Opening this article voids warranty
magazine.scienceforthepeople.org
magazine.scienceforthepeople.org
<DmncAtrny> I will write on a huge cement block "BY ACCEPTING THIS BRICK THROUGH YOUR WINDOW, YOU ACCEPT IT AS IS AND AGREE TO MY DISCLAIMER OF ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, AS WELL AS DISCLAIMERS OF ALL LIABILITY, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL OR INCIDENTAL, THAT MAY ARISE FROM THE INSTALLATION OF THIS BRICK INTO YOUR BUILDING."
<DmncAtrny> And then hurl it through the window of a Sony officer
<DmncAtrny> and run like hell
Luckily nowadays users just install Spotify, no need to bother with rootkits.
I think it's because the movie/tv industries are unionized and everyone has to get paid, so they have to get more from the customer side. Whereas in the music industry, we're ok with musicians being "starving artists", so the labels can just pay the artists less.
The value of a singular service with 'all' the content is higher than a plurality of services each with only a little. In other words I'd happily pay more per month for the Spotify of TV, movies, and sports that I currently do for a sampling of the usual streaming services.
Frankly if I was king of the world any and all licensing deals for media would have to be explicitly non-exclusive, effectively decoupling production from distribution. Any service should be able to stream/rent any media for the same rate as any other. This would let the market sort out what people value in terms of streaming 'packages'.
Google Play Pass[0] is basically the app equivalent of Spotify. One monthly or annual fee for access to a library of "hundreds" of apps. And movies, TV shows, and music can all be purchased a la carte, not just through streaming subscriptions.
> Any service should be able to stream/rent any media for the same rate as any other.
Sounds good to me. I would also be fine with compulsory licensing for individual copies, or frankly just an end to copyright altogether.
>Google Play Pass[0] is basically the app equivalent of Spotify. One monthly or annual fee for access to a library of "hundreds" of apps.
At the risk of dating myself, this is not a way I/my social circle consumes 'apps'[0]. But by the same token, if I were to subscribe to a service like MSFT's GamePass[1] personally I would find the most value in a service with everything, and be annoyed at having to juggle multiple subscriptions. The multiple services make it difficult and expensive to enjoy a breadth and diversity of media, regardless of total amount/quality consumed. For instance, imagine how obnoxious Spotify would be if it broke up into different services by genre.
By extension, I'd always pay more than my current given subset of subscriptions for an 'everything' service.
> And movies, TV shows, and music can all be purchased a la carte, not just through streaming subscriptions.
Certainly, but back when I purchased such things a la cart I'd have no problem cross shopping redbox/blockbuster/amazon. Probably because I only ever have to engage one and that engagement ends after the transaction, until re-initiated by myself. Maybe it's a psychological hangup, shrug.
[0]Not that I 'consume' many apps, or interact with the stores often. I think of them (sans games, and novelties) as little more than glorified websites. An 'app', as I use my phone, is just a glorified gateway to either data delivery (e.g. Netflix) or other backend traditionally and adequately served via website (e.g. google calendar)
[1]Google Stadia manages to be the worst of both worlds here, trying to be a service that also requires a la carte purchasing, instead of one or the other.
I remember using it 2007-2008-ish and it being pretty magical at the time.
s/Sony/$sourceOfCurrentIre/
The brick containing EULA should be universally accepted.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29164111
Basically John Deere made their tractors impossible to repair without official parts, and we have now a harvest season + inflation, thus John Deere employees now hold all the cards, if they stop working people will literally starve without tractors to do the harvest, since repairing the tractors without their help is now impossible, thus they are strinking.
1. You can't legally break such code, unless it's for a handful of statutorily or administratively selected purposes
2. You can't legally tell people how to break such code for any purpose
This provision is part of the DMCA, section 1201. It was policy-laundered through the WTO into US law against the objection of the tech community, so basically every country has the same rules.
The problem with this law is that it's scope dramatically extends past it's intent - hell, half the original law is just exceptions intended to control the extremely broad scope of "no breaking digital locks". What people realized was that they could put DRM on anything, regardless of if copyright actually protected it or not, and it would still have the same effect because DMCA 1201 has horrific chilling effects. Even if SCOTUS says you can't use DMCA 1201 to protect, say, printer cartridge DRM; that decision still took 10 years and millions of dollars in legal fees to reach. No company wants to spend that amount of time and money just to gain access to repair aftermarkets.
On the other hand, the law regarding price gouging is very old and well-established; because it's a very long-running problem. Serial-locked parts were basically unheard of outside of videogame consoles up until this decade. The assumption with DMCA 1201 was that it was going to keep people from copying DVDs, not from repairing tractors. It's one of the few cases in which the law actually needs to catch up to technology (as opposed to someone trying to get away with something and parroting a thought-terminating cliche).
Yes, individual Americans will get harmed by, say, anticircumvention law, copyright trolling operations, or automated content ID systems. But nobody gets outraged about that in large enough numbers. They do get outraged, however, when they hear about "China stealing our valuable intellectual property" or somesuch. So the message Congress ultimately hears is, "More please!"
... Federalism?
Most of the time it's not illegal to scalp toilet paper. There are select cities and states, with interventionist city councils and legislatures; when citizens saw inflated prices, these bodies decided that they would enact bans on scalping, in a manner which usually focus on consumer goods.
Note that economists suggest that scalping is a natural part of supply and demand and helps reduce shortages by incentivizing traders to move in supply from elsewhere (and scalping bans are sometimes deliberately weaponized against immigrant-owned small businesses because of course they are why did you doubt for a moment? Even NYC rolled that back somewhat and offered refunds on the fines they levied on bodegas.) But while the theoretical efficiency may or may not actually be realized in the aftermath of a disaster, it is of course entirely irrelevant to the legal monopoly on tractor repair services, which certainly have no such excuse. This just makes it all worse, of course.
or, you know, maybe John Deere owners/execs have the power? maybe if they paid their employees a living wage employees wouldn't need to go on strike?
Quick googling suggests that they were making $20-$30 per hour before the strike. Another quick Google suggests that the average assembly line hourly rate is $19/hr (another source says only $14/hr).
It looks like the wages aren't out of line as far as livability, but it is understandably infuriating to see the company as a whole making tremendous profits while only paying slightly above average.
Is that pretty much the situation or did I miss something?
i appreciate the data, though 1.) this is America - so workers have to deal with a lack of basic social services like in Europe, 2.) from my understanding the concessions made by John Deere were pitiful so far. an account from someone on the ground: https://twitter.com/JonahFurman/status/1456457606583758871
> but it is understandably infuriating to see the company as a whole making tremendous profits while only paying slightly above average.
yes exactly, that's the superior argument here.
although the best argument is the one about climate change, and how viable solutions are not profitable enough to capitalism in the short term. we need open source, modular tech like the Science for the People article argues.
"The current political economy is based on a false idea of “immaterial scarcity.” It believes that an exaggerated set of intellectual property monopolies – for [trade secrets], copyrights, trademarks and patents – should 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. In an age of grave global challenges, the political economy keeps many practical alternatives sequestered behind private firewalls or unfunded if they cannot generate adequate profits."
http://wealthofthecommons.org/essay/peer-peer-economy-and-ne...
I imagine John Deere probably ran similar to a company I used to work for. The order book was full, there was money to be made. 9-10 hour days Monday-Friday. Most Saturdays was mandatory overtime. The only way to guarantee you can do something over the weekend with your family is by taking PTO on Friday, which would get you out of overtime on Saturday.
Pair in that the last couple negotiations have been during downturns in farming, it's pretty reasonable that they're trying to make up ground after taking concessionary contracts.
Even if every John Deere employee made 3x of a "living wage" (relative to local costs), they'd still have every right to collectively bargain by withholding labor (to say nothing of non-monetary demands: autonomy, safety standards, flexible scheduling, etc).
Not saying I don't support the strike, or what the strike is trying to achieve, just trying to understand the nuance of whats going on here.
Besides, what kind of company looks at the supply chain situation right now and says "yea, now is a good time to move all of our business-critical infrastructure overseas."
And all that sets aside operational & regulatory challenges moving heavy manufacturing overseas.
It's pretty safe to assume that, after 30+ years of offshoring, old companies who haven't yet offshored have good reason not to do so.
c.f. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_North_and_Global_South
Many years ago there was an Italian maker of (at the time CRT's) TV's which was considered on one side "cheap" but on the other "simple/indestructible" called MIVAR.
Their TV's AFAICR were essentially made of 6 or 8 electronic cards/PCB's on a sort of backplane of connectors.
You brought the (not working) TV to the (approved) repairman, he would open the back of the TV, identify which card had issues, and replace it in like 5-10 minutes, for a fixed price (depending on which card had to be replaced).
Then the cards were sent to the factory where they had a laboratory to diagnose the issue and replace just the component(s) that failed, and these refurbished cards were sent back to the repair shops.
I have a 2004 Corvette. When I got it several years ago, it had (like many others of its ilk) a failed ABS/traction controller. Removing it was slightly complicated by the fact that it had servos connected to the hydraulic braking system, but wasn't difficult. And fortunately, at least at the time, there were a couple small companies in the business of refurbishing brake controllers. The refurbished controller has been working perfectly ever since.
Not cheap, but very significantly cheaper than a new unit.
The rise of the throwaway product is a rather recent phenomenon. Our grandparents repaired everything. It's the only sustainable approach.
I think our grandparents had just as many disposable things as we do, just not nearly as expensive. I think the idea of disposable products basically began with the industrial revolution, when mass production became easy, if not necessarily "cheap" yet
How do you change that, though? Our grandparents repaired things because they were expensive. In the 50s, a washer & dryer cost $500. In today's money that would be over $5000. And income has gone up even more. Purely in economic terms it has become considerably less appealing to fix a broken appliance.
My previous washer was about 30 years old when the tub finally rusted out at the support. It would have been 25 years had I not pathched it twice with water resistant epoxy when it first sprang a leak. It had a simple mechanical timer knob that handled the sequencing and timing of cycles. Couple of other knobs set the water temp, spin/wash speed, and optional rinse. It was dumb as a brick and cleaned my clothes.
Now my $1200 LG washer has WiFi (I NEVER connected it on purpose), beats the shit out of everything you put inside, and heavily soiled items come out stained and half clean. I emailed LG asking if they offered you access to their dumb cloud API and the answer is No unless your are a partner company. I hope this thing does not break down in the next 10 years but I doubt that.
I think some appliances (TVs, perhaps?) have been caught connecting to any open AP they can find, even if you don't give it credentials to your network.
When these need replacing, I'm buying a speed queen.
Speed Queen still makes quality laundry machines, buy those next time. No WiFi!
Many people in sci/tech industries are already aware of the importance of repairability and right to repair controversies.
For an article like this to actually make a difference to the entire population, it needs to be written and published somewhere the general public will see it.
It also needs to be dumbed down and put into terms the average person will understand: lose the "robotic arm" example and start talking about how that shiny $2000 exercise bike that you just bought for your wife will someday, inevitably, become an expensive ornament because Peloton's servers have shut down and the hardware/software can't be modified.
Until the average person cares about repairability, longevity, and hardware ownership, it just won't take hold. In my opinion.
...be resilient in the face of unpleasant events. Past a certain point, optimization is the enemy of resilience, and for optimization for the producer's profit, that point is not very far along.
This is corollary to the fundamental dictum, "Life is hard. Life is harder if you are stupid."
i've not heard of this. is it the same as critiquing the intellectual property system as a whole? if not, how is it different?
Sounds like it's more concerned with the opposite, human side - the madness that grips people who have some control and are terrified of losing it, so they use copyright (and lobbying for copyright enhancements and extensions) to keep themselves from ever having to relinquish anything they can't get back.
Production of industrial machinery like farm equipment requires massive factory infrastructure with significant supply chains. Getting the capital together for that is hard enough, but then the new company would be competing against the established John Deere, with the added (perceived, if nothing else) handicap of lenient repair rules.
An existing competitor to John Deere? I suspect it is for the same reason that sedans are essentially indistinguishable, style-wise: operating in the same environment (aerodynamics, interior volume and shape, etc. on one hand, the legal and cultural background on the other), they have all struck on the same optimizations, which include repair restrictions.
Now, if one does decide to try the alternative, and makes significantly more profit, you'll see a fairly rapid state change as most of them switch.
Market position and power takes time to be established. It takes time to shift. Even under extreme negative pressure (that is, "loyalty" is due far more to lack of alternatives than genuine delight or satisfaction) collapse can be a long time coming.
And that's before anticompetitive pressures are brought to bear (e.g., exclusive contracts or threats of retaliation against any of the above).
Lots of moats - financial, reputational, generational, technological, branding, performance, distribution, etc.
The readers of HN would do well to think long and carefully about the ideas herein. The fate of our world may depend upon it.