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?
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
>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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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 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?
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.
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.
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/...
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