Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We Can’t Let John Deere Destroy the Idea of Ownership

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 405 posts

Re: We Can’t Let John Deere Destroy the Idea of Ownership

#221

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

mcguire wrote: post #149
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Iowan here. There are almost no family farms left at all. My neighbor would desperately like to be a farmer. But the scrubby 40-acre field across from his house just sold for $400,000. He'd get maybe 120 bushels of corn off of it. Current price per bushel: $3.80. So $456 income per acre == $18,240 per year. That's half the mortgate payments. Not to mention the cost of working the field. So a lost cause. The 13 farmer…

One wonders how the corporations farm them. The situation you describe doesn't sound like it would be any more economically feasible for them to work than your neighbor. (Hm. Random calculation: 120 bushels of corn at 56 lbs per bushel, per acre, is about 11 metric tons per hectare[1]. According to the FDA[2], the US average projected production for 2014/2015 is 10.7 metric tons (the world average is about half that)…

40 acres is probably about the absolute minimum worthwhile size to farm corn and it would be handled by a tractor much smaller than the one shown in the article. And that's probably if you inherited the land for free. A "normal" farm will have hundreds or thousands of acres of corn, so the cost of equipment is amortized across a much larger crop volume.

Re: We Can’t Let John Deere Destroy the Idea of Ownership

#222

Post by elwin »

api wrote: post #185
ploxiln wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people who try to make a living making music or writing are unable to do so, even if the music or the writing is pretty good, and that's due to obscurity, not piracy. Historically, even fewer people were able to. Pages and even chapters of books have been copied by photocopiers (found in many libraries!) for decades. The only limit to the copying was how many quarters you had. You need to give up the idea that p…

"Create less and have a real job." Wow. I see lots of this kind of sentiment when I bring this up, but yours deserves credit for being exceptionally honest.

The world probably needs less content creation. We're long past the point where there are too many useful books to read in one lifetime. Even in narrow fields, we're producing comedy television, historical fiction novels, or cat pictures faster than one person could consume them all. You could spend a lifetime just researching what's worth consuming.

With this kind of overproduction, it's no surprise creators can't make money.

Re: We Can’t Let John Deere Destroy the Idea of Ownership

#223

Post by therandomguy »

chacham15 wrote: post #162
apricot wrote: post #48

Richard Stallman spent the last 30 years telling us this would happen. As soon as books become computer files, you don't buy them anymore, you lease usage rights. As soon as tractors contain computer code, you don't own them anymore, you are granted a license to use them. When will it stop? More and more everyday objects are incorporating software and firmware in many different forms. I remember reading Stallman's sh…

The real problem here isnt that we're leasing things (we have leases for cars, houses, and many other physical goods). The problem is that the manufacturers mix leasing and owning. I.e. you own the device, but lease the software. I think that everyone would be radically happier if you either leased everything or owned everything. This is partly because when we buy something at a store, we expect to own it, not own pa…

Price is set by the market. The lease cost will match the purchase price today. It will all be the same for the consumer.

Re: We Can’t Let John Deere Destroy the Idea of Ownership

#224

Post by hackuser »

mathattack wrote: post #211

What's really wrong with this? As a provider of goods or services, I should have the right to say, "I'm only renting you this, not selling it to you. If you want to buy it, go see someone else." If I build a house, I should be able to rent it out, and not sell it if I want to keep it. If the market demands builders to sell it, some will find a way. There's no intrinsic right to forcing people to have an option to buy…

> What's really wrong with this? As a provider of goods or services, I should have the right to say, "I'm only renting you this, not selling it to you. If you want to buy it, go see someone else." ...

It's a good question, but an important consideration is whether your customer has the option of saying no. For example, if you are a small farmer, you can't really negotiate with tractor manufacturers because you lack the market power; you just take what they give you. If they all deny you ownership, you're stuck.

Consider someone who wants a smartphone that doesn't track them, a credit card without waiving legal rights ... I was thinking the other day of people who might have been opposed to lead in gasoline (I assume there must have been some), but they had no choice. Their fate was determined by those who had the market power to control the technology.

Also, most people don't undertand the implications of what they are buying. Nobody has time to study and learn all that.

Re: We Can’t Let John Deere Destroy the Idea of Ownership

#226

Post by dtech »

api wrote: post #136
apricot wrote: post #48

Richard Stallman spent the last 30 years telling us this would happen. As soon as books become computer files, you don't buy them anymore, you lease usage rights. As soon as tractors contain computer code, you don't own them anymore, you are granted a license to use them. When will it stop? More and more everyday objects are incorporating software and firmware in many different forms. I remember reading Stallman's sh…

This is getting meta and no longer directly responsive to the article, which I don't wholly disagree with. A tractor and a book are different situations. Books are hard to copy, while files are easy to copy. Writers have to get paid, and people are cheap and don't want to pay them... even while they will pay the same for a fancy cup of coffee. Hence a scramble for some way to set up a toll booth that is hard to circu…

In the doom scenario you sketch nobody would produce creative content anymore, and what exactly would be the problem with that then? Apparently people don't think it's worth enough. This is how a free market works.

I also disagree with your statement that people only want creative content for free. I think Spotify and Netflix prove that people simply want the most convenient service, but old-fashioned companies keep making roadblocks that make legal content less convenient to use than pirated/illegal content.

> Stallman [...] is a tenured academic. It doesn't matter to him that nobody pays for his work.

The university does? I assume he can get fired if he doesn't do his job even if he has tenure.

> Someone who works for nothing is the definition of a slave.

I think a lot of volunteers, e.g. a large amount of programmers who contribute to open source projects, do not think of themselves as or could be qualified as slaves.

Re: We Can’t Let John Deere Destroy the Idea of Ownership

#227

Post by baddox »

chacham15 wrote: post #162
apricot wrote: post #48

Richard Stallman spent the last 30 years telling us this would happen. As soon as books become computer files, you don't buy them anymore, you lease usage rights. As soon as tractors contain computer code, you don't own them anymore, you are granted a license to use them. When will it stop? More and more everyday objects are incorporating software and firmware in many different forms. I remember reading Stallman's sh…

The real problem here isnt that we're leasing things (we have leases for cars, houses, and many other physical goods). The problem is that the manufacturers mix leasing and owning. I.e. you own the device, but lease the software. I think that everyone would be radically happier if you either leased everything or owned everything. This is partly because when we buy something at a store, we expect to own it, not own pa…

I don't think it's that either. I think it's that laws exist to protect "intellectual property," which leads to a lot of bizarre consequences that don't occur with laws protecting traditional physical property. A lease on a physical good like a car is not particularly strange. It's just a contract that allows the lessee to use a scarce physical item that belongs to the lessor under certain terms.

If we had that kind of lease on software, but without IP laws, there still wouldn't be any strange legal consequences. The lessee gets the software, and perhaps the terms say that the lessee cannot copy or modify the software. The difference is that if the lessee does distribute a copy of the software, the lessor cannot go after third parties who download those copies, because they haven't signed any sort of lease or contract. The lessor can go after the lessee, of course, but that's it.

This latter description shouldn't be described as an "attack on ownership" any more than renting a car from the airport is an attack on ownership. The real attack on ownership is the existence of IP laws. You own your hard drive, but only until the hard drive happens to arrange some bits in a particular order.

Re: We Can’t Let John Deere Destroy the Idea of Ownership

#228

Post by randomdata »

AJ007 wrote: post #101
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Iowan here. There are almost no family farms left at all. My neighbor would desperately like to be a farmer. But the scrubby 40-acre field across from his house just sold for $400,000. He'd get maybe 120 bushels of corn off of it. Current price per bushel: $3.80. So $456 income per acre == $18,240 per year. That's half the mortgate payments. Not to mention the cost of working the field. So a lost cause. The 13 farmer…

Is this land that is being bought for future subdivisions? Definitely have seen this in areas by suburban areas. Certainly not all farming is being done at a loss?

Farming is a lot like a startup, except maybe drawn out over more years than tech people like to see.

You invest everything you have into a business that will return you very little, at least in the start. As you start to grow you put your profits into growth. Finally, as you reach retirement age the debts are hopefully paid off and you are actually making money for the first time. You're also sitting on millions of dollars worth of assets that are now fully in your name. When you are ready to retire, you sell it all.

In other words: You live in poverty over your working career so that you can cash out later in life, while hopefully not going bust in the meantime. The profitability of the business is dependant on the market and the weather, but even more dependant on what stage your business is at. Early stage businesses are apt to lose money most years, but late stage businesses should make money most years.

Re: We Can’t Let John Deere Destroy the Idea of Ownership

#229

Post by baddox »

acbart wrote: post #205
ploxiln wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people who try to make a living making music or writing are unable to do so, even if the music or the writing is pretty good, and that's due to obscurity, not piracy. Historically, even fewer people were able to. Pages and even chapters of books have been copied by photocopiers (found in many libraries!) for decades. The only limit to the copying was how many quarters you had. You need to give up the idea that p…

I suppose we have fundamentally different utility functions. I think it is valuable to society to have a class of (relatively) well-off creators who do that as their full-time job. Some of these creators will even start off making mediocre works that don't contribute much, as they move from peripheral authentic participation towards the center (or drop out and get a "real job"). If you don't see that as a valuable te…

Is your utility function such that you believe these content creators ought to make good money regardless of whether there are people willing to pay for the content they create?

Re: We Can’t Let John Deere Destroy the Idea of Ownership

#230

Post by bsder »

declan wrote: post #173

The linked article is good as far as it goes, but it fails to take the next logical step and call for the simple repeal of the anti-circumvention section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. I was living in Washington, D.C. and following the DMCA when it became law in 1998 -- I can assure you that nobody expected sec. 1201 to morph into the creature it has become today. It was sold to Congress as a non-contr…

> I was living in Washington, D.C. and following the DMCA when it became law in 1998 -- I can assure you that nobody expected sec. 1201 to morph into the creature it has become today.

I shake my head at this.

Everybody in tech with 2 brain cells predicted this.

The DMCA isn't buggy. It is functioning precisely as designed--protecting big businesses.

Post reply on HN