Colorado passes agricultural Right to Repair • Hacker News Board

Re: Colorado passes agricultural Right to Repair

#111

Post by yencabulator » Wed, Apr 12, 2023, 6:46 PM UTC

Dennip wrote: post #85

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…

its why they're spinning up the big bud again! https://cowboystatedaily.com/2023/03/20/big-bud-worlds-large...

Wow.

> The Big Bud 747 weighs in at 135,000 pounds fully ballasted and its 1,000-gallon fuel tank topped off.

https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=E...

That's a >$3,200 fill-up (give or take volume pricing, with your own larger container). And I thought driving a class A motorhome with a 150 gallon tank hurt to fill up!

Re: Colorado passes agricultural Right to Repair

#112

Post by heywhatupboys » Wed, Apr 12, 2023, 7:35 PM UTC

midoridensha wrote: post #79

heywhatupboys wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

no, the point is they built their own diary factories

Re: Colorado passes agricultural Right to Repair

#113

Post by zamnos » Wed, Apr 12, 2023, 7:57 PM UTC

chongli wrote: post #75

zamnos wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

So select for investors who can stomach a specified return, so the company doesn't have to IPO, but can instead buy them out. After the coop is able to generate revenue to and is able to buy out the initial investor's initial investment, and give them a return between 10 and 100x, it reverts to being a traditional coop.

Re: Colorado passes agricultural Right to Repair

#114

Post by eru » Thu, Apr 13, 2023, 12:39 AM UTC

thomastjeffery wrote: post #99

eru wrote: post #35

Hooray for even more regulation.. Surely this particular piece of well-intended regulation will go work out exactly as hoped for, and won't have any unintended consequences that stifle things in the longer run.

...and the alternative had no consequences? Get your head out of the sand.

The alternative is to let people make their own decisions about what to buy and what contracts to enter.

If there's some other regulation standing in the way of making that useful, perhaps we should dismantle that one, instead of adding more?

Re: Colorado passes agricultural Right to Repair

#115

Post by kortilla » Thu, Apr 13, 2023, 5:45 AM UTC

icelancer wrote: post #39

dataflow wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

W.r.t. the first bullet point, I don't think NY was any different - AFAIK the governor didn't "mess" with it (despite the reporting making it look that way); she just didn't sign it until the legislature revised it. The second one is nice to hear though.

"I don't think NY was any different - AFAIK the governor didn't "mess" with it (despite the reporting making it look that way); she just didn't sign it until the legislature revised it." Isn't this a distinction without a difference?

No, because the Colorado governor could do the same.

Re: Colorado passes agricultural Right to Repair

#116

Post by chongli » Thu, Apr 13, 2023, 8:07 AM UTC

elsjaako wrote: post #106

chongli wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That article is bunk. Louis Rossmann and others in the right to repair community have praised Apple for providing these repair kits. They let you do factory-quality repairs. What the author of that article doesn’t realize is that all of Apple’s modern phones are waterproof. To achieve that factory seal against liquid ingress requires fancy adhesives. You can’t open these things with a jeweller’s screwdriver. It takes…

AFAIK Louis Rossmann has criticized Apple for creating a really unpractical program, calling it "virtually worthless": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwgpTDluufY Or is there a more recent video where he changes his mind?

He praised the ability to get real tools. He criticized the lack of parts availability.

Re: Colorado passes agricultural Right to Repair

#117

Post by thomastjeffery » Thu, Apr 13, 2023, 12:37 PM UTC

eru wrote: post #114

thomastjeffery wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and the alternative had no consequences? Get your head out of the sand.

The alternative is to let people make their own decisions about what to buy and what contracts to enter. If there's some other regulation standing in the way of making that useful, perhaps we should dismantle that one, instead of adding more?

That's not an alternative, that's the status quo.

There is no regulation standing in the way of allowing customers to repair their property.

What is standing in the way is a perverse incentive.

Re: Colorado passes agricultural Right to Repair

#118

Post by redeeman » Thu, Apr 13, 2023, 11:27 PM UTC

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #101

baremetal wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's little reason that a fairly normal fabrication shop couldn't be making tractors, and making them competitively with mainline manufacturers Economies of scale. We don't live in a fantasy land where things work a certain way just because it would be nice if they did.

To add to that: if I'm purchasing a hugely expensive piece of capital equipment that my business depends on, it's nice that I can repair it myself when I have downtime, but if I need it up and running tomorrow, it's probably worth it to bring in the repair tech who does it day in, day out and can get it done a lot faster than me. That local fab shop would now have to provide 24-hour on-call service, which is a comple…

no, there are loads of mechanics anywhere that will happily work on things, they are simply prevented from working on many aspects of modern vehicles because it is made impossible by the manufacturers

Re: Colorado passes agricultural Right to Repair

#119

Post by redeeman » Thu, Apr 13, 2023, 11:43 PM UTC

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #27

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure that John Deere tractors are not a throwaway item, even if the dealer is holding you hostage on a repair.

I suspect many of the parts on a John Deere tractor get thrown away when they could be repaired.

ultimately you can repair an awful lot of things, so... suppose some small metal bracket holding something up has begun rusting because something scraped the paint off, or hit it, and its also a bit bent.

this piece of metal costs $50 or so from the manufacturer, which admittedly is borderline theft, but what can you do?, while i have the cab off the tractor, i may aswell replace it. I could opt to strip the paint off, either by using toxic chemicals, or abrasively. But now I need to also do a little welding to fix it up, then sand it down again, degrease it, and give it a new paint job. This took me around 2-3 hours to do. Do we repair this item or chuck it in the scrap pile?

Re: Colorado passes agricultural Right to Repair

#120

Post by crabmusket » Fri, Apr 14, 2023, 3:44 AM UTC

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!"

Agreed, but from a distance it sounds like farm machinery might be something that keeps interest and involvement, as it's so critical to operations.

I'm somewhat influenced by the descriptions of various farming organisations in Seeing Like A State which I recently read. There is a lot of active cooperation, experimentation, knowledge sharing etc. around crop varieties.