I think...$5,500 in 2005? Probably not relevant to today's prices. I would imagine the equipment has made things a bit safer and easier, which would probably ... Well I'm sure it wouldn't drop the price because who ever does that? But it probably kept it from rising too much.

$6.5k AUD 3 years ago for lasik. Prk would have been 5k. I wouldn't be worried about mistakes, the opthamologist does the procedure like 15 times a week and the laser machine is tracking your eye movement at 1kHz. Mistakes are almost unheard of. Where your issue may lie is if your eye is physically not good for the surgery, like if your prescription is too strong or cornea too thin. They do a bunch of tests and discuss what's right for you.

Well, if it was real science, then popscience links like interestingengineering.com wouldn't be allowed. Instead, research papers would be linked directly.

Yeah, pretty much. The problem is they're always focusing on their own problems. It's always a hardware problem, and there's no physics to be learned from it, so it's not useful work to anyone who isn't building a similar system. If you pretend that fusion is purely an engineering problem, that would be fine, but we still don't really have a solid physics understanding of everything that goes into a fusion system.