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

141–150 of 405 posts

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

#141

Post by dublinclontarf »

themartorana wrote: post #53
bryanlarsen wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of family farms own tractors worth more than $200K, and combines worth more than $500K. They're paying significant interest to the bank for the privilege, but owning equipment that can cover twice the land in a day is a lot cheaper than buying and maintaining two smaller tractors (and accompaning accessories) and hiring a farmhand.

Like my family. Also, small farmers buy a lot of tractors second, third, fourth-hand. Many are still running 50 years later. This is as much an attempt to kill the secondary market and the right to resell. Without being able to buy and fix up used farm parts/equipment, many (including my family) would be fiscally unable to farm - full stop.

So this is the plot to Robots then?

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

#142

Post by cbd1984 »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #131
cbd1984 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If you want to help poor people eat, you should give poor people money to help them eat, rather than paying farmers to make one specific type of farming easier and distorting the market to artificially favor something that's actually less efficient (and may have all sorts of crazy side effects on the rest of the world). Favoring direct intervention to fix the actual problem should be axiomatic, really.

> If you want to help poor people eat, you should give poor people money to help them eat

The more food we can make per unit resource, the more food we have, given that resources are finite.

Giving the poor more money does nothing to change that.

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

#143

Post by TheCapn »

hharnisch wrote: post #39
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…

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…

I agree with you, both local farmers I talk to and family are speaking of the new generation being brought up farming. There's still a lot of family involvement in the industry and those young farmers taking over the family land are extremely interested in relevant and modern technology. They'll be a huge driving force in the coming years.

And farmers still talk. If Farmer Brown and Farmer Ted are sittin' down at the local terminal having their coffee they talk about their equipment. Word of mouth still matters huge in the areas I work in.

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

#144

Post by bsimpson »

Lawtonfogle wrote: post #82
bsimpson wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The intangibility of code makes the marginal cost of a copy $0, which in turn raises the spectre of copyright law. You can't copy an engine made of steel, so copyright law is moot.

But you can. The cost is higher, but you can make a copy. So if the cost is really small (not $0, but small) it changes? Also to note, in these cases, we are talking about both the code and the rest of the machine. Is this to say that if any part of the machine can be copied for close to $0, we can remove ownership? Any single piece of that engine can be easily and cheaply copied, so once again, why the difference?

Copyright law is an exception.

The laws of the physical world mean that, if you give/sell an object to another party, you no longer have access to it yourself. This is where concepts like the first sale doctrine come into play - it's your one tangible thing, and you can do with it whatever you like. You control that one, and only that one, instance of the thing.

Intangibles can be given/sold to another party without relinquishing your use of the original (because copies are free). You can buy one CD and gives copies of the music on it to 1,000,000 people without cost, and without giving up your right to the original. Even if you could copy an engine for relatively cheaply, the same economics do not apply.

Therefore, an exception exists to our physical property laws to cover this edge case: copyright law. As userbinator notes, there are other areas of intellectual property law that may apply to physical goods (e.g. patents), but you asked what the difference is between digital programming and mechanical: the difference is that digital programming is intangible, so it can be copied ad naseum, so the ownership exception we call copyright law applies.

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

#145

Post by lisper »

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…

Stallman is not a tenured academic. He's the president of a non-profit (the FSF). He makes his living from people's voluntary donations and (I presume) speaking fees.

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

#146

Post by api »

lisper wrote: post #145
api wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Stallman is not a tenured academic. He's the president of a non-profit (the FSF). He makes his living from people's voluntary donations and (I presume) speaking fees.

Doesn't he have an office at MIT in the Gates building?

In any case, it doesn't impact what I said. His gig is nice if you can get it, but I don't think the FSF can afford to pay everyone who works on GNU code.

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

#147

Post by Retric »

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…

There is little wrong with DRM as a concept, "But" just because you call something DRM does not mean it should be able to do anything.

IMO, a DRM bill of rights needs to exist to qualify for government protection. Data needs to be transferable FOR FREE to a new user. You can't shut down your DRM servers without first removing the DRM. You can't remotely change anything on a user’s system. Source code must be freely available for security researchers. DRM can only protect information not the operation of a physical device.

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

#148

Post by api »

Retric wrote: post #147
api wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There is little wrong with DRM as a concept, "But" just because you call something DRM does not mean it should be able to do anything. IMO, a DRM bill of rights needs to exist to qualify for government protection. Data needs to be transferable FOR FREE to a new user. You can't shut down your DRM servers without first removing the DRM. You can't remotely change anything on a user’s system. Source code must be freely a…

That's a good idea, but I don't see it happening. Perverse incentives abound on every side. Everyone wants this tilted their way.

We had a very good system in the age of printed and recorded media. Not perfect, but good. We just have to figure out how to update it, or figure out a new one. Part of my point was that this hasn't happened yet, and I'm sad that few seem to be thinking about this from all sides snd really working on it.

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

#149

Post by mcguire »

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…

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), so your field is pretty decent.)

[1] Thank you, units! You have: (181 * 56) pounds per acre You want: metrictons per hectare * 11.360947 / 0.088020829

[2] http://apps.fas.usda.gov/psdonline/circulars/production.pdf

Post reply on HN