There must be some kind of narrative to wrap this with so it could be dropped on Alex Jones’ doorstep.
(Not that I think that would help. I just want to see what comes out the other end of that garbage masher.)
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On a similar topic about car repair rights on Ars Technica, I said that I thought that this kind of overreach could be a boon in the development of a grassroots open-source car movement. My comment was inexplicably “downvoted” into oblivion and disappeared.
But I stand by that ethos here. “It would be nice” to be able to trust large profit-driven companies to be fair by their customers, but it’s terribly naive. Only working if and when some precarious protections can be imposed by a privileged state actor. Meanwhile, it would be nice if common people were encouraged to pool their knowledge and resources and not get fleeced at every turn.
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Sounds like undependable software, certainly not professional grade.
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Regulations that might prevent this behavior are exactly the regulations that farmers and rural folk have elected conservative politicians to roll back. It’s time for farmers to return to the Grange Movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Grange_of_the_Order_of_Patrons_of_Husbandry who should be fighting this, just as they fought corporate takeovers of agriculture 100 years ago. Farmers used to be the center of the progressive movement.
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Volvo?
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A great many, mostly imports at this point. Kubota are currently the most popular brand in my area for new tractors, but many end users (including me) see modern equipment as less durable and cost effective than old tractors. You are unlikely to find anyone willing to trade a 1940s tractor in like-new condition for a newly made tractor of the same capabilities! The old stuff is iron, not plastic, and is not impeded or cluttered by safety features or semiconductors.
Tractors are sold in the same way as ideologies and politicians; brand loyalty is neurological programming. Just as many people cannot conceive of voting for anyone but their party’s candidate, no matter what failings she has and no matter how impossible it is for her to win, many farmers cannot bring themselves to buy outside their brand, and will convince themselves that they are doing the right and patriotic thing when objectively they clearly aren’t.
In the absence of outside interference the free market’s brutal invisible hand would punish loyalty to a brand whose owners feel no corresponding loyalty to the customer; one might expect either the John Deere aficionados who aren’t solely dedicated to antique tractors would go out of business, or food prices would to rise to cover their increased costs. But since there isn’t any free market any more, mostly due to Republicans gleefully abetting regulatory capture by giant corporations, I have no idea what will happen. Probably whatever John Deere and their paid lackeys in Congress want to happen.
The old John Deeres were great tractors. But if I was a farmer, and needed to buy new, it would be Chinese, Indian or Japanese in order to avoid as much needless, failure-prone and expensive electronic gimcrackery as possible.
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Surely someone that can afford to spend that much money on a brand new tractor isn’t going to try to fix it themselves, right?
A EULA like that makes it sound downright ‘enterprise grade’. In the worst possible way.
We can only assume that their next-gen ECUs will feature a JVM, per-core licensing, require either DB2 or Oracle to store engine parameters, and actually getting the tractor up and running will require more consultant hours than a SAP implementation. It Will Be Glorious.
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Doesn’t the Windows EULA specify it’s not suitable for use in Nuclear power plants? I mean the Iranians found that out the hard way, but probably not for the same reasons Windows was thinking of.
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That’s part of the problem. They really can’t “afford” the price of new tractors, especially incredibly expensive pieces of equipment like combine harvesters that easily top $250-500K new. They are financed, often against the farm mortgage. Used farm equipment doesn’t depreciate the way an automobile does, so those options are largely unavailable to farmers unless they have a really good relationship with their creditors, leading to manufacturer financing (i.e. permanent indebtedness) as the only option for many farmers.
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Good to know. I really wasn’t trying to concern troll or anything – I know little about the economics of farming.
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I wonder what the JD EULA has to say about resale of the tractors. If the EULA is a binding contract between the original purchaser and John Deere, I am curious how this would extend to sale to a second party. We could conceivably swap our tractors with each other, and be working on one that we never agreed not to modify.
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Oxen!!
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Not if they bought a Deere. Deere stopped making good tractors and went into manure hauling some time ago.
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in rural PA last year, I noticed about 10 million dollars (at least) of heavy modern ag equipment in front of a dingy old service shop. Turns out the shop, an authorized servicer, owned a LOT of equipment, and rented it out to the locals seasonally. My friend indicated that -most- of the equipment was run that way since house-farming (subdivisions) came to the area. Hardly any one farmer could afford to own the equipment themselves between not keeping it in use and not making anything near that kind of profit (from anything other than growing houses and mini malls).
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They could probably afford to own it cooperatively more easily than renting it for someone else’s profit. Not unlike with houses, autos, and other expensive things; people in the US appear oddly conditioned against considering such options, even when things get desperate.
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I imagine some probably do, but pretty clearly many do not. I offer for your sentimental consideration:
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I didn’t read it as such. I work in a segment of agriculture focused on bringing more revenue potential to farms by getting away from the commodity crop model (or at least diversifying revenue within that system). The current system that most commodity crop farmers are beholden to mandates that they receive a steadily-devalued commodity price which, in turn, calls for more land acquisition which, in turn, calls for more sophisticated high-volume equipment which ends up with the farm operation actually being completely held by creditors. It is a far more volatile situation than most folks realize.
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This used to be a major resource of ag equipment use by small farmers, but a number of factors have driven farmer co-ops nearly out of existence. Much of it has to do with nefarious dealings by equipment manufacturers, brokers and financiers, but it also points to an intrinsic issue with ag co-ops: everyone in an area sows and harvests at nearly the same time. As farms have grown larger, the equipment is employed for longer periods of time which shuts out all other growers’ access.
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