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> A few decades ago, any given farmer often had the skills and tools needed to quickly make repairs if their machinery broke down. These days, however, it’s not

> A few decades ago, any given farmer often had the skills and tools needed to quickly make repairs if their machinery broke down. These days, however, it’s not so straightforward. Most modern farm equipment is technologically advanced, containing computers and sensors that collect and transmit data. As a result, specific software tools are typically necessary to address mechanical failures and other issues. > However, most companies refuse to make those tools available to farmers, making it exceptionally difficult to fix broken machinery on their own. They can’t even go an independent mechanic, since manufacturers won’t sell them parts or diagnostic tools either. This leaves farmers essentially no choice but to take their broken equipment to a licensed dealership. > This isn’t cheap. A farmer might spend thousands of dollars on a simple adjustment they could have done themselves with the appropriate resources. On the other hand, this arrangement has proven wildly lucrative for manufacturers; for Deere, as an example, parts and repairs are up to six times more profitable than selling the equipment itself. This is a part of a larger pattern. Our current underlying system "keeps many practical alternatives sequestered behind private firewalls or unfunded if they cannot generate adequate profits". The current system enables "an exaggerated set of intellectual property monopolies – for copyrights, trademarks and patents – [which] restrain the sharing of scientific, social and economic innovations. Hence the system discourages human cooperation, excludes many people from benefiting from innovation and slows the collective learning of humanity" [1]. Imagine today's high-tech world, without the capitalist intellectual property system. It will allow many more people to become skilled and able. I think we will look back at this phase of human civilization in horror; IP systems are an excessive way of dominating people and stifling their growth. [1] http://wealthofthecommons.org/essay/peer-peer-economy-and-new-civilization-centered-around-sustenance-commons http://wealthofthecommons.org/essay/peer-peer-economy-and-ne...

antibuddy 5y ago
On the other hand the incentive for people to innovate and make it accessible to anyone is often money. The criticism of capitalism is warranted, however the supposedly bad capitalist IP system is also the reason for innovation and cooperation.
- CraigJPerry 5y ago
  Most of the interesting innovations happen on publicly funded research. Whether it’s your RNA vaccine https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-details/darpa-awards-moderna-therapeutics-grant-25-million-develop/ https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-d... or your phones touch screen, or your siri voice assistant or your uber gps taxi
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    > Most of the interesting innovations happen on publicly funded research Excluding airplanes, jet engines, rockets, transistors, git, etc.
    - devdas 5y ago
      Rockets were publicly funded research. A lot of airplane research was publicly funded.
      - WalterBright 5y ago
        Goddard was not publicly funded. The Langley prototype fell into the Potomac like a sack of wet cement, and cost 20 times in government funding what the Wrights spent on their entire R+D program. Langley clearly had not solved any of the problems necessary for controlled, powered flight.
- louis___ 5y ago
  This rethoric has been proven false in the software development ecosystem. Nowadays almost all new programming languages are open-source, and *nix OS softwares have won the cultural battle over Windows in the devops community. > the supposedly bad capitalist IP system is also the reason for innovation and cooperation For me this is as much a myth as the good old "the wealth trickles down from the rich to the poor"
  - vimacs2 5y ago
brobdingnagians 5y ago
Are the technological advancements in tractors really worth it? Does anyone have any stats on this? I imagine tractors two decades ago did the job about the same. Is adding a whole bunch of chips to something for a very minor increase in efficiency worth losing the ability to repair it easily. If it is anything like cars, then I would think the technology increases chance of failure and actually just increases the cost of doing business; especially when they have to wait to do simple things. Cars 40 years ago did just fine getting from A to B, had air conditioning, radio, and worked reliably. Cars now are finicky, spy on you, and very expensive to repair. It makes me wonder if we would just be better off with not flooding everything with chips. Does connecting your car to your phone really improve your life? I don't think it would improve mine. If anything, I'm trying to connect my phone to _less_ things than I used to because it just steals my attention from things that really matter.
- eliaspro 5y ago
  Tractors and farming in general have dramatically changed throughout the last 20 years or so. They've become much bigger in size (and thereby more efficient), they're mostly self-driving once in the field and control now the whole operation very precisely down to centimeter accuracy e.g. for fertilizer application.
- bluGill 5y ago
  > Does anyone have any stats on this? Yes, every farmer in the US who is serious (that is no small hobby farmers). If the GPS is broken they won't bring the planter out in the field. Technology allows them to put exactly the right amount of seed in the ground at the right place. They saves thousands of dollars every year just by not planting too much. Then get tens of thousands more every year because the right amount of seeds results in more yield (profit) than either too much (plants have to fight each other for sun) or too little (bare ground doesn't produce a harvest). Farmers are still figuring out to turn other data into profit, but they are learning that some soils just never will yield well no matter how much fertilizer they put on so they don't waste money on them, while others with a little extra fertilizer will yield more. The computer lets them easily adjust fertilizer levels for each small section of land.
dalbasal 5y ago
I like this line of thinking, but I don't like the grand theory aspects of it. Terms like "current political economy." Explaining everything, from poverty to environmental degradation, as a product of psycho-societal ideas like the "false idea of material abundance." It might work as a method of criticism, but I don't think it works the other way. We need to discover and develop new ways, and that doesn't tend to work from highly broad, abstract understandings down to the practical level. I agree with most of the major touchpoints, but I think it could be written better.^ To hazard an inexact term, this needs to be far less ideological. Take this paragraph: We believe that new forms of cooperative and distributed property will emerge along these lines, a trend explained by Matt Cropp in his article, “The Coming Micro-Ownership Revolution.”6 Cropp’s article explains the direct link between P2P-driven declines in transaction costs and the shift to more distributed forms of ownership. The new corporate forms will no longer be based on shareholder-based ownership, but on common capital stock, held by the commoners themselves. These new entities constitute the “third commons” of “created materiality,” i.e., humankind’s productive machinery (in other words, capital), which joins the first two commons, the inherited material commons of nature and created “immaterial” cultural commons. The new forms of distributed individual property, which can be freely aggregated into collectives, emulate the free aggregation... The author believes this because its a highly legible, direct application of the ideas and analysis. It has the disadvantage of being both limiting, and nonspecific. Hard to use as a formula, and easy to use for rejection. I'm totally on board with OSS/Linux & Wikimedia as existence proofs. I would also add the WWW. OSS and its ecosystems are a rich set of smaller examples. I think lichess makes a great example, somewhat similar to wikimedia. Note that Jimmy Wales is more of a capitalist/libertarian, in his ideals. He would (I assume) be totally off put by this article's take. Thibault Duplessis, Lichess' founder, describes himself as a french communist. CVince Serf is just a dude. TimBL is more of a moderate pragmatist. Good look finding a take on "contemporary capitalism" that appeals to all three. Why carry all this unnecessary baggage. ^More practical, convincing to the unconvinced, more room to graft on other ideas, less combative, less offensive to pre-xistsing political identities....
GuB-42 5y ago
In fact, the pattern is that people don't want to spend a lot of money upfront and companies like sustained income. So given the choice between a $50k tractor which cannot be repaired unless you pay a lot of money and an easy to repair $100k tractor, both farmers and manufacturers will chose the first option. Of course, farmers want an easy to repair $50k tractor, but manufacturers have to make money. And manufacturers want to sell $100k expensive-to-maintain tractors, but competition won't let them. The system we have now, with all its flaws, is one that suits people the most. We can make laws when the free market doesn't work, for example, we could make $50k unmaintainable tractors illegal, which I think would be great, but it will piss off farmers who will need to pay $100k for their tractors and it will piss off manufacturers who will lose their steady income. > Imagine today's high-tech world, without the capitalist intellectual property system. No need to imagine, we have China, and before that, we had USSR. Not perfect examples, especially for China, but these are the real world alternatives to capitalism.
- sequesteredmar 5y ago
  It isn't about maintenance itself, it's limiting that maintenance to the manufacturer only artificially where it could be done by anyone.
- msrenee 5y ago
  I'm not sure how I'm supposed to have any kind of sympathy for a manufacturer who wants to offer a worse product for more money. Especially when that directly translates to higher food costs for everyone. I'm not saying communism is the answer, but a free market where your choices are a crappy "cheap" product or an acceptable product for twice the price isn't something to be proud of. Oh, the market will solve the problem. Well this is what the market has produced, so that means this is the best possible option. It's like some kind of religion. If this is what the market has decided, then it must be the best thing and we have no right to question it.
  - GuB-42 5y ago
    By the option that suits people the most, I didn't mean "best". The free market is actually a science, and the "invisible hand of the market" is formalized by game theory. And it often result in optimal solutions, but not always. The prisoner's dilemma is the best-known counter-example. There is mathematical proof that a free market is not perfect, but currently, in practice and when supplemented by relatively light regulation, that's the best we have. As for the choice, you can't have good and cheap, it is not about being proud of something, it is just how things are. Legislation can just remove the choice. For example, you are not allowed to buy a car so cheap that it is going to kill you and the environment, which is a good thing. But because of that, you are forced to pay "twice the price", you just don't notice it because the cheap option is simply not available.
maxerickson 5y ago
The DRM in these tractors doesn't really depend on any IP laws. There's probably some restriction on reverse engineering it, but for a relatively low volume market with difficult to manufacture hardware parts, there's not going to be all that much interest in overcoming DRM even if there weren't laws.
- salamandersauce 5y ago
  DMCA. Breaking even the shittiest DRM is illegal. This of course kills incentives to break DRM from the commercial side as nobody can make any money off it without getting sued. Otherwise I imagine some 3rd party part manufacturer would attempt it.
  - saurik 5y ago
    Even if it weren't illegal, we are rapidly entering an era where it won't be practical anyway: I work directly on these issues--participating in the DMCA exemption process every cycle and serving as a witness during the hearings--and the whole process just feels kind of dumb knowing that "sure, so let's say it is legal to jailbreak your tractor: they still have to make a mistake in a world where bootloaders are becoming increasingly reliable" :(.
    - bluGill 5y ago
      The DMCA is the least of your worries. The EPA has figured out that the only only reason people actually want to update software on their tractors is to turn off emissions controls.
      - LgWoodenBadger 5y ago
        Manufacturers of higher-powered diesel tractors have had to introduce features to allow for regen cycles to be postponed, so I wouldn’t be surprised at all
        5y ago

antibuddy 5y ago

On the other hand the incentive for people to innovate and make it accessible to anyone is often money. The criticism of capitalism is warranted, however the supposedly bad capitalist IP system is also the reason for innovation and cooperation.

CraigJPerry 5y ago
Most of the interesting innovations happen on publicly funded research. Whether it’s your RNA vaccine https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-details/darpa-awards-moderna-therapeutics-grant-25-million-develop/ https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-d... or your phones touch screen, or your siri voice assistant or your uber gps taxi
- WalterBright 5y ago
  > Most of the interesting innovations happen on publicly funded research Excluding airplanes, jet engines, rockets, transistors, git, etc.
  - devdas 5y ago
    Rockets were publicly funded research. A lot of airplane research was publicly funded.
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      Goddard was not publicly funded. The Langley prototype fell into the Potomac like a sack of wet cement, and cost 20 times in government funding what the Wrights spent on their entire R+D program. Langley clearly had not solved any of the problems necessary for controlled, powered flight.
louis___ 5y ago
This rethoric has been proven false in the software development ecosystem. Nowadays almost all new programming languages are open-source, and *nix OS softwares have won the cultural battle over Windows in the devops community. > the supposedly bad capitalist IP system is also the reason for innovation and cooperation For me this is as much a myth as the good old "the wealth trickles down from the rich to the poor"
- vimacs2 5y ago

brobdingnagians 5y ago

Are the technological advancements in tractors really worth it? Does anyone have any stats on this? I imagine tractors two decades ago did the job about the same. Is adding a whole bunch of chips to something for a very minor increase in efficiency worth losing the ability to repair it easily. If it is anything like cars, then I would think the technology increases chance of failure and actually just increases the cost of doing business; especially when they have to wait to do simple things. Cars 40 years ago did just fine getting from A to B, had air conditioning, radio, and worked reliably. Cars now are finicky, spy on you, and very expensive to repair. It makes me wonder if we would just be better off with not flooding everything with chips. Does connecting your car to your phone really improve your life? I don't think it would improve mine. If anything, I'm trying to connect my phone to _less_ things than I used to because it just steals my attention from things that really matter.

eliaspro 5y ago
Tractors and farming in general have dramatically changed throughout the last 20 years or so. They've become much bigger in size (and thereby more efficient), they're mostly self-driving once in the field and control now the whole operation very precisely down to centimeter accuracy e.g. for fertilizer application.
bluGill 5y ago
> Does anyone have any stats on this? Yes, every farmer in the US who is serious (that is no small hobby farmers). If the GPS is broken they won't bring the planter out in the field. Technology allows them to put exactly the right amount of seed in the ground at the right place. They saves thousands of dollars every year just by not planting too much. Then get tens of thousands more every year because the right amount of seeds results in more yield (profit) than either too much (plants have to fight each other for sun) or too little (bare ground doesn't produce a harvest). Farmers are still figuring out to turn other data into profit, but they are learning that some soils just never will yield well no matter how much fertilizer they put on so they don't waste money on them, while others with a little extra fertilizer will yield more. The computer lets them easily adjust fertilizer levels for each small section of land.

dalbasal 5y ago

I like this line of thinking, but I don't like the grand theory aspects of it. Terms like "current political economy." Explaining everything, from poverty to environmental degradation, as a product of psycho-societal ideas like the "false idea of material abundance." It might work as a method of criticism, but I don't think it works the other way. We need to discover and develop new ways, and that doesn't tend to work from highly broad, abstract understandings down to the practical level. I agree with most of the major touchpoints, but I think it could be written better.^ To hazard an inexact term, this needs to be far less ideological. Take this paragraph: We believe that new forms of cooperative and distributed property will emerge along these lines, a trend explained by Matt Cropp in his article, “The Coming Micro-Ownership Revolution.”6 Cropp’s article explains the direct link between P2P-driven declines in transaction costs and the shift to more distributed forms of ownership. The new corporate forms will no longer be based on shareholder-based ownership, but on common capital stock, held by the commoners themselves. These new entities constitute the “third commons” of “created materiality,” i.e., humankind’s productive machinery (in other words, capital), which joins the first two commons, the inherited material commons of nature and created “immaterial” cultural commons. The new forms of distributed individual property, which can be freely aggregated into collectives, emulate the free aggregation... The author believes this because its a highly legible, direct application of the ideas and analysis. It has the disadvantage of being both limiting, and nonspecific. Hard to use as a formula, and easy to use for rejection. I'm totally on board with OSS/Linux & Wikimedia as existence proofs. I would also add the WWW. OSS and its ecosystems are a rich set of smaller examples. I think lichess makes a great example, somewhat similar to wikimedia. Note that Jimmy Wales is more of a capitalist/libertarian, in his ideals. He would (I assume) be totally off put by this article's take. Thibault Duplessis, Lichess' founder, describes himself as a french communist. CVince Serf is just a dude. TimBL is more of a moderate pragmatist. Good look finding a take on "contemporary capitalism" that appeals to all three. Why carry all this unnecessary baggage. ^More practical, convincing to the unconvinced, more room to graft on other ideas, less combative, less offensive to pre-xistsing political identities....

GuB-42 5y ago

In fact, the pattern is that people don't want to spend a lot of money upfront and companies like sustained income. So given the choice between a $50k tractor which cannot be repaired unless you pay a lot of money and an easy to repair $100k tractor, both farmers and manufacturers will chose the first option. Of course, farmers want an easy to repair $50k tractor, but manufacturers have to make money. And manufacturers want to sell $100k expensive-to-maintain tractors, but competition won't let them. The system we have now, with all its flaws, is one that suits people the most. We can make laws when the free market doesn't work, for example, we could make $50k unmaintainable tractors illegal, which I think would be great, but it will piss off farmers who will need to pay $100k for their tractors and it will piss off manufacturers who will lose their steady income. > Imagine today's high-tech world, without the capitalist intellectual property system. No need to imagine, we have China, and before that, we had USSR. Not perfect examples, especially for China, but these are the real world alternatives to capitalism.

sequesteredmar 5y ago
It isn't about maintenance itself, it's limiting that maintenance to the manufacturer only artificially where it could be done by anyone.
msrenee 5y ago
I'm not sure how I'm supposed to have any kind of sympathy for a manufacturer who wants to offer a worse product for more money. Especially when that directly translates to higher food costs for everyone. I'm not saying communism is the answer, but a free market where your choices are a crappy "cheap" product or an acceptable product for twice the price isn't something to be proud of. Oh, the market will solve the problem. Well this is what the market has produced, so that means this is the best possible option. It's like some kind of religion. If this is what the market has decided, then it must be the best thing and we have no right to question it.
- GuB-42 5y ago
  By the option that suits people the most, I didn't mean "best". The free market is actually a science, and the "invisible hand of the market" is formalized by game theory. And it often result in optimal solutions, but not always. The prisoner's dilemma is the best-known counter-example. There is mathematical proof that a free market is not perfect, but currently, in practice and when supplemented by relatively light regulation, that's the best we have. As for the choice, you can't have good and cheap, it is not about being proud of something, it is just how things are. Legislation can just remove the choice. For example, you are not allowed to buy a car so cheap that it is going to kill you and the environment, which is a good thing. But because of that, you are forced to pay "twice the price", you just don't notice it because the cheap option is simply not available.

maxerickson 5y ago

The DRM in these tractors doesn't really depend on any IP laws. There's probably some restriction on reverse engineering it, but for a relatively low volume market with difficult to manufacture hardware parts, there's not going to be all that much interest in overcoming DRM even if there weren't laws.

salamandersauce 5y ago
DMCA. Breaking even the shittiest DRM is illegal. This of course kills incentives to break DRM from the commercial side as nobody can make any money off it without getting sued. Otherwise I imagine some 3rd party part manufacturer would attempt it.
- saurik 5y ago
  Even if it weren't illegal, we are rapidly entering an era where it won't be practical anyway: I work directly on these issues--participating in the DMCA exemption process every cycle and serving as a witness during the hearings--and the whole process just feels kind of dumb knowing that "sure, so let's say it is legal to jailbreak your tractor: they still have to make a mistake in a world where bootloaders are becoming increasingly reliable" :(.
  - bluGill 5y ago
    The DMCA is the least of your worries. The EPA has figured out that the only only reason people actually want to update software on their tractors is to turn off emissions controls.
    - LgWoodenBadger 5y ago
      Manufacturers of higher-powered diesel tractors have had to introduce features to allow for regen cycles to be postponed, so I wouldn’t be surprised at all
      - 5y ago