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It reportedly checks subscription upon putting the vest on and supposedly won’t turn off mid ride.

Honestly the fact that it has code that says "under condition X, don't save the user" is concerning in and of itself. I wouldn't trust this thing in the first place.

The monthly subscription model leaves me feeling so very conflicted. On one hand, it’s a way to get an important piece of safety equipment for less money up front, which is good—there’s certainly cheaper airbag vests, but there’s more expensive ones, too.

No, no, there's nothing conflicting here. If you need expensive safety equipment that you can't afford up front there's already a solution for that, it's called financing. There is no upside to this, it's just unethical, irresponsible, and dumb.

Here's a great vid on airbags for motorcycles

Fun fact the manual ones are better

Edit: He even mentions the one in the post about how it's a bad idea.

I was hoping that the future would be like Star Trek, a beautiful high tech paradise where we worked our problems out and live in a post-scarcity world. Instead we're getting Deus Ex, minus the shades and trench coats.

This gets posted occasionally and while I agree, the subscription for an airbag is one of the dumbest things ever, it's not the only way to buy the thing.

It's available as a one-time purchase instead, which obviously is what everyone here would choose, but it's a fairly high price, and their argument for offering a subscription model is that they want the price barrier for safety equipment to be lower. There are other ways to do it, but the option of a subscription is fine IMO as long as the one time purchase remains as well.

Isn't that illegal?

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.

What annoys me about this is that it implicitly says that if you have more money you deserve to be safer.

You know, if I'm going to spend my entire adult life in a cyberpunk dystopia, I should at least be able to get Kid Stealth legs.

klim: do you have a subscription for that?

me: guess i'll die 🤷‍♂️

Next up on the capitalism shit train:

Pay us or we fucking kill your family

So what happens if you start your airbag in an area without cell reception (so it can't verify your subscription)?

How often does it check... If you're out in the middle of nowhere and it can't get a wifi signal is it going to let you die?

Someone will buy this thing.
Someone will hack this thing.
And this someone will make it open

Y’all trust the activation system?

Source

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?)

That's gotta be illegal, isn't it LITERALLY EXTORTION to lock a REQUIRED SAFETY FEATURE behind a paywall?

Imagine if the Fire Extinguisher at your workplace had a fucking credit card slot next to it.

Personal safety systems as a service.

What's next? Air as a service? Don't pay and we'll turn off your oxygen?

"which include unlimited warranty"

Are they expecting people to periodically test the device to verify it's working? This kind of thing is going to be a one shot deal, or at least needing a overhaul after use to be functional again.

Subscribe and 'test' afterevery ride, get new gear for free?

How about a smoke alarm subscription? Or even better, handbrake subscription!