101–110 of 330 posts
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I can buy an electric wheelchair at Walmart for $750. What is the issue?
As the sibling comments noted, we're talking about bespoke wheelchairs for people with severe mobility disability (MS, ALS, etc). Things like Stephen Hawking's chair.
What the article does not seem to mention is that an usual electric wheelchair costs about $65,000 (and is intended to be replaced every six years or so). This and the non-availability of replacement parts is why some wheelchair users started a project to open-source a wheelchair from standard parts: https://themif.org/ Louis Rossmann interviewed the founder of the project here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaAj59…
Really cool that an electric wheelchair costs more than a luxury EV and is somehow less reliable.
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> how would it fix things then if it wasn't private equity dominating that market? I'd start importing them for less than $500 from India [1]. (Versus $1,500 to $6,000 for these jalopies.) [1] https://www.amazon.in/electric-wheelchair/s?k=electric+wheel...
The regulations don't just disappear to allow for such imports as in your example ...?
The dumb thing is these super cheap wheelchairs would likely cost the end users more money than the expensive ones as they will buy them out of pocket vs having their insurance/medicare cover most/all of the cost.
The reason these companies don't sell these wheelchairs in the US is likely because the marketing would run afowl of regulations about selling medical devices. You probably could sell these as bicycles and hobby chairs though.
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How do think we should address security around AI, and the public's control over a major impact on their lives, welfare, freedom, prosperity, etc.
The first step is to stop thinking of "the public" as a monolithic entity whose interests are pursued by the government, and instead recognize that control over things that have a major impact on the lives, welfare, freedom, and prosperity need to be things they can effectively control or opt-out of as individuals . Regulatory intervention makes it harder, not easier, for individuals to take charge of these matters f…
If AI takes over the world, or others pump lots of GHG into the air and cause climate change, or someone sets off explosives and burns down my neighborhood, or my frozen chicken contains poisonous bacteria, or my bathroom sanitizer doesn't really sanitize - how do I opt out?
Plenty of regulations coexists with FOSS, obviously.
The arguments against all regulation are transparently weak, and the apparent dogmatism discredits everything else. Why be so dogmatically anti-regulation? Dogmatism isn't about finding truth but about serving someone's political interests. If I understand correctly what's happening, whose interests are you serving and why?
The first is that you say that this kind of thing is good. It's all part of capitalism. The market will work it out. People will say this kind of thing with a straight face.
The second is to say that it is bad. But why is it bad?
The first stage is you believe that there are bad apples. Private equity is simply a few bad actors who may or may not need to be dealth with by way of legislation, regulation and/or prosecution. Lots of people believe this because they still fundamentally believe in our current economic system.
The second stage is you realize that private equity isn't an outlier and isn't a few bad apples. It is exactly what our system is designed to produce: to financialize and rent-seek in every aspect of our lives as a means of extracting wealth from the poor to the already vastly wealthy.
Private equity is taking over every aspect of your life by buying up homes, mobile home parks, vets, medical practices, hospitals, etc. There probably isn't a single aspect of our lives that hasn't been tainted by private equity.
And the playbook is exactly the same:
1. Jack up the prices, usually by cornering a market by either buying up all the competition or through legislatively creating enclosures;
2. Cut costs. Use noncompete agreements and and the like to suppress wages; and
3. Load up the entity with exploding debt and sell it to the market before the debt explodes.
This is capitalism working as intended. No more, no less.
On wheelchairs in particular, it's truly disgusting what we as a society put wheelchair users through. One of the most egeregious examples is how airlines will routinely destroy wheelchairs.
We are steadily marching towrads a future where almost all of us will be a permanent underclass devoid of any kind of security. Every aspect of our lives will be at the mercy of our overlords. Capitalism inevitably leads to neofeudalism.
What the article does not seem to mention is that an usual electric wheelchair costs about $65,000 (and is intended to be replaced every six years or so). This and the non-availability of replacement parts is why some wheelchair users started a project to open-source a wheelchair from standard parts: https://themif.org/ Louis Rossmann interviewed the founder of the project here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaAj59…
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It's all theoretical. Do you see it actually working out this way? When and where? > regulators just, you know, look at the design of the chairs to evaluate them for certification. But customers could do the same thing for themselves, at less cost (what, you think those government regulators work for free?). So the regulations are actually adding zero value. But they're certainly not adding zero cost. I have little i…
Eternal September, except it’s an Econ 1 class.
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This is a great project. I didn't realize that FDA Class I regulations were this easy to comply with.
> I didn't realize that FDA Class I regulations were this easy to comply with. They definitely won't be once this open source effort shows any sign of success. You can't solve political problems with technical solutions. At best, you may be able to displace them, but even that is rare.
Yes, that's what I've been thinking too. Tom Quiter even mentions in the interview that there already have been companies which tried to offer cheap wheelchairs, but the quasi-monopolists had the FDA alter the regulations in a way with which the newbies couldn't comply.
However, since the MIF already attracted suppliers, I hope they can gain some leverage.
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This is a great project. I didn't realize that FDA Class I regulations were this easy to comply with.
> I didn't realize that FDA Class I regulations were this easy to comply with. They definitely won't be once this open source effort shows any sign of success. You can't solve political problems with technical solutions. At best, you may be able to displace them, but even that is rare.
I suppose the FDA's reasoning is that they're better off having no mobility than having a device that doesn't work properly.