Somewhere in Illinois this week, farmers won a fight against their own tractors. The FTC settled with John Deere on right-to-repair, the second time this year the company’s been dragged into it (there was a $99 million class action back in April too), and now Deere has to hand over the software farmers need to fix their own equipment instead of routing every repair through an authorized dealer with a truck and an hourly rate. Small thing to celebrate, but I’ve spent a month reading the opposite story on repeat. Sony is killing PlayStation discs. Samsung wants to charge developers for its own smart home API. T-Mobile is quietly herding people off their old plans. Notion killed its email app because, in the company’s words, everyone’s using AI agents for that now anyway. The theme all month has been: you don’t own it, you’re renting the right to use it until the terms change. Deere getting forced into compliance, twice, is the crowbar winning for once. I’ll take it.

Meanwhile nobody can explain why Americans are leaving the workforce. Labor force participation just hit its lowest point in fifty years outside of Covid, and June’s jobs report was soft too, only 57,000 added. At the same time, SK Hynix’s US listing came in seven times oversubscribed, riding the same AI wave that had Oracle laying off 21,000 people while other companies that blamed AI for their own cuts are quietly regretting it. Investors racing toward the AI trade with both hands, workers quietly stepping sideways out of the labor force for reasons nobody’s bothered to nail down. That gap might be the more honest economic indicator this week.

Small mercy: Bonnie Tyler died today at 75. Turn around, bright eyes.

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