81–90 of 511 posts
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Because there is no competition in the US.
Does farmers in other countries somehow enjoy a plethora of tractor manufacturers to choose from?
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All good ideas, but repairing surface mount / integrated / dust and vibration glued parts is not as easy EVEN IF they were open standards as a 40 year old tractor is to repair. I spent way to long repairing an old gas engine, it was super simple in terms of operating approach. Opening the hood on my new car - the fixes are not as obvious.
I couldn’t even swap out a headlight in my girlfriend’s car, because of the tight space. Instead she has to pay a garage to do it. That’s not it used to be.
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Why was this downvoted? I just made the same comment before noticing this one already done. Competition is what solves these kind of things.
Sure, but how do you propose to introduce competition into this market?
“ They cost a fraction of the price, and then the operating costs are much less because they’re so much easier to fix,” he said.” It’s not really so much a technology problem as the ability to repair, probably by the farmers themselves. Companies don’t make it easy. You need special equipment, tools, etc. We could insist on a right to repair, open standards, etc
Vote with your wallet.
"These things, they’re basically bulletproof. You can put 15,000 hours on it and if something breaks you can just replace it.” Amen. It is true that there is always someone saying "Things were better back then." But that doesn't always mean that they are wrong.
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.
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 reliable.
Key points: that Chevy needed an oil change every 3-4000 miles. New cars need oil changes every 8-10000 miles, give or take. Old cars also needed tune-ups.
What do you think?
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…
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If customers don’t want this stuff, why isn’t there a competing company offering non-DRM tractors?
Mahindra is selling small and medium tractors in the US now; I don't know for sure but I wouldn't be surprised if they were much more user-serviceable than the American brands people are complaining about.
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Because the shortest path to fixing anything is always electing a politician who knows nothing about that thing, in order to have them approve legislation written by other people who know nothing about that thing, that demands that companies do a thing. That always works great.
Certainly all the greatest societal reforms have been brought about by individual purchasing decisions.
Good luck, Mssr. Quixote.
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…
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…
Sometimes the invisible hand is invisible because it's not there. I don't understand how "fewer regulations" is supposed to address problems like these, or really any market failure state.