Subscription airbag
Subscription airbag
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Tweet: Okay I thought this one straight up has to be hyperbole, there's no way they'd make an airbag that checks your subscription status or it doesn't go off, but it's fucking TRUE: "Without the subscription service from In&Motion, the airbag system is non-operational."
Quoted tweet: Reminder that Klim makes a motorcycle airbag vest that has a subscription service and if you don't pay and get in a wreck it just doesn't go off
Google results screenshot: Ai-1 Airbag Vest (Klim) - Choose from $12/month or $120/year subscription options, which include...
Original tweet dated 30th April 2021
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It's more of reskinned lease scheme. These are expensive devices, and you can either buy the whole device up-front, or you can buy a cheaper version and pay a monthly fee to make up the difference. Either $800 up front, or $400 up front + $12/mo or $120/yr for three years.
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There is no world in which you die because "your airbag's ping is too high". It checks your subscription once a day before you leave home; part of getting ride-ready is making sure your airbag is prepped. If you have no sub, the device warns you, the same as if the airbag was faulty or unready for any other reason.
It's absurd on the face of it, but I'm not sure it's worse than a world where motorcyclists don't get airbags if they don't have $800 right now.
In the event you don't pay they have made a deliberate decision to just let you die. Wall.
In your opinion, would it be better if the lease scheme didn't exist, and the only way to have one at all was to pay $800 up front?
Again, it's not like it's going to catch you by surprise. You are alerted well before you ever even get on your bike, as you're putting the vest on, that it's inactive. You have to make the choice to ride with an inactive vest. It doesn't check your payment status mid-crash or shut off mid-ride. Other vest manufacturers only offer a full-price one-time-purchase. These guys have gone out of their way to make it more accessible to people who can't pay $800 up front. If they simply never checked, people would just buy the vest for "half price", and the company quickly couldn't afford to offer it. They've made it as safe as possible while not letting themselves go out of business. I'm not sure what else you want them to do.
Gonna be honest, I just don't think this is an appropriate model for an air bag. Disabling a potentially life saving device just because someone didn't pay money is kind of a shitty thing to do no matter how you look at it.
If someone rents something monthly and stops paying partway through, we already have existing systems in place to deal with this sort of thing. Let it keep working and deal with it through the proper channels.
What's the functional difference between "disable the vest remotely" and "send repo men to take the vest away"? In either case, you no longer have access to the air bag, but in the former case you can resume paying for it much more easily. I would personally far rather a "subscription" than a traditional lease; I can stop paying when I don't need the thing or can't afford it, and seamlessly resume using it when I need to and have money.
What's the functional difference between "disable the vest remotely" and "send repo men to take the vest away"?
If there's no functional difference then why turn it off? It's unnecessary bullshit that had to be designed and would have cost them nothing to not do in the first place. Why spend more money and make it more complicated for no gain? And you're even opening up security vulnerabilities by letting it connect to the internet.
I would personally far rather a "subscription" than a traditional lease; I can stop paying when I don't need the thing or can't afford it, and seamlessly resume using it when I need to and have money.
I would rather there not be any sort of subscription model for fucking safety equipment. If your netflix subscription expires because you're broke that's one thing, it won't kill you, but for equipment that is designed to save lives, turning it off because someone is poor is fucking barbaric, especially when it would have cost them nothing to leave it turned on.
It doesn't cost them nothing. If they left it on without payment, then people would just buy the subsidized one and never pay the sub. The company can't afford to sell all the vests at half price. Then they couldn't afford to offer the subscription option anymore. Without a method to enforce payment, the only option is to price poor people out entirely. That's worse, not better.
It just does not occur to you that people shouldn't have to pay out the ass or be subject to all this arbitrary subscription bullshit for safety equipment, does it? "Oh no what about their profit motive" I don't give a fuck. If this equipment really is a huge improvement for the safety of motorcyclists then maybe it should be nationalized and subsidized so it can be affordable for anyone who rides a motorcycle and so people's lives aren't dictated by a handful of rich fucks who only care about their bottom line.
Of course it occurred to me, which is why I framed it the way I did. I don't disagree, obviously it should be easily available. However, villainizing this specific company for finding a way to make it more easily available than their counterparts who price poor people out entirely is a step backwards. Villainize the government and the system for putting us here. Villainizing a company that found a way to work within the stupid framework we're stuck in to do something, even if it's less than perfect, to make it more affordable, for taking basic steps to make sure they don't go out of business for it, is nuts.
However, villainizing this specific company for finding a way to make it more easily available than their counterparts who price poor people out entirely is a step backwards
Oh shit, I didn't know they were doing this out of the goodness of their hearts! You should have told me this to begin with!
They did it this way because they thought it would earn them the most profit. If you think it's for any other reason than that, then you don't really understand how capitalism works.
Capitalists finding a way to tap into the market of "people who can't afford motorcycle air bag vests" means poor people have access to it when they previously didn't. Is it worse than a world where anyone could get one for free from the DMV or take it out from a library or something? Yes, absolutely. That's easily preferable to this. Is it better than a world where poor people had no way to access it? I would say so.
It doesn't cost them nothing. If they left it on without payment, then people would just buy the subsidized one and never pay the sub.
Just sell the vest at the subsidized price then. I promise you they aren't doing this out of some desperate need to hold onto razor thin margins, the upfront payment probably already nets them a tidy profit they're just trying to milk people who don't have as much upfront cash by rent seeking.
Really we should just abolish capitalism.
Really we should just abolish capitalism.
No arguments here
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