Deere to allow farmers to repair their own equipment
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First, quote from the MOU [1]:
> AFBF agrees to encourage state Farm Bureau organizations to recognize the commitments made in this MOU and refrain from introducing, promoting, or supporting federal or state "Right to Repair" legislation that imposes obligations beyond the commitments in this MOU. In the event any state or federal legislation or regulation relating to issues covered by this MOU and/or "Right to Repair" is enacted, each of AFBF and Manufacturer reserve the right, upon fifteen (15) days written notice, to withdraw from this MOU.
It might play out like this:
1. Deere starts a half hearted parts process. They will provide some parts, there will be year long delays in roll out, it will be annoying to use, documentation will be made incomplete on purpose by leaving out random pages or drawings and there will be no way to get them to fix it.
2. Farmers are now locked into using this service for their existing deere equipment because anything else will bankrupt them. Those machines will remain in service for a good 10-20 years which is an important time frame, because
3. Deere will spin off a subsidiary or buy a competitor which will sell what used to be Deere branded technology, "under license". This "new company" will keep all the anti-repair technology in place. New products will primarily come from this company going forward, and the products will be priced so that actual Deere-branded products are not competitive any more, especially second-hand ones.
4. It is now 2028. The MOU cannot be broken because farmers still need parts for their "old" Deere products. Deere anti right to repair lives on in the artificial competitor, which now retains 90% market ownership. Farmers cannot argue for right to repair any more. They've been sold out. Everything has gone back to normal for at least the next 25 years, as far as Deere is concerned.
(1) go and do farm work for a few years, doing anything anybody needs for a few medium sized operations and talking to everybody
(2) pick one product and advertise that you're building a competitor, emphasize that it's maintainable in the field and made from commodity parts
(3) struggle to actually launch or sell it because manufacturing physical stuff is incredibly hard. Take lots of outside investment
(4) ship 100 units and credibly claim to be able to ship many more
(5) Deere will buy you for $1bn and shut it down, which was your plan the whole time
It’s not like there’s a lack of competition anyway.
I am confident the reporting would likely be captured by the manufacturers anyway and there would be a lot of arbitrary inputs into the reports, but something to fight the short term profit taking you describe.
It's extremely hard to know ahead of time which products will ultimately be reliable and which will be flaky. Most flaky components weren't designed with that in mind -- there are some exceptions, but maintenance headaches are normally a mistake by the manufacturer. And even setting that aside, a big part of "cheap to maintain" is how many units you ship: part of why it's cheap to maintain a Civic or a Corolla is because they made millions of them, parts are everywhere, and every shop knows how to deal with them. But knowing up front if your product is going to be a hit or a flop is just not generally possible, even though that has a huge impact on maintenance costs.
Even in a world of angels, I don't know that this idea would work in general. Maybe if it was specific to some industries where the costs are easier to estimate?
For example the Ankarsrum food mixer (successor to the classic Electrolux Assistent) entry at Elkjop.no states that the expected lifetime is 30 years and that spares will be available for 12 years.
https://www.elkjop.no/product/hjem-rengjoring-og-kjokkenutst...
The French idea looks good. IKEA don't provide that information here :-(
[1] A report on this at https://www.corporateleadersgroup.com/files/cisl_digital_pro...
Companies like consumer reports should do this sort of thing.
MBAs had no long-term vision, so in each company they infested, they made poor strategic decisions such as moving manufacturing overseas, which then forced other companies to move their manufacturing overseas.
The countries they chose have zero respect for intellectual property. So now what's left are zombie companies milking their cash cows dry as international competitors arise and take their market share.
The economic basis for that appeared way before the first MBA got a job.
“My goal is to make money”
Other people think:
“I need to make some money to achieve my goal”
There are plenty of people from the second category that run businesses, but probably more from the first though.
A company should stay true to its mission and vision.
But I notice you didn't actually give an example of an outlier MBA that did not behave this way and contributed positively to the company they ran?
Generally one is not supposed to stereotype groups based on characteristics outside their control.
on edit: added in abhorrent.
But he is right in the sense that a company leader needs to occasionally leave the meeting room and get in the factory floor, get direct exposure to customers and see things firsthand.
We would be already in Mars if we had not stopped doing that.
I can't see how, the same people pushing for WTO/NAFTA are those who profited immensely from outsourcing in the 80s-90s are now the same one who likely stand to benefit the most from either supply chain disruptions, and war.
The truth is that JD is just another monopoly ([0] over 50% market share of tractors) that represents the underlying aspects of crony capitalism writ large. This is just another example how the mantra that 'tech should be in everything' needs to die, and how pervasive these horrible practices can become for the small sector of humans (less than 1% of the Human population feeds the other 99%) who grow the food everyone eats.
MBAs making supply chains inherently fragile and over who valued BS things like JIT are just reflecting what is most rewarded in the corpo culture: quick profits are the way to get fat bonuses and stock options in order to bail out when even the slightest hint of head-winds occur. This is just a symptom, not the cause and a reason why US manufacturing will likely take some time before it can get off it's addiction to the garbage made in China.
0: https://www.economicliberties.us/our-work/cheat-to-win-the-j...
Also reflected in what is most rewarded by consumers: lower prices.
No business was ever going to thrive selling US manufactured goods at a significant price premium compared to non US manufactured goods.
It's like they're targeting the lowest common denominator.
It's a self fulfilling prophecy right? If the manufacturing was internal to the US say, theres more jobs hence better economy hence people are able too afford those locally prepared goods.
That probably requires a united front against outsourcing though. It's almost as if globalism breeds poverty, and is just a way for megacorps to milk us of our cash. Totally removed from any kind of social responsibility.
They sure love to change their logos to a rainbow and call that social responsibility though. Like Nike shipping you a keychain of all the micro plastics produced during the manufacturing of those shoes you just bought as if making you deal with their waste is environmental responsibility.
Or it is arbitraging labor prices across different markets and lifting up others. Or it is also arbitraging environmental regulations and taking advantage of more corrupt/inept societies. Or it is also arbitraging better efficiencies in a more appropriately regulated economy, rather than an under or over regulated economy.
Really? Did you post your comment by carrier pigeon?
...besides, maybe they're posting from one of those Raspberry Pi Model Bs that were fabbed in the UK.
That is connected to a router made in China. And the keyboard and display, where were they made? My point is that it is pretty much unachievable and your "wherever possible" is just a get out of jail free card. Also it isn't a particularly laudable aim if we scale it up to the whole of society. We need the various countries in the world to be interdependent, we need China to need to sell to us.
China (aka East Taiwan) makes cheap shit. If you have money you can afford the better manufactured stuff from non tofu-dreg countries.
We need to divulge from China a much as possible and many companies are. It is not ethical to do business with a country that has concentration camps. Hopefully one day the ROC will reclaim power over China and clean all that up.
Obviously paying the premium for Snap-On over harbor freight is worth it, for some people. Harbor Freight still makes the most sense for a huge portion of the market, reducing the market for US made tools.
Whatever the result, it will be visible in what succeeds in the market over the long term.
After the product people you have the marketing people come in. They don’t really know how to evolve the product, but they know how to sell it and generally they know not to mess with a good product and the company makes a lot of money and grow to the logical maximum of whatever product or services they offer.
Eventually the marketing people reach the limit and then the finance people come in. And this is when a company fully gets gutted. To the bean counters every thing is a bean. They look at the good successful product and think, “how can we make this cost less to make.” So they cut every corner they can to make numbers go up on a spreadsheet. At first this is okay, because it is just a few changes that aren’t that big of a deal, but 30 change later and customers notice and are irate and swear off the company forever.
Not satisfied they will usually cut internal costs too and all of the good employee will leave.
The company then sometimes brings back in a product person and rebounds or sells off to private equity.
I don't see much recourse, other than substantial and continued boycotts for all companies pushing this garbage.
I am not buying mobile phones anymore, since my last one broke due to overheating, and in spite of the warranty terms not forbidding custom ROMs they did not honor it.
What's interesting is this appears to be driven by Right to Repair legislation that's been making it's way through various states. There's an explicit ask that AFBF not support any Right to Repair legislation:
"AFBF agrees to encourage state Farm Bureau organizations to recognize the commitments made in this MOU and refrain from introducing, promoting, or supporting federal or state "Right to Repair" legislation that imposes obligations beyond the commitments in this MOU. In the event any state or federal legislation or regulation relating to issues covered by this MOU and/or "Right to Repair" is enacted, each of AFBF and Manufacturer reserve the right, upon fifteen (15) days written notice, to withdraw from this MOU."
Seriously, Deere has been a market leader in alienating customers for years. There is no possibility that this is being done for the benefit of their customers. Mark my works, this move will ultimately be revealed as self-serving. Meanwhile, it should be met with nothing but skepticism by customers.
this probably aims to thwart legislative action
In the event any state or federal legislation or regulation relating to issues covered by this MOU and/or "Right to Repair" is enacted, each of AFBF and Manufacturer reserve the right, upon fifteen (15) days written notice, to withdraw from this MOU.
It's a blatant threat that they'll double down on their practices if any state or the federal government tries to pursue right to repair legislation.
This of course means that the only way to fix this without harming consumers is federal laws which is shitty because grassroots legal progress is far more preferable.
They will surely allow DIY in the most convoluted, inaccessible way humanly possible and try to keep this scenario as close as possible to the tractors being unrepairable.
So if one path has a 10% chance of -100000 points (ie something terrible happens) and a 90% chance of get 1000 points (something very good happens) this path has an expected value of (.1 * -100000) + (.9 * 1000) = -9100
whereas some other branch has a 100% chance of an outcome of 10 points. You take the branch where you get the guaranteed 10 points because even though the best case is on the other branch, the average case on that branch is worse than on the 10 point branch.
And what I'm saying is they decided that their highest average payoff as doing some compromised version of self allowed diy whereas they get a really bad payoff in the case where the diy legislation is written externally and actually forces them to allow reasonable diy
This is a terrible idea. There is a very good reason "warranty void if removed" stickers are unenforceable in the US due to the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act
If I have a software safety check in a giant combine harvester: if person detected <3m in front of harvester, emergency stop.
Farmer finds it annoying so they install a "patch" they found on the Internets that disables it. Now there are two major options legally: * The law states that it's the company who is responsible for this safety feature, therefore the company tries to lock down the hardware/software as much as possible * The law states that modifications null/void certain parts of the warranty & other bits.
If I have a warranty on a CPU, isn't it void if I overvolt that CPU to the point it dies? Don't you think it should be? Afaik it's accepted that warranties on cars are void if you do something stupid with them.
There are a lot of physical systems that are capable of damaging themselves if they operate in an unconstrained manner - so the limitations are software defined.
Look, for example, at what Stuxnet is capable of doing to industrial centrifuges.
Now, it's somewhat unlikely that user defined software will cause damage comparable to active malware - but mistakes do happen.
(marcus0x62's comment pretty much invalidates what I just said.)
edit - and I tend to view encrypted ROMs, etc., as being more about pulling the kind of anti-consumer/anti-repair shenanigans discussed in the original article than any genuine concern about limiting liability. But maybe that’s just my bias peeking through.
https://www.farm-equipment.com/blogs/6-opinions-columns/post...
All brands break. If you don't have easy access to parts, it's harder sell. Farmers don't want machines they can't easily fix and so Deere wins on that front. The CaseIH dealer network is just as strong, so that's the actual competition for Deere in these parts.
Also: JV with GUSS automation orchard spraying tech. And Light for some kind of vision AI. There is a ‘startup incubator’ guy sitting in SF and JD is furiously buying everything they can get their hands on. In fact, I know at least two moderately funded startups whose sole aim is to be acquired by JD.
Meanwhile Case IH/CNH is also invested in Raven(that I like a lot actually and can give a good run for JD who hasn’t been lagging behind in the grain/combine automation equip). AGCO/Massey/Fendt is looking at the retrofit sector. Bless their hearts.
It’s time to consolidate just like with the Ag inputs/seeds/fertilizer where I think a few giants control almost all of the market after a flurry of mergers and acquisitions: Dow/DuPont, Sygenta/ChemChina, Bayer/Monsanto. BASF stands alone but they are not big on seeds. Dow/DuPont merged but then spun off Corteva, but it’s still incestous. It’s the Big4 now. Same thing will happen with the tractor and equipment sector with the main players being JD, CNH and AGCO.
It is what it is.
ETA: Let’s not forget how JD almost bought Monsanto before it went before DoJ to stop the sale and Bayer ended up paying 60 something billion for a lemon right before the Roundup trial. JD desperately wanted Climate Fieldview and Monsanto that owned Climate did NOT include it in the sale to Bayer. Fun times.
Blame your fellow 'I'm just making money' loose ethics type programmer, they could just as easily be making drones used to destroy entire apartment buildings or the privacy-intruding facial recognition with that type reasoning, but instead they choose to deny farmers from making the food that you eat instead.
I noped the hell out of that asap.
Would be useful to compare the terms of this agreement with draft right-to-repair legislation which has been rejected by Deere and others.
Not unlike how the record companies gave in to the "Parental Advisory" label.
Indeed, and they’re not making a secret of it, see vvanders’ comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34307382
Unfortunately Case IH, New Holland, Claas and Kubota all have a similar attitude towards their customers, which makes this an industry wide problem, not a John Deere problem. Legislators should ignore the veiled threats and force these companies to open up 'or else'.
The less a company makes on maintenance and repairs, the more it has to make on the initial sale, which means a higher upfront cost. People generally don't like paying a lot of money upfront, so naturally, companies will make profit in other ways.
Easy to see with smartphones. When manufacturers started to make batteries non user replaceable, did it make consumers flock to manufacturers that still offered user replaceable batteries? The answer is no, consumers have chosen, they don't care, except for a minority too small for manufacturers to need caring. There are alternatives, like the Fairphone, but it is not a mainstream device, and it is expensive for its specs, so few people buy it.
Not only it is our choice, but we are not even honest about it. We are happy to buy hard-to-repair devices, but then, we want to game the system by using regulation.
Don't get me wrong, I am in favor of the right to repair movement. But I also understand that it will go against the will of consumers by raising the prices. It is a bit like safety and the environment. We don't want cars with emission control, because they are more expensive and have more points of failure, but we are forced to buy them anyways, and it is good for all of us in the end. I think the right to repair is good for the environment and for the economy in general, so it is worth regulating.
"But they kept the copyright to all data and electronic tools. You have to buy their equipment and many manuals amounting to over 20k for each piece of equipment in most cases. I talked to one of the john deere mechanics, he said he only knows of one farm that has done so because of the price but did so because he also hired a guy that use to work for john deere. I thing the Most important thing farmer's get out of it is the access to the diagnostic codes and JD manuals that can be used to trouble shoot the problem once you have the code. I've seen the software used and it is dynamite. It talks the mechanic through most steps of the trouble shooting. Since everything is computerized, almost need it to understand the electronic issues which of course is all stored on the individual computer components. One for transmission,engine, power train couplings and all other devices. Yet again, it costs approximately 5-7 hundred dollars just for the mechanic to show up at the farm, each time.. so if it doesn't get fixed or no parts til the next day, that's 2 trips which doesn't include any labor... "
Here’s hoping the EU forces them to get their shit together soon.
Yes. That's Deere's explicit goal. The American Farm Bureau Federation had to agree not to support right-to-repair legislation to get that concession from Deere.
Signed on a Sunday. Wonder why. Some legislative deadline approaching?
I’ve known a few farmhands and they claimed to not mind harvest season because of the pay.
I loved farming, but there is not a ton of money in unskilled labor. (Sure, you can do a lot better if you have skills/experience or own the farm...)
When finally those laws get proposed I fully expect manufacturers to claim "security and IP theft" exceptions and politicians will fold. I still have electronic equipment made in the 80's that had not just schematics in its manual, but pcb layout drawings so you could remake a pcb if it got destroyed... And somehow we didn't have clones of this equipment appear.
Hobbyists/industrial outfits would be a different story as they would have in-house expertise....
Then I bought some "service manual" cd on ebay and there was everything there. Even estimates how long it "should" take to replace specific parts.
But the 1991 Nissan Patrol manual for instance doesn't show how to reflow your injectors. It does however indicate you can use a fish scale to measure the force of the throw for the steering swivel hub so you can decide if you need to add or remove shims from the king pin bearings. Rebuilding this hub and even the diff is described.
Deere fought this tooth and nail and will probably still not play nice. They are being forced to do this and must continue to be forced.
Is this supposed to be a threat? Should legislation be enacted, they would be forced to comply with it. At that point any "voluntary" agreement seems pointless.
Are they trying to coerce individual states into not passing right to repair under the assumption that should one state pass a right to repair law, they would retaliate by discontinuing access to spare parts and related materials in other states?
Am I missing something?
I bet in 5-10 years they'll be back to doing everything they can to make repair impractical.
Where they create a network of rental hubs.
I think a lot of farming machinery has moved this way already where you dont pay to own a machine that you may only need a limited number of days/year.
I don't know the details how it works, but I am assuming there is a way they can work it out where everyone is reasonably happy. Because it is in the interest of the rental service to be predictable.
And there is a huge benefit for the farmer to not have to own and store something that is probably the most expensive machine they have. And also not have to worry about it breaking down at the most critical moment.
But that comes at a steep hourly price i assume.
Market economy is not always a bad thing.
I frankly don’t trust the product of a company who has been actively trying to screw over their customers for the past 20 years.
My guess is they know that there are enough parts now that are proprietary and difficult to clone that they are going to have to go the the Deere dealer anyway. Like modern cars those things are loaded with computers and sensors. You have the right to repair it, but that doesn’t mean you have any hope to.
If you sell hardware you can bundle it with open-source software that people are free to modify.
Or you can sell it without software and other vendors can supply closed-source software that can't be modified, but you can't have exclusive agreements with those vendors or prefer one over another.
I buy a widget without software, install a closed source option that is available for the widget, and later want to sell it. Do I have to remove the software?
When you make the company about maximizing profit, you interfere with the purpose of your business. You now get in the way of your customers getting what they need and want. This has been proven by Deere, getting in the way of farmers fixing their equipment.
Deere could have instead opened their business more to repair, maximizing trust and reliability with consumers. Truly maximizing their gain in the market. Instead of making themselves the most desirable business in the market, they tried to trap people into inefficient overly-expensive time-wasting processes for the short-term gain of some shareholders and some greedy shallow executives.
That’s not the point. That's marketing.
> When you make the company about maximizing profit, you interfere with the purpose of your business.
Maximizing profit is the general purpose of business in a capitalist society. Serving other ends is a means to that end, not the purpose.
> In the agreement, the AFBF says it will encourage “state Farm Bureau organizations to recognize” these commitments and “refrain from introducing, promoting, or supporting federal or state ‘Right to Repair’ legislation.[^1]
[^1]: https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/9/23546323/john-deere-right-...
Something needs to change where the perceived "cost" of building out repair lock in revenue is much higher than it currently is.
This is the great fraud of our time - Right to Repair is portrayed as government intervention in the free market and excersise in socialism
When actually it is the Government that grants John Deer artifical monopoly on bits and bites and doesn't just fine, but imprisons anyone who doesnt agree.
Copyright, itself a fraudulent name, is a privilidge, awarded to advance sciences and arts. Where it does not advance anything, it should not apply.
Imagine they did this with a physical object, broke into your house and stopped you from opening the engine - that would be tresspass and a dozen other crimes. Why is it legal just because it's digital?
This is why people are calling it Neo-feudalism or digital feudalism, the relationship is lile between me the serf and john deer the medieval Lord
Also I am not against copyright, but it was created for books 200 years ago, not control software that determines if you go bancrupt, or live or die.
OP described exactly what prevents you from modifying hardware you own how you see fit:
> hardware manufacturer from making the firmware impossible to modify for example by using hardcoded signature verification.
If you don't understand this entirely technical mechanism, then you should read into it to find out what we're really up against. Basically, the chip running the software is set up to only run software that has been cryptographically signed by the manufacturer. If you modify the software, the chip refuses to run it.
If you painstakingly opened the chip and managed to change a few of the right bits, you might be able to convince that one chip to run different software. But you wouldn't get any information that would help you run software on other, unmodified, chips - the private signing key stays with the manufacturer, the chips themselves only contain the public verification key. Of course manufacturers employ techniques to prevent such physical attacks, so you wouldn't have an easy time of it either.
The straightforward path to overcome would be to completely swap out the chip for another without such a restriction, and completely rewrite the software, but then you're up against the churn of the market - the model (and hardware revision) you've specifically designed a replacement for will be a tiny fraction of the market.
I was trying to point out that securing the chip against the owner of the tractor should not be legal - in the same way that taking away a wheel from your tractor would not be allowed -it now your property
On the technical side, the difficult bit is coming up with ways that discern the owner of a computer from a mere possessor of a computer. There are many legitimate cases for protecting against a mere possessor (evil maid, datacenter, theft prevention), to the point that blanket outlawing processors with built in code signing isn't going to happen. The only way I've thought of is through some sort of time delay where if you put the processor in a debug mode and let it sit there for a period of time (say a week), you'd then be treated as the owner and could reflash signing keys etc.
The simple legislative approach would be to make it so that a manufacturer has to create an automated process of signing code hashes supplied by legitimate owners, that would allow the code to run on the owner's hardware. But this would just be constraining the centralized power that manufacturers have and hoping the law would be strong enough to enforce it (and keep enforcing it), rather than reforming the capability to begin with.
That idea is so easy to abuse (e.g. are you sure you become the owner when you buy a computer?) that IMO there really should be no distinction between owner and possessor. If you have physical access to the device you should be able to do whatever you want with it. Physical security is easy for people to understand, unlike public-key cryptography. I'd much rather have maids steal my encrypted bits due to my carelessness if it means I have full control over my hardware.
I'd like to see the keys to the kingdom being unique for each machine and being handed over to the owner when the purchase is made.
As for positive government action- I think government plays 'neutral' action when it sets the rules of the game, and current rules of the game are, you could be consodered owner of a vehicle even though you don't have keys to the software.
Those rules are wrong and need changing - because we have never explicitly set the rules for what does it mean to own an object with firmware.
I am trying to frame it in such a way, as to make it clear that we arent asking manufacturers for concession, we are correcting illigitimate market behaviour, sort of like selling snake oil.
It's not theirs to allow or disallow. The farmers own their equipment.
On the other, Farmers are a terrible group to start with. They've actively resisted it in the past and are very unlikely to have or be willing to gain the skills needed and they are ultimately running businesses and should behave accordingly.
For contrast:
"Government to allow people to use their own brains."
You could argue that any changes to the software are then the fault of the user, which is a reasonable point of view. But what if someone comes up with a mod that makes your wifi better by breaking transmit power rules (at the expense of others). Lots of people might use it, and then there are resulting widespread interference problems. Difficult to identify culprits, possibly too many to prosecute etc.
This already exists in multiple forms. It's incredibly easy to import adapters and antennas that give you an order of magnitude more power than you're legally allowed to use. I used one of those setups in high school to run uTorrent over the AP of the McDonald's half a mile away.
Regular folks don't care enough to break the rules.
In the past, most of the key aspects of the radio were pretty fixed in the hardware. Whereas now, more and more of the radio is in software (and/or FPGA), or at least configurable from software. Tinkering in that case requires a "per person" level of skill. Whereas tinkering with software requires one person to be able to tinker, and then lots of people can use the result.
Slightly OT, they pronounce router “rowter” over here, presumably to avoid the same issue.
On the plus side for Australia, we never have to hear the classic form:
> Rooter? I hardly even know 'er!
So unfortunately, what we're really looking for is some positive government regulations that would make companies have to publish some of their documentation and source code. That's much harder to create and draft, although for a simple first stab I would look at requiring that source code be available to make a work eligible for copyright protection.
Not true. The DMCA makes it illegal to "circumvent" DRM schemes. It's also illegal to carrier-unlock your phone without your carrier's permission.
But even if these legal restrictions were to vanish tomorrow, we'd still be stuck with a similar landscape - most manufacturer control comes from technical restrictions combined with a high rate of churn so even if someone invests the time to figure something out, it quickly becomes yesterday's model. Fundamentally, understanding is more difficult than creation.
The calculus could be different on tractors, which are meant to last a real long time. Except the topic here too is focused on getting companies to positively supply things to help, rather than removing laws that hinder (FTA: "The agreement creates a mechanism to address farmers’ concerns and give them access to resources needed to repair their own equipment, such as diagnostic and repair codes, manuals and product guides.")
So my ultimate point is that you need to move past thinking that a Constitutional "right to repair" law would address these problems. Such a thing would be as ineffectual as the Constitutional "freedom of speech" has been in addressing the social media oligopoly.
- Repair manuals.
- Reasonably priced replacement parts.
- Give the owner a key to sign / certify any parts they want.
- Give the owner the ability to disable OTA updates.
- Give the government a key to sign / certify parts.
- Give the government the ability to review and delay OTA updates.
Governments should be acting more in their own nations' self-interest, and simply forbidding any such things from foreign vendors.
It's pretty sad because replaceable batteries have been a thing in just about everything since I was a kid and the idea that laptops are somehow so special that we can't do it because they are thin is ridiculous to me. But apparently that's what the market wants.
Bad idea. Very bad idea. We've already seen malware campaigns where governments actually stole signing credentials such as Stuxnet, where the creators managed to get their malware signed by Realtek and JMicron certificates [1].
Maybe that could rectify this ridiculousness in about 5 - 15 years (if successful).
If the company is truly a threat to your community, and if the damage is targeted and restrained enough to be considered an act of protest and not chaos for the sake of it, then a jury of your peers ought not convict.
But as a human who likes food, my desire to make sure that nobody has a "press here to make the people hungry"-button is legitimate.
If it turns out that the existing political machinery is ineffective at preventing the creation of this button, US norms provide no recourse. If the government makes you mad enough, you overthrow the government (ideally peacefully).
But what do you do when a private company becomes a significant threat? Send them a strongly worded letter? Companies don't speak english, they're just sensitive to their bottom line. If you want to communicate with them, you have to influence their bottom line.
So I mean that I think we'd all be better off if we considered periodic slashing (drilling, maybe?) of for-sale tractor tires, and other forms of nonviolent sabotage, to be legitimate political speech. If certain lines were crossed, we ought to encourage each other to get off the couch and go practice that speech.
I own some John Deere equipment on my farm, alongside equipment from all of the major brands. I find no measurable difference in experience across dealing with those brands, and they are all great compared to other products in my life. Repairability in everyday life is actually quite horrendous compared to farm equipment. My broom broke the other day and I have no idea where to even begin looking for parts to fix it. I'm going to have to buy a new broom to replace it.
When my farm equipment breaks, the parts department at the local dealer will bend over backwards to find what I need.
the way things have been organized economically and politically (especially under US late-state capitalism) once a business does well financially it can basically capture its political/regulatory context and control its own destiny by influencing all decisions that affect it. it is no longer a Milton Friedman style rule taker, it is a rule maker.
there are many channels that enable this, both on the incentive side that create the desires to act in such ways and the response side (regulation, laws) that define the corporate interface with society (e.g lack of liability for any externalities created, oligopoly status ("there is no alternative") or revolving door arrangements with regulators and politicians (people shamelessly cashing-in on relations and knowledge)
nothing intrinsically difficult to solve to get to a better place. it does not take a "revolution" to fix democratic, market based, economies. it "only" requires having a moral compass and the transparency and awareness that helps navigating according to its prescriptions. the rest would take care of itself. exorbitant profits, environmental destruction, astronomical wealth inequality etc. are not required for the system to work. they are the result of system that is degenerating in the hands of a particular set of people
Additionally the negative effects of a monopoly can also show in a duopoly or the like. It doesn't even need cartel like collusion.
It's obviously better for deere to set the terms of the repairs, rather than have it be dictated to them via legislation.
What happened, however, is that the equipment manufacturers in modern times streamlined manufacturing such that they created a whole line of equipment that is physically identical but differentiated by software unlocks. The problem is that if you were able to repair the software, you would be able to unlock features. It is access to those systems has been closely guarded to prevent piracy, just as all kinds of software has done for 50+ years. They do have a problem with you using software you didn't pay for.
It sounds more like artificially inflating the price for hardware