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Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

What many people may not realize is just how long-lived a lot of farm equipment is. There will be tractors out there still working that are 75 years old and just keep getting repaired.

Obviously the manufacturers would like to sell those farmers tractors more often than that or, in the very least, generate a revenue stream from existing hardware and honestly that's what I see a lot of computing in vehicles as being: nothing more than guaranteeing a revenue stream. It'll get marketed and sold as "efficiency" but the manufacturers are capturing those (alleged) efficiency gains by charging farmers to repair them.

This is also the case with GM crops too. For years, farmers cultivated seeds and replanted them for the next year's harvest. GM crops are typically constructed so they're not fertile beyond the current generation. Why? So the farmer has to re-buy the seed stock from the manufacturer.

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I grew up on a citrus farm and I can tell you CAT equipment makes Apple look like an open hardware platform. Parts where unavailable to non dealers they used patents to stop aftermarket and where hostile to hardware hackers that fixed flaws in their design. This was all while they where mechanical. I cannot imagine what it is like owning a CAT machine now that they are computerized. I know my grandfather tended to stick to Massey Ferguson and Minneapolis Molean's for that reason. We only bought CAT and Deere equipment if it was a specialty piece that could not be duplicated with an all purpose tractor like a MF or MM. Which is really CAT's bread and butter. They like the machinery that no one else produces and locking you in to support. They caught onto this long before the automotive and electronics world ever did.

On seed stock it get's even worse, if you are next to a GM farm and get cross pollinated then your stock is tainted and you have to reseed again with clean seeds that will just get tainted in the next spawn.

We did not have this problem with citrus because it is not grown from a seed, all citrus is root-stocked and then hybrid to make sweet citrus. I know it is an issue for corn and grain farmers who do not want to grow GMO crops.

>On seed stock it get's even worse, if you are next to a GM farm and get cross pollinated then your stock is tainted and you have to reseed again with clean seeds that will just get tainted in the next spawn.

I see a simple solution here when some farmer gets stung by this: some company needs to make some really cheap GM seeds which exist only for the purpose of "accidentally" tainting the GM field next door, so that the owner of that field can get a dose of their own medicine.

The GM Field wouldn't be collecting the seeds anyway.

  > On seed stock it get's even worse, if you are next to a GM 
  > farm and get cross pollinated then your stock is tainted and 
  > you have to reseed again with clean seeds that 
  > will just get tainted in the next spawn.

Genuine question: If your neighbor's seeds spread into your farm why do you have to reseed? Are you trying to avoid the cross pollination or are you required to do this by something/someone else?

Not a farmer or a Lawyer, but if you collect seeds from the tainted plants then the new plant is too close to the Patented plant, and therefore illegal for you to grow on your own.

Exactly there was a case of one farmer who did not buy GM stock all of the farms around him did, the genes crossed into his stock and he was sued for not buying the stock. GM buyers are not allowed to reseed it is IP theft according to law.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2001/03/30/f...

This is why GMOs are a bad idea. The science, in and of itself, is amazing stuff. Unfortunately the science doesn't exist in a vacuum and it's the business and legal structures (globally, not just in the US) surrounding it in which GMOs are problematic. Seeds are fundamental to almost all types of farms and the fact that there are "legal intricacies" surrounding the legality of growing food using seeds on your land is bananas! (Semi-relevantly, Cavendish Bananas are another plant that aren't grown from seeds, similar to citrus.)

That doesn't mean GMOs are a bad idea, it means the legalese surrounding it is.

That’s certainly a reasonable position to take. Unfortunately, there’s no way to escapable the legalese, so my opinion is they are practically bad. They’re not absolutely bad, but they are under our current regime.

Your comment on GM crops is technically correct but also misleading. Most crops are already grown from hybrid seeds. For reasons of genetics, hybrid seeds cannot be reused in the next season.

It's also quite a time-consuming process to reuse seeds, which makes the whole process less cost effective anyway. GM crops have not had a significant effect on this issue.

> For reasons of genetics, hybrid seeds cannot be reused in the next season.

Can you provide supporting evidence/materials to back this claim?

Depending on the plant, you'll get either of the two species used to make the hybrid instead of the hybrid itself.

Thank you, and excuse my naivete here. So what makes the hybrid route the optimal way to produce these GM plants, rather than cross-breeding in a way that survives reproduction? Do we know GM crops to always be hybrids of this nature?

Hybrid vigor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterosis

It lets you create a sort of super crop... but it only works for a single generation. ‾\_(ツ)_/‾

Also, as someone said above, this predates GM, its unrelated.

The way I understand it (I took a course in this 5 years or so ago but might not remember correctly) it's a matter of ease of matching up certain chromosomes. Like people, plants tend to have chromosomes in multiples (though not necessarily 2). From one generation to the next, for a given set of chromosomes, a parent only passes half on to the child, and this is pretty much random. That means that for a plant breeder it's very undesirable to have parents with genetic diversity: this diversity results in randomness (unpredictability) in the offspring. BUT you don't want offspring that has identical copies for all these chromosomes because those are not strong genotypes (this is where the hybrid vigor comes in, you want plants with diverse chromosomes). The solution that plant breeders have found is that you take parents which have copied chromosomes, but you take 2 different parents and you control who the parents are. That way the offspring gets a mix, but the content of that mix is highly predictable.

Some side issues are that the parents are only suitable for breeding (they don't have strong genotypes themselves) and that if you take this offspring and mix them again you get a genetic shuffle which reintroduces unpredictability. This second generation will also perform very poorly, or at least unpredictably.

For seed companies you can tell that this is attractive in 2 ways: they can produce quality seed relatively easily, and the farmer always needs to buy the seed that they use for production because the farmer does not have the parent plants and the second generation is unusable.

It's not just GM plants. In fact, the GM crops might not even be hybrids at all (I don't really know). But many fruits that we love, like most citrus fruits, as well as bananas, are the result of cross-breeding between different species.

Why is this optimal? Well, I guess it isn't always. I'm willing to bet there are more failed hybrids than successful ones, but sometimes when you combine traits from different species, you get something that's bigger or tastier than the originals.

I have no idea about other crops; I was under the impression that grain and many other common crops could be replanted, but maybe it can't.

A mule is a hybrid. It's bigger and stronger than either a donkey or a horse. It is infertile. It's the same with your garden variety hybrid corn or tomatoes. Big easily stotable and shippable product (but without flavour or desirable texture), but is infertile or doesn't breed true.

Not all hybrids are infertile. Maize corn was developed from its wild progenitors through centuries of genetic modification through selective hybridization -- it is not a plant found in nature -- and that required viable offspring. The same goes for other major crops developed by scientists in the past few centuries, like potatoes, tomatoes, and peppers (interesting pattern there, they all originated in the same part of the world).

It's incorrect to conflate hybridization with modern direct gene manipulation (GMO). They both have the same goal, and effectively do the same thing, but are completely different approaches. Hybridization requires the cross-breeding of unrelated varieties or species, and involves both genetic and epigenetic selection. GMO is directly splicing genes of a single organism to produce altered offspring. Don;t confuse the two.

Mendel's law of independent assortment.

https://www.ndsu.edu/pubweb/~mcclean/plsc431/mendel/mendel3....

Cash crops use something known as hybrid vigor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterosis) which breeds together two distinct, albeit mediocre, blends into a single offspring that is sort of like a super plant. The catch though is that it only works for a single generation, and if you were to replant the crop's offspring you would end up with a highly undesirable crop. For this reason, almost no farmers replant using their harvest. This pre-dates the use of GMO seeds.

Every summer in the midwest you get armies of workers who do something called 'detasseling' where you walk through the seed fields and rip off the male genetalia of one of the two breeds, which forces the seeds to be pollinated in a specific way. The result is the seeds that are used to plant next years crop.

source: I grew up on a corn farm.

is this for all farms or just very large ones? i can imagine small time farmers perhaps not having such super seeds / plants?

The case of hybrid vigor I'm familiar with is from camels during the middle ages. One hump camels are adapted to hot desert climates, while two hump camels are adapted to cold steppe climates. This created a divide between central asia and the middle east where you would have to switch camels as you traveled. There were people who learned to crossbread the camels to create a hybrid that was stronger than either and could survive in both climates, and they began to dominate trade routes in the area. The catch was that the hybrid vigor only lasted a single generation, and if you tried to breed them again you'd get runts.

Aside: I grew normal and F1 hybrid courgettes (american = zucchini) as a kid and can confirm the hybrids were proper little triffids compared to the pure-strain plants.

Regarding the camels, can you dig up a link, am curious. Thanks.

I learned about hybrid camels from the work of Dr. Richard Bulliet, particularly this lecture:

https://youtu.be/ublh9JkbeuM?t=2350

I linked to the start of the section where he begins discussing the migration of the Turks into Iran (39:10). Discussion about hybrid camels is from around 45:26 onwards.

Amazon link to his book: Cotton, Climate, Camels.

https://www.amazon.com/Cotton-Climate-Camels-Early-Islamic-d...

Here is the entire playlist of his 46 lectures on World History, of which the first link is lecture 13. His lectures are not just him retelling the material in the textbook, but rather gives criticism about how the textbook was constructed (He is the lead editor), and stories from his own research:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXxM47ZxXvkaODXkQBO5R...

Thanks, will follow up.

It's pretty much all farms in the US, since most farms in the US are hard corn or soy farms. It's large and small. Bank owned and family owned. Everyone buys their seed every year. It's not some conspiracy, it's just better business for the farmer.

Heirloom and organic farmers tend to reseed from heritage crops. I will give you they are a small subset of farming but the cross germination is having an effect on them.

Smaller farmers have consultants that come out and help plan for seed/herbicide/pesticide. Farming is very complicated now and many farmers just run the equipment.

> The Bowman case has come about after the 75-year-old farmer bought soybeans from a grain elevator near his farm in Indiana and used them to plant a late-season second crop. He then used some of the resulting seeds to replant such crops in subsequent years.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/12/monsanto...

monsantos 'terminator' seed comes to mind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_use_restriction_techno...

The article doesn't specifically mention Monsanto, though I couldn't imagine them not pursuing this technology.

Also, thankfully:

> As of 2006, GURT seeds have not been commercialized anywhere in the world due to opposition from farmers, consumers, indigenous peoples, NGOs, and some governments.

It's a common narrative that Monsanto did release crops into the wild that caused nearby farms to produce sterile crops after incidental cross-pollination. It seems like this is misinformation?

It's absolutely misinformation, as is almost everything else you read on the subject of GMOs.

Have you tried google? This is a very basic fact about hybrid seeds.

F1 hybrids are the first generation (filial-1) offspring of two homozygous parents, both of which breed true for certain genetic factors.

The F1 hybrid is a uniformly heterozygous cross. They will be a consistent and uniform mix of desired genetic factors, much like clones, but all siblings of parents that are themselves like clones.

The F2 generation will be less consistent. The genes will recombine such that the desired high-producing mix of genes will not be present in all offspring. By the F3 generation, it will almost be back to the diversity of a genetically unmanaged population. Harvest times will spread out, such that by the time the slowest plants mature, the fastest ones may already be spoiling or eaten by birds.

F2 seed can be sold and planted the next season, at a lower price, but the yield will be lower than with F1 seed. F3 seed is not economically viable to sell for planting, as the farmers that habitually save seed probably already have F3 or greater from their last crop, or an heirloom cultivar.

A lot of commercially sold seedstock is F1 hybrids https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F1_hybrid

... first generation crosses between different parent strains. If you sow the seed from F1 hybrids (F2) they don't have a consistent phenotype

I've seen and used farm equipment and machine tools (lathes, mills, etc.) from the 40's and 50's that are still in good serviceable condition.

I think it's been a long time since farmers cultivated their own seed though, even before roundup-resistant and GM crops were commonplace. It's a very different science and skill to growing crops.

I still run a 1949 Ford 8N tractor. No heroic measures needed to keep it going. Just routine maintenance.

Designed to last forever if maintained properly..

A cool thing I learned from watching AvE's channel is that bearing surfaces are meant to last forever if properly lubricated. The oil in them is meant to take all the load, and the metal surfaces should never touch. If you don't replace the oil regularly, or let it get so hot it flows out of the journal, the bearing will wear and need replacing. The design is meant to last a really long time if properly serviced and not overloaded though. (I'd love to hear from a MechE if I misunderstood, I'm just a dumb programmer who watches YouTube).

Thats pretty much right. Excluding how some types of bushings work, and other similar bearing surfaces.

Side note. There also air bearings which are also pretty awesome but require tight machining tolerances. They are used in the semiconductor industry for some things. Mainly because you dont want lubricant to dirty the enviroment, but the tighter tolerances also help ensure a spindle/shaft dont wobble as much.

I assume this means it's airtight and instead of a cushion of oil, it uses a cushion of (presumably compressed) air?

Yea pretty much. This video starts off with a nice demo of the concept.

https://youtu.be/sFrVdoOhu1Q

Great, thank you. As an aside, I love listening to people with accents explain things, so the video was doubly enjoyable!

Edit some time later: And then perhaps I'll go down an hours-long rabbit hole watching all his videos and learning a ton about machining...

>I love listening to people with accents explain things

Are there people without accents that explain things? Because that would be a video I want to see.

I suppose by "without accent" you mean "with General American accent"? German or French can be spoken without accent, but English doesn't have one universally agreed "standard accent". What's without accent to the American is just an American accent to everyone else.

I take the parent's comment to mean that everybody has an accent. There's no such thing as neutral or reference-frame speech.

The word "accent" implies that it is being compared to some kind of reference. You might be looking for the word "dialect" here.

For example, if you have two speakers with English as a first language and a third from Germany with English as a second language, the native English speakers will probably detect a German accent in the ESL-speaker's dialect.

People get into long internet arguments over this, but the closest thing to a neutral English dialect is General American English, also sometimes called Broadcast English because newscasters, TV personalities, and actors would be trained this dialect so as to not sound like they are "from" anywhere in particular. It used to be common as well for highly-educated or upper-class individuals to hire speech coaches to teach them this dialect in order to "lose their accent". It still may be common for all I know, but I believe the deliberate acquisition of General American is probably on the decline.

That's just an American-centered view-point though. Just because an accent dominates doesn't mean it's not an accent.

This isn't completely true: even within America, there's different accents. So people with a "standard American accent" (generally midwestern) listen to Southerners talk and say they have an accent. There's also northeastern accents (such as the famous Boston accent).

Of course, these days, a lot of the accents are disappearing because of mass communications, so the "American accent" is homogenizing, but those other accents aren't completely gone yet.

Obviously I mean foreign accents when speaking English.

AvE makes a lot of generalizations. What he says about technical topics is generally right enough for anyone who doesn't make a living designing the things he discusses. Those people would do well to understand the underlying theory.

>If you don't replace the oil regularly, or let it get so hot it flows out of the journal, the bearing will wear and need replacing.

It's still going to wear out from cold starts and the entire rest of the engine that doesn't have pressurized lubrication is also going to wear out eventually so there's no point in trying to outlast all those components since you're gonna have to take it apart to deal with them when they reach EOL and you can just deal with bearings at the same time.

You can still buy 9Ns from the 1930s around where I live. Also, you can still buy new parts from after-market suppliers. They might not handle 16-bottom plows or even a round baler but they're still damn good machines for basic work and they're simple enough to maintain that even I could do it.

I got a '56 Farmall 230. Not a big tractor, but it can do anything I need for myself, primarily used to feed my two cows which I grow for meat, but also for hauling wood out of the woods for heating my house. Very little maintenance really needed. Just two months ago I even got fancy and installed an electric starter! A fine addition when you need to plow the driveway in the winter and don't feel like doing a full body workout just to get the thing started.

Farmers definitely still cultivate their own seed, even in the West, for cereal crops like wheat, oats, rye, and rice where hybrid and GMO variants do not exist or are not competitive.

For these crops, it's not a very different skill. You just have to clean the seed and ideally test germination rates, though many farmers do not even do that.

Serviceable does not imply profitable (though profitable implies serviceable).

As much as I love lugging around rotary tables and indexing heads a machine shop that makes triple digit part quantities would be stupid to run old machines (too many man hours per part) and a repair machine shop would be stupid to finance a new 5-axis.

Equipment in most industries moves from low margin, high duty cycle operators to operators with either higher margins and/or lower duty cycles.

Yeah but it is great equipment to have in a garage ready to go all around the country. So much shit is thrown away because you need some new little piece machined or repaired that you can't buy. It's not worth it to a machining business, but to some individual at home with a waiting machine and time on their hands? They could make a good deal making simple replacements pieces or parts for things.

It is not always because farmers couldn't produce their own seed, but it is also because growing for viable seeds has a bit different finishing procedure as growing food stuff. You might end up with a loss of seed viability because your primary effort is based on selling food for the highest profit and not storing viable seed in the most pristine way. So naturally a local farm community can evolve into a large number of food producers who don't store their own seeds, and a smaller variety of seed farmers to supply the other farmers with crop seed every year.

The search for an ongoing revenue stream is one of the most destructive forces in the tech industry. It leads to some very customer-hostile experiences.

The problem is that not having a revenue stream is one of the most destructive forces to tech (or other) companies, and people like to keep their jobs.

You make a thing. You sell your thing. You sell it for more than it cost to make it. That's your revenue stream. But that's not enough (apparently) hence locking down repairs and other anti-end user behaviour.

Now you've shipped your thing that lasts forever. If it's a mechanical object, maybe you can get continuing revenue from spare parts, but those will bring in less than the original purchase. Worst case, someone brings up a factory copying your part design (without doing any engineering work on them, just copies them exactly), and undercuts you.

If you sell software, do you let the old stuff atrophy and become insecure? If not, you are spending salaries on maintenance without any associated revenue. As time goes on, the maintenance costs increase without bringing in another cent.

On the software front, this is why I, personally, am a fan of the subscription model... if done right. And almost no one does it right.

The shining example for actually doing it right is Jetbrains. There is a schedule for new releases they keep to. You get loyalty discounts for long term subscriptions and ending a subscription entitles you to a version that is ~1 year old in perpetuity.

Plus the prices are (IMHO) entirely reasonable.

Almost no one else does this. Other companies will, say, take the MSRP of the software package, divide it by 12 and give you that as the monthly price with a minimum contract period of 12 months. They'll also restrict you to choose platform when you purchase and may limit the number of installs rather than concurrent users.

Another company using this model very effectively is Derivative, makers of Touchdesigner. Licenses are sold at an initial price that includes a year of updates. Once that year expires, the newest version (old versions are kept available on the site) within your update period will continue to be usable with your license - which is freely transferable between machines. They offer a couple license tiers, custom work, and paid support hours. They even provide a free non-commercial license that is minimally limited and great for learning. The other great thing is that they are highly responsive to user feedback and bug reports. I've had a situation before where we found a bug in the course of a project and they fixed it in a matter of days, had a build sent over in time for my deadline, and then the fix was pushed for everyone in the following update. I frequently point them out as a model for the best way to offer a software product to both a professional and amateur market. It's essentially all the benefits of perpetual licensing while still providing a revenue stream for the company and ongoing support for professional users.

No direct affiliation, but I've shared drinks with the devs and am a very pleased user.

> Now you've shipped your thing that lasts forever. If it's a mechanical object, maybe you can get continuing revenue from spare parts, but those will bring in less than the original purchase.

This might be bad for a tractor manufacturer; but an everlasting tractor would be great for society, right?

The incentive now is to innovate in order to create a better more efficient product. E.g.; a more fuel efficient tractor which increases productivity - then you'll get another sale.

Deliberately hobbling your product so that it needs repair or replacement disincentives innovation and is a form of rent-seeking https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/rentseeking.asp and as such should be treated as a market failure. (I.e., legislated against)

Exactly - it's a perverse incentive against the interests of society.

As I type this I'm looking at the Onkyo stereo and Polk speakers I bought in college. I'm 50 years old.

I can't help but think they regret making these things that durable.

UBI, more research spending, a flatter wealth distribution, and separating necessities from investment portfolios would help to allow developers to develop without living like stereotypical artists.

Hardly. There are countless firms who built their reputation on and survived quite happily making durable products. You might find pages of their early products filling eBay and the like, still going strong. A few are still adhering to those built to last attributes, most have transitioned into "as cheap as we can get away with, but with our valuable brand and logo" as has most of the whole world, including those offering coffee pod and headphone (ffs!) subscriptions.

The steady progression of new people - some created every day, new homeowners and what have you was enough to give a vibrant business, and ongoing sales.

What changed was the deal.

Pre 1980s most companies tried to balance the needs of all - staff, customers, local area, and shareholders. Post 1980s only the shareholders count, all else is secondary. Products and offerings are made and subscribed accordingly. The few folk still making stuff to last seem to have an anachronistic worldview to go with it. Perhaps still care about craftsmanship, repairability, and reputation, rather than built in obsolescence, subscriptions and DRM'd parts. Now they can sell you the thing 15 times, perhaps 12 of those without good cause apart from greed.

Could you give some examples of such products?

High end mechanical watches like Rolex and Omega. They keep parts going back decades. If a part isn't in inventory, there are watchmakers that can create just about any part from scratch.

Note that these are products that conspicuous consumers may in fact buy several of, including new models as they come out.

Not exactly "farm tractors that last forever".

Kenwood and Dualit kitchen equipment and Linn hi-fi. Still support products they made in the sixties and seventies, and have provided upgrade routes and repairs for later improvements. In each case those flagship products still exist, are still being made, perhaps with vastly better materials and technology almost incomparable with the original, and spare and repairs are still readily available.

Not too different with Hoover vacuums in the era of the Hoover Senior and Junior -- they stuck around, being repaired and reconditioned easily for decades. Had Hoover or Dyson not gone with cheap throwaway plastic for everything when cyclones meant capability improved in post 1980/1990 models we might have those lasting 30+ years easily too. As is they self destruct in a decade or less as more and more bits break. The (cheap plastic) spares that are available are priced such that you're heavily incentivised to replace. One or two commercial brands still make products that might last a while...

Most of the current kitchen appliance brands are mainly now just worthless logos, usually owned en masse in a larger group, probably after a leveraged hostile buyout. Now made in the same single factory and generate churn with new models every year - for the sake of difference not because there is any improvement, just deliberately changed from the previous. Spare parts might be just filter, lamp or element, often deliberately unique to model, and will be available at vastly inflated price for limited time only.

No end of other examples from hand tools, garage equipment, and home goods through to the most complex products.

"Pre 1980s most companies tried to balance the needs of all - staff, customers, local area, and shareholders."

I think you have a very strong set of rose-tinted glasses. Planned obsolescence was a strategy long before 1980.

More that I remember the companies I dealt with back then, and the products they made which I bought. Many of which would remain static far longer, with readily available spares available in stores, alongside the new sales. There was some decent effort to use common spares across multiple models, often for decades unless something transformative required a major change.

I could compare and contrast in just about every sector I can think of. Sure there were some abuses, notably some of the car makers come to mind. The needs of the customers -- beyond making the initial sale -- were far higher up the priority list than today.

That and control of how the product is "mis"-used and data gathering.

You mean you don't want a mattress subscription?

My fave is "subscription headphones": https://www.nuraphone.com/products/nuranow

> Please note: NuraNow is not a rent-to-own program — as long as your subscription stays active, the Nuraphone stays active too.

...isn't that straight worse than rent-to-own...?

Rent-to-Never-Own

I had to double take on this to make sure it wasn't on the Onion. Wow, just wow.

At least you get a free cable with it. With $20 RRP, I sure hope the entire cable is gold plated, not just the connectors.

Well,now I've seen everything.

Interesting, I've been looking for case studies like this. I'm curious if there has been anything similar that managed to turn a long term profit.

Completely unsellable to anyone with a time preference extending beyond next month.

But the remaining market is probably big enough.

For anyone wondering, these are also sold outright (though not on their site I guess?) for $400. They are essentially a generic pair of bluetooth headphones that don't even have ANC, and use some kind of proprietary charging cable.

That along with buying an entire new product for a minor gain. So what if the new car is super green? You are replacing one multiton hunk of metal and hazardous waste with a brand new multiton hunk of metal and hazardous waste, doubling your footprint of extraction of resources from the earth but netting the same utility. Or people who replace their perfectly functioning phone with a completely brand new phone to continuing to use the same exact trio of apps on a screen with darker blacks.

The most frustrating part of tech is how disposable it is by design. It's degenerate and seemingly inescapable.

As annoying as replacing a phone is, I don't think the argument works for ecological dimension. The car produces many times larger carbon footprint in the course of being used, than comes from its manufacturing.

Plus you are not destroying your old car, they are sold onwards and used for decades by someone anyways. You are probably enabling someone to replace a rusbucket two or three steps down the line, possibly in a condition so bad, it does not pass road worthiness tests.

Well, unless you implement the Cash for Clunkers program that just smashes up a bunch of cars for a quick buck, then they don't get used. So many good and valuable cars, and especially car parts, that were all lost. People think "But it was a $500 car! They can't be good!" Except ive fixed and driven many $500 cars for the same amount in parts and put another 100K+ miles on them. $1000 for 28 MPG and 100K miles is a pretty damn good deal if you are poor as shit.

But now those cars mostly don't exist because we smashed them all up and weren't allowed to part them out either. Instead of spending $20 for $150 worth of parts, now I gotta buy all new Chinese manufacturer replacements for 10X as much.

Especially in agriculture custom firmware is getting more and more prevalent. I think for many people wanting to be productive products like iCrap and consorts are generally not worth it.

I think John Deere tractors were especially restrictive for any form of unauthorized rapairs. Restricting access for selected partners is a very customer hostile behavior. It is like printer ink all over again.

Still there are high technically hurdles that can indeed be compared with the smartphone market that still supplies crappy software on otherwise decent phones.

I think software broke economics in a way, since that was one of the only products which you could produce once and sell infinitely. No other thing on the planet you could do that with. All other things you need to transform something physical or spend time doing which results in a linear mapping between input and output.

Digital goods (such as music, games, etc) do not count as independent things since they are implemented as software. Also previously things like music you had to perform or distribute physically.

I'd like to introduce you to some songwriter friends of mine.

Before computing divorced the idea of the file from the physicality of the storage medium, music was sold as live performance, printed paper, plastic discs, or magnetic tape.

Those all have a non-trivial cost of reproduction.

Now that music is just files, the marginal cost of sending a file down the network wire is proportional to its compressed file size, which is insignificant in relation to the cost of the human labor of creating a master recording.

Also, now that music is encoded digitally, all copies are (usually) perfect reproductions of the original.

Long before the invention of paper, plastic, magnetic tape, piano rolls, or metal drums with pins, songs and stories and other kinds of "intellectual property" could be conveyed from mind to mind verbally. Such ideas were expensive and difficult to create the original copy (ever write a song or derive Pythagoras' theorem from first principles?), but the marginal cost of each reproduction was minimal and close enough to zero. It it weren't, whoever wrote those earworms I get would be fabulously rich by now.

Centuries, nay millennia, ago there were starving artists who created great works, only to have the economics of zero marginal cost of production take the food from their mouths. The appearance of and democratization of high-bandwidth telecommunication (enabled by computers, but not a property of computers) did not create that situation, it's only multiplied the zero marginal cost by a large constant. An if you've been paying attention, zero multiplied by anything is still zero.

I think you're discounting the cost of pre-network human communication a bit too much.

Before computers, it was nearly impossible to copy a musical song from one person to another faster than the time it took to perform it. And to go that fast, you needed someone trained to perform it well enough (cheap, but not free) and someone trained to memorize it by ear in one take (expensive). To do it more slowly, with more repetitions, you still needed someone that could perform what they had learned, which was cheap, but not free.

The cost of connecting the teacher with the learner was likewise not free. They had to be in the same place, physically. They might meet up, learn each other's repertoire, then split up again, so as to not compete with each other by working the same territory. The invention of written musical notation was a huge leap forward, in that it enabled the profession of composer/lyricist to be separated from that of the musical performer.

Millennia ago, great works were lost completely, because they were not copied enough to survive the deaths of everyone who knew how to reproduce them. That is not a thing that happens when copies are cheap. Even things that were written down have been lost, because copying written materials was not cheap enough until the printing press.

If making a copy takes a specialist four hours, and consumes paper and ink, that is nowhere near "close enough to zero".

Now, you can copy music in a millisecond, using a device that nearly everyone carries in their pocket, to anyone in the world who likewise carries a similar device. The cost is still not zero. It is just now too small to think about, unless you are making millions of copies per second.

I may get tarred and feathered (well, more likely simply digitally snuffed out or whisked away to the digital concentration camp of shadow banning and/or digital gassing) for saying this here, but I think you are talking about two different motivations.

One is the VC/investor trap, where the primary unrealized motivation is actually just finding VCs that will fund some scheme to be the "next {insert hopes and dreams of boundless riches}", where far more often than not the winners are the cunning founders (Adam Neumann anyone?) and the VCs, with everyone else left holding the bag (Hello, WeWork starry eyed people that believed the predictions of alien visitation) if the effort can't be pawned off on someone else, or some "exit" to a corp in a kind of reverse defensive blackmail auction to snuff out or keep a competitive advantage from a competitor.

The other thing goin on here is that very predatory and pernicious and rent seeking nature you are directly referring to that seeks to constantly corral and rope in as many consumers as possible as the whole tech industry is rapacious in its lust to generate "ongoing revenue streams" through dependency or even (what used to be illegal) what amounts to predatory pricing and snuffing out alternatives by reaping havoc on the target industry and society. None of these tech companies should have been allowed to use this predatory pricing model to utterly decimate our economy as they have … Amazon, Uber, WeWork, etc. are just a few examples. At the very least it should not be allowed for public money (pensions, etc.) to be invested in companies that are unprofitable at certain ratios, e.g., over 1/4 of their existence.

One clear example comes to mind in Uber/Lyft and their wake of both immoral and illegal actions that have led to the utter collapse of the taxi industry through unfair competition, predatory pricing, and illegality. What we are now left with is a for-hire transportation sector that is now a far less competitive environment (Uber/Lyft compared to roughly 5-20+ taxi companies per city (Ignore the flaws of the industry that are irrelevant to the anti-competitive issue), but we are now also facing a collapse of competition on a far larger scale, essentially Uber/Lyft instead of literally tens of thousands of taxi companies just alone in the USA.

So what happens when the Taxis cannot keep up under the Uber/Lyft onslaught? Well, we know what happens, they use regulatory capture to limit and prevent competition and they start raising rates as they have and are doing.

Yeah, I do own 30 years old tractor and it work just fine as is very simple machine and there are very few things that could break. This is why machines of this grade just keep their price: after initial drop the price just stays the same and demand is strong. I can see tractors from 70s changing hands on regular basis

A "right to repair" is insufficient but a good start.

As you say computers in vehicle are nothing more than holding consumers captive for a guaranteed revenue stream for the lifetime of a product. The first incident that got me thinking about this is Tivoization. The problem is getting much worse and regular consumers are unaware it is happening.

As I said "right to repair" is a good right to fight for. We need a "right to own". I recognise and acknowledge there is significant overlap.

This is why I would never buy a Tesla.

Regarding the reuse of previous harvest's seed, the lobbying of Monsanto and Co have also managed to make it illegal until recently.

> What many people may not realize is just how long-lived a lot of farm equipment is. There will be tractors out there still working that are 75 years old and just keep getting repaired.

I'm going to not try and not infer anything from your handle, but how exactly do you know this?

I personally worked on and with hose 50-25 year old tractors (Renault, Ferrari, Fiat, Massey-Fergueson, Case, Ford) in my apprenticeship in Europe and I can tell you that finding parts for a lot of those were half the problem. So unless you had an in with the few shops that kept them running like they do in Cuba with GM and the like, you were SOL.

Anecdote: In England we had to drop a transmission in the middle of harvest on a 30/40 year old Case and all the spares available after several hours of calls and online searches would have to come in from former yugoslavia nations (Macedonia and Montenegro from what I recall) that had trans from tractors that 'ran when last parked' (before the break up in the 90s?) and couldn't come in by rail/air shipment in 2014 as it was the rainiest year in recorded History and brought everything to halt.

So we gathered the village and did the harvest by hand, our yield wasn't great but it wasn't a total loss as it could have been had we waited for that trans to come in.

But the following season they rented and hired a crew with a massive New Holland and John Deere fleet to help them out instead of buying.

What I guess I'm alluding to is that in the case with farming, especially at the small farm (sub 50 hectare) owning anything but a small tractor for daily tasks is unnecessary, as the cost and maintenance is way out of reach for most people's budget or even needs.

Flash-forward to 2013 in Colorado where the first legal hemp harvest took place, and you'd see a large number of farmers with more requests than they can handle to rent out their combines (with crazy combinations) and haulers out in the fields.

There will always be a 'steady stream' of purchases for tractors/combines etc... its just that they got used to the crony-capitalist profits from rebuilding Iraq, Afghanistan after the invasion etc... and forgot their projected profits should be calculated withing the confines of the production of mainly domestic demand.

As a former farmer, Biodynamic no less, I want Ag to go as automated as it can, but I can't shed a single tear for those manufactures who refuse to see why having proprietary blocks on their products will drive farmers away.

Hopefully this spurs on a lot of the talent in FAANG to do something actually productive and necessary in Society and help an opensource hardware movement in Ag.

>There will be tractors out there still working that are 75 years old and just keep getting repaired.

This is a massive over-generalization.

Those tractors are not being used to farm low margin commodities (which are the people most new tractors are sold to). You can't operate a soy/corn/whatever farm without equipment that has a $/results number similar to everyone else in your market (who are also trying to reduce costs). There's a reason you don't see a lot of combines from the 70s still in operation whereas skidders basically never get replaced until they're broken in half.

I know it's handwavy but basically every aspect of running a farm converts to money at the end of the day and depending the specifics of what you farm and where you farm it determine whether you have to keep up with the joneses or can run older equipment.

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