Comment by alphazard
7 months ago
Yeah this guy gets it.
Regardless of your stance on whether the government should regulate x or y, it's important to understand that the people driving this law do not care about you or your fingers. This is rent seeking; someone who makes safe saws wants to sell more of their saws, and they compete with people who sell less safe saws. They are using the legal system to benefit their own bottom line.
After the real goal is established, reasons like "think of the children" or "think of the fingers" can be fabricated.
>it's important to understand that the people driving this law do not care about you or your fingers
People and consumer advocates can feasibly have motives other than greed.
Seatbelts is a good example: Volvo let any one use 3 point seatbelts so this could be standardised.
But what do the goals matter? The only relevant question I can see is 'are the fingers worth the rent?'
To that point, a regulation requiring "if and only if" per unit licensing is available at (much) less than the worth of the fingers should be a no brainier.
Given the relatively small market share that SawStop enjoys, you can only assume that most people feel like the fingers aren't really worth the rent.
It's not really their choice to make though. (trivially, see seatbelts, smoking, airline regulations, ...).
Should it be? Maybe, but that's a discussion out of scope from 'is it in society's interest to mandate inclusion of sawstop's technology, or it's equivalent?'.
1 reply →
A lot of people simply can’t afford their saws though.