Pay no attention to the USB port behind the “no USB” sticker
theverge.com
theverge.com
That's why the Costco HP printers are often models exclusive to Costco.
(They require a similar thing of Sony televisions, which is why Sony TVs have slightly different model numbers at Costco.)
It may have changed recently but last I knew Sony TVs had few if any ties to Sony services, come loaded with basically unchanged Google TV, and are perfectly happy to be used as fully offline "dumb" TVs. If that holds true for current Sony TVs it's hard to imagine what would be different in Costco versions.
But I don't think that's true with the current generation.
I say as someone who just bought a sony tv, declined all features, and just use an hdmi input from an actual computer. Very pleasant experience. Can't say I've ever seen a TV that doesn't actually allow you to do this.
I hated that t.v. And was glad it died prematurely.
On a related note, the LG TV I bought at Fry's Electronics was a Fry's-only model.
Investigating it, I found out it was actually a Brazilian model with the built-in DVR disabled for the American market.
I thought about trying to hack it to enable the DVR, but realized it would have to connect to the internet to retrieve program information, and there's no way I'm going to let my TV connect to the internet.
(And before a bunch of HN smarty pantses tell me it will just latch onto a neighbor's wifi, that's not possible in my building, as we're all on the same building-wide VLAN, and you have to register a new device's MAC address in the portal to allow it in. I'm also too high up to pick up any street-level wifi.)
Are you under the impression that airplane wifi reaches the ground, or that apartment buildings are 20,000 feet tall? Even if that was true, planes move at hundreds of miles per hour, so clearly you're not posing a serious argument.
A Cessna 150 cruises around 100. Cessna 172s are used regularly for scheduled commercial service, and cruise under 150. No issue putting a small wifi ap in one of those. If you want I can turn on my phone tethering next time I go flying to prove my point.
Plenty of small aircraft cruise around doing survey work over cities all day every day.
Look at project loon from google, those guys travel around at an airspeed of nil providing internet.
2) Eventually some sneaky TV vendor is doing to work out a deal with a cell phone network to periodically run cell phones in wifi AP mode so they can retrieve telemetry from TVs that aren't connected to the internet. You could even wait for the phone to be connected to a charger, if you wanted to be nice and not drain the battery.
No DSL or cable because the building was never wired for POTS or cable. The building runs Cat6 and satellite TV to every room, and it's included in the rent. Why would you pay for another service when you're getting 250/250 service plus video at every large wall?
It is not really a big deal, and to be honest it sounds like the ideal multi tenet building wiring. put a baby IX in the basement, run high quality cable to each location. and let the tenants figure out what they want.
But the point is networks are complicated versatile things. and just because there is no real need for a private access point does not mean there are no private access points.
Then the IT guy figures it out. It's a large apartment building, not a campground. We're not left on our own.
He actually lives in the building and if you need help, that's what he's for.
For example, if you're elderly, or if you have something you want to hook up that doesn't have its MAC printed on the outside, you make an appointment and he handles it for you.
Because I am an idiot I like to run an open accesspoint.
The only user* so far has been the neighbors samsung tv sending status updates. I should probably be a better person and block it.
*probably because I am not a complete idiot and the open network is throttled down to just about unusable. enough perhaps for a webpage and a message but pictures are unpleasant and video is right out.
Extremely unlikely that LG would be doing this, but at least theoretically the TV could listen for communication from other devices and then reuse a MAC address from an authorized device when that device is not around.
Use an xbox or a PS5 to drive the TV and run the apps on that.
you can do:
- start setup - continue without wifi - manual start
then you can manually press all the buttons (speed, incline, etc)
but no treadmill programs.
Annoying? Yes. Limited? Yes. Crippled? No.
This treadmill has "manual start". Then you get SPEED +/-, INCLINE +/- and STOP.
If cloud-only things have higher return rates, that will drive up costs far more than cloud-only returns.
The NHS looks good compared to the broken American system. But it's a spendthrift compared to Singapore.
Healthcare outcomes in Singapore are no worse than in the US or UK.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Singapore for more information.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.GD.ZS?end=2... has the numbers. Picking 2019 to avoid covid's effects you get:
US: 16.68%
UK: 9.87%
Singapore: 4.42%
The world bank also has data to show private vs public health expenditure.
> I mean, it's on-brand; if the USA has bad things from too much privatization, it's poetic for the solution to be more privatization.
The municipality of Flint that's mentioned in the article still was in charge of providing water. They just outsourced parts of that duty. More privatisation might have helped. Who knows?
[0] Yes, I know that was a crazy hand-wave over History...
Yeah, yeah. We've all heard the popular Dutch idiom. Repeating it ad infinitum doesn't make it true.
Atleast the Dutch are aware enough of 1860s-1990s history to leave out the "accidentally became" part.
As far as I can tell it was always structured as a normal business, albeit one requiring an annual membership fee: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costco
Co-ops are different: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative
Eg the investment manager Vanguard has a very curious ownership structure:
> Vanguard is owned by the funds managed by the company and is therefore owned by its customers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vanguard_Group
So Vanguard is in some real sense a co-op, even if that's not the legal official form of the company.
See https://investor.vanguard.com/investor-resources-education/n... for more on the matter. (But keep in mind that it's advertisement by Vanguard about itself. So take it with a grain of salt.)
For a clearer example, Sam's Club has a similar membership, but that's well-known to be owned by Walmart…
Is it owned by the public (the state), or by private persons? Private persons.
It is a private business.
By default, consumers are their own best regulator. You buy only the bread that tastes good, and that shoes that fit, so the market will provide, etc.
It's a small step from there, to outsourcing part of that to a middle men like Costco. Costco benefits from their reputation with customers they got from those efforts.
Similar for product reviews on independent websites or magazines or even on Amazon.
It's only in exceptional circumstances that 'consumer regulators' can not be private entities.
And much of the time, we get lots of government regulation that could be done by private entities just fine or better. But to be honest, lots of that regulation is still 'good enough', so it doesn't do that much harm. Two examples to illustrate:
Germans like to eat raw minced pork. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mett So there are rules in Germany that all pork sold has to be save to eat raw. In most other countries, people don't share that peculiar preference, so the government regulations on pork are less strict.
I hold that even in the absence of specific regulation, the German market would provide Germans with pork that's safe to eat raw. Companies would just put a little sticker on their meat that tells you, that it's safe to eat (and normal existing rules about truth in advertising would make sure the sticker is trustworthy).
The second example: thanks to harmonised EU rules you can put palm oil in your chocolate without loudly declaring it and still call it chocolate on the packaging. (You just have to mention the palm oil in the fine-print list of ingredients.) By and large, German customers don't like palm oil in their chocolate. So German supermarkets mostly only carry 'proper' chocolate. So we private companies regulating the German chocolate market, to give consumers what they want.
Salmonella only hurts a few people and not the company, and skimping on cleaning gives execs bigger bonuses. There's tons of regulations that are good and well intentioned.
Shit, even with your example of chocolate in the US capitalism got us shitty ass Hershey "chocolate". Why would that happen ya think?
Why do you think healthier options have been flooding shelves for 20 years now? We’re getting wealthier, and our standards are going up. Don’t make the mistake of mandating your standards onto others ‘for their own good’. Sometimes availability is the goal, not the quality of a good.
In all the places I lived, you can buy different kinds of bread. My taste buds prefer bread without sugar added. (And that's also the most common kind in Germany, where I grew up.)
If you need a nanny that bans you from consuming sugary bread, please hire one.
(There might be some laws in Germany that ban you from calling stuff with too much sugar in it 'Brot', but you can still make it and sell it under a more creative name. So no regulation keeps this kind of product off the market in Germany.)
> Shit, even with your example of chocolate in the US capitalism got us shitty ass Hershey "chocolate". Why would that happen ya think?
The market provides what customers are willing to pay for. I don't know why mainstream Americans have weird taste in chocolate.
Germans get the kind of chocolate they are willing to pay for. And Americans get the kind of chocolate they are willing to pay for.
As far as I can tell, it's perfectly legal to sell Hershey's in Germany. (You might just have to get creative with the name, I'm not sure.)
There's about as much 'capitalism' in German chocolate as in American chocolate.
Lest you think everything is great in Germany, they have their own weirdness. Eg in mainstream German supermarkets you can't find the quality of rice that would be acceptable in eg Singapore. You'd have to go out of your way to a specialist store and pay a premium.
It's perfectly legal in both Singapore and Germany to sell low quality rice. Mainstream Germans just don't care enough.
Reading through some of these comments makes me wonder why people still hold this sort of opinion. Companies are actively attempting to screw you over like hiding the functionality of a printer behind a sticker. It's active deception. Are we all to become experts in everything and join all the specialty forums? Where is the time to make an informed decision coming from? Do you think consumer protection agencies formed because consumers were being told all the relevant information to make an informed decision?
That expert could be your knowledgeable friend, it could be a review in a blog or it could even be a retailer like Costco.
Having a reputation for recommending quality products is valuable. And if they screw up a few times, they can lose it quickly. So they are going to be careful and protect it. (Or rather, the retailers that keep their reputation are those who have been careful.)
Law enforcement is a function that even many libertarians, but not all, reserve for the 'nanny'. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night-watchman_state
Is Costco really doing anything other than selling the more expensive version which you could buy anyway?
If not it suggests Costco is acting as some kind of hired protection, which definitely doesn't sound like an optimal supply choice scenario in an ideal market.
So, I see it less as a trusted environment and more as a seller motivated to make sure returns don't hit their margins. A consumer-positive/trusted environment is still be a good thing for consumers, regardless of if the creation of that environment was motivated by the bottom line.
People buy larger ticket items at Costco because they trust it to work, with a return policy that makes it a safe bet. So Costco needs to sell products that don’t get returned in order to make this strategy work.
Costco is a retailer, and as such is providing a service by amongst other things aggregating consumer preferences.
I'd love if the market fixed all these product quality issues, but it doesn't.
I'd love if the market fixed all these product quality
issues, but it doesn't.
The problem is that a consumer relies on thousands of products a year and it is a practical impossibility to be educated in all domains of knowledge. You can't have deep knowledge of transport, healthcare, technology, food, and a thousand other things.
(Shouldn't this be obvious to everyone?)
Also they skipped history class and are unfamiliar with all of the toxic and disgusting shit companies used to adulterate their food and medicine with
But bureaucrats are?
If you think it's impossible or merely undesirable for a society to have experts in public employ working for the greater good then... okay. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'm certainly not going to change your ingrained beliefs. But hopefully you can learn to understand others' views. What I'm seeing is the typical tendency to misrepresent others' beliefs as some sort of all-encompassing faith in "bureaucrats." Wrong.
Markets are useful and proven tools. So are rules.
Both of them have proven inadequate on their own.
Quality ain't free. There's often a trade-off between quality and price. Pretending otherwise is foolish.
No food manufacturer us going to sell the 'normal' product as just that and label the cheaper one as somehow inferior.
On a side note, it irks me that a certain brand of mayonnaise (made by a global chemicals company), which calls itself 'real mayonnaise' lists its top two ingredients as vegetable (not olive) oil and water. Not exactly a classic start to how the original was made.
> No food manufacturer us going to sell the 'normal' product as just that and label the cheaper one as somehow inferior.
This sounds quite plausible if you go by the wording on the package. But the design can be quite telling.
Have a look at eg Tesco's 'Everyday Value' design. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=!i+tesco+everyday+value That stuff is made to look inferior.
walmart has had plenty of walmart-specific model numbers.
it typically leads to more confusion over what a customer is buying. the model number proliferation and the typical act of using the short form names leaves it feeling closer to gambling.
By default, consumers are their own best regulator.
You buy only the bread that tastes good, and that
shoes that fit, so the market will provide, etc.
It works pretty well for bread or chocolate: most people can afford to try different brands until they find one they like. No knowledge required.
It works less well for relatively expensive items like printers with relatively hidden pitfalls that require a some level of domain knowledge and research to comprehend before purchase. Most people can't buy a different printer every week until they find the one they like, and outside of the HN crowd many (most?) people don't have the domain knowledge to research a tech product properly.
Obviously third-party review sources (Wirecutter, Consumer Reports, whatever) can mitigate this somewhat but they are subject to their own biases.
The second example: thanks to harmonised EU rules you
can put palm oil in your chocolate without loudly
declaring it and still call it chocolate on the packaging.
(You just have to mention the palm oil in the fine-print
list of ingredients.)
1. the box contains a device that is nonfunctional unless consumers pay an ongoing subscription fee
2. what that fee is
3. a warning and the manufacturer can essentially brick the device at any time by intentionally discontinuing support or going out of business
Even that assumes that the bread/chocolate is not poisonous. (Which again is a form of regulation.)
But that assumes consumers can tell when they're being poisoned. If a person drops dead immediately after eating a candy bar... sure, that's pretty obvious. But long-term harms can't be easily attributed to a single product.
The free market is a very very useful tool. So is government regulation. Both of them also are wholly inadequate on their own.
Someone might even agree with you that this kind of minimal
and general regulation is useful (eg 'no labeling poison as food')
Think of the more general cases of adulterated foods and/or foods with unacceptable levels of harmful chemicals whose like mercury, arsenic, etc. These are things that consumers cannot practically check for.
A reasonable free-market response might be that if consumers really think this is important, they will pay more for products that have been vetted by some trusted third party and therefore the government is not needed. There could even be multiple such third parties and consumers could vote with their wallets for the one(s) that they find best. This already exists in a sense in the form of organizations that certify food as halal, kosher, etc.
I don't totally disagree with this, but I think it is ripe for corruption and monopoly in ways that a well-functioning government is not.
But that doesn't mean that all the other regulation is
necessary nor useful.
It also only works if there are lots of competitors. With tech that is often not the case. You probably only have a handful of consumer printer manufacturers to choose from and if all of them decide to pull the same shit (because its more profitable) then you're SOL.
People aren't picking Costco because Costco has the best printers, they're buying their printers at costco because they're already at Costco buying groceries and clothing.
It's the same thing with apple -- monopolizing power gives corporations regulatory power.
> normal existing rules about truth in advertising would make sure the sticker is trustworthy
Take out one regulation, while leaving another overlapping regulation, and the regulation still works? This is switching the conversation to which regulations are the most effective, rather than saying that regulations are irrelevant.
Same with Samsung TVs. Unfortunately Samsung’s smart TV stuff is worthless, but the panels have been just fine.
I abandoned HP’s trash products awhile back. I found that replacing my HP printers with Brother’s mid-range laser printers have been a fantastic upgrade for the price.
You could say that about every individual item Costco sells: people don't go specifically to Costco to buy socks.
People don't go to Costco specifically to buy celery either. Etc.
> Take out one regulation, while leaving another overlapping regulation, and the regulation still works? This is switching the conversation to which regulations are the most effective, rather than saying that regulations are irrelevant.
Maybe. General regulations like 'no lying in ads' or 'contracts need to be honoured' are better than specific regulations like, 'bananas that bend more than 5cm are banned'.
Except, Hershey has been using vegetable oils in Chocolate in the US, due to lower costs and lax regulation, for decades. It hasn't stopped them at all and is the primary reason the cheap commercial chocolates in the US "taste like vomit", to foreigners.
These foods are deeply ingrained with the culture now. It's much more complex than just having an opinion about how things are made and assuming that opinion is correct.
Just because a vocal minority complains about the quality of a product doesn't mean the majority agrees or stops buying it. People vote with their wallets.
OP claimed that the market would balance things out when given subpar foods. When Hershey first made these subpar chocolates the market didn't correct it, despite OP's claims. Just like how the market didn't correct meat glue use in Europe, until it was regulated out.
No, I never claimed that. The claim that I wanted to make is the one that sublinear made: the market provides what the people care enough about that they are willing to pay for.
Eg Germany has good pork and decent chocolate in mainstream supermarkets. But the boil-in-bag rice those places sell would make your average Asian through up a little.
Consumer regulation does the least harm, when it is the least necessary: when the mainstream consumer already agrees with it, and when it's reasonably easy for knowledgeable people with different tastes to side-step.
Eg the German 'Reinheitsgebot' purity law has some strict rules about what you can put in your beer and still call it 'Bier'. But it doesn't actually restrict the knowledgeable consumer: your supplier can concoct whatever they feel like, they might just have to get creative with the name.
If Americans like 'shitty food', that's up to them. Who are we to judge them?
The point being, a lack of regulations allowed for low quality chocolates that are available and some people purchase. There's no reason to believe the same wouldn't happen in other countries; Germans, French, Japanese, etc aren't somehow more enlightened about food.
My point is that when people are willing to pay, the market will provide. As long as regulations allow it.
(Or sometimes even when regulations ban the desired product, but providing things via the grey or black market typically drives up costs.)
> The point being, a lack of regulations allowed for low quality chocolates that are available and some people purchase.
And that's fine by me. Personally, I'm ok with whatever people prefer as long as I can also easily buy the stuff I like without too much hassle.
Do you think the point of regulation should be to keep other people from buying stuff you and me don't approve of?
I simply was countering the claim that regulations were unnecessary to block the production and sale of low-quality foods, based on cultural merits (or, in general).
If my personal opinion matters at all, I'm a hardline libertarian on any issues that directly affect (to avoid going down a conversational pigeonhole of obesity affecting the medical system, or otherwise) solely the individual.
Drug consumption, food, prostitution (e.g. a single person/entity choosing to sell their body/intimate services to another person/entity in a consensual and legally protected manner), personal data encryption, etc: zero regulations, beyond commercial ones forcing full disclosure by corporations ("our food was sprayed with these pesticides", etc)/the authority entity (full disclosure on STD testing by sex work provider and consumer).
Trafficking (including the less savory forms of sex work, such as pimping and brothel work that constitutes servitude/slavery), gun ownership/sales, drug sales, fraud, employer relations, tenant protections, etc: regulated (including banning, in many cases) in favor of the general public.
If someone is fully aware that Hershey's has butyric acid and vegetable oil in it, and still chooses to consume it; go for it. If Hershey's add a heavy carcinogen to their recipe which increases general risk for cancer, probably should regulate it. It's a muddy line, but it's like they say about porn: "you know it when you see it"; and one feels like a clear societal problem.
And of those who do not, how many are even aware that there is a difference?
The process is a company and trade secret, but experts speculate that the milk is partially lipolyzed. This produces butyric acid, a compound found in substances such as Parmesan cheese which stabilizes the milk from further fermentation. This flavor gives the product a "tangy" taste that the US public has come to associate with the taste of chocolate …
I think that just further reinforces the point though, that the market doesn't correct for a (generally regarded) subpar product, on its own. It requires external influence; whether it be regulatory, cultural, health-based, etc.
Have you tried American white chocolate, like the white Kisses? Candles have more flavour.
(( But even so, I can't say any kind of white chocolate tastes like or has less taste than candle wax. White chocolate has distinctive tastes...which I don't like, and stubbornly refuse to believe the tosh that it's chocolate. ))
In the UK, white chocolate has a very creamy flavour.
My MIL has white chocolate kisses (and those grim white chocolate mint ones) every Christmas, and they remind me of that same day if I ever feel like I might have been too hard on them and try one.
Seems history is dubious on this idea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Meat_Inspection_Act
That's because Americans don't typically eat their pork raw, so they don't care enough for the market to supply this product.
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair ended up being a major catalyst, there were a lot of claims by the meat industry that the book’s account was overblown, but as evidence piled up regulation was demanded.
Markets only work when everyone is forced to be on a level playing field. Sometimes you need regulation to provide some minimum proof of this, sometimes market players themselves find it desirable even, otherwise new market entrants can make a much much lower cost product that relies on market ignorance of what people are buying (so what if all the meat is packed by people on their death bed and sick… my margins are better).
It's perfectly possible to buy decent chocolate in the US. Eg Lindt and Ritter Sport seem to be widely available. (They are far from the best chocolate, they are just decent-enough brands that I remembered at the top of my head, and could verify with a quick web search are available in the US.)
How toxic is that meat actually? What are your sources? How do you know it's more of a problem in the US than in Germany? (Americans like to complain about their products. But we get American beef here in Singapore, and it's generally ok. Typically not as good as the Japanese or even Australian stuff, but good enough.)
> [...] nor health clinics where you can simply declare yourself in need of large amounts of highly addictive opiate painkillers in order to receive a prescription.
The stories I heard are rather the opposite: the political and regulatory backlash against the alleged 'opioid epidemic' has been so bad, that it's hard for people who legitimately need painkillers to get a prescription.
I suspect the US is a big country, so both accusations can be true at the same time. Even if the problem is tiny in relative terms, because of the size of the country, in absolute terms you will find plenty of cases of both failure modes.
What country does Ritter Sport come from? Is it considered luxury chocolate in that country?
The huge differences between husbandry and meatpacking standards in the United States and Western Europe are extremely well known. Most US meat products are not allowed to be imported to the EU because of this. I'm surprised you need a 'source' for this widely known fact pattern (which in fact, you yourself mentioned in your comment above - pork in the US can not be eaten rare). What US meat is exported is generally a completely different standard than what's sold domestically.
The ready availability and aggressive marketing of opiate painkillers in the US continued for around twenty years, many of it based in 'pain clinics' whose only service was writing scripts for pills. Such clinics do not exist in Western Europe. The govt cracked down on these at a point where addiction was endemic in some regions. The problem was demonstrably not 'tiny in relative terms'.
Lindt? There may be better brands, and I've actually seen someone gag on the 70% dark Lindt that I favour; but "far from the best" seems to me an idiosyncratic view.
Demonstrably not true. Consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alum :
> In the Victorian era, alum was used along with other substances like plaster of Paris to adulterate certain food products, particularly bread. It was used to make lower-grade flour appear whiter, allowing the producers to spend less on whiter flour. Because it retains water, it would make the bread heavier, meaning that merchants could charge more for it in their shops. The amount of alum present in each loaf of bread could reach levels that would be toxic to humans and cause chronic diarrhea, which could lead to death in young children.[26]
Or https://www.geriwalton.com/food-and-drink-adulteration-in-17...
> ... by the early 1800s, the practice of adulteration had become so common, nineteenth century people developed a taste for fraudulent substances in their food and drink and often did not realize anything was wrong with what they were ingesting until it was too late.
quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_bread :
> [Bread adulteration] gradually came to an end with government action, such as the 1860 and 1899 Food Adulteration Acts in Britain.[29] America had a more difficult time ending these processes of adulteration, however, as various states had varying policies regarding bread making.
The free market could not resolve the problem.
All of these free market tenets fall apart in a propaganda state.
Btw, heroin partially became popular as a re-creational drug because smoking opium and pot was banned. Just like the American prohibition of alcohol led consumers to switch from beer to hard liquor, because less bulky drugs are easier to smuggle.
This theory only holds if the consumers are fully informed about their options in the market - which isn't the case, else everyone would buy their printers & TVs at Costco.
Well people are supposed to be able to vote with their wallet, and reward businesses that supply what the customer wants.
This assumes perfect knowledge from the consumer though. And actionable signals.
The question is, do consumers value a printer with a usb port, how much is it worth to them, do they have a choice in the matter?
You could view your chocolate example the other way. If you do like palm oil in your chocolate, you don't have the option of buying it. 'ideally' there would be a palm oil alternative so that consumers have a choice. But this also highlights another shortcoming of the market economy. There are negative externalities to Palm oil production, externalities that the market seem incapable or unwilling to fix. I suppose you could argue that is why Germans don't want palm oil in their chocolate, but this isn't an outright ban, so palm oil could still pop up in other things.
Not at all. Imperfect knowledge is enough most of the time. Consumers will reward companies that are transparent and trustworthy over a long time.
> The question is, do consumers value a printer with a usb port, how much is it worth to them, do they have a choice in the matter?
Indeed, consumers have to make their own trade-offs about whether they value having a USB-port.
> If you do like palm oil in your chocolate, you don't have the option of buying it.
It's legal, and available, if you look for it. (Even before the rule change in Germany it was legal, you were just banned from calling the product 'chocolate'.)
> There are negative externalities to Palm oil production, externalities that the market seem incapable or unwilling to fix.
Since those negative exernalities are still around, you could equally blame the government or Santa Claus for not fixing them.
The 'market' does some of that fixing: customers who often pay a premium for 'ethically' sourced products that don't include palm oil. And there are producers who oblige them.
Most, but not all, of those externalities occur in the palm oil producing countries. It would make sense for the people most affected to eg vote to put taxes and subsidies in place to internalise those externalities. (Alas, many of those places also have corrupt and incompetent governments.)
ROFL
If nobody sells a TV that doesn't spy on you and play ads because of collusion, or simply because it's the single best profit optimizer, how do consumers regulate the market? The only option is for nobody to buy a TV ever again, which clearly won't happen.
Capitalism requires external regulation, otherwise we get monopolies and collusion that remove choice so that consumers have no option other than to pay too much for something that doesn't work well enough.
"The market" isn't a fairy godmother with your best interests in mind. It's a senseless machine that can only optimize for more paperclips forever. It's fundamentally incapable of doing anything else without external input.
Someone can start a new TV producing company to break the collusion. Or even just make a clever router that filters out the spying.
> Capitalism requires external regulation, otherwise we get monopolies and collusion that remove choice so that consumers have no option other than to pay too much for something that doesn't work well enough.
Real world regulation is responsible for more monopolies and collusion than 'capitalism' ever was.
Yes, you can come up with some nirvana regulation that's perfect. Just like we can come up with some 'nirvana' scenario for the market that's perfect. That doesn't prove very much either way.
> "The market" isn't a fairy godmother with your best interests in mind. It's a senseless machine that can only optimize for more paperclips forever. It's fundamentally incapable of doing anything else without external input.
The market is consumers and producers interacting. They provide the 'external input'.
If consumers want paperclips and are willing to pay for them, that's what they get. If consumers want quality products, that's what they get.
This is a pretty wild omission of all of the food safety regulation out there. Regulation we got because the "let each consumer get sick enough to change their behavior" approach turned out to have some flaws that people did not like.
Are you sure about that? Supermarkets do sell Mett and normal minced pork separately with the latter usually having an indication that it is only to be consumed cooked.
This would match the Wikipedia article you linked which mentions that
> Unless pre-packaged, the German Lebensmittelhygiene-Verordnung ("food hygiene/health directive") permits mett to be sold only on the day of production.
> I hold that even in the absence of specific regulation, the German market would provide Germans with pork that's safe to eat raw. Companies would just put a little sticker on their meat that tells you, that it's safe to eat (and normal existing rules about truth in advertising would make sure the sticker is trustworthy).
Yeah fuck that. Companies regularly make a mockery of any truth in advertising laws - something being proven misleading in court and something misleading actual customers are very different things. Food safety is not something you can leave up to for profit corporations.
HP printers come in an "e" model, which requires an Instant Ink subscription (but is cheaper - effectively subsidized by the subscription), and a non-"e" model that is unlocked (but costs more). Just don't buy the "e" models if you're shopping elsewhere.
In general, the reason Costco sells electronics with different model numbers is so that you can't price match them to/from other retailers. Sometimes a few minor features get removed as well to lower the overall cost.
Absolutely, although it's not clear who the perpetrator is. I suspect it's the manufacturer, not Costco.
Costco doesn’t offer price matching.
Edit: I was just thinking a little more about this and wondering "wait, why would they want to stop people from doing that?" Best hypothesis: you see the Costco price and you know that it's going to be the best price you're going to find on that; there's no reason to shop around, if you want it you just go to Costco and get it.
Ah yes, “just” add another highly specific thing to your memory so that sometime unpredictable in a next x years you don’t get completely screwed by the giant corp. And for all those people who don’t spend their days on a computer reading HN, sucks to be you, HP got ya.
The sarcasm in this comment isn’t directed at you (thanks for sharing the ‘e’ tidbit) - I’m just so so tired of giant corps actively trying to screw the consumer at every possible turn. It makes shopping for anything besides the absolute basics exhausting.
This kind of bullshit has gone on for years, notably in the mattress industry. Mattress companies are famous for simply slapping different model numbers on the same mattresses sold to each retailer, to undermine price guarantees.
No doubt HP, Sony, and who knows who else pulls the same shit with merchandise sold to Costco.
I'm actually quite impressed with this. It's a shame all stores don't do this.
It's also a shame I don't have a Costco reasonably near me.
Well at least in the UK
Here is a reply from the Mastodon thread that seems more plausible:
> @steeph @netspooky They're not hiding it, they're getting you to set up the printer over wifi, and only use the USB port after that. It seems if you use the USB port straight away it'll only print up to 20 pages then stop. They do this to get you to opt into hp+ and lock the printer in to use official toner. That's why the printer is so cheap
As far as I can tell there is no option to "buy out" an e model to remove the subscription requirement. Given HP's history I suspect once this annoys the wrong person it'll turn out to be pretty trivial to break, but for now if you feel the need to purchase a new HP product you should definitely avoid the ones with an e in the model number.
AFAIK Brother hasn't tried anything like this (yet?) and they're cheap so if they fit your needs I recommend them.
The simpler solution is to just avoid purchasing HP products.
Got a scanner instead that was fully supported on Linux and cursed HP for three generations.
Then I bought a far cheaper second-hand Brother printer, turned off firmware updates, and have continued using 3rd party toner. So only kind-of fuck them, I guess, because their printers do the job pretty well.
But I am glad I switched to mono, because the colour MFC would have cost AUD$550+ on genuine toner (3 colour + 1 black). Too much for casual usage once a month.
Damn, that sucks, I'm happily using my old Brother printer and was thinking about second one. Did it not let you override that warning in service mode[1]?
[1] Brother printers have a hidden menu where you can set cartridge values to different ones than read by printer's sensors. Godsend if you are using very cheap 3rd party cartridges, as they sometimes report their capacity as 0%. The way to access it depends by model, for OP's model I found https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6lsUBu1TDg
HP is one of the worst offenders, but the others aren't much better.
I bought a dirt cheap (~$100 AUD) Fuji Xerox CP105b colour laser printer about 10 years ago and it still works fine. No crapware in the drivers, no cartridge lockouts, no bullshit. Super crisp print jobs. I fear that when it breaks, I won't find another deal like that.
I recently replaced the toner and drum with third-party ones, and they work fine - no vendor lock-in.
I don't do a lot of printing, but when I do it's for a real need and I just want it to work. So I got another HL-L2375DW (mono full duplex laser) last year to replace my first which I gave to my ex after separation/divorce - a perfect little unit, not a trace of HP-level BS anywhere to be found. It goes to sleep with minimal power use, and wakes up when needed, even weeks or months between each use - can print straight from my Samsung phone with no extra driver install needed, as well as from PC naturally. I've just set it up on the Wifi, but it also has a network port + USB. Perfect.
It was only around 200 AUD; mind you the included toner wasn't the biggest but I only need it for occasional use so it's still going strong. I'll probably get their big drum when it eventually runs out (that's what I did with my 1st, ex printed a lot more than I) and whilst I could go 3rd party I'll just buy theirs anyway to support them in a small way.
https://www.brother.com.au/en/products/all-printers/printers...
It seems people are reporting that Brother has stared rejecting third party ink.
This seems to be a recent development so people who bought a Brother 5 or more years ago won't have run into that bs yet (like who updates their printer firmware, seriously).
So its more likely genuine users (that includes me) recommending products that have worked well for them.
And the drivers were acting weird even before that
Also there's a test page that you can print which should detail the IP address.
It could be that the printer got new IP address and your PC is remembering the last, or something like that.
I know that’s not accessible for the tech un-savvy, but it’s there for those of us that are.
In Germany we have "Mogelpackung des Jahres" ("Cheat packaging of the year") by the consumer center/protection organisation for example that points out companies that abuse shrinkflation
https://www.vzhh.de/themen/mogelpackungen/mogelpackung-des-j...
Shame is a big driver of achieving cultural/behavioral alignment, the same has to be done with corporations if they misbehave.
While legal entities do not care, their employees and customers can be capable of that. Make every such infraction public so the companies' reputation, brand and profits correspond to the morality of its actions. Systemic failures like these need systemic fixes.
Maybe it would be a good idea to force companies to publicize product return rates, so managerial brainfarts like these get rewarded accordingly.
I was thinking maybe I moved the printer and it is not level?
Unlike the inkjet where it shines a little LED through the cartridge (covering with black electrical tape makes it think it's always full), laser toner I think has an id chip on the cartridge and the printer just maintains an internal counter as to guess when it'll run out. Reset that, and make sure the option is turned off that stops it continuing to print once low (networked models have a webpage you can go to to turn these from stop to just warn).
2. Speaking from experience doing support for a lot of them, brother* printers are notorious for not realizing the toner (even with originals) was changed. There are ways to reset the counter though(Holding two buttons while powering on). It's usually mentioned in the manual.
* It's the only brand I know with that problem.
Now maybe things have changed. But I bought my Brother MFC-8890DW back in April of 2011. It is still going strong. In that time period I have replaced the toner once. But I have only printed 3,768 pages in that time. So 314 pages per year.
It is the best type of printer for my use case which is infrequent printing. Ink type printers aren't the best options if you might have 90+ days between printing jobs. I also really like having the scanning and photo copying features that mine has. And the Ethernet connection makes it so anyone in the house can easily print.
Given all of the issues with printers over the years (driver compatibility, ink cartridge drm, things like the above post), I’m curious if there is a reason open source printer hardware is not more common.
My assumption would be the complexity of the print mechanism / tolerances / balancing.
Now, what I don't know (and don't recall seeing) is whether that's true of every jurisdiction or if it's just a US-centric problem and the EU could have their revenge by having an open printer that US consumers couldn't buy :-/
That said, I think open-source firmware for existing 2D printers would be a better idea, perhaps with a controller board to retrofit into existing mechanisms since I suspect they've heavily used crypto to lock out alternative firmware. Driving the two axes is relatively simple, but RE'ing printhead signals and driving those are probably going to be the most difficult part.
Paper handling is hell (there's a great magazine article from a few years back on the Xerox division who handles this... they're wizards, the lot of them). Hardware, software, and environment dependent.
Everything needs to be RIPped but that's the sort of thing which software is really good at and which is well suited to open source.
For an inkjet driving the nozzles is the nasty bit. First figure out which ones to fire when, then you have to actually do it. I'm told by those in the know that this really just can't be done well enough in software, you need the timing control of FPGA/ASIC solutions. So, very doable, but hard.
Laser printers have difficult drum and transfer belt issues but solutions are mostly copyable from existing products. Driving the laser diode itself is pretty easy (admittedly I've worked with laser guys, but still). The hard bit is pointing the laser in the right direction, with either spinny prisms or galvos. Or you could forgo the laser in favor of an LED array but I don't think anyone (Oki?) ever got great results out of that. Overall a B&W laser is probably the easiest thing to start with.
That all said, everyone knows China's reputation in the hardware space: clone, clone, clone. And yet, how many Chinese printers do you come across? There's probably a reason for that. It sure isn't lack of skill.
It's probably just that printers are awful.
To get a rough idea of the frequencies involved, consider a 1440x1440 DPI printer, with a 12" wide axis and 1" swath. Assume the printhead can move across the full 12" around 5 times per second (this is really fast), for a standard 8.5x11 portrait print this turns out to be around 1 page every 2.2 seconds or 27 pages per minute; at this speed the printhead is moving at 60 inches per second, so for 1440 DPI each nozzle needs to be pulsed at 1440x60=86400kHz or an 11us period, which is not that fast in terms of digital electronics. However, if you're firing 1440 nozzles in parallel, then the total throughput of the data that needs to go into the printhead goes up to 124.416MHz, or closer to 500MHz for all 4 colours, but this is easily parallelisable.
That said, those numbers are probably on the high end and represent a fast printer; I'm not even sure any consumer inkjet can do full-colour 1440 DPI at 27PPM.
Most of my knowledge here comes from very peripheral involvement with a project to repurpose an inkjet printhead to do Something Else™ (sorry, NDA here). The printhead high priests just scoffed at any kind of software control over the firing process, and that was that.
I've often wondered about an open printer design. My current printer uses inkjet cartridges which contain the print heads (HP 45/78). That would seem to be most of the difficulty, already made available in a commoditized off the shelf package.
I've heard paper picking can be kind of a black art, but I'd think a community could iterate fast enough to get it at least passable, or just suck it up with single sheet feeding in the beginning. And it's not like commercial printers are foolproof.
Then there's motion control, which is already the bread and butter of the 3D printing scene. Perhaps not initially good enough to align 600dpi over multiple inches repeatably for photo quality, but I'd think it would be fine for business forms and whatnot that people end up having to print.
The printer I got from brother is definitely using one LED array per color.
Inkjets are junk, because the ink dries up within a year. I'm still on my original laser toner from 2007.
And I don't see why a dot matrix printer would be that hard to make. The hardest part would be the ink ribbon, and compared to e.g. an inkjet head that's low tech (plastic foil ribbon coated with essentially laser toner).
We _need_ an open source printer. Ideally a monochrome laser with an automatic paper feeder.
For most, it would be the only printer in consideration when in the market for a printer. This is true even if the specs were just at the level of early 90s printers.
Even if buying something else, the mere existence of this printer would keep printer brands honest. They get to be scummy because they know we have no alternative.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code#Hi...
More difficult, as opposed to easier?
Avoiding this (insane) tracking anti-feature is an argument for open source, not against.
I once sat on a chairlift with a lawyer who had represented one of the big printer companies and he explained that printers are the perfect storm of: hardware, software, firmware, chemistry, physics, fluid dynamics, paper science, and (yes) lawyers.
The larger companies have put billions into R&D, hence them continuing to pull the crap we see every other month on HN.
I seriously doubt that R&D was about long term cost efficient reliability in a user friendly context - because we’re mostly seeing the opposite.
I print two b&w pages per month, for now I’m another happy user of a brother laser printer.
They are complex machines with complex parts. And to have those priced sensibly needs volume. Like how many injection moulds would you need? And then you would have one factory equipped.
https://www.engadget.com/2010-11-17-windows-phone-7s-microsd....
A removeable SD card you're ... not supposed to remove.
On a more positive note, it used to be somewhat common for cheap no-name Android phones, mainly based on Mediatek SoCs, to boot from an internal removable microSD card, along with the "official" external removable one next to the then-standard removable battery and dual SIM slots. They disappeared rather quickly once eMMC became the norm, likely in a next revision of a reference design.
They're obviously trying to get the whole family to wirelessly print with all their devices via WiFi to use up ink. And not just connected to dad's boring household accounting desktop.
What gets me is large parts of HP was cut (calculators, test instruments, laser printers, etc), not because they weren't profitable, but instead because they weren't as profitable as selling ink.
I think this is the key part... I haven't installed a printer driver from the manufacturer in years. Using CUPS through my Mac or Linux machines "just works". The crazy bloatware drivers are almost always associated with Windows, so if you're using Linux or a Mac, there isn't much of a risk here, is there? Linux even more so...
It's paper jamming when I insert more than one sheet at a time. I ordered a new pickup stamp and roller already. Unfortunately the pickup stamp was the wrong type and didn't fit, and the roller alone didn't fix it. I just don't print often enough for it to be annoying, but one day this thing will go again. One day....
"To cook the frog one need to slowly increase the temperature so the frog will not feel stress but relaxation, and when the temperature exceeds some point, the frog will not have strength to jump out"
As apparently this cruel recipe probably even does not work in case of this amphibian, it is really great metaphor and it really works in case of people. People can get accustomed to every inconvenience one can imagine, as long as it is accompanied by additional "convenience" attached to it. No cash - you don't need to take money with you. No cable printing - you can print without cables. Ink subscription - you can always have any amount of ink you want (as long as it does not exceed certain amount of pages)
Or don.
This is a vast contrast to the cheap inkjet I got from them before which was drop kicked all the way to the trash after it died replacing the first cartridge.
I had a Brother laser before them and the thing used to jam all the time and ate drums.
Got a (pretty good) apron from William Sonoma but it had the logo sewed on with a huge patch, had to painstakingly unstitch it to get a pretty apron without any branding emblazoned across the front.
I bought a pencil case for work off Amazon and it had a bright red patch with the company name on it, just some sort of absolute nonsense combination of consonants and vowels. One minute with an xacto blade cut the stitches and I was left with an acceptable quality pencil case.
pretty easy to peel, too, given how much larger the sticker is from the little port extrusion thing.
for that matter, it isn’t even centered.
assuming it would even remain stuck given how little it would be sticking to.
almost like someone placed a sticker over a usb port.
would someone do that?
that isn’t to say their app isn’t nefarious or supported by alphabet agencies. it could be. or not.
but this sticker isn’t there to hide anything.
And with the rise of digital records, most people could probably live on the $1/month plan where you get 10 pages and can rollover up to 30 pages with every extra 10 pages costing $1 when you need it. It'd take 3 years of not printing a total of 315 pages to lose money on Instant Ink compared to the price of the new cartridge (I'm on the grandfathered $1 15 pages/month plan).
It's the same reason why I'm subscribed to exactly one digital service.
Plus the convenience store printers have neat tricks like being able to print A3 sheets or stickers.