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

#101

Post by AJ007 » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 3:55 PM UTC

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #62

hharnisch wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree. The family owned farmers care too. For the big equipment, like combines, there's a handful of people everyone pays to have their fields harvested. This person get's compensation in the form of money and other services (someone else will plow their field for instance). People own their own tractors and share time to get things done, otherwise you'd have to own all of the equipment (which is only justified wh…

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?

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

#102

Post by c_ehlen » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 3:57 PM UTC

pragone wrote: post #2

Very interesting. I did not know this issue extended all the way to farming equipment. At the same time, I can't say I'm terribly surprised given the state of things currently. Thread hijack: Am I the only one who finds Wired's... "unique"... styling of links absolutely obnoxious?

> I did not know this issue extended all the way to farming equipment.

It's not just farming equipment. The heavy equipment industry uses closed and highly protected diagnostics tools. They don't want to give the control of the internal of the machine away to the customer.

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

#103

Post by mariodiana » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 3:57 PM UTC

jimmytucson wrote: post #59

sologoub wrote: post #35

An earlier article did a much better job layout why this is a huge problem for independent farmers: "The family farmer who owns this tractor is a friend of mine. He just wanted a better way to fix a minor hydraulic sensor. Every time the sensor blew, the onboard computer would shut the tractor down. It takes a technician at least two days to order the part, get out to the farm, and swap out the sensor. So for two day…

Why doesn't the market handle this? If John Deere is only willing to sell lifetime licenses to operate their vehicles, thus putting the farmer at risk in ways like you described, why do farmers still buy these "licenses"? Naively, they must represent some advantage (despite their shortcomings), otherwise John Deere wouldn't be able to sell these things.

Are there regulatory barriers for entering the market for producing farm tractors? That's the first question I would ask, if I were wondering why doesn't the market handle this.

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

#104

Post by zzalpha » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 3:58 PM UTC

toufka wrote: post #86

jimmytucson wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why doesn't the market handle this? If John Deere is only willing to sell lifetime licenses to operate their vehicles, thus putting the farmer at risk in ways like you described, why do farmers still buy these "licenses"? Naively, they must represent some advantage (despite their shortcomings), otherwise John Deere wouldn't be able to sell these things.

John Deere was the Apple of tractors, 20 years before Apple was Apple. It's killed off all the competition [1] for their tractors' ability to "just work" - even at a premium. Deere coupled high quality hardware with high quality service, whereas most other tractors tried to compete on cost by dropping one. Apple vs HP; Deere vs Case. It served them well in the long run, if made things dicy early on. There is no compe…

Put slightly more technically: there are natural barriers of entry to the marketplace that make it tough for a disruptor to displace a incumbent monopolist (or in this case oligopolist... Deere basically splits the market with a few other competitors, all of whom collude on this issue).

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

#105

Post by userbinator » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 3:58 PM UTC

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…

When will it stop?

Once most of the population realises the situation we've gotten ourselves into, perhaps things might change for the better. However, it's looking more and more like we're increasingly willing to sacrifice individual ownership rights and freedom for convenience or other things like security...

The closest we've gotten to a sort of "copyright revolution" might've been in the last decade when file sharing grew explosively and many people started thinking about the issue, but then the efforts of governments and corporations seem to have effectively suppressed that by leading consumers into using more convenient but less free systems.

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

#106

Post by cbd1984 » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 3:59 PM UTC

briantakita wrote: post #61

cbd1984 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the yields like? What would doing that for all food do to the price of food?

Yields are pretty high. Though there are many products. So you won't necessarily have high yielding corn, but you will overall have more food & materials. The fruits tend to be more of a mixed bag that is best distributed & consumed locally. > What would doing that for all food do to the price of food? Note that conventional petrol agriculture is heavily subsidized. Removing the subsidy will increase the price of foo…

> Removing the subsidy will increase the price of food.

Then it would be wrong to do remove that subsidy. Poor people need to eat, too.

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

#107

Post by StavrosK » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 3:59 PM UTC

Loughla wrote: post #12

The people who have the money to buy the mega-tractors you see in the article don't care. That's why, unless someone outside the industry makes a stink, nothing will happen. These are giga-corporations who are 'family owned' in name only. If they don't rent, they operate that machine for a few years, play the tax game, and trade it even-money for a new one. To them, ownership doesn't matter. Their service contracts w…

This doesn't only affect the US. Pretty much the entire world buys John Deere, Ford, Lamborghini, etc tractors.

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

#108

Post by aeturnum » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 3:59 PM UTC

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…

> As soon as books become computer files...When will it stop?

IANAL, but legally, this has nothing to do with software. You can force buyers to agree to a license agreement to legally read your book. The right to first sale applies to copyright and trademark - it does not allow you to ignore license agreements. Obviously it's easier to enforce on software because you can execute DRM code on a device.

Blaming this on software or computers misses the underlying mechanism and focuses on the wrong thing. It is, and always has been, an issue of what we allow and don't allow in our legal system.

It will stop when people want it to stop.

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

#109

Post by roel_v » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 4:01 PM UTC

chainsaw10 wrote: post #3

I am not a lawyer, so I'm probably wrong on some of the finer points here, but I'm going to postulate an analogy here. Why can't we equate the software inside a computer inside a vehicle with the mechanical equivalent? What then would our rights be? It obviously doesn't require permission to move a valve or a gear around. Therefore, it shouldn't require permission to move a few bits. It also doesn't require permissio…

"Why can't we equate the software inside a computer inside a vehicle with the mechanical equivalent? What then would our rights be?"

Well, probably because software is unlike the mechanical equivalent. How could it not be? When I own a hammer, and I sell it to you and hand it to you, you have it and I don't. Music scores, software, movies etc. don't work that way, so they need a different system to work in. That system is based on contracts, because we already had those.

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

#110

Post by SovietDissident » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 4:01 PM UTC

Loughla wrote: post #12

The people who have the money to buy the mega-tractors you see in the article don't care. That's why, unless someone outside the industry makes a stink, nothing will happen. These are giga-corporations who are 'family owned' in name only. If they don't rent, they operate that machine for a few years, play the tax game, and trade it even-money for a new one. To them, ownership doesn't matter. Their service contracts w…

It doesn't help that over 70% of farming subsidies go to ~10% of the farms in the country.