JPG40504 wrote:There is little difference between a monopoly(GASS) getting the government to mandate a product and an oligopoly(PTI) doing the same thing(IMHO).
My point exactly. Yet if that's true, PTI is no better than Gass and yet everyone calls Gass names and nobody seems to have gotten worked up by PTI.
I don't think any of us can honestly say we know (and we may never know) what the incremental cost of blade stopping technology using SawStop's technology would be if it were adopted industry-wide and the economies of scale involved in high-volume manufacture/production were brought to bear on the problem as opposed to one relatively new and small company (SawStop) making/buying the necessary hardware in far smaller numbers. In fact, nobody here really knows how much the hardware costs SawStop now and whether the cost of the hardware contributes significantly to the prices SawStop currently charges for its saws. While it may seem reasonable to assume it is more expensive to incorporate SawStop technology rather than a new riving knife design, none of us really knows that to be true or if it is true, how much more it would be. I suspect, however, that hardware in the case of both riving knives and blade breaking technology is not terribly significant compared to the one-time major expense of redesigning and retooling to manufacture a saw that incorporates either a riving knife or blade-breaking technology.JPG40504 wrote:Comparing the costs of riving knife to saw stop is like comparing apple seeds to apple trees. Not on the same scale!
Why should it make a difference to the end user? I mean in either case somebody is using the government to force somebody else to buy and pay for a technology they may not want and which the manufacturer would otherwise have to offer up in the free market with the hope the technology would be well received and rapidly adopted by consumers. PTI successfully avoiding taking the financial risk on incorporating riving knives by getting riving knives required in a "voluntary" standard that directly impacts all of us users for whom the standard is most definitely involuntary. Gass has already taken the financial risk on his technology and now is trying to guarantee a return on his investment. It is not a substantive difference in my view but a timing issue. One (PTI) got a guaranteed return on its investment before putting its technology out in the market. The other (Gass) made his investment first and went to market with his product and now is seeking a guaranteed return. Why is one worse or better than the other?JPG40504 wrote:In the sawstop case, the existence of a single patented design adhering to the 'requested' mandate alters the balance. I do not believe the riving knife requested 'mandate' involved a single design, but was a more general requirement that was met by each individual manufacturer's unique design.
As to the specificity of the standards involved, I again fail to see why it should make a difference to me or you. We all know Gass has proposed a standard that PTI currently says only Gass's patented technology can meet (I think Gass has said it would be difficult to comply without using his technology). I do not necessarily trust either PTI or Gass to be telling the truth on that question, since they both have financial incentives and motives in making those comments (PTI is trying to get CPSC not to adopt the standard and Gass is trying to convince PTI that they better just pay him a royalty rather than trying to invent a new way to skin the cat). Assuming it is true, however, why should your or I care whether a technology being forced on us is making money for every manufacturer equally (as is the case with riving knives) or whether a portion of the money we involuntarily pay for a technology forced upon us indirectly provides a special benefit (through royalty payments) to an inventor like Gass (at least until the patent runs out)?
In the final analysis, doesn't the end user, you and me, lose the same amount of theoretical freedom whether CPSC mandates a patented breaking technology that the PTI manufacturers then have to license from Gass or whether PTI comes up with a riving knife standard that PTI jams down our throats through CPSC and for which we pay (whether we want a riving knife or not)?
By the way, I don't really have a problem with what PTI did or Gass is trying to do; I'm just trying to figure out why people think there is a qualitative difference between what Gass is trying to do on blade breaks and what PTI already did on riving knives and why some people react so negatively to Gass's techniques while hardly giving a second thought to PTI's. To my way of thinking PTI and Gass are both doing the same thing to the end user --although PTI's technique seems more subtle because they call it voluntary when, to the end user, it is anything but.
Thanks for the thoughtful comments JPG, Dusty and others.
--Al
