A bit unrelated but I've been told biohacklabs reimplemented lab/med equipement for a hundredth (even a thousandth) of the price. Not 2015 state of art, but still usable.
Free market has blind spots.
Free market has blind spots.
Here [1] is a picture of a thermocycler, it probably took dozens of people to develop and I doubt more than 100 of the particular model are sold. On the other hand, it operates in same way as a rice cooker.
Lets do some math, it costs 1,000,000 per year to maintain the team of engineers that builds these things. They sell about 100 a year, so each one needs to sell at 10,000 just to pay for labor.
The feeling of outrage comes from the low cost cost of consumer goods. The thing is that many consumer goods (such as an electric can opener) are built at both large scales and low engineering investment - perhaps exploiting comparably cheap labor and lax patent laws in Asian. We might find that the initial engineering investment (perhaps done in the 1950s) was non-trivial, yet we aren't paying for it today.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b8/G-Storm_...
Not sure this is blind spots so much as regulation. You can built it for far less, but you can't get it approved as safe.
You can build anything for less. Safety isn't a regulation issue, it's an issue of harming human beings. I'm very glad for those regulations.