Buy a Brother monochrome laser with duplex, an ethernet port, and BRScript/3 (their PostScript clone). Even if you're sure you will never need one or more of those features, get them all. Wifi and Bluetooth and NFC are strictly optional, and probably not worthwhile.
If you need color printing, send it to a printing company. There might even be a local one. It will be done at a higher quality, with better ink and good paper, than you can do at your office or house -- unless you are big enough to utilize a whole flock of printers, or you are a professional. If you are a pro, you don't need this advice.
Great advice, and I echo 95% of it. My observation is that I have found Wifi useful when I need the printer in an odd location in the house, and color is useful for non-professional usage like "the kids need to print out their report for school" and "the med school student needs anatomy diagrams in color"
My trusty color Brother laser HL-3170CDW cost ~$300 at the time and has been trucking along for 7+ years now without a hiccup. If it dies, I'm replacing it with another Brother laser printer.
EDIT: added cost of printer. The article is right: if all you are ever going to do is print your taxes and financial documents once a year, a ~$100 monochrome laser printer is fine.
Even for those non-professional uses it's probably better to put the PDF on a flash drive, walk into Staples and print it on their machines. For anyone who hasn't done it, it's incredibly streamlined. You don't have to talk to anyone and you don't have to wait in line. You just walk up to one of the many printers, put in your flash drive, tap your credit card and collect your printouts.
I'm just not convinced that having the ability to print in color at home is worth the huge expense in ink cartridges or in a color laser printer. In fact schools have just had to learn to accept digital submissions due to COVID-19 so printing at home probably won't be necessary at all anymore. When our black & white toner printer dies we will probably not replace it and just go to Staples for whatever little printing we will still need.
> Even for those non-professional uses it's probably better to put the PDF on a flash drive, walk into Staples and print it on their machines
I'm not trying to be argumentative, and what I'm going to say might be a "well obviously, duh" comment: This advice is really only applicable to those who have convenient access to a "staples", which is probably only 20% of us here. It is also only convienient if you don't have to regularly print things, and/or need things printed quickly.
Why am I bothering to write this? I guess I want you and others like you to not assume everyone is in the same situation as you. It's an easy trap to fall into, and especially dangerous if you are a builder wanting to take things to market (like so many people here on HN are).
Even the article fell into this trap. There's a good reason to own at least a B&W printer even if there's a Staples downstairs: your home printing needs will predominantly fall outside the business hours. After all, during business hours you are most likely at work.
The need to print something is usually a result of some chain of actions. You noticed an interesting paper. You have a stack of documents to sign. Your kid just realized, at 22:00 sharp, that they need some printout for school tomorrow. These are things that, for most working adults, tend to happen during evenings and on weekends - because that's the only time they have to deal with personal stuff. Not having a printer available at a moment's notice tends to be a huge blocker.
+100 to this, not sure why these simple usecases are being ignored by the other commenters, most of whom think people are printing for “ignorant” purposes.
There's definitely more need for empathy (or life experience) all around :).
Having recently lived for a few years in a small town (population ~16k), I'll also add that the two or three printing shops that are in the town are absolutely not a viable option for most people either. They're always too far away, and closed when you need them.
Also, "ignorant" use cases have their value too. People underestimate the impact of trivial inconveniences[0]. My wife likes to print out interesting recipes she spots on-line. I wouldn't have eaten half of the good stuff I had over the years if she had to go to a copy shop every time she spotted something interesting to cook.
My "local" print shop allows me to email the docs and will have them ready to pick up first thing in the morning.
It's all about planning. And when -like me- you live outside urban area's everything is about planning. I can't order a pizza when I forgot to buy groceries. I can't have a Gorrilla cyclist deliver some beer when I ran out. So I need to plan (and have a larger storage).
Sure, I've been in the spot where I needed to print something at 04:50 in the morning (and could not). But that problem was really just poor planning, and not lacking a printer at that time.
I'm not dismissing. If there is a reasonable chance that you unexpectedly need full-color-prints at saturdays 03:00, or often get the material for the final prints mere hours for a deadline: sure! cover your risks by buying expensive machineries. It's what they are for.
Obviously, you'd need to cross-reference with the actual risk: are you out of a job, failing class, or kicked out of the local church when you fail to deliver full-color-prints last minute: cover your risks by buying the machines that were made for this.
My point is that most people don't have those risks. And if they do, can cover those risks with little planning just as well as with buying equipment.
You only need to print your CV minutes before the job-interview when such job-interviews are planned minutes our hours ahead (and in my experience that is literally never the case). You only need to print your dissertation last minute if you spent the first 6 months of "writing the dissertation" procastinating. I definitely did that. And I definately found that my printer jammed at 05:50 the morning before I had to turn it in at 10:00. if only I had planned just a little better...
It isn’t dismissing, it is pointing out that for things that are not incredibly important, you can plan for it, and if you don’t, there might be a situation sometime where you are out of luck. I cannot imagine a scenario will I will desperately need a full color printout at 3am, that can’t wait till the morning and a short trip to the Walgreens, Staples, CVS, whatever. Is it possible that a situation could come up? I guess. But its not really reasonable to go out and buy multi hundred-dollar pieces of equipment for random insanely unlikely scenarios.
If you are in a situation where you need to print full color at extremely odd hours, by all means, you might want to get a printer. But if you are just forgetting to do something until 3am, that’s just poor planning and likely not even a big deal, or something that couldn’t wait until 6. Edge cases exist, but pretending like the edge case is the norm is silly.
Yes, buying an expensive piece of equipment is always an option. The point is that maybe people should explore other options and think about whether you actually need it and if the purchased equipment is going to give the quality you require. Occasionally I need to move an appliance or haul a load of lumber for a house project, so buying a truck could be a plan. But is the cost, both in purchasing and in poor gas mileage, and the space it takes up worth it for the hauling ability? For me, renting a truck the occasional time I need that ability is a far better option for me, but it does require me to actually think ahead and plan and I can’t just run to the Home Depot and pickup a sheet of plywood on a whim.
If I did get a pickup, is it the best tool for the jobs I need? Would a larger moving truck serve me better? It wouldn’t be a smart move to spend the money and then have it under perform for the tasks I actually need, because buying a commercial grade version is not feasible.
Buying a b&w printer that you only use once every few months might not actually be your only option. Buying a color printer that prints lower quality than you really want and is gummed up or out of ink when you need it, might not actually be your only option. Without one, you can’t print at 3am, but just like that sheet of plywood, is that scenario really important enough to you?
Uh. Shops offering printing-as-a-service are one of the most common things found in every small town, all over the world. They're one of the first entrepreneurialist ventures to be developed in developing countries after electrification (just buy a printer and a computer, and charge $1 to print a page.) Every Internet cafe offers printing. Every parcel shipping store (UPS, FedEx, etc.) offers printing—and in fact many Internet cafes are just glorified print shops where you can pay to use the computers originally set up for printing. In villages of 500 people (such as the one I lived in as a teenager!), either the post office, the community center, or the elementary school (frequently all the same building) will own a printer, and allow people to pay to use it.
Okay, you might live in a cabin 200 miles away from the nearest town. 80% of people are not in that situation. 80% of people on this Earth have access to someone they can pay to print something for them.
> It is also only convienient if you don't have to regularly print things
Don't have to regularly print things in color. Most people don't. Unless you do photography for money, color very likely isn't a crucial part of anything you're required to be printing. (It might be a nice-to-have part of things you're required to be printing; or it might be a crucial part of things you don't really have to be printing; but it's unlikely for color to be crucial, and for the print to be required.)
I need to print things quite often, and yet I personally haven't needed to print anything in color... literally ever. (I did print things in color, when I used to own an inkjet, but in retrospect, I didn't need to have printed those things in color.)
>> Every parcel shipping store (UPS, FedEx, etc.) offers printing
> No such thing in Poland and closest equivalent does not offer printing as service (exceptions may apply).
While there are "parcel points" in Poland, I've never seen them advertising a document printing service, and they're also being rapidly displaced by the spread of Paczkomaty - automated self-service parcel collection and sending booths.
Yes, but you're not addressing the thrust of the argument. Certainly print shops don't exist in Poland, but that doesn't mean that getting prints done is inconvenient in Poland if you don't have your own printer.
In sufficiently-developed countries like Poland, you don't need print shops, but it's not because "nearly everyone has printer accessible at home or at work." (That's not even true; many people don't have color printers either at home or at work!)
Print shops never existed for the sake of making one print or one copy; the way they made their money was commercial, volume printing. Sign printing; poster printing; flyer printing; etc. "Consumer" printing/copying was always a side-business.
No matter how developed your city, commercial print shops still need to exist, because consumer printers just aren't up to the task of producing thousands of pages per hour, reliably, day-in-day-out; and because there's real labor involved in collating and feeding all that paper. Especially for weird paper shapes that need cutting (e.g. business cards.)
No, the reason Poland doesn't have consumer print shops, is because the commercial printers (and package services) who used to offer walk-in consumer printing as a convenience service, have been out-competed in that space by the lower margins offered by online document/photo print-and-deliver services (who can serve Polish customers from anywhere in the EU very cheaply, and so don't need to have a local presence in Poland.)
> that doesn't mean that getting prints done is inconvenient in Poland if you don't have your own printer.
It is inconvenient in Poland as there is no easy to use way to get your stuff printed.
There are some print shops, but focusing on specialist/large prints - and just few of them in a city, definitely not on every corner. Printing a single A4 page would cost me about 5% of printer cost (travel cost, printing itself, time of travel).
> Shops offering printing-as-a-service are one of the most common things found in every small town, all over the world.
FWIW, I live in the outer suburbs of Melbourne in Australia. By no means a small town. It’s a 20min drive to my closest place that does printing, which is apparently out in an industrial estate. There’s absolutely nothing in the 3-4 most accessible shopping/retail areas. These types of places have been shrinking with every passing year.
I'm in Tasmania's second largest city, Launceston.
The closest printing shop with extended hours, which I need because I'm just a lowly blue collar working who needs to work 12 hour days to make ends meet, is Officeworks, and there's exactly one of those here and it's 8 kilometres from my house and shuts at 7pm.
I'll just use my second hand Brother colour laser, cheers.
Six day weeks, leaves me with Saturday afternoon and Sunday.
Does it bother you that much if I’m ok maintaining a colour laser printer myself because I want to have it handy for the Hangul of times a month I want to use it.
Because this thread is about buying a simple B&W laser printer for its reliability, and how that removes the option of printing photos (which is something people sometimes try to do at home), but retains the option to print pretty much anything else[1] people try to print at home.
And then, as a tangent, this is a subthread about using printing services to substitute for the rare — and as you say, declining! — use-case of printing photos, which, when you realize that that's possible, makes the calculus of "buying a simple B&W laser printer for its reliability" much more clear.
[1] (It also removes the option to print e.g. color flyers or posters or business cards, but people don't generally try to do any of those at home anyway, instead deferring to a commercial printer to 1. get a high-quality result, and 2. not have to buy dozens of ink cartridges and spend hours fighting their printer to get a thousand flyers out of it.)
I too am in Australia, but 15 minute drive into a small town without a print shop. Perhaps Australia is a oddity, and most people/places worldwide do in fact have easy access to a local print shop, but I am guessing the grandparent is seeing things from the perspective of a north American and in my experience it is a relative safe bet that the north American experience does not usually translate to the rest of the world where the majority of people live.
FWIW my 20% number was pulled out of the air and based on very rough knowledge of HNs userbase.
Where I live in Asia, every convenience store (in any decently sized city, 24 hours and a 5 minute walk) and any major supermarket has a copier/printer. The convenience store ones also tend to have for-pay online features (photo prints of K-pop/J-pop idols, music scores to print)
> I am guessing the grandparent is seeing things from the perspective of a North American
No, I’m basing this on extensive travel experience in Africa, South America, and South Asia. If a town has anything resembling a hostel, then it is also 100% likely to have a copy shop or an Internet cafe with a printer.
—————
I think the actual failure of shared model here, is that there are people here who think something being 20 minutes away by car is “inconvenient.”
Folks, where I used to live, the nearest thing other than a farmstead was an hour away by car. And I still would have had my photos printed in town rather than owning a shitty inkjet printer (that would have been used so little that it would have required maintenance before every print.)
I said "20 minutes by car"; I didn't say driving. Americans like to measure things in by-car distances. What I meant was "an hour's walk" or "45 minutes by bicycle."
I didn't own a car where I used to live. Whenever I needed anything in town, I walked two hours to town. (When I eventually got a bicycle, it was a big upgrade!) And this was convenience to me.
Many people, in many places in the world, live this way. It is a uniquely-first-world perspective to think that "living far from town" means living in some self-sufficient "own one of everything you need" farmstead/mansion. For most people, in most of the world, living far from town just means commuting to town, on foot, all the dang time.
People in most of the rural parts of India, or Nigeria, or China, still commute on foot to a town-center-ish area to get water. Together, that makes up most of the population of the world! You think these people should own color printers? When they only barely have electricity? No; in the rare, rare case that such a person would need to get a physical photo printed, they'd walk however long it took to get to "the big city", and from there, they'd go to a dang print shop.
Honestly, I think people are having a severe failure of imagination in this thread, if they think that the various different kinds of developed nation that HN users live in, collectively make up "80% of the world."
But for most of the world, the cost calculus doesn't work out, because inkjet printers are shitty and break down, and use up their super-expensive color cartridges to print B&W prints. (And laser printers don't work well in humid climates, so good luck using a color laser.)
It's the same reason that in most of the world, you don't see people using those shaving razors with disposable razor-blade cartridges. They're too expensive over time, compared to a straight-razor / safety razor that can be sharpened.
If you only ever need to print, say, five photos in your entire life, it's fine if each one takes a three-hour round-trip walk to town and the equivalent of a day's wages. That'll still be lower TCO than printing every B&W text report you ever need to print on a color inkjet, and so needing to feed it a new yellow cartridge every few months just so it can keep putting microdots on the paper.
20 minutes by car has a lower carbon output that one ink cartridge (which is about the consumption when you realize once a year that you need to print something and the old cartridge has the yellow nozzle dried out)
I was just looking into this for while I'm on vacation next week in Wisconsin (or perhaps not, given delta), and the nearest printing place is about a 20 minute drive away. But then, because I do a lot of writing and prefer to edit on paper, I'm probably on the right side of the bell curve when it comes to printer usage.
I realize that. And that was the point I was trying to contradict: that you shouldn't make arguments about life experience either way, without having quite a lot of it. Because sometimes, a thing that you might intuitively think is one of those "only rich North American people have it" things is actually something possessed by the vast majority of the world, and so is a very bad example — a counterexample, in fact — of people being in different life situations.
> you shouldn't make arguments about life experience either way
These two arguments are not equivalent. Mathematically speaking, one side has to find just 20+% counter examples and the "vast majority" argument crumbles.
This thread has so many different people, from different parts of the world chiming in to say "this is not my lived experience", and you are still digging in to say "I'm right, the vast majority fit this mould".
"I plugged my flash drive into the printer station and all I got was my financial documents uploaded to a Russian server and 4 viruses written to the boot sector." -- my paranoid assumptions about public print stations with USB ports.
it'd be interesting to see if this flash drive transport for documents evolves into an email address you send via your phone instead (so no hardware on your end needed).
I appreciate the correction, but the risk still seems minimal.
1. The attack is very situational. There are hundreds of usb flash drive controllers out there (see: https://www.usbdev.ru/files/). The chance that your flash drive a) can be re-programmed b) the malware author bothered making a payload for c) copier is infected are all very small.
2. The attack is very visible, since the user would notice the computer randomly opening command prompts and typing commands. It's also very easy to interrupt. Stray mouse/keyboard inputs would foil the attack, as will unplugging the USB drive.
3. Despite how visible the attack is (see above), the lack of empirical reports probably suggests it's not a real attack that's being carried out
That assume it presents as a HID, and not another device profile with more direct attack surface in the hardware or kernel. Windows isolates the USB drivers to thwart such attacks, but perhaps it could manage to attack memory directly through the PCI bus before the kernel’s involvement?
I am not sure of the details, but agree that seems like a rather large amount of hacker effort, when they can currently attack over the internet and demand instant bitcoin payment.
> Windows isolates the USB drivers to thwart such attacks, but perhaps it could manage to attack memory directly through the PCI bus before the kernel’s involvement?
AFAIK how these attacks essentially work is by imputing key sequences to execute malicious code (eg. typing curl ... | bash into the terminal). There's no driver or pcie/DMA attacks going on.
He is? Who needs to print "financial documents" in color? Also, the part about "4 viruses written to the boot sector" suggests the kiosk is also dropping malware onto the USB.
>He is? Who needs to print "financial documents" in color?
Nobody. Some still do out of ignorance.
The same thing can happen when you print them in black and white from a similar kiosk.
And the financial documents could be in the same usb next to documents you did want to print in color.
>Also, the part about "4 viruses written to the boot sector" suggests the kiosk is also dropping malware onto the USB.
He's trying to make a point, even if that wasn't the case in that particular instance, it's something that can very easily happen too.
There's a lot of losing the forrest ("people sticking usbs to commercial kiosks to print is bad security") for some less significant detail trees in those questions...
This whole thread has got to be among the most, shall we say, eyebrow-raising ones I've ever read on HN. It has everything from "just drive 20 minutes to 2 hours to the next town to print a couple pages" to "just don't be poor" and "why do you even print". ;-)
But disregarding the staggering amount of unwillingness to look any further than one's own nose, everyone considering printing on a public / shared printer should know one this:
I can guarantee you that a copy of anything you output there gets saved. Not just statistics & metadata (page coverage, timestamp, copies...) but an actual picture of the page (at least as a thumbnail), regardless of what anyone will tell you. Even if the feature is not turned on for compliance reasons and gets collected by a central server, it will be stored on the printer's internal hard drive at least until the next maintenance cycle and can be retrieved for a significant amount of time.
If you pay by card or connect to it with your phone and thus add another level of personal data, you might as well just put it up on your Facebook publicly and ask anyone to print & mail it to you.
Modern commercial printers (such as those you will find at larger offices or at Staples) are basically full-blown PCs with a scanner and laser unit attached to them and as such nothing you put through there is ephemeral by default. It also means they are vulnerable to all kinds of horrible exploits that pretty much never get patched.
Almost nothing stops you from refilling a $30 inkjet with generic ink cartridges at $5 a pop (even cheaper, although messier, if you refill yourself). Or, if you print more, by all means, get that $100 mono laser. But "just go for a drive and print at Staples" has got to go on that wall of worst HN ideas ever.
I bought an HP 3600N networked color laser printer in Nov 2006. Cost me $574.39 delivered and gives reliable and excellent quality output for about $38/year so far in capex. 3rd party toner cartridges run around $110 for all 4 (they're about half the fill of the genuine HP article for about 1/8th the price).
In home use, I've replaced the cartridges twice, so I'm around $800 plus paper for almost 15 years of convenient printing at home. $38/year in capex and $12/yr in consumables.
There’s no way I can justify leaving my house to color print in order to save $4.50 a month.
Having the printer for two pre-teens during COVID schooling was a bonus as well, but it was long ago “paid for” by convenience and time savings.
Even for those non-professional uses it's probably better to put the PDF on a flash drive, walk into Staples and print it on their machines. [...] I'm just not convinced that having the ability to print in color at home is worth the huge expense in ink cartridges or in a color laser printer.
Depends on how much you value your time. I would happily pay a bit more if it saves me 100+ trips to a copy shop over the lifetime of a printer.
Besides that, ink tank printers like Epson EcoTank printers are really cheap per print because they do not use cartridges. E.g., an EcoTank all-color refill is 40 Euro and prints up to 4000 black & white and 7500 color pages.
> ... put the PDF on a flash drive, walk into Staples and print it on their machines.
In Japan, you can do the same thing on the multifunction printer/copiers that most convenience stores have. You can also upload the files in advance, so you don’t even need a flash drive [1 (English), 2 (Japanese)]. There are several such stores within a five-minute walk from my home in Yokohama. I do most of my printing there, though I do avoid them for confidential documents.
It is not reasonable to drive 20 minutes there and back every time I need something printed. Colour printers are extremely useful, and I'm unlikely to go back to a monochrome one anytime soon.
Flash drive is entirely unnecessary and, honestly, sounds like a pain. You can simply email your print jobs to Staples.
However, the couple times I've printed at Staples I've had to wait in line - there's only a couple printers and I had to wait for other people to finish printing.
> The article is right: if all you are ever going to do is print your taxes and financial documents once a year, a ~$100 monochrome laser printer is fine.
$100? I've got a xerox phaser 3140 that I got off the returns table at a major store chain 10 years ago here in SA for 350 ZAR (about 25 USD). I've printed enough to exhaust the toner twice.
The problem with color laser printers (at least from Brother) is that the lifespan of a bunch of the parts is quite a bit lower than for the mono printers (lower as in 1/4 to 1/3 the life), and in some cases you need to replace them in sets of 4.
My home color laser came from a client that replaced it with a mono multifunction - they rarely used color, but it was overdue for replacement of all 4 color drums and leaves a streak down the very edge of the paper. Replacing the parts just didn't make sense, so it got "recycled" to me instead.
I have the same printer. Sometimes it randomly locks up. And disappears from the network (ethernet, wifi is off).
Otherwise it is precise enough for me to toner transfer masks to manufacture little PCBs with traces of 0.2mm. And with colors I can print in green to make a poor's man solder mask and silkscreen.
> if all you are ever going to do is print your taxes and financial documents once a year
I get that you’re making a point about printers being rarely used.
The exact detail though - are there places where printing of your tax documents is still required and they can’t be digital?
I file electronically but prefer to keep a printed copy of my returns. They go into the same manila envelope that collects my receipts and tax forms throughout the year and then gets filed away until I need to refer to it.
Filling out my kid's FAFSA this year was much easier with hard copy of my tax return rather than bouncing back and forth to a PDF. Maybe I'm just old.
I print off my receipts and other schedules to hand off to my preparer (who does not accept outside PDFs from a security angle). The actual filings are digital, but the intermediate are paper.
+1 to the wifi. But without it, I've got a Google Wifi extender puck that has an ethernet port on it that can act as a wifi bridge. The puck is velcro'd to the laser printer so it will always be on the network. This has worked well for us for a few years.
Modern Powerline Ethernet adapters are really decent these days, and can even come with Wifi bridges/repeaters built in that can either replace, or 'mesh' with your router's wifi.
I re-did the home network at a relative's place early this year when also replacing the laptop.
Zero regrets. All the fixed devices now have either an eithernet port right near them, or good wifi signal. The devices that had flaky wifi were now meters from a wifi AP. Better still, it didn't take up any more power points as they all had pass-through power support. So plugged in behind the TV, and bedside tables and lamps.
Powerline ethernet adapters have always depended very heavily on how the power is laid out in your home (and things like "noise") They can't, for example, jump breakers well.
So YMMV, but in my experience they haven't improved much if at all, the only thing that could have changed is your placement, the noise on the lines or your home.
I'm comparing against three different generations (and brands).
A very early powerline adapter that was I think 100Mbit, back in around 2004-2006 I think - it basically didn't work at all, and I got rid of it.
In ~2017 a new set top box came with a pair, but much smaller and sleeker. They worked out of the box, but did need to be powered off and on every month or two.
These new ones, they plugged right in, they delivered 800-900Mbit through iperf3, and the wifi thing, once configured with the right SSID and Password, worked great, and have been stable for about 6 months now.
This is all in the same house, and no major rewiring or renovations have taken place, and using the same sockets. The new deployment included additional sockets in other rooms since it worked so well.
I would never buy something else than a laser printer again.
The alternatives are unreliable junks with gold priced cartridges that will dry on you at the sightless neglect. The machine will find a way to end up breaking, jamming or printing garbage at some point anyway, after what you end up buying the new one in a moment of panic, which again lasts barely the honeymoon period.
But then, one day I decided to suck up the buying price, and went laser. My brother too. Since then, every page prints, fast, clear, like the first one. No jam, no breaking, just printing. And so many pages, like the cartridge could never end.
One day though it did, so I prepared to bleed to death again, except it was $10 on amazon.
I wish I could take a time machine and sing to my young self the gospel of laser printers.
* From CMD+P to page rolling out of the printer is less than 5 seconds
* It prints on anything you can imagine and scans from anything too. Duplex, envelopes, photo paper, weird formats etc.
* No jams. No confusing setup. No dingy and confusing on screen menu but a good small touch screen.
* It takes 4 separate CMYK cartridges so you can replace a color at a time. 3000 BW prints for €30 (€0,01 per page). Color cartridges good for 2000 pages go for €20.
Concluding, laser printers have obvious benefits for certain printing use cases. No discussion here. But please do not conflate the butchering and crappyfication of inkjet printing by HP and Canon with inkjet being slow/annoying/expensive/useless in general.
> I would never buy something else than a laser printer again.
I rarely print anything, but when I do it's things like the entire GDPR. Fully agreed!
No more switching it on after a year wondering if the heads will be able to clean themselves or if they're just completely caked in dry ink and a write-off. Just fire it up, print.
Of course the initial setup was a pain in the arse, it is still a printer after all, but as printers go it's been the least painful printer I've ever had (for ref its a Brother HL-1210W I've got)
Just want to add another advice for “brother” as well as any other brand laser printers.
If your printer says it cant print any more as the ink is gone, just go search
to internet to find how to reset the cartridge counter, and then the same (wink) “empty” cartridge will print for another couple 100 to 1000 sheets of paper.
For me that meant 3 more years of printing and still going on reportedly “empty” cartridges.
What These companies are doing is criminal and no different than dieselgate. Mis-reporting wrongly to throw cartridges to landfills.
Wow, thanks a lot, didn't know this. I've been forced to buy cartridges as I run out of ink way every few months, don't think the black HP cartridges today even last the promised 500 pages, they can literally configure it to their whim.
Funny, I bought a Brother HL-1240 for $15 off of Craigslist five years ago and it’s still going strong. Couldn’t be happier. So much so that I bought a USB-Ethernet adapter (https://www.iogear.com/product/GPSU21/) to avoid having to upgrade to a newer model with Ethernet/WiFi included.
In the last five years I have printed a few hundred pages, experienced <5 paper jams, and spent $0 on ink. (The guy I bought the printer from threw in a toner cartridge for free. But I’m still on the original cartridge.)
I bought my HL-1240 ages ago, and printed thousands and thousands of pages before it finally died. I bought a newer model Brother, and have so far been equally happy, printing at the same rate.
I have a Brother printer without duplex printing. I kick myself basically every time I need to print because I almost always need to manually flip/reinsert.
I dream of the day that my printer will die and I can buy a new Brother monochrome laser printer with duplex, but it's been over a decade and I'm pretty sure this motherfucker will outlive me.
(it's also USB only, no ethernet/wifi/bluetooth and ... I dunno what BRScript is. These aren't issues for me because it's plugged into my media server which handles all the networking stuff.)
Please forgive me for the brash and commanding tone of the unsolicited advice, but: Sell it!! Get one that has duplex. Someone else will love your non-duplex printer just like it is. Duplex is so absolutely and completely worth having if one is so inclined.
I generally agree, though I personally stopped caring and learned to love my non-Duplex Brother.
We've all been conditioned to believe the bullshit about saving the trees, despite the reality being, paper manufacturing is very efficient and mostly uses its own specially-grown trees these days; plus, a typical office worker in a bank will print more paper a day than you'll use in a year. Point being, you aren't killing the planet by printing one-sided vs. duplex. The use of ink or toner is the same.
So I don't mind anymore. I do occasional manual duplexing for convenience or out of courtesy (e.g. when printing contracts), otherwise I print single-sided, and keep the prints around after they've served their purpose. I have a small stack of one-sided prints which find their second life as source paper for further non-critical prints, or as drawing paper for my daughter.
Ah, makes sense – I am just now becoming aware of the fact that practically speaking, I print duplex only because it … reads nicer? The printed product is lighter and smaller and easier to staple, and feels like a book. For me the effect is like a “cleaner workspace” for reading.
I’m sure this varies between people. (Incidentally, it seems that individual variety is most clearly represented in abstract activity. As an example, we all learn mathematics in our individual way. And reading is highly abstract! And what matters for reading efficiency probably varies a great deal from person to person.)
To be clear - I find duplex prints more convenient to handle too :). If I were in a market for a new printer, I'd go for duplex now. But I have a perfectly fine Brother laser printer, and it turns out that single-sided prints are not big enough of an issue to me to justify the effort of selling it and getting a new one.
Same, except: Get a HP color laser printer that does duplex printing.
(“Duplex”. Funny word. It seems to be latin for “can slurp the paper back into itself to flip it and print on both sides of the page”.)
In all earnestness, I am 100% convinced that yours is the best possible printer advice for many people! Maybe the majority?
People like me might have the competitive disadvantage of lower reading speed of black-and-white-only text and figures. Or the capacity to employ color for faster ingestion? For people who find that they benefit from readig in color, I emphatically recommend getting a color laser printer. With duplex printing.
Specifically, the HP M254dw has been excellent. I followed online recommendations for it. It has been bulletproof. As a detail, printing on it in macOS seems nicer and smoother compared to the Brother printers I’ve used. iirc Linux printing just worked.
Color has been worth having. For example, there are more and more computer science papers that have colored syntax in the typeset PDF. Printing these to a keel-stapled full-color book using the Booklet layout option in macOS is magic. It’s just great. I read a lot more papers with the capacity to print them like this instantly and on demand. Reading retention is better. Scribbling notes on the margin is magic too. And the little books make great gifts.
—For the keel stapling, there are “long-arm staplers”. I believe they’re also called “lawyer’s staplers” or something like that? I got a Zenith 502 cucitrici da tavolo per cucire con precisione lungo la piega fogli piegati a quaderno. It’s a little Italian tank. It’s great! Beautifully designed. https://www.zenith.it/prodotti/cucitrici-da-tavolo/zenith-50...
They say you can’t buy happiness. I hold that it can be. It’s just not a given. You can’t just buy … anything. Certainly, a duplex color laser and a good long-arm stapler have brought me a measure of happiness.
My last HP colour laser was a nightmare. It cost a fortune to run and was unreliable. The mono Brother I replaced it with has never missed a beat in the ten years I have owned it.
uh-oh – I hope mine is different! And generally, I hope that we as a society can build some form of composable structure for gathering and discovering objective information about how to live efficently. So we can stop having to waste resources on individually discovering one bad printer after the other in an uninteresting and dreary process.
I agree, I read a lot more papers when I print them off. Thanks for the advice about the color printer - I also find my comprehension better that way. I've saved your recommendation for when I next am looking to buy a new printer.
In Japan virtually every convenience store has a self service printer (¥10/page for monochrome).
For the cheap inkjets mentioned in the article, it’s even worse than the author states. I know people that think they are getting a deal buy buying a new printer every time they run out of ink because it’s “cheaper.”
Japan, and particularly Tokyo is special. Apartments are mainly glorified cupboards so most people will prefer to print out than dedicate precious space to an only occasionally used device like a printer.
+1, brother dcp-1512 which I got because it was cheaper than buying just the black ink cartridge for the HP inkjet it replaced. It’s hooked up to an old thinkpad and set up so we can AirPrint to it from our phones. Including one toner cartridge it’s probably cost under 70 bucks for 5 years of service.
People knock inkjets but I've loved my Brother inkjet. Finding cheap ink is not a problem; Amazon has knockoffs for cheap. And in spite of what others do I gladly print color at home for random purposes. Sometimes for a family gift, other times for kid projects or hobby stuff. Printing color on photo paper produces great results.
I also enjoy using WiFi. It makes printing with a laptop less of hassle and gives you flexibility with where the printer resides.
>People knock inkjets but I've loved my Brother inkjet
Brother are definitely the least scummy printer manufacturer by a country mile. Everyone I know with a Brother has always been pleasantly surprised by the quality, support (both my 2004 label printer and 2009 colour laser still get software updates!) and cost of supplies. Unfortunately, the Canons and HPs are definitely the most popular...
Agreed - my brother HL-L2375DW monochrome laser works great with Pop!_OS (based on Ubuntu). I print over wifi due to lack of desk space and it is pretty much plug and play - I turn it on and within few seconds it is available as a printer in the print dialog. I am not a heavy user + I set it to toner-saving settings so still using the original cartridge it came with (bought in Aug 2019).
+1. I have a Brother HL-5250 that's 15 years old. I think I paid $250 for it, but it has to be one of the best pieces of technology I've ever bought. It's been a while since I looked at its internal counters but it probably has printed close to 50k pages. The printer itself is still 100%. About 5 years ago something gave out in the paper tray and it stopped feeding correctly, but these days I don't print more than a couple times a year so I just load paper manually in the front tray.
Workhorses, I've seen one last until something well over 200,000 pages though it sounded terrible towards the end. When pricing them vs something like HP printers that take a maintenance kit, just figure the replacement cost of the printer IS the "maintenance kit" to replace worn parts.
Since I got a WiFi printer (Brother), I print 99% of things straight from my phone, and no longer procrastinate printing stuff because I'd have to boot the laptop, find the cable, log in to download the document etc.
This is good advice. Laser printer cartridges for office printers last a long time and are priced as a minor (but infrequent) consumable.
Now, if you live in Tibet, have kids who need full-colour printing at 2am, or can't afford biscuits let alone printing supplies - then you know that. Quite why there's a pile-on to diss the advice is beyond me! Particularly the 'not outside US' crowd. Come on! HN has an obvious US bias and it's not interesting to be told that.
By all means let's hear alternative advice, but be interesting.
Apologies for the off-topic. As an info-nugget to compensate, I'm very happy with my HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M281fdw so that may be a good alternative for those who know they need colour. Its drivers (via HPLIP) work well with Ubuntu Linux, including the excellent scanner; the latter has proven to be extremely useful for both mundane form scanning and family photographs (where the colour reproduction is far more faithful than the handful of other scanners I had tried).
Years ago I bought a Epson WP4515 printer/scanner. It had Ethernet and no WiFi but it had to sit just by the PC so it wasn't an hassle back then. One day however I had to move things around and it would suddenly need a long cable to connect to the nearest Ethernet switch.
Fortunately I had at hand a bunch of TpLink TL-MR3020 mini routers I had bought literally for coins at a flea market because I knew they support OpenWRT, so I grabbed one, installed OpenWRT and set it up to bridge the Ethernet input to my home WiFi, and bingo, the device was online without cables. If anyone is interested, those small routers are sold as 3/4G routers for being able to host a 3/4G dongle modem in their USB port but actually they contain no mobile modem, they just have 2.4GHz WiFi, one Ethernet port, one USB port. They are also ridiculously limited in HW capabilities, RAM and storage, etc, however they can run old OpenWRT versions, which makes them good for that use.
I mean, if you can just hook it up to wired Ethernet you can do the same thing. My Brother MFC-3770CDW only supports 2.4GHz which is hella unreliable, so I run Ethernet to my switch instead and still can use network printing (including AirPrint from my iOS devices) everywhere in the house.
P.S. not all Brother printers have reasonable running costs - my MFC-3770CDW is outrageously expensive for consumables because it had a lower price tag than their higher end color laser MFCs. I needed a printer in a hurry because my old Brother Inkjet died and the better models weren’t readily available at the start of the pandemic, and it’s still cheaper than ink, but so make sure you do your research even with commonly trusted brands.
The point is not to buy a printer with only ethernet. But it should also have ethernet as fallback. I would recommend the same, now that my printer can't connect to any wifi anymore for whatever reason, but it works again since I connected an old wifi repeater via ethernet.
My wife started her PhD program a few years ago and printed nearly all of her resources on our inkjet printer at the time - only to recycle all of it after the class was completed. We were spending ridiculous amounts of money and constantly going out to buy the darn cartridges. I don’t know why, but I had completely forgotten about laser printers, then one day I suddenly remembered from my childhood school days that everyone used laser printers, did some research, and bought one. The cost was more than triple that of a decent inkjet, but nearly three years later, and she has only had to buy maybe two toner cartridges and the darn thing is extremely reliable. Personally I wish she didn’t have to print so much, but it helps her quickly annotate, locate, and visualize large amounts of literature.
I followed this advice right after the last time I spent 20 minutes having an ink-jet printer clean its nozzles thrice before I could print one sheet of monochrome text. I print infrequently enough that the nozzles would often dry up and get clogged.
It had been so long since I looked at laser printers, I didn't realize their prices had become so affordable for home/personal use.
Now, when I print something, I know it'll "just work", and that the text will be crisp and legible every time, with no banding and wasted paper.
Plus, it's so much faster.
The cost and reliability of toner vs ink is one thing... but the lack of stress surrounding the occasional small print job at home? As stated by a much-parodied ad campaign, "priceless"!
(Edit: and I still have 60% capacity in the complimentary toner cartridge it came with!)
Question, what's the deal with the toner cartridges plastic? It looks like a lot of thick plastic. I get to buy a new one and throw the old one, or refill one with the "not recommended non-original toner".
Does the manufacturer offer some other environment friendly option?
It's good to know. Unfortunately, in Uruguay we're not part of the 28 countries where Brother has recycling in place [1]. And I don't think we get any real alternative except for rogue refilling of the cartridges, or just recycle it as regular plastic waste.
Still, I consider having recycling in 28 countries to be pretty good.
I’m pretty happy to get a brother colour laser printer for $300 I think because printing in colour when you want is great for kids homework and creative play, while being a good workhorse otherwise. My regret is the flatbed scanner I’d prefer one that can feed a few pages for me.
For colour printing, I found an Epson EcoTank on Gumtree that a local business was giving away for free, having found the process of replacing ink too tedious. For those who don't know, the EcoTank line don't use cartridges in the traditional sense, you just pour ink directly into tanks on the printer. It's a bit of a hassle to fill compared to just putting cartridges in, but for just printing stuff off for around the house, it's worked out so much cheaper for me so far. Plus there's no worry about proprietary cartridges being discontinued in the future. If you can find one for free/cheap, I'd say go for it :)
This is my exact advice (minus the duplex, ethernet, and brscript) and my friends are tired of hearing it. My HL-2170W from... 2008? is still going strong. I just spent $20 on THREE 2600 page refilled toner cartridges. The printer itself was free, and I had to put a drum in it once (which was the reason it was free).
I second your advice but disagree on the WiFi point: there's a solid convenience aspect to anyone in the house being able to hit print on their phone with no further work. Guests can print boarding passes without asking, kids can print from their iPads, etc. with zero friction.
Why do you recommend BRScript/3? I'm not disagreeing, just unfamiliar with different print drivers. I did find a page on Brother's website [1], but it says the advantages of BRScript/3 are mainly related to color graphics.
Years ago the boss at the time wanted to do printing in a very dusty environment (stone, nothing flammable), specialist printers where expensive - my suggestion, buy a decent cheap brother printer and replace it when it died.
They where still using them when I left years later.
This is about the worst environment imaginable outside of trying to destroy them, a steel cabinet in an old workshop that wasn't really sealed from the elements where they where sandblasting stone and they just kept kicking.
My problem with laser combos (printer + scanner) is that they are >50% larger than an inkjet with same features. Inkjet is just the right height where you can use it on a shelf/desk and it won't be unbearable + you can stack some stuff on top.
WiFi kind of helps but still not a fan of having a giant box around for something that I rarely use (but still need often enough to justify owning)
If WiFi printing is essential, then add it to your personal list of desired features. The point of the original feature list is to point out things that will save you money. The point of the anti-feature list is to point out things that vendors typically add-on to make their product more enticing yet don't necessarily add value.
Take WiFi printing. The typical WiFi router has ethernet ports. In that case a printer with an ethernet port is WiFi accessible, is typically easier to setup to be WiFi accessible, and is indirectly upgradable when WiFi security standards change. (The latter is important if a printer lasts 10+ years.)
It is also important to note the original desirable feature list can be modified. PCL emulation, rather than PS emulation, is typically fine. The point is to avoid printers where the drivers are vendor/model specific. USB only or USB/WiFi is fine, as long as you realize that network printing requires (or, at some future point, will require) setting up a print server.
Edit: also, I cringe slightly at the Brother recommendation. I use their printers and only have good things to say about them. Yet the important thing is to avoid the games many vendors play. There may be other vendors who don't play games. More important, there is nothing preventing Brother from playing games in the future.
The printer doesn't need wifi if it's connected to a network bridged with a wifi ap, like nearly every soho router/ap combo or isp-provided modem/router/ap combo is by default.
I wonder if I can get one of those that can also print A3-like sizes. When I last went printer shopping, there was a vastly wider gap between standard and wide-format prices for laser printers than for inkjets.
Why use such large paper? Printing off the occasional orchestral score.
I went for a massive Xerox Versalink for the same reason - it's not disposable garbage, the toner lasts an insane amount of time, and as long as you buy at least one toner cartridge a year you extend the onsite(!!!) warranty indefinitely.
AirPrint is a must for me. I do not maintain a dedicated desk. I leave the printer on an end table in one room of the house and I work from all over the place. AirPrint allows me to print from any of my devices from anywhere inside my house.
I've had the same black/white HP LaserJet 4000 with ethernet for close to 20 years, and it has been an amazing beast of a printer. Never needed anything else.
We have had the same Okidata led printer for almost a decade. Similar philosophy though. It’s a joy to use and works with Linux out of the box. Networked, etc.
I have a Brother HL-L2380DW. It's a basic monochrome laser with duplex and WiFi. Setting it up was easier than any of my prior laser-jet printers (Canon, HP, both of which always had flaky software and drivers). My iOS devices print to it without any config - it just appears as an available printer and does its job.
> Unless there’s a way to make it work like normal printer does, eg with AirPlay?
It wasn't your distant forefathers in their "brutish, short, and dark" lives, nor even your own boomer parents in the hilarious 1970s, but people alive and walking among us even now (your boss, your children's school principal, your next-door neighbour...) who once upon a time -- not even all that long ago, actually right here in this same century we're living in now! -- regarded occasionally connecting and disconnecting an Ethernet or USB cable not as some freakishly onerous imposition but actually rather "normal".
There should be a law that states for any subscription product I should be allowed to buy a fixed-term version with no auto-renewal. In the past two days I've had the following experiences:
* Wanted to buy a Font Awesome "Pro" license for their icons. The only way to do this is a 99/year subscription. Reading the fine print says that I can buy it and cancel it the next day and still have lifetime access to the version at the time of my purchase. Why make me jump through the hoops?
* I wanted to support a writer on Substack by subscribing for a year. But I can't, I can only start a perpetual sub. So I subbed and canceled 1 day later. Then I got a "why did you cancel?" email. I didn't really
* I saw a cool open source project I liked and wanted to donate. They only had a Patreon link. Patreon only has recurring subs. So I had to email them and ask for their PayPal so I could send them $100.
I really wonder how much of SaaS revenue is people who have forgotten to cancel. I would guess 25% industry-wide.
In similar cases (me not wanting to recurring payment to happen) I just create a new virtual credit card in Revolut and dispose it right after purchase.
Passing a physical credit card info to services is like giving them universal key to my house. After some years I don't know who does have a key to my house, and I'm just living with fear that someday I find an empty house.
We subscribe to a local CSA as well [1]. We chose to pick it up about a ten minute drive away rather than have it delivered. But we collect it in re-usable cloth bags so there's nothing disposable or recyclable. It's just food, and the trimmings all go in the compost.
I highly recommend it to everyone. I get incredibly excited when I pick it up; I feel pretty ridiculous to be honest. But the food is so much fresher and more flavorful than what's in the grocery store, it's relatively cheap, and it's environmentally friendly. It's nice to know our groceries are coming from a farm just outside the city, not from a barge that crossed the ocean. The only problem is that living in Canada, it only runs for 17 weeks since the ground is frozen the rest of the year :(
As I understand it, your typical CSA is a fairly light organization that works with a handful of local farms. Some seem to be a single farm's retail arm.
So, yes! A CSA could absolutely consider aquaponics, hydroponics, or vertical farming. Indeed I suspect many farmers have considered precisely these things. Taking a wild guess, I would speculate that there are questions of capital at work here. Every successful urban hydroponic farm I've seen or read about to date has focused on high-value, crops used in small quantities where freshness is at a premium. Herbs, spices, and similar flavorings or luxuries.
For other things, it still seems to be the case that shipping in apples or avocados or ground wheat from thousands of miles away is cheaper than trying to grow them in a repurposed office building in a city center. Plus there's likely a non-zero cost to acquiring, repurposing, and providing ongoing resources (electricity, water, nutrients, etc.) to this brand new vertical farm.
Again, you're absolutely right. Those are all things a local CSA could consider! It's perhaps possible that that consideration has been taking place carefully, deliberately, and with financial calculations at hand for something like eighty years now. Or perhaps I severely and deeply misunderstand the resources a typical local CSA commands.
Not sure where in the world you are, but Sprouts in the US sells milk in glass bottles. You pay a fee, and you get that back when you return the glass bottle the next time you come in to buy more milk.
It's not delivery, but it's a whole lot better for the world than more plastic.
Danzeisen Dairy is available in Phoenix at various grocery stores. I do wonder what the fuel consequences are for the additional weight. It would be ironic if the fuel consequences are more than the plastic they could be in.
I don't think reusable milk bottles and subscription vs product are linked together. There is no reason why a van couldn't deliver plastic milk bottles and there is no reason why a supermarket couldn't take a deposit for returned glass milk bottles. Supermarkets already do this, many will take back used sodastream CO2 canisters for a discount on the replacement.
It just happens that these two changes happened at the same time. Plastic is cheaper than glass so glass milk bottles went out but compressed gasses can not be stored in a cheap plastic container.
I’m pretty sure the deposit on the canisters is at least 4 EUR, and no one who is taking the trouble to fizz their own water and get replacements at the service desk would just chuck an empty one.
No problem, I got that it was stores you meant. What I don't get is what customers do if they once get a canister from them: Now they have two. Can they return the extra for a refund in stead of replacement, at one of the "normal" places that does receive used ones? Or are they stuck with two canisters for ever more?
Up until the mid-1970s in the US, sodas were often sold in eight-packs of thick glass pint* bottles, returnable for deposit at the store. The delivery trucks picked up the returned bottles and took them to the bottling plant, where they were washed and reused. Coca-Cola bottles were famous for being stamped on the bottom with their originating bottling plant.
Then came the thin-wall non-returnable glass bottles, followed quickly by plastic. I don't think it was an improvement.
It was undercut by supermarkets. In the transitional years when milk float services were still around, they were the more expensive option.
Refrigeration makes sense as the underlying driver - freshness and locality became less important. Then the supermarkets didn't have the cost of the distribution network, and exercised more centralised buying power on the suppliers.
You're going to the supermarket or having the groceries delivered anyway, so at that point it's easier for most people to have control at purchase time over quantity and expiry dates etc.
Also the usual issues with delivering to apartments and other such living accommodation.
My guess would be the rise of supermarkets. Newsagents, post offices, grocers, sweet shops I suspect have been decimated by supermarkets and more people with cars to get to them.
Staples-as-a-Service. I would totally buy that service vs overpriced meal boxes or on-demand grocery delivery. An app could be used to coordinate your order/inventory levels, and a reusable cooler could sit on your porch or lobby for exchange and temp storage. Pop a cheap tracker and lock in it if piracy is an issue. There are major efficiencies associated with route delivery vs on-demand ordering- pick&pack in batches, delivery in batches, consistent staffing needs, etc. somebody should pitch this for Winter 2022!
Nit: Theft may be a more accurate term than piracy.
Arrrr, through my spyglass I did sight a hearty meal on thy dock, and being as I am a ravenous, immoral beast I bent my sails against the wind to secure it as my prize.
But thwarted I were by a hidden RFID and three days hence arrested by a regiment of dirty british redcoats. But, upon mine hanging, my belly were full and thine empty.
Porch pirates are a scourge of the seven streets to be sure... RFID is no match, but GPS + Cell could finally bring justice to these shores.
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000235765025.html
That plus a little lock system might just do it, but at some point its cheaper just to redeliver stuff than worry about reusable containers being stolen, especially when you have to figure out how to power the damn thing and get a ton of cheap SIMs+plans.
I know there's already Imperfect Foods, which uses a route delivery model rather than traditional shipping. I haven't tried them, but I'm considering signing up.
...until you realize that having a dedicated truck driving around delivering milk is probably going to cause as much oil usage (if not more) than picking up a plastic jug of milk on your weekly shopping trip.
Right but what's the ratio of people making dedicated trips for milk vs people who buy it with their other groceries? I'd think most people plan ahead to avoid dedicated trips, but that's just based off my experience.
It's hard to keep milk and bread fresh as long as other things, so you don't buy as much in advance, and therefore run out sooner.
I can buy several weeks of stuff in advance, but not several weeks of milk and bread, or it'll expire, especially bread without many preservatives in certain climates.
Nevermind the fact that a lot of people live in an on-demand, last-minute world. A lot of people do a lot of things last-minute, so that's a contributing factor in this equation, too.
As someone who hates making frequent grocery trips and drinks milk too intermittently to ever finish a normal bottle before it goes bad, I highly recommend buying UHT (Ultra High Temperature) pasteurized milk which does actually often have 3+ week shelf life. In the US, typically the organic brands are all UHT since they often come from farther away and need longer shelf life, but some of the cheap brands like Hood also do it.
>I can buy several weeks of stuff in advance, but not several weeks of milk and bread, or it'll expire
You also forgot: meat, vegetables, fruit
If anything those expire sooner than milk and bread (at least judging by the best before dates), so I'll need to go to the supermarket to buy those before I need to buy milk/bread.
It's pretty common for shoppers to do one large weekly shop, and a second smaller 'top-up shop'
Of course, you can do things like freeze bread - but if you're going into the store for milk anyway, you might as well pick up some fresh bread / bananas / avocados while you're there.
Another side of the coin, the cow milk production obliterates any savings on transport of the milk to the consumer. It's one of the most energy intensive ways to produce food. (impregnating the cow every year, feeding the cow to support more than 7 gallons of milk a day, creating insane externalities by mishandling cow poo).
Hardly. Delivery often beats out random one off trips in economies of scale. Even assuming it’s not an EV (see below), the fact that the truck engine is warmed up will alone beat out your typical short trip to the shops.
Milk delivery could work some years ago, but today there are so many options that it would be a problem. Not saying impossible, but near. And added costs.
I'm currently buying whole and lactose-free whole (this is surprinsigly hard to find). In the market you have skim, semi and whole; cow, goat and sheep; with and without lactose; organic and non organic. And then different enrichments, brands and even added flavours, that are more marketing than reality, but they work.
People has to go to the market anyway, so it's just more convenient to buy 30 litres of your brand-semi-lactofree-uht for the month than to rely on the delivery.
Here in eastern Canada milk is often offered in bags.
I know bags use a great deal less plastic and probably are easier on the environment shipping wise but they are also not recyclable.
I have seen some examples on the internet where you can refill shampoo/cleaning liquid from a dispenser into your own container. I think it would be cool if that could be done for a number of products that are liquid into a standardized glass container. That way shipping would be more efficient and users could use whatever type of container they want.
I think we should have every company use a standard, probably plastic, container based on product lines. Takeaway food containers are almost standardised and can be used for 100s of uses and only appear to use about 5 times the plastic. You'd send them back to the store they'd wash them and reuse them.
Require reusable packaging.
Also, all suppliers would have to take back any packaging they distribute - use the supply chain in reverse.
My position is that plastics are not evil, lack of reuse is where the malevolence lies.
There was some scandal here in Australia recently where we discovered our plastics were all getting bundled up and shipped to China. I think it came out because China stopped accepting it. I don't think any of it was getting recycled at all.
Update: After doing some reading to jog my memory. China stopped buying it so there was oversupply here in Australia, so the price plummeted, so it was not economical to do anything with it, so I believe it was stockpiled.
Same thing for the US as well: China stopped importing trash, so we just started chucking ours into landfills, which isn't a great way to keep people motivated about recycling.
In order for us to start building things to last, there are a number of things that would need to happen first. We're pretty much at the mercy of the companies who have integrated the manufacturing of plastics into their supply chain. There's no doubt that they've optimized their own individual cost-benefit ratios as much as possible, which involves externalizing costs as much as possible. It's not purely due to greed, which is unfortunately a super common and super facile take; rather, they have to get all their shit as efficient as possible (privately, not socially) in order to remain competitive. Capitalism forces participants in the market to be continually improving in order to remain competitive; unfortunately, offloading costs onto the environment is a great way to do this, which has absolutely disasterous effects at global scale.
Our options are 1) to change the market conditions through state regulation, but that only works at the national level. 2) We can impose tariffs to try to incentivize our overseas trade partners into changing their behavior, but they're also free to shop elsewhere where there are no such "barriers to free trade" (in addition, we'd also be incentivizing overseas governments and companies to compete with each other for who can take the most environmental waste the cheapest, which ultimately does absolutely nothing to solve the problem). 3) Instead of changing the economics from the top down, we could look to bottom up solutions (with perhaps some help from government). If companies who use unrecyclable plastics were required to clearly mark their packaging as such - say, requiring plastic bottles of Sprite to have a conspicuous red ring around the neck (obviously NOT made of unrecyclable plastic), this would impose minimal additional cost, but it would contribute to consumer awareness by introducing the public to a semiotics of environmental consequences - THIS bottle is going to end up in a landfill. It's recyclable, but it won't get recycled, because no one wants your trash. Competitors, seeing a market opportunity, would be incentivized to explore a shift to "green" packaging, distinguishing their brand as well as their individual products from the wasteful stuff. (Superficially, it looks to be the same approach as mandating cigarette packaging to show photos of lungs filled with pulmonic phlegm-cheese in order to get consumers to think twice. However, from my experience, smokers are aware of the joys of emphysema, but it's damage they're doing to themselves, so there's not really that much disgust or shame. Moreover, cigarette warnings suffer from too much abstraction: yeah, cigarettes cause cancer, but the impact of this pack is not quantifiable, and plus, I can easily displace any feeling of responsibility, because I can always quit later. Compare to the real-time insight that this bottle before me is offering ten minutes of bubbly enjoyment but will go on to hang around on our planet as absolutely useless plastic somewhere for a thousand years immediately after the consumption of its contents in one of our designated waste dumps we pretend aren't a problem growing worse alarmingly quickly … it’s much more cognitively salient when the negative consequences being signified are nearly certain, the signifier pointing to it is not an amorphous type of behavior, but an individual observable token, and the nature of the connection between the two is indexical, i.e. a physical, direct cause/effect relation between signifier and signified.
I was going to go on about Dosenpfand in Germany - the deposit you pay on cans is high to incentivize consumers to recycle them to get their deposit back, but due to the inconvenience of having to return them to the store to get it, plastic bottles of beer (kein Scheiß) have become an attractive alternative to some consumers. But I should actually be working for the man right now ….
Not sure if this is what you mean, but redemption systems are where you are just getting your own money back. Nobody is really paying you.
Maybe there are some places that pay for the plastic itself, but I would imagine they are more picky. Or the government is paying them as part of some misguided scheme.
I don't mean redemption systems. Where I live, recycling centers pay for used plastic in bulk. We bag up a variety of plastic and take it to them. They don't pay a lot, but they do pay, and I wonder where they get the money.
I got one too, so I found out which site was giving the ads, then created a script to do all kinds of invalid traffic on their port. Every hour or so I do 20 malformed HTTP requests on the ad server, after which their firewall locks me out for the rest of the day. The TV traffic gets locked out too as it shares my IP address. Presumably I violate some laws in some country on the other side of the planet, but as I don't respect shariah law I already did that anyway ;-)
I only get non-animated mostly black ads for a product named timeout now.
Sometimes I want to write an ad blocker that actually goes on the offence. Every time it blocks an ad, it should download a few hundred megs of ads from the offending server and drop them in the ethernal bitbucket in the sky. It would either cost them money or get me banned from seeing ads, both are fine by me. Then drop it in an app store, get a few thousand users, and see them squirm. I'd call it Do Not Track, with a mind diseasing number of exclamation marks after it.
Alas, this would probably violate some real laws, plus messing with shady businesses might make them search out other than legal means for getting redress. At the very least, Baron Google would banish me from their land.
Wow. Mind blowing. I am real big on the never give my TV WiFi password but just recently bought a new TV. It’s been getting firmware updates and I could not figure out how. Got the latest HDMI 2.1 for the XBox.
It seems blocking/removing Pin 14 or cutting the wire should work [1] So yes, a simple passive HDMI ethernet filter should be possible. You can also buy cables without ethernet, but then you also need do verify it actually isn't present.
I knew ethernet was in the spec, but this is the first time I heard it actually works.
Excellent point. I returned the TV and stuck with my old one, but now I wish I still had it so that I could test this. This seems like the perfect solution.
Can't you configure the ROKU to not create the bridge interface or whatnot to the HDMI? Or doesn't it give that kind of control and will just connect no matter what?
It's much more likely that your TV either has some ads preloaded or it just joining an open WiFi network. While Ethernet is part of the HDMI standard, no products were ever released that support it.
TVs, I'm crossing my fingers my new Sony (android) delivered soon lets me turn off all the ads. My old Sony (also android) did. You have to turn off notifications for every app. and, given android's tons of little applets it can take a while to turn them all off manually with the remote. Maybe someone who knows android better can tell me some magic shell script that will turn them all off.
I could also replace the home screen/launcher with another. I tried it and got it to work, forgot why I stopped using it though.
As for Adobe, there are plenty of apps that will open adobe formats. Certainly Photoshop and Illustrator. It's possible you'll lose access to some features though. I agree, it feels like extortion.
They used to have to create features I want to entice me to upgrade. I upgraded photoshop about once every 4 years for $200. Now it's $120 a year so more then 4x the cost and I haven't seen a feature I cared about in over a decade at least except (1) updating to new OS versions and (2) HEIC support, which under the old plan I would have happily paid for the upgrade. It's not a tool I use daily though. If it was might feel less bad. My artists friends all seem to be fine with the price tho.
Semi-Off-Topic but related to Opex vs Capex: One of the weird aspects of Japanese tax law is the Capital Assets tax.
Every year your local city taxes any capital goods at 1.5%. What is a capital good? Anything which takes multiple years to deduct. A couple examples: Cars, Machines, Factories. A couple odd examples: desks, chairs, TV, elevators.
In the past other first world countries had such capital goods taxes but removed them. It seems so counter intuitive to punish companies for building capital. After all capital and acculumation of capital is what pushes productivity.
I suspect it, as so many other aspects of Japanese tax law, is about solving perverse incentives: no one goes around misclassifying opex as capex when there is a capex tax...
My US county (Wake County, NC) has such a tax... worse even.
Each year I have to catalog every pencil, pen, paperclip and ream of paper in my office. The desk, tables, shelves, printer ink, bottle of windex, each of my books, even individual USB cables all need to be listed. I need years acquired and purchase prices for every little object owned by each of my 4 businesses.
Each summer, a tax bill shows up for my personal property.
I generally don't mind taxes. I really don't. But this one I hate. It's such a colossal waste of time that I can't even hand off to an accountant.
Sounds like it would be much easier to reincorporate in a neighbour county. I don't know, of course, if the US law gives a damn about you not being located there.
US law does care where you're located. Physical nexus means the local county can tax me. The business is actually domiciled in another state where I used to live.
Wow that is indeed horrible. In Japan anything under 3k USD (30万円）would be discounted instantly and thus not count towards the capital tax. Furthermore there is a 15K USD （１５０万円）cliff below which no capital is levied but reporting is still required.
Reporting down to the pen sounds horrible, and uncompetitive if other counties do not levy the same.
Indeed, I almost wrote wealth tax when describing the tax. The difference being I think that capital goods in relation to taxes are most about depreciation. The capital account is meant to be decreasing.
The business optimal situation is for a capital good's book value to reach 0 while the productive use continues unchanged. Thus the business got to buy the machine without paying income taxes on the investment.
Thus from the tax office's perspective handling of capital goods is about preventing too-fast depreciation and or over investment. By such logic any dollar spent on capital goods is a dollar not booked at profit and thus taxed.
About 1/3 of Japan's national tax revenue comes form corporate income tax. Oddly enough, while the capital goods tax is levied by the town, towns do not control their own tax policy. Instead the federal level dictates the exact tax rates down to the prefectural and city level.
Thus in Japan there is little room for the tax centric competition we see in the US. Towns cannot negotiate tax exceptions with industry. Instead the only instances of regional tax preferences in force now were written at the federal level to give various incentives to rebuild the Touhoku region after the tsunami of 2011.
Thus while the town may tax capital goods it is the federal tax authority (NTA) which benefits from the increase in profits.
When I moved to US in late '90s, my mentor told the Milk distribution story/change (NY/NJ). During his grandfather times (I am sure around 1950/60s, Milkman used to enter the home and check how much milk is needed and change the bottle. With time, few crimes and privacy concepts started coming into picture, the milks bottles were left outside.
And now Amazon wants to enterr your home to do exactly what milkman used to do 60-70years back.
speaking of coming into your house (and completely off topic), TIFU by using a KeyMe kiosk. I needed a copy of a key. I expected it was a mechanical copier which I'd seen before. Instead it's some kind of digital kiosk that scans the key and then, sends the info to their servers and they mail you a key.
In other words, they have a database of people's keys and the address those keys belong too. I feel so stupid. Time to change my locks.
Right. It's a scary world these days. I've recently noticed that my first, instinctive reaction to any new business idea in physical space is to look what information about me it can observe and where can it go. I started to actively avoid anything involving Internet-connected computers.
As in your case: the kiosk sends a key scan and your address to some company. It's just one infosec fuckup from giving your local thieves a time of their lives.
Interesting point about car PCP financing at the end of the article. I bought a car through a PCP a few years back (a new 2013 Mazda) and it seemed fairly humane:
- Nominally 0% interest (albeit we paid sticker price of the vehicle with no discount).
- Deposit + payments such that the car was never 'under water'. In fact, subject to some heavy caveatting about its condition, I think we could have handed the car back and walked away from the agreement at any time, something almost unheard-of in American-style car loans.
- At the end of the PCP period, there was still a big balloon payment, which is how they get you rolling onto a new car+contract of course. But it was a known quantity that was possible to save up for, and due to the monthly payments, as mentioned above, being of sufficient size, the balloon payment was much less than the cost to buy the same car in same age/condition/etc on the open market, so it made sense to pay the money and keep the car.
There are a couple of things I find interesting about the above. One is that I perceived some benefits from the monthly payments being larger rather than smaller - when considering time value of money etc this is presumably irrational. But people do seem to genuinely suffer from upside-down car loans, where they could 'afford' the payments but find themselves trapped making them on an un-sellable vehicle. I guess what I'm saying is the payments were set at a level where I could actually afford the car. The other interesting thing is how easily the formula could be tweaked to make more expensive cars look affordable, and to incentivise rolling onto another contract. The flip side is that such tweaks let the purchaser have a lower payment, or a nicer car for the same payment, but might not be in the purchaser's rational best interest.
> My favourite example of this are the "smart" televisions that one day decided, all on their own, to start showing their adverts: a new, recurring psychic cost for their subscribers, who had thought they were owners.
Nice perspective, never thought about it that way. My hate for the companies that do this has been renewed.
Great article. One minor point of disagreement I have:
> For Adobe's subscribers, the lock-in is considerable as access to their existing bank of files and documents is contingent on continued payment.
Losing access to uploaded files isn't really a relevant factor in paying for an Adobe subscription. Their cloud storage is an afterthought, and they can all anyways be trivially exported. The lock-in comes from the software itself. We must have Photoshop, and there is no other way to get Photoshop than to pay Adobe every month till you die.
I don't think he meant losing access to cloud storage. He meant losing the ability to open your files. It makes little difference whether you're storing the files yourself because you can't open them without Photoshop.
also, once you realize you hardly use photoshop and cancel your subscription, you get a fat cancellation fee. so do you pay the cancel fee, or "maybe I'll need photoshop, who knows?"
This would sound strange but the biggest subscription I pay annually (which does not seem like a subscription) is my DMV registration renewal fees. It comes around $300+ every year out-of-the-blue in my mailbox and I realize then that is indeed a subscription for a product which is my Car that I never thought about.
From a practical persepctive you are indeed correct. In 99.9% of cases - the DMV are effectively a subscription expense you need to pay to use your car.
But they're not actually a subscription to your car; the fees are a subscription to the roads and associated infrastructure, which do need constant upkeep.
If you had a vehicle which was only used off-road (for example, on privately owned racetracks) and was only transported on a trailer then you would not need to register or insure it. For track motorcycles it's even relatively common to buy/sell them used without a title - so $0 fees to the government. Obviously exact laws on this may vary depending on location.
Property tax has to be more than that. Even if you don't own your residence, whatever the landlord passes through to tenants is going to be more than $300 a year.
Eh, as a landlord, taxes don’t determine how much rent I charge. I let the estate agent tell me what market rates are and go with that.
The place I own is in the UK so taxation is calculated differently (and as I don’t live in the UK, it’s confusing and that makes it a bit scary), but I don’t see how my decision making process of “delegate pricing to experts” would change if the UK hypothetically copied any of the American tax codes.
Fun story: My adult daughter lives at home. She does our shopping and came home one day with a toilet bowl brush that was "revolutionary" (my words based on her excitement about it) because it is refillable and can be used to clean the outside and the inside of the toilet.
Recognizing this as a refill subscription, I forbade its use. It sits there, unwilling to be thrown away, and unable to be used. If not for the receipt being lost, it would have been immediately returned!
If anything requires repeated payments to be useful, it's a subscription.
This was a great read, but even better was the link to an article by Nicholas Lovell at the end. I love reading thoughtful analysis of the video game industry. What a goldmine!
> Good business sense is to do only what is reasonable for yourself but great business sense is to make others do what is not.
I think its interesting to meditate for a moment on the great amount of meaning in the closing sentence here. Great business sense by this definition seems inherently immoral and extractive rather than productive for one. Secondly the it seems quite the antithesis of competition under free capitalism producing better outcomes - the effects of concentrations and imbalances of power is something that is frequently left out of those debates.
I think that we should try to strive for a world where good and moral business sense is better rewarded than great business sense.
> I think that we should try to strive for a world where good and moral business sense is better rewarded than great business sense.
This stuff gets outcompeted by the free market every time. You don’t have to look far to find failed attempts to plan economies around the morals du jour. The whole point of free market capitalism is it’s game theory - if something worked better anybody would be free to use that better method. Humans have a consensus on what better means, and free markets are structured around that (+ a sane amount of government oversight because humans act dumb at scale.)
When market mechanisms lead to a sub-optimal outcome "within" the economy, that's called a "market imperfection" or "market failure". The fact that these things exist show that "the free market", while perhaps the best system ([Citation needed]) is certainly not perfect.
On the meta-level, should the fact that "the free market" wins out even though it is perhaps not the best system -- at least according to many (most?) people's morals "du jour", however long that is -- be called a "meta-market imperfection" or a "market meta-failure"?
The structure of the market is such that massive scale and non-local business has been winning out lately, but that has not always been the case. I’m not arguing against capitalism here (plenty of arguments to be made tho), but against the incentives of our current policies.
> At the end of their 4-5 year contract these secret renters are bamboozled at the dealership and convinced to just "roll over" their deal onto a new car with much the same monthly payment and, again, no ownership. It costs considerably more to do this great rigmarole than just to buy outright.
Unfortunately I couldn't find data on how much of these cars were leased by companies (where it makes sense to lease that 7 series BMW for the C-level exec) and how many were leased by consumers.
In any case, the why is the important thing: 70% of Americans don't have more than 1.000$ in savings (https://www.statista.com/chart/20323/americans-lack-savings/), and probably 90% of Americans require a car because public transport is inefficient and/or unusable for their daily lives. These people don't have a realistic choice between taking on debt or not taking on debt (they need a car and don't have savings), and the result is an immensely profitable racket - the market for consumer car loans alone is 1.17 trillion $ (https://www.statista.com/statistics/453380/outstanding-autom...). Even at a measly 5% interest that's 85 billion $ a year that banks extract from the poor (and likely more, given that lower credit scores yield over 10% interest!
Despite having the capital, both of our cars were purchased on finance deals. For my car (3yo at purchase) an outright purchase was the same price as total cost of finance, so I financed. For my partners car (new) it worked out significantly cheaper to finance as they 'match' the scrappage deal of the old (very broken) car.
Whilst most finance deals are scams, there are good ones. In our case double dipping on scrappage and sourcing a second hand car from a cheaper geography certainly played a part; and for once I'm sure I'm not deluded - with a family member running their own dealership we had quite the inside look at alternatives.
That said, an ongoing profiteering racket is servicing and associated consumables. Most independents are cheaper, though it does take work to find a good one - you have to check the quality of alternative consumables.
> Whilst most finance deals are scams, there are good ones.
It's hard to get these though. You need a combination of good credit scores, a lot of time, math knowledge and car knowledge and insider connections for that. Everyone else will get ripped off.
> Most independents are cheaper
I admit I'm a bit clueless about the US situation, but here in Germany if you have a new car it will lose resale value if checkups haven't been done at an authorized dealership in the prescribed intervals ("scheckheftgepflegt").
Losing "value" on independent services is true, but unless you have the car a short time you will not lose more than you save (UK) unless its a very premium car.
I just canceled one of my credit cards and then started getting DOZENS of emails from services warning me that they were canceling soon. It is absolutely stunning to me how many different subscriptions were flying under the radar. Sneaky sneaky!
Huge shoutout to Adobe for making a stellar product but come on... I need it for so much that it is basically like paying rent.
Another product that does this: video games. Games like Destiny are sold at full price and then ALSO require semiyearly purchases to retain access to the content you bought. Technically each purchase cycle provides new content, but you always lose access to something you had.
This is a bit of a weird derail, presumably because you don't like the idea of the Playdate, but it's worth pointing out that the subscription, in the case of Playdate, works much like milk: It's better as a subscription.
But Playdate is both parts. It's a device built to host a subscription, but the subscription itself only works to support the device. The device is built with deliberate constraints to provoke creativity in game design, and that creativity in game design is what you subscribe to. It's the milk bottle and the milk.
The thing is that no one is buying a Playdate without being aware of what they're getting. There's no hidden catches or unadvertised subscription fees. You can, if you want, just buy a Playdate and sideload content onto it, although you won't get the next season's games and the thing that makes the device special in a lot of people's minds. Without it, you will never get to play Lucas Pope's next game. Without it, Lucas Pope would never make a handheld game operated by a crank.
Does this mean anything to you? Maybe not. If it doesn't, don't buy it and don't subscribe. You probably also don't subscribe to my favourite magazine, Scrimshander's Monthly. People have different interests, and find lots of different things cool, and that's okay.
> The thing is that no one is buying a Playdate without being aware of what they're getting.
Nonsense, no one knows anything about future subscriptions aka "what they are getting". How can consumers be fully informed when nothing is announced?
The PlayDate will have an astronomically small install base. Amortizing a dozen game's developments over such a small install base without subsidy from Panic will surely lead to sticker shock. There are 21 titles in the first season. At a mere 50K USD per title (small even for indie dev budgets) that is 1,050K USD to develop the season. With 20K sold play dates that's a per device cost of 50$, or about 100$ for a year of releases.
Can the playdate justify a 8$ per month subscription? Yeah I think so, but only because it is a pure novelty. Except novelties have a habit of being low commitement. If only 25% of units re-sub that puts your per sub development costs at 400$ a year. Are Playdate owners going to be happy to pay 2x the cost of the device for a single year of games? Obviously not.
The playdate needs to move more units or it will die, I don't think current buyers understand this risk at _all_.
No one knows anything about the financials of the thing but you do know what you're getting: A unique little handheld, with 21 unique-to-the-platform indie games, at known price point, and a promise that they're gonna try to put out seasons of games.
What you might get thereafter being entirely unknown (other than it being a device-bespoke set of games for some price) is exciting.
Maybe the subscription will be too pricey to stomach. Maybe they'll go tits up. Maybe it'll be a complete commercial flop.
Maybe, on the other hand, they've already sold 100,000 devices and manage an attach rate of 65% at $5 a month and they make that million a quarter to fund games. Maybe it's $20 a 3 month season and they've got even more in their pocket.
Can’t see how it would be; you pay up front to own (lifetime access without need to check a DRM server) X amount of games which are released to you over time. If you want another Y amount of games, you can pay again, or you can just keep what you’ve already bought.
Closer to their point would be the battery or the mechanism behind the crank that will inevitably fail.
Worth reading the whole article, I'm only referencing a couple of specifics. The very last sentence of the article is what it was all leading to, and excellently summed up into what is a modern recurring theme: good business practice is consumer-unfriendly practice.
I thought this was specifically called the "Gillette Business Model". Reading the relevant wikipedia page[0], which also mentions printers and ink, calls it the "razor and blade" model.
One must also familiarise oneself with the "Machine that goes ping" Monty Python skit (on YT, watch it, it's much better than just reading the relevant quote). It was my first introduction to the complexities of corporate finance:
"Ah, I see you have the machine that goes 'ping!'. This is my favourite. You see, we lease this back from the company we sold it to - that way it comes under the monthly current budget and not the capital account"[1]
I almost lost a friendship on discussing that "good business is consumer-unfriendly". Because it fundamentally alters one's view of the consumerist-capitalism society we live in, it's very hard to accept for anyone invested in the system, even slightly. if one accepts that fact, then the question becomes: is there a level of user-unfriendliness that is morally acceptable? Or is it all pure and simple exploitation? Which cannot be logically answered in a clear and simple way; we just accept the status quo because we think any potential alternative would be worse, which we have no way of knowing.
Even the older double-edged safety razors were designed around such a model, but at least there is a 'standard' for those, with plenty of different companies producing interoperable consumables.
Would it be fair to say that any product with consumables that are proprietary to the vendor, is a subscription?
I actually shifted to using a double edged safety razor when the cost of the disposable blades felt like too much.
It isnt quite as easy, and I still cut myself from time to time but I also am still using the variety pack of 100 blades that I bought two years ago for like 10$.
I have basically stopped shaving and just use my Wahl trimmer. Even though it can't match a close shave, since my work environment doesn't demand a super clean shaved look, it works out for me. No foam needed either. Must have saved hundreds of dollars by now.
Only a few years ago I was the same, but now I've had a little more practice I'm shaving not only my beard but also my head quite effortlessly within 10 minutes and without bloodbaths nearly every day.
It's just a skill that takes some time to develop.
Some general advice, not particularly aimed at you: Try not to focus on the equipment or the blades too much. The Feather blades that are often suggested are overkill and bring the cost back up close to Gilette levels. Even me with my sensitive skin am doing just fine with cheapo Derby blades of questionable and variable quality.
I also switched a few years ago, and found I actually cut myself less than the Gillette I had befote. When I do cut myself it bleeds more though :-)
I usually use Bic blades which you can get in pretty much any supermarket in Europe for 50c a pack. The blades are steel and the packaging is paper, so much better for the environment too.
The reason why I switched is worth mentioning. I was working abroad in another Western European country and couldn't find the blades for my specific razor. They had plenty of other Gillette blades, but not the one I needed (of course the blades are not interchangable with the head). I tried a few other supermarkets and it was the same. I figured ok let's buy a complete new razor, and in the supermarket there was a safety razor next to the other razors for the same price, so I figured I'd give it a try.
Try disposable blades from Feather, a Japanese razor and blades company. It is sold on Amazon. I settled on their cartridge razor just for convenience. Blades are excellent.
The mix packs of blades works best while you figure out which is best for your skin and hair. I personally find Feather too aggressive, Astra and Dorco Prime Platinums worked best for me. You should know after the first shave whether the blade is okay enough to use for day 2, otherwise toss and move on.
Soaps are also quite variable in lather and feel—affecting the shave. Tallow, glycerine, and oil based soaps all coat differently. Get a good brush and it’s a nice way to get ready in the morning.
For traveling I use a disposable 3 blade and aerosol shaving cream because you’re not supposed to take the safety razor blades through security.
<3 my Feather blades, but I agree with the sibling comment - you should buy some sample packs and find what works well for you. I’ve also had good experiences with Shark blades from my sample packs where general consensus online is mixed on them - it all comes down to your preference and how blades interact with different varieties of facial hair.
Same. I’ve found the key to not cutting myself is to make sure the blade is reasonably sharp (never more than 2-3 shaves with the same one) and apply very little pressure.
It’s a bit more of an art than my ol’ Mach 3, but I’ve grown to really enjoy it. Also, invest in some fancy shaving cream and aftershave for a close-to-barbershop feel.
>I actually shifted to using a double edged safety razor when the cost of the disposable blades felt like too much.
You should actually try straight razor that takes a half of a razor blade. It might appear very scary, but it is not, if you cover 95% with a straight razor, and cover the rest with a safety razor.
The point of using the straight razor to cover the 95% is that the safety razor tends to get jammed with hair, making it a frustrating exercise quickly, if you don't have a habit of shaving every day..
> Would it be fair to say that any product with consumables that are proprietary to the vendor, is a subscription?
Seems reasonable at least as a first approximation / coarse rule of thumb.
Economists specialised in the area may refine it further, but for the layman it serves like the Newtonian approximation to physics, i.e. quite good enough for everyday usage -- I don't move at relativistic speeds all that often.
The "printer refill scam" was just an example of how a product is turn into a service. Funny to see the post being ignored just because people are so mad at printers.
I now have a CP2025 for a decade, no problems, before I had another large HP for over a decade, only dropped it because the new one is a color printer.
Other submission here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28037039. For some reason, algolia adds 10 hours to the submission time, this one that's 1 hour ago according to HN is marked as 11 hours ago, and the other that's 10 hours ago according to HN is marked as 20 hours ago.
Imo dairy isn't good if done via industry model i.e. central company provides value for all. All cow in central place, profit oriented. Old cows thrown for slaughter, it becomes very inhumane.
Coming from village where cow is part of family and treatment like family and has name as we do, then same dairy become very beautiful relationship.
You do realize that in order to get milk from a cow there is a precondition that ultimately leads to slaughter anyway? Unless you can afford keeping every calf and won’t exploit them for milk further.
When that named cow gets old and dies, does it get buried in the family cemetery along with the rest of the family? Do you mourn for it? Or perhaps, it turns into a steak of some form or another?
Printers are just another example of how effective loss leaders are in selling products (or subscriptions if you want to call them that).
Classic example: fast food burgers are typically sold at or near cost. It's the fries and drinks where they make all their money.
It's also why accessory sales are so prevalent. I've heard of $800 cameras being sold for <$10 profit but a $1 UV filter is sold for $20..
And then there's the whole extended warranty "scam". By the way, staff in Best Buy and the like are typically judged on how many warranties they sell, not how many products. That's why such places push them so hard.
Anyway, one thing I want to say about printers is that in the "home" end of the market there are really two types of printers:
1. Cheap printers intended to get customers into a cycle of buying expensive ink. These printers are typically sold near or even below cost. They may even cost less than a full set of replacement ink but you should know the printer rarely comes with full cartridges. Honestly, I would completely avoid this kind of printer.
It's worth noting that these printers are designed to go through ink as fast as possible. This includes using the ink to clean the print heads every day so you'll run out of ink after some months even if you've never printed a page; and
2. So-called tank printers. These have a higher duty cycle and are more expensive. Instead of cartridges you typically fill them with bottles of ink (and much more of it than you'd typically find in a cartridge).
These don't have the same ink-selling focus the first category has.
If you print at all just buy a tank printer.
As for add-on services like Adobe's cloud... I mean does anyone really trust Adobe with this?
For the record, I'm a big fan of the _idea_ of software subscriptions. I know some people like to own their software outright but software requires constant maintenance. Security fixes, bug fixes, supporting new devices, that sort of thing.
A sticker price and that's it creates perverse incentives for the company to end-of-life your software so you have to buy an upgrade. It's better to just pay a hopefully reasonable ongoing fee.
The gold standard for software subscriptions is Jetbrains. You get 3 major releases a year, annual or monthly subscriptions and when you stop paying you get to keep old versions forever.
Compare that to Adobe's Photoshop and Lightroom... yeesh. Adobe's idea of reasonable pricing is monthly cost = sticker price / 12. Oh and you have to sign up for a year, get auto-renewed and it's difficult to cancel.
Got the extended warranty on a Samsung TV once. It was a relatively small percentage to add to the purchase price, so said 'yes' when I would normally say 'no'.
That warranty ended up being very worthwhile as the panel developed the vertical lines problem, after 18 - 24 months - got a full replacement TV as the purchased model was no longer 'current' or able to be serviced. The replacement eventually got the vertical lines as well, still inside the 5-year (I think) warranty period - got another replacement, which is still going strong.
The original TV, with extended warranty, was purchased probably ten years ago.
Another cost to factor in with an extended warranty is the time / hassle to actually make the claim. Claiming the warranty on the second TV failure required some argumentative firmness.
Herewith, my standard advice.
Buy a Brother monochrome laser with duplex, an ethernet port, and BRScript/3 (their PostScript clone). Even if you're sure you will never need one or more of those features, get them all. Wifi and Bluetooth and NFC are strictly optional, and probably not worthwhile.
If you need color printing, send it to a printing company. There might even be a local one. It will be done at a higher quality, with better ink and good paper, than you can do at your office or house -- unless you are big enough to utilize a whole flock of printers, or you are a professional. If you are a pro, you don't need this advice.