It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription
calpaterson.com
calpaterson.com
Herewith, my standard advice.
Buy a Brother monochrome laser with duplex, an ethernet port, and BRScript/3 (their PostScript clone). Even if you're sure you will never need one or more of those features, get them all. Wifi and Bluetooth and NFC are strictly optional, and probably not worthwhile.
If you need color printing, send it to a printing company. There might even be a local one. It will be done at a higher quality, with better ink and good paper, than you can do at your office or house -- unless you are big enough to utilize a whole flock of printers, or you are a professional. If you are a pro, you don't need this advice.
My trusty color Brother laser HL-3170CDW cost ~$300 at the time and has been trucking along for 7+ years now without a hiccup. If it dies, I'm replacing it with another Brother laser printer.
EDIT: added cost of printer. The article is right: if all you are ever going to do is print your taxes and financial documents once a year, a ~$100 monochrome laser printer is fine.
I'm just not convinced that having the ability to print in color at home is worth the huge expense in ink cartridges or in a color laser printer. In fact schools have just had to learn to accept digital submissions due to COVID-19 so printing at home probably won't be necessary at all anymore. When our black & white toner printer dies we will probably not replace it and just go to Staples for whatever little printing we will still need.
I'd love a service that would mail you the documents back in an envelope and was still as cheap ($0.15/page).
2. autoruns haven't worked on USB drives since windows XP SP3. The risk of getting a virus in this case is minimal.
1. The attack is very situational. There are hundreds of usb flash drive controllers out there (see: https://www.usbdev.ru/files/). The chance that your flash drive a) can be re-programmed b) the malware author bothered making a payload for c) copier is infected are all very small.
2. The attack is very visible, since the user would notice the computer randomly opening command prompts and typing commands. It's also very easy to interrupt. Stray mouse/keyboard inputs would foil the attack, as will unplugging the USB drive.
3. Despite how visible the attack is (see above), the lack of empirical reports probably suggests it's not a real attack that's being carried out
I am not sure of the details, but agree that seems like a rather large amount of hacker effort, when they can currently attack over the internet and demand instant bitcoin payment.
AFAIK how these attacks essentially work is by imputing key sequences to execute malicious code (eg. typing curl ... | bash into the terminal). There's no driver or pcie/DMA attacks going on.
Nobody. Some still do out of ignorance.
The same thing can happen when you print them in black and white from a similar kiosk.
And the financial documents could be in the same usb next to documents you did want to print in color.
>Also, the part about "4 viruses written to the boot sector" suggests the kiosk is also dropping malware onto the USB.
He's trying to make a point, even if that wasn't the case in that particular instance, it's something that can very easily happen too.
There's a lot of losing the forrest ("people sticking usbs to commercial kiosks to print is bad security") for some less significant detail trees in those questions...
I'm not trying to be argumentative, and what I'm going to say might be a "well obviously, duh" comment: This advice is really only applicable to those who have convenient access to a "staples", which is probably only 20% of us here. It is also only convienient if you don't have to regularly print things, and/or need things printed quickly.
Why am I bothering to write this? I guess I want you and others like you to not assume everyone is in the same situation as you. It's an easy trap to fall into, and especially dangerous if you are a builder wanting to take things to market (like so many people here on HN are).
Uh. Shops offering printing-as-a-service are one of the most common things found in every small town, all over the world. They're one of the first entrepreneurialist ventures to be developed in developing countries after electrification (just buy a printer and a computer, and charge $1 to print a page.) Every Internet cafe offers printing. Every parcel shipping store (UPS, FedEx, etc.) offers printing—and in fact many Internet cafes are just glorified print shops where you can pay to use the computers originally set up for printing. In villages of 500 people (such as the one I lived in as a teenager!), either the post office, the community center, or the elementary school (frequently all the same building) will own a printer, and allow people to pay to use it.
Okay, you might live in a cabin 200 miles away from the nearest town. 80% of people are not in that situation. 80% of people on this Earth have access to someone they can pay to print something for them.
> It is also only convienient if you don't have to regularly print things
Don't have to regularly print things in color. Most people don't. Unless you do photography for money, color very likely isn't a crucial part of anything you're required to be printing. (It might be a nice-to-have part of things you're required to be printing; or it might be a crucial part of things you don't really have to be printing; but it's unlikely for color to be crucial, and for the print to be required.)
I need to print things quite often, and yet I personally haven't needed to print anything in color... literally ever. (I did print things in color, when I used to own an inkjet, but in retrospect, I didn't need to have printed those things in color.)
FWIW, I live in the outer suburbs of Melbourne in Australia. By no means a small town. It’s a 20min drive to my closest place that does printing, which is apparently out in an industrial estate. There’s absolutely nothing in the 3-4 most accessible shopping/retail areas. These types of places have been shrinking with every passing year.
The closest printing shop with extended hours, which I need because I'm just a lowly blue collar working who needs to work 12 hour days to make ends meet, is Officeworks, and there's exactly one of those here and it's 8 kilometres from my house and shuts at 7pm.
I'll just use my second hand Brother colour laser, cheers.
Again, who needs glossy photo prints with a 24 hour deadline? What for?
Does it bother you that much if I’m ok maintaining a colour laser printer myself because I want to have it handy for the Hangul of times a month I want to use it.
I know my use case pattern is something like "oh shit, I have to print [a form/some homework-type presentation]" closer to once a year.
Why do you assume that’s the /only/ thing someone would want printed? Quite odd, considering the declining popularity of print photos.
And then, as a tangent, this is a subthread about using printing services to substitute for the rare — and as you say, declining! — use-case of printing photos, which, when you realize that that's possible, makes the calculus of "buying a simple B&W laser printer for its reliability" much more clear.
[1] (It also removes the option to print e.g. color flyers or posters or business cards, but people don't generally try to do any of those at home anyway, instead deferring to a commercial printer to 1. get a high-quality result, and 2. not have to buy dozens of ink cartridges and spend hours fighting their printer to get a thousand flyers out of it.)
FWIW my 20% number was pulled out of the air and based on very rough knowledge of HNs userbase.
No, I’m basing this on extensive travel experience in Africa, South America, and South Asia. If a town has anything resembling a hostel, then it is also 100% likely to have a copy shop or an Internet cafe with a printer.
—————
I think the actual failure of shared model here, is that there are people here who think something being 20 minutes away by car is “inconvenient.”
Folks, where I used to live, the nearest thing other than a farmstead was an hour away by car. And I still would have had my photos printed in town rather than owning a shitty inkjet printer (that would have been used so little that it would have required maintenance before every print.)
I didn't own a car where I used to live. Whenever I needed anything in town, I walked two hours to town. (When I eventually got a bicycle, it was a big upgrade!) And this was convenience to me.
Many people, in many places in the world, live this way. It is a uniquely-first-world perspective to think that "living far from town" means living in some self-sufficient "own one of everything you need" farmstead/mansion. For most people, in most of the world, living far from town just means commuting to town, on foot, all the dang time.
People in most of the rural parts of India, or Nigeria, or China, still commute on foot to a town-center-ish area to get water. Together, that makes up most of the population of the world! You think these people should own color printers? When they only barely have electricity? No; in the rare, rare case that such a person would need to get a physical photo printed, they'd walk however long it took to get to "the big city", and from there, they'd go to a dang print shop.
Honestly, I think people are having a severe failure of imagination in this thread, if they think that the various different kinds of developed nation that HN users live in, collectively make up "80% of the world."
But rather, in the scope of this discussion, having a printer at home when you can afford one, makes a lot of sense from a cost/time angle.
It's the same reason that in most of the world, you don't see people using those shaving razors with disposable razor-blade cartridges. They're too expensive over time, compared to a straight-razor / safety razor that can be sharpened.
If you only ever need to print, say, five photos in your entire life, it's fine if each one takes a three-hour round-trip walk to town and the equivalent of a day's wages. That'll still be lower TCO than printing every B&W text report you ever need to print on a color inkjet, and so needing to feed it a new yellow cartridge every few months just so it can keep putting microdots on the paper.
I don’t know why we need to argue on about the poorest people who can’t afford it? Sounds like a rhetorical discussion honestly.
There’s lots of inkjets now that don’t suck, and don’t need much opex or capex. Some don’t need cartridges, they have refillable containers.
• own a simple, reliable black-and-white laser printer for printing text; go to a print shop for fancy color-glossy prints
• own a fancy, unreliable color inkjet printer, and use it for both simple black-and-white text prints and photo prints
Nobody's suggesting not owning any printer at all.
That does not mean that they survive.
> Okay, you might live in a cabin 200 miles away from the nearest town.
In Poland such places are mostly gone (some survive near universities) as nearly everyone has printer accessible at home or at work.
Some are at places where people need printing (government offices) but charge massive fees.
> all over the world
World is more varied than you expect.
> Every Internet cafe offers printing.
Not present anymore in Poland
> Every parcel shipping store (UPS, FedEx, etc.) offers printing
No such thing in Poland and closest equivalent does not offer printing as service (exceptions may apply).
>> Every parcel shipping store (UPS, FedEx, etc.) offers printing
> No such thing in Poland and closest equivalent does not offer printing as service (exceptions may apply).
While there are "parcel points" in Poland, I've never seen them advertising a document printing service, and they're also being rapidly displaced by the spread of Paczkomaty - automated self-service parcel collection and sending booths.
All that I have seen are extra service of kiosk/greengocer/fuel station - not an independent location.
In sufficiently-developed countries like Poland, you don't need print shops, but it's not because "nearly everyone has printer accessible at home or at work." (That's not even true; many people don't have color printers either at home or at work!)
Print shops never existed for the sake of making one print or one copy; the way they made their money was commercial, volume printing. Sign printing; poster printing; flyer printing; etc. "Consumer" printing/copying was always a side-business.
No matter how developed your city, commercial print shops still need to exist, because consumer printers just aren't up to the task of producing thousands of pages per hour, reliably, day-in-day-out; and because there's real labor involved in collating and feeding all that paper. Especially for weird paper shapes that need cutting (e.g. business cards.)
No, the reason Poland doesn't have consumer print shops, is because the commercial printers (and package services) who used to offer walk-in consumer printing as a convenience service, have been out-competed in that space by the lower margins offered by online document/photo print-and-deliver services (who can serve Polish customers from anywhere in the EU very cheaply, and so don't need to have a local presence in Poland.)
It is inconvenient in Poland as there is no easy to use way to get your stuff printed.
There are some print shops, but focusing on specialist/large prints - and just few of them in a city, definitely not on every corner. Printing a single A4 page would cost me about 5% of printer cost (travel cost, printing itself, time of travel).
You're actually missing my main point. It really isn't about Staples, or North American vs the world, print quality, or preferences for B&W vs colour.
My main point is this: Don't fall into the trap of thinking your life experience always maps well to eveyone else you interact with in life.
These two arguments are not equivalent. Mathematically speaking, one side has to find just 20+% counter examples and the "vast majority" argument crumbles.
This thread has so many different people, from different parts of the world chiming in to say "this is not my lived experience", and you are still digging in to say "I'm right, the vast majority fit this mould".
The need to print something is usually a result of some chain of actions. You noticed an interesting paper. You have a stack of documents to sign. Your kid just realized, at 22:00 sharp, that they need some printout for school tomorrow. These are things that, for most working adults, tend to happen during evenings and on weekends - because that's the only time they have to deal with personal stuff. Not having a printer available at a moment's notice tends to be a huge blocker.
Having recently lived for a few years in a small town (population ~16k), I'll also add that the two or three printing shops that are in the town are absolutely not a viable option for most people either. They're always too far away, and closed when you need them.
Also, "ignorant" use cases have their value too. People underestimate the impact of trivial inconveniences[0]. My wife likes to print out interesting recipes she spots on-line. I wouldn't have eaten half of the good stuff I had over the years if she had to go to a copy shop every time she spotted something interesting to cook.
--
[0] - https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/reitXJgJXFzKpdKyd/beware-tri...
It's all about planning. And when -like me- you live outside urban area's everything is about planning. I can't order a pizza when I forgot to buy groceries. I can't have a Gorrilla cyclist deliver some beer when I ran out. So I need to plan (and have a larger storage).
Sure, I've been in the spot where I needed to print something at 04:50 in the morning (and could not). But that problem was really just poor planning, and not lacking a printer at that time.
If you are in a situation where you need to print full color at extremely odd hours, by all means, you might want to get a printer. But if you are just forgetting to do something until 3am, that’s just poor planning and likely not even a big deal, or something that couldn’t wait until 6. Edge cases exist, but pretending like the edge case is the norm is silly.
If I did get a pickup, is it the best tool for the jobs I need? Would a larger moving truck serve me better? It wouldn’t be a smart move to spend the money and then have it under perform for the tasks I actually need, because buying a commercial grade version is not feasible.
Buying a b&w printer that you only use once every few months might not actually be your only option. Buying a color printer that prints lower quality than you really want and is gummed up or out of ink when you need it, might not actually be your only option. Without one, you can’t print at 3am, but just like that sheet of plywood, is that scenario really important enough to you?
Obviously, you'd need to cross-reference with the actual risk: are you out of a job, failing class, or kicked out of the local church when you fail to deliver full-color-prints last minute: cover your risks by buying the machines that were made for this.
My point is that most people don't have those risks. And if they do, can cover those risks with little planning just as well as with buying equipment.
You only need to print your CV minutes before the job-interview when such job-interviews are planned minutes our hours ahead (and in my experience that is literally never the case). You only need to print your dissertation last minute if you spent the first 6 months of "writing the dissertation" procastinating. I definitely did that. And I definately found that my printer jammed at 05:50 the morning before I had to turn it in at 10:00. if only I had planned just a little better...
Genuine Q: how important is it for such school printouts to be in color?
In Japan, you can do the same thing on the multifunction printer/copiers that most convenience stores have. You can also upload the files in advance, so you don’t even need a flash drive [1 (English), 2 (Japanese)]. There are several such stores within a five-minute walk from my home in Yokohama. I do most of my printing there, though I do avoid them for confidential documents.
However, the couple times I've printed at Staples I've had to wait in line - there's only a couple printers and I had to wait for other people to finish printing.
There’s no way I can justify leaving my house to color print in order to save $4.50 a month.
Having the printer for two pre-teens during COVID schooling was a bonus as well, but it was long ago “paid for” by convenience and time savings.
Depends on how much you value your time. I would happily pay a bit more if it saves me 100+ trips to a copy shop over the lifetime of a printer.
Besides that, ink tank printers like Epson EcoTank printers are really cheap per print because they do not use cartridges. E.g., an EcoTank all-color refill is 40 Euro and prints up to 4000 black & white and 7500 color pages.
But disregarding the staggering amount of unwillingness to look any further than one's own nose, everyone considering printing on a public / shared printer should know one this: I can guarantee you that a copy of anything you output there gets saved. Not just statistics & metadata (page coverage, timestamp, copies...) but an actual picture of the page (at least as a thumbnail), regardless of what anyone will tell you. Even if the feature is not turned on for compliance reasons and gets collected by a central server, it will be stored on the printer's internal hard drive at least until the next maintenance cycle and can be retrieved for a significant amount of time.
If you pay by card or connect to it with your phone and thus add another level of personal data, you might as well just put it up on your Facebook publicly and ask anyone to print & mail it to you.
Modern commercial printers (such as those you will find at larger offices or at Staples) are basically full-blown PCs with a scanner and laser unit attached to them and as such nothing you put through there is ephemeral by default. It also means they are vulnerable to all kinds of horrible exploits that pretty much never get patched.
Almost nothing stops you from refilling a $30 inkjet with generic ink cartridges at $5 a pop (even cheaper, although messier, if you refill yourself). Or, if you print more, by all means, get that $100 mono laser. But "just go for a drive and print at Staples" has got to go on that wall of worst HN ideas ever.
Cheaper, and much easier.
Otherwise it is precise enough for me to toner transfer masks to manufacture little PCBs with traces of 0.2mm. And with colors I can print in green to make a poor's man solder mask and silkscreen.
I re-did the home network at a relative's place early this year when also replacing the laptop.
Zero regrets. All the fixed devices now have either an eithernet port right near them, or good wifi signal. The devices that had flaky wifi were now meters from a wifi AP. Better still, it didn't take up any more power points as they all had pass-through power support. So plugged in behind the TV, and bedside tables and lamps.
So YMMV, but in my experience they haven't improved much if at all, the only thing that could have changed is your placement, the noise on the lines or your home.
A very early powerline adapter that was I think 100Mbit, back in around 2004-2006 I think - it basically didn't work at all, and I got rid of it.
In ~2017 a new set top box came with a pair, but much smaller and sleeker. They worked out of the box, but did need to be powered off and on every month or two.
These new ones, they plugged right in, they delivered 800-900Mbit through iperf3, and the wifi thing, once configured with the right SSID and Password, worked great, and have been stable for about 6 months now.
This is all in the same house, and no major rewiring or renovations have taken place, and using the same sockets. The new deployment included additional sockets in other rooms since it worked so well.
My home color laser came from a client that replaced it with a mono multifunction - they rarely used color, but it was overdue for replacement of all 4 color drums and leaves a streak down the very edge of the paper. Replacing the parts just didn't make sense, so it got "recycled" to me instead.
I get that you’re making a point about printers being rarely used. The exact detail though - are there places where printing of your tax documents is still required and they can’t be digital?
Filling out my kid's FAFSA this year was much easier with hard copy of my tax return rather than bouncing back and forth to a PDF. Maybe I'm just old.
The IRS rejected my e-filed tax returns a couple of years back, and demanded everything in paper form. Hundreds of pages.
The stated reason was due to possible fraud. Hilarious, in light of the fact that the return in question indicated tax owed, not a refund.
$100? I've got a xerox phaser 3140 that I got off the returns table at a major store chain 10 years ago here in SA for 350 ZAR (about 25 USD). I've printed enough to exhaust the toner twice.
In the last five years I have printed a few hundred pages, experienced <5 paper jams, and spent $0 on ink. (The guy I bought the printer from threw in a toner cartridge for free. But I’m still on the original cartridge.)
I also enjoy using WiFi. It makes printing with a laptop less of hassle and gives you flexibility with where the printer resides.
Brother are definitely the least scummy printer manufacturer by a country mile. Everyone I know with a Brother has always been pleasantly surprised by the quality, support (both my 2004 label printer and 2009 colour laser still get software updates!) and cost of supplies. Unfortunately, the Canons and HPs are definitely the most popular...
I actually find Wifi useful.
Question, what's the deal with the toner cartridges plastic? It looks like a lot of thick plastic. I get to buy a new one and throw the old one, or refill one with the "not recommended non-original toner".
Does the manufacturer offer some other environment friendly option?
https://www.brother-usa.com/supplies/toner-ink-recycling Go here, print a label, put old cartridge in the box your new one was in and drop it off at the post office or have your postal driver pick it up.
Still, I consider having recycling in 28 countries to be pretty good.
The rest I agree
P.S. not all Brother printers have reasonable running costs - my MFC-3770CDW is outrageously expensive for consumables because it had a lower price tag than their higher end color laser MFCs. I needed a printer in a hurry because my old Brother Inkjet died and the better models weren’t readily available at the start of the pandemic, and it’s still cheaper than ink, but so make sure you do your research even with commonly trusted brands.
Middle-tier option: Walgreens Photo. Last time I wanted to print an 8x10" it cost $4 and I picked it up an hour later.
Workhorses, I've seen one last until something well over 200,000 pages though it sounded terrible towards the end. When pricing them vs something like HP printers that take a maintenance kit, just figure the replacement cost of the printer IS the "maintenance kit" to replace worn parts.
And cars, for that matter. May be not right now, but soon enough.
I have a Brother printer without duplex printing. I kick myself basically every time I need to print because I almost always need to manually flip/reinsert.
I dream of the day that my printer will die and I can buy a new Brother monochrome laser printer with duplex, but it's been over a decade and I'm pretty sure this motherfucker will outlive me.
(it's also USB only, no ethernet/wifi/bluetooth and ... I dunno what BRScript is. These aren't issues for me because it's plugged into my media server which handles all the networking stuff.)
We've all been conditioned to believe the bullshit about saving the trees, despite the reality being, paper manufacturing is very efficient and mostly uses its own specially-grown trees these days; plus, a typical office worker in a bank will print more paper a day than you'll use in a year. Point being, you aren't killing the planet by printing one-sided vs. duplex. The use of ink or toner is the same.
So I don't mind anymore. I do occasional manual duplexing for convenience or out of courtesy (e.g. when printing contracts), otherwise I print single-sided, and keep the prints around after they've served their purpose. I have a small stack of one-sided prints which find their second life as source paper for further non-critical prints, or as drawing paper for my daughter.
I’m sure this varies between people. (Incidentally, it seems that individual variety is most clearly represented in abstract activity. As an example, we all learn mathematics in our individual way. And reading is highly abstract! And what matters for reading efficiency probably varies a great deal from person to person.)
For the cheap inkjets mentioned in the article, it’s even worse than the author states. I know people that think they are getting a deal buy buying a new printer every time they run out of ink because it’s “cheaper.”
(“Duplex”. Funny word. It seems to be latin for “can slurp the paper back into itself to flip it and print on both sides of the page”.)
In all earnestness, I am 100% convinced that yours is the best possible printer advice for many people! Maybe the majority?
People like me might have the competitive disadvantage of lower reading speed of black-and-white-only text and figures. Or the capacity to employ color for faster ingestion? For people who find that they benefit from readig in color, I emphatically recommend getting a color laser printer. With duplex printing.
Specifically, the HP M254dw has been excellent. I followed online recommendations for it. It has been bulletproof. As a detail, printing on it in macOS seems nicer and smoother compared to the Brother printers I’ve used. iirc Linux printing just worked.
Color has been worth having. For example, there are more and more computer science papers that have colored syntax in the typeset PDF. Printing these to a keel-stapled full-color book using the Booklet layout option in macOS is magic. It’s just great. I read a lot more papers with the capacity to print them like this instantly and on demand. Reading retention is better. Scribbling notes on the margin is magic too. And the little books make great gifts.
—For the keel stapling, there are “long-arm staplers”. I believe they’re also called “lawyer’s staplers” or something like that? I got a Zenith 502 cucitrici da tavolo per cucire con precisione lungo la piega fogli piegati a quaderno. It’s a little Italian tank. It’s great! Beautifully designed. https://www.zenith.it/prodotti/cucitrici-da-tavolo/zenith-50...
They say you can’t buy happiness. I hold that it can be. It’s just not a given. You can’t just buy … anything. Certainly, a duplex color laser and a good long-arm stapler have brought me a measure of happiness.
Unless there’s a way to make it work like normal printer does, eg with AirPlay?
It wasn't your distant forefathers in their "brutish, short, and dark" lives, nor even your own boomer parents in the hilarious 1970s, but people alive and walking among us even now (your boss, your children's school principal, your next-door neighbour...) who once upon a time -- not even all that long ago, actually right here in this same century we're living in now! -- regarded occasionally connecting and disconnecting an Ethernet or USB cable not as some freakishly onerous imposition but actually rather "normal".
It’s really quite simple (and inexpensive even if you have to buy a cheap switch or wifi access point).
WiFi kind of helps but still not a fan of having a giant box around for something that I rarely use (but still need often enough to justify owning)
Now, if you live in Tibet, have kids who need full-colour printing at 2am, or can't afford biscuits let alone printing supplies - then you know that. Quite why there's a pile-on to diss the advice is beyond me! Particularly the 'not outside US' crowd. Come on! HN has an obvious US bias and it's not interesting to be told that.
By all means let's hear alternative advice, but be interesting.
Apologies for the off-topic. As an info-nugget to compensate, I'm very happy with my HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M281fdw so that may be a good alternative for those who know they need colour. Its drivers (via HPLIP) work well with Ubuntu Linux, including the excellent scanner; the latter has proven to be extremely useful for both mundane form scanning and family photographs (where the colour reproduction is far more faithful than the handful of other scanners I had tried).
The alternatives are unreliable junks with gold priced cartridges that will dry on you at the sightless neglect. The machine will find a way to end up breaking, jamming or printing garbage at some point anyway, after what you end up buying the new one in a moment of panic, which again lasts barely the honeymoon period.
But then, one day I decided to suck up the buying price, and went laser. My brother too. Since then, every page prints, fast, clear, like the first one. No jam, no breaking, just printing. And so many pages, like the cartridge could never end.
One day though it did, so I prepared to bleed to death again, except it was $10 on amazon.
I wish I could take a time machine and sing to my young self the gospel of laser printers.
I rarely print anything, but when I do it's things like the entire GDPR. Fully agreed!
No more switching it on after a year wondering if the heads will be able to clean themselves or if they're just completely caked in dry ink and a write-off. Just fire it up, print.
Of course the initial setup was a pain in the arse, it is still a printer after all, but as printers go it's been the least painful printer I've ever had (for ref its a Brother HL-1210W I've got)
I am using a Brother inkjet/scanner/everything combo (https://www.brother.ee/printers/inkjet-printers/mfc-j5330dw) and it's magnificent.
* From CMD+P to page rolling out of the printer is less than 5 seconds
* It prints on anything you can imagine and scans from anything too. Duplex, envelopes, photo paper, weird formats etc.
* No jams. No confusing setup. No dingy and confusing on screen menu but a good small touch screen.
* It takes 4 separate CMYK cartridges so you can replace a color at a time. 3000 BW prints for €30 (€0,01 per page). Color cartridges good for 2000 pages go for €20.
Concluding, laser printers have obvious benefits for certain printing use cases. No discussion here. But please do not conflate the butchering and crappyfication of inkjet printing by HP and Canon with inkjet being slow/annoying/expensive/useless in general.
And I own a Brother inkjet. It was the same deal as usual.
I don't know about your experience, so can't really argue.
It's worth it.
One I found in the trash, one I bought for 150€.
If your printer says it cant print any more as the ink is gone, just go search to internet to find how to reset the cartridge counter, and then the same (wink) “empty” cartridge will print for another couple 100 to 1000 sheets of paper.
For me that meant 3 more years of printing and still going on reportedly “empty” cartridges.
What These companies are doing is criminal and no different than dieselgate. Mis-reporting wrongly to throw cartridges to landfills.
Take WiFi printing. The typical WiFi router has ethernet ports. In that case a printer with an ethernet port is WiFi accessible, is typically easier to setup to be WiFi accessible, and is indirectly upgradable when WiFi security standards change. (The latter is important if a printer lasts 10+ years.)
It is also important to note the original desirable feature list can be modified. PCL emulation, rather than PS emulation, is typically fine. The point is to avoid printers where the drivers are vendor/model specific. USB only or USB/WiFi is fine, as long as you realize that network printing requires (or, at some future point, will require) setting up a print server.
Edit: also, I cringe slightly at the Brother recommendation. I use their printers and only have good things to say about them. Yet the important thing is to avoid the games many vendors play. There may be other vendors who don't play games. More important, there is nothing preventing Brother from playing games in the future.
Why use such large paper? Printing off the occasional orchestral score.
It had been so long since I looked at laser printers, I didn't realize their prices had become so affordable for home/personal use.
Now, when I print something, I know it'll "just work", and that the text will be crisp and legible every time, with no banding and wasted paper.
Plus, it's so much faster.
The cost and reliability of toner vs ink is one thing... but the lack of stress surrounding the occasional small print job at home? As stated by a much-parodied ad campaign, "priceless"!
(Edit: and I still have 60% capacity in the complimentary toner cartridge it came with!)
They where still using them when I left years later.
This is about the worst environment imaginable outside of trying to destroy them, a steel cabinet in an old workshop that wasn't really sealed from the elements where they where sandblasting stone and they just kept kicking.
[1] https://support.brother.com/g/b/faqend.aspx?c=us&lang=en&pro...
* Wanted to buy a Font Awesome "Pro" license for their icons. The only way to do this is a 99/year subscription. Reading the fine print says that I can buy it and cancel it the next day and still have lifetime access to the version at the time of my purchase. Why make me jump through the hoops?
* I wanted to support a writer on Substack by subscribing for a year. But I can't, I can only start a perpetual sub. So I subbed and canceled 1 day later. Then I got a "why did you cancel?" email. I didn't really
* I saw a cool open source project I liked and wanted to donate. They only had a Patreon link. Patreon only has recurring subs. So I had to email them and ask for their PayPal so I could send them $100.
Passing a physical credit card info to services is like giving them universal key to my house. After some years I don't know who does have a key to my house, and I'm just living with fear that someday I find an empty house.
Unless it’s glass, fibre, or aluminum, you are lying to yourself if it’s going into the blue bin.
Glass-contained milk delivery seems great. Someone needs to start a company. Sure it won’t be sexy or use AI but it’s useful.
I have a local co-op that delivers local produce. It’s amazing to see a pile of naked produce show up in a repurposed apple crate.
Arrrr, through my spyglass I did sight a hearty meal on thy dock, and being as I am a ravenous, immoral beast I bent my sails against the wind to secure it as my prize.
But thwarted I were by a hidden RFID and three days hence arrested by a regiment of dirty british redcoats. But, upon mine hanging, my belly were full and thine empty.
Porch pirates are a scourge of the seven streets to be sure... RFID is no match, but GPS + Cell could finally bring justice to these shores.
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000235765025.html That plus a little lock system might just do it, but at some point its cheaper just to redeliver stuff than worry about reusable containers being stolen, especially when you have to figure out how to power the damn thing and get a ton of cheap SIMs+plans.
I know bags use a great deal less plastic and probably are easier on the environment shipping wise but they are also not recyclable.
I have seen some examples on the internet where you can refill shampoo/cleaning liquid from a dispenser into your own container. I think it would be cool if that could be done for a number of products that are liquid into a standardized glass container. That way shipping would be more efficient and users could use whatever type of container they want.
Require reusable packaging.
Also, all suppliers would have to take back any packaging they distribute - use the supply chain in reverse.
My position is that plastics are not evil, lack of reuse is where the malevolence lies.
You mean you are being lied to, by well organized groups: https://www.startribune.com/lobbying-group-fights-insurgence...
Not sure where in the world you are, but Sprouts in the US sells milk in glass bottles. You pay a fee, and you get that back when you return the glass bottle the next time you come in to buy more milk.
It's not delivery, but it's a whole lot better for the world than more plastic.
I highly recommend it to everyone. I get incredibly excited when I pick it up; I feel pretty ridiculous to be honest. But the food is so much fresher and more flavorful than what's in the grocery store, it's relatively cheap, and it's environmentally friendly. It's nice to know our groceries are coming from a farm just outside the city, not from a barge that crossed the ocean. The only problem is that living in Canada, it only runs for 17 weeks since the ground is frozen the rest of the year :(
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community-supported_agricultur...
So, yes! A CSA could absolutely consider aquaponics, hydroponics, or vertical farming. Indeed I suspect many farmers have considered precisely these things. Taking a wild guess, I would speculate that there are questions of capital at work here. Every successful urban hydroponic farm I've seen or read about to date has focused on high-value, crops used in small quantities where freshness is at a premium. Herbs, spices, and similar flavorings or luxuries.
For other things, it still seems to be the case that shipping in apples or avocados or ground wheat from thousands of miles away is cheaper than trying to grow them in a repurposed office building in a city center. Plus there's likely a non-zero cost to acquiring, repurposing, and providing ongoing resources (electricity, water, nutrients, etc.) to this brand new vertical farm.
Again, you're absolutely right. Those are all things a local CSA could consider! It's perhaps possible that that consideration has been taking place carefully, deliberately, and with financial calculations at hand for something like eighty years now. Or perhaps I severely and deeply misunderstand the resources a typical local CSA commands.
This seems likely, but the one thing I can't understand is: if they aren't recycling the plastic, why do they pay for it?
Maybe there are some places that pay for the plastic itself, but I would imagine they are more picky. Or the government is paying them as part of some misguided scheme.
It just happens that these two changes happened at the same time. Plastic is cheaper than glass so glass milk bottles went out but compressed gasses can not be stored in a cheap plastic container.
Holy shit, are you saying they're sold any other way?!? What, like people just throw them away? Holy chrome-moly, that's one I'd never imagined.
In my original comment I meant many stores and not many sodastream users, slightly confusing wording in my original comment.
Then came the thin-wall non-returnable glass bottles, followed quickly by plastic. I don't think it was an improvement.
* US pint = 16 fl. oz. = 473.2 ml
Milk usually comes in #2.
Update: After doing some reading to jog my memory. China stopped buying it so there was oversupply here in Australia, so the price plummeted, so it was not economical to do anything with it, so I believe it was stockpiled.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-12-10/china-ban-on-foreign-...
https://theconversation.com/chinas-recycling-ban-throws-aust...
Anyhow, building things to last and be re-usable is significantly better than recycling.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gNZtI7hbvI
In order for us to start building things to last, there are a number of things that would need to happen first. We're pretty much at the mercy of the companies who have integrated the manufacturing of plastics into their supply chain. There's no doubt that they've optimized their own individual cost-benefit ratios as much as possible, which involves externalizing costs as much as possible. It's not purely due to greed, which is unfortunately a super common and super facile take; rather, they have to get all their shit as efficient as possible (privately, not socially) in order to remain competitive. Capitalism forces participants in the market to be continually improving in order to remain competitive; unfortunately, offloading costs onto the environment is a great way to do this, which has absolutely disasterous effects at global scale.
Our options are 1) to change the market conditions through state regulation, but that only works at the national level. 2) We can impose tariffs to try to incentivize our overseas trade partners into changing their behavior, but they're also free to shop elsewhere where there are no such "barriers to free trade" (in addition, we'd also be incentivizing overseas governments and companies to compete with each other for who can take the most environmental waste the cheapest, which ultimately does absolutely nothing to solve the problem). 3) Instead of changing the economics from the top down, we could look to bottom up solutions (with perhaps some help from government). If companies who use unrecyclable plastics were required to clearly mark their packaging as such - say, requiring plastic bottles of Sprite to have a conspicuous red ring around the neck (obviously NOT made of unrecyclable plastic), this would impose minimal additional cost, but it would contribute to consumer awareness by introducing the public to a semiotics of environmental consequences - THIS bottle is going to end up in a landfill. It's recyclable, but it won't get recycled, because no one wants your trash. Competitors, seeing a market opportunity, would be incentivized to explore a shift to "green" packaging, distinguishing their brand as well as their individual products from the wasteful stuff. (Superficially, it looks to be the same approach as mandating cigarette packaging to show photos of lungs filled with pulmonic phlegm-cheese in order to get consumers to think twice. However, from my experience, smokers are aware of the joys of emphysema, but it's damage they're doing to themselves, so there's not really that much disgust or shame. Moreover, cigarette warnings suffer from too much abstraction: yeah, cigarettes cause cancer, but the impact of this pack is not quantifiable, and plus, I can easily displace any feeling of responsibility, because I can always quit later. Compare to the real-time insight that this bottle before me is offering ten minutes of bubbly enjoyment but will go on to hang around on our planet as absolutely useless plastic somewhere for a thousand years immediately after the consumption of its contents in one of our designated waste dumps we pretend aren't a problem growing worse alarmingly quickly … it’s much more cognitively salient when the negative consequences being signified are nearly certain, the signifier pointing to it is not an amorphous type of behavior, but an individual observable token, and the nature of the connection between the two is indexical, i.e. a physical, direct cause/effect relation between signifier and signified.
I was going to go on about Dosenpfand in Germany - the deposit you pay on cans is high to incentivize consumers to recycle them to get their deposit back, but due to the inconvenience of having to return them to the store to get it, plastic bottles of beer (kein Scheiß) have become an attractive alternative to some consumers. But I should actually be working for the man right now ….
PET Plastic (#1) is recycled very commonly. Don't lump it in with the other plastics.
I guess this is the only way to properly recycle plastics: incentivize customers to sort them out. The 'assorted plastics bin' is a lie.
...until you realize that having a dedicated truck driving around delivering milk is probably going to cause as much oil usage (if not more) than picking up a plastic jug of milk on your weekly shopping trip.
I can buy several weeks of stuff in advance, but not several weeks of milk and bread, or it'll expire, especially bread without many preservatives in certain climates.
Nevermind the fact that a lot of people live in an on-demand, last-minute world. A lot of people do a lot of things last-minute, so that's a contributing factor in this equation, too.
You also forgot: meat, vegetables, fruit
If anything those expire sooner than milk and bread (at least judging by the best before dates), so I'll need to go to the supermarket to buy those before I need to buy milk/bread.
From my experience, definitely more than 1:50.
Of course, you can do things like freeze bread - but if you're going into the store for milk anyway, you might as well pick up some fresh bread / bananas / avocados while you're there.
https://www.treehugger.com/electric-milk-trucks-still-workin...
Refrigeration makes sense as the underlying driver - freshness and locality became less important. Then the supermarkets didn't have the cost of the distribution network, and exercised more centralised buying power on the suppliers.
Also the usual issues with delivering to apartments and other such living accommodation.
Also delivery by milkmen was ~2x more expensive.
I'm currently buying whole and lactose-free whole (this is surprinsigly hard to find). In the market you have skim, semi and whole; cow, goat and sheep; with and without lactose; organic and non organic. And then different enrichments, brands and even added flavours, that are more marketing than reality, but they work.
People has to go to the market anyway, so it's just more convenient to buy 30 litres of your brand-semi-lactofree-uht for the month than to rely on the delivery.
Nope. HDMI changed that.
I bought a TV a few months ago and it started showing adverts because it was connected to the internet through my ROKU via HDMI.
That's right, you can't even have a dumb TV anymore.
Someone needs to make an HDMI internet filter, stat.
But Adobe? That smells like extortion.
An HDMI splitter might do the job. I can't imagine that both output ports would support two-way communication with the input: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B079LMPSKS/
Bunnie's NeTV is off to a good start!
Can't you configure the ROKU to not create the bridge interface or whatnot to the HDMI? Or doesn't it give that kind of control and will just connect no matter what?
That is really cool but also very scary.
I could also replace the home screen/launcher with another. I tried it and got it to work, forgot why I stopped using it though.
As for Adobe, there are plenty of apps that will open adobe formats. Certainly Photoshop and Illustrator. It's possible you'll lose access to some features though. I agree, it feels like extortion.
They used to have to create features I want to entice me to upgrade. I upgraded photoshop about once every 4 years for $200. Now it's $120 a year so more then 4x the cost and I haven't seen a feature I cared about in over a decade at least except (1) updating to new OS versions and (2) HEIC support, which under the old plan I would have happily paid for the upgrade. It's not a tool I use daily though. If it was might feel less bad. My artists friends all seem to be fine with the price tho.
I knew ethernet was in the spec, but this is the first time I heard it actually works.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDMI#HDMI_Ethernet_and_Audio_R...
I only get non-animated mostly black ads for a product named timeout now.
Sometimes I want to write an ad blocker that actually goes on the offence. Every time it blocks an ad, it should download a few hundred megs of ads from the offending server and drop them in the ethernal bitbucket in the sky. It would either cost them money or get me banned from seeing ads, both are fine by me. Then drop it in an app store, get a few thousand users, and see them squirm. I'd call it Do Not Track, with a mind diseasing number of exclamation marks after it.
Alas, this would probably violate some real laws, plus messing with shady businesses might make them search out other than legal means for getting redress. At the very least, Baron Google would banish me from their land.
Oh well, a man can dream.
Every year your local city taxes any capital goods at 1.5%. What is a capital good? Anything which takes multiple years to deduct. A couple examples: Cars, Machines, Factories. A couple odd examples: desks, chairs, TV, elevators.
In the past other first world countries had such capital goods taxes but removed them. It seems so counter intuitive to punish companies for building capital. After all capital and acculumation of capital is what pushes productivity.
I suspect it, as so many other aspects of Japanese tax law, is about solving perverse incentives: no one goes around misclassifying opex as capex when there is a capex tax...
OTOH, wealth taxes seem to be gaining popularity in the western world. Maybe we're going full circle?
The business optimal situation is for a capital good's book value to reach 0 while the productive use continues unchanged. Thus the business got to buy the machine without paying income taxes on the investment.
Thus from the tax office's perspective handling of capital goods is about preventing too-fast depreciation and or over investment. By such logic any dollar spent on capital goods is a dollar not booked at profit and thus taxed.
About 1/3 of Japan's national tax revenue comes form corporate income tax. Oddly enough, while the capital goods tax is levied by the town, towns do not control their own tax policy. Instead the federal level dictates the exact tax rates down to the prefectural and city level.
Thus in Japan there is little room for the tax centric competition we see in the US. Towns cannot negotiate tax exceptions with industry. Instead the only instances of regional tax preferences in force now were written at the federal level to give various incentives to rebuild the Touhoku region after the tsunami of 2011.
Thus while the town may tax capital goods it is the federal tax authority (NTA) which benefits from the increase in profits.
Each year I have to catalog every pencil, pen, paperclip and ream of paper in my office. The desk, tables, shelves, printer ink, bottle of windex, each of my books, even individual USB cables all need to be listed. I need years acquired and purchase prices for every little object owned by each of my 4 businesses.
Each summer, a tax bill shows up for my personal property.
I generally don't mind taxes. I really don't. But this one I hate. It's such a colossal waste of time that I can't even hand off to an accountant.
Reporting down to the pen sounds horrible, and uncompetitive if other counties do not levy the same.
Determining what you need replaced and fulfilling it != secure delivery of what you ordered yourself.
In other words, they have a database of people's keys and the address those keys belong too. I feel so stupid. Time to change my locks.
As in your case: the kiosk sends a key scan and your address to some company. It's just one infosec fuckup from giving your local thieves a time of their lives.
TIL.
- Nominally 0% interest (albeit we paid sticker price of the vehicle with no discount).
- Deposit + payments such that the car was never 'under water'. In fact, subject to some heavy caveatting about its condition, I think we could have handed the car back and walked away from the agreement at any time, something almost unheard-of in American-style car loans.
- At the end of the PCP period, there was still a big balloon payment, which is how they get you rolling onto a new car+contract of course. But it was a known quantity that was possible to save up for, and due to the monthly payments, as mentioned above, being of sufficient size, the balloon payment was much less than the cost to buy the same car in same age/condition/etc on the open market, so it made sense to pay the money and keep the car.
There are a couple of things I find interesting about the above. One is that I perceived some benefits from the monthly payments being larger rather than smaller - when considering time value of money etc this is presumably irrational. But people do seem to genuinely suffer from upside-down car loans, where they could 'afford' the payments but find themselves trapped making them on an un-sellable vehicle. I guess what I'm saying is the payments were set at a level where I could actually afford the car. The other interesting thing is how easily the formula could be tweaked to make more expensive cars look affordable, and to incentivise rolling onto another contract. The flip side is that such tweaks let the purchaser have a lower payment, or a nicer car for the same payment, but might not be in the purchaser's rational best interest.
Nice perspective, never thought about it that way. My hate for the companies that do this has been renewed.
> For Adobe's subscribers, the lock-in is considerable as access to their existing bank of files and documents is contingent on continued payment.
Losing access to uploaded files isn't really a relevant factor in paying for an Adobe subscription. Their cloud storage is an afterthought, and they can all anyways be trivially exported. The lock-in comes from the software itself. We must have Photoshop, and there is no other way to get Photoshop than to pay Adobe every month till you die.
and just like ditching your printer, it does not work for everyone
But they're not actually a subscription to your car; the fees are a subscription to the roads and associated infrastructure, which do need constant upkeep.
If you had a vehicle which was only used off-road (for example, on privately owned racetracks) and was only transported on a trailer then you would not need to register or insure it. For track motorcycles it's even relatively common to buy/sell them used without a title - so $0 fees to the government. Obviously exact laws on this may vary depending on location.
The place I own is in the UK so taxation is calculated differently (and as I don’t live in the UK, it’s confusing and that makes it a bit scary), but I don’t see how my decision making process of “delegate pricing to experts” would change if the UK hypothetically copied any of the American tax codes.
Guilty as charged.
Recognizing this as a refill subscription, I forbade its use. It sits there, unwilling to be thrown away, and unable to be used. If not for the receipt being lost, it would have been immediately returned!
If anything requires repeated payments to be useful, it's a subscription.
I think its interesting to meditate for a moment on the great amount of meaning in the closing sentence here. Great business sense by this definition seems inherently immoral and extractive rather than productive for one. Secondly the it seems quite the antithesis of competition under free capitalism producing better outcomes - the effects of concentrations and imbalances of power is something that is frequently left out of those debates.
I think that we should try to strive for a world where good and moral business sense is better rewarded than great business sense.
This stuff gets outcompeted by the free market every time. You don’t have to look far to find failed attempts to plan economies around the morals du jour. The whole point of free market capitalism is it’s game theory - if something worked better anybody would be free to use that better method. Humans have a consensus on what better means, and free markets are structured around that (+ a sane amount of government oversight because humans act dumb at scale.)
On the meta-level, should the fact that "the free market" wins out even though it is perhaps not the best system -- at least according to many (most?) people's morals "du jour", however long that is -- be called a "meta-market imperfection" or a "market meta-failure"?
And yet, about 1/4 to 1/3rd of new cars are leased (https://www.statista.com/statistics/453122/share-of-new-vehi...), and probably more than that are financed by actual loans.
Unfortunately I couldn't find data on how much of these cars were leased by companies (where it makes sense to lease that 7 series BMW for the C-level exec) and how many were leased by consumers.
In any case, the why is the important thing: 70% of Americans don't have more than 1.000$ in savings (https://www.statista.com/chart/20323/americans-lack-savings/), and probably 90% of Americans require a car because public transport is inefficient and/or unusable for their daily lives. These people don't have a realistic choice between taking on debt or not taking on debt (they need a car and don't have savings), and the result is an immensely profitable racket - the market for consumer car loans alone is 1.17 trillion $ (https://www.statista.com/statistics/453380/outstanding-autom...). Even at a measly 5% interest that's 85 billion $ a year that banks extract from the poor (and likely more, given that lower credit scores yield over 10% interest!
Whilst most finance deals are scams, there are good ones. In our case double dipping on scrappage and sourcing a second hand car from a cheaper geography certainly played a part; and for once I'm sure I'm not deluded - with a family member running their own dealership we had quite the inside look at alternatives.
That said, an ongoing profiteering racket is servicing and associated consumables. Most independents are cheaper, though it does take work to find a good one - you have to check the quality of alternative consumables.
It's hard to get these though. You need a combination of good credit scores, a lot of time, math knowledge and car knowledge and insider connections for that. Everyone else will get ripped off.
> Most independents are cheaper
I admit I'm a bit clueless about the US situation, but here in Germany if you have a new car it will lose resale value if checkups haven't been done at an authorized dealership in the prescribed intervals ("scheckheftgepflegt").
Huge shoutout to Adobe for making a stellar product but come on... I need it for so much that it is basically like paying rent.
So true!
Even if a product doesn’t necessitate a subscription, the revenue compounds, so subscriptions can be 10-100x the revenue of a one-time charge.
Surely this isnt about playdate.
Closer to their point would be the battery or the mechanism behind the crank that will inevitably fail.
But Playdate is both parts. It's a device built to host a subscription, but the subscription itself only works to support the device. The device is built with deliberate constraints to provoke creativity in game design, and that creativity in game design is what you subscribe to. It's the milk bottle and the milk.
The thing is that no one is buying a Playdate without being aware of what they're getting. There's no hidden catches or unadvertised subscription fees. You can, if you want, just buy a Playdate and sideload content onto it, although you won't get the next season's games and the thing that makes the device special in a lot of people's minds. Without it, you will never get to play Lucas Pope's next game. Without it, Lucas Pope would never make a handheld game operated by a crank.
Does this mean anything to you? Maybe not. If it doesn't, don't buy it and don't subscribe. You probably also don't subscribe to my favourite magazine, Scrimshander's Monthly. People have different interests, and find lots of different things cool, and that's okay.
Nonsense, no one knows anything about future subscriptions aka "what they are getting". How can consumers be fully informed when nothing is announced?
The PlayDate will have an astronomically small install base. Amortizing a dozen game's developments over such a small install base without subsidy from Panic will surely lead to sticker shock. There are 21 titles in the first season. At a mere 50K USD per title (small even for indie dev budgets) that is 1,050K USD to develop the season. With 20K sold play dates that's a per device cost of 50$, or about 100$ for a year of releases.
Can the playdate justify a 8$ per month subscription? Yeah I think so, but only because it is a pure novelty. Except novelties have a habit of being low commitement. If only 25% of units re-sub that puts your per sub development costs at 400$ a year. Are Playdate owners going to be happy to pay 2x the cost of the device for a single year of games? Obviously not.
The playdate needs to move more units or it will die, I don't think current buyers understand this risk at _all_.
What you might get thereafter being entirely unknown (other than it being a device-bespoke set of games for some price) is exciting.
Maybe the subscription will be too pricey to stomach. Maybe they'll go tits up. Maybe it'll be a complete commercial flop.
Maybe, on the other hand, they've already sold 100,000 devices and manage an attach rate of 65% at $5 a month and they make that million a quarter to fund games. Maybe it's $20 a 3 month season and they've got even more in their pocket.
Who knows, but I'm still excited.
Good piece. So many things are hidden subscriptions these days, even when they don’t have a need to be.
It’s so obviously a money grab.
I thought this was specifically called the "Gillette Business Model". Reading the relevant wikipedia page[0], which also mentions printers and ink, calls it the "razor and blade" model.
One must also familiarise oneself with the "Machine that goes ping" Monty Python skit (on YT, watch it, it's much better than just reading the relevant quote). It was my first introduction to the complexities of corporate finance:
"Ah, I see you have the machine that goes 'ping!'. This is my favourite. You see, we lease this back from the company we sold it to - that way it comes under the monthly current budget and not the capital account"[1]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razor_and_blades_model
[1]: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Monty_Python%27s_The_Meaning_o...
Would it be fair to say that any product with consumables that are proprietary to the vendor, is a subscription?
It isnt quite as easy, and I still cut myself from time to time but I also am still using the variety pack of 100 blades that I bought two years ago for like 10$.
It’s a bit more of an art than my ol’ Mach 3, but I’ve grown to really enjoy it. Also, invest in some fancy shaving cream and aftershave for a close-to-barbershop feel.
Soaps are also quite variable in lather and feel—affecting the shave. Tallow, glycerine, and oil based soaps all coat differently. Get a good brush and it’s a nice way to get ready in the morning.
For traveling I use a disposable 3 blade and aerosol shaving cream because you’re not supposed to take the safety razor blades through security.
There’s no one-size fits all solution here.
It's just a skill that takes some time to develop.
Some general advice, not particularly aimed at you: Try not to focus on the equipment or the blades too much. The Feather blades that are often suggested are overkill and bring the cost back up close to Gilette levels. Even me with my sensitive skin am doing just fine with cheapo Derby blades of questionable and variable quality.
I usually use Bic blades which you can get in pretty much any supermarket in Europe for 50c a pack. The blades are steel and the packaging is paper, so much better for the environment too.
The reason why I switched is worth mentioning. I was working abroad in another Western European country and couldn't find the blades for my specific razor. They had plenty of other Gillette blades, but not the one I needed (of course the blades are not interchangable with the head). I tried a few other supermarkets and it was the same. I figured ok let's buy a complete new razor, and in the supermarket there was a safety razor next to the other razors for the same price, so I figured I'd give it a try.
You should actually try straight razor that takes a half of a razor blade. It might appear very scary, but it is not, if you cover 95% with a straight razor, and cover the rest with a safety razor.
The point of using the straight razor to cover the 95% is that the safety razor tends to get jammed with hair, making it a frustrating exercise quickly, if you don't have a habit of shaving every day..
I think I have faster shaves and less cuts now since I change blades more often.
Tried a few. The Feather ones I tried and Bluebeard still cuts me. Others I have tried including Gilette works better for me.
Seems reasonable at least as a first approximation / coarse rule of thumb.
Economists specialised in the area may refine it further, but for the layman it serves like the Newtonian approximation to physics, i.e. quite good enough for everyday usage -- I don't move at relativistic speeds all that often.
>It's an artifact of the re-upping system. '1 day ago' was the original submission time and '1 hour ago' was the re-up time. Lots of explanation here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Sorry for the confusion!
>See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 and links back from there.
They all require ongoing expense.
Dairy isn’t know for being great for the environment.
Coming from village where cow is part of family and treatment like family and has name as we do, then same dairy become very beautiful relationship.
Never met one.
Classic example: fast food burgers are typically sold at or near cost. It's the fries and drinks where they make all their money.
It's also why accessory sales are so prevalent. I've heard of $800 cameras being sold for <$10 profit but a $1 UV filter is sold for $20..
And then there's the whole extended warranty "scam". By the way, staff in Best Buy and the like are typically judged on how many warranties they sell, not how many products. That's why such places push them so hard.
Anyway, one thing I want to say about printers is that in the "home" end of the market there are really two types of printers:
1. Cheap printers intended to get customers into a cycle of buying expensive ink. These printers are typically sold near or even below cost. They may even cost less than a full set of replacement ink but you should know the printer rarely comes with full cartridges. Honestly, I would completely avoid this kind of printer.
It's worth noting that these printers are designed to go through ink as fast as possible. This includes using the ink to clean the print heads every day so you'll run out of ink after some months even if you've never printed a page; and
2. So-called tank printers. These have a higher duty cycle and are more expensive. Instead of cartridges you typically fill them with bottles of ink (and much more of it than you'd typically find in a cartridge).
These don't have the same ink-selling focus the first category has.
If you print at all just buy a tank printer.
As for add-on services like Adobe's cloud... I mean does anyone really trust Adobe with this?
For the record, I'm a big fan of the _idea_ of software subscriptions. I know some people like to own their software outright but software requires constant maintenance. Security fixes, bug fixes, supporting new devices, that sort of thing.
A sticker price and that's it creates perverse incentives for the company to end-of-life your software so you have to buy an upgrade. It's better to just pay a hopefully reasonable ongoing fee.
The gold standard for software subscriptions is Jetbrains. You get 3 major releases a year, annual or monthly subscriptions and when you stop paying you get to keep old versions forever.
Compare that to Adobe's Photoshop and Lightroom... yeesh. Adobe's idea of reasonable pricing is monthly cost = sticker price / 12. Oh and you have to sign up for a year, get auto-renewed and it's difficult to cancel.
That warranty ended up being very worthwhile as the panel developed the vertical lines problem, after 18 - 24 months - got a full replacement TV as the purchased model was no longer 'current' or able to be serviced. The replacement eventually got the vertical lines as well, still inside the 5-year (I think) warranty period - got another replacement, which is still going strong.
The original TV, with extended warranty, was purchased probably ten years ago.
Another cost to factor in with an extended warranty is the time / hassle to actually make the claim. Claiming the warranty on the second TV failure required some argumentative firmness.
Do I generally want to move as much as possible to OPEX, so I don't have to pay any taxes in the end?