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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Why not send top stockholders to prison while you're at it? And regional managers as well? And the stores that sell the printers too?

No, prison makes zero sense. When people agree to a business contract and one side fails to uphold their end of the bargain, the remedy should remain financial. And punitive remedies exist precisely to make sure the "cost of doing business" makes it no longer profitable.

And if that's not happening, then that's the fault of the legislators and voters. This is why we need to vote people into office who ensure that consumer protection laws remain strong.

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> When people agree to a business contract and one side fails to uphold their end of the bargain, the remedy should remain financial

Not at all - when one party intends to cheat another, we call that fraud and we do send people to jail for this regularly.

It's not as if corporate actors are passive non-participants in the political process, abstaining from lobbying or campaign financing. It's much more economical for corporation to influence legislation/regulation than for voters to build a coalition and then try to leverage it to significantly alter the status quo. Ignoring this reality makes idealistic arguments like yours seem naive at best.

No, there's nothing naive about it at all. I'm not making a specific political endorsement here, but if voters elect candidates like e.g. Elizabeth Warren to Congress then you get much stronger consumer protections, corporate lobbying be damned.

I'm not saying corporate lobbying has zero influence (that would be naive), but if the electorate chooses to care about something, it trumps corporations. This is actually a major finding of academic research on corporate influence and lobbying in politics -- it's mostly effective specifically in areas where voters aren't paying attention and don't care.

The idea that there’s cornucopias of choice in day to day life for 99% of Americans is absurd

You have to go to extraordinary and extreme measures to break out of the basic choices that you are offered for which the profits all go to the same group of people

There is basically Zero diversity in the corporate landscape for either consumers or workers.

Maybe even if that’s the trend, let’s choose not all live in a pvp hellscape owned by about 10,000 people that enjoy infinite luxury, another 8 million who insulate them by showing that “You too can be a class striver and abandon the working class” and the rest of the 8Billion people slowly killing each other for the scraps left behind as everyone tries to claw their way into the 1% and beyond.

> You have to go to extraordinary and extreme measures to break out of the basic choices that you are offered for which the profits all go to the same group of people

In this case we are talking about printers. There are literally dozens of printer makers.

Personally I just buy Brother now, though they are starting to do some of the tricks.

Least evil option?

What is Brother doing now? I haven’t heard that with Brother printers and I had one for years.

Some of their software started to get pushy, and their toner cartridges started to ‘be empty’ too early - with some new printers also having ‘trial’ toners with almost no toner in them.

Mellow compared to the alternatives.

Canon does not do this. They also let you opt into the feature that blocks third party cartridges. You read that right. The feature is opt-in.

Coincidentally, many HP and Canon laser printers use slight variations of the same toner cartridges such that third parties can support both printers with the same cartridges:

https://www.shop.xerox.com/supplies-accessories?brand=6346

I am curious if this is also true for the inkjet printers, but finding out would probably involve buying every cartridge and comparing. I cannot justify that expense to sate my curiosity.

At least with my HL-1112 (bottom-barrel model in 2015) and MFC-L2700DW (entry level all-in-one with decent, albeit aftermarket, multiplatform support) it's trivial to manually reset the levels once you know the button sequence - don't even need a retail cartridge with the mechanical "unused toner" spinner!

That said... yeah, who knows what they're up to, 5 years later?

And Berkshire Hathaway has an outsize position in the largest of them, HP.

What else does BRK own, and thus influence via board and activist shareholder position that is in your home.

This is the point. You can have a million “options” but if they all only benefit a handful of owners then no matter how you “vote” with your dollars it still makes the same people the same money.

Again, you have to go to extremes to find a printer that is manufactured by a union or employee owned cooperative if there even are any.

For what it is worth, HP barely still designs printers. Most of them are just rebadged Canons. They have a small number of models that are based on Samsung models that they got from their acquisition and an even smaller number of printers they actually made themselves. For the most part, when you buy a HP, you are buying a Canon printer with HP's label on it and HP firmware. HP is really just a middle man, and I am not sure why people keep buying their printers given that middlemen should be avoided.

So fraud shouldn't result in prison time? This isn't an "oops I couldn't do what I said", it's purposeful.

I wonder if their lawyers will argue that putting that they do this in their documentation and advertising materials precludes any possibility of fraud. You cannot view HP’s printer descriptions without having this mentioned in them.

> Why not send top stockholders to prison while you're at it?

Or just curtail every holder's shares by a fixed percentage, if/when a publicly-owned company is found to have engaged in anti-competitive behavior. If the incentive of maximizing shareholder value is no longer aligned with the interests of society, maybe that's how to fix it.

This is exactly what a fine does tho?

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