[mulmen]

I paid for books (and beer) in college with a summer farm job. I did equipment maintenance and drove trucks. We ran John Deere 6602 combines from the mid 1970s. This was in the late 2000s.

They were an absolute dream to work on. Everything was straightforward and consistent. The assembly was well thought out to enable in the field repairs. In my mind at the time John Deere was a brand that understood the needs of farmers.

I can't reconcile their current position on right to repair with my experience. Something clearly changed between the 1970s and today.

[snarf21]

Sure you can. They don't care about farmers because farmers are a smaller percentage of their business each year. When Private Equity buys all the mega-farms, they won't care about having to rent tractors from JD. Actually, they would prefer it because you can CapEx a maintenance contract instead of putting it on OpEx. It does mean that there will be an ever growing opportunity for a smaller tractor company that actually does care about farmers but JD knows where their bread is buttered and they don't care about the little guy.

[thrdbndndn]

Why are we making a distinction between (indie) farmers and mega-farms?

They are all farmers, do the farmers' thing. And the latter is more efficient. It makes sense (and IMO is better) for a tractor company to cater for the latter.

[adolph]

That seems a kinda conspiratorial stretch for a phenomena that has a simpler possible explanation: they see maintenance as a growing revenue source.

[salawat]

It's not conspiratorial at all. After a certain size, and upon getting a CFO that'll actually pay attention to things like that, this is a 100% incentivized way of doing things.

It's not conspiratorial in the mustache twirling sense, but it is 100% an unambiguously desired outcome of how our tax laws and accounting principles are currently structured.

A system is perfectly tuned to generate the outcomes it does. If you don't like those outcomes, you have to change the system.

[ask_b123]

What are the benefits of a maintenance contract being CapEx rather than OpEx?

[zdragnar]

My grandfather and his brother (sons of poor immegrants) traveled halfway across the country in their youth with nothing but a motorbike and some tools. They stopped at a farm each night and worked out a deal to do some equipment repair work in exchange for food and a place to sleep.

Those days are long gone. Fewer small family farms, fewer friendly and trusting people, fewer simple things for mechanically minded handy men to fix.

There's a lot of good things progress brings us, though it is often interesting to ponder on what we have lost.

[MisterTea]

> fewer friendly and trusting people,

I honestly blame film/TV and other modern media for implanting anxieties in people via a combination of sensationalist news reports on gruesome crimes and the horror genre which seem to form a feedback loop of mistrust. Before that people had to go out of their way to hear of such grizzly tales in books or newspapers (if they could even read) so most lived in ignorant bliss, unaware of the potential violence lurking in every corner of humanity. Maybe I'm wrong but I'd just like to know when ans why it was we lost out innocence as a society.

[zdragnar]

Sadly, I never got a chance to ask him about it, though I imagine he probably would have had a few stories of inhospitable hosts or people who wanted nothing to do with them as they came through.

Nowadays, people tend to have more worth stealing - including your identity if you happen to have documents in an easily accessible area of your home. Back then, though, there wouldn't have been much worth taking from a small family farm- no TV, cell phones, electronics other than a radio and light fixtures for the most part (this would have been in the 1930's or 40's, I forget which).

One last stay thought: hospitality and community in general were much more central to people's way of life in rural farming communities then- farmers would help each other out with planting and harvesting, share equipment, every person in the community went to the same or one of two churches, etc. People had to rely on each other just to survive.

[mulmen]

It's been over a decade since I worked on a farm but back then it was common during harvest season to have a tractor and disc hooked up in case a fire broke out. Everyone had one set up because it was in everyone's interest to stop the spread ASAP. If your neighbors field caught fire you'd still run your tractor over to help.

[linuxftw]

I'm not worried about being murdered as much as I am being robbed blind of everything that isn't bolted down. The opioid addiction crisis is real.

[alistairSH]

Even at that, the chances of being robbed (national averages, at least) are pretty low - through 2020 they were the lowest since the 1970s. I realize the pandemic caused some spikes, but I can't find numbers for those and if those spikes brought us anywhere near the peaks in ~1980 or ~1990.

[kevin_thibedeau]

> Something clearly changed between the 1970s and today.

MBAs took over American companies. They're the ones who cook up these exploitative ideas so that no money is ever left on the table.

[lotsofpulp]

401k owners, IRA owners, and taxpayers via defined benefit pension funds want to pay for the management that maximizes returns.

[kevin_thibedeau]

Convenient that forces have aligned to make people dependent on 401K and IRA by taking away all other profitable money stores. Why play with only rich peoples' money when you can force everybody to be exposed to a market you take a cut from.

[daniel-cussen]

Man different CEO, they got the sales (wrong word in this case, see my other comment about selling) in charge of the company. Clearly. I highly doubt John Deere--the man named John, last name Deere, the actual living breathing human--would have stood behind like tractor on a cloud.

Tractors on the cloud.

Castles in the sky.