A subscription for the right to repair your own machine seems completely insane to me. How is this a thing that is allowed?
I pay a monthly fee for the right to pay Apple more money to repair my phone.
I know some repairs are included/free, but still…
The American Way is to let corporations fuck you over in any way that increases profits. Sure, they have the least efficient healthcare system in the world, ineffectual public education, massive wealth disparity, crumbling national infrastructure, and a different school shooting every week.
But at least they're not socialists.
>the least efficient healthcare system in the world
and the most advanced healthcare
>ineffectual public education
actually it's better than most rich countries after controlling for race/ethnicity
that said, healthcare, education, and most of all housing are massively far from free markets, they're the most regulated parts and it's hard to innovate. the more free you make those markets, the better they'll get.
>massive wealth disparity
because, and this is no exaggeration, we are way fucking wealthier than almost anything except oil-rich Norway and tiny Luxembourg. it's a lot easier to have disparity when some grasses grow tall.
>crumbling national infrastructure
depends; California and New York yes, Texas no
>and a different school shooting every week
not that often but this is an american pathology yeah
(ignoring Australia and other countries having longer life expectancies and better cancer recovery rates, sure)
> not that often
It's telling you have to downplay this at all.
> depends; California and New York yes, Texas no
and the more than 40 other states? See the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Infrastructure Report Card (spoiler, it's a C)
> depends; California and New York yes, Texas no
lol. lmao.
Yikes dude
> the more free you make those markets, the better they'll get.
How can you concede the first point and argue the second in the same breath? Are you about to tell me European healthcare is cheaper because its some bastiom of deregulation?
I recently moved to Ireland (an EU country).
When I wanted to get set up with a new GP, I was offered an appointment the same week. I wasn't ready to actually go in yet, so I asked for one the following week. My wife needed some specialty care, and when we made the appointment they were very apologetic that they could't give us an appointment until 2.5 weeks later. (For a non-emergency consult, preparatory to a specialty surgery.)
Meanwhile, in the US, when we tried to make GP appointments, they were routinely not available until 6-8 weeks later. And that's if it was even possible; we had 2 GPs just leave the area over the course of a few years, and in both cases we were left to find our own replacements, despite the fact that both were part of larger medical practices with at least a half-dozen GPs each (plus others).
***
From my experience in Estonia, any specialty care routinely has month+ waiting list. One example: I was trying to get diagnosed for ADHD, and a couple clinics were ready to make an appointment for me... where I could take the test, then wait a couple months until the actual psychiatrist can see me.
Then there’s dental care. I’ve had a chat with a nice girl who had, like, really bad teeth problems. Asked why she doesn’t get it fixed, and sure enough it’s nearly impossible to get an appointment on state insurance, and paying out of pocket was way too expensive for her. (We’ve joked about getting her a Russian visa so she could just go to St. Petersburg like I’ve been doing for my dental problems; of course, that was before the full-blown Russo-Ukrainian war.)
GP and emergency care are great. One night out I’ve twisted an ankle, decided it was not a big deal, so I got home, and woke up in the morning barely able to walk. Took an Uber, got to the nearest emergency room and got an x-ray and everything in maybe a couple hours. I haven’t been on the insurance plan at the moment, so at first I was quoted around 400 €, but after some back-and-forth I’ve learned that for same day accidents the rate is lower. Told them it was at 1am, so the final price was 5 € :-)
***
I don’t doubt it’s way worse in the US (never been!) My point is rather that regulation doesn’t really help here. We need to make incentives to have more affordable options, and make it easier to get to the market.
I’m now seeing a psychiatrist in Thailand for around $45 a session, and sure, everything is cheaper in Thailand, but the best part is I never have to wait more than a week to get a slot, and it’s all online. The most difficult part for me is going to Thailand every couple of months to pick up the meds.
Our public education is so pozzed in Dem/Blue states, though; that has nothing to do with ethnic makeup in the students. Bloated budgets fueling insidious DEI agendas with openly consumer-hostile teachers unions. Maybe in sane states it's better.
> and the most advanced healthcare
We have miraculously great trauma medicine and surgery and diagnostics. The NICU medicine I've seen at work is like science fiction.
That said, I'd argue my family doctor is just a brainless expert system for prescribing toxic pharma products. There's nothing healthful about that aspect of our healthcare. The terrible US diet and these wretched drugs are why we're so sick and the trauma doctors are so busy. It's complicated why it costs a fortune and yet we're so sick.
Americans need consumer protections so badly!
Can an American explain what this is supposed to be saying? Sounds like a right wing sound byte.
Are black people supposed to be inherently less healthy???
Saying this is something you need to "control for" is complete statistical nonsense. You wouldn't say "the accessibility in this building is better than average after controlling for wheelchair use".
Socialism is a political ideology centered (it's really at it's core!) the idea of "means of production must be in the hands of the people". In reality the "means of production" (capital, land, workforce) was in the hands of a small undemocratic elected ruling caste. But the core idea still prevails. In socialism banks were seized (capital), land was seized from the farmers and Kolchoses or LPGs (agricultural production cooperatives) were formed by force. Companies were seized and Kombinate" were formed. The underlying idea of all of this force is the "dictatorship of the proletariat", their way to tell themselves that cruelty and excessive physical and psychological force is okay, almost a must.
Right to repair has nothing to do with seizing capital, land, or pressing the workforce into mismanaged cooperatives.
Another central idea of socialism is the thinking of castes, err classes. Most notably the worker classes. That describes the situation in GB around the industrial revolution. But today? Won't fit in most countries.
Right to repair has nothing to do with working class. A professor (the "intelectual class") would also be able to repair his stuff.
Tesla for example lets you pay to access their diagnostic software, so why is John Deere the bad guy here?
And yes. I am happy to expand that list to literally every other manufacturer you have in mind. They are all bad guys too. If manufacturers were altruistic good guys, they would need no regulation.
Regulation is the solution to this prisoner’s dilemma.
Up to $8k per engine unit produced in EPA regulatory fees.[1]
Between $100k and $500k per engine model variant for EPA testing and General Compliance.[2]
$100k to $200k for Transient & Steady-State Dynamometer Testing.[2]
$150k per engine variant for Useful Life Deterioration Testing.[2]
[0] https://www.msci.org/federal-rules-costs-small-manufacturers...
[1] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-40/chapter-I/subchapter-U...
[2] https://www.epa.gov/regulations-emissions-vehicles-and-engin...
Good regulation: right to repair, manufacturers must supply manuals.
Bad regulation: JD bribed senators to write regulations that make it insurmountably difficult for new players to enter.
Calling regulation bad because corruption is baked into the US Constitution makes it really hard to get anything done.
Every regulation looks good or at least defensible in abstract, especially when some peddler is trying to sell it and the consequences aren't obvious yet.
I can grab any data I want from the OBD port. The hardware was cheap, the software to use it is, again, free.
I'm not excited about this brave new world where you have to pay a subscription fee to plug a cable into a device you own and interact with it, and even less excited there are people here defending the idea.
The cheap OBD2 readers lack the vast majority of data and tools you would want to use for service as well.
There are aftermarket options but most manufacturers want you to subscribe to their service tools - often charged per monthly plus an additional a fee per VIN it touches. These cost in the hundreds to thousands. It can be pretty frustrating as a shadetree mechanic.
Theoretically, they are to be replaced at 120k miles (!!) but they won’t even tell you that in the owners manual.
Insane.
You're probably aware of this already but luckily a lot of service manuals can be found online in PDF form.
Somewhat related but I was going through an older relatives belongings not too long ago to help cleanup and found a bunch of old manuals for various household things. The detail included in them was beautiful to see - full wiring diagrams, mechanical diagrams, etc.
Not official ones for John Deere tractors unless they were leaked from authorized service agents!
One example: https://assets.sia.toyota.com/publications/en/omms-s/T-MMS-1...
The fact that they've been allowed to build systems like that is appalling.
It’s a shame, I use to buy the service manual when I bought the car.
I'd love to move towards a world where owners can access everything, flash the firmware in the headlamps, etc. But all I can do as an individual is vote with my wallet and avoid the 2020s computers-on-wheels.
As a counter argument: I was just looking at a small open source utility. As I was going through the code I found cases where certain arguments could be set to magic values that cause useful, but undocumented behavior. Should the developers be forced to document these options?
I don’t think a manufacturer should be able to lock you out of reading diagnostics on your own devices, or that anyone should be prevented from reverse engineering what those values mean. But I also don’t think there should be any requirement that they are forced to do additional work. That seems just as immoral.
But they do do that. Also what’s the difference between a lot of obfuscation and prevention and how will you enforce that without lawsuits and discovery?
Also, what is those values have the ability to do damage and cause safety issues? Like losing your own software onto a control by wire car? Then you can rent a car and install your own software surreptitiously.
>> don’t think there should be any requirement that they are forced to do additional work
At one time seatbelts, airbags, emission controls, etc were all viewed in this category. Now we have regulations enforcing aspects of all of these. Why would diagnostics be different?
If you’re starting up a small business, selling at-a-loss widgets to gain market share do you want to be forced to publish a diagnostic manual that not only increases your work, but may also increase your liability?
Seatbelts and airbags are safety, but if you talk to anyone at a body shop, they will tell you there are significant regulation changes in the past decade that have made cars more expensive to fix while not necessarily safer.
I just don’t think it’s as cut and dry as everything must be forced to be documented. What is everything, at what size or industry is this documentation required, why this industry and not that one, is it just OBD or _everything_ including all CAN bus communication, etc. Minimally the end result is increased cost for everyone.
If it’s already published, perhaps libraries should start collecting the service manuals.
The right to repair cases that bother me most is where the company goes out of their way to prevent end-user repair (cryptographic pairing of modules!?), or where service manuals/information exist but are only available to dealers.
There's documentation, and then there's documentation. What passes for documentation in the modern era is scattershot over thousands of JIRA tickets and Confluence pages. Most outdated.
Resetting the oil/maintenance light, recoding key fobs, resetting the battery stats upon replacement, etc.
I want independent mechanics to be able to do that. I also want to be able to do that myself, if I’m so inclined.
I’m absolutely in favor of being able to repair my own stuff and voiding any warranty or liability in the process. I absolutely support reverse engineering and preventing companies from issuing copyright strikes on uncopyrightable facts about their products. I’m mostly OK with the idea that unqualified people can make potentially life threatening changes to their 2-ton vehicle barreling down the road at 80mph.
Would I like documentation for all these things? Absolutely! Should it be enforced by law? I don’t think so.
Yes. Network services and client software should be considered two separate products/markets, and tying between them should be seen as anti-competitive behavior worthy of anti-trust enforcement.
That the software industry has been able to develop some brazenly anti-competitive pratices does not constitute an argument that it should be allowed to continue.
I’m fine with Google Workspace owning the client and the service, same with Zoom, Slack, Teams, Box, Dropbox, etc.
I don’t think we’d have better games (pretty much for certain), and I don’t know that we’d have as good online productivity tools either.
The multi-user productivity apps you listed would most certainly be better off as separate clients and services! The entire point is that you shouldn't be forced into using one (often terrible) piece of proprietary client software simply due to the network effects of other people using it. Wouldn't it be nice to use the Slack client in a Teams environment (or vice versa if that's your thing) ? This would produce more competition because companies would have to develop the client software to be compelling itself, rather than relying on the pull of installed deployments with captive victims^wusers.
You were able to do that because it was open source. If a car mfr was willing to do that, it would be plenty enough for me. They shouldn't be forced to do any additional work beyond the 5 seconds it takes to type `git remote add origin github.com/honda/civic`. Then the community would have everything it needs to carry things forward.
Failing that, yes, I do think everything should be documented.
You want to force companies to publish and maintain repositories using your preferred toolset?
Ghidra exists. That doesn't mean all software is open source.
> You want to force companies to publish and maintain repositories using your preferred toolset?
Nope. Anywhere will do, whatever is easiest for them, as long as device owners can access it.
https://github.com/Konik-ai/j1939_dbc/blob/main/dbc/j1939.db...
There are a ton of dbc files floating around like this. Almost any car with a turbo has a kit to flash the ecu for more boost, so even the proprietary signals have been reversed.
The reason there is an opaque number in that open source utility is precisely because of a lack of open documentation for that register definition. Independent black box analysis of the messages only got as far as "write this value to do effect X". Whomever developed that utility would have loved to spell that bitfield out, but not at the cost of more days reverse engineering.
But manufacturers aren't reverse engineering register definitions, they're working off of vendor datasheets or protocol definitions they themselves created. All of this documentation has already been produced, as it was used to develop the tractor from its various subsystems. It just needs to be published!
At any rate, for things a manufacturer doesn't consider important enough to document themselves then there can be a clear alternative requirement - release whatever upstream documentation they did use to create it, plus the software source code they developed on top of it. If it's not important enough to have been documented as its own product, then it also isn't a significant part of the value they're actually selling, right?
You're talking about things that by definition have to be documented and internally published in order to design and build the powertrain in the first place. You can't design a computer-controlled automatic transmission without documenting the shift points.
The cost is therefore essentially nothing, because the information already exists. Just copy paste it into a PDF and put it on your website.
Intentionally obfuscating the data¹ also requires time effort and costs.
I think that if you want to sell to the public, it is entirely moral to force manufacturers to do additional work. The trivial example is that we already force restaurants to do additional work to follow food safety and hygiene regulations. That is additional work they don't really have to do. If that's not amoral in the food industry, why would it be immoral for cars?
I work on a project related to it and was absolutely surprised at how the company gave instructions to the clients to help them fix their machines (stuff I wouldn't be able to do myself).
Having a non-working machine can mean big $$ lost everyday.
Also, there's something special about tractors. Their owners (farmers) are both willing and capable of repairing tractors, in general, so John Deere is demonized for taking that ability away. Where as Tesla's owners are comfortable not changing their own oil, so "less" was taken away. (Yes, I know Tesla doesn't have engine oil, don't get hung up on that)