We Can’t Let John Deere Destroy the Idea of Ownership • Hacker News Board

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

#331

Post by TeMPOraL » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 9:03 PM UTC

elwin wrote: post #222

api wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 m…

> The world probably needs less content creation.

It's funny how this was noticed by King Solomon, far before the age of print. "Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body." (Ecclesiastes 12:12b). Apparently information overload was a problem even back then.

Anyway, I agree that we have too much content, but not content in general. We have too much for-profit content. I can't back this up with numbers, but I'm willing to bet that the majority of content creation is just an indirect form of advertising.

Take news sites. Why all those articles are so crappy, full of mistakes, and often outright lies? Because news sites don't care about the truth; the content is just the way to make you see the ads.

Or take all those images people repost on social media. I have a close friend working as a "content marketer", so I get to see first-hand how those images are made. There are people whose job is literally to create dozens of such pictures every week and post them on the pages they manage. The pages themselves are only tangentially related to what is advertised.

The whole scheme works like this: imagine you want to advertise a fitness club you own. So you create a bunch of Facebook pages about dieting, general health and exercise, and you hire a bunch of people to make you an image or two for each page, every day, and to spread them around in a way that links back to said pages. The images are usually pretty useless; the content doesn't matter as long as people share and "like" it. The idea is that you will waste a little bit of lots of people's time hoping that a percent of a percent of those people will convert and pay enough to justify all that social media carpet-bombing.

Frankly, I find this scheme evil, but for some reason it is a respected occupation nowadays...

The problem we really need to solve is wasting other people's time to make money. Content overload will fix itself then.

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

#332

Post by oldmanjay » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 9:04 PM UTC

jordigh wrote: post #297

metaphorm wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stallman understands better than most the true nature of wealth and power. Concentrated wealth (in the hands of either individuals or corporations) becomes obsessed with maintaining the concentration of wealth. The most straight-forward way to do this is to never actually sell anything, but rather to collect rent on it. However, the right to collect rent is a legal right that must be enforced by the state (or by forc…

> Stallman's focus on copyright law and intellectual property law Channeling Stallman here, there's no such thing as "intellectual property law". There are a bunch of laws that work in very different ways, evolved under different circumstances, and have different purposes. Copyrights are for ensuring authors retain economic and/or moral rights on their work, patents are so that inventors will disclose their invention…

And arguing endlessly about the language to use when it's not germane to the discussion is an ages-old rhetorical technique to attempt to frame the debate. Stallman might love freedom, but I suspect he loves winning arguments by being "clever" even more.

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

#333

Post by JoeAltmaier » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 9:08 PM UTC

rsync wrote: post #315

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Specialty crops depend on the availability of somebody to buy them. My brother tried that last, before he gave up.

An alternative to specialty crops is regular crops but higher up the value-add chain. Corn -> corn mash -> fermented corn mash -> ethanol -> bourbon -> aged bourbon 40 acres of corn gets you nowhere. 40 acres of corn converted to bourbon gets you generational wealth.

Ha! This is what all Appalachian farmers did in the 1700's, with no roads and long distances to market. They converted corn to whiskey, concentrating the wealth. It was George Washington that ruined that with his regressive Whiskey Tax. Our modern caricature of the moonshining mountain yokel was created way back then, to marginalize poor farmers.

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

#334

Post by TeMPOraL » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 9:09 PM UTC

djb_hackernews wrote: post #272

elwin wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

Imagine a futuristic utopian human society. Are the people writing poetry, playing instruments and painting murals or are they assembling widgets in a factory? Humans are really good at creating things, that's what I think we are here to do, not "work".

Most of the content nowadays is created as "work", usually for advertising. In the futuristic utopian society we would get rid of all that crap, and I'm willing to bet we could let people create however much they'd like and we still wouldn't have information overload problem. It's easier to manage your information diet when everyone around you stops trying to push their content into you.

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

#335

Post by Kluny » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 9:10 PM UTC

redblacktree wrote: post #214

Kluny wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe tractor hacking will become a thing, too. I know lots of guys who circumvent the computers in their cars with pirated software, to make them racier. Might be a career in it for some of them.

I've recently become interested in this, since I bought a 2015 vehicle with a computer in the console. Do you have any advice/resources for a budding car hacker?

I don't have much personal experience other than watching my friends laptopping from underneath a car. www.dorikaze.com is a forum for drift racing that a lot of my friends frequent, and there's bound to be at least a couple knowledgeable people in there. Be warned though, there's a lot of grade-school antics, meming, and sexism, and the smart guys are used to curtly fending off stupid questions. So do a lot of reading before you start typing.

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

#336

Post by TeMPOraL » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 9:10 PM UTC

oldmanjay wrote: post #332

jordigh wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Stallman's focus on copyright law and intellectual property law Channeling Stallman here, there's no such thing as "intellectual property law". There are a bunch of laws that work in very different ways, evolved under different circumstances, and have different purposes. Copyrights are for ensuring authors retain economic and/or moral rights on their work, patents are so that inventors will disclose their invention…

And arguing endlessly about the language to use when it's not germane to the discussion is an ages-old rhetorical technique to attempt to frame the debate. Stallman might love freedom, but I suspect he loves winning arguments by being "clever" even more.

Actually, Stallman here is pointing out that the term "intellectual property" is an example of this "age-old rhetorical technique". Ditto for calling piracy "theft". It is very important what language we use because it determines the thoughts and emotions we have.

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

#337

Post by TeMPOraL » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 9:12 PM UTC

api wrote: post #240

elwin wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

There are about seven billion people, and they all like different things. There's no overproduction.

Surely there is, unless you think that people like the "content" that is explicitly designed to abuse them and trick into buying things.

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

#338

Post by TeMPOraL » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 9:14 PM UTC

harperlee wrote: post #252

elwin wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

That is a ridiculous argument. The more content we produce, the more quality and diversity you can get in the corpus that you will read; the more choices that you can make. There might be infinite insight in the contemplation of cat pictures. :) Or from another angle: why don't we destroy half of the content of the world? Surely we have enough with the remainings. If we were to find tomorrow another intelligent speci…

> The more content we produce, the more quality and diversity you can get in the corpus that you will read; the more choices that you can make.

If so, then we should just spend all day reading /dev/urandom. Infinite content there.

> Or from another angle: why don't we destroy half of the content of the world? Surely we have enough with the remainings.

If we destroyed the half that is advertisement in disguise, the world would be much better off.

> If we were to find tomorrow another intelligent species, would you be interested in their culture? Or won't you have time to read it?

I would, but I'd happily limit my time spent on analyzing ways members of that culture abuse one another and look for something interesting to learn from them.

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

#339

Post by Joeri » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 9:14 PM UTC

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…

The confusion goes further. When you "buy" a kindle book, are you buying it or leasing it? It's still restricted, you can only put it where amazon says you can put it, so in my view that's leasing. Yet the button on the site says "Buy", and there's no other component involved.

At the very least the labeling laws should require clearly distinguishing between purchase and lease. If there's a part of the product that you're only leasing and not buying, the whole thing must say "lease" or "rent". It would be funny to see amazon forced to relabel their site like that though...

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

#340

Post by deveac » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 9:15 PM UTC

alexqgb wrote: post #309

deveac wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In his world, the creators of things starve. How so? The entirety of human history has shown us that we create no matter what. Art, music, tools, stories, technology, etc. Creators have been making (and eating) for eons, well before modern IP laws. Look at the patron model, or commission based production, used for centuries. Or look at creation during leisure time for leisure (and its close modern cousin, large port…

"Look at the patron model, or commission based production, used for centuries." Here's a better idea: look at the actual work produced under this model. With a few notable exceptions, it's an endless parade of flattering portraits of rich people, glorified depictions the wars they won, politically slanted historic fictions used to justify their authority, and scenes from the religious stories they used to instill ter…

>Here's a better idea: look at the actual work produced under this model. With a few notable exceptions, it's an endless parade of flattering portraits of rich people, glorified depictions the wars they won, politically slanted historic fictions used to justify their authority, and scenes from the religious stories they used to instill terror and obedience in the people they dominated ruthlessly....

The historical art and creation of our race is so much more than that, and always has been. Come on. You know this. I'd wager that the vast majority of music, art, and technological process and creation for our species has not been for pay in service of the groups you described. To think that art has historically been created solely for the rich is rather absurd. It simply isn't true. From the first known cave paintings, to the blues, to free software, this has always happened and always will, regardless if the creator is getting paid by a customer (rich or poor), and organization, her community as a whole, or not paid at all.

>Seriously, what else have you got? A compelling case for a return to the divine right of kings? Maybe you could defend the Church's Index of Banned Books while you're at it? Or remind us why burning witches was maybe a good thing after all?

Woah. Ok, I'm out. I see what I'm dealing with now. Don't need a "protip" from this type of derailing commenter. Good day.