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Ah yes, as usual, HN provides the most sociopathic take possible within the first few comments.

mardifoufs 4y ago
On the other hand, calling people sociopathic (over a pretty open question) is totally normal and shows a very mentally stable outlook at life. Sociopathy is when an outside to the farming world wonders what value john deer actually provided to farmer if they seemingly overlook the massive caveats that we regularly hear about. Obviously.
- kerkeslager 4y ago
  1. You'll note I didn't call him a sociopath. One does not have to be a sociopath to believe a sociopathic take. In this case, merely being deceived by anarcho-capitalist rhetoric explains why the person I'm responding to believes this. 2. The question was rhetorical. Nobody "wonders" anything in this conversation. 3. The extremist capitalist ideology espoused by many of HN's members is among the most harmful ideologies alive in our society today, and the mentally stable thing to do is treat it as the harmful ideology that it is. Consistently prioritizing corporate profits over basic human rights and decency is not healthy, and it's not healthy to treat it as if it were okay.
  - mardifoufs 4y ago
    I don't disagree about your last point, and I even agree that HN has some truly awful takes that can be almost 100% guaranteed to pop up whenever certain topics are discussed. It's just that I find myself to also ask the exact same question GP asked. I don't know anything about farming, or JD or even if JD has a market dominant position. And it's interesting to wonder what we, as mostly-tech-focused people here in HN, are missing. In the sense that, yes open source is great and being able to repair stuff is amazing. But farmers are probably really aware of the upsides of easy to repair hardware... so what are we missing? I just fundamentally tend to assume that people in other fields know a lot more about their stuff than I do, so it's important to ask what's the other side that we can't see here. So I didn't necessarily took the GP as being some sort of gotcha question in this context (even though I'm usually pretty good at picking that up)
    - kerkeslager 4y ago
      > It's just that I find myself to also ask the exact same question GP asked. I don't know anything about farming, or JD or even if JD has a market dominant position. And it's interesting to wonder what we, as mostly-tech-focused people here in HN, are missing. Sure, and it's a legitimate question. If the person I was responding to had merely asked a question, I wouldn't have posted what I did. But, he followed up with a statement which showed the question was rhetorical.
      - mardifoufs 4y ago
        Ah I didn't see that. Weird because I made sure to check before. Sorry about that.
        kerkeslager 4y ago
        No worries! Since it seems like you're genuinely curious, I'll offer what insight I have (which isn't much). I'm not a farmer but I've lived around farmers and get my food from community-supported agriculture (CSAs) wherever possible, which puts me in direct contact with farmers a lot, and we talk. In a lot of areas, John Deere is the only company with local distribution, meaning that if you want to buy a new tractor, you have to either buy John Deere or pay for delivery. The new alternatives are not particularly good, either, since economies of scale force them to either charge more, or cut quality to cut cost. Kubota, for example, is one of the few alternatives with wide distribution, but are known for quality issues. The alternative which most smaller-scale farmers seem to prefer is actually buying used, but that preference is reflected in the price: good-condition used tractors from the 80s or earlier run for about 3x the price of equivalent new tractors. Most of these old machines were overbuilt and therefore don't break down often if maintained well, but when they do break down, parts aren't available and mechanics don't know how to work on them. The CSA I went to in upstate NY had a farmer on staff who knew how to work on their two tractors--and pretty much only those two. And building a patchwork tractor fleet out of various different used tractors obviously scales poorly. Tractors are possibly the least complicated machines John Deere sells, and for many of the products they sell, such as tillers, planters, etc., they have no large-scale competition, and some of these machines didn't exist 40 years ago, at least not in their modern forms. With the exception of a pull-behind tiller, the CSAs I've been to don't have this equipment, instead doing this labor by hand. Part of the reasoning behind this is that it's more sustainable, but I suspect that's at least partly putting a positive spin on being priced out. Modern versions of these complicated machines are more reliable than older versions because they coordinate the complicated interactions digitally (no moving parts involved in coordination) rather than mechanically. This digital control is precisely where John Deere is violating the GPL and people's right to repair. Finally, some farmers are locked in by inertia: they bought and trusted John Deere for generations before John Deere started using software monopolistically, and didn't experience any of the problems until their newest equipment started breaking down, which might have only happened recently. In general, part of the fallacy of anarcho-capitalism is that unregulated competition is stable: eventually one competitor becomes dominant and can use that position to no longer have to compete on serving the customer's needs. That's where John Deere is, and they'll continue to behave monopolistically as long as they are allowed to. True capitalism requires a strong central authority to prevent anti-competitive practices through regulation. If anarcho-capitalists really believe that unregulated capitalism results in the best results for consumers, then they should have no problem with regulating in favor of consumers, since it's just making rules that companies have to do what they're going to do anyway.

On the other hand, calling people sociopathic (over a pretty open question) is totally normal and shows a very mentally stable outlook at life. Sociopathy is when an outside to the farming world wonders what value john deer actually provided to farmer if they seemingly overlook the massive caveats that we regularly hear about. Obviously.

kerkeslager 4y ago
1. You'll note I didn't call him a sociopath. One does not have to be a sociopath to believe a sociopathic take. In this case, merely being deceived by anarcho-capitalist rhetoric explains why the person I'm responding to believes this. 2. The question was rhetorical. Nobody "wonders" anything in this conversation. 3. The extremist capitalist ideology espoused by many of HN's members is among the most harmful ideologies alive in our society today, and the mentally stable thing to do is treat it as the harmful ideology that it is. Consistently prioritizing corporate profits over basic human rights and decency is not healthy, and it's not healthy to treat it as if it were okay.
- mardifoufs 4y ago
  I don't disagree about your last point, and I even agree that HN has some truly awful takes that can be almost 100% guaranteed to pop up whenever certain topics are discussed. It's just that I find myself to also ask the exact same question GP asked. I don't know anything about farming, or JD or even if JD has a market dominant position. And it's interesting to wonder what we, as mostly-tech-focused people here in HN, are missing. In the sense that, yes open source is great and being able to repair stuff is amazing. But farmers are probably really aware of the upsides of easy to repair hardware... so what are we missing? I just fundamentally tend to assume that people in other fields know a lot more about their stuff than I do, so it's important to ask what's the other side that we can't see here. So I didn't necessarily took the GP as being some sort of gotcha question in this context (even though I'm usually pretty good at picking that up)
  - kerkeslager 4y ago
    > It's just that I find myself to also ask the exact same question GP asked. I don't know anything about farming, or JD or even if JD has a market dominant position. And it's interesting to wonder what we, as mostly-tech-focused people here in HN, are missing. Sure, and it's a legitimate question. If the person I was responding to had merely asked a question, I wouldn't have posted what I did. But, he followed up with a statement which showed the question was rhetorical.
    - mardifoufs 4y ago
      Ah I didn't see that. Weird because I made sure to check before. Sorry about that.
      - kerkeslager 4y ago
        No worries! Since it seems like you're genuinely curious, I'll offer what insight I have (which isn't much). I'm not a farmer but I've lived around farmers and get my food from community-supported agriculture (CSAs) wherever possible, which puts me in direct contact with farmers a lot, and we talk. In a lot of areas, John Deere is the only company with local distribution, meaning that if you want to buy a new tractor, you have to either buy John Deere or pay for delivery. The new alternatives are not particularly good, either, since economies of scale force them to either charge more, or cut quality to cut cost. Kubota, for example, is one of the few alternatives with wide distribution, but are known for quality issues. The alternative which most smaller-scale farmers seem to prefer is actually buying used, but that preference is reflected in the price: good-condition used tractors from the 80s or earlier run for about 3x the price of equivalent new tractors. Most of these old machines were overbuilt and therefore don't break down often if maintained well, but when they do break down, parts aren't available and mechanics don't know how to work on them. The CSA I went to in upstate NY had a farmer on staff who knew how to work on their two tractors--and pretty much only those two. And building a patchwork tractor fleet out of various different used tractors obviously scales poorly. Tractors are possibly the least complicated machines John Deere sells, and for many of the products they sell, such as tillers, planters, etc., they have no large-scale competition, and some of these machines didn't exist 40 years ago, at least not in their modern forms. With the exception of a pull-behind tiller, the CSAs I've been to don't have this equipment, instead doing this labor by hand. Part of the reasoning behind this is that it's more sustainable, but I suspect that's at least partly putting a positive spin on being priced out. Modern versions of these complicated machines are more reliable than older versions because they coordinate the complicated interactions digitally (no moving parts involved in coordination) rather than mechanically. This digital control is precisely where John Deere is violating the GPL and people's right to repair. Finally, some farmers are locked in by inertia: they bought and trusted John Deere for generations before John Deere started using software monopolistically, and didn't experience any of the problems until their newest equipment started breaking down, which might have only happened recently. In general, part of the fallacy of anarcho-capitalism is that unregulated competition is stable: eventually one competitor becomes dominant and can use that position to no longer have to compete on serving the customer's needs. That's where John Deere is, and they'll continue to behave monopolistically as long as they are allowed to. True capitalism requires a strong central authority to prevent anti-competitive practices through regulation. If anarcho-capitalists really believe that unregulated capitalism results in the best results for consumers, then they should have no problem with regulating in favor of consumers, since it's just making rules that companies have to do what they're going to do anyway.