Nebraska farmers vote overwhelmingly for Right to Repair

I'm going to not try and not infer anything from your handle, but how exactly do you know this?

I personally worked on and with hose 50-25 year old tractors (Renault, Ferrari, Fiat, Massey-Fergueson, Case, Ford) in my apprenticeship in Europe and I can tell you that finding parts for a lot of those were half the problem. So unless you had an in with the few shops that kept them running like they do in Cuba with GM and the like, you were SOL.

Anecdote: In England we had to drop a transmission in the middle of harvest on a 30/40 year old Case and all the spares available after several hours of calls and online searches would have to come in from former yugoslavia nations (Macedonia and Montenegro from what I recall) that had trans from tractors that 'ran when last parked' (before the break up in the 90s?) and couldn't come in by rail/air shipment in 2014 as it was the rainiest year in recorded History and brought everything to halt.

So we gathered the village and did the harvest by hand, our yield wasn't great but it wasn't a total loss as it could have been had we waited for that trans to come in.

But the following season they rented and hired a crew with a massive New Holland and John Deere fleet to help them out instead of buying.

What I guess I'm alluding to is that in the case with farming, especially at the small farm (sub 50 hectare) owning anything but a small tractor for daily tasks is unnecessary, as the cost and maintenance is way out of reach for most people's budget or even needs.

Flash-forward to 2013 in Colorado where the first legal hemp harvest took place, and you'd see a large number of farmers with more requests than they can handle to rent out their combines (with crazy combinations) and haulers out in the fields.

There will always be a 'steady stream' of purchases for tractors/combines etc... its just that they got used to the crony-capitalist profits from rebuilding Iraq, Afghanistan after the invasion etc... and forgot their projected profits should be calculated withing the confines of the production of mainly domestic demand.

As a former farmer, Biodynamic no less, I want Ag to go as automated as it can, but I can't shed a single tear for those manufactures who refuse to see why having proprietary blocks on their products will drive farmers away.

Hopefully this spurs on a lot of the talent in FAANG to do something actually productive and necessary in Society and help an opensource hardware movement in Ag.

The tighter integration of components (instead of routing everything through pluggable buses) reduced power consumption.

Every time a data line passes through a connection (solder joint, connector) you have to crank up power a bit to make sure that the signal makes it. Every time you have to decrease clock a bit, which means more parallel connections (with higher physical requirements == more waste at some point) for the same throughput.

At some point there's a trade-off to be made between inherent eco-friendliness (because it runs on much lower power) and replacability.

> There are also mountains of these parts floating around after sale. The OEM could encourage the return of unwanted electronics and then gut them for parts to use in repairs after they have been tested. Any leftovers after 10 years can be sent to recycling.

Return programmes already exist (although they generally end up in recycling, not as reused parts), and some countries mandate them (e.g. WEEE in the EU, plus RoHS to eliminate troublesome compounds).

Reuse can be troublesome since quality control is so much harder than for parts in factory fresh condition: All the paranoia here (and elsewhere) about three letter agencies tampering with devices during shipment? Multiply that by some large number because supply chain attacks just became trivial.

I'm all for designing products in an eco-friendly way, but a 2019 laptop is so much better in that regard than a 2009 model, that the decision doesn't seem simple to me at which point the 2009 model shouldn't be refurbished any longer.

> Customers preferences need to take a back seat over environmental needs. A customer can live with a 1mm thicker phone.

I agree and a thicker phone has more room for longevity (eg. sufficient shock absorbance built into the frame simply by virtue of being larger than the components inside) than a thin one that I long for a robust device. The majority of customers seems to prefer other aspects though.

https://youtu.be/ublh9JkbeuM?t=2350

I linked to the start of the section where he begins discussing the migration of the Turks into Iran (39:10). Discussion about hybrid camels is from around 45:26 onwards.

Amazon link to his book: Cotton, Climate, Camels.

https://www.amazon.com/Cotton-Climate-Camels-Early-Islamic-d...

Here is the entire playlist of his 46 lectures on World History, of which the first link is lecture 13. His lectures are not just him retelling the material in the textbook, but rather gives criticism about how the textbook was constructed (He is the lead editor), and stories from his own research:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXxM47ZxXvkaODXkQBO5R...