Colorado governor signs tractor right-to-repair law opposed by John Deere
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
The amount my family has saved by being able to fix and even modify stuff on their own is huge. My dad still mows our lawn with an antique Allis-Chalmers hooked up to a commercial mower. Equipment is wildly expensive compared to margins at smaller scales (think like 2k acres for small farms). Things need to last for decades or generations in order to keep a profit.
[0] See "Farm and other F words" by Sarah Mock for a more complete treatment.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/agricultural-land-area-by... https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-farms-size?country...
* https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2015/11/25/japan-strugg...
* https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/japans-farms-wea...
* https://thediplomat.com/2014/09/japans-agriculture-dilemma/
Small family farms are good when a country is still developing and has excess labour, but once industrialization gets going folks move to urban areas for factory jobs and farms need to consolidate and mechanize. This has been the story over history for all countries have been 'developed', and in the post-WW2 is generally true of Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. Though this mechanization never really happened in Japan.
How Asia Works: Success and Failure in the World's Most Dynamic Region goes over this quite well:
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16144575-how-asia-works
The USDA says that only 4% of farms in America are 2,000 acres or larger.
https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Highlights/2019/2017C...
The average farm in America is 446 acres, according to the USDA.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...
The OP is completely out of touch thinking that 2,000 acres is small.
That's a weird definition.
Acres of contiguous land controlled by a single owner is how people tend to use the word farm.
In reality, farmers are often equipment owners and negotiate with landowners to manage X acres.
None of this discussion is worth wile in referencing farms.
Best could be said : a farmer who has to service equipment equal to a 400 acre farm benefits by laws protecting their farm equipment.
GP may be wrong about the USA as a whole, though I'm sure there are areas of the US where 2,000 acres would indeed be a small farm.
Also, let’s be clear: we’re talking about the US. I’m sure it’s different in other countries.
The 'farm vlogger' channel Laura Farms operates a 2000 acres (800 hectares; 8 sq. km) farm:
>The 2021 Colorado average farmland real estate value, a measurement of the value >of all land and buildings on farms, was $1,610 per acre. This is an increase of >1.3 percent from 2020 and 2.5 percent from 2019.
So we're talking $3.2mm today and by what the person you replied to said, I'm betting that his family bought that land a very long time ago.
I'm not a farmer by any means, but I just did a quick search for land in Colorado and I'm even seeing ~2,400 acres on sale for $1.7mm today. There's 15,000 acres listed for $2.1mm. I mention not being a farmer because I don't know if those lands are viable for anything.
Furthermore, computerizing farm implements means shorter life span for its equipments.
Probably why older cars are lasting longer than newer ones. Computer chip failure of a 20-yo car means a trip to the wrecking yard to get that chip or get totaled; 40-yo car, not as much.
https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Highlights/2019/2017C...
By way of comparison, a top 4th-percentile income is $205,000 a year.
Saying 2,000 acres is a small farm is like saying $205,000 a year salary is low-income.
How many of the farms surveyed are the owner and operator’s full time job? How many of those farms are owned and operated by multiple families at the same time?
Farming in the US is nothing like a corporate job, or even most small businesses, for reasons I just don’t have the time to share. Your comparison to income for the general population…doesn’t work.
Farms with 2k acres or less are indeed small, family run operations. Especially if you only farm cash crops. These are the kinds of farms that rely on right-to-repair the most. Not the homesteader family with 16 acres and some goats.
Sorry all, your idea of what most full-time, successful, multi-generational farming operations in the US looks like is simply not accurate.
Seriously though, I think Polis has done a good job and he's the rare politician who can understand the implications of the right-to-repair law.
When I was teaching Comp Sci at the high school level and we got a bunch of refurbished computers from his foundation ( http://www.jaredpolisfoundation.org/ ).
The desktops came with bare-bone Windows and a bunch of open source applications. Of course we put Linux on all of them anyway, but most people back then would have NOT known how to use a Linux box, so the setup they came with was understandable.
híjole!
> Hardly. This never should have been necessary to begin with. It's pathetic that it took so long to reverse.
Are you kidding me? We have been lambasting corrupt politicians who are too greedy to stand against lobbyists and wishing for the right to repair for years and now that it's happened, all you can say is "no big deal, this isn't a win, harrumph harrumph?" Bollocks to you, good sir.
Of course it should have been a given in the first place! However, while I can't speak for you, I myself live in an imperfect world where we must do the best we can with what we have. So if, for a change, elected officials act in the best interests of their constituents to overturn something that you and I both readily agree is a disgusting perversion of the law, YES it's a win, and GOOD FOR THEM. Shame on you.
Congratulations to Colorado citizens for enshrining those rights into law. I hope this paves the way to enshrining general computing freedom into law as well.
This is true. I don't think there's any arguing that; often city policies including things like limitless expansion have harmed rural life. Rhetoric from constituents often paints rural people living a "lifestyle", which is largely a marginal amount of people. Most people live out there because that's what they can afford. Policies that are statewide that make sense for cities often don't make sense for folks in rural areas.
> We say it will help them but then why aren't lobbying their representatives to vote for this bill.
I'm guessing you haven't spent time immersed in any of these issues. I am a Democrat and spent some time living in a rural area. Often Republicans pay lip service to rural people, veterans, first responders, etc but don't do anything other than serve their own (the representatives) needs and desires. I have no mercy for Republicans as a party, but I have empathy for the people they claim, and fail, to represent. This is not a complex paradigm.
Now, combine my previous paragraph with this paradigm to understand the full scope of their choices in voting:
- Democrats have been outright hostile to them. Hillary Clinton walked into a coal mining town, told them she was going to take their jobs, and that they were going to become coders. When concerns were voice they were trolled and turned into a meme. This is just one example of the outright contempt some Democrats have shown in the past.
- Republicans on the other hand at least speak in a friendly tone to them, but hardly do anything. At times, they also harm them in their pursuit of self-gratification.
Now put yourself in the shoes of someone that's a voter: Do you vote for the person that speaks and acts with contempt for you or do you vote for the person that speaks nicely and at times acts with contempt? That's why this whole thing is big to me. Democrats finally grabbed a thing that's stupidly important to rural folks and ran it to the highest extent they could. This won't undo generations of harm, but it will start a conversation, and with any luck will get some folks to flip their voting. I say this from the perspective that Democrats used to care about rural people, businesses, etc. Hell, Democrats were even the ones that stood up the VA (and subsequently abandoned fighting to maintain it).
This moment in history is momentous imo. Not only did rural people, ag-tech, and open source ethos prevail, but it was Democrats that did it - not Republicans. Paying lip service to those things is now measurably not enough. That symbolizes both a change in historic Democratic attitudes, but also shows there are inroads to places where Republicans have, at least in peoples minds, ruled with an iron fist.
Pop a top on a beer, pack away your culture war and divisional rhetoric, and appreciate the fact that today sensibility prevailed above all else.
She left him a John Deere letter!
Farm equipment was a good first win because the opposition isn't as big as some other industries. It's relatively easy to get everyone on board with helping farmers and compared to say Apple or Google companies like John Deer don't have as deep of pockets.
We probably won't have a lot of success jumping directly to one of the more difficult markets like phones or cars, since the opposition there is strong, well connected and well funded.
The next battle will likely be won over a market that is bigger than farm equipment but smaller than phones or cars in general. I could see kitchen appliances, washesr/dryers or other equipment in that space being a good target. It would be relatively easy to motivate a base of people to care about it, because everyone has these appliances, and the opposition is fragmented and not as well funded in lobbying.
The monopoly status and the amounts we can extract from parts and services is astronomical.
Taught me lessons about never wanting any companies to control over me like that
Does this also put upward pressure on tractor prices as any other manufacturer would also have to comply with this? (Meaning competition won't prevent passing the cost along to the farmer)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35532479 Colorado passes agricultural Right to Repair (ifixit.com - 15 days ago, 124 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35714294 Colorado becomes first to pass ‘right to repair’ for farmers (wivb.com - 1 day ago, 83 comments)
Hmm. I'm thinking about apple right there, for a number of years now, Apple has been requiring independent repair centers like mine to adhere to restrictive contractual agreements. This needs to be applied to them as well.
Apple has no business telling people how to repair their own devices or restricting how people lawfully obtain parts.
One recent win: Nintendo has agreed to lifetime replacement of Switch controllers, and while they or their reseller tried to weasel their way out of it by demanding sales receipts, consumer authorities has already pointed out the ridiculousness of it as every single one of them are eligible for replacement anyway.
Lays tried to sue a few potatoe farmers, when they saw they were destined to lose the case they withdrew it, Gov't realizing they weren't going to get the case law to fix the issue decided to just outright invalidate a bunch of the patents.
I'm only half-joking.
Not really a law, but their attitude towards IP means that you can find schematics and parts (many of them aftermarket) for tons of equipment there.
budgets in the short-term are negatively impacted by this decision for all/most tractor makers, which is why they resisted this change. no one can accurately predict market forces that far out, so short-term concerns, being much easier to predict, win out.
What’s to stop the new manufacturer from implementing a similar policy once the farmers are locked in with an expensive purchase?
That is in the context of a business starting to sell farm equipment that can be repaired. Threads, go figure.
That attitude is why John Deere and similar have the anticustomer policies that they do.
The purpose of a corporation is not "profit above all else". Corporations are also supposed to operate in a manner that benefits society. We used to actually strip corporations of their charters when they failed their social responsibility.
The responsibility to shareholders depends a lot on the charter, but in general, it's to run the company in a profitable and sustainable manner. Again, it's not "make the most money possible no matter what". If that were the case, then there would be no corporations engaging in anything but the highest-margin sorts of business. So there'd be no low-margin stuff like toilet paper.
This mostly applies to tractors that, today, are too old to violate R2R. But someday, the tractors sold today will be that old.
The "capitalism encourages healthy competition that works to the advantages of innovation and the consumer" only works when companies are prevented from cheating. And the natural inclination of anybody who wants money and power is to cheat.
There are a ton of problems that can't be solved through market competition.
in theory it could have been solved by a more competitive market.
I believe most shortfalls in our current market economy stem from a lack of competition and then subsequent cartel style collusion for the few big players, high barriers to entry that are fortified through regulatory capture, and a tendency for lots of small players in tight competition to consolidate over time into fewer bigger players. (I think we need to disincentiveze consolidation in all but the most egregious cases of natural monopolies like most public utilities)
this answers so many questions from "why is it so hard to work on my new car" to "why do my tennis shoes wear out so fast".
there are also cultural factors. people using the tools aren't the same craftsmen who build, repair, and sell them. each of these disciplines is now siloed and few companies are putting real effort into considering this holistic lifecycle view of their products.
then when these options do exist people may not be aware, or obtaining them is more immediately expensive or less convenient in the short term. or they simply don't care.
That set of problem is indeed enormous. I'm not arguing otherwise. But there is also an enormous set of problems that can't be solved by more competition, but people put forth "more competition" as a solution anyway.
Increasing competition is valuable, but it's not a panacea.
I'm far from convinced that this particular problem can be solved by more competition for a few reasons, but the primary one is this: the established players have shown that behaving this way will maximize profit. New players in the space have a greater economic pressure to do the same than to do differently.
Thing is, farmers already have their John Deere tractors, and, just like Apple sucks you into their ecosystem and soon every tech thing you own is an Apple product, so does John Deere. The switching cost is just too high, especially for a whole farm's equipment that you buy and keep/use for 15 years. The first iphone is just older than that. So you buy a tractor in 2008, it's only just now time to replace that tractor, but in the interim you've bought all of the special dongles, at $50k-$300k a pop, are you really going to switch tractor manufacturers? You could, we're talking about farm equipment, not mini DVI dongles, but you really want your hardware to work together, and it's going to take you another 15 years to fully divest yourself of the Apple, err John Deere ecosystem. But you're already 40, having inherited the family farm when you were 25. Another 15 years and you'll be 55, and it'll be time for retirement soon enough. So you just keep buying John Deere products and hope the corporate farms don't get you before then.
I know government regulations are anathema to some, but they're anathema because they really do force somebody's hand, and change things. Sometimes, even for good.
and
> market problem
are two different classes of problems.
And tractors/farm equipment isn't the only thing we need right to repair on. So count this as a small victory towards a much larger goal.
You don't have to prove the reason why to observe that it didn't happen. No company sprung up.
I wouldn't want HN to become a place where you can't ask questions!
The "Free Market" does do a far better job of rapidly and semi-accurately allocating resources and labor than central planning.
However, the "Free Market" is absolutely horrible at solving other problems, starting with the Commons Problem, and including the tendency towards monopolies, which are the problem here. It is a near-mathematical certainty in a 'free market' that the big get bigger, and weild that power to crush any upstarts. Even if there is massive demand for something new, the entrenched monopoly/near-monopoly/cartel players will crush it. This is the case here. Also, in regulated markets (i.e., all of them, see next paragraph), the large players will often succeed at regulatory capture, which further enables them.
Also note that the "free market" is an absolute fiction. It does not exist. Every market has rules, spoken or tacit.
The only question is what are the rules and how are they enforced. Wise governments will set rules that minimize the tendency towards monopoly, and protect their institutions and citizens from regulatory capture. This is a step in that direction.
Another tack to answer your question is to observe what actually happens in these "free" markets. There has been enormous demand for this, with pressure provoking legislatures to attempt to act for decades, yet no competitor has arisen. Similarly, it took literally most of a century, and major legislation to get car companies to even start installing safety gear like collapsible steering columns (replacing the ones that impaled the drivers in small collisions), seat belts, airbags, etc. Plenty of demand, but a cartel-ish industry fails to meet it.
Re-examine your libertarian tendencies more closely. I also used to find it an attractive concept, but it is full of glib answers that are not actually realizable in the real world (and often not even in toy models). Actually working through the consequences of many of the concepts shows that they are just a mirage, and sticking to those ideas simply enables monopolists and oligarchs to thrive.
The "Free Market" does do a far better job of rapidly and semi-accurately allocating resources and labor than central planning.
In theory a central decider works better, and nearly every company I have ever heard of has some form of central planning as their overall governing strategy. But trying to central plan a whole economy; that takes too much information, and is too venerable to corruption. And it also requires the central planner to really understand what is "best", and consistently choosing the "right" central planners seems to require political structures we just don't have. So even in the absence of "true" corruption the decision making processes get "corrupted".
Looking at history it looks like some sort of market economy with legislators making rules to keep the market from doing bad things (e.g.: externalizing things like global warming, or killing people in meat processing plants) is the best solution that humanity has yet invented.
I'm really curious if the IoT and AI age we're entering changes this. It doesn't seem like an immutable law of the universe - my guess is that people's self-interest and the challenges of scaling communication are the root cause. Objective analytics and AI systems to synthesize information might change the efficacy of central planning; also, the current free market implementation appears that it's being twisted as externalities become of larger focus (ie climate change)
Market forces work best with commodities and substitute products. The farther away you get, the weaker the effect.
Off-topic: Most any market is a legal fiction invented by the government. Some markets are even designed by teams of economists to reduce overheads by designing the rules of the market - say electricity markets.
The closest we have to free markets in the world are probably war zones.
You bring up "free market" all the time, yet it is an incredibly vague concept. Do you have a link that defines exactly what you mean by the term? Ideally a blogpost written by you.
Generally I feel when you invoke the words "free market" you are just calling for a beneficient perfect god to fix whatever fault you have identified.
I am all for reducing unnecessary regulations and unnecessary government overhead. However much regulation and government overhead provides necessary things that I can't buy/negotiate as an individual.
(Edits & additions)
Not really. A free market is one where people make trades based on negotiation rather that coercion. Property rights are enforced, contract agreements are enforced, and using force or fraud in the negotiations is not allowed.
This is the usual definition of a free market.
I understand that free markets are a chaotic system, which leaves a lot of people very uncomfortable. I also understand that free markets are not an easy thing to understand.
> The closest we have to free markets in the world are probably war zones.
A war zone fits none of the definition I provided. So does slavery and selling poison to babies, other things people claim are "free market".
Q1: Where do trademarks fit into your definition of a free market?
The topic is buying tractors that can be fixed without using the vendor's service agents.
Q2: How does coercion apply in the situation of buying a tractor from John Deere? (I.e. what part of buying a John Deere tractor is not a free market negotiation in your definition).
Copyright is a property right. All property rights are abstract definitions that don't exist outside our minds (e.g. I have one dollar in a bank account).
Q3: Where does copyright fit into your definition of a free market?
PS: I strongly disagree that there is any consensus about how a "free market" is defined. Maybe provide a link to a place that you agree with the definition, preferably defined in high detail.
It's still a legal fiction, but I was mainly referring to patents and copyrights.
Trademark is an anti-fraud measure. Remember I wrote that a free market proscribes fraud?
> what part of buying a John Deere tractor is not a free market negotiation in your definition
Trying to control your use of the product after the sale by abusing IP law.
> Copyright is a property right.
Debatable. It's a modern invention, for example.
> All property rights are abstract definitions that don't exist outside our minds
Property rights (like the rights to life and liberty) are inalienable and are properties of our minds. They are not fictions.
> I strongly disagree that there is any consensus about how a "free market" is defined
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/freemarket.asp
is more or less aligned with what I wrote. If you google "define free market" you'll find consistency.
In software we all see the abuses of copyright and patents, so I can understand why you rail against them.
You have again used the term "legal fiction" which I translate to "a law you don't like". What is a legal non-fiction? Our laws are rules. All rules ultimately only exist in our minds except rules (or sub-dependencies) imposed upon us by a god or the universe.
> Trying to control your use of [a John Deere tractor] after the sale by abusing IP law.
That control doesn't require any IP law at all: DRM can be equivalently enforced by private contracts and/or a secret that is too difficult to reverse engineer (recent gaming consoles). John Deere can negotiate a private contract with you that you must use their parts and service agents. Surely that is a likely outcome of a properly free market?
> Property rights (like the rights to life and liberty) are inalienable.
I think that statement is too vague to have any real meaning. Inalienable just means something like "very important rule" or perhaps "meta-rule". Property rights includes intellectual property rights (its all just rules).
Your rights to life and liberty sometimes conflict with my rights to life and liberty. Laws and wars can result from compromise and conflict.
Thank you for explaining your position better. I admit I am struggling to see internal consistency with your definitions. I guess I am mostly responding to you because I tend to read your comments as short political soundbites, and I prefer more comments with deeper explanations of any point someone is trying to make. I sincerely appreciate your time in giving me more detail.
I actually expect we are mostly in broad agreement.
Perhaps I would tend to give inaliable rights a higher priority than you? Rights to property, life and liberty need to be encoded in the legal constraints that restrict free markets in unobvious ways. Adding fair legal constraints is tortuous. Even more difficult is avoiding regulatory capture and other tricks that work against our inaliable rights, or give unfair advantages to some groups or individuals.
Compromises are grey. Good engineering is making good compromises. Good lawmaking is equally about making compromises, but is much harder than engineering because the outcomes are more abstract, the measurements are harder, and there is more historical and political baggage.
These rights are not restrictions on the free market. They are fundamental to the free market.
> Your rights to life and liberty sometimes conflict with my rights to life and liberty.
They don't. Your right to life, for example, does not require me to give you food. It means I cannot take your life. Your right to liberty means I cannot enslave you. There is no right to enslave another, regardless of what the law says.
When I say "legal fiction" I mean writing laws that attempt to change reality. For example, a law that says π == 3 is a legal fiction. Your rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are not a legal fiction. The government frequently tries to create new "rights" that are not rights at all.
Put another way, the government enforces rights, or abrogates them. It cannot invent them.
Inalienable means it's an inherent property of being a human being. I.e. people still have a right to liberty, even if the government says it's ok to enslave them.
Evidence? Communism tries to deny the right to property. The result is communist countries cannot even feed themselves. Slavery tries to deny the right to liberty. The result is a also poorly performing economy. Countries that guarantee the rights to life, liberty, and property thrive.
One can sign a contract that enslaves you, but it is unenforceable in a free society. John Deere sells you a tractor but retains the "right" to remotely disable it? I'd say that would be unenforceable as they sold it to you, meaning it's yours to do with it as you please.
If they wanted to rent it to you, it should be a rental agreement, not a sales agreement.
Perhaps we have different axioms. Perhaps it is a language barrier. Perhaps we have different logical dependencies.
I sincerely appreciate your efforts to enlighten me: it is a shame that it is so very difficult to communicate using only a few written sentences.
Cheers
I didn’t buy my Tesla as a status symbol, I bought it because of the 0-60 time.
But the Model 3, with 498 horsepower, lets me overtake lumbering trucks on the narrow, winding, hilly, one-lane-in-each-direction road that makes up my commute. In my previous vehicle I could not overtake safely. With the Model 3 I can be in and out of the opposing land quickly without endangering myself or other motorists.
Or, to put it another way, warrantees offered by new entrants carry precisely zero weight in my purchasing decisions. If you are new, then -expect- you to fail, and that factors into my decision.
I don’t know enough about this to be able to answer. Maybe John Deer was guilty of anti-competitive behavior that suppressed competition in the market? Or there are some other challenges that make it difficult to start a farm equipment company?
Agriculture is very time-of-year dependent. Waiting a few weeks for spare parts can be devastating to annual revenue.
would you buy the from the start up who pinky promises to always let you repair it, or the incumbent who is annoying to work with but has existed your entire life and will after you die?
Even if this is just a band aid while we wait for competition to pop up (I'm not that optimistic about the market) it would still be valuable and I see no problems with it.
Because this is a serious question whose answer is extremely non-obvious. Is this a market failure or not? If so, what kind? Is this a very unique market failure that needs specific legislation to address in farm equipment specifically, or is it generalizable to certain conditions that future legislation might target to benefit more people? If so, what are those conditions?
I think we can defend right-to-repair, and at the same time ask the serious questions about why we need legislation around it at all, why it hasn't happened on its own?
Sometimes companies will always make more money by not giving consumers what they want. As long as all companies care about is making as much money as possible, they will exploit consumers whenever doing so makes them the most profit no matter how consumers feel about it.
A company could come up and meet the demand for tractors that consumers can repair, but that company would lose more money by not screwing over their own customers than they could ever hope to gain by enticing them with a repairable product.
A company that let's customers repair their own tractor gets a one time purchase and nothing else. A company that forces their customers to pay for highly overpriced repairs and parts gets that same one time purchase but also secures an endless revenue stream that stuffs their pockets with cash over and over again for the entire lifetime of the tractor and then it starts all over again when that same company claims they can't (or wont) repair it anymore and the customer has to make another new purchase.
The market (and shareholders) will not tolerate leaving huge stacks of cash on the table just to give consumers what they want.
This statement needs more qualification
It hasn't been, so something's gone wrong.
This is often the result of regulatory capture. For example, the DMCA makes it illegal for third parties to break the tractor company's DRM. Independent repair shops don't want to get arrested or sued, so there aren't as many willing to go into business repairing tractors.
You can't solve a problem with competition when you don't have a competitive market.
If you have the political power to repeal Section 1201 of the DMCA or any of the other laws preventing market competition, please do so. But it was passed in 1998 and the problems it would lead to were already understood in 1998 and it's still on the books.
State legislatures can't repeal the DMCA and many other competition-destroying regulations because they're federal. They can pass right to repair legislation. If you don't like right to repair legislation, direct your efforts to repealing the federal regulations that generate the demand for it.
Contrary to popular belief markets don't solve everything. They are just price and exploit discovery mechanisms.
Apparently taking away consumers ability to repair is something that can be exploited and giving them right to repair is something that almost cannot.