This is so, so important for helping family farms stay alive.
The amount my family has saved by being able to fix and even modify stuff on their own is huge. My dad still mows our lawn with an antique Allis-Chalmers hooked up to a commercial mower. Equipment is wildly expensive compared to margins at smaller scales (think like 2k acres for small farms). Things need to last for decades or generations in order to keep a profit.
2000 acres is a "small" "family" farm?? The myth of farming in the United States far over-estimates the where the _value_ in farming lies. Yes, John Deere is exploitative - but what about the wealthy land owners that profit off the backs of poorly paid _farm workers_? Or the huge government subsidies paid to growers of commodity grain? The idea of the "family farm" as a productive and legitimate sector of the economy is mostly a myth[0].
[0] See "Farm and other F words" by Sarah Mock for a more complete treatment.
This only seems large by European standards I think. The 50-100 acre farms in my homeland are a relic of pre-industrial times, and can't be competitive in a world market without vast EU subsidies.
>Since 1974, the Census of Agriculture
has defined a farm as any place from
which $1,000 or more of agricultural
products were produced and sold, or
normally would have been sold, during
the census year.
That's a weird definition.
Acres of contiguous land controlled by a single owner is how people tend to use the word farm.
In reality, farmers are often equipment owners and negotiate with landowners to manage X acres.
None of this discussion is worth wile in referencing farms.
Best could be said : a farmer who has to service equipment equal to a 400 acre farm benefits by laws protecting their farm equipment.
Here in Western Australia, the average cropped area per farm is almost 3,000 acres. From my perspective, 2,000 acres is a small-ish farm, and the 50-100 acre farms surrounding my parents' house in Scotland are comically small, heavily-subsidised gardens.
GP may be wrong about the USA as a whole, though I'm sure there are areas of the US where 2,000 acres would indeed be a small farm.
Do you have any references on small farm size efficiency? In Japan ~90% are < 50 acre both by land mass and count, and seeing the 100m^2 farms in my neighborhood I can't believe it's anywhere near efficient, even when sharing farm equipment.
Small family farms are good when a country is still developing and has excess labour, but once industrialization gets going folks move to urban areas for factory jobs and farms need to consolidate and mechanize. This has been the story over history for all countries have been 'developed', and in the post-WW2 is generally true of Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. Though this mechanization never really happened in Japan.
How Asia Works: Success and Failure in the World's Most Dynamic Region goes over this quite well:
How many of the farms surveyed are the owner and operator’s full time job? How many of those farms are owned and operated by multiple families at the same time?
Farming in the US is nothing like a corporate job, or even most small businesses, for reasons I just don’t have the time to share. Your comparison to income for the general population…doesn’t work.
Farms with 2k acres or less are indeed small, family run operations. Especially if you only farm cash crops. These are the kinds of farms that rely on right-to-repair the most. Not the homesteader family with 16 acres and some goats.
Sorry all, your idea of what most full-time, successful, multi-generational farming operations in the US looks like is simply not accurate.
2000 acres is not a small farm period. For context the price per acre where I live (centre of Quebec, Canada) is 15k$. So 30M$ for 2k acres, it's an industrial farm that need employees (at least one or two if it's a highly automated crop) and can afford the price of brand new John deer. You can even afford a Combine harvester at that size. Our farm is around 120 acres and we definitely cannot.
That really depends where you live, since this thread is about Colorado:
>The 2021 Colorado average farmland real estate value, a measurement of the value >of all land and buildings on farms, was $1,610 per acre. This is an increase of >1.3 percent from 2020 and 2.5 percent from 2019.
So we're talking $3.2mm today and by what the person you replied to said, I'm betting that his family bought that land a very long time ago.
I'm not a farmer by any means, but I just did a quick search for land in Colorado and I'm even seeing ~2,400 acres on sale for $1.7mm today. There's 15,000 acres listed for $2.1mm. I mention not being a farmer because I don't know if those lands are viable for anything.
2,000 acres of highly-automated 4-employer farm nets an income of $240,000 USD per year. John Deere equipments all cost more than that.
Furthermore, computerizing farm implements means shorter life span for its equipments.
Probably why older cars are lasting longer than newer ones. Computer chip failure of a 20-yo car means a trip to the wrecking yard to get that chip or get totaled; 40-yo car, not as much.
Huh? This is about things like hardware modules not connecting to the bus until an authorized repairer allows them to, exposing part numbers so board level repairs can happen, releasing board schematics, and things like that. Nobody is suggesting re-writing firmware? There is a mountain of context that you're either unaware of or leaving out on purpose for some reason.
software documentation includes things like APIs, bus protocols and configuration, and other interface points. It need not have anything to do with re-writing firmware and nothing is calling for that.
If the John Deere engineers understand those systems so well, then they could design their products in ways that the farmers could repair the products for common use cases. They are intentionally designing the products to prevent that. That's the whole problem.
This legislation is more akin to allowing you to repair your PC and replace a damaged RAM module.
I don’t think any farmer is looking to tinker with the control software, and even if they want they should be able to tinker considering it’s their property and their farmland and only they themselves are liable for any damages caused to neighbours or otherwise.
John Deere is just trying to create artificial barriers and extract more value from existing customers.
(As an outsider looking in) I think Deere's (and many other companies) financial incentives more align with product gatekeeping, than with maximum safety and performance; maximum safety does not pay Deere's bills, but service appointments do.
It kinda just sounds like you're content with family farms not existing, because all of your points fail to address the economic realities for these farms.
Product liability for industrial and agricultural equipment gets interesting.
You can modify a household lawn mower and if you get maimed by it by those modifications, you're at fault.
However, for industrial equipment if you can modify it - the manufacturer is likely liable. Consider how often you hear about deaths due to manufacturing defects (the stats for deaths for framers is 60 - 70 per year per 100,000 in the US).
> However, for industrial equipment if you can modify it - the manufacturer is likely liable.
That’s interesting if true, but do you have a better source (ideally, a court case)? I don’t see that theory of liability discussed anywhere on the page you linked.
The main piece is that industrial and agricultural equipment falls into the category of strict liability. Going back up a few parent posts:
> >They're designing the products for maximum safety and performance
> How do you know this. Do you work for Jon Deere? Since the code is closed source that's simply an assumption
If you have a piece of equipment that is known to be dangerous (e.g. farm equipment like combines and such) then anything that is considered a defect or failure to warn about and prevent someone from using the equipment in an unsafe way the liability falls on the manufacturer - even if there is no proof of negligence in its design.
> Strict liability, in contrast, does away with the analysis of whether the defendant's conduct met or fell below a certain standard. The thinking here is this: If it were necessary for a consumer to identify and illustrate the specific unsafe or unreasonable conduct that occurred at some point along the timeline of a product's journey to the marketplace—including design, manufacture, and distribution—these kinds of cases would be nearly unwinnable. Courts and state legislatures recognize this, so strict liability is established law in product defect cases.
> Simply because a plaintiff is required to prove less in a strict product liability case (compared with a negligence-based action) does not mean a defendant's liability is automatic. There are a number of ways a strict liability case can fail, or be successfully defended. The defendant might be able to show that:
> the plaintiff used the product in a way that he or she knew (or should have known) could lead to injury, or used the product despite knowing of the defect ("assumption of the risk")
> the plaintiff's own careless actions contributed to or were the only cause of the injury, including using the product in a manner for which it was not intended, or
> some other person or event interacted with the product to such an extent that the product was not the real cause of the injury.
---
So, here's the question that will be posed.
Does a farmer using 3rd party firmware on their JD tractor know that this could lead to injury?
Is using 3rd party firmware in a JD tractor careless?
Is a farmer updating the firmware of a tractor sufficient interaction with it that the JD tractor itself is not the real cause of injury?
If these questions are answered with "no" then JD is responsible and would be expected to take all reasonable actions to prevent those interactions.
> They're designing the products for maximum safety and performance. It was never in the cards to make it open.
Well, then, that was stupid of John Deere and makes them a victim of their own arrogance. Period. There wouldn't be a law right now if John Deere hadn't unnecessarily, by their own actions, pissed off so many people in the process of increasing "safety" and "performance". As though anybody complained about the lack of "safety and performance" in the century-long history of tractors before computers came along and saved us.
Let's be clear here: John Deere, a multi-billion dollar company, isn't the victim here, but the aggressor against family farms, good intentions or not. Mourning for them is absurd.
> A huge change, that will take years and millions to achieve?
Nope. It's as easy as clicking "Publish" on the repositories and setting the Dropbox folder to "Public." I could do it in 15 minutes. Any legal review or trade secret review or whatever else is entirely the company protecting their own interests. John Deere has done that long enough, a hard deadline is their self-inflicted penalty.
This is an odd comment in my opinion. Do you work at John Deere? I ask only because you say you are familiar with their testing environment. I don't think your horror scenario is realistic. How many farms are located in a neighborhood? If a farmer destroys property they are probably liable. I don't think John Deere is restricting repairs to protect random property damage since since I've never heard of that happening before.
Sorry, should have said, worked on the John Deere guidance module for auto-driving tractors. As a contractor.
There are field limits defined. But they are respected as algorithms need, to determine turn parameters at the end of a row. I could imagine easily that fiddling with that code could end up with a tractor on the other side.
What horror scenarios do you think are realistic? Remember we are considering multi-ton machines with maybe a thousand horsepower, wielding huge spinning blades and crusher mechanisms. What scenario can we consider that is not a horror show?
Your car, heater, air frier, lawn mower, etc all have the potential to kill you. I’d even argue that the probability of a car killing someone due to technical malfunction or user tinkering is way higher than a farm equipment that operates in a large open area.
If all of these things were locked down following John Deere’s logic our daily lives would become very expensive and inconvenient.
We as a society have more than enough legal and insurance frameworks to mitigate any of the risks that you’ve mentioned.
Your car, heater, air fryer, and lawn mower are consumer devices. If you modify them and they become unsafe, you're at fault.
However, farm equipment is classified as industrial equipment and if you can modify it to be unsafe without being an expert in that domain, then it is the manufacturers fault that you can do that.
Locking down industrial equipment so that it requires a trained technician to modify it is one of the ways that industrial equipment manufacturers try to mitigate the liability that they face.
> then it is the manufacturers fault that you can do that.
This is not always the case, and if it gets to the point that legislation has to be written to stop you, it's likely you don't care that much about the law in the first place.
When Marvin Heemeyer built the Killdozer, nobody blamed Komatsu for providing him the parts. Unprecedented, violent problems can happen with all sorts of equipment. We stop these accidents by holding professionals liable, not their machines.
The legislation and liability for industrial and agricultural equipment already exists. Under that structure, the manufacturer is the one facing the product liability claims if any claims are to be paid out.
If you (the framer) modify a JD tractor and someone gets hurt, JD is is the one likely to pay.
While I agree these systems are highly complex, I am not sure why farmers need to mess with source code to perform a repair? If farmers are messing with the code (disabling sensors or whatever), then I'd have to assume the farmer knows they are taking on this risk that their tractor will not function as expected.
If sensors can be safely disabled, then why not provide an easy to do that?
Again, we're not talking about a lawn mower or toaster. We're talking about a multi-ton autodriving machine of destruction. God no, don't disable a sensor, any more than you'd disable a sensor on a jet airliner.
I agree; farmers should under no circumstance mess with code to perform a repair. I'm concerned that the software documentation is part of this bill (and in the minds of many technologists, should be open).
The closest example I can think of is my car. If the seat belt sensor doesn't detect when my safety belt is properly working, I think it's ok to disable the sensor so that I can operate my vehicle without warning lights and sounds distracting me while I drive.
I am sure there are comparable sensors on these vehicles that can have inaccurate readings that can safely be ignored if the operator knows what they are doing.
To me, even though you might call this hitting a nerve, this comment and the one you did earlier, scream the classic stereotype of white collar workers looking down on blue collar workers like farming. "If they were smart like me, they wouldn't be farmers." "They are too dumb to manage a multi-ton machine despite having done it for over a century. Unlike me, who has written code for a few years."
Farmers aren't stupid. They're actually sometimes very high-IQ people because maintaining a profit with so many constraints and uncontrollable circumstances is extremely difficult; and Silicon Valley flunkies would be in bankrupt within days of trying. If they could even survive waking up at 4AM for more than 3 days in a row.
I’m a robotics engineer designing an open source solar powered farming robot (links in my profile).
I gotta be honest it sounds like you have been exposed to Deere’s propaganda and believed it. To put this another way, I feel like you’re missing what this bill is really about.
Deere has added software locks to their modules so that even if you can source another identical module with identical firmware and you’re capable of plugging it in, you have to use dealer software to change the software lock and allow the module to work with your tractor.
No one is saying farmers need source code, they’re saying they need access to the dealer software tools (not engineering tools!) to allow replacement of modules without a trip to the dealer.
This is extremely important for farmers! Please read the replies to your comments and consider that you may have been misinformed. Respectfully, I think this can be a learning moment for you today.
and I feel we can add a dash of smug superioty over presumed to stupid farmers.
I worked on sheep shearing robots in the 1980s at UWA and went on to have a global career in geophyical data aquisition, processing, and interpretation with a sideline in developing "Google Earth" pre current Google Earth .. all funded by part time work in 800 million tonne per annum iron ore mining projects.
Now I'm hanging about with farmers in rural WA.
"Giant John Deere tractors" are small fry compared to mining machines .. and many farmers here have FiFo (Fly In - Fly Out) minesite experience working as electricians | mechanics | operators on mining operations.
The bulk of local area mechanics that come to fix tractors have that same background .. understanding the technology is not the issue with agricultural machine repair, it's gate-keeping by the companies and system protocols designed to hinder part replacement, board updates, diagnosis, etc without a commission going back to oginal manufacturer.
This reminds me of when I taught a robotics class for a week at a university in Mauritius, off the East coast of Africa near Madagascar. We're exposed to so much nonsense about how "people over there" are simple and can't understand complex concepts. But those kids from Kenya, South Africa, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Morocco were exactly as talented as students from Palo Alto. People don't need to be treated like babies, they need to be given tools. No matter how special some engineer thinks they are, there's loads of equally talented people all over the globe.
I would like to have a couple of sock-puppets to upvote this more!
I jest, of course, but, this is such an important point that engineers and the designers of a product don't have monopoly on intelligence and people need not to be babied. I think some people even come to believe it themselves and develop some kind of learned helplessness.
Hey, I joined up a few days ago and wrote a little intro post, but I seem to be blocked from posting pending admin approval. I know you’re busy, so I don’t want to bother you, but I’m eager to participate.
I imagine this multi ton machine running over a fence, into a tree stump. The stump disconnects the wheel from the axle and it's no longer able to drive.
I think what we're saying here is changing the oil is not allowed. You can't change your own oil, or use third party oil because there is a detector that says this oil is not John Deere brand oil. The engine is now deactivated and you must call a John Deere technician to put in the encryption key to unlock the engine. Your next available appointment is in 938 days. Please note, we have a higher than expected volume of repair calls than usual this year. Your appointment may be de-prioritized. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Assuming that there is some sort of sensor that’s measuring these turn radiuses? What happens to the machine when the sensor malfunctions? Does it shut down (requiring work to stop), keep going (being a huge liability) or is there a box of them under the chair the operator can swap in and keep going? I think what’s being asked for here is option 3, not so much being able to modify turn parameters.
I'd argue allowing farmers to fix their own stuff is way better (and safer) than them having to seek out sketchy foreign vendors/hacks in order to fix their own equipment on the black market as an alternative.
Obviously the majority of farmers aren't going to be going into the software and editing it themselves, but instead paying reputable companies in the industry to do the programming/fixing/debugging for them.
Companies like John Deere could embrace this by releasing a ton of guides and self-learning classes to teach these same farmers how to do basic coding, repairs, debugging and etc. themselves. Could start a whole new wave and generation of tech-literate and educated farmers which would be better for all involved.
The way I understood the issue (as an outsider) is that they weren’t offering things like gaskets for sale. Sure, I can pull out the old one if it pops but what do I do now? That plus there being a remote kill switch if someone does figure out how to manufacture replacements…
Joe's been an active member here with good contributions for a long time. I disagree with his opinion in this thread, but he's not some fake account trying to cause trouble.
Hopefully we see more like this. But also, as a Coloradoan, just wanna say I appreciate Polis for giving time to real legislation. I know now everyone loves him, he is a politician after all, but you gotta love a Gov. who doesn't exist solely to posture for the extreme half of his/her base.
When he was still a congressman, I met him when he showed up unannounced to meeting night at a hackerspace I was involved with. I thought it was cool that he was making an effort to get out to meet and hang out with people he represented. Real genuine guy. He takes his job seriously.
Here in Pueblo there are a lot of "closet" Hatch chili people ;-)
Seriously though, I think Polis has done a good job and he's the rare politician who can understand the implications of the right-to-repair law.
When I was teaching Comp Sci at the high school level and we got a bunch of refurbished computers from his foundation ( http://www.jaredpolisfoundation.org/ ).
The desktops came with bare-bone Windows and a bunch of open source applications. Of course we put Linux on all of them anyway, but most people back then would have NOT known how to use a Linux box, so the setup they came with was understandable.
Could be any one of: not understanding the issues, not caring, being corrupt.
This moment in history is momentous imo. Not only did rural people, ag-tech, and open source ethos prevail, but it was Democrats that did it - not Republicans. Paying lip service to those things is now measurably not enough. That symbolizes both a change in historic Democratic attitudes, but also shows there are inroads to places where Republicans have, at least in peoples minds, ruled with an iron fist.
Pop a top on a beer, pack away your culture war and divisional rhetoric, and appreciate the fact that today sensibility prevailed above all else.
Biggest complaint from rural people is that the "city folks" don't understand them and pass legislation that hurts them. So it's an honest question, why did all the rural house members vote against this bill. We say it will help them but then why aren't lobbying their representatives to vote for this bill.
> Biggest complaint from rural people is that the "city folks" don't understand them and pass legislation that hurts them
This is true. I don't think there's any arguing that; often city policies including things like limitless expansion have harmed rural life. Rhetoric from constituents often paints rural people living a "lifestyle", which is largely a marginal amount of people. Most people live out there because that's what they can afford. Policies that are statewide that make sense for cities often don't make sense for folks in rural areas.
> We say it will help them but then why aren't lobbying their representatives to vote for this bill.
I'm guessing you haven't spent time immersed in any of these issues. I am a Democrat and spent some time living in a rural area. Often Republicans pay lip service to rural people, veterans, first responders, etc but don't do anything other than serve their own (the representatives) needs and desires. I have no mercy for Republicans as a party, but I have empathy for the people they claim, and fail, to represent. This is not a complex paradigm.
Now, combine my previous paragraph with this paradigm to understand the full scope of their choices in voting:
- Democrats have been outright hostile to them. Hillary Clinton walked into a coal mining town, told them she was going to take their jobs, and that they were going to become coders. When concerns were voice they were trolled and turned into a meme. This is just one example of the outright contempt some Democrats have shown in the past.
- Republicans on the other hand at least speak in a friendly tone to them, but hardly do anything. At times, they also harm them in their pursuit of self-gratification.
Now put yourself in the shoes of someone that's a voter: Do you vote for the person that speaks and acts with contempt for you or do you vote for the person that speaks nicely and at times acts with contempt? That's why this whole thing is big to me. Democrats finally grabbed a thing that's stupidly important to rural folks and ran it to the highest extent they could. This won't undo generations of harm, but it will start a conversation, and with any luck will get some folks to flip their voting. I say this from the perspective that Democrats used to care about rural people, businesses, etc. Hell, Democrats were even the ones that stood up the VA (and subsequently abandoned fighting to maintain it).
>> This is a huge win for rural people, open source, and ag-tech. Hats off to Colorado for understanding what's at stake and the brass to fix it.
> Hardly. This never should have been necessary to begin with. It's pathetic that it took so long to reverse.
Are you kidding me? We have been lambasting corrupt politicians who are too greedy to stand against lobbyists and wishing for the right to repair for years and now that it's happened, all you can say is "no big deal, this isn't a win, harrumph harrumph?" Bollocks to you, good sir.
Of course it should have been a given in the first place! However, while I can't speak for you, I myself live in an imperfect world where we must do the best we can with what we have. So if, for a change, elected officials act in the best interests of their constituents to overturn something that you and I both readily agree is a disgusting perversion of the law, YES it's a win, and GOOD FOR THEM. Shame on you.
I mean, I hear you, but freedoms have been incrementally been being taken away from lay people for at least the past two decades. We finally won one, I think if we're going to continue to fight the long fight then we need to drop our salty packs for a bit and celebrate.
It shouldn't be necessary to say freedom is a basic human right but in practice it is absolutely necessary given how often corporations will trample all over it.
Congratulations to Colorado citizens for enshrining those rights into law. I hope this paves the way to enshrining general computing freedom into law as well.
This is only for farmers and farm equipment. I'll take a win when I get one, but do we have a right to repair our property or not? I think we do, and a government gracefully giving us some of our rights is not good enough.
We just need to take this same success and copy/paste it to other industries enough times until everyone gets tired of doing N different legislation and a more abstract and widespread bill is created and passed.
Farm equipment was a good first win because the opposition isn't as big as some other industries. It's relatively easy to get everyone on board with helping farmers and compared to say Apple or Google companies like John Deer don't have as deep of pockets.
We probably won't have a lot of success jumping directly to one of the more difficult markets like phones or cars, since the opposition there is strong, well connected and well funded.
The next battle will likely be won over a market that is bigger than farm equipment but smaller than phones or cars in general. I could see kitchen appliances, washesr/dryers or other equipment in that space being a good target. It would be relatively easy to motivate a base of people to care about it, because everyone has these appliances, and the opposition is fragmented and not as well funded in lobbying.
In one of the earlier threads about this bill, someone said that doing the bill once per type of product is easier because you split your set of opponents up into smaller groups. So just going small bills forever might be better.
I wonder about the mechanics of how this would be enforced, and on what basis. What if John Deere just doesn't do that? Will they not be able to sell tractors in CO? Or what if they just decide not to anymore on their own? And then what if I buy a tractor from them out of state and bring it into CO. Does John Deere have to provide repair parts/manuals to me? What if they have slightly different models for CO and everywhere else?
Does this also put upward pressure on tractor prices as any other manufacturer would also have to comply with this? (Meaning competition won't prevent passing the cost along to the farmer)
I think since they already sold tractors in CO they should be compelled to release manuals/parts and if they don't just be fined with escalating fines till they do or go out of business.
> Manufacturers also can't impose "substantial" obligations, such as requiring an equipment owner or independent repair provider to "become an authorized repair provider of the manufacturer."
Hmm. I'm thinking about apple right there, for a number of years now, Apple has been requiring independent repair centers like mine to adhere to restrictive contractual agreements. This needs to be applied to them as well.
Apple has no business telling people how to repair their own devices or restricting how people lawfully obtain parts.
One recent win: Nintendo has agreed to lifetime replacement of Switch controllers, and while they or their reseller tried to weasel their way out of it by demanding sales receipts, consumer authorities has already pointed out the ridiculousness of it as every single one of them are eligible for replacement anyway.
Lays tried to sue a few potatoe farmers, when they saw they were destined to lose the case they withdrew it, Gov't realizing they weren't going to get the case law to fix the issue decided to just outright invalidate a bunch of the patents.
Why couldn't this have been done through market competition? Is there no tractor manufacturer who could step up and advertise their lower TCO with their open repair policy? And if not, and if the demand was so strong, why wouldn't a new company have sprung up to compete on that basis?
One of the main benefits of right to repair is to keep tractors in service for longer. Your solution is for farmers to throw away their tractors and buy new ones?
What’s to stop the new manufacturer from implementing a similar policy once the farmers are locked in with an expensive purchase?
The question being answered was "What’s to stop the new manufacturer from implementing a similar policy once the farmers are locked in with an expensive purchase?". You can tell that because the question was immediately above the reply.
That is in the context of a business starting to sell farm equipment that can be repaired. Threads, go figure.
So that every corporation can have "you have no rights and waive any rights you think you have" standard legal boilerplate in their documents? No thanks.
> Why couldn't this have been done through market competition?
It hasn't been, so something's gone wrong.
This is often the result of regulatory capture. For example, the DMCA makes it illegal for third parties to break the tractor company's DRM. Independent repair shops don't want to get arrested or sued, so there aren't as many willing to go into business repairing tractors.
You can't solve a problem with competition when you don't have a competitive market.
If you have the political power to repeal Section 1201 of the DMCA or any of the other laws preventing market competition, please do so. But it was passed in 1998 and the problems it would lead to were already understood in 1998 and it's still on the books.
State legislatures can't repeal the DMCA and many other competition-destroying regulations because they're federal. They can pass right to repair legislation. If you don't like right to repair legislation, direct your efforts to repealing the federal regulations that generate the demand for it.
This is how hard that industry is to disrupt: I needed a mid-sized utility tractor in the 40-60 hp range with a loader. I briefly visited the local Mahindra dealer, decided their offerings looked both expensive and flimsy, and then spent a month on FB marketplace until I found a 1974 Ford Industrial in good working order.
I believe it could also be argued that some fraction of the value created by repairability is in fact an externality. Your standard rational pricing model uses exponential discounting. A farmer does not necessarily expect to be in business for the entire useful lifetime of a tractor. But the resold tractor provides potentially more value to the economy if it is easier to fix. I.e. the initial buyer's discount rate should be higher than the overall society's discount rate, because they get most of the value from using the tractor, not its resale, but society gets more value if the tractor can be used longer by other farmers.
This mostly applies to tractors that, today, are too old to violate R2R. But someday, the tractors sold today will be that old.
in theory it could have been solved by a more competitive market.
I believe most shortfalls in our current market economy stem from a lack of competition and then subsequent cartel style collusion for the few big players, high barriers to entry that are fortified through regulatory capture, and a tendency for lots of small players in tight competition to consolidate over time into fewer bigger players. (I think we need to disincentiveze consolidation in all but the most egregious cases of natural monopolies like most public utilities)
this answers so many questions from "why is it so hard to work on my new car" to "why do my tennis shoes wear out so fast".
there are also cultural factors. people using the tools aren't the same craftsmen who build, repair, and sell them. each of these disciplines is now siloed and few companies are putting real effort into considering this holistic lifecycle view of their products.
then when these options do exist people may not be aware, or obtaining them is more immediately expensive or less convenient in the short term. or they simply don't care.
> I believe most shortfalls in our current market economy stem from a lack of competition
That set of problem is indeed enormous. I'm not arguing otherwise. But there is also an enormous set of problems that can't be solved by more competition, but people put forth "more competition" as a solution anyway.
Increasing competition is valuable, but it's not a panacea.
I'm far from convinced that this particular problem can be solved by more competition for a few reasons, but the primary one is this: the established players have shown that behaving this way will maximize profit. New players in the space have a greater economic pressure to do the same than to do differently.
Reducing rectivism with for-profit prisons. Society can agree that's a good goal, but the prisons make more profit the more people are in prisons. People in prison don't have to paid minimum wage and have fewer constitutional rights and would rather work sewing clothes for a corporation or whatever than be assigned worse jobs. Having more for-profit prisons just drives down wages and reduces costs and does nothing for recidivism because the incentives just aren't there. Anywhere the incentives just aren't there, more competion isn't going to help things and may make things worse.
There many that are! An interesting question is if increased competition (from the same competitors) comes at the hand of government regulation. Let's say for product X there are competitors A and B. They're not really actively competing, and in fact, have divided the market up between them. Then along comes the government, and says "Hey you two (John Deere and Caterpillar, or Apple and Google), you've formed a duopoly", and pushes some regulation (say, right to repair, or 3rd party app stores) on them.
I'm reminded of when Boba exploded in popularity. The story goes there was one store in the food court, then it got super popular, so then there were five stores, but there wasn't the market to support five of them in the same food court, so then they all folded. There was a market for one of those stores. Increased competition split the market up too much so there weren't enough sales to sustain any stores, leading to a failure of the market to maintain a Boba store in a food court that's able to sustain one.
How many more competitors (factories) do you need to see before it becomes painfully obvious that businesses don't and won't care about global warming unless it becomes material to their bottom line? (Or they're companies who's executives believe in that mission, eg Patagonia).
I think the very problem we're talking about is a good example. If the John Deere's of the world are doing this, then any competitor will also have to do this in order to compete with them. So competition won't fix it.
John Deere has a number of (large) competitors,
Caterpillar being the largest. But hey, guess what, Caterpillar's not so big on right to repair either. There are a number of smaller brands in that market as well, some of them do support repairability in order to compete with John Deere, but the worry is if they're even going to be around in 15 years.
Thing is, farmers already have their John Deere tractors, and, just like Apple sucks you into their ecosystem and soon every tech thing you own is an Apple product, so does John Deere. The switching cost is just too high, especially for a whole farm's equipment that you buy and keep/use for 15 years. The first iphone is just older than that. So you buy a tractor in 2008, it's only just now time to replace that tractor, but in the interim you've bought all of the special dongles, at $50k-$300k a pop, are you really going to switch tractor manufacturers? You could, we're talking about farm equipment, not mini DVI dongles, but you really want your hardware to work together, and it's going to take you another 15 years to fully divest yourself of the Apple, err John Deere ecosystem. But you're already 40, having inherited the family farm when you were 25. Another 15 years and you'll be 55, and it'll be time for retirement soon enough. So you just keep buying John Deere products and hope the corporate farms don't get you before then.
I know government regulations are anathema to some, but they're anathema because they really do force somebody's hand, and change things. Sometimes, even for good.
You're a smallholding farmer. The last couple of years crops have done well enough you've managed to pay down enough of your debt to the ag supply corp that you've got enough financial wiggle room to finance a new equipment purchase. Are you going to go with the incumbent player with four generations of history in the industry and a network of dealerships across the planet or Bay Area BushelMaster's new offering that's been on the market for 18 months, is advertised largely in Facebook Groups, who's sole dealership is a job trailer behind a carwash in Fresno? Hell, Mahindra makes more tractors than any other manufacturer on the planet and they're just now starting to make inroads into the 20 acre hobby farm, homestead, and landscaping market niches (hearafter referred to as the Bullshit Tractor Market or BTM for short). It'll be another 20 years before you start seeing fleets of Mahindra combines cruising the seas of wheat in the midwest, if ever that day comes.
Warranties are based on trust. If you warrantee equipment for say 10 years I need to be reasonably sure you'll be in business 10 years from now. And I need to trust that you'll honor the warrantee and not have dome sort of weasel condition.
Or, to put it another way, warrantees offered by new entrants carry precisely zero weight in my purchasing decisions. If you are new, then -expect- you to fail, and that factors into my decision.
Warranties aren't worth the paper their printed on when there's nowhere close by to service your equipment. Anyway farmers don't want a warranty they want their equipment to work.
These two markets are so different that the only properties they share is both items cost money and are made out of roughly the same raw materials (steel, plastic, wiring, etc). Tesla managed to claw their way into the industry through a brilliant marketing campaign that nailed the subset of the (entirely suburban) market that believe an expensive car is a status symbol and new always means better. This line absolutely does not scan in the context of agricultural equipment, where the defining ethic is one of hard work and rugged dependability, both of which have to be proven in action. All the hyper-macho cargo-pants-and-a-tactical-vest advertising in the world isn't going to make a dent in an industry where the only two considerations are price and proven durability. So you've got a chicken-and-the-egg problem. To prove durability and workability you have to have product in the field, but nobody's buying unproven equipment. Put another way: the ag industry doesn't have a cohort of suburbanites with loose cash and a taste for novely to tap into.
They are certainly superior in may ways now, none of which was true when Tesla made their debut. There is also the raft of basic build fuckups, gross fitment issues, and bullshit software problems to consider, none of which dissuaded the early adopters required to have the brand hit critical mass and go mainstream. My next vehicle will almost certainly be an EV, and absolutely will not be a Tesla. Thank you for illustrating my point in any case.
Yeah, I should have put “because it’s fun to drive without contributing towards global warming” (I live in a hydro-power area) - guilt-free pleasures are hard to come by.
Nah. Here's why: anyone who actually engages the vehicle to it's full capabilities outside of a closed track is going to eat some combination of racing or careless/reckless charges and lose their license for sure, and likely the car as well. They think it sounds fun, think it's fun to tell folks around the watercooler, and putter along at the same speeds as the Toyota Yaris in the lane next to them.
My Tesla Model 3 cut my commute down from 50 minutes to 40 minutes. And I'm not driving any faster, in fact I'm one of the few drivers who do not exceed the legal speed limit.
But the Model 3, with 498 horsepower, lets me overtake lumbering trucks on the narrow, winding, hilly, one-lane-in-each-direction road that makes up my commute. In my previous vehicle I could not overtake safely. With the Model 3 I can be in and out of the opposing land quickly without endangering myself or other motorists.
'Open repair policy' ~= No dealership support in your country. There's a number of lesser known brands of tractor which just bolt together parts from ZF, Perkins and the like, but they don't have dealer coverage, and there's low expected longevity of what dealers they do have. A Hattat or Basak tractor is a fairly straightforward machine which you could work on yourself just fine, but there's just no dealer coverage, which means there's no quick way to get parts
> Is there no tractor manufacturer who could step up and advertise their lower TCO with their open repair policy? And if not, and if the demand was so strong, why wouldn't a new company have sprung up to compete on that basis?
Sometimes companies will always make more money by not giving consumers what they want. As long as all companies care about is making as much money as possible, they will exploit consumers whenever doing so makes them the most profit no matter how consumers feel about it.
A company could come up and meet the demand for tractors that consumers can repair, but that company would lose more money by not screwing over their own customers than they could ever hope to gain by enticing them with a repairable product.
A company that let's customers repair their own tractor gets a one time purchase and nothing else. A company that forces their customers to pay for highly overpriced repairs and parts gets that same one time purchase but also secures an endless revenue stream that stuffs their pockets with cash over and over again for the entire lifetime of the tractor and then it starts all over again when that same company claims they can't (or wont) repair it anymore and the customer has to make another new purchase.
The market (and shareholders) will not tolerate leaving huge stacks of cash on the table just to give consumers what they want.
In most industries there are scale and network effects that favor larger incumbents regardless of the wishes or long term interests of customers. That's why startups are nearly always started off the springboard of big social or technical changes, otherwise there's no room for them to get started. Incumbents work to tilt the field in their favor through expanded product features, lock-in via cross product integrations, exclusive distribution deals, heavy regulation, etc. Simple example: All current iPhones are much bigger than I want, but the switching cost of going to Android is very high due to lock in via Apple services and integration between devices so I don't leave. Paradoxically competitive markets require some regulation to fight customer lock-in.
First, "free market competition" is NOT a cure-all for everything.
The "Free Market" does do a far better job of rapidly and semi-accurately allocating resources and labor than central planning.
However, the "Free Market" is absolutely horrible at solving other problems, starting with the Commons Problem, and including the tendency towards monopolies, which are the problem here. It is a near-mathematical certainty in a 'free market' that the big get bigger, and weild that power to crush any upstarts. Even if there is massive demand for something new, the entrenched monopoly/near-monopoly/cartel players will crush it. This is the case here. Also, in regulated markets (i.e., all of them, see next paragraph), the large players will often succeed at regulatory capture, which further enables them.
Also note that the "free market" is an absolute fiction. It does not exist. Every market has rules, spoken or tacit.
The only question is what are the rules and how are they enforced. Wise governments will set rules that minimize the tendency towards monopoly, and protect their institutions and citizens from regulatory capture. This is a step in that direction.
Another tack to answer your question is to observe what actually happens in these "free" markets. There has been enormous demand for this, with pressure provoking legislatures to attempt to act for decades, yet no competitor has arisen. Similarly, it took literally most of a century, and major legislation to get car companies to even start installing safety gear like collapsible steering columns (replacing the ones that impaled the drivers in small collisions), seat belts, airbags, etc. Plenty of demand, but a cartel-ish industry fails to meet it.
Re-examine your libertarian tendencies more closely. I also used to find it an attractive concept, but it is full of glib answers that are not actually realizable in the real world (and often not even in toy models). Actually working through the consequences of many of the concepts shows that they are just a mirage, and sticking to those ideas simply enables monopolists and oligarchs to thrive.
This is a really good statement, but I think you are missing some nuance on one statement:
The "Free Market" does do a far better job of rapidly and semi-accurately allocating resources and labor than central planning.
In theory a central decider works better, and nearly every company I have ever heard of has some form of central planning as their overall governing strategy. But trying to central plan a whole economy; that takes too much information, and is too venerable to corruption. And it also requires the central planner to really understand what is "best", and consistently choosing the "right" central planners seems to require political structures we just don't have. So even in the absence of "true" corruption the decision making processes get "corrupted".
Looking at history it looks like some sort of market economy with legislators making rules to keep the market from doing bad things (e.g.: externalizing things like global warming, or killing people in meat processing plants) is the best solution that humanity has yet invented.
> The "Free Market" does do a far better job of rapidly and semi-accurately allocating resources and labor than central planning.
I'm really curious if the IoT and AI age we're entering changes this. It doesn't seem like an immutable law of the universe - my guess is that people's self-interest and the challenges of scaling communication are the root cause. Objective analytics and AI systems to synthesize information might change the efficacy of central planning; also, the current free market implementation appears that it's being twisted as externalities become of larger focus (ie climate change)
It probably would happen, it'd just take more time. The best minds of my generation are trying to become famous on tiktok, resting and vesting at Big Tech, or writing day trading algorithms. Minimal work to max profit is what we're all trying to optimize.
I think things are moving in the opposite direction. tech has enabled heavier handed control over products Long after they are sold. often customers legally do not own the products they buy through IP law shenanigans amounting to legal machinations as bizarre as leasing a pair of tennis shoes for $120. you're free to throw them out but you may not use them in a way that reflects poorly on the brand.
Legislation being opposed by large corporations is becoming a decent indicator that passing the law will be beneficial for society and we'd all be better off enacting it.
No. This is a mischaracterization of both the purpose of corporations and the responsibility corporations have to their shareholders.
The purpose of a corporation is not "profit above all else". Corporations are also supposed to operate in a manner that benefits society. We used to actually strip corporations of their charters when they failed their social responsibility.
The responsibility to shareholders depends a lot on the charter, but in general, it's to run the company in a profitable and sustainable manner. Again, it's not "make the most money possible no matter what". If that were the case, then there would be no corporations engaging in anything but the highest-margin sorts of business. So there'd be no low-margin stuff like toilet paper.
The purpose of incorporation is to encourage business speculation by offering a mechanism to limit personal liability of the owners. That's the only purpose a corporation has and they definitely don't have responsibilities themselves as they are only a legal fiction. The employees of a corporation have responsibilities.
I’ll tell you one reason and it is in lots of farmers’ minds John Deere is the best. It’s a status symbol. That’s what it is for my Dad. It’s a flashy Cadillac. Probably why their insane policies have continued.
But you can definitely ask why not. Asking questions helps our understanding, to help recognize where situations like this might also exist, or arise in the future.
I wouldn't want HN to become a place where you can't ask questions!
Part of this stems from intellectual property laws, which are more or less a legal fiction invented by the government, and are not an inherent property of a free market.
I suggest you explain how you buy a tractor on your hypothetical free market, and explain how that hypothetical free market would solve the problem that this legislation solves.
Off-topic: Most any market is a legal fiction invented by the government. Some markets are even designed by teams of economists to reduce overheads by designing the rules of the market - say electricity markets.
The closest we have to free markets in the world are probably war zones.
You bring up "free market" all the time, yet it is an incredibly vague concept. Do you have a link that defines exactly what you mean by the term? Ideally a blogpost written by you.
Generally I feel when you invoke the words "free market" you are just calling for a beneficient perfect god to fix whatever fault you have identified.
I am all for reducing unnecessary regulations and unnecessary government overhead. However much regulation and government overhead provides necessary things that I can't buy/negotiate as an individual.
Not really. A free market is one where people make trades based on negotiation rather that coercion. Property rights are enforced, contract agreements are enforced, and using force or fraud in the negotiations is not allowed.
This is the usual definition of a free market.
I understand that free markets are a chaotic system, which leaves a lot of people very uncomfortable. I also understand that free markets are not an easy thing to understand.
> The closest we have to free markets in the world are probably war zones.
A war zone fits none of the definition I provided. So does slavery and selling poison to babies, other things people claim are "free market".
Intellectual property laws include trademarks. Trademarks reduce fraud and help prevent selling poison to babies.
Q1: Where do trademarks fit into your definition of a free market?
The topic is buying tractors that can be fixed without using the vendor's service agents.
Q2: How does coercion apply in the situation of buying a tractor from John Deere? (I.e. what part of buying a John Deere tractor is not a free market negotiation in your definition).
Copyright is a property right. All property rights are abstract definitions that don't exist outside our minds (e.g. I have one dollar in a bank account).
Q3: Where does copyright fit into your definition of a free market?
PS: I strongly disagree that there is any consensus about how a "free market" is defined. Maybe provide a link to a place that you agree with the definition, preferably defined in high detail.
In software we all see the abuses of copyright and patents, so I can understand why you rail against them.
You have again used the term "legal fiction" which I translate to "a law you don't like". What is a legal non-fiction? Our laws are rules. All rules ultimately only exist in our minds except rules (or sub-dependencies) imposed upon us by a god or the universe.
> Trying to control your use of [a John Deere tractor] after the sale by abusing IP law.
That control doesn't require any IP law at all: DRM can be equivalently enforced by private contracts and/or a secret that is too difficult to reverse engineer (recent gaming consoles). John Deere can negotiate a private contract with you that you must use their parts and service agents. Surely that is a likely outcome of a properly free market?
> Property rights (like the rights to life and liberty) are inalienable.
I think that statement is too vague to have any real meaning. Inalienable just means something like "very important rule" or perhaps "meta-rule". Property rights includes intellectual property rights (its all just rules).
Your rights to life and liberty sometimes conflict with my rights to life and liberty. Laws and wars can result from compromise and conflict.
Thank you for explaining your position better. I admit I am struggling to see internal consistency with your definitions. I guess I am mostly responding to you because I tend to read your comments as short political soundbites, and I prefer more comments with deeper explanations of any point someone is trying to make. I sincerely appreciate your time in giving me more detail.
I actually expect we are mostly in broad agreement.
Perhaps I would tend to give inaliable rights a higher priority than you? Rights to property, life and liberty need to be encoded in the legal constraints that restrict free markets in unobvious ways. Adding fair legal constraints is tortuous. Even more difficult is avoiding regulatory capture and other tricks that work against our inaliable rights, or give unfair advantages to some groups or individuals.
Compromises are grey. Good engineering is making good compromises. Good lawmaking is equally about making compromises, but is much harder than engineering because the outcomes are more abstract, the measurements are harder, and there is more historical and political baggage.
> Rights to property, life and liberty need to be encoded in the legal constraints that restrict free markets in unobvious ways.
These rights are not restrictions on the free market. They are fundamental to the free market.
> Your rights to life and liberty sometimes conflict with my rights to life and liberty.
They don't. Your right to life, for example, does not require me to give you food. It means I cannot take your life. Your right to liberty means I cannot enslave you. There is no right to enslave another, regardless of what the law says.
When I say "legal fiction" I mean writing laws that attempt to change reality. For example, a law that says π == 3 is a legal fiction. Your rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are not a legal fiction. The government frequently tries to create new "rights" that are not rights at all.
Put another way, the government enforces rights, or abrogates them. It cannot invent them.
Inalienable means it's an inherent property of being a human being. I.e. people still have a right to liberty, even if the government says it's ok to enslave them.
Evidence? Communism tries to deny the right to property. The result is communist countries cannot even feed themselves. Slavery tries to deny the right to liberty. The result is a also poorly performing economy. Countries that guarantee the rights to life, liberty, and property thrive.
One can sign a contract that enslaves you, but it is unenforceable in a free society. John Deere sells you a tractor but retains the "right" to remotely disable it? I'd say that would be unenforceable as they sold it to you, meaning it's yours to do with it as you please.
If they wanted to rent it to you, it should be a rental agreement, not a sales agreement.
there are reasons for government, and things like this are one of them. left alone, companies will always prioritize short-term goals over long-term goals.
budgets in the short-term are negatively impacted by this decision for all/most tractor makers, which is why they resisted this change. no one can accurately predict market forces that far out, so short-term concerns, being much easier to predict, win out.
ag machinery has generational life spans, they aren't laptops or even lawn mowers.
would you buy the from the start up who pinky promises to always let you repair it, or the incumbent who is annoying to work with but has existed your entire life and will after you die?
As we have seen it didn't work, at least not right now.
Even if this is just a band aid while we wait for competition to pop up (I'm not that optimistic about the market) it would still be valuable and I see no problems with it.
I just want to say that it's a shame you're being severely downvoted.
Because this is a serious question whose answer is extremely non-obvious. Is this a market failure or not? If so, what kind? Is this a very unique market failure that needs specific legislation to address in farm equipment specifically, or is it generalizable to certain conditions that future legislation might target to benefit more people? If so, what are those conditions?
I think we can defend right-to-repair, and at the same time ask the serious questions about why we need legislation around it at all, why it hasn't happened on its own?
The "capitalism encourages healthy competition that works to the advantages of innovation and the consumer" only works when companies are prevented from cheating. And the natural inclination of anybody who wants money and power is to cheat.
The usual way of putting this is that once a player emerges as a winner, that they turn towards regulatory capture. Or in the worst case players collude to prevent new players.
Regulatory capture has distorted the market, making it harder for competitors to join. How much of the existing issue preventing sharing of information, tools, and technology to repair the current equipment is supported by government laws, be they IP, DRM, or anti-hacking, or other?
What evidence is lacking? Regulatory capture is a well-documented phenomenon, that it exists is not in question. Surely you're not proposing that industries are spending billions to drive this phenomenon for no reason?
Why would there be a demand of evidence for my response when there isn't one for the previous question I was responding to? It appeared to me the question asked was ideological, given that it was an informal question of a few sentences and not giving plenty of evidence to the idea that another competitor would have solved the issue?
You’re getting downvoted, but I think this is a really good question. Why didn’t market competition solve this issue?
I don’t know enough about this to be able to answer. Maybe John Deer was guilty of anti-competitive behavior that suppressed competition in the market? Or there are some other challenges that make it difficult to start a farm equipment company?
Because, as you suggest, suppressing competition is a winning strategy, especially when there are barriers to entry? Because the free market prefers monopolies?
If you don't want to go compete with John Deere in this space even though you see this as a lack of competition, that's a basic answer to your question.
The amount my family has saved by being able to fix and even modify stuff on their own is huge. My dad still mows our lawn with an antique Allis-Chalmers hooked up to a commercial mower. Equipment is wildly expensive compared to margins at smaller scales (think like 2k acres for small farms). Things need to last for decades or generations in order to keep a profit.