161–170 of 511 posts
It appears that tractors in general are dramatically overpriced. Who else makes big tractors? Brazil?
Up to a point. Larger than that point there are different specializations that you will only get from a single manufacturer. For a few of those that manufacturer is Brazilian, but most of the time it's from the US.
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It's not sad, it's progress. These are not mutually exclusive concepts.
It's sad that progress must mean sadness for some. We should have better social safety net so that displacement doesn't mean despair.
https://www.opensourceecology.org
Btw, Open Source Ecology does have a DIY tractor as well.
https://opensourceecology.dozuki.com/c/LifeTrac
https://www.opensourceecology.org/portfolio/tractor/
They regularly have courses, workshops, internships at their Missouri farm. There's a full machine fabrication shop, permaculture farm, & sustainable living community. Their courses are a great deal & they even do work exchange. Highly recommend checking it out.
My grandfather, rest his soul, was a 3rd generation rancher and farmer. He bought 2 John Deere tractors in the '80s and used them for 35 years. They are still being used to this day on the ranch. Growing up, I visited the ranch regularly. Farming and ranching is very hard on equipment so the tractors often needed repair. My father and grandfather could seemingly fix anything on the tractor without even needing to go…
Thanks for sharing this about your grandfather. > The world changes and sometimes it sucks but that is how progress is made. This touches on something I think a lot about. Massive driverless farms, in my mind's eye, looks like one puzzle piece towards the utopia of the future. But you do lose the human aspect. It reminds me of Star Trek where Picard is working with his hands on a vineyard. Capitalism is abolished so…
* easy automation for those that need it; if corporations want to driverless tractors doing all their farming, so be it. They're responding to a market that is demanding a lot of cheap food.
* occupation as a choice; the productivity gains from automation shouldn't all just pile on to the people who made the investment; but it could be used to provide necessities to those that need them. So a small scale farmer, for instance, would not be competing directly in the same market as the corporation, and they wouldn't need to make a profit to do what they want to.
Human brains are great at seeing patterns; we shouldn't be wasting them on repetitive work that can be mechanized. Let people do what they want to without existential threats and see what happens.
In a certain sense, this is already true for the wealthy. The nature of wealth is that it gives you safety nets to fall back on if you fail at what you want to do. A lot many of the greatest artists came from wealthy backgrounds.
I would honestly want a lot more people creating art, video games, curing cancer etc. than have more people picking crops.
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Yup. I also put large household appliances in this category. They've been getting more expensive and more fragile for decades, without much real progress other than energy efficiency which is unrelated to the fragility afaik.
Do you think normal gas powered cars have have been getting less reliable? I agree with what many others here have said about how hard it is to service new vehicles. After he died, I kept my grandpa's 1970 Chevy C-10 pickup going for years. It was simple and very easy to fix/work on. But it needed a lot more attention than modern cars, and I think that while the age played a factor, it was just inherently less reliab…
the most important difference IMO is that older cars are now dangerously unsafe by modern standards, by orders of magnitude. crumple zones, multiple airbags, pedestrian scoops, and now driver-assists like emergency braking.
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These companies are losing customers. That is never good for business. Eventually, someone will take the matter into his own hand and start making 80s-like tractors, so these companies will lose even more customers. They could do the same, but at this point they lost the trust of their customers, so it will be very hard to gain them back.
Really? Which products are getting more repairable with time? Nobody is bringing back easily repairable washing machines or easily repairable automobiles.
The technology itself is not the issue, the problem is that companies are at war with their customers. These companies will go to any length to extract as much revenue as possible. Milking your customers is not good for business, especially if you drive them into insolvency. I hope in the future there are more companies that try to align incentives with their customers, such that their business practices help custome…
Not long ago, it seems companies were still in the business of making tractors, or cars, or cakes, or something... Nowadays it seems every company is in the business of making money and paying bonuses for directors. The rest is an excuse.
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These companies are losing customers. That is never good for business. Eventually, someone will take the matter into his own hand and start making 80s-like tractors, so these companies will lose even more customers. They could do the same, but at this point they lost the trust of their customers, so it will be very hard to gain them back.
Really? Which products are getting more repairable with time? Nobody is bringing back easily repairable washing machines or easily repairable automobiles.
Either way, I suspect, apples to oranges.
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If you don't know the answer to that - you may have wanted to think it through a little more. Manufacturing at scale is hard and expensive. John Deere has been doing it for years, creating the most reliable tractors in the world for decades and has only recently decided to bend customers over to give them the ol' in-out-in-out. A new brand would need to start from almost smaller than scratch, and have tens of million…
In today's market, your argument doesn't hold water. A new brand would need to start from smaller than scratch? So what? People start new companies every day. It would require tens of millions of dollars of investment? So what? We keep being told how capital markets are just sloshing with cash looking for investment opportunities; that one of the reasons for rising inequality is due to the dearth of investment opport…
The technology itself is not the issue, the problem is that companies are at war with their customers. These companies will go to any length to extract as much revenue as possible. Milking your customers is not good for business, especially if you drive them into insolvency. I hope in the future there are more companies that try to align incentives with their customers, such that their business practices help custome…
> Milking your customers is not good for business, especially if you drive them into insolvency. It clearly is good for business, even if it's bad for customers and society at large. Pretending it's bad for business just encourages complacency because it suggests that the natural discipline of the market will drive the milkers out of business and encourage good business practices. But that doesn't happen, and if we w…