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For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity

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Re: For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity

#361

Post by heavyset_go »

strken wrote: post #333
Balgair wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't fix things. This one sticks out to me from a job-market POV. Plumbers are already on par with psychiatrists in terms of pay. Sure, the work is hard, but from a supply-demand POV, the markets are saying that they do work that is of equal value (all this varies highly, but stick with me here). Most repair work takes a LOT of experience until the employee is anywhere near proficient. Farmers will tell you that…

Do you have a source for plumbers being on par with psychiatrists? I have friends in the trades (back in Australia) and my impression is that their pay isn't as high as is commonly believed.

Going to need a source, as well. Whenever these statistics are trotted out, they use figures from a few standard deviations to the right of the mean income, where the trades-person is usually self-employed at their own business that employs many others.

Re: For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity

#362

Post by yesbabyyes »

iso1210 wrote: post #264
quacked wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your choice unfortunately affects the greater world. Which would you rather have- a locally-produced society that's expensive to live in, or a Walmart society that's convenient to live in?

It makes sense for the local optimisation of the individual to go for the walmart society - after all their single choice won't make a difference to anything other than their bottom line It makes sense for people as a whole to optimise as a society and have the locally produced society That's where we can choose an economic system that ensures that we optimise in general rather than individually, so we avoid the pris…

Makes me consider Douglas Hofstadter's superrationality. Hofstadter provided this definition: "Superrational thinkers, by recursive definition, include in their calculations the fact that they are in a group of superrational thinkers."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superrationality

Re: For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity

#363

Post by bjt »

skywhopper wrote: post #65
wvenable wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why was this downvoted? I just made the same comment before noticing this one already done. Competition is what solves these kind of things.

Sure, but how do you propose to introduce competition into this market?

There are nearly three dozen tractor manufacturers in listed on this page: https://www.ranker.com/list/best-tractor-brands/werner-brand....

Deere doesn't have a monopoly. But they do have an incredibly strong brand.

Re: For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity

#365

Post by combatentropy »

NicoJuicy wrote: post #348
nine_k wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. It's never been harder to compete by producing a long-term, very reliable machine. * You have to make your machine good the first time. The customer buys it completely, no chance to update and fix things. * Your machine is marketed as reliable. This means it has to be reliable, so you put a lot of effort / material / money into your machine, when your competition puts in much less. * If your machine is in…

Most things that break are electrical, not mechanical. The mechanics of reliable machines are taught in school and are widely available + relatively easy to repair. And I'm speaking from growing up in a village with the highest agricultural % of population in Belgium. Which my family is also pretty involved with ( my dad is a veterinarian for farm animals, my uncle has ~40 tractors) Also: a cousin with a garage, some…

> I'd actually buy a mechanical environmental-friendly car.

I agree. In fact an electric car could be simple. Just because it has an electric motor doesn't mean it has to have a computer too.

Re: For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity

#366

Post by heavyset_go »

beardedetim wrote: post #174
sl1ck731 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same could be said for robots displacing humans in factories or trucks or anywhere else. That doesn't make it less sad for people's whose livelihoods depend on those positions just because its technological progress.

> doesn't make it less sad for people's who livelihoods depend on those positions I totally agree. Id say, however, that we should be making it so those people, and we all, are okay without a job/with our jobs being automated away, not be Luddites about it.

The Luddites were Luddites precisely because they weren't okay without a job, they went hungry and homeless.

Re: For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity

#367

Post by heavyset_go »

wolco wrote: post #196
ahoy wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Losing your job to automation is bad for your livelihood. It has been since we started automating things.

Is it bad for your children's livelihood? You are sending a message on a computer made by a machine. Parts are so small it would be impossible to do by hand which created a number of other jobs to support this new ability.

> Is it bad for your children's livelihood?

Yes, there are numerous documented detrimental effects to children raised in poverty, and many of those effects follow them for life.

Re: For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity

#368

Post by carapace »

danem wrote: post #288
NeedMoreTea wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Progress implies improvement. s/progress/change/

And how haven't things improved for the vast majority of people on Earth in regard to food security?

Well, it's interesting, we now have obesity problems and other issues brought on by our very success. "Too much is always better than not enough." But too much still brings trade-offs.

Further, consider that, since the invention of artificial nitrogen fertilizer[1] we have been converting oil into humans[2], and population growth is the main driver of environmental impacts. Food security is an illusion: if anything ever interrupts the production of nitrogen fertilizer in a serious way billions of people will starve.

Jared Diamond called agriculture "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race"[3]

We cannot judge the benefits of our civilization just yet.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process circa 1910

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population Look at the graph, notice that it curves up sharply circa 1925-1950.

[3] http://www.zo.utexas.edu/courses/THOC/Readings/Diamond_Worst...

Re: For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity

#369

Post by Gustomaximus »

viator wrote: post #26
xtian wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vote with your vote. As far as I know only two candidates in the presidential primary race support right-to-repair: Sanders and Warren.

Because the shortest path to fixing anything is always electing a politician who knows nothing about that thing, in order to have them approve legislation written by other people who know nothing about that thing, that demands that companies do a thing. That always works great.

You know politicians consult field experts etc and have legal teams go over legislation with many drafts and experts as well as laymen reading and commenting.

Most peoples jobs dont know everything that happens under them... you have people that have specialised expertise and the value of good leadership (among other things) is those who can hire and utilise people well, not know all.

Re: For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity

#370

Post by ethbro »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #344
unapologetic wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They all want to get to the point of being Tesla. Hiding features only in software, pushing out updates, and trying to bake in a living (recurring revenue) model. It's a problem for a lot of reasons. First off it's the complete death of ownership. I can't fix things. At some point they will probably just lock stuff back down if I want to sell, assuming I can even sell without them getting a cut. Second, repairability…

Well I'm designing a solar powered farming machine we hope we can make open source. A bunch of the parts can be printed on a $1000 printer. I hate proprietary technology, and I think our entire economy should consist of open/libre technology. It definitely feels like "big business" is working against us in this regard. Everything new is locked down because the the rent-seeking those software locks enable. It's a drag…

Do you have any idea how the Global Village Construction Set folks are doing? Or any other similar projects in the space?

I stumbled across open source ag / construction efforts years ago, but haven't kept tabs on them since.

And thanks for spending your time on something so useful to society!

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