Use the “black market” whenever possible, avoid any taxes possible, and so on.
Legally, of course! I think EVERY American should respect the law EXACTLY like our President(s), CEOs, and police et al. do, as in completely.
By completely I mean not at all. In Pac-Man, or whatever.
I will always repost this article: Their Bionic Eyes Are Now Obsolete and Unsupported - Second Sight left users of its retinal implants in the dark
https://spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-eye-obsolete
“I remember exactly where I was: I was switching from the 6 train to the F train,” Campbell tells IEEE Spectrum. “I was about to go down the stairs, and all of a sudden I heard a little ‘beep, beep, beep’ sound.”
It wasn’t her phone battery running out. It was her Argus II retinal implant system powering down. The patches of light and dark that she’d been able to see with the implant’s help vanished.
Post ironically ableist to lack link to source or text alternative: by lacking accessibility, this image of text sustains a pattern of systemic discriminatory exclusion.
Images of text break much that text alternatives do not. Losses due to image of text lacking alternative such as link:
- usability
- we can’t quote the text without pointless bullshit like retyping it or OCR
- text search is unavailable
- the system can’t
- reflow text to varied screen sizes
- vary presentation (size, contrast)
- vary modality (audio, braille)
- accessibility
- lacks semantic structure (tags for titles, heading levels, sections, paragraphs, lists, emphasis, code, links, accessibility features, etc)
- some users can’t read the image due to lack of alt text (markdown image description)
- users can’t adapt the text for dyslexia or vision impairments
- systems can’t read the text to them or send it to braille devices
- web connectivity
- we have to do failure-prone bullshit to find the original source
- we can’t explore wider context of the original message
- authenticity: we don’t know the image hasn’t been tampered
- searchability: the “text” isn’t indexable by search engine in a meaningful way
- fault tolerance: no text fallback if
- image breaks
- image host is geoblocked due to insane regulations.
Contrary to age & humble appearance, text is an advanced technology that provides all these capabilities absent from images.
- usability
If it goes in your body or is required for normal human function, it should be open source.
Everything should be open source, but let’s start there.
At the very least, all design and code should be held in escrow, to be released immediately if the company stops maintaining it.
In theory, that’s part of what a patent is supposed to do: the design is filed with the patent office, and after the course of the patent has run out, other companies have the design and the legal right to make competing products. I kind of wonder if making software patentable could help the open source movement.
Software patents are very common and no, this has not helped the open source movement.
Hey, OP, can you pass this along to the OP-OP?
It’s an open source cochlear implant hearing aid as in the part that goes on to the actual physical implant.
Fr I think the WHO, ISO, or EU (I would say or America, but we’re no longer trustworthy) should put out standards for open compatability standards for assistive devices, especially implanted ones and nations should mandate that these standards be followed. They don’t have to stay the same, but backwards compatability should be important. If something is implanted into your body, especially in a way that’s unable to be realistically replaced and involves damaging your abilities to improve them, you have the right to keep it working and to not be bound to a single company or cartel.
Also I’m pretty sure only one state in the US mandates insurance cover hearing aids, so if you don’t live there or have a union job with hearing damage, enjoy the $3k bill.
I think a lot of people assume that we just need Diaper Shitting Don to bite the bullet and things will get better.
Nah.
The rate at which things are getting worse might slow down, but this country is all sorts of fucked. We’re going to have entire generations suffering and dying as they get older from treatable conditions because they just won’t have access.
Dark future.
Care and progress for the disabled has always been an open door for corporations to test new technology on a truly captivated audience. The absurdly high costs and exclusivity is often how the public justifies to themselves that these companies couldn’t possibly have any malintent because the stakes are too high. They have no incentive to reduce costs, improve repairability, or even genuinely care about the patients or symptoms that they’re treating; that’s the inventor’s problem.
It also often involves ignoring us when we say what we need or want out of assistive devices. I’ve seen a lot of amputees write up essays on how artificial limbs are often designed for the wants of able people (cool technology, robotics, how similar it looks to a biological limb, etc), rather than the wants of the people wearing it (lightness, comfort, ease of use, etc). Robotics are heavy, and a lot of the robotic controls are done by flexing muscles in patterns which is inconvenient compared to a grasper hook. Meanwhile able people keep thinking that the goal should be robot strength arms like in a comic book, but a simple force body diagram will show that that just moves the point of discomfort and failure away from the prosthetic and onto the place it attaches to the body.
Designers with OEM parts: If you gotta replace your arm, might as well add a badass super-strong mech suit with guided missiles, just like in the movies.
Person who just wants to eat their soup before it gets cold: …
Basic models: Starting around $1,200 to $2,000 for travel chairs.
Mid-range options: Typically between $2,500 and $5,000.
High-end models: Can exceed $10,000 for advanced features and customization.
Customized models: Prices can go up to $5,000+ for specialized needs.
Seems pretty reasonable to me, not sure what their point was. The ear implants are crazy, wheelchairs aren’t.
Seems pretty reasonable to an able-bodied person who can pull an income. A ton of disabled people cannot, and US medicaid often has disgustingly low limits.
Yeah wheelchairs look to be around hearing aid prices by that, though with much more room on both ends (yeah I know you can get dirt cheap HAs that are the auditory equivalent of reading glasses, but they’re the auditory equivalent of reading glasses)
i don’t know anyone who needs a power chair who doesn’t need a customized one. try again.
My neighbor has one.
But do they need a customized one? Have you ever asked them?
wdym
What’s really fun is we have two ruling parties, both of whom don’t give a damn about right to repair, tech monopolies, or universal health care.
Generic person:
Well boo hoo, what did you do to get that / should’ve cared more / been more careful.
Later:
Boohoo, I didn’t think it would affect me! Now it’s serious!
Generic Republican. Leftists have empathy.
To me this mostly isn’t a universal healthcare issue, it’s a right to repair issue. Everyone that reads this should support both concepts.
It’s also a medical devices being expensive in general issue. If you build something and you want it to get cleared for medical use you need to test the shit out of it and get several kinds of certification. And you need to do it all over everytime you make any change whatsoever. This can easily take two years for every change, even if you just change something trivial.
All of this is to prevent another Therac-25. For the uninitiated: That was a radiotherapy device that, due to design flaws on several levels, could inadvertantly be turned into a literal death ray. Several patients died because of this. In the aftermath, the regulations for medical decides were tightened considerably.
That’s a major part of why medical devices are so insanely expensive. Much of what you’re paying for is a titanic amount of certification work.
Unfortunately, this also makes it harder to implement a right to repair for these. Few people want to figure out who is responsible when e.g. a CPAP device that someone repaired themselves fails. The current approach is to make it damn near impossible for the manufacturers to screw up but that’s a lot harder when the device can ever be in a configuration that hasn’t been extensively tested and certified.
I don’t buy the “testing makes it so expensive” rationale unless I see the actual source numbers. Every bicycle made in Europe, the US, or Taiwan goes through an extensive ISO-defined testing process that is every bit as rigorous as that of a hearing aid yet somehow they all arrive in shops with reasonable sticker prices, and they often have production runs with smaller numbers than those implants. Yes testing will obviously increase cost, but show me the paperwork for the process that brings a single hearing aid part to $23K. It doesn’t exist. The goldfish is merely growing to fill the bowl, and the bowl is private insurance.
The fact it makes everything expensive and proprietary is just an unfortunate side effect.
I think any company that is sunsetting a product with existing customers still using it should offer full refunds or a way to operate it without the company.
Cloud services have no incentive to continue operating unless they charge ‘rent’ as servers and maintenance is not free. However, if they choose to use proprietary ways to protect their IP, they should also have an obligation. If they choose to not have that obligation, they lose the IP and open source it.
So “ironbound-operion” is complaining about having to pay only $2,300 for cochlear implants that cost $23k?
No, they are complaining that a single replacement part for a cochlear implant, which they already paid for, has a base cost anywhere near $23k, since there is simply no way that a processor chip costs that much, and it’s clearly price gouging.
Subscriptions for necessities. Subscriptions to live.
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Drink verification can.
Fucking rent
