That does make sense. But still, making a powered chair is not at all technologically difficult. You need the chair, two motors and an input system that works for the user.
Sure, if there's a lot of bespoke parts and manual labour, coupled with basically no economy of scale, it's going to be expensive. But it's not difficult.
It's expensive for sure, but that's mostly because powered chairs are made by medical companies and in comparatively low numbers.
A mobility scooter has almost all components a powered chair has, and these can be had for as little as €1000.
The technology behind a powered chair isn't hard.
And even if we use the high price of a power scooter: How much does it cost to make a paraplegic person walk?
Another thing to consider here: the player characters are absolute heroes in most campaigns, not just the average rando peasant. So the stuff they have access to (magic skills, potions, money, ...) is not at all an indication of what the average person has access to. Maybe that bias causes some players to lose touch with ingame reality.
In most magic systems (RPG and books/films) using magic costs the magic user something (decades of studying, exhaustion, life force, mana potions/crystals, ...). So it would be natural that they want to be compensated for their work.
So depending on how difficult regrowing an eye is for the magic user that could be quite pricey.
Some magic systems also require the magic user to exactly picture what they want to cast. Not sure if anyone can actually picture all the connections of an optical nerve.
In our world we do have the magic to push a wheelchair around, and it's not even hard to do this. Tinkerers can cast the spell of self-propelling wheelchair in their garages.
But magicing someone's legs to work is still a far way off.
(Remember, when magic is well explained and documented, and people get used to it, they tend to call it technology.)
I thought the last one was going to be "...so I can talk with my boss."
Yeah, noticed that too. This is really annoying.
The median income before tax is €55 731 per year and after tax and mandatory health insurance €38 623 per year. That's per full-time worker, not per household.
Wikipedia tells me the per-person median income in the USA is $56 287.
I do see what you mean, but I wouldn't give people an incentive to murder artists ;)
Just imagine Disney hitmen who are killing the copyright owners for prospective Disney movies.
For heritage in general, I do agree with you.
99pi. I started from the beginning two years ago, and now I am just 40 or so episodes behind.
Depends on the size and your patience. A single room apartment can be had for <€400 if you get lucky.
And if you have enough patience to get into the government housing program, you pay next to nothing. Buildings older than 1955 are also regulated and quite cheap.
You can also get cooperative housing flats (and even houses) with quite a low rent. We pay <€800 for about 80m².
But we did have some 10% increase over the last year.
And for all of these cheap options you need a lot of patience (between half a year and 5 years). If you need a flat right now, you can easily pay double of that on the free market.
(All these numbers are for the capital city Vienna. Prices in other places can be much lower. There are dieing villages in many rural areas, where houses are pretty affordable, because nobody wants them.)
We are sadly ahead of Germany by 10-15 years. Our right wing equivalent (FPÖ) has been around since the country was re-founded after WW2.
They had their ultra-radical time about 25-30 years ago. Since then they have been in government (I think) three times as a minor partner. Every time there was some big corruption/financial scandal that kicked them back out of government and reduced their election result massively. But time and time again, people keep forgetting and they rise again. Currently they lead again in the polls.
Luckily, due to their incompetence, they never managed to do much harm, and due to the fact that they actually want to get into government, they are not as crazy radical as the AFD.
So, it's not good, but it's not as bad as Germany, Hungary or Italy.
There's no talk about exiting the EU since Brexit, they don't have the power to get rid of asylum (though they diverted funds from asylum-related issues), and by now they actually argue for "qualified, legal migrants".
Other than that, the conservatives have been in government for ~20 years or so, with changing partners. That's not exactly good, since they do have had a few scandals where they pushed a fair bit of money to the super rich in the country.
The social democrats elected a marxist as a leader, and since then they managed to overtake the conservatives in the polls.
The neoliberals get ~9% in the polls and they effectively never managed to do anything with that.
The greens are jumping rather wildly in the polls, and even though they only get 8-15% they currently hold the President and are in government.