[HN Gopher] Farmers fuming over California's ban on driverless t...
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Farmers fuming over California's ban on driverless tractors, other
robots
Author : ilamont
Score : 25 points
Date : 2025-06-11 18:03 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nbcbayarea.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nbcbayarea.com)
| guywithahat wrote:
| States shouldn't be allowed to be this dysfunctional; I wish
| there were stronger constitutional protections so things like
| this couldn't happen.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| You don't even need to involve the feds or the balance of fed-
| state power. Just slice up the damn state. There's just no
| avoiding dysfunction at its current scale. No one state
| government can serve so many diverse interests.
|
| On the east coast they solve this problem by having smaller
| states. Wouldn't want those Massachusetts doctors or NYC
| financiers sticking their dick in Pennsylvania's farming
| economy or Maine's lumber and tourism economy and screwing it
| all up. Or vise versa. And those are the problems that CA
| suffers from.
|
| If the argument not to is federal party politics there are
| plenty of solutions to slice and dice in a net-neutral manner.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _On the east coast they solve this problem by having
| smaller states._
|
| That makes it sound like the eastern seaboard was originally
| the size of California, and then we recently decided to break
| them up when it was too big to effectively govern.
|
| (I mean, I guess you could say that _is_ what happened during
| the colonization of the area, and the Revolutionary War... I
| 'll leave that debate to someone who studied more history
| than I did.)
|
| Although I will say that New Jersey and NYC _do_ constantly
| do things that affect the other one; it 's just a function of
| NYC being a huge city, on the border of a dense state.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| I should have said "doesn't have this problem much at all"
| rather than "solves" but regardless...
|
| >Although I will say that New Jersey and NYC do constantly
| do things that affect the other one; it's just a function
| of NYC being a huge city, on the border of a dense state.
|
| And their misery is their own doing so nobody feels bad for
| them in the way that people feel at least a little bad for
| CA famers who are getting crapped on by people the white
| collar workers elected or feels bad for LA being hamstrung
| by policy that appeals to SF and Sac or whatever.
| singleshot_ wrote:
| Did you know Maine used to be part of Massachusetts?
| buonu wrote:
| Yeah pretty sure CA suffers from humans not made up gibberish
| as you put it
|
| Soon as you open the door to the conversation though your
| simple pipe dream is clogged by every land developer, US or
| overseas, environmental groups, etc
|
| Because people outside the government exist and will engage.
| It's opening a new lane on the freeway assuming it will help
| forever and it's clogged in a couple years.
|
| People flock to a void and a new set of states and legal
| boundaries is a knowledge void to fill with special
| interests.
|
| But go ahead and forget every NGO, and people themselves and
| just put our agency at the whims of government. Not say
| government bad, just that no it won't just be government
| dictating. And it should not be cause that's how you get to
| "government bad".
| Terr_ wrote:
| > Just slice up the damn state.
|
| The smaller states will not permit it: It would dilute their
| own unfair representation in the Senate, legacy of their
| ancient join-up bribe.
|
| https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artIV-S3-C1-4.
| ..
| LPisGood wrote:
| California is one of the best functioning states in the
| country.
| chfritz wrote:
| "California safety regulations currently require operators to be
| "stationed" at the controls."
|
| This is _NOT_ a huge burden. Any robotics company operating a
| fleet today will have _someone_ watching almost all the time in
| one form or another anyways. So this really just becomes a matter
| of interpreting what "the controls" means. The regulation seem
| to omit any mention of "on the device/vehicle" so these controls
| can clearly be remote. It also doesn't seem to specify a 1:1
| ratio of operators to devices. So if there is one operator, e.g.,
| at the air-conditioned HQ of the robotics vendor, at the
| "controls" of twenty tractors that are operating in the field
| which the operator can see remotely using low-latency video-
| streaming and which he can stop instantly with the press of a
| button, then that might already be all that is required. It
| certainly is logically.
| cyode wrote:
| "[John Deere autonomous] tractors are currently being used by
| farmers in 11 states but not California."
|
| And what of the other 38 states?
|
| The graphic shows those tractors are also not adopted in Texas,
| Montana, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Tennessee, all top 10 farming
| states by acreage. [0]
|
| California is an ironic example due to its tech industry, but
| hardly seems like something specific to "dysfunctional"
| California, as suggested by other commenters.
|
| [0] https://www.agriculture.com/farming-across-america-a-
| state-b...
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(page generated 2025-06-11 23:02 UTC)