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I have a group of friends who looked at the BBC article talking about this RTR MOU - https://www.bbc.com/news/business-64206913 https://www.bbc.com/news/busines

I have a group of friends who looked at the BBC article talking about this RTR MOU - https://www.bbc.com/news/business-64206913 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-64206913 - and after reading it, were claiming confidently that it helped push forward right to repair in a good way - I actually spent the time to look at the MOU the article linked and knew right off the bat that it was a load of crap, only meant to extend an easily broken olive branch to farmers. (Right at the bottom, look who is signing the MOU - "SALES AND MARKETING VP" - gee, why isn't it a CEO, or the board of directors?) It's cementing my personal opinion deeper and deeper within me that that the media is directly responsible for forming the viewpoints and ideas of a huge amount of people - and they're violating this responsibility in huge ways by having inexperienced/irresponsible journalists and journalism - not to mention the corporate and governmental meddling that's pervasive to journalisms core. It's somehow become a foreign concept though it wasn't long ago that you could take your TV, vacuum, appliance, computer, small electronics, into repair shops and have experienced, knowledgeable people able to diagnose and repair problems quickly and efficiently. Sure, electronics have gotten more discrete, smaller, harder to replace without specialized tools... The concept is still the same despite what these massive corporations tell you. Apple "supports" individuals by allowing them to pay for a massive/heavy shipments of tools, equipment, instructions, etc. to replace parts on your devices - when they could just provide easily available parts like chips, boards, screens, etc. to third-party repair shops (not "apple-authorized" that come with all kinds of riders and caveats). All so Apple can look at legislators who don't understand intent of laws and societal desires and say "Look, we're trying! We support RTR!" John Deere is pulling the exact same thing - and the media is playing right along with it. It's economically cheaper and more advantageous to go through all these motions to extend this fake peace offering to farmers and have the media convince everyone that it's 'actually really totally right to repair guys' while at the same time controlling absolutely everything in their supply chain so they make profit on their devices at every single corner of market capture - sales, repair, maintenance, customer retention (oh dang, it's too expensive to repair my tractor/phone because the part/board costs 40-50% of a new device, might as well buy a new one!) It's a disgusting anti-consumer practice and it's only going to get worse. The one good thing about inflation and consumer electronics being more expensive long-term is we might see legislation that forces companies to actually allow consumers to repair and maintain their devices, with access to parts, schematics diagrams, etc. etc. I somehow doubt it though.

boltzmann-brain 4y ago
I disagree about computer repair. Maybe it was different in the US, but in Europe, at no time were there easily accessible repair services for computers. Even with the most easily repaired ones - 8-bit computers - you always had to find some guru who was doing it out of sheer love for the machines rather than for money. Once things went into 16 bits they were too complicated for typical repair shops. Electronics repair shops really only ever focused on (CRT) TVs, radios / (cheap) hifi, mayyybe alarms or door openers, mayyyybe the electronics (only!) inside new-fangled electronic laundry machines (up until ~2000 most of them were mechanical, using clockwork mechanisms similar to old mechanical mains-shutoff timer plugs). It might be surprising from today's perspective but most EE's didn't really deal with computers and had no interest in them. They were more interested in analog electronics and many of them were merely glorified electricians. That said my uncle who taught me the basics of my C128 was an electrician, so there.
larossmann 4y ago
>It's cementing my personal opinion deeper and deeper within me that that the media is directly responsible for forming the viewpoints and ideas of a huge amount of people - and they're violating this responsibility in huge ways by having inexperienced/irresponsible journalists and journalism - not to mention the corporate and governmental meddling that's pervasive to journalisms core. I would be fine with the author of the article not being informed on the topic if they had just reached out to some farmers to ask what they think before blindly publishing this as a win. I'm not a farmer. I have no clue. I get numbers of people who show up at the state legislature in Nebraska in 2017, Maryland 2020, NY 2015, and I call them all up when this comes out. Some will be open to speaking on the record, some not, and some will come on video. Nobody has all the answers, and nobody has the time to research & become an expert on everything when covering so many different topics in a day. That's fine. Not asking the direct stakeholders who are affected by this news what they think of it when writing these articles, is a giant misstep. It takes so little time to do. I think there is a financial penalty to not being the first out with an article, so the incentive structure is to be the first out with the new news, rather than the most correct. The corrections will never do as well as the original piece, either. There was one thing I got wrong in 2018, because I didn't have access to the court records at the time. Once they were shared with me, I posted a correction in 3 separate videos, that, altogether, got less than 5% the viewership of the original piece. It's even worse for mainstream outlets that issue the correction as an asterisk or bury it, rather than as a centerpiece of their programming.

boltzmann-brain 4y ago

I disagree about computer repair. Maybe it was different in the US, but in Europe, at no time were there easily accessible repair services for computers. Even with the most easily repaired ones - 8-bit computers - you always had to find some guru who was doing it out of sheer love for the machines rather than for money. Once things went into 16 bits they were too complicated for typical repair shops. Electronics repair shops really only ever focused on (CRT) TVs, radios / (cheap) hifi, mayyybe alarms or door openers, mayyyybe the electronics (only!) inside new-fangled electronic laundry machines (up until ~2000 most of them were mechanical, using clockwork mechanisms similar to old mechanical mains-shutoff timer plugs). It might be surprising from today's perspective but most EE's didn't really deal with computers and had no interest in them. They were more interested in analog electronics and many of them were merely glorified electricians. That said my uncle who taught me the basics of my C128 was an electrician, so there.

larossmann 4y ago

>It's cementing my personal opinion deeper and deeper within me that that the media is directly responsible for forming the viewpoints and ideas of a huge amount of people - and they're violating this responsibility in huge ways by having inexperienced/irresponsible journalists and journalism - not to mention the corporate and governmental meddling that's pervasive to journalisms core. I would be fine with the author of the article not being informed on the topic if they had just reached out to some farmers to ask what they think before blindly publishing this as a win. I'm not a farmer. I have no clue. I get numbers of people who show up at the state legislature in Nebraska in 2017, Maryland 2020, NY 2015, and I call them all up when this comes out. Some will be open to speaking on the record, some not, and some will come on video. Nobody has all the answers, and nobody has the time to research & become an expert on everything when covering so many different topics in a day. That's fine. Not asking the direct stakeholders who are affected by this news what they think of it when writing these articles, is a giant misstep. It takes so little time to do. I think there is a financial penalty to not being the first out with an article, so the incentive structure is to be the first out with the new news, rather than the most correct. The corrections will never do as well as the original piece, either. There was one thing I got wrong in 2018, because I didn't have access to the court records at the time. Once they were shared with me, I posted a correction in 3 separate videos, that, altogether, got less than 5% the viewership of the original piece. It's even worse for mainstream outlets that issue the correction as an asterisk or bury it, rather than as a centerpiece of their programming.