https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29164111
Basically John Deere made their tractors impossible to repair without official parts, and we have now a harvest season + inflation, thus John Deere employees now hold all the cards, if they stop working people will literally starve without tractors to do the harvest, since repairing the tractors without their help is now impossible, thus they are strinking.
1. You can't legally break such code, unless it's for a handful of statutorily or administratively selected purposes
2. You can't legally tell people how to break such code for any purpose
This provision is part of the DMCA, section 1201. It was policy-laundered through the WTO into US law against the objection of the tech community, so basically every country has the same rules.
The problem with this law is that it's scope dramatically extends past it's intent - hell, half the original law is just exceptions intended to control the extremely broad scope of "no breaking digital locks". What people realized was that they could put DRM on anything, regardless of if copyright actually protected it or not, and it would still have the same effect because DMCA 1201 has horrific chilling effects. Even if SCOTUS says you can't use DMCA 1201 to protect, say, printer cartridge DRM; that decision still took 10 years and millions of dollars in legal fees to reach. No company wants to spend that amount of time and money just to gain access to repair aftermarkets.
On the other hand, the law regarding price gouging is very old and well-established; because it's a very long-running problem. Serial-locked parts were basically unheard of outside of videogame consoles up until this decade. The assumption with DMCA 1201 was that it was going to keep people from copying DVDs, not from repairing tractors. It's one of the few cases in which the law actually needs to catch up to technology (as opposed to someone trying to get away with something and parroting a thought-terminating cliche).
Yes, individual Americans will get harmed by, say, anticircumvention law, copyright trolling operations, or automated content ID systems. But nobody gets outraged about that in large enough numbers. They do get outraged, however, when they hear about "China stealing our valuable intellectual property" or somesuch. So the message Congress ultimately hears is, "More please!"
... Federalism?
Most of the time it's not illegal to scalp toilet paper. There are select cities and states, with interventionist city councils and legislatures; when citizens saw inflated prices, these bodies decided that they would enact bans on scalping, in a manner which usually focus on consumer goods.
Note that economists suggest that scalping is a natural part of supply and demand and helps reduce shortages by incentivizing traders to move in supply from elsewhere (and scalping bans are sometimes deliberately weaponized against immigrant-owned small businesses because of course they are why did you doubt for a moment? Even NYC rolled that back somewhat and offered refunds on the fines they levied on bodegas.) But while the theoretical efficiency may or may not actually be realized in the aftermath of a disaster, it is of course entirely irrelevant to the legal monopoly on tractor repair services, which certainly have no such excuse. This just makes it all worse, of course.
Not saying I don't support the strike, or what the strike is trying to achieve, just trying to understand the nuance of whats going on here.
Besides, what kind of company looks at the supply chain situation right now and says "yea, now is a good time to move all of our business-critical infrastructure overseas."
And all that sets aside operational & regulatory challenges moving heavy manufacturing overseas.
It's pretty safe to assume that, after 30+ years of offshoring, old companies who haven't yet offshored have good reason not to do so.
or, you know, maybe John Deere owners/execs have the power? maybe if they paid their employees a living wage employees wouldn't need to go on strike?
Even if every John Deere employee made 3x of a "living wage" (relative to local costs), they'd still have every right to collectively bargain by withholding labor (to say nothing of non-monetary demands: autonomy, safety standards, flexible scheduling, etc).
Quick googling suggests that they were making $20-$30 per hour before the strike. Another quick Google suggests that the average assembly line hourly rate is $19/hr (another source says only $14/hr).
It looks like the wages aren't out of line as far as livability, but it is understandably infuriating to see the company as a whole making tremendous profits while only paying slightly above average.
Is that pretty much the situation or did I miss something?
I imagine John Deere probably ran similar to a company I used to work for. The order book was full, there was money to be made. 9-10 hour days Monday-Friday. Most Saturdays was mandatory overtime. The only way to guarantee you can do something over the weekend with your family is by taking PTO on Friday, which would get you out of overtime on Saturday.
Pair in that the last couple negotiations have been during downturns in farming, it's pretty reasonable that they're trying to make up ground after taking concessionary contracts.
i appreciate the data, though 1.) this is America - so workers have to deal with a lack of basic social services like in Europe, 2.) from my understanding the concessions made by John Deere were pitiful so far. an account from someone on the ground: https://twitter.com/JonahFurman/status/1456457606583758871
> but it is understandably infuriating to see the company as a whole making tremendous profits while only paying slightly above average.
yes exactly, that's the superior argument here.
although the best argument is the one about climate change, and how viable solutions are not profitable enough to capitalism in the short term. we need open source, modular tech like the Science for the People article argues.
"The current political economy is based on a false idea of “immaterial scarcity.” It believes that an exaggerated set of intellectual property monopolies – for [trade secrets], copyrights, trademarks and patents – should restrain the sharing of scientific, social and economic innovations. Hence the system discourages human cooperation, excludes many people from benefiting from innovation and slows the collective learning of humanity. In an age of grave global challenges, the political economy keeps many practical alternatives sequestered behind private firewalls or unfunded if they cannot generate adequate profits."
http://wealthofthecommons.org/essay/peer-peer-economy-and-ne...