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posted by martyb on Wednesday April 22 2020, @12:44PM   Printer-friendly
from the next-up:-tractors-as-a-service dept.

'Right to repair' taken up by the ACCC in farmers' fight to fix their own tractors:

The 'right to repair' movement has finally bent the ear of Australia's competition and consumer watchdog, the ACCC, in its pleas to be able to fix their own farm equipment.

[...] Farmers have emerged as an unlikely force in the global right to repair movement.

The movement eschews the disposable culture of consumer electronics in favour of letting independent repairers and home tinkerers fix broken smartphones, tablets, and laptops.

Proponents want access to the code that makes modern machines hum, putting them at loggerheads with tech giants including Apple who own the proprietary software.

In the United States, farmers have risked voiding their warranties by hacking their own John Deere tractors with torrented software so they can carry out their own repairs.

[...] In its first deep dive into the modern agricultural machinery market, the ACCC published its discussion paper on the matter in late February and is seeking accounts from those who buy and use farm machinery, or repair it for a living.

"Broadacre croppers with large tractors, harvesters, seeders … and particularly tractors seem to be an area of some contention," Mr Keogh said.

"We have heard from dealers who say that they have no issues with providing service, yet we hear from independent service providers that they can't get access to the [software] diagnostic tools they need.

"In some cases they can't get access to the [manufacturers'] parts they need.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 22 2020, @04:46PM (13 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 22 2020, @04:46PM (#985766)

    Late-stage capitalism

    Was James Watt a "late-stage capitalist"? [jalopnik.com] The market acts against monopoly rents - what happened to Sun Microsystems business model when faced with commodity suppliers? The moment a large company misses a beat and it becomes cheaper for someone else to manufacture and service that item, that is the moment the large company loses that market. Even examples of longevity have there limit when profitability dips below the overhead costs for a large corporation - which is why GE are to cease manufacturing light bulbs.

    you aren't going to be in the big club that runs things no matter what you do.

    ... but you can order David Icke's latest book on amazon dot com!

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 22 2020, @05:38PM (9 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 22 2020, @05:38PM (#985791)

    Soooo you want to allow bad behavior that harms markets and customers because someday the monopolist will fuck up and lose their market capture?

    That is your logic, really?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 22 2020, @06:35PM (8 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 22 2020, @06:35PM (#985809)

      That is your logic, really?

      More a theory of moral sentiments tbh

      • (Score: 2) by gtomorrow on Wednesday April 22 2020, @07:53PM (7 children)

        by gtomorrow (2230) on Wednesday April 22 2020, @07:53PM (#985838)

        More a theory of moral sentiments tbh

        More a "I can't tell the difference between theory and practice" tbh. Or possibly more a "I got mine, pull up the lifeline" line of thinking, a school of thought unfortunately pervasive here. Or maybe more an empathy impairment due to some unknown brain trauma/social dysfunction To Be Perfectly Honest. Or maybe we're all just feeding the troll.

        I seriously, seriously, seriously think the Voight-Kampff needs to be applied before anyone can post.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 22 2020, @08:01PM (6 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 22 2020, @08:01PM (#985842)

          I seriously, seriously, seriously think the Voight-Kampff needs to be applied before anyone can post.

          You would fail that test, you've clearly never read Aristotle or much else. [wikipedia.org]

          • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 22 2020, @08:44PM (1 child)

            by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 22 2020, @08:44PM (#985864)

            troll feeding it is

            get lost scrip face!

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 22 2020, @11:53PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 22 2020, @11:53PM (#985903)

              When you've finished with Smith, cover Aristotle [libertyfund.org] and come back when you have a grown-up argument in place of silly name calling. 150 years to the day since the birth of Lenin and some people have not only failed to learn but would willingly repeat the disaster.

          • (Score: 2) by gtomorrow on Thursday April 23 2020, @06:38AM (3 children)

            by gtomorrow (2230) on Thursday April 23 2020, @06:38AM (#985963)

            Yes...feeding the troll it is.

            And thank you sincerely for clarifying. You squarely fall in the "can't tell theory from practice" camp (possibly Asperger related) with some Venn diagram overlap into the other categories I'd mentioned. Possibly also with some socially-sanctioned "greed is good" sociopathy involved.

            Get lost, squirt.

            • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 23 2020, @01:05PM (2 children)

              by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 23 2020, @01:05PM (#985999)

              And thank you sincerely for clarifying. You squarely fall in the "can't tell theory from practice" camp (possibly Asperger related) with some Venn diagram overlap into the other categories I'd mentioned. Possibly also with some socially-sanctioned "greed is good" sociopathy involved.

              Did you ever think that instead of siding with the screeching child demanding a proverbial lollipop from someone else, you should instead help them make their own lollipops? What happens when that self-entitled child goes on to kill in order to deprive someone else of their property or was that your intention all along? Sociopathy may be characterized by a sense of entitlement and the employ of pity as a faux justification for anti-social acts. It's not by accident that those who complain the loudest about how "unfair" capitalism is also produce nothing of value. Here is the pro-social stance "you have no right to other peoples stuff".

              But let's hammer those nails home on poor suffering Jesus and discuss Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. [scrapsfromtheloft.com]

              This was not American propaganda about the Nazis, these were real Gestapo documents. There was one which was the diary of an S.S. man who was stationed in Poland, in Warsaw, and he’d even drawn pic­tures of Jews in the ghetto. He’d gone into the ghetto, the Jewish ghetto, and drawn pictures of what he described as these colorful people. That was in the late forties when I read that diary and I still remember the one line he had in there: ‘We are kept awake at night by the cries of starving children.’ I still remember that line, and that influenced me. I thought, there is amongst us something that is a bi­pedal humanoid, morphologically identical to the human being but which is not human. It is not human to complain in your diary that starving children are keeping you awake. And there, in the forties, was born my idea that within our species is a bifurcation, a dichotomy between the truly human and that which mimics the truly human

              An easy assumption would be that replicants were psychopaths but how would that scale to explain what happened in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union? If you're familiar with the Milgram experiment, you already understand social pathology. The only person having publicly spelled it out in recent years was Jordan Peterson who lectured extensively on both the evils of collectivist societies and Jungian psychology. [wikipedia.org] Are the 66% of people who become monsters in variations on the Milgram experiment sociopaths, were Germans under Hitler or Russians under Stalin? Would the public in these societies describe themselves as evil, did they have integrated personalities with full self-awareness or were they accepting of authority and going along to get along?

              So you see, you must be able to answer the inverse of the Voight-Kampff test; not "why aren't..." but "why are..."? That's where the questions get really interesting and if you're going along to get along like the nazi concentration camp guard, 66% of people in the Milgram test or people with no understanding of nicomachean ethics and the Jungian shadow (who routinely project their own subconscious onto others) - then you fail the test!

              Get lost, squirt.

              I fear you are lost, perhaps your father should have used a tissue? Then again there's only so much we can say about the successful practice of capitalism Vs the failed theory of socialism (AKA: sociopathy). Perhaps next time if only you make those "evil capitalists" wear badges or something?

              • (Score: 2) by gtomorrow on Thursday April 23 2020, @02:53PM (1 child)

                by gtomorrow (2230) on Thursday April 23 2020, @02:53PM (#986022)

                Hey, thanks for the laughs, coward. At very least your disconnected ravings seem eloquent.

                Note to self: I really have to stop dogwhistling to the insane.

                I'm still convinced of your theory/practice resolution problems, tho. Go out and get some sun. No, really...I mean right now. And remember to take deep breaths.

                • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 23 2020, @07:42PM

                  by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 23 2020, @07:42PM (#986177)

                  Hey, thanks for the laughs, coward

                  My pleasure although "coward" here implies personal privacy, the term "anonymous coward" was always a joke but true cowardice is no joke. [aristotelianphilosophy.com] As Jung once observed:

                  "Those who are always on the look out to do charitable works serve virtue out of their moral cowardice and fall into the worst depravity."

                  Virtue signaling is not a new phenomenon. "Socialists" then; clearly not taught to respect the rights of others [psycom.net] yet somehow perpetual victims. [wikipedia.org] A line of wrong-think that enabled them to slaughter the Kulaks. Socialists consider themselves entitled to other peoples labor but are too cowardly to call themselves slavers. Are they sticking up for the oppressed against the oppressor are they?

                  And those who can't start their own business because the sociopath told them they couldn't, that there's some shadowy cabal intent on holding them back. [kafka-online.info] Failure is baked-in to the lives of sociopaths, aspiration and success threatens them. As if anyone can stop you making the moral choice to start a company to manufacture ice-lollies or tractors. LMFAO!!!

  • (Score: 2) by SpockLogic on Wednesday April 22 2020, @08:35PM

    by SpockLogic (2762) on Wednesday April 22 2020, @08:35PM (#985860)

    David Icke spouts bollocks and is a dick and was so when he was a BBC bowls commentator.

    --
    Overreacting is one thing, sticking your head up your ass hoping the problem goes away is another - edIII
  • (Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday April 22 2020, @11:48PM (1 child)

    by PartTimeZombie (4827) on Wednesday April 22 2020, @11:48PM (#985902)

    The market acts against monopoly rents...

    Which is true. That is exactly why capital has been purchasing stricter and longer lasting IP laws over the last 50 years or so.

    Markets are hard, and what they really want is control. Which they have.

    This is one of the points made in the article.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 23 2020, @12:14AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 23 2020, @12:14AM (#985906)

      Copying is cheap but R&D is an expensive sunk cost that a business and investors have to recover before profit. Nothing here dictates being an asshole and annoying your customers, so why people are reading my comments as a defense of JD is a mystery to me?

      We've seen industrial manufacturers trying to withhold schematics for decades, their equipment (and the brand) ends up being devalued. What deprecation on a John Deere when the resale collapses because the company will not support it after 10 years?