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John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement

apnews.com

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Re: John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement

#151

Post by wickedsight »

cgyvbunji wrote: post #78
srejk wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate everything he stands for - he's on the right side of just about every issue. I just wish he could make more succinct and effective videos.

Personally I think if he did that people wouldn't pay attention. My experience is that when you complain to people about digital rights they just glaze over unless you walk them through all the ins and outs and the implications.

I'm one of the people who mostly ignores his videos due to their length and the 'old man angry ranting about things' vibe they give me.

Re: John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement

#152

Post by kelnos »

SideQuark wrote: post #59
syntaxing wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP but I went through some data and John Deere makes 5B NET profit for the worse years. 10B for their best (only looking back 10 years). I wouldn’t be surprised these anticompetitive (as in anti “consumer”) has netted them north of 10B.

Last year was 5b net profit on 44b revenue. Attributing more than a tiny fraction of profit to the right to repair stuff is wild dreams, given the amount of physical goods they sell. Nothing in their SEC filings shows anything mentionable about such claims. It does break out actual profit by company sectors.

The net profit figure isn't all that relevant. But I would be completely unsurprised if they made significantly more than $1M via their anti-right-to-repair practices.

Re: John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement

#153

Post by kelnos »

koolba wrote: post #65
Grombobulous wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This concept of percent of profits shouldn't be considered in the context of fines. For regulations to have teeth, punishments shouldn't just slap you on the wrist just because harmful practices weren't responsible for a lot of profit. In that scenario, a lot of growth companies or just poorly performing companies could just say "sorry, we don't make any profit, so our maximum fine is $10," and obviously that wouldn'…

> Fines should really be about "what size fine will be a deterrent for this company?" To a degree. But it also has to be commensurate to the actual market size and impact. If an Amazon releases a defective dog toy that is bought by 10 people, it’d be unreasonable to fine them $100 billion dollars just because they’re a huge company.

Maybe $100B is too much for that particular infraction, but the idea of punitive damages has nothing to do with "fairness" or charging the real cost of the bad thing they did.

It's a deterrent. It says: "you did a really bad thing and I'm going to slap a huge fine on you so you think twice about doing it again". And "huge" has to scale with the entity paying the fine. It has to be an actual wound, not a papercut.

Re: John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement

#154

Post by stavros »

mboto wrote: post #141
wojciii wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ignore video posts. Why would I spend 20 minutes watching something when I can read the same in one or two minutes? I read inhumanely fast.

I didn’t realise you were committing literary war crimes! Please read more humanely! Books have rights too!

No, if he reads humanely he reads slowly.

Re: John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement

#155

Post by spacedcowboy »

throw2ih020 wrote: post #97
dataflow wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I share his videos here but nobody seems to see them and/or care enough to vote; all I get is crickets. It's baffling to me. Examples: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48802162 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48395520 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47043208

HN audience prefers text to video; videos rarely do well here compared to other sites.

This. I never watch video posts. I can skim-read a text site in seconds to see if it's worth a real read. I can't do that with video, and there's always some ads in it, whether the author put them there or not. I hate ads.

And it's not just HN either, video is a very poor substitute for a well written article. Video can augment a well-written article, but it can't replace it.

Re: John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement

#156

Post by BrenBarn »

GuB-42 wrote: post #47
ggoo wrote: post #7

Bananas that stuff like this needs to get litigated in our society - if you asked 100 random people "should farmers be able to repair their equipment", you would get 100 yes's.

Except it is not the right question in a market economy like ours. The right question is "what is the value (in dollars) of the right for farmers to repair their equipment". If John Deere values it more than farmers, then they will sell tractors that farmers can't repair on their own, hoping to earn more on repairs rather than easier to repair tractors that are more expensive up front. Basic market economy. It only n…

> The right question is "what is the value (in dollars) of the right for farmers to repair their equipment".

That is exactly right. That is why the punishment for not giving customers the right to repair needs to be in the billions, so that the value of giving customers that right is huge.

Re: John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement

#157

Post by VorpalWay »

parineum wrote: post #106
cogman10 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. The two things John Deere did was make it impossible to diagnose problems with software lockouts and they did software locks for common parts. Imagine, for example, needing to pay $1000 to replace an oil filter because you needed to buy the official John Deere oil filter and have the John Deere technician drive out to install it and flash the tractor to start up with the new filter. That's what John Deere was up…

> Imagine, for example, needing to pay $1000 to replace an oil filter because you needed to buy the official John Deere oil filter and have the John Deere technician drive out to install it and flash the tractor to start up with the new filter. >That's what John Deere was up to. Is that an actual price and the actual process?

Even in other industries it is common that spare parts and consumables have a very high margin (while the initial purchase has a much smaller margin or in some cases is even subsidised).

The most well known example is probably printer ink/toner. (Razors is another often quoted example.) But this applies to car parts too. I needed a new small plastic clip to my Dacia. I was quoted 100 SEK (about 10 USD) for that. I 3D printed a sturdier version that will last longer for less than 5 SEK in materials (less than 0.5 USD).

From that you can estimate the approximate margins many companies have for spare parts. Of course being able to prevent cheaper third party parts will seem enticing if they want to maximise shareholder value. And this is why we need regulation.

Re: John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement

#158

Post by maxhille »

al_borland wrote: post #57

It was always crazy to me that farm equipment was locked down. I almost understand yuppie buying an E-Class not working on their own car, but a farmer not able to work on his own tractor just felt so wrong. It made me wonder how John Deere was still so popular and seemingly beloved.

It was always crazy to me that computers were locked down. I almost understand Karen buying an iPhone not coding her own apps, but a dev not able to deploy on their own device just felt so wrong. It made me wonder how Apple was still so popular and seemingly beloved.

Re: John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement

#159

Post by rainbow13 »

j2kun wrote: post #96
esseph wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two different groups: the hackers, and the money people.

I heard someone say recently that one reason tech sucks is because the sociopathic narcissists domesticated the hackers.

Just look at this site now lol

Re: John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement

#160

Post by Cthulhu_ »

mothballed wrote: post #8
ggoo wrote: post #7

Bananas that stuff like this needs to get litigated in our society - if you asked 100 random people "should farmers be able to repair their equipment", you would get 100 yes's.

Until you tell them how easy it makes it to bypass emissions restrictions. My tractor was shipped with a screw turned down to Opening up John Deere tractors for right to repair virtually assures they will ~all be doing emissions deletes. Part of their lock-down was profit seeking, but the other half is that different vendors had different ideas interpretations of the law about how locked down the system had to be to…

Tractors (and farms) should be subject to regular emissions checks anyway, just like cars etc. Both to check for intentional tampering and wear & tear issues causing excess emissions. The party making the change is responsible for the violation.

...which has a neat overlap with e.g. chat control and online age verification.

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