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Trained repair professionals at hospitals are regularly unable to fix medical devices because of manufacturer lockout codes or the inability to obtain repair parts. During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, broken ventilators sat unrepaired for weeks or months as manufacturers were overwhelmed with repair requests and independent repair professionals were locked out of them. At the time, I reported that independent repair techs had resorted to creating DIY dongles loaded with jailbroken Ukrainian firmware to fix ventilators without manufacturer permission. Medical device manufacturers also threatened iFixit because it posted ventilator repair manuals on its website. I have also written about people with sleep apnea who have hacked their CPAP machines to improve their basic functionality and to repair them.
PS: he got it repaired.
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Do you have a source on the food supply angle? Sounds interesting and enraging.
Short of it is that John Deere is preventing farmers from repairing their own tractors. How much it threatens the food supply, I’m not sure, but there is an obvious connection.
I’ve also read about the John Deere issue as a leading instigator of right-to-repair laws. They weren’t able to provide authorized local repair techs when a tractor breaks down, so farmers were stuck waiting 1-2 weeks for someone to show up while crops were rotting in the fields (think of how fast your fresh fruit rots in your kitchen and then imagine dozens of fields of that crop going to waste). And the biggest insult was when the repair tech drove into town for a $5 part that the farmer had already identified but couldn’t replace because of manufacturer lockouts.
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Yeah, just search up right to repair farm equipment, just linking one or two articles won’t give you the scope of the problem the way seeing how much it has been covered, but not changed.
I got family that farms independent, and it’s pretty much the single biggest factor in profitability over time. Those machines can cost as much, or more, than a nice house, and you’re locked in to inflated service and parts costs.
Enraging doesn’t honestly do the problem justice.
This isn’t a “google it” thing, it’s really about actually seeing the search results first hand. We’re talking pages of hits going back decades.
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Here is a some what related video, $200000 to Mobility Independence Foundation; Thomas Quiter’s guide through the wheelchair industry - Louis Rossmann. It a pretty long video at 1 hour and 11 minutes but I felt it was worth the watch because my unfamiliarity with the topic.