1009
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2024
1009 points (98.3% liked)
Technology
59366 readers
2098 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
That depends entirely on who's safety is on the line. When you repair your brakes wrong (to follow the original example), and it causes a pile up that kills 4.or 8 or 10 people, someone should be held liable for that.
When you repair the electrical box in your basement wrong and it causes a fire that takes out the houses on either side of you, someone should be held liable for that.
This is like saying "just because some people who drive drunk kill people doesn't mean that everyone shouldn't be able to". The difference here though is that we know there's a statistically significant increase in the likelihood of death or serious injury from driving drunk.
There's a statistically less likely chance of death or bodily injury when people repair their own devices, but I would wager that has a lot to do with the fact that the pool of people doing it have the knowledge to do so and aren't completely ignorant of how those devices work, or it takes into account that right to repair also encompasses people getting a third party who is qualified to repair the device to do it, but outside of what the manufacturer allows per user agreement. Once more random laymen start doing it because they are allowed or perceived themselves to be allowed, I would expect that the number of wrongly repaired devices would go up.
Some states have mandatory car inspections. So for instance, if you repair your brakes wrong and leave a caliper bolt off or don't grease the slides or any number of other things there's another qualified person looking over that and noting it. So there's less possibility that it won't be fixed properly. We do not have anything like that for medical devices except when they are repaired through the manufacturer.
I'm not even arguing against the right to repair. I'm just pointing out the hurdles that are going to be there and saying they should be addressed. I'm actually generally for people learning how things work so that they can do simple repairs or even complex repairs if they need to.
But I still think that some things should be handled by professionals. Or at least with a professional QC'ing the work.
In the field I work in, work can be done by the owner but only with a qualified and licensed A&P present. Would you suggest that any old person off the street should be able to repair a plane and fly over your house?
I don't think there's any solid argument that precludes people from doing maintenance on their own car. There's always some form of inspection or monitoring that can be done. Brakes in particular are perfectly reasonable. I particularly miss ease of maintaining drum brakes. They were literally designed to be maintained by the end user, you pull the wheel, The drum slides right off and the parts are readily available. If you want to get fancy you could buy a tool to help you remove the spring.
Things should be designed to be maintained by the end user and the end user could choose to go to a mechanic if they wanted to.
Honestly what we're running up against at this point with car maintenance is design to cost. Every part that is maintainable on a car could be designed to be easily maintainable for a cost. Rather than the manufacturer paying that cost, there making us pay the cost at the mechanic. You can literally buy repair parts that are easy and convenient to work with that are improvements over OEM.
In the case we're talking about for this article it's literally a wire on a lithium ion battery pack in a wrist mounted device that failed that they're refusing to replace.
And it's not like he's going to fall out of the sky and land in somebody's backyard.
If inspection or monitoring were mandatory you'd have a point. But it isn't mandatory. Not everywhere. Not even most places. Only 19 of the 50 states require vehicle safety inspections periodically. So at most the vast majority of vehicles probably haven't had one since the car was new unless the state where that car is registered requires it. For a country that's very car dependent with car accidents being one of the leading causes of death in the US, that's terrifying.