5 ms·

The point is that when the firmware was locked down, it was vastly more difficult to bypass emissions restrictions. I'm not sure what you mean when you say John

The point is that when the firmware was locked down, it was vastly more difficult to bypass emissions restrictions. I'm not sure what you mean when you say John Deere was cheating the system. Arguably they were taking compliance more strictly before this ruling.

moffkalast 3mo ago
The emissions restrictions were meant to get the likes of Deere to design and use smaller, more efficient engines, not to keep doing whatever they were with a slightly more restricted fuel hose.
- gbacon 3mo ago
  “The purpose of a system is what it does.”
  - throwaway27448 3mo ago
    Sure, if you completely ignore the meaning of "purpose". What an asinine sentiment.
    - Timon3 3mo ago
      While I'm not sure I agree that the quote is applicable here, it is generally an incredibly useful way to analyze systems. Reality doesn't care what you're hoping to achieve with a system, the outcome won't change based on thoughts and ideas. Since reality tends to be fairly complicated, we usually won't design perfect systems on the first try - instead we have to analyze the outcome, and make changes to nudge the results into the direction we want. But what if we don't do that? What if we stick with the initial approach even after we measure that the outcome doesn't align with our initial intentions, maybe even introduces unwanted side effects? It would be fair to say "well, we tried our best" if nobody was able to have hidden intentions, but that's not the world we live in. People can be very, very happy about our systems not aligning with our intentions & introducing unwanted side effects because this misalignment advantages them in some way. These people can then block changes to the system to keep these advantages alive. I believe a small fraction of decision makers is enough to keep most systems fixed in such a misaligned state, and we'd never do anything about it if we followed your logic.
      - throwaway27448 3mo ago
        "Purpose" and "hope" (hell let's through "telos" in there) are inherently subjective terms. Conflating this with empirical observation of effect is simply not useful outside of certain political situations where you intentionally want to disregard intent. It's asinine unless accompanied with persuasion that intent is working against collective interests. In most situations disregarding intent is not useful for getting things done unless you have unilateral power to override intent. A better explanation is that John Deere, like the massive truck corporations that make pickups, was happy to take advantage of blatant loopholes.
  - moffkalast 3mo ago
    Yeah the outlook of a crook who only sees laws as quid pro quo vehicles for enriching those in the know. I don't think VW and a few others trying to cheat the system to improve their bottom line makes it some kind of made up law that's supposed to be optics only and nothing in practice. It's just the typical corporate response to having to do something that's for the commons for once instead of tragedizing them.
    - gbacon 3mo ago
      I understand that imposing the restrictions may have involved great amounts of wishful thinking as to the outcome. Even this is not so certain because certain politicians were able claim a victory for having Done Something by writing words on pieces of paper. It may even be against their interest — and they are self-interested actors despite claims to being detached public servants — to solve an issue that is evidently so effective at getting people so worked up. Vendors’ compliance is not disputed, and you have produced no credible evidence of cheating. If there were demand for the smaller, more efficient engines that you’re fantasizing about, someone would already be building them with no legislative restrictions necessary. Under capitalism, any valid complaint can be rephrased as a business plan. You may not like how they complied with the law, but that’s a you problem. If you can’t bear to see it that way, then take it up with the inept authors of the restrictions. The purpose of a system is what it does. Stating a broader principle in order to apply it to this instance, we in the U.S. are not obligated to go out of our way to pay more in taxes: “The legal right of a taxpayer to decrease the amount of what otherwise would be his taxes, or altogether avoid them, by means which the law permits, cannot be doubted” (Gregory v. Helvering, https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/293/465/ https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/293/465/). Similarly, the law requires manufacturers to meet the restrictions and does not require them to go out of their way to incur the enormous costs of design, certification, building and tooling up new factories, testing, hiring, training, etc., etc., etc. to produce entirely new engines. Anyone who seriously proposed such a rigamarole would have been accused of over-engineering or Rube Goldberging. Executives who put such a plan in place would have been sued and likely lost their jobs. Intertemporal effects matter, but they are so frequently left out of what passes for economic analysis. Are you able to read minds to know what someone else’s outlook is? Your interpretation cannot be the most charitable one. https://ethics.org.au/ethics-explainer-the-principle-of-charity/ https://ethics.org.au/ethics-explainer-the-principle-of-char...
darksim905 3mo ago
posit: are these considered 'road vehicles' in the same way that a car is?
- mothballed 3mo ago
  No, there are different standards, between road vehicles, mobile power trains, fixed, emergency, etc. Emergency and fixed tend to have the most liberal allowances. Public road vehicles the most stringent. Tractors are somewhere in-between. Of course the government exempts itself from this because they know all that bullshit of "it's just as reliable etc" is trickery. It's common to buy previously government owned deleted vehicles, because the people working in federal government don't want to eat the dogfood the plebs do, and AFAIK if you buy it from them then you're allowed to have it.
  - bumby 3mo ago
    What kind of government vehicles are you referring to that are typically modified to legally avoid emission standards? Short of military or emergency vehicles, I’m not aware of This as a practice.
    - mothballed 3mo ago
      The ones I've seen, IIRC, were from DHS (CBP, etc) or various border operations. They pop up on auction every so often, but I don't have the links off hand.
      - bumby 3mo ago
        I know people used to look for retired police cruisers back in the day because they thought they were “detuned” but I’m pretty sure that was a resale marketing myth.
        darksim905 3mo ago
        The hardware package is slightly different in PI vs CV along with in some cases a tune. The HP would vary from anywhere from 10 to 20 from Civilian to Police. Generally though, you'd also want a police vehicle because of how well maintained fleet vehicles are in general, along with some added features and viewing the idle engine hours.
9dev 3mo ago
> I'm not sure what you mean when you say John Deere was cheating the system. Instead of selling tractors with more powerful, but limited motors, they should have sold tractors with less powerful motors and no screw. There is no need to do any of this in software. They were purposefully avoiding the regulation by telling farmers, "do not loosen that screw, or you'll break the law, wink-wink!"
- Manuel_D 3mo ago
  I'm no mechanical engineer, but can't any motor be run with greater power if the fuel mixture settings are remapped? Is it possible to design a motor that runs at 25 horsepower at leaner emissions-compliant settings, but can't run at higher power if a user changes the fueling settings to a richer mixture? I'm skeptical if it's even possible to design an engine that runs at 25 horsepower when complying with emissions requirements, but can't be tuned to run at higher power if users have the ability to change fuel settings. > They were purposefully avoiding the regulation by telling farmers, "do not loosen that screw, or you'll break the law, wink-wink!" They were? The whole point of John Deere locking down the firmware was to prevent this metaphorical loosening of the screw. It looks more like John Deere invested heavily in preventing modification of its hardware, much to the chagrin of farmers who wanted to cheat emissions. It's more like: every engine has a metaphorical screw that can change the fuel mixture - this is inherent to combustion engines. John Deere made it really difficult or impossible to change that screw. Now farmers regained the ability to change that screw under the guise of repair.
  - bumby 3mo ago
    I think your general point is reasonable, but far too centered on emissions. There are other reasons to limit modifications beyond just emissions. As an example, most turbocharged vehicles are de-tuned to a much lower psi of boost. The can run at much higher HP but also reduce emissions (depending on what type of emissions you're concerned with. Sometimes decreasing one type corresponds to an increase in another). They often force consumers to a lower psi rating for reliability reasons. So should a user be forced into higher reliability by a manufacturer? That seems like a much less clear answer than being forced into lower emissions.

moffkalast 3mo ago

The emissions restrictions were meant to get the likes of Deere to design and use smaller, more efficient engines, not to keep doing whatever they were with a slightly more restricted fuel hose.

gbacon 3mo ago
“The purpose of a system is what it does.”
- throwaway27448 3mo ago
  Sure, if you completely ignore the meaning of "purpose". What an asinine sentiment.
  - Timon3 3mo ago
    While I'm not sure I agree that the quote is applicable here, it is generally an incredibly useful way to analyze systems. Reality doesn't care what you're hoping to achieve with a system, the outcome won't change based on thoughts and ideas. Since reality tends to be fairly complicated, we usually won't design perfect systems on the first try - instead we have to analyze the outcome, and make changes to nudge the results into the direction we want. But what if we don't do that? What if we stick with the initial approach even after we measure that the outcome doesn't align with our initial intentions, maybe even introduces unwanted side effects? It would be fair to say "well, we tried our best" if nobody was able to have hidden intentions, but that's not the world we live in. People can be very, very happy about our systems not aligning with our intentions & introducing unwanted side effects because this misalignment advantages them in some way. These people can then block changes to the system to keep these advantages alive. I believe a small fraction of decision makers is enough to keep most systems fixed in such a misaligned state, and we'd never do anything about it if we followed your logic.
    - throwaway27448 3mo ago
      "Purpose" and "hope" (hell let's through "telos" in there) are inherently subjective terms. Conflating this with empirical observation of effect is simply not useful outside of certain political situations where you intentionally want to disregard intent. It's asinine unless accompanied with persuasion that intent is working against collective interests. In most situations disregarding intent is not useful for getting things done unless you have unilateral power to override intent. A better explanation is that John Deere, like the massive truck corporations that make pickups, was happy to take advantage of blatant loopholes.
- moffkalast 3mo ago
  Yeah the outlook of a crook who only sees laws as quid pro quo vehicles for enriching those in the know. I don't think VW and a few others trying to cheat the system to improve their bottom line makes it some kind of made up law that's supposed to be optics only and nothing in practice. It's just the typical corporate response to having to do something that's for the commons for once instead of tragedizing them.
  - gbacon 3mo ago
    I understand that imposing the restrictions may have involved great amounts of wishful thinking as to the outcome. Even this is not so certain because certain politicians were able claim a victory for having Done Something by writing words on pieces of paper. It may even be against their interest — and they are self-interested actors despite claims to being detached public servants — to solve an issue that is evidently so effective at getting people so worked up. Vendors’ compliance is not disputed, and you have produced no credible evidence of cheating. If there were demand for the smaller, more efficient engines that you’re fantasizing about, someone would already be building them with no legislative restrictions necessary. Under capitalism, any valid complaint can be rephrased as a business plan. You may not like how they complied with the law, but that’s a you problem. If you can’t bear to see it that way, then take it up with the inept authors of the restrictions. The purpose of a system is what it does. Stating a broader principle in order to apply it to this instance, we in the U.S. are not obligated to go out of our way to pay more in taxes: “The legal right of a taxpayer to decrease the amount of what otherwise would be his taxes, or altogether avoid them, by means which the law permits, cannot be doubted” (Gregory v. Helvering, https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/293/465/ https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/293/465/). Similarly, the law requires manufacturers to meet the restrictions and does not require them to go out of their way to incur the enormous costs of design, certification, building and tooling up new factories, testing, hiring, training, etc., etc., etc. to produce entirely new engines. Anyone who seriously proposed such a rigamarole would have been accused of over-engineering or Rube Goldberging. Executives who put such a plan in place would have been sued and likely lost their jobs. Intertemporal effects matter, but they are so frequently left out of what passes for economic analysis. Are you able to read minds to know what someone else’s outlook is? Your interpretation cannot be the most charitable one. https://ethics.org.au/ethics-explainer-the-principle-of-charity/ https://ethics.org.au/ethics-explainer-the-principle-of-char...

darksim905 3mo ago

posit: are these considered 'road vehicles' in the same way that a car is?

mothballed 3mo ago
No, there are different standards, between road vehicles, mobile power trains, fixed, emergency, etc. Emergency and fixed tend to have the most liberal allowances. Public road vehicles the most stringent. Tractors are somewhere in-between. Of course the government exempts itself from this because they know all that bullshit of "it's just as reliable etc" is trickery. It's common to buy previously government owned deleted vehicles, because the people working in federal government don't want to eat the dogfood the plebs do, and AFAIK if you buy it from them then you're allowed to have it.
- bumby 3mo ago
  What kind of government vehicles are you referring to that are typically modified to legally avoid emission standards? Short of military or emergency vehicles, I’m not aware of This as a practice.
  - mothballed 3mo ago
    The ones I've seen, IIRC, were from DHS (CBP, etc) or various border operations. They pop up on auction every so often, but I don't have the links off hand.
    - bumby 3mo ago
      I know people used to look for retired police cruisers back in the day because they thought they were “detuned” but I’m pretty sure that was a resale marketing myth.
      - darksim905 3mo ago
        The hardware package is slightly different in PI vs CV along with in some cases a tune. The HP would vary from anywhere from 10 to 20 from Civilian to Police. Generally though, you'd also want a police vehicle because of how well maintained fleet vehicles are in general, along with some added features and viewing the idle engine hours.

9dev 3mo ago

> I'm not sure what you mean when you say John Deere was cheating the system. Instead of selling tractors with more powerful, but limited motors, they should have sold tractors with less powerful motors and no screw. There is no need to do any of this in software. They were purposefully avoiding the regulation by telling farmers, "do not loosen that screw, or you'll break the law, wink-wink!"

Manuel_D 3mo ago
I'm no mechanical engineer, but can't any motor be run with greater power if the fuel mixture settings are remapped? Is it possible to design a motor that runs at 25 horsepower at leaner emissions-compliant settings, but can't run at higher power if a user changes the fueling settings to a richer mixture? I'm skeptical if it's even possible to design an engine that runs at 25 horsepower when complying with emissions requirements, but can't be tuned to run at higher power if users have the ability to change fuel settings. > They were purposefully avoiding the regulation by telling farmers, "do not loosen that screw, or you'll break the law, wink-wink!" They were? The whole point of John Deere locking down the firmware was to prevent this metaphorical loosening of the screw. It looks more like John Deere invested heavily in preventing modification of its hardware, much to the chagrin of farmers who wanted to cheat emissions. It's more like: every engine has a metaphorical screw that can change the fuel mixture - this is inherent to combustion engines. John Deere made it really difficult or impossible to change that screw. Now farmers regained the ability to change that screw under the guise of repair.
- bumby 3mo ago
  I think your general point is reasonable, but far too centered on emissions. There are other reasons to limit modifications beyond just emissions. As an example, most turbocharged vehicles are de-tuned to a much lower psi of boost. The can run at much higher HP but also reduce emissions (depending on what type of emissions you're concerned with. Sometimes decreasing one type corresponds to an increase in another). They often force consumers to a lower psi rating for reliability reasons. So should a user be forced into higher reliability by a manufacturer? That seems like a much less clear answer than being forced into lower emissions.