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Shenanigamii t1_jdjoo0z wrote

Saving you all a click:

We’ve noted how agricultural machinery giants like John Deere have spent several years waging war on independent tractor repair shops in a bid to monopolize maintenance and drive up costs. We’ve also noted that every time industry promises to stop doing this, it turns out they’re largely full of shit.

With John Deere now facing increased action on “right to repair” reform in Congress, at the DOJ, and in numerous states, the company has been trying to pre-empt reform by striking silly, pointless memorandums of understanding with key agricultural groups.

For example last January, John Deere struck such a deal with the American Farm Bureau Federation, claiming it would do a better job of making repair manuals and parts available to independent repair shops and farmers, if the Farm Bureau agreed to never support right to repair legislative reform.

The problem: the agreement wasn’t actually binding, pre-empted real reform with real penalties, and John Deere already had a long history of empty promises on this front.

This week, the American Farm Bureau Federation struck another similar memorandum of understanding, but this time with another agricultural giant with a history of attempting to monopolize repair: CNH Industrial. It’s effectively the same as the John Deere deal; CNH Industrial pinky swears that it will try a little bit, in exchange for the AFBF agreeing to not support meaningful legislative reform.

Right to repair activists at organizations like PIRG aren’t particularly impressed:

Our key criticism of the Deere MOU was that it did not provide farmers with reasonable paths to recourse should the manufacturer deny them repair materials. And the manufacturer could walk away from the agreement with a mere 30 days’ notice.

Both of these are true for the CNH Industrial MOU as well. As a result, farmers are at real risk of being left out in the cold without what they need to fix equipment they spend up to $800,000 for. That’s not an acceptable outcome.

Industry giants aren’t going to meaningfully adhere to voluntary pinky swear agreements. They’re simply trying to delay the inevitable implementation of state and federal right to repair guidelines with actual teeth. Organizations claiming to represent constituents and keen on real reform probably wouldn’t be letting their organizations be used as props toward that end.

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Informal-Teacher-438 t1_jdlt43b wrote

This “Everything as a Subscription” garbage has to stop.

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DropDeadEd86 t1_jdm9hex wrote

Everything needs a sub these days because the CEOs all need passive income

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catmoleman t1_jdmpdlt wrote

It’s all to satisfy the asshole finance people who are insisting on infinite growth, which is pretty obviously unsustainable to anyone rational.

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Catlenfell t1_jdnscwq wrote

It's either this, or they actually have to innovate and develop new features.

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mrGeaRbOx t1_jdmoui5 wrote

But research out of their think tank shows that subscription models are psychologically different than upfront purchases to consumers.

What do you expect them to do, shut down the think tanks?

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Sanity_LARP t1_jdjtvvf wrote

They also spend billions lobbying against climate change legislation.

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MosesZD t1_jdmr97n wrote

Which is 100% meaningless. Here is the real science:

We live in what is called an 'inter-glacial period.' They're short, about 10K-to-12K years. But as our orbital dynamics change, the earth gets cold again. Global temperatures over the next 10K years will drop between 12C and 15C. We have understood those cycles longer than you have been alive. But the fear-mongers don't care about that. After all, 'don't worry, be happy' doesn't get you political power through fear-mongering with pseudoscience.

Or as NASA says:

>Cycles also play key roles in Earth’s short-term weather and long-term climate. A century ago, Serbian scientist Milutin Milankovitch hypothesized the long-term, collective effects of changes in Earth’s position relative to the Sun are a strong driver of Earth’s long-term climate, and are responsible for triggering the beginning and end of glaciation periods (Ice Ages).

Strong is the wrong word. Primary is the correct word.

In fact, you can see the cycles when you look at EPICA (European Project on Ice Core Analysis) data (which is brought to you by Wikipedia) and you can see with your own eyes that 120K years ago it was warmer than it is now. And a 120K years before that.

There was no industrialization to cause those temperature spikes leading to inter-glacial periods. Humans barely existed.

Yet when you look at the obvious pattersn, you can see the inevitable the global temperature changes caused by the Milankovitch cycles. That's actual science. Not 'lets scare the shit out of people for political power' psuedo science.

Milankovitch driven-climate cycles have been verified by EPCIA, by astronomers and by geologists who (studying sea-core samples) who also discovered the same cycles. But Al Gore can't sell a you line a bullshit if you know how it really works.

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scnottaken t1_jdmul89 wrote

"Earth is getting warmer when it should be getting cooler that's how I know climate change is wrong" is a take. Not a good one. But it is one.

But hey since you seem like quoting NASA

https://climate.nasa.gov/ask-nasa-climate/2949/why-milankovitch-orbital-cycles-cant-explain-earths-current-warming/

"Finally, Earth is currently in an interglacial period (a period of milder climate between Ice Ages). If there were no human influences on climate, scientists say Earth’s current orbital positions within the Milankovitch cycles predict our planet should be cooling, not warming, continuing a long-term cooling trend that began 6,000 years ago."

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ultrastarman303 t1_jdmxlff wrote

You didn't mention how CO2 raises energy accumulation (heat) by lowering how much radiation is reflected back out as it has specific absorption bands that are outside of other greenhouse gases that don't absorb the same, causes ocean acidification, has a lifespan that's 2-3x longer than other greenhouse gases, and it's been emitted in record numbers only recently, creating anthropogenic climate change.

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Sanity_LARP t1_jdo318u wrote

  1. Why would human impacts on climate and Milankovitch cycles be mutually exclusive?

  2. Why would it matter that we've "understood something longer than I've been alive" when our ability to measure things and the things we're measuring are changing drastically in our lifetime? Like a century ago a dude figured something out and we've confirmed it lines up with observations of the past, so that's the way it's going to be? The way the world would change every 10 years would have blown his mind and the factors involved now would have been beyond the predictions of sci-fi.

  3. If it's meaningless then is it fine that they're spending billions on it? Or are they heroes? What's more likely: the massive scale of humanities dumping of waste into the ocean and gasses into the air would have no impact on the environment, or that a large corporation would invest to avoid short term changes in crop futures even if it hurts us?

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mrGeaRbOx t1_jdmomh1 wrote

If only there were a group of people that farmers could vote for to write consumer protection laws who are against protecting all these monied interests...

Oh well 🤷

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trekbone87 t1_jdomirt wrote

I know you are /s, but the people they vote in are in the pockets of the anti right to repair side.

It's like the Republican Party wants to turn America's farms into McDonald's Ice Cream Machines.

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focus503 t1_jdmtq5l wrote

Conservatives/libertarians consistently vote for "no rules; whoever has the most money decides" aka free market economics and then complain when the guy with the most money dictates the rules to them.

Leopard meet face.

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Dependent_Survey_546 t1_jdm33q2 wrote

I'm in a business that's stuck in the middle between the likes of JD and the people using the machinery.

Every year there's a new scheme to lock purchaser's into only dealing with the manufacturer for their new machinery. From service agreements that are sold alongside the machine to proprietary tech to lock them out to needing manuals only available to dealers to translate error codes the machine throws out to something which you can understand and then try and (possibly) fix.

It's not great

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Reason_He_Wins_Again t1_jdo5mci wrote

It's annoying you guys turn this into red vs blue thing like if you magically vote D this all disappears. The blue team was in power in the 90s and 00s and they did nothing at all on this issue...just like the red team

I just tried to buy a wiring diagram for a 20-year-old machine that is EOL and the company wouldn't even talk to me because I wasn't a partner...so it got scrapped. Such a fucking waste.

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CryoAurora t1_jdn0ag3 wrote

Correction...............

GOP Politicians Who Tricked Farmers Into Voting For Them, Block Meaningful Right To Repair Protections They Championed To Entice Their Votes In The First Place.

Never forget this is about greed at the top, keeping those at the bottom uninformed so they will vote against themselves.

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