cheat emissions for years without getting caught.
How would you implement that though? As soon as you push a law in a single state, the company will move states, over a single country and the company will move countries, and you’re not gonna get this law passed somewhere like China
> and you're not gonna get this law passed somewhere like China
That's exactly what embargos are for.
Or at least proper regulation. If you want to import X to the US then it must comply with Y
Yes, but we should also be honest about the fact that this protectionism will have a cost. In the case of farm equipment, it means that everyone who buys food will be paying more to subsidize the protected industry.
I'm not making a judgment on whether it's worth it or not, I think that depends on a lot of details, but when people throw out tariffs they are rarely honest about the fact that it's a tax that flows downstream to the end user. In some cases multiple ways, like farmers who pay higher cost for equipment due to tariffs, so production of their soybeans (or whatever) are higher, so then they needs USDA subsidies to make them price competitive for export, so there's multiple layers of taxation there to make it work.
Even low-tech anti-features are insidious. They make the windows in a 3D "bubble" type shape so when you break one, they can charge you more, or use it as leverage to scare you into paying for a support plan that "covers" broken windows. If they were made out of flat panels, 3rd parties could make them, farmers could make their own, and they would be cheaper.
I don't think it's going to happen. Too many shares of automotive companies locked up in influential institutions. The same reason Microsoft is untouchable.
If you buy a device, the manufacturer should retain no control over it whatsoever. There should not be technical provisions to make such control possible. Otherwise, it should be considered a rental and made very clear to you before you commit to it.
Hahaha I hadn’t seen that they’re discontinuing that already. It seemed like such an obvious dud when I saw them announcing it. What a waste of resources.
I'm not and do not know American farmer so I'm asking a genuine question, why did they keep buying Deere tractors ?
I know for a fact that there are competitors, in Europe we have many other brand of tractors. It would make no sense to buy something that you know you can't repair.
JD has a good reputation for reliability, and at least in the area where my family farms, green tractors retain their resale value better than most. Also a well built-out dealer network for support. A key factor for my brother's operation is that a large regional JD parts depot is a 20 minute drive away. With any other brand, the mechanic might tell you: "Well, we can have the part here in two days." versus "If you drive to the depot now and pick up the part, I can have you running by the end of this afternoon." During spring planting and fall harvest, that is a big deal.
So despite their big flaws (repairability), they still are better than their competitor ?
I know a few farmer in Europe, despite being better if you tell them they can't repair their engine, they would get very angry and never buy this brand again. When things break its faster to repair themselves because they already repaired it many times.
But here farms are much smaller than in the us, so it might be a matter of priority. If you have so much land than loosing a day on repairing something makes you lose more money, it makes sense to go with John Deere.
On the other hand, these farmers all have several tractors and old equipment like 40 years old so that when a thing break they can still use another even if less efficient to do the job.
It was the bait and switch - it's the end of most incredibly successful capitalist corporations. The reputation JD built was very well earned so they defacto became the everyman's tractor and for good reason.
At some point all corporations start to trim expenses or generate new revenues from existing avenues - so that reputation was used to get everyone kinda trapped in their JD world that was essentially made "unrepairable" overnight.
This is the same thing Monsanto did with seed, Dow chem with Roundup and Microsoft with windows for a non farm example.
Once you envelop an ecosystem of products and services the people within that system are largely at the mercy of it. Apple and their batteries intentionally being made to fail scandal a few years back is another great example.
It's just the numbers are much bigger in the agricultural world than the consumer tech world. The tractor that has essentially a SaS contract/required yearly operating expense for maintenance and upkeep might cost millions in the first place. Many farmers have machine shops that are plenty capable of repairing tractors - bc they've always done so.
JD is trying to fundamentally change the game - it's not the farmers fault for being a loyal customer for 10-40+ years, as many farmers today inherited farms that already had JD equipment from their fathers/grand fathers.
JD is exploiting that and their supply chain to make tractors and farm equipment glorified rentals.
I am a farmer, although one that isn't big enough to buy new equipment. Essentially, what happens is that only the big operators buy new – or more likely lease new – where they only keep it for a season or two. They aren't apt to be too worried about right to repair as the machine will be under warranty the entire time they keep it. Once it goes onto the used market, well... You're at the mercy of what is on the used market.
As sibling comments have said, wide availability of parts and specialists is a big part of it. Big time ops can have people on staff, but most mom and pops will lean on the service shops. Either way though, you need to have parts physically nearby so you can be back up and running in hours rather than days. When your hay is down and rain is in the forecast, waiting days instead of hours can be the difference between a great harvest and a field full of ass grass. In the north american west, when your irrigation is broken and it's July/August, you may only have a day or two before crops start drying and wilting. If you're lucky, you'll get it back up before permanent damage starts.
In many rural areas, John Deere is the closest and/or only option, so you have to choose between freedom and inconvenience, or technological slavery and safety. As we've seen with the general public, most people will go with the latter. Your insurance premiums are certainly cheaper that way.
I guess I don't really understand this argument in an age of near-overnight shipping. I am not a farmer, but I have maintained EOL equipment like refrigerators, fancy stoves, a MB 240D, chainsaws in a small mountain town (ie, far from parts sources). I tend to have the next obvious replacement parts on the shelf already. So for instance I have brake pads for a 2001 Toyota Tundra on the shelf.
Though I am not a farmer I have spent time with the spouse's family out in W Minnesota and all of them were farmers. I did not get the impression that they were useless around a wrench, welding rig, or electrical circuits.
An argument I could buy about Deere's brand loyalty is that (I know nothing about this beyond farmer hearsay) the current generation of farmers seems to really like the GPS automation. Grandpa can go a lot more years these days, is the point. I'd be curious about the accuracy of that anecdata.
Farmers like the automation bc it's increasingly a single farmer running a family farm and even corporate farms can't find people to employ - hence the widespread employment of illegal immigrants, it's practically and functionally necessary for the agricultural industry in the United States today to have access to cheap, off books and unregulated labor.
I live near a farmer that owns a several thousand head dairy, the company that transports the milk to the creamery that he also owns and the brands that creamery sells to local business - he just keeps buying farms as soon as they go up for sale, anything in the area.
He rips out the homestead and leaves only building that he will use immediately and plows the entire acreage - not a tree in sight. Those trees between fields exist bc of the dust bowl in the 30s - we literally already kno what happens when people do that, he doesn't care at all.
The land he owns is larger than the estates barons of old would rule over - larger by a lot.
Once he automates and all the land outside the cities are owned by him and ppl like him - it can stay that way indefinitely... much like the dark ages. That's their goal - a permanent divide between the rural and urban populations.
This seems like a tangent but it's not - the family farms are being pushed and bought up by the farmers that willingly play JD's games bc they kno only so many can.
JD doesn't want millions of repair contracts with farmers - they want to consolidate that into something more controllable.
> I tend to have the next obvious replacement parts on the shelf already
What I was going to say, moreover when you have a tool that is critical to your job, you get a second one. It doesn't have to be a great one, it can be the old one that kept failing so you decided to buy a new one, whatever but just good enough to save your life Incase your critical equipment fails.
I'm not a farmer, just friends with some. Driving through tiny towns in rural America you often see small-time John Deere dealerships and repair shops. They are very very well established. I've heard that they have trade-in and financing programs that are very attractive; for many farmers their only option is to go with what is local and has the minimum down up front.
I'd imagine you buy whatever color of machine you can get at your nearest dealer.
Not so much nearest dealer, but nearest large repair-parts warehouse, even if you drive a few more miles to the dealer.
JD is like the IBM of farm equipment.
Ahh, IBM - another great example of a company that attained a near universal adoption by setting the standards of quality - literally established what we thought a computer was and then just went to shit.
IBM couldn't get their supercomputer/AI that McDonalds funded to correctly run a drive thru - the project was literally shelved. It can play chess tho ;)
The specialist machinery that Deere makes is really well refined and good at what it does and the fact that farming in the US has consolidated a lot over the decades so the median tractor is bought by some "large enough that they don't really care" business of a farm who doesn't really care because they'll be buying aa maintenance contract and getting rid of the thing in X years anyway.
Thanks for that.
A John Deere lobbying ad about how much they have contributed to manufacturing was presented right next to this article.
The last parts Ive ordered from JD have been made in China.
I’d be surprised if their contributions to American manufacturing was much more than assembly to avoid import taxes.
Ya, I got the same ad. I wonder if (1) they believe that the ad will reduce the bad-pr generated by the article, or if (2) it’s just triggering because it matches some keywords (e.g. “John Deere”). The linked page looks like it’s intended to generate good will, so I think it’s case 1. But it really comes off as tone deaf to me
I think all those targeted ad algorithms are effectively just really dumb. Whenever you look through the comments of a YT video criticizing a product/company you are almost guaranteed to find a dozen comments saying they got an ad from that company when the video started.
But then again, what are they supposed to do when practically every corner on the internet only mentions John Deere in a negative context.
We have information that you just bought an air fryer, DO YOU WANT TO BUY 10 MORE AIR FRYERS?
People may be even more likely to click on those ads if it will cost John Deere money.
Which are costs that John Deere will ultimately pass on to the consumer.
The point is that the ad recommendation models don’t know why people are clicking the ads, they just know people click on the ads.
> all those targeted ad algorithms are effectively just really dumb.
They are. I've had a gmail account for almost 20 years. Hell, I worked for Google for 10 years. They know who I am. They've seen me search the internet and watch YT videos for effectively eons. Yet the YT ad targeting algorithm is so stupid that it apparently doesn't know that I'm male. I get pre-roll ads for feminine hygiene products and bras all the time.
BTW, ad gods: please don't make it smarter. I don't want ads. When I start to see ads, I block them. If I can't block them, I will just use the product less. How do you not know this? Or maybe that's by design...
Lol, after moving production to Mexico. Should be called Juan Deere from now.
I just left the industrials space. All the other manufacturers are racing to implement AI and the John Deere model. Of course, most of them don't command the control over their customers like JD but they are definitely planning to lock things down. A major concern is the capabilities and availabilities of technicians. The techs as a whole do not have a good reputation for being competent so they are looking to provide remote diagnostic services with the help of AI...again, looking at JD as the exemplar.
In one of the slowest movements registered ever in the animal kingdom
I don’t know where a “bright line” needs to be drawn here wrt jurisprudence, but akin to Monsanto, I have _zero_ doubt that Deere has been crossing it for decades.
The Feds are coming, and I hope they keep going and going until there isn't a single product or service left that dares dictate what you can do after the transaction is complete.
Say hello to your new Subscription products
I've been rolling the idea around that perhaps if a product is encumbered by a subscription then it's not a first sale and the product counts as inventory. And gets taxed as such.
I don't know the first thing about such things, but I'll bet if companies were pushed on this they'd suddenly start asserting that it's a lease, which I think is typically taxed similarly to a sale.
I hate the "everything's a subscription" business model that's taking over everything. We'll achieve peak serfdom when the air we breathe, water we drink, and food we eat is bought on a subscription model.
Water is already a subscription model.
Food sometimes is, and honestly a more centralised food subscription system could drive down the cost of food by making demand more predictable and enabling better economy of scale.
How is water a subscription model? You pay for the water you take from the tap. After you take it, it’s yours.
If it were feasible to charge you for your own heartbeats, companies absolutely would. Infinite growth is a poison pill idea - it brought us to where we are today, and would drag us to the future you outlined, unless the folly is abandoned.
Nothing wrong with growth,it's natural. The population grows and so does the money supply in turn. This is good. What is not good is when a particular company is trying to retain ALL growth of certain segments for themselves through abusive leverage.
A principle that stuck out to me as a child was that our society prioritized lower prices for consumers as a whole over the prosperity of any one company or industry.
We let companies grow to the point where they now subvert the will of the people.
> I'll bet if companies were pushed on this they'd suddenly start asserting that it's a lease, which I think is typically taxed similarly to a sale.
A lease allows for the buyer to own the product, free and clear of the seller.
Not in real estate. There is technically no difference between leasing and renting, other than the things that are colloquially associated with. A lease agreement (or rental agreement) may or may not have a clause offering the borrower an opportunity to take ownership.
Rent might also refer to the price portion of a leasing agreement (or rental agreement). So in shorthand usage, “the lease” might encompass all terms of borrowing something, including the price, but “the rent” might just refer to the price.
That is exactly how it should work.
If the user does not own it, someone does and the accounting should play out accordingly.
Does it work that way for ISPs that "lease" their modems? This is the first time I've ever considered this idea that the hardware would still be inventory. Does inventory get taxed annually or monthly? Seems like the monthly lease fees would more than cover that.
That's a perfect example. They demand it back at the end of your contract, there's not even an option to keep it, let alone modify it.
I remember reading that, back in the 50s or 60s, the phone company owned "your" phone. It was permanently attached to the wall, and you weren't allowed to do anything to alter it. Did AT&T pay taxes on those phones as inventory?
If one was not returned, they charged what it cost to replace it.
Wish I knew about inventory. My guess is yes! They would have to do accounting on all the modems anyway. Service, where they are all at, serial numbers and more.
When one went bad, it usually involved either a visit to the ISP, or a tech shows up with a new one and a few records get updated and the modem ends up home.
Cable TV boxes are another example!
I do know those were inventoried. A friend went to work as a tech for a local cable company. (Yes, they did tell me how to enable decryption on all channels for at least one model...) They fixed the incoming boxes and those units went right back out to homes.
The units were purchased a few times per year to balance subscriber growth and attrition. Good repair metrics saved a TON of money. The units were from one to a few hundred dollars a pop!
Rental was $7.99 / month at one point I could remember.
Say the box was $150, at that rental rate the box becomes a minor profit item after a year and a half, right?
Well, most cable boxes got used a decade or more, especially when the company did not have to change its encryption tech.
That is a 4 to 5x return on the purchase price. Maybe 3x return after attrition, failed returns and repair costs get woven in.
Not a bad deal for them. And as the user, not many worries, but also basically zero options.
An example from cable boxes was serial ports and input and output ports either disabled or nerfed to the point of poor usability really sucked for anyone wanting to use the gear technically, or as part of an automation of some kind.
They did! And the not so nice part of that was being stuck with the phones they supply. Now, as simple phones, I liked them. Audio quality was great, the device did not break easily and all that. No worries. But, if you wanted to do anything connected to that phone, or the line, that was off limits!
The nice part was it being their phone, they took care of it. Service was a call away and the service tech could do what it takes and have few worries.
Begin sidebar:
Our wall mounted phone was surrounded by phone numbers and other bits of information. I started it one day writing the name of a burger joint we used to call all the time by the phone.
Mom was pissed, but Dad liked it! Next time we went to call the number was right there!
And so it began...
When I left home for the last time, I looked at that phone and wall for a long time. Many years of our lives were there. Friends, family, businesses, other things like EMS, poison control, various hotlines were all there organized fairly well given the organic way it started.
I wish I had taken a picture!
Seeing that happen and being a part of it all is probably one of the more potent reminders, to me of course, of what the pre-digital times were like.
End sidebar
> It was permanently attached to the wall
That's a bit hyperbolic. It was just hung on the wall. If it was permanent, they wouldn't be able to take it back. Thanks for the reminder that we're to the point in time that "kids today" honestly have no memory of land line phones.
But yes, the phones were only available from Ma Bell, and you did have a monthly fee for them. They did have table top versions as well, so it wasn't just wall mounts. They were heavy solid well built devices. Once it was opened for anyone to make, they became cheap light weight plastic pieces of crap.
Sorry, "hard-wired" would have been more clear.
I had a landline when I was a kid, but my parents got rid of it shortly after I left for college.
Intriguing idea! Some thoughts:
- If a consumer buys a car with heated seats and an option to activate the heated seats as a subscription, but the consumer elects not to subscribe, do the inactive heaters still count as inventory? If so, what if the car or heaters get destroyed but the automaker doesn't ever learn about the destruction?
- Would this apply to e-books and media? In today's market, if I buy an e-book or media from a streaming service, I'm not buying a copy, but rather a revocable license with a one-time fee. It seems like that e-book or media is inventory for the book seller.
IMHO it should be on the automaker to learn about the destruction. They should have to carry it as inventory just like anything else. There should be real expenses to it, not just the ability to throw it out there with some tech that blocks it unless a user registers and pays the subscription, and not have to do anything about it. I think they should also be required to pay for repairs if/when it breaks. If they want to retain ownership of the heated seats so they can charge a subscription for it, then they need to own (pun intended) the responsibilities of ownership.
While I do think that's fair, my personal hope is that such a requirement would make them stop this asinine practice.
Very interesting idea.
When I buy something I must pay sales tax to the government. Later, if it turns out I never owned it and ownership is revoked, can I get the sales tax back?
Ukraine was at the forefront of white hat hacking their miserable machines.
Regarding right to repair, you can watch the Youtuber "Louis Rossmann" [1]. He repairs Macbooks and extensively talks about the importance of "Right to repair" in his Youtube channel.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/@rossmanngroup
One of the very few things I can appreciate from this administration.
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Government regulation is critical to a healthy market economy. No economy should be totally unregulated as it will end in a monopoly. Instead you need a moderate level of regulation to prevent people from abusing positions of power. That's what this is. They're purposefully making their products impossible to repair without them, and using their market dominance to enforce it. You're welcome to disagree, but every stable economic theory relies on some regulation.
They're not using their market dominance to enforce it. They're using regulations (copyright and trade secrets) to enforce it.
They're using the money they got from market dominance to finance their lobbying for regulations to enforce their market dominance.
It's the political economy. Every market system ever has had one.
They get away with it because of their dominance in the market, that's why the gov't needs to take action. They're so huge there are no real competitors for customers to turn to.
1) agricultural equipment relies on a network of local dealers to sell and maintain the equipment.
For this reason, it's very hard for competition to break in. No one wants to wait 2 weeks for a part for their tractor during crop season.
2) No other manufacturers offer real choice (and the required logistics I mentioned above), so it's not something the free market will fix.
This is a frustratingly bad take. Bad repair practices are gradually taking over the entire market and they clearly represent a failure of said market to provide good products, ie the strategy consists of making the product irrefutably worse in order to make a bit more money. Every major phone manufacturer, for example, has followed in apple’s footsteps to make independent repair more difficult purely to extract more profits. In other words, how does the corporate shoeshine taste?
Except you can't because they abuse the shit out of the paten system. The paten system was a great idea when it protected up starts from being destroyed by the competition, but now it's used by incumbents to stifle markets.
I would agree only if John Deere is not allowed to use provisions like DMCA[1] to prevent repair of their hardware.
[1] https://reason.com/2024/01/08/how-john-deere-hijacked-copyri...
Incredibly short sighted. Extrapolate this to the point where all of the manufacturers use DRM / abuse the legal process to prevent an owners right to repair their own devices. Where's your "free market" now?
It's a captured market. Free markets are where no one has extreme market power like with a mono/duopoly or monopsony or whatever. A free market would be one where Deere is broken up by antitrust action. Making right to repair rules is the soft-touch approach to curbing their abuse.
It isn't a free market. It is a regulated market and that regulation benefits both innovation and the producers and consumers in the market.
What public interest is served by allowing companies to engage in anti-competitive and anti-consumer practices like locking people into proprietary systems?
The world is a better place because regulators mandate things like interoperability in phones or requirements that auto manufacturers supply parts for 3rd party mechanics to fix vehicles.
> This is certainly abuse from the executive branch and I hope the courts stop it.
“Actually I think it’s good that companies don’t allow you to repair their products. And it’s an abuse of power for the government to stop them”
You realize that forcing companies to respect the right to repair actually makes the economy stronger?
Independent repair shops can exist in that environment. The market becomes more free in that sense…
"Free Market". Yeah sure Jan.
Yeah! If the children want to lay my rail road lines for pennies, who the hell are the regulators to tell me and them we can't do that?!?!?
Are you saying companies should be able to sell bottles of bleach as "baby formula"?
Are you saying John Deere makes farm equipment that by design makes people physically sick? And if that is not your opinion, what was the point of your question?
Grow up
In the past, the free market deliberately produced formula that didn’t nourish babies and then lied to their mothers. It’s hyperbolic, but not really a bad question to test op’s logic.
Almost exactly a half-century ago, Nestle sent sales girls dressed like nurses into Africa to convince women to stop breastfeeding. They gave them free trial samples that lasted long enough to stop natural lactation, and the women were forced to rely on formula.
Problem was, the water wasn't suitable for giving babies that young, resulting in some babies dying.
Yup. Pretty crazy stuff.
“Buy a different brand of tractor” isn’t the same as “let them feed bleach to babies”.
It kinda is. The FDA regulates food and drugs - the FTC does the same thing for unhealthy market configurations. You can claim up and down that other options exist in both cases ("don't want to eat rat feces? buy something else!") but the regulation of unhealthy practices overall improves the quality of market options while also making businesses (rightfully) fear exploiting their customers.
In this instance, it's not like John Deere is using their position to improve the status quo of their product for everyone involved. They are explicitly demanding money for nothing - not only is it anticompetitive, but it's not promoting healthy market development. Deliberately designing malnutritional formula is really not that different from deliberately designing a tractor it's owners can't own. The mechanism for regulating both issues is pretty similar as well.
If you try to lobby against the people who invented lobbying, you're gonna have a bad time.
some of my Uncles are farmers....
Most hate John Deere as their profits derive from cost savings in fixing their own equipment.
Farming.. The ultimate form of corporate welfare..
"This is all a bit misleading. Farmers don’t want to repair their own equipment. They want to be able to call someone on a Sunday when something breaks to come fix it. Which they can’t do today due to restrictions on John Deere’s IP that limits 3rd parties from offering that service."
For what it's worth, if they bought the tractor I also think they should be able to call a third party on a Sunday to repair the tractor if it breaks. That is sort of how ownership is supposed to work.
There are two alternatives here:
* your food is 5x more expensive as a result of protectionist tariffs
* there are no protectionist tariffs and all of your food is produced in and imported from poor countries who can now use this as diplomatic leverage
You do like eating, right? Of all the things to subsidize, food seems like a good one.
Credz to the farmers for fighting back
Farmer here. John Deere and any other company that does not fully support the right to repair should go bankrupt.
"The main complaining about Deere and other brands are the guys that get mad they hacked the code for the ecu and allowed the engine to rev higher and provide more horsepower. Thus lowering the life of the engine and bypassing certain things like DEF. Then something breaks, and the dealer denies the warranty cause it's obvious they messed with the code. So then they go ape shit and say they should be able to customize their vehicle however they want. I know this cause I used to work at a dealer and this happened every season. They read up on some forum how to bypass stuff and boom, I'm replacing their engine."
Yeah, that's how the whole arms race started. Why JD didn't disseminate this fact though?
It's ironic that farmers (traditionally thought of as less technical people, "workers of the earth", etc) and hackers (highly technical nerds writing operating systems and engineering compatibility parts) are so connected by this issue. Some of the farmers I've talked to understand the importance ownership and right to repair better than even many engineers.
That said, I think John Deere is just the asshole willing to weaponize the legal system to enforce their dreams. The real problem is laws that protect IP like the DMCA and the patent system. I'm not saying we should just delete all those, but they are in bad need of reform and enable a tremendous amount of abuse. The abuse is only going to get worse unless we treat the cause(s) rather than just the symptoms.
I'm glad the feds are giving John Deere some attention, but I really hope they are going to fix the lopsided system instead of just try to bully or micro-regulate John Deere into "voluntarily" allowing more repair. If we stopped unleashing the lawyers on people for modifying or interfacing with devices they purchased, it would shift the balance of power more toward the center (whereas currently the power is almost entirely on the side of the companies).
Even if you have no interest in repairing or "tinkering" with your own stuff, you should be on the side of right to repair.
Many people (including comments on hacker news!) have called farmers the original hackers. The amount of bespoke problem solving needed is tremendous. Uniformity in farming is an extremely recent phenomenon.
eg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=626534
OpenSourceEcology has the mission to create open source versions of 50 technologies they consider fundamental to "human civilization". One of the few technologies they've actually succeeded in open sourcing is a tractor
https://www.opensourceecology.org/portfolio/tractor/
They also have a 3d printer, a microhouse, a CEB press, and a power cube
https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/
Everyone was a farmer until not so long in the past.
most of the named countries that are recognized today, were founded by hunting groups (defined by spoken language) that sought control over farmers and definitely over migrants.. oddly, farming itself is cited as a major driver of armed conflicts
Yeah... I grew up on a multi-generational family farm and we hacked everything to repair or extend its functionality.
Or just consider animal husbandry at its roots, OG bio hacking...
Not just animal husbandry. Modern corn is the result of centuries of genetic engineering.
Farmers have long used bio engineering to make crops tastier or more resistant to disease or drought.
Oh I know, a relative was bio-chem at monsanto related to corn... but I normally avoid telling people that because of the stigma it carries (unfair considering the global impact to yield)... now he works tirelessly to reduce invasive species to reduce coastal erosion.
> unfair considering the global impact to yield
The Monsanto stigma is well-earned by its legal teams, much to the chagrin of its many Monsanto biochem employees that saw (and see) the company as a creator of good in the world.
Exactly, I dont deny this. He retired early.
this purposefully blurs the distinction between pairing natural breeding versus invasive engineering.. often repeated by people in favor of invasive engineering
Because "invasive engineering" is just systematized "natural breeding".
People that don't understand this think that the production of GMO crops is done by scientists gene splicing scary chemicals into food products.
What is actually done is scientist get a genetic profile of crops, look for genes in crops that behave in a way they like, and bread crops with those genes. Exactly what "natural breeding" does, except for maybe the fact that it can be far more targeted with the genetic information.
There is a downside to this, it often results in highly homogeneous genetics in plants. However, that's a problem we already have with "natural" processes (see: bananas and most citrus fruits).
You are describing selective breeding.
GMO is different. It involves the laboratory isolation of genes, and techniques to introduce said genes into an organism such that its DNA is altered. These technique do include gene splicing.
Golden rice is one well known example. It is a GMO plant which has been modified with genes taken from daffodils and a bacteria called erwinium uredovora. It's not just breeding existing species for good qualities.
Yes this is why eg the French bombard seeds with extraordinary amounts of radiation to get desired sets of random mutations, it’s much more natural and less invasive.
What an assumption. We're just having a fun conversation.
> traditionally thought of as less technical people
You've never met a farmer. Admittedly no one in my family is a farmer, but half of them are loggers, diesel mechanics, or heavy equipment operators. Most of them are ridiculously intelligent and able to fix anything that moves.
Agree with this. I do come from a family of farmers and they could do anything it seemed! Phone line repair, diesel repair, welding/fabrication, plumbing, hydraulic repairs (very dangerous), all manner of home repairs, light vet work, and the list goes on and on. BTW, the description I just gave was for a specific guy that dropped out of school in sixth grade.
> You've never met a farmer.
What a stupid thing to say. Not only do you not know anything about me (I am myself a small-time/part-time farmer, and my neighbors are all farmers. My 14 acres is the smallest lot in my area. My neighbor/friend across the street farms 80 acres and sells his crops as some of the highest quality produce to top buyers. I also grew up with farmers as family members and friends. I think I've probably met a farmer before), but you clearly didn't even read my comment before replying to it or you would know that you're opening salvo is quite wrong. A quote from my comment that you replied to:
> Some of the farmers I've talked to understand the importance (sic) ownership and right to repair better than even many engineers.
It seems to me that logically, it's hard to have talked to people, while simultaneously having never met them.
After such a sloppy and unnecessarily assumptive (and incorrectly assumptive) response, it's hard to give any credibility whatsoever to anything else you say. I agree with it, but (as many of us rural livers/farmers) like to say, "even a stopped clock is right twice a day".
Also, I never said they aren't intelligent or able to fix anything that moves. If something I said suggested they weren't intelligent or capable, please point it out to me. Such a thing would be absurd - all the farmers I know are quite handy and can fix just about anything (that big corporations don't actively engineer to prevent, hence the hullaballoo over right-to-repair).
What I said was that they don't usually care about political fights like right-to-repair. And I stand by that, many of them don't. It's not a direct relation with intelligence level or handiness, it's more about personality and individual interests. Most of them just think John Deere are assholes but have no idea about the right-to-repair movement. They don't realize how deep the poison goes. More and more are getting into it, but it's still pretty unusual.
It's a free-ish country so you can do as you please, but I would recommend that you read and think a little more carefully before replying to people, especially when you're going to insult them by loudly proclaiming that they are an ignorant liar like you did to me.
Apologies for the harsh portions. After re-visiting, I feel I was a bit too harsh. As is probably apparent, you touched a nerve.
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Are you gunning for "most close-minded post of the year"? I know this is HN, but m8.
How else would you classify farmers?
To the topic in question, Republicans want to abolish most regulations (see: Project 2025). And so far the only states to pass right-to-repair laws are Democraticly-controlled (NY, MN, CA, OR, CO).
Actually mine don't.
More to the point, it's not really acceptable to accuse people of being stupid based on how they vote. Reasonable people can disagree on things. I strongly disagree with the political views of some of my family members, but that doesn't make them stupid or anything... we just see things differently.
> More to the point, it's not really acceptable to accuse people of being stupid based on how they vote.
"I've been voting XXX all of my life, and my state has been ruled by XXX over the last 20 years, and the life is still shitty. It's totally a failure of YYY, they want to destroy America"
Reasonable people can disagree on things
Usually. Not this time around, though. You can't call yourself a "reasonable person" and vote for the people behind https://i.imgur.com/WQ4qbfj.png .
Sorry. You just can't.
Yes, you can. Stop treating politics like it's an existential battle between good and evil; that attitude is literally destroying our country.
No, people who engage in insurrection and election fraud are literally destroying our country... or trying their hardest to. We are lucky that they're such idiots, but there is no reason to expect our luck to hold indefinitely.
In any case there are other venues where this type of conversation is better held.
+1
Could you share a link to that full PDF? I assume it's from the recently published documents from Smith?
Edit: Found it! https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25238371-chutkan-ord...
Farmers are - and have been for most of history - some of the Most technical people on the planet… probably more so then your modern “hacker” that probably couldn’t actually disassemble and repair most of the things they own and use.
I spent a summer working on a 3rd generation family farm, and it was one of the most technically competent workplaces I’ve ever seen. The owner had a degree in agricultural engineering, and dozens of patents from farming equipment he initially invented for his own use. Much of the equipment they used day to day was designed and built on site and they had a full machine shop, electrical shop, etc. Modern equipment like combines are so complex, automation heavy, and unreliable that they are usually operated by master mechanics that also weld, code, and are otherwise primarily technical people. When those multi-million dollar machines break- which happens daily- they are losing money fast and need to fix it immediately, right there in the field.
The idea of farmers as uneducated non-technical people is an ignorant stereotype held by urban people that have no clue what farms are really like.
Can you blame them? If you drive through farm country you see crazy Trump effigies everywhere and Trump/Vance signs in every yard.
So it's difficult to know that these people don't care about Trump at all and think he is just as ridiculous as you do. They just hate the Democrats so much that they will do anything they can to stop them. The reasons are numerous and valid, btw.
Indeed the situation isn’t as simple as it seems on the surface. The 3rd generation farmer/inventor I mentioned above is an environmentalist and many of his inventions are focused on improving the long term sustainability and environmental impact of farming- he liked to talk about how he wants the farm to be sustainable to pass down for many more generations by protecting the soil quality, water table, etc. Yet he also has massive signs all over his land supporting conservative politicians. Most likely not because he really likes or agrees with them on much, but because he believes their opponents are actively trying to shut his farm down. I couldn’t say more, because I actively avoid having political discussions with my boss.
Where did you get this stereotype of farmers?
I’ve always though of them as business owners with special skills in growing things, auto mechanics, and logistics.
>Where did you get this stereotype of farmers?
it's not a hard guess even if you don't share the opinion ; nearly every movie where 'farmer' is a plot point demonstrates a rural-living poorly educated family living in dust-bowl conditions and barely scraping enough resource by to feed the animals.
grapes of wrath, wizard of oz, of mice and men, o brother where art thou, ballad of buster scruggs -- yes it's a stereotype , but it's a common one in movies and literature.
Maybe I haven't noticed this since I got inoculated against this notion by the reality of farmers early on.
It still seems surprising to me that this idea can survive more than five seconds of thought. Farmers own tracts of land, lots of equipment, and have to navigate the market for their product, financing, capital allocation, weather patterns, all sorts of random events. They frequently have dozens of employees, and constantly have to negotiate with those, and with customers, and with vendors.
All of this is in addition to the actual growing of crops.
It seems like the most natural thing in the world that this type of person won't take kindly to being dictated to by John Deere (doesn't mean it doesn't happen anyway) and would try their hand at a bit of hacking if needs must.
The mass media likes to portray farmers as straw-chewing hicks. It's the farmer stereotype.
I even saw a conversation on here a few months back where someone on here not-so-nicely corrected a user that the big industrial farmers are smart but the rest of them are backwoods hicks that barely know what electricity is.
I saw a comment recently on HN about how farmers exemplified unsophisticated investors who would never be able to understand complicated financial instruments.
I pointed out that futures trading was literally invented by farmers.
It's endemic to urban areas of the US, where "rural" has the connotation of ignorant, backwards, stupid, inbred, etc., and "farmer" is the epitome of rural. Bog-standard xenophobia and classism.
It’s an interesting form of classism because I’d bet the average farmer is vastly better off than the average cubicle slave, in addition to being masters of their domain.
People who’ve never lived in or around rural communities tend to stereotype those populations as country bumpkins. Newsmedia doesn’t help.
> Where did you get this stereotype of farmers?
It would probably be easier to describe where one would not get this stereotype. Pretty much every city person (which as many sibling comments have pointed out, control essentially all media and pop culture) holds and perpetuates that stereotype.
Pretty much only people who are or know farmers know the reality behind it.
But I do think it's important to point out that farmers are a very diverse group, just like many other professions. There are geniuses and there are morons. You can't take a sample size of n <= 5 and extrapolate characteristics of millions of people.
We're already seeing another dark cloud on the horizon with Deere. They're almost done with the work to move to single-pair Ethernet on their vehicle bus and leave the traditional CAN/ISOBUS connector behind.
We have a number of things that sniff the traffic for important implement data and state and Deere is going to lock it all up. You'll be left with minimal data on the J1939 connector like the automakers did with OBD2.
There’s such a dark cloud for automotive too, usually there’s a gateway between the diagnostic port/ bus and the vehicle network (usually CAN, LIN, Flex-ray) where you can still see traffic. They’re moving towards ethernet(100base-T2), although it’s easier to analyze the traffic the authentication is more complex and in many cases it requires “personalized login” which of course means paying a fee on top of your diagnostic tool subscription. In most cases re-programming used control modules is not permitted “for safety reasons”. Some brands sell a short time subscription but others (like Mercedes Benz) do so in the EU but not in USA/ CAN, there you need to buy a yearly subscription for around $4.5k plus taxes and fees and on top of their “approved tool” (another $2-4k).
> It's ironic that farmers (traditionally thought of as less technical people
I see you’ve never met a farmer. The exact opposite of what you claim is reality.
Farmers are highly technical and have come up with plenty of ingenious solutions to problems on their farms, any labor saving device they can dream up can save them lots of time and money. Repairing equipment quickly is an important skill to have when something shits out during harvest, the weather isn’t going to wait..
A farmer can work miracles with a welder, hammer, wrench, and pliers since they’re generally put in the middle of nowhere and need to keep equipment operational.
> I see you’ve never met a farmer.
More evidence that people really shouldn't trust their first, shallow reactions to things. You know nothing about me and yet have jumped to an absurdly wrong conclusion, ironically while trying to correct what you think was an incorrect conclusion of mine. For more information, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41887807
> The exact opposite of what you claim is reality.
Please read it a little closer. I'm not claiming any such thing. I'm pointing out that it is a popular conception - and it is. That the popular conception is wrong does not mean it isn't a popular conception. That's quite the logic error. And for someone to point out a popular conception does not mean they agree with it, and even if they did, it certainly does not mean they've never met a farmer (lol). This has so many fallacies in it, it's actually funny.
The feds are not in charge of key legislation like the DMCA, and their power to regulate things has been severely curtailed by the supreme court in recent months. If we want these things to change, we need to seek out all of the individuals in the House and Senate who oppose these things and mount systematic campaigns to replace them. And do the same thing at the state level. Demanding that the feds "do something" without clear legislation is not going to work anymore.
> The real problem is laws that protect IP like the DMCA and the patent system.
That is A problem, but that is not the problem seen here. The problem here is trade secrets. Specifically electronic secrets that prevent third parties from fully servicing their own equipment. Like HP inkjet electronic restrictions that prevent people from refilling their own ink cartridges. This is still a problem without patent law, without copyright law, and without lawyers.
> The real problem is laws that protect IP like the DMCA and the patent system.
system created to protect inventors and authors from being abused by more powerful people(investors, corporations, publishers) is actually used to abuse everyone except powerful groups then yeah - it is a horrible system that needs to go.
Farmers and hackers share a lot in common. They're people who roll up their sleeves, find a solution within their means, and implement it.
> I'm not saying we should just delete all those
It wouldn't be the worst thing. 20 years for a patent may have been sensible a century ago but these days it's almost absurd.
Fix the root of the issue instead of it's consequences ? One can dream.
Too much money and private interest here.
I hope the feds are looking at a right to repair software too, Deere is in violation of the GNU GPL due to withholding Linux kernel source code, which means you can't fix bugs in your tractors.
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/mar/16/john-deere-gpl-vi...
What happens if the GOP wins in a couple of weeks? Would there be any way these actions can be sustainable for more than a few months?
Following the Reagan era, the GOP had a period of wanting to reign in the federal government, but I don't think that's quite true now. Folks like Trump or DeSantis are not pro-small-government, they just want to use it to advance different social policies. In the fight between farmers and Deere, I doubt they'd side with the company.
Data point: Trump's VP nominee likes what the FTC is doing - https://fortune.com/2024/08/11/jd-vance-5000-child-tax-credi...
Alternative data points:
> Under Project 2025, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) would be eliminated, and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) would be privatized
> The Department of Education would be eliminated and oversight of education and federal funding for education will be handed over to the states
> The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) would be eliminated and moved to the Department of Interior or the Department of Transportation if combined with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)
> The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s many regional labs and entire offices of enforcement and compliance and scientific integrity and risk information would be eliminated.
> The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is to “privatize as much as possible” and close many hospitals and clinics.
> The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) would be taken apart and send much of its work to states and other agencies
> The Department of Justice (DOJ) would lose its independence and be under control of the President
> The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) would be drastically reduced and split into two entities: one gathering scientific data and one making public health recommendations and policies.
Source: https://www.afge.org/article/project-2025-seeks-to-dismantle...
Aren't the 1s and 3rd points basically just a reversion to how things were pre 9/11? I have a hard time seeing those by themselves as a bad thing.
> > Folks like Trump or DeSantis are not pro-small-government
> Alternative data points
Presenting that list as a counter suggests that "leave it to the states" necessarily means "more freedom for individuals", which is very questionable. Look what just happened to abortion rights.
The ur-example in American history would be literal slavery.
> The Department of Justice (DOJ) would lose its independence and be under control of the President
Hold up, is this "big government" as measured by employee count, or is this "big government" as measured by oppressive power?
A dictatorship can get away with far fewer public-employees than a democracy, yet it's not the kind of "small government" anybody should want.
> the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) would be eliminated
The DHS was created in the wake of 9/11 by GW and has furthered the security/police state. They fail pretty hard at securing the border as wlel.
> the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) would be privatized
The TSA is a jobs program for rude/mean people who also steal/assault passengers. It did not exist pre-2001. Privatizing it makes sense. Its workers form unions that extort the taxpayer.
> The Department of Education would be eliminated and oversight of education and federal funding for education will be handed over to the states
Good. All the DoE does is service loans and hand out free money to the broken higher education system. They don't set curriculum. Every state has its own DoE as well. Every educational metric has declined under the DoE as well. Its essentially a jobs program for bureaucrats.
> The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is to “privatize as much as possible” and close many hospitals and clinics.
As a Vet, the VA is a total mess. I can't see how it could get worse by becoming private. Lets shake things up.
> The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) would be taken apart and send much of its work to states and other agencies
HUD is probably the worst landlord in the country. States have public housing agencies already as well.
How is "project 2025" relevant? It's a random blog post that was never endorsed by Trump or Vance.
"never endorsed by Vance"?!
Vance literally wrote the forward to an upcoming book by Heritage Foundation President Kevin D. Roberts, the organization responsible for Project 2025. It is absolutely relevant.
Not to endorse project 2025 or Vance, however, Your example is not an endorsement. It's an association which does not in any way imply endorsement.
I think it does imply some support and agreement.
I associate and even am friends with all kinds of people I don't agree with. Implying that I endorse their views just because I associate with them would be to assign motivations to me that I don't have.
That's not what happened.
Writing an introduction to someone's book, as a public figure, is lending your reputation to them - that's the point, to put your name and reputation behind them, and so they can show that off for credibility.
Ah, yes, that random blog of no particular note or influence, the Heritage Foundation.
This is not a claim that is possible to make in good faith.
> How is "project 2025" relevant? It's a random blog post.
This seems to massively undersell the resources that went into it's creation and promotion. ref:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025
> Donald Trump Says Project 2025 Author 'Coming on Board' If Elected
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-says-project-2025-auth...
> Trump's VP nominee likes what the FTC is doing
Actions speak louder than words, and the DNC's VP passed the most comprehensive right to repair legislation ever in the U.S. in his home state: https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/25/minnesota_right_to_re...
(Doesn't cover farming equipment but still a huge step in the right direction.) You can also be certain that Big Tech was fuming when this was passed.
Trump’s VP nominee also completely flipped his views in the last few years to join the ranks of conservative grifters feeding off anti-immigrant and anti-“woke” sentiment. I wouldn’t trust anything he says.
The Trump/Vance admin will support whichever side they believe will benefit them financially, which won’t be the farmers.
The second statement does not follow from the first statement. You're suggesting that Trump will surround himself with sycophants based on him choosing as his running mate somebody who has publicly criticized him in the past.
Trump’s short term memory loss is a common symptom of old age and dementia.
If the incumbent conservative party loses the presidency in a few weeks, the lack of meaningful right to repair regulation over the past two decades is most certainly one of the problems that has contributed to our society being so brittle, which will amplify the destructive effects of the populist reactionaries. Really the only way out of the current pickle is to fix the longstanding problems that the reactionaries are using to rally around while also keeping them away from power so they can't pull the self destruct levers.
> lack of meaningful right to repair regulation over the past two decades
https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/25/minnesota_right_to_re...
I don't get the point you're making in regards to my comment? It's great that things are starting to change, and perhaps all the recent attention will have affected the market in a decade. But that doesn't really change where the power dynamic is right now, and its being part of why so many people feel the authoritarian boot on their necks but have been primed to blame it on the de jure government while ignoring all of the other entities exercising coercive power. And with this topic, unfortunately I don't see how it can be fixed any way but government regulation, similar to laws about building codes, unauthorized access, breach of fiduciary duty, etc.
Most likely, Lina Khan will be removed, the FTC will return to being largely inactive, and John Deere (and Big Tech) wins.
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The investigation is going on since 2021, the filing was made public on Thursday.
Only a filthy redneck conspiracy theorist would conjecture that this is populist election influence!
Prepare for the comments that "Lina Khan is on a tear" and this is all not influenced by the election at all.
It was made public because HAI filed a motion on Thursday to quash the FTC’s subpoena. Do you think HAI did that intentionally to bolster Lina Khan’s and the FTC’s public image?
It's about time! Hopefully the FTC has their scythes good and sharp, 'cause Deere most richly deserves the worst that the Feds can do to 'em.
This will be a tough fight. I'm assuming warranty and second sale transactions will be much more complicated in some futures. In big purchases, I'd assume it would be a lot like Title Insurance on real estate?
I'm curious where this will ultimately go. Feels like the best path would be a "minimal capability" set that machines need to support at basically a mechanical level? Probably gets a lot more complicated on some of the more advanced gear. Which, really doesn't help the narrative, as people try and show the basic tractors as the only thing impacted.
> second sale transactions will be much more complicated in some futures
I recall a story of a person who bought a used Tesla which erroneously had some feature or another enabled -- sold by the second-hand dealer and purchased by the customer with the understanding that the car came with the feature -- until the feature was remotely disabled when someone at Tesla discovered the error.
Some of the features that are gated by cars are just silly, such that I'd want to know more about the feature before really having an opinion on this. Is why I would think a "minimal feature set" would be key.
Even in this scenario, though, I would expect you'd need something like the Title Insurance to really protect people?
It would definitely not fall under such a feature set given that it's something that seemingly can be reasonably disabled and only otherwise increases the value of the vehicle. I recall that the buyer thought they were buying the thing with the feature and the seller thought they were selling the thing with the feature when someone uninvolved with the transaction (the original manufacturer, Tesla in this case) changed the deal after-the-fact. It seems a bit moot how one feels about the feature itself when they can observe that the people transacting seem to agree on the value of the feature.
(Looks like it was something to do with Autopilot, for what it's worth. https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/6/21127243/tesla-model-s-aut...)
Ostensibly, I could see some "autopilot" like stuff relying somewhat on a central server. That said, I would also expect some form of local only capability to be available. Devil would be in the details.
It was autopilot.
The original owner purchased it and when the new owner created their account for the car it was removed.
It's pretty simple, none of this security lockout crap and hardware needs to be "source available" for electrical schematics and software.
I'm not clear what you mean, here?