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.)
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.
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.
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.
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