What annoys me about this is that it implicitly says that if you have more money you deserve to be safer.
I mean, more expensive cars have more safety features. You pay to be safer.
Sometimes, we must face reality. Newly developed safety features are a selling point and people do pay more for safer cars. If law dictated (and enforced) that all cars must have the exact same safety features, there would be no financial incentive to develop better safety, or much less incentive at least. In reality, car safety features are one of the few examples of things actually trickling down: today’s cheapest cars have safety features that at some point only existed in the most expensive luxury cars. This is fine.
None of this applies to whatever the fuck the original post is about though.
What will be interesting is how a false negative plays out. A vest fails, someone dies yet the subscription is current: how does the lawsuit play out?
See, when a life-saving device can fail due to software bugs, our brains point to malicious negligence when it does fail. It’s no longer a badly packed parachute but a company whose billing department wants to kill poor people.
Y’all trust the activation system?
It - meaning the activator, no comment on subscription - seems par for the course.
Hard to argue it couldn’t be at least marginally safer if remote disabling were impossible, though wonder if that’d be implemented for recall purposes as perhaps it is on modern vehicles? (Anybody know?)
So if I’m reading this right, you buy the air vest, and then either buy or rent a gizmo that tells it when to inflate
Uh, or just don’t get one? This is a stand-alone product with an unconventional business model. It’s not like they’re forcing it on anyone.
Uh, that’s not really the point? If you’re making a product that aims to promote safety and save lives, then you shouldn’t be able to cancel it at the will of the company. It would be like waking up in the middle of a surgery and the doctor telling you “Hey, looks like your anesthesia subscription expired, so unless you’ve got an extra $20 in your pocket right now, then we’re just going in raw.” If you absolutely NEED the extra money as part of your business model or whatever, then just charge them AFTER the service is used. Don’t just fucking turn the airbag off with no warning because they’re behind on a payment
Nobody really likes the implementation of the insurance model of healthcare, but… You do at least asunderstand the idea behind it, right?
Insurance charges a much lower rate than the actual price, but everyone pays even when they don’t need it. That way the people who aren’t using it cover the people who are. It doesn’t work if you only get charged when you use it.
That’s all this is. You pay a subscription that is much lower than the price of the product. If it gets used, they send you another one.
The cost is fixed, and you don’t have to worry about going without an important piece of safety equipment or incurring further costs after needing to use it.
If you have enough money to buy one directly, nobody is stopping you. This is actually aimed at people who can’t afford that and would not have access to this technology at all otherwise.
I do wonder if the product you paid full price for also has a remote kill switch… Just morbid curiosity, I have no take in this.
Marketing safety equipment subscriptions specifically to people who can’t afford to buy that equipment outright, and then disabling it when they fail to make a payment (because you’re specifically targeting the demographic most likely to miss payments) is a great way to kill poor people, and this individual business should absolutely get the shit they get for doing it
Poor people do have options. Better options, in fact. There are mechanical airbag vests that cost about $700, and don’t use proprietary CO2 carts. If you can afford this subscription for 2 years, you can afford a better vest. Helite has no way of disabling the vests you get from them.
Hot take: if you can afford $400 plus $12 a month, you can afford to save up another $300 for a device that doesn’t use a battery and that the company can’t ever disable
How about a smoke alarm subscription? Or even better, handbrake subscription!
Scuba diving equipment! Sorry you used your allocated oxygen, swipe your credit card to renew the subscription.
