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Colorado passes agricultural Right to Repair

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Re: Colorado passes agricultural Right to Repair

#71

Post by zamnos »

vkou wrote: post #44
kelseyfrog wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name, shame, and industry blacklist Deere product managers. It's the only way. Stop acting like there's nothing that can be done.

> Name, shame, and industry blacklist Deere product managers. Why would you give them that kind of free advertising? Do you think the people that hire them don't want them to behave in that way? It's like trying to shame a door-to-door salesperson for being too pushy. All you're doing is advertising that he's really good at his job. 'Name and shame' is a feel-good knee-jerk to social problems that need to be solved b…

That makes me think about the sequence from Wolf of Wall St, where there's a very negative article posted about Jordan Belfort's practices, and Jordan Belfort is feeling ruined, but then the next day, the article had a positive effect on the firm's recruiting efforts. Turns out the negative attention encouraged cutthroat salesmen to join the team in the hopes of making a lot of money.

What the movie fails to underscore is the attention from the SEC that the article also brought, which is what lead to his downfall.

Let the assholes turn their quick buck. Karma will get them in the end. Meanwhile, the rest of us want to know who to avoid working with. If someone wants to go work for Travis Kalanick, Adam Neumann, Anthony Levandowski, or Elizabeth Holmes, they're welcome to go right ahead. I'm happier knowing their stories so I don't end up working at one of their companies.

Re: Colorado passes agricultural Right to Repair

#72

Post by zamnos »

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote: post #13
paws wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have links about this? I was extremely disappointed [1] when I learned about Hochul's last minute nerfing of right to repair and I'd be curious to learn more how the governors office acquired that power. IANAL but thought separation of powers was supposed to be guaranteed by the Constitutions, both US and NY. What happened? [1] https://twitter.com/onpaws/status/1618787954306211840

Lots of things are supposed to be guaranteed by various constitutions which, sadly, are not.

In particular, the 14th amendment gives all persons born in the United States rights. Until they are born, fetuses have no rights.

Re: Colorado passes agricultural Right to Repair

#73

Post by defrost »

zamnos wrote: post #65
lb1lf wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While that is true for most smaller farms - there simply is no way a small farm can afford the capital expenditure of someone who could be working day-to-day spending years in study, it still holds true that farmers by necessity are excellent jacks of all trades. You simply do not make enough money off of the farm to rent professional help whenever something goes wrong. Just one data point - when the clutch on our 19…

That only saved you $4,750 if your time is worth $0/hr. Assume it was two eight-hour days, times two people, or 32 hours of labor. If you make $149/hr, it's cheaper for you to pay the quoted cost. If you don't, it's cheaper for you to do it. Which it sounds like it was. But thinking you just "saved" $4,750 doing it yourself isn't the right way to look at it.

The reality on farms is repairs aren't a one off they're constant .. farming as a business is literally working the land at the critical times and dovetailing working the equipment and the business in between the pure agricultural work.

Having a hundred repair jobs a year that might be each be quoted between one and ten thousand sound about right for medium scale farm here, and the bulk of those would be done "in house" .. welding up jigs, repairing sprayers, building sheds, moving silos, putting in gas, power, water lines etc .. all par for the course.

That's the life style, steady fettling.

Re: Colorado passes agricultural Right to Repair

#74

Post by lb1lf »

zamnos wrote: post #65
lb1lf wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While that is true for most smaller farms - there simply is no way a small farm can afford the capital expenditure of someone who could be working day-to-day spending years in study, it still holds true that farmers by necessity are excellent jacks of all trades. You simply do not make enough money off of the farm to rent professional help whenever something goes wrong. Just one data point - when the clutch on our 19…

That only saved you $4,750 if your time is worth $0/hr. Assume it was two eight-hour days, times two people, or 32 hours of labor. If you make $149/hr, it's cheaper for you to pay the quoted cost. If you don't, it's cheaper for you to do it. Which it sounds like it was. But thinking you just "saved" $4,750 doing it yourself isn't the right way to look at it.

I considered bringing up that point, but figured it was implied by the post - believe me, no small-time farmer makes anywhere near $149/hour, I doubt it would even be $14.90/hr - so effectively, you can assume your work to be worth $0/hr as a first-order approximation.

Hence I do engineering instead. The farm is just an expensive hobby. :)

Re: Colorado passes agricultural Right to Repair

#75

Post by chongli »

zamnos wrote: post #68
chongli wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Credit is probably the only way. But I don’t see regular banks jumping at the chance to invest in worker co-ops. Maybe a credit union? VC doesn’t work. Investors want equity for their money.

VC works plenty well. It's a business deal. 100% of a $0 business is $0, so in exchange for enough money to jump start the business that you don't have the funding for, you give up some equity so that in the eventuality that you're successful supplanting John Deere, your investors get paid out. That's how the system works.

No, it doesn't work. If you let VC invest then you cease to be a worker co-op, you become a regular business.

Worker co-ops have only one class of member: worker-owners. People who do both the day-to-day work and are part owners of the business. Unless the VC people are willing to show up and start punching the clock like everybody else, they are a different class: owners who don't work. Worker co-ops disallow that class of membership by definition.

Re: Colorado passes agricultural Right to Repair

#76

Post by einpoklum »

cobertos wrote: post #45
crabmusket wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without knowing about the industry, I like to wistfully think that a cooperative would be the way to structure a company that cares about this. Not just worker-owned, but customer-owned as well. If you're buying an asset you expect to last decades, having a stake in the manufacturer doesn't seem like a completely bad idea.

The problem with any cooperative feels like a human one. Keeping everyone informed and active communicants. People like to forget about things when they're stable. A coop loses so much value when it just becomes a one email a year affair with "Hey, it's that time to vote for things again!"

This is a problem in every social/political organization which is not ruled by interested minorities. So, co-operatives, voluntary social activity clubs, democratic NGOs/associations, professional societies, etc. Democratic states suffer from this also, although it's arguable whether they're not ruled by interested minorities to begin with. In fact, the unfortunate public-opinion manipulations we see in national and international politics are also often present in smaller, local organizations, albeit in less-well-funded and less-spectacular form.

I'm always reminded of the Anarchist Peasants:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2c-X8HiBng

Re: Colorado passes agricultural Right to Repair

#77

Post by GordonS »

lb1lf wrote: post #61
rtpg wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I don't understand is why a couple of the higher quality tractor companies have not started pushing hard to brand "we support repair" and having available online manuals and software to support this. This seems a perfect marketing/product platform for an underdog that also believes this. My understanding is basically all high-capital machinery makes a _lot_ of money from support contracts and repairs. I think…

-This is very much my (anecdotal, but from several companies in the subsea business, ranging from huge multinationals to small fry almost mom-and-pop shops) experience, too: Service work is basically seen as a licence to print money. Contract negotiations for newbuilds are cutthroat, the most important parameter being price, price and price. Hence margins are as you'd expect. Except when it comes to service work, as…

I also worked with subsea companies for a long time, and can concur - they'd do anything to get new engineering and manufacturing contracts, then make the margins later on aftermarket service. It wasn't a secret either, people were quite open about it.

Re: Colorado passes agricultural Right to Repair

#78

Post by vkou »

zamnos wrote: post #71
vkou wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Name, shame, and industry blacklist Deere product managers. Why would you give them that kind of free advertising? Do you think the people that hire them don't want them to behave in that way? It's like trying to shame a door-to-door salesperson for being too pushy. All you're doing is advertising that he's really good at his job. 'Name and shame' is a feel-good knee-jerk to social problems that need to be solved b…

That makes me think about the sequence from Wolf of Wall St, where there's a very negative article posted about Jordan Belfort's practices, and Jordan Belfort is feeling ruined, but then the next day, the article had a positive effect on the firm's recruiting efforts. Turns out the negative attention encouraged cutthroat salesmen to join the team in the hopes of making a lot of money. What the movie fails to undersco…

> Karma will get them in the end.

No, it won't. The universe isn't just, there's no scales that get balanced out, and people the world over have very comfortably built and kept their empires and fortunes by planting their boots firmly on the bodies of others.

And fighting right-to-repair isn't even in the same league as the actually evil shit that people do.

Re: Colorado passes agricultural Right to Repair

#79

Post by midoridensha »

heywhatupboys wrote: post #54
chongli wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s very difficult to start a worker cooperative in a capital-intensive industry. In most companies, the difference between workers and owners is that the owners provided the capital to get things started. A factory that builds modern tractors is a pretty huge investment. It’s very large and has a ton of very expensive robotics. It also has a huge supply chain that delivers a wide variety of parts to the factory for…

> It’s very difficult to start a worker cooperative in a capital-intensive industry some of the most successful Danish agricultural companies started out as / are cooperatives.

So the solution is to invent a time machine, and go back in time to the days before factories (or internal combustion engines) were invented and stuff was manufactured (with "man" coming from Latin for "hand") by hand in cottages, and start your co-op then.

Re: Colorado passes agricultural Right to Repair

#80

Post by ShadowBanThis01 »

This seems like a good step, but the piecemeal approach is aggravating. Are they going to pass a separate right-to-repair law for every industry and product category, one at a time?

"Last year, they passed the first US Right to Repair bill since 2012, protecting Coloradans’ right to fix their own powered wheelchairs"

This is absurd. They need to pass comprehensive right-to-repair legislation and then amend it as problems and loopholes emerge.

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