
Deere suit sheds light on race for $240B farm tech market - jessaustin
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-deere-agco-lawsuit-20180625-story.html
======
hirundo
This is an evergreen story. Regulations sold as weapons for davids to defend
against goliaths are instead used by goliaths to fend off davids. It turns out
that Goliath can learn to use a sling too, and can hurl bigger stones with it.
This is why goliaths like regulations so much, and why patents may be more
disease than cure.

~~~
specialist
I've been wondering, for a while, if regulatory capture is a natural outcome
of two-party systems.

The central genius, IMHO, of the US Constitution is the built-in trilemma
(separation of powers, court vs legislature vs executive), which has proven
more durable. (Present circumstances notwithstanding, ahem.)

What would a trilemma for regulations look like? Give "the market", in the
form of consumer advocates, a seat at the table?

I still have no idea.

I've asked everyone I can think of. Famed muckraker Greg Palast's, who has
direct experience trying to thwart regulatory capture, answer was "more
transparency, more participation".

Which I find very unsatisfactory. Having done the whole agitator,
whistleblower routine, it really isn't sustainable for outsiders to serve as
the counterbalance. It occurs to me each of the three parties needs some kind
of veto power.

~~~
dmix
A few ideas:

1) Regulations by default should be capped at organization size or industry.
Minimum wage is a great example of this, great for 25% of
companies/industries, terrible for the rest - its hard to measure jobs that
are never created as a result.

2) A powerful, well financed agency whose mandate is to audit all regulations,
monitor and capture data regarding it's function, and review their ultimate
utility to society as a whole. The vast majority of harmful regulations were
designed in a different era and for a different evolved market. Markets also
adapt to regulations as well naturally reducing utility.

This agency would have the power to temporarily end regulations until congress
reviews it and either updates it or ends it officially.

3) Time limits on regulations forcing them to be renewed every x years,
requiring data to show it's helping, not harming society

~~~
KozmoNau7
RE: your point #1, nope that won't work. By capping based on revenue, bigger
companies will simply spin off certain employee segments into separate
contractor companies. Create a possible loophole, and it _will_ be exploited.

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voxadam
A better link, one that's not blocked in European countries:

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-20/deere-
sui...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-20/deere-suit-sheds-
light-on-race-for-240-billion-farm-tech-market)

~~~
vasili111
Why is it blocked in European countries?

~~~
KozmoNau7
Because they don't understand how GDPR applies to them, or they don't want to
respect their users' privacy.

------
amoshi
>Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European
countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options
that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We continue
to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with
our award-winning journalism.

Nice - "get tracked or fuck off" approach.

~~~
joeblow9999
This is a perfectly reasonable response to GDPR if you are a non-European
content service with little traffic from Europe.

~~~
chrischen
Why even comply to GDPR if you are our of jurisdiction?

~~~
rgbrenner
because tribune media (who owns the paper) has 2b in annual revenue, and would
make a great example case if the EU wants to test its ability to enforce the
law against foreign companies.

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dreamcompiler
> its machine has far more lines of computer coding than a space shuttle.

This kind of comparison is ridiculous. It's like saying "Niagara Falls
produces far more water per second than a kitchen faucet." Well of course it
does. The computing power of a space shuttle is laughably tiny in comparison
to an Arduino, which is itself a tiny computer by modern standards. Does the
general public not know this?

~~~
benjaminsuch

      The computing power of a space shuttle is laughably tiny in comparison to an Arduino
    

Is that so? I'm actually surprised and yes I did not know this. Do you have
something to read about that? Sounds interesting.

~~~
jcranmer
People tend to overestimate the actual complexity of code for a space shuttle;
it's rocket science, therefore it must be some sort of complex black magic.

Most of the space shuttle is going to boil down to control theory. The code
for a control system essentially looks like this:

    
    
        while (true) {
          readInputs();
          smoothInputs();
          computeUserDesiredSetpoints();
          adjustVariablesToHitSetpoints();
          makeActuatorsMove();
        }
    

These functions are not computationally challenging. Even the complex
mathematics boils down to "evaluate this function", and you can often get away
without needing high precision if you have a feedback mechanism that can
adjust for systematic error. There's also a lot of leeway on how simple or
complex you can make the user direction: it is far more complex to implement a
"perform a translunar injection orbit" than it is to say "burn thrusters at X
heading at Y thrust for Z seconds" (think the difference between self-driving
cars and cruise control).

~~~
realusername
Also there's the factor that every line on the space shuttle is a potential
bug, and bugs might be deadly. There's a huge incentive to reduce the code to
its absolute minimum.

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onetimemanytime
>> _“There must be sufficient difference in the technology, or else Deere
wouldn’t have wanted to acquire it in the first place. "_

Or just to kill a competitor for next to nothing ($190 mil.) Together they
have 80+% market share

This is the way it should be: well financed competitors fighting each other in
courts, not a farmer vs John Deere.

~~~
specialist
There's some cliche about two wolves deciding how split the lamb...

~~~
jessaustin
As long as AGCO sells retrofits that give old, completely-depreciated planters
the performance of new planters, they are firmly on the farmers' side.

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billysielu
I thought it was going to be some sort of farming iron man.

~~~
rl3
Same. Though instead of an arc reactor it'd probably run on ethanol.

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oedenfield
Farmers have historically benefited little from advancement in technology and
this is no exception. If I think I'm worth more than my employer is paying me,
I can shop my services around for a higher bidder. And while the concept is
true for a farmer's output/services in reality most farmers (I grew up on a
small family farm) have little choice but to sell at the price the local
market will give them. Likewise they have to buy input goods (seed,
fertilizer, breeding stock, etc.) at the price others choose. Holding output
product is often not an option as banks (and other bills) need paid and food
needs to be on the table. I'm thankful for a fairly healthy (by comparison)
tech market.

~~~
randomdata
Grain farmer here:

 _> Farmers have historically benefited little from advancement in technology
and this is no exception._

I think I have benefitted massively from technology. As a sixth generation
farmer on my family's land, I expect I do not make any more money (inflation
adjusted, of course) on the farm than my forefathers did. I believe this is
where your concern lies.

However, they spent the entire year working on the farm. I can do all the work
in a few weeks, thanks to technology. That also allows me to have a career in
the tech industry. Being able to have everything they did and a tech salary is
a _huge_ gain!

 _> most farmers (I grew up on a small family farm) have little choice but to
sell at the price the local market will give them_

Western Canada, for instance, had a wheat/barley pool until a few years ago
where you had to put your product – by law – into the pool and receive
whatever price the pool was able to market your grain at. But these kind of
programs are pretty much long gone in 2018. In America, which seems to be the
main audience of HN, there was never such a thing. Subsidies are the preferred
way to support farmers.

Not knowing where you are from, you may still have such a system, but
generally that is not the case. For me, different buyers, even within the
local market, will pay more or less depending on what they plan to do with the
product, and will generally negotiate price. And, of course, I can ship my
product outside of the local market if an even better deal is found elsewhere.

 _> Likewise they have to buy input goods (seed, fertilizer, breeding stock,
etc.) at the price others choose._

This is the same as every other business in existence, however. All sales
require negotiation. If the offer made by the seller is not acceptable to any
buyers, the seller will make no sales and will be quickly compelled to reduce
their next offer.

 _> I'm thankful for a fairly healthy (by comparison) tech market._

Uncompetitive is the word you are looking for, I believe. Everything you
mentioned before is a result of farming being _very_ competitive. I might even
suggest the most competitive industry in the world. Tech is not very
competitive, relatively speaking. When it comes to labour, there are not a lot
of people to go around, and intellectual property laws limit how many vendors
can offer the same product.

~~~
olivierlacan
Did you write more about this somewhere? I feel like an AMA would be very
interesting to read. My mother’s side of the family comes from a very rural
area where they farmed on a very small scale so I’ve always eyed the
technological efficiency gains in agriculture with a very curious eye
considering how much back-breaking labor they still have to do.

------
wcchandler
I’m pretty interested in a lot of AgTech. While I like to see these pieces as
it justifies my interest, it reminds me you can’t escape capitalism and
everyone is going to try to make a dime off of you. As such, I feel like I’ll
only be able to take my projects seriously if they’re funded or vested by an
incubator or VC who is equally benevelont or altruistic. I’m even
contemplating going for a PhD just so a large university would be willing to
handle this burden. Farmers are always thought of as the humble, true
“American” figure. The idea that hard work pays off. But I’ll be damned if
it’s not rife with more corruption than any other industry.

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mistrial9
Can we recall for a moment, that more than 70% of the continental US
population lived on farms or in rural areas, not much more than 100 years ago.
The crush of humanity to the cities, and the concentration of capital in
farming, is very much a huge experiment. There is nothing in capitalism that
says that humans have to live, or enjoy life, or said another way, the drives
of capital take over even common sense things.

Secondly, wafting around some huge number of dollars for a market cap is
getting pretty close to (WS:WEASEL) weasel words..

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Word...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Words_to_watch)

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ourmandave
_In its patent-infringement complaints, filed June 1 in federal court in
Wilmington, Delaware, Deere said the combination of AGCO unit Precision
Planting 's vSet seed meters and SpeedTube seed-delivery system infringes 12
patents related to Deere's ExactEmerge, which allows farmers more accurate
seed placement and spacing while planting at higher speeds._

Getting flashbacks to Apple's infringement claim based on it's patent for
rectangles with rounded corners.

~~~
dragonwriter
Apple's case was a design patent case, this is a utility patent. The two are
quite different.

