Deere seems to have bad relations with their employees, customers, and regulatory bodies.
The shareholders should remove the board of directors.
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/money/business/2021/...
What public interest is served by allowing companies to engage in anti-competitive and anti-consumer practices like locking people into proprietary systems?
The world is a better place because regulators mandate things like interoperability in phones or requirements that auto manufacturers supply parts for 3rd party mechanics to fix vehicles.
For this reason, it's very hard for competition to break in. No one wants to wait 2 weeks for a part for their tractor during crop season.
2) No other manufacturers offer real choice (and the required logistics I mentioned above), so it's not something the free market will fix.
[1] https://reason.com/2024/01/08/how-john-deere-hijacked-copyri...
“Actually I think it’s good that companies don’t allow you to repair their products. And it’s an abuse of power for the government to stop them”
You realize that forcing companies to respect the right to repair actually makes the economy stronger?
Independent repair shops can exist in that environment. The market becomes more free in that sense…
Data point: Trump's VP nominee likes what the FTC is doing - https://fortune.com/2024/08/11/jd-vance-5000-child-tax-credi...
Firing a board is generally risky, and the shareholders probably haven't fired them because even though the board has, almost objectively, not been good - firing them is likely even worse for the stock short term, and there aren't a lot of long-term, active investors left in the world.
That said, I think John Deere is just the asshole willing to weaponize the legal system to enforce their dreams. The real problem is laws that protect IP like the DMCA and the patent system. I'm not saying we should just delete all those, but they are in bad need of reform and enable a tremendous amount of abuse. The abuse is only going to get worse unless we treat the cause(s) rather than just the symptoms.
I'm glad the feds are giving John Deere some attention, but I really hope they are going to fix the lopsided system instead of just try to bully or micro-regulate John Deere into "voluntarily" allowing more repair. If we stopped unleashing the lawyers on people for modifying or interfacing with devices they purchased, it would shift the balance of power more toward the center (whereas currently the power is almost entirely on the side of the companies).
Even if you have no interest in repairing or "tinkering" with your own stuff, you should be on the side of right to repair.
In line with remote-bricking discontinued hardware, these policies only serve to generate eWaste.
If you sell programmable hardware, or really anything with embedded software, you should be required to make all the tools and software available to end users (doesn’t have to be free, but shouldn’t require a subscription or support contract either) in perpetuity.
Licenses to enable additional hardware features are fine, but they must be granted for the life of the device (i.e. as long as it can be kept working), not an arbitrary “we think the life of this thing is 5 years”. You should never have to keep paying to use a device you already bought.
I hate the "everything's a subscription" business model that's taking over everything. We'll achieve peak serfdom when the air we breathe, water we drink, and food we eat is bought on a subscription model.
I'm curious where this will ultimately go. Feels like the best path would be a "minimal capability" set that machines need to support at basically a mechanical level? Probably gets a lot more complicated on some of the more advanced gear. Which, really doesn't help the narrative, as people try and show the basic tractors as the only thing impacted.
I recall a story of a person who bought a used Tesla which erroneously had some feature or another enabled -- sold by the second-hand dealer and purchased by the customer with the understanding that the car came with the feature -- until the feature was remotely disabled when someone at Tesla discovered the error.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/16/john_deere_doom/
Just for that failure, they should all likely be gone.
Even in this scenario, though, I would expect you'd need something like the Title Insurance to really protect people?
Only a filthy redneck conspiracy theorist would conjecture that this is populist election influence!
Prepare for the comments that "Lina Khan is on a tear" and this is all not influenced by the election at all.
You've never met a farmer. Admittedly no one in my family is a farmer, but half of them are loggers, diesel mechanics, or heavy equipment operators. Most of them are ridiculously intelligent and able to fix anything that moves.
They have gone from $4.3b in operating income to $14.5b in three years, while their sales nearly doubled. That's an old industrial company boom the likes of which is almost never seen by those types of companies.
By comparison what you're calling catastrophic is entirely trivial. It's not even in the room as a consideration compared to the soaring profits. Nobody is removing a whole board with that kind of profit growth.
> Under Project 2025, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) would be eliminated, and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) would be privatized
> The Department of Education would be eliminated and oversight of education and federal funding for education will be handed over to the states
> The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) would be eliminated and moved to the Department of Interior or the Department of Transportation if combined with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)
> The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s many regional labs and entire offices of enforcement and compliance and scientific integrity and risk information would be eliminated.
> The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is to “privatize as much as possible” and close many hospitals and clinics.
> The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) would be taken apart and send much of its work to states and other agencies
> The Department of Justice (DOJ) would lose its independence and be under control of the President
> The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) would be drastically reduced and split into two entities: one gathering scientific data and one making public health recommendations and policies.
Source: https://www.afge.org/article/project-2025-seeks-to-dismantle...
That is A problem, but that is not the problem seen here. The problem here is trade secrets. Specifically electronic secrets that prevent third parties from fully servicing their own equipment. Like HP inkjet electronic restrictions that prevent people from refilling their own ink cartridges. This is still a problem without patent law, without copyright law, and without lawyers.
Problem was, the water wasn't suitable for giving babies that young, resulting in some babies dying.
system created to protect inventors and authors from being abused by more powerful people(investors, corporations, publishers) is actually used to abuse everyone except powerful groups then yeah - it is a horrible system that needs to go.
(Looks like it was something to do with Autopilot, for what it's worth. https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/6/21127243/tesla-model-s-aut...)
The Trump/Vance admin will support whichever side they believe will benefit them financially, which won’t be the farmers.
"This is all a bit misleading. Farmers don’t want to repair their own equipment. They want to be able to call someone on a Sunday when something breaks to come fix it. Which they can’t do today due to restrictions on John Deere’s IP that limits 3rd parties from offering that service."
Or just consider animal husbandry at its roots, OG bio hacking...
We have a number of things that sniff the traffic for important implement data and state and Deere is going to lock it all up. You'll be left with minimal data on the J1939 connector like the automakers did with OBD2.
it's not a hard guess even if you don't share the opinion ; nearly every movie where 'farmer' is a plot point demonstrates a rural-living poorly educated family living in dust-bowl conditions and barely scraping enough resource by to feed the animals.
grapes of wrath, wizard of oz, of mice and men, o brother where art thou, ballad of buster scruggs -- yes it's a stereotype , but it's a common one in movies and literature.
This seems to massively undersell the resources that went into it's creation and promotion. ref:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-says-project-2025-auth...
It wouldn't be the worst thing. 20 years for a patent may have been sensible a century ago but these days it's almost absurd.
I even saw a conversation on here a few months back where someone on here not-so-nicely corrected a user that the big industrial farmers are smart but the rest of them are backwoods hicks that barely know what electricity is.
Vance literally wrote the forward to an upcoming book by Heritage Foundation President Kevin D. Roberts, the organization responsible for Project 2025. It is absolutely relevant.
If an action that hurts the stock short-term but will help int he long-term needs to be performed why would you as an investor enact it or even stay for the ride?
You are better off either opposing it or selling your stock and then waiting to see if someone will enact the changes, then you have the "insider" information to know that the short-term stock drop was a good thing for the long-term and rebuy the shares cheaper.
* your food is 5x more expensive as a result of protectionist tariffs
* there are no protectionist tariffs and all of your food is produced in and imported from poor countries who can now use this as diplomatic leverage
https://www.opensourceecology.org/portfolio/tractor/
They also have a 3d printer, a microhouse, a CEB press, and a power cube
It still seems surprising to me that this idea can survive more than five seconds of thought. Farmers own tracts of land, lots of equipment, and have to navigate the market for their product, financing, capital allocation, weather patterns, all sorts of random events. They frequently have dozens of employees, and constantly have to negotiate with those, and with customers, and with vendors.
All of this is in addition to the actual growing of crops.
It seems like the most natural thing in the world that this type of person won't take kindly to being dictated to by John Deere (doesn't mean it doesn't happen anyway) and would try their hand at a bit of hacking if needs must.
The Monsanto stigma is well-earned by its legal teams, much to the chagrin of its many Monsanto biochem employees that saw (and see) the company as a creator of good in the world.
A lease allows for the buyer to own the product, free and clear of the seller.
People that don't understand this think that the production of GMO crops is done by scientists gene splicing scary chemicals into food products.
What is actually done is scientist get a genetic profile of crops, look for genes in crops that behave in a way they like, and bread crops with those genes. Exactly what "natural breeding" does, except for maybe the fact that it can be far more targeted with the genetic information.
There is a downside to this, it often results in highly homogeneous genetics in plants. However, that's a problem we already have with "natural" processes (see: bananas and most citrus fruits).
Tragedy of the commons was an ideological essay designed to justify privatization of public goods. It was disproven by data before it was published. I am sure there are some hyper specific examples where it has happened as described, but as a “fact” about the world and as a justification for any course of action, it’s highly suspect.
https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false...
Usually. Not this time around, though. You can't call yourself a "reasonable person" and vote for the people behind https://i.imgur.com/WQ4qbfj.png .
Sorry. You just can't.
"I've been voting XXX all of my life, and my state has been ruled by XXX over the last 20 years, and the life is still shitty. It's totally a failure of YYY, they want to destroy America"
> Alternative data points
Presenting that list as a counter suggests that "leave it to the states" necessarily means "more freedom for individuals", which is very questionable. Look what just happened to abortion rights.
The ur-example in American history would be literal slavery.
> The Department of Justice (DOJ) would lose its independence and be under control of the President
Hold up, is this "big government" as measured by employee count, or is this "big government" as measured by oppressive power?
A dictatorship can get away with far fewer public-employees than a democracy, yet it's not the kind of "small government" anybody should want.
Rent might also refer to the price portion of a leasing agreement (or rental agreement). So in shorthand usage, “the lease” might encompass all terms of borrowing something, including the price, but “the rent” might just refer to the price.
I see you’ve never met a farmer. The exact opposite of what you claim is reality.
Farmers are highly technical and have come up with plenty of ingenious solutions to problems on their farms, any labor saving device they can dream up can save them lots of time and money. Repairing equipment quickly is an important skill to have when something shits out during harvest, the weather isn’t going to wait..
A farmer can work miracles with a welder, hammer, wrench, and pliers since they’re generally put in the middle of nowhere and need to keep equipment operational.
Could you share a link to that full PDF? I assume it's from the recently published documents from Smith?
Edit: Found it! https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25238371-chutkan-ord...
In this instance, it's not like John Deere is using their position to improve the status quo of their product for everyone involved. They are explicitly demanding money for nothing - not only is it anticompetitive, but it's not promoting healthy market development. Deliberately designing malnutritional formula is really not that different from deliberately designing a tractor it's owners can't own. The mechanism for regulating both issues is pretty similar as well.
But then again, what are they supposed to do when practically every corner on the internet only mentions John Deere in a negative context.
- If a consumer buys a car with heated seats and an option to activate the heated seats as a subscription, but the consumer elects not to subscribe, do the inactive heaters still count as inventory? If so, what if the car or heaters get destroyed but the automaker doesn't ever learn about the destruction?
- Would this apply to e-books and media? In today's market, if I buy an e-book or media from a streaming service, I'm not buying a copy, but rather a revocable license with a one-time fee. It seems like that e-book or media is inventory for the book seller.
You think that's bad? I bought a "RAM upgrade" over the phone from HAAS for a CNC machine back in 2016ish. The upgrade was from 1mb to 16mb of RAM.
The technician on the phone told me to go to the machine and punch in a series of keys followed by a 21 digit code. That was my ~$2,000 RAM upgrade.
The RAM was always there. It was just locked away as "reserve value" for the manufacturer.
I know for a fact that there are competitors, in Europe we have many other brand of tractors. It would make no sense to buy something that you know you can't repair.
Too much money and private interest here.
I spent a summer working on a 3rd generation family farm, and it was one of the most technically competent workplaces I’ve ever seen. The owner had a degree in agricultural engineering, and dozens of patents from farming equipment he initially invented for his own use. Much of the equipment they used day to day was designed and built on site and they had a full machine shop, electrical shop, etc. Modern equipment like combines are so complex, automation heavy, and unreliable that they are usually operated by master mechanics that also weld, code, and are otherwise primarily technical people. When those multi-million dollar machines break- which happens daily- they are losing money fast and need to fix it immediately, right there in the field.
The idea of farmers as uneducated non-technical people is an ignorant stereotype held by urban people that have no clue what farms are really like.
Yes their profit is up, no it is unrelated to the concerns
The company is acting in a way that luts the whole food system at risk
They should be disbanded, by force. I recommend replacement with a farmer cooperative
What do you call that if you can't call it a tragedy of the commons?
A simple search finds more examples and references to literature than you can likely read in years.
I’d recommend starting here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
Tesla won't let you buy parts unless you enter the vehicle vin. I believe some other things you have to order through the tesla app.
I think those kinds of requirements should be disallowed too.
Won't happen. Feds find the status quo too useful to let every tom dick and harry start wrenching on these things
I'm pretty familiar with what's going on at CAT. A large part of the way all the emissions stuff that everyone (I'm talking about the customers, dealers, OEMs, the people who actually pay for things, not the online peanut gallery) hates gets enforced is that the OEM threatens the dealers that they'll cut them off from the software if they don't run a tight ship and their techs are too frequently caught doing things like plugging into vehicles outside the scope of their job, working on deleted equipment and whatnot. The dealers roll this downhill to their employees. I assume Deere is similar.
Basically removing the dealers and therefore the OEM's stranglehold on software would take the teeth out of emissions enforcement.
Food sometimes is, and honestly a more centralised food subscription system could drive down the cost of food by making demand more predictable and enabling better economy of scale.
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/mar/16/john-deere-gpl-vi...
I somewhat agree with your earlier comment, but this bit is ignoring the systemic issues involved.
Deere is a leader in much of the efficiency technology that allows large-scale farming operations to reach the economy of scale needed to farm the huge multi-thousand (tens of thousands of acres in many cases) grain operations that are slowly but surely taking over food production in the US.
This trend, unabated, is a weird form of monopoly power for lack of a better word. If one manufacturer is more or less the sole-source for the largest corporate farms, and those farming operations are putting smaller ones out of business due to cost pressure - eventually - and likely sooner than later it becomes a too big to fail situation and a systemic national security risk.
This is starting to get into the realm of arms manufacturing. If these trends continue for another decade or three, and then Deere has say a massive IT failure, planting and harvesting operations literally grind to a halt for the top-end equipment entirely reliant on the automation and data harvesting these machines require to operate. People will be at risk for starvation in the event of an extended outage. Farming as a Service has a hidden cost to it many are not seeing in these comments.
I don't agree with disbanding Deere and nationalizing it - however this really needs to be looked at much more than a simple competition issue. It's rapidly becoming a winner-takes-all market, which is subsequently running the smaller operations out of business and putting the US food supply at a systemic risk if nothing is done.
Of course a competitor could somehow battle through the patent forest and capital requirements, but I wouldn't bet our lives on that.
"What is common to many is taken least care of, for all men have greater regard for what is their own than for what they possess in common with others."
Maybe you're suggesting that that essay popularized the phrasing? But I'm pretty sure even as a coined "term" it was around before then
GMO is different. It involves the laboratory isolation of genes, and techniques to introduce said genes into an organism such that its DNA is altered. These technique do include gene splicing.
Golden rice is one well known example. It is a GMO plant which has been modified with genes taken from daffodils and a bacteria called erwinium uredovora. It's not just breeding existing species for good qualities.
This does seem like capitalism at work. Still, I really want to hate the players and the game. This has been brutal extractive malevolence against an industry supporting the very base of the pyramid of needs: John Deere is hurting the world incredibly badly.
To the topic in question, Republicans want to abolish most regulations (see: Project 2025). And so far the only states to pass right-to-repair laws are Democraticly-controlled (NY, MN, CA, OR, CO).
I remember reading that, back in the 50s or 60s, the phone company owned "your" phone. It was permanently attached to the wall, and you weren't allowed to do anything to alter it. Did AT&T pay taxes on those phones as inventory?
In any case there are other venues where this type of conversation is better held.
That's a bit hyperbolic. It was just hung on the wall. If it was permanent, they wouldn't be able to take it back. Thanks for the reminder that we're to the point in time that "kids today" honestly have no memory of land line phones.
But yes, the phones were only available from Ma Bell, and you did have a monthly fee for them. They did have table top versions as well, so it wasn't just wall mounts. They were heavy solid well built devices. Once it was opened for anyone to make, they became cheap light weight plastic pieces of crap.
More often, companies shill bullshit, inestimable long-term growth (AI-bullshit for example) to pump price. Tesla is the poster-child of this strategy.
In contrast, short-term thinking/marketing is a sure fire way to annihilate a stock. Why would the next buyer pay a premium for a squeezed orange?
The dark reality is that most things we customers and employees complain about as “short-term thinking” are tremendously profitable over the long run.
Yes, future earnings are worth far less than current earnings - especially in a non-ZIRP world.
I pointed out that futures trading was literally invented by farmers.
I had a landline when I was a kid, but my parents got rid of it shortly after I left for college.
I suspect some popular blog/YouTube channel made some waves around it.
It is only after stocks suffer severe shocks, does private equity spring into action, and discipline executives via the threat of acquisition & firings.
So its is actually executives that can be shortsighted, not an ultra-long-termist passive investment dominated US investor base.
They're also well-known for artificially capping battery capacity unless you buy an unlock. There have been a few stories before about them unlocking the expanded capacity for free during emergencies.
I know a few farmer in Europe, despite being better if you tell them they can't repair their engine, they would get very angry and never buy this brand again. When things break its faster to repair themselves because they already repaired it many times.
But here farms are much smaller than in the us, so it might be a matter of priority. If you have so much land than loosing a day on repairing something makes you lose more money, it makes sense to go with John Deere.
On the other hand, these farmers all have several tractors and old equipment like 40 years old so that when a thing break they can still use another even if less efficient to do the job.
Tesla however, they change stuff alllll the damn time because they make so much of their stuff in-house, the vertical integration eliminates the need for rigid contracts. You absolutely need the VIN because for some differences even knowing the week of the production doesn't give sufficient resolution.
By the way, legacy car makers are also shifting to that model, BMW for example doesn't deliver paper-printed sheets for which fuse in the fuse box does what for a few years now, you have to use an online service. The logistics for printing the sheets for all the variants became too complex.
In this case, you already bought and paid for the additional RAM. The manufacturer is refusing to let you use it until you pay additional money, even though you theoretically own it already. That’s not providing a service, it’s just extortion.
If you could somehow prove that the additional RAM was not factored into the original cost of what you bought then this might be fair (albeit wasteful) - but I doubt it…
The DHS was created in the wake of 9/11 by GW and has furthered the security/police state. They fail pretty hard at securing the border as wlel.
> the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) would be privatized
The TSA is a jobs program for rude/mean people who also steal/assault passengers. It did not exist pre-2001. Privatizing it makes sense. Its workers form unions that extort the taxpayer.
> The Department of Education would be eliminated and oversight of education and federal funding for education will be handed over to the states
Good. All the DoE does is service loans and hand out free money to the broken higher education system. They don't set curriculum. Every state has its own DoE as well. Every educational metric has declined under the DoE as well. Its essentially a jobs program for bureaucrats.
> The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is to “privatize as much as possible” and close many hospitals and clinics.
As a Vet, the VA is a total mess. I can't see how it could get worse by becoming private. Lets shake things up.
> The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) would be taken apart and send much of its work to states and other agencies
HUD is probably the worst landlord in the country. States have public housing agencies already as well.
I don't buy that. This strangehold is the only way that VW managed to cheat emissions for years without getting caught.
They are. I've had a gmail account for almost 20 years. Hell, I worked for Google for 10 years. They know who I am. They've seen me search the internet and watch YT videos for effectively eons. Yet the YT ad targeting algorithm is so stupid that it apparently doesn't know that I'm male. I get pre-roll ads for feminine hygiene products and bras all the time.
BTW, ad gods: please don't make it smarter. I don't want ads. When I start to see ads, I block them. If I can't block them, I will just use the product less. How do you not know this? Or maybe that's by design...
What a stupid thing to say. Not only do you not know anything about me (I am myself a small-time/part-time farmer, and my neighbors are all farmers. My 14 acres is the smallest lot in my area. My neighbor/friend across the street farms 80 acres and sells his crops as some of the highest quality produce to top buyers. I also grew up with farmers as family members and friends. I think I've probably met a farmer before), but you clearly didn't even read my comment before replying to it or you would know that you're opening salvo is quite wrong. A quote from my comment that you replied to:
> Some of the farmers I've talked to understand the importance (sic) ownership and right to repair better than even many engineers.
It seems to me that logically, it's hard to have talked to people, while simultaneously having never met them.
After such a sloppy and unnecessarily assumptive (and incorrectly assumptive) response, it's hard to give any credibility whatsoever to anything else you say. I agree with it, but (as many of us rural livers/farmers) like to say, "even a stopped clock is right twice a day".
Also, I never said they aren't intelligent or able to fix anything that moves. If something I said suggested they weren't intelligent or capable, please point it out to me. Such a thing would be absurd - all the farmers I know are quite handy and can fix just about anything (that big corporations don't actively engineer to prevent, hence the hullaballoo over right-to-repair).
What I said was that they don't usually care about political fights like right-to-repair. And I stand by that, many of them don't. It's not a direct relation with intelligence level or handiness, it's more about personality and individual interests. Most of them just think John Deere are assholes but have no idea about the right-to-repair movement. They don't realize how deep the poison goes. More and more are getting into it, but it's still pretty unusual.
It's a free-ish country so you can do as you please, but I would recommend that you read and think a little more carefully before replying to people, especially when you're going to insult them by loudly proclaiming that they are an ignorant liar like you did to me.
Sounds like a maintenance nightmare. Who decides when parts go EOL?
A principle that stuck out to me as a child was that our society prioritized lower prices for consumers as a whole over the prosperity of any one company or industry.
We let companies grow to the point where they now subvert the will of the people.
It's not in the interest of shareholders to buy into tactics that pump up share price at the end of a quarter but we're talking about an information disadvantage; the seller is rearranging their books with respect to intangibles to deceive the buyer.
It would probably be easier to describe where one would not get this stereotype. Pretty much every city person (which as many sibling comments have pointed out, control essentially all media and pop culture) holds and perpetuates that stereotype.
Pretty much only people who are or know farmers know the reality behind it.
But I do think it's important to point out that farmers are a very diverse group, just like many other professions. There are geniuses and there are morons. You can't take a sample size of n <= 5 and extrapolate characteristics of millions of people.
And the Deer example is sorta nice in that I don't have to explain to management why that sorta DRM is a horrible idea. They already know.
In many rural areas, John Deere is the closest and/or only option, so you have to choose between freedom and inconvenience, or technological slavery and safety. As we've seen with the general public, most people will go with the latter. Your insurance premiums are certainly cheaper that way.
I'm not making a judgment on whether it's worth it or not, I think that depends on a lot of details, but when people throw out tariffs they are rarely honest about the fact that it's a tax that flows downstream to the end user. In some cases multiple ways, like farmers who pay higher cost for equipment due to tariffs, so production of their soybeans (or whatever) are higher, so then they needs USDA subsidies to make them price competitive for export, so there's multiple layers of taxation there to make it work.
While I do think that's fair, my personal hope is that such a requirement would make them stop this asinine practice.
Though I am not a farmer I have spent time with the spouse's family out in W Minnesota and all of them were farmers. I did not get the impression that they were useless around a wrench, welding rig, or electrical circuits.
An argument I could buy about Deere's brand loyalty is that (I know nothing about this beyond farmer hearsay) the current generation of farmers seems to really like the GPS automation. Grandpa can go a lot more years these days, is the point. I'd be curious about the accuracy of that anecdata.
All of that fuckery is not going to help you or the technician when your car breaks.
I guess this suggests what kind of people should be buying Teslas (buying new cars every 1-3 years) and what their resale value should quickly become (disposable cars).
I could see only long-term earnings being available but that's something quite different. Shareholders are often willing to put up with that situation, as long as they believe the long-term story (and see that other investors believe it).
A situation that could make short-term share price increases unlikely is if the stock is just way overvalued for its likely earnings in any reasonable timeframe, in which case shareholders will happily take profits rather than try to make the company change anything.
You might drive down the share price if earnings go down, but that's not necessarily the case if the long-term value is clear. An example would be any company reinvesting earnings in a new factory.
So it's difficult to know that these people don't care about Trump at all and think he is just as ridiculous as you do. They just hate the Democrats so much that they will do anything they can to stop them. The reasons are numerous and valid, btw.
Yes and this underpins what most consider the disgusting trait of being excessively greedy, not just executives, doctors specialties like dermatology, anything.
The doctor who wants the ultra high paying medical specialty sometimes cares nothing about becoming rich. Fear. Fear of being crushed by all that student debt. Doing everything possible to avoid that. Planning to start a family, fear of homeless, etc. Fear of being unable to retire. Excess, irrational fear. Then, it passes, and now we have what seems in retrospect, simply a greedy bastard with now an excessive amount of money.
Same with executives, the thought may not be "let me cheese short term gains as hard as possible" but "let me hedge against short term losses as much as possible".
Aggression from sheer greed is human human thought modality. Predatory. Aggression when cornered, anxiety / fear response, arguably a more vicious and nasty aggression, is another very much different type of aggression because it is not predatory. The difference is predatory feels more voluntary and fear is about whether I should risk being super aggressive or not. In defense-of-self aggression, fear as already there plenty, so a person can do about any hyper aggressive evil thing in the name of defending from a perceived threat - such as lay off half the work force, destroy customer relationships, etc. In this way a good leader must have a steady hand and outlook with regards to fear.
The best thing to do is to not buy it in the first place.
Actions speak louder than words, and the DNC's VP passed the most comprehensive right to repair legislation ever in the U.S. in his home state: https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/25/minnesota_right_to_re...
(Doesn't cover farming equipment but still a huge step in the right direction.) You can also be certain that Big Tech was fuming when this was passed.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/25/minnesota_right_to_re...
At some point all corporations start to trim expenses or generate new revenues from existing avenues - so that reputation was used to get everyone kinda trapped in their JD world that was essentially made "unrepairable" overnight.
This is the same thing Monsanto did with seed, Dow chem with Roundup and Microsoft with windows for a non farm example.
Once you envelop an ecosystem of products and services the people within that system are largely at the mercy of it. Apple and their batteries intentionally being made to fail scandal a few years back is another great example.
It's just the numbers are much bigger in the agricultural world than the consumer tech world. The tractor that has essentially a SaS contract/required yearly operating expense for maintenance and upkeep might cost millions in the first place. Many farmers have machine shops that are plenty capable of repairing tractors - bc they've always done so.
JD is trying to fundamentally change the game - it's not the farmers fault for being a loyal customer for 10-40+ years, as many farmers today inherited farms that already had JD equipment from their fathers/grand fathers.
JD is exploiting that and their supply chain to make tractors and farm equipment glorified rentals.
What I was going to say, moreover when you have a tool that is critical to your job, you get a second one. It doesn't have to be a great one, it can be the old one that kept failing so you decided to buy a new one, whatever but just good enough to save your life Incase your critical equipment fails.
Writing an introduction to someone's book, as a public figure, is lending your reputation to them - that's the point, to put your name and reputation behind them, and so they can show that off for credibility.
The nice part was it being their phone, they took care of it. Service was a call away and the service tech could do what it takes and have few worries.
Begin sidebar:
Our wall mounted phone was surrounded by phone numbers and other bits of information. I started it one day writing the name of a burger joint we used to call all the time by the phone.
Mom was pissed, but Dad liked it! Next time we went to call the number was right there!
And so it began...
When I left home for the last time, I looked at that phone and wall for a long time. Many years of our lives were there. Friends, family, businesses, other things like EMS, poison control, various hotlines were all there organized fairly well given the organic way it started.
I wish I had taken a picture!
Seeing that happen and being a part of it all is probably one of the more potent reminders, to me of course, of what the pre-digital times were like.
End sidebar
Wish I knew about inventory. My guess is yes! They would have to do accounting on all the modems anyway. Service, where they are all at, serial numbers and more.
When one went bad, it usually involved either a visit to the ISP, or a tech shows up with a new one and a few records get updated and the modem ends up home.
Cable TV boxes are another example!
I do know those were inventoried. A friend went to work as a tech for a local cable company. (Yes, they did tell me how to enable decryption on all channels for at least one model...) They fixed the incoming boxes and those units went right back out to homes.
The units were purchased a few times per year to balance subscriber growth and attrition. Good repair metrics saved a TON of money. The units were from one to a few hundred dollars a pop!
Rental was $7.99 / month at one point I could remember.
Say the box was $150, at that rental rate the box becomes a minor profit item after a year and a half, right?
Well, most cable boxes got used a decade or more, especially when the company did not have to change its encryption tech.
That is a 4 to 5x return on the purchase price. Maybe 3x return after attrition, failed returns and repair costs get woven in.
Not a bad deal for them. And as the user, not many worries, but also basically zero options.
An example from cable boxes was serial ports and input and output ports either disabled or nerfed to the point of poor usability really sucked for anyone wanting to use the gear technically, or as part of an automation of some kind.
I live near a farmer that owns a several thousand head dairy, the company that transports the milk to the creamery that he also owns and the brands that creamery sells to local business - he just keeps buying farms as soon as they go up for sale, anything in the area.
He rips out the homestead and leaves only building that he will use immediately and plows the entire acreage - not a tree in sight. Those trees between fields exist bc of the dust bowl in the 30s - we literally already kno what happens when people do that, he doesn't care at all.
The land he owns is larger than the estates barons of old would rule over - larger by a lot.
Once he automates and all the land outside the cities are owned by him and ppl like him - it can stay that way indefinitely... much like the dark ages. That's their goal - a permanent divide between the rural and urban populations.
This seems like a tangent but it's not - the family farms are being pushed and bought up by the farmers that willingly play JD's games bc they kno only so many can.
JD doesn't want millions of repair contracts with farmers - they want to consolidate that into something more controllable.
IBM couldn't get their supercomputer/AI that McDonalds funded to correctly run a drive thru - the project was literally shelved. It can play chess tho ;)
The tragedy of the commons didn’t claim that crop yields are slightly depressed. The claim is that the commons will be overused to the point of threatening to destroy it.
People cite the tragedy of the commons to discourage sharing of resources. The idea that common land should be divvied up into private ownership to prevent them falling into ruin. When really shared resources just need accountability between the people who make use of them. It’s just basic game theory: If there is no cost to abusing your opponent, that strategy will get used. But if you’re going to be playing long term with the same people, systems will form to deter abuse.
You read that and understood “categorically proven to be an invalid concept”?
So, just because it’s old doesn’t mean it’s true. Just like “kids these days” or “seems like nobody wants to work anymore” some bad ideas are evergreen.
However, from the parent comment I keyed in on your quote less, and much more on:
> It was disproven
FWIW.
More evidence that people really shouldn't trust their first, shallow reactions to things. You know nothing about me and yet have jumped to an absurdly wrong conclusion, ironically while trying to correct what you think was an incorrect conclusion of mine. For more information, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41887807
> The exact opposite of what you claim is reality.
Please read it a little closer. I'm not claiming any such thing. I'm pointing out that it is a popular conception - and it is. That the popular conception is wrong does not mean it isn't a popular conception. That's quite the logic error. And for someone to point out a popular conception does not mean they agree with it, and even if they did, it certainly does not mean they've never met a farmer (lol). This has so many fallacies in it, it's actually funny.
Charging to stop blocking the use of hardware features that are already present on a product you own however (like seat heaters or battery capacity), is unacceptable in my opinion.
Software Freedom would solve all these problems by making it trivial for users to buy a software patch from a third party vendor for cheap that unlocks the seat heaters, thus destroying the incentive for manufactures to do stupid stuff like that in the first place.