As I type this comment, most other comments are pointing out how a 6th grader got this wrong, by failing to suggest the "correct" solution of abandoning printing.
I don't... how do I put this nicely.
This is a kid. He is smart. He looked at the problem from a new angle. He came up with a nice hack. Presumably we want more kids with more of a hacking spirit.
Indeed. He identified an approach that seemed off the beaten path, took a systematic and consistent approach, quantified the savings and wrote it up. I'm impressed. We should be encouraging this sort of exploration and rigour in school kids. It doesn't even matter if we 'grown-ups' think there's a 'better' solution.
Somewhat. The story rests on the assumption that all government printing is done with a wasteful serif font, and that $$$ could be saved by using a slimmer one. Sure, people discuss toner vs ink, government discounts vs retail prices, and the necessity/desirability of printing things on paper in the first place. But almost everyone has accepted the assumption at face value.
If, like most Americans, you prepare your tax return in the next couple of weeks - an annual ritual which involves a truly mind-boggling amount of printed paper - take a look at the fonts on IRS documents. Almost invariably, the IRS uses thin Sans Serif fonts. As do a great many other government printing departments.
Now I don't expect the kid to think about this since he probably hasn't had to fill out a tax return yet, being only 14. But perhaps it's the sort of thing CNN ought to have mentioned, or asked the Government Printing Office about, if they were interested in presenting useful news. Of course, they're not, in this case; it's clickbait which relies on readers accepting all the assumptions in the article and patting themselves on the back for feeling smarter than Uncle Sam.
The other side of the equation is that serif fonts are easier to read. What is the cost in time and/or productivity that a person might lose by utilizing a font that is less easy to read?
I've submitted tax returns for last 5 years without ever printing anything at all. I don't think you need any printed paper - in theory, it can be done with zero paper at all, in practice many places send you printed forms (though I believe they have an option to choose electronic delivery, many of them do not support it) but you could do without printing anything yourself if you want to.
Maybe if the tax return is really complex and most of the software can not handle it you'd have to go back to paper. But for vast number of Americans, tax returns are simple enough.
The government prints a lot less forms and booklets than it used to. You may remember you or your parents going to the public library or post office or IRS office to pick up printed forms and instructions, or receiving them in the mail. Today, in most cases, even if (like me) you still do your taxes on paper, you download and print the forms yourself. So the cost of paper and printing has been largely shifted to the individual.
It does matter. It's called 'constructive criticism', and learning how to accept it is a valuable asset. There's a difference between "nice work, but have you thought of..." and "nice work, you're the best!".
And it's entirely debatable which is better: seeing your argument trigger a wave of patronising good-on-yous from adults you respect; or seeing your argument trigger a wave of intriguing discussion between the same.
I agree that we should be encouraging and not dismissive of it, but the kid is 14, he's nearly an adult himself. He can handle being exposed to deeper analysis.
"If you stand up and announce a new idea, hundreds if not thousands of armchair quarterbacks will tell you why your idea is wrong / how they could do it better / why they are smarter than you"
or
"Good job thinking critically about an issue that literally millions of people have taken for granted for years and trying to come up with out-of-the-box solutions, backed by actual quantitative research."?
Personally, I want to communicate the second. Will he have to learn that solving problems involves creating ideas and then iterating on those ideas, sometimes tearing the original idea to shreds in the process? Yes. Will he need to learn to divorce himself from his work and not feel that criticism of his work devalues him as a person? Yes.
But some (not all) of the HN comments, while critical, do not feel exceptionally constructive. Too often, when some unique or innovative new idea is touted, smart people rush to explain why it won't work or why it's not actually that great an idea or why it's solving the wrong problem in the first place. But none of these people are actually helping to solve the problem. It is important for us to have this talk about fixing the frankly toxic attitude that seems to pervade this space sometimes. And it's important not to hide behind the shield of "constructive criticism" when the criticism is less constructive and more just petty.
No one in government is going to stop printing documents any time soon. Abandoning printing might be the most efficient solution but it's also the most disruptive solution. His solution is elegant in that it would receive little in the way of friction whilst providing tangible benefits.
It's not completely trivial to change what font the government uses. There are a lot of documents that would need to be layed out differently after the change.
> There are a lot of documents that would need to be layed out differently after the change.
You could take any font with both "normal" and "light" weights, and then apply the leading and pair-kerning from the normal weight to the light weight, to produce a font that reflows text the same as the normal weight, but uses the ink of the light weight. I do wonder whether the results would cause typographers to gag, though.
I actually think it would be a lot easier to eliminate printing on a document by document basis than changing the font and dealing with all potential issues arising from that.
I agree, on a global scale this could have real impact, especially if the headline grabbing aspect can encourage people to look at other ways to save ink and paper usage in general. I understand that there is a financial impact in laying out new forms, the future savings on ink costs could go towards a usability and accessibility audit and use the findings to inform the new layout designs :)
> there is a financial impact in laying out new forms
This is a huge cost. Consider the U.S. Army, one part of the much larger Department of Defense. The Army has literally thousands of pre-prepared forms [1] and manuals. It's likely that these forms get printed hundreds of thousands of times per day. You could indeed save a lot of ink by switching to Garamond but that means that each form needs to be re-done. Some are simple MS Word forms where it might be easy. Others are PDFs and most are XFL (awful Lotus Forms), all of which will take a major effort to convert. Multiply that time and effort across an entire government's worth of forms and the effort required is mind-boggling. It would take many years for this to pay off.
I use to work as a comsec custodian. It was my job to update or replace military publications with the newest version.
In the military/government, forms, publications, and manuals are regularly updated, distributed, and printed. Rolling out a new font on each update before distribution wouldn't be a huge task.
My main issue with him is that he didn't spend 5 minutes researching this on the internet because it's come up many times previously and doesn't count as a nice hack worthy of any praise. Sorry kiddo.
As an example, these links are all 2010 or earlier.
This is why I think the Internet might actually be stifling innovation and creativity.
I find that more and more often I think of something, then search on the internet, and if I see that someone somewhere has done anything similar, I abandon the project immediately. After all, it's been done, so what's the point?
Net result if we push this to an extreme: instead of pursuing interesting ideas people end up wasting time in useless discussions on Hacker News, thus adding exactly zero value and failing to move humanity forward.
At a first approximation, everything has been tried by someone. It is very, very rare to have a truly groundbreaking idea. But that's not a problem! Humanity advances mostly through incremental improvements, not just by giant leaps.
> I find that more and more often I think of something, then search on the internet, and if I see that someone somewhere has done anything similar, I abandon the project immediately. After all, it's been done, so what's the point?
Or you learn how much progress has been made on the subject you're researching and, standing on the shoulders of giants, make new independent discoveries based on what has already been found.
It's not the Internet's fault if most people don't have the right mindset for research.
What you describe is not stifled creativity but a hurt self-esteem.
There are lots of people in the world smarter then you (and me). This might be humbling, but this can also be used to your advantage.
Instead of being sad about someone having had already invented what you thought about, build upon it! It's magic: you just thought about it, and it already exists, often ready to be used. Use it and build the next level. Pick the ready-made wheels, steel beams, a motor, and build something new, say, a car.
Sometimes I feel the same: I'm not going to be able to do this better or even as good, so I'll stop working on it.
Sometimes, though it's the other way around. This has been done, but it still sucks so I'm going to do it better. Or sometimes, it's been done and works great for these people but not for me, so I'm going to make it better for my use case.
The Internet is stifling innovation and creativity? Which Internet are you on? Mine is -full- of innovation and creativity. There's too much, in fact, to keep up with on a daily basis which is why I have to subscribe to aggregators like Hacker News!
I think you're right. I wonder how productive I'd be cancelling my ISP subscription. No flavors of the month, just me, my bookshelf, my compiler.
What's frustrating is the complete lack of historical context to most things on the internet. There is one version: current, and everything previous is deprecated. Is this kid aware of every similar attempt to alter typography to save ink? Probably not. Should we throw him under the bus for being ignorant? Probably not.
What I see when I close my eyes is a community that assumes the OP might be right. That's all it takes, the presumption that this person, as young/Blubby/naive as they are, can find a better route up the mountain. I think it just takes patience &/ humility.
I don't think we should throw him under the bus but someone should reign in the overly gushing coverage because it benefits no-one - not us, not the kid, not future kids.
Spider Robinson(?) has a classic short story about how infinite copyright terms with perfect archiving) will destroy the human psyche when we discover that there really is nothing new under the sun and all creativity is rehash.
As others have pointed out: It wasn't the first time the idea had come up, but he came up with it and looked into it independently. That, at the age of 14, is the kind of thinking science fairs should be encouraging. As a Ph.D project? Not so much.
I'm suggesting that science projects which are not original ground-breaking research should not be portrayed in the media as original ground-breaking research.
Nowhere does it suggest that the kid is some kind of genius. Not in the original article, nor in these threads. It's clear that this was a school science project and that he was encouraged by his teachers (and his reviewers) to pursue it.
The fact that it's considered newsworthy enough ("man bites dog" & all that) to merit a CNN story is itself the claim that this is somehow novel or interesting.
It's the same objection you'd have if CNN posted a story about "kid uses physical model to predict lava distribution from volcano using baking soda and vinegar".
What I'm more interested in is: why did this kid get all the press coverage from this suggestion, as opposed to the numerous other people who have suggested it (many if them probably kids too).
The real issue is that a bunch of people have thought of this before, some even made websites and posted articles, but they didn't get on cnn.com (and the top of Hacker News) for it. So now they are hurt and upset.
I agree. More importantly, this opens it up a new approach that can be used in lots of places. Perhaps development of fonts that require less resources when printed. While printing government forms may seem like a waste to us, there are lots and lots of places where paper is still the cheapest and best solution: name tags, business cards, flyers, posters, billboards, random one off signup forms, booklets with info (think of populations without access to the web that need to be educated about things like STD's, etc.), instruction manuals, product packaging, official documents (passports, etc.), paper money.
I am all for going paperless as much as possible, but think of the back of your toothpaste container and the warnings printed there. Could there be both a savings and an environmental impact in using a better font?
It's hardly a new approach - people have tried this sort of thing for decades. I don't know of any significant adoption analysis, but it pops up as an idea fairly regularly.
edit: There is some confusion; this was a response to parents "More importantly, this opens it up a new approach that can be used in lots of places.", not to the article. It doesn't really open anything up.
I really hope you and 6cxs2hd6 are being tongue in cheek. First, this kid clearly has a good head on his shoulders, and is even able to do some pretty cool technical stuff that most of the population cannot. Second, judging someone based on a single action you've seen from them is... less than scientific. By that logic you should be a "short comment writer" :).
Note that the conversational tangent my comment was in response to was "if it wasn't actually his idea". In that case, the thing it best shows is that he did a good job presenting it. Which is itself a valuable skill, is my point. Obviously there's a question of how well the little we know about him generalizes, regardless of what skills we're considering.
I'm sure it's not a totally original idea, but if this gets enough publicity it might push for actual innovation.
As a somewhat related anecdote I was repeatedly told by my professors that in Physics everything is named after the last person to discover it, not the first.
I can't find the quote now, but I'm sure that I've read of someone saying (when told that a result had been found earlier but forgotten), "Yes, but when I discovered it, it stayed discovered!"
Exactly. It's easier to get someone to modify his/her existing behavior than it is to get someone to stop a habit altogether. Additionally, do you know what doesn't require electricity to display text? Print on paper.
In many cases, agencies cannot simply stop printing because they are legally required by congress to put stuff on paper. Agencies cannot compel congress to fix badly written legislation but they can change their default font. Where I come from, cost-savings that don't require an act of congress are called good ideas.
(PS there are probably other considerations such as accessibility for the visually impaired that I don't know enough about.)
And you need electricity for every page printed. Considering the rotors of a printing press, it is likely more than it takes to broadcast the page over the net to a device, and then view it for a few minutes.
The problem is not volume, the problem is delivery. It is easy to deliver a lot of electricity to specific point (printing press) at specific time (when document is printed). It is much harder to ensure electricity will always be there and available when you need to consume that information.
Also, given how fast the printing press prints and how many times a printed document can be read and for how long it can be stored, I'm not sure it actually is more electricity to print.
Then there's another problem. Try fetching electronic document from 50 years ago. What? You don't have tape reading machine? You are not even sure which format it is in? Oops. Now try looking at a printed document from 500 years ago. Provided it does not physically degrade, can be read pretty easily. You can see Gutenberg's bible in the Library of Congress and you don't need anything to perceive information there. How much of today's electronic info would it be possible to read in 550 years?
> How much of today's electronic info would it be possible to read in 550 years?
If the encoding standards are non-proprietary and you either kept data stored in a linear binary format compatible with modern persistent file encoding, or just translated the works over time, then all of them.
All ODF / PDF files should be readable in 500 years. You can back them up for minimal cost in facilities around the world, and since the specifications to render them are completely open standards, you can (at worst) write software to interpret them again if necessary.
When dead tree rots, it rots. You had to (painstakingly) transcribe dead tree papers over and over to insure they don't degrade. We already have ROM archive tape standards meant to last millenia in the absence of environmental decay of their containments.
They should be, but that assumes docs about what PDF format is survive, and they'd know how to read media on which PDF is stored (which is much more scarcely documented - do you know how your HD encodes data on physical level?) and have compatible hardware or know how to build one. That's a lot of hops and failure on any of them may render the whole chain unworkable.
And, of course, magnetic media can degrade and be physically destroyed as well as dead tree media. There are standards for long-term storage, but most of the info is not stored that way. We find most routine documents from thousand years ago written on paper, cloth, leather, bark, papyrus, etc. but today's routine information would never survive even a century, only specially preserved data - a tiny minority of it - would.
But realistically, not a good idea. Garamond uses less ink because it is skinnier and less readable. It's a font for young eyes, or for Apple customers (long time user of Garamond).
Exactly. Great project. The media is to blame for trying to portray this kid as some sort of brilliant revolutionary, all externalities are being tossed to the side. It's not jealousy to point out that our current inefficiency is preferable to faux-fiscal conservatism.
I would guess the other commenters are jealous that their problem solving skills don't get as much attention. "No, this kid was WRONG!!!" is a way to justify that they are better thinkers, and therefore relevant. In a day and age when everyone has to justify their own existence, I suppose it's not that surprising really.
I actually meant that as, "I hope he doesn't read this stuff about him on Hacker News". I'm sorry it was unclear. Unfortunately it's too late to edit my comment.
Well it only applies to inkjet printers one one hopes that schools that are printing large numbers handouts use a cheaper laser printer and not a 6 color photo quality inkjet which are designed for small numbers of high quality prints.
You'll not abandon printing in the next 75 years. It's not a realistic solution. This kid provided a fix you can put into place in the next 12 months that will save a good chunk of change. Getting people to not print anything will take considerably more time and money to implement.
Well you're right but also the "just use digital" is flippant and ignorant. Changing fonts is simpler and cheaper on the short term than digitizing everything. It's also a more realistic goal. There us nothing with doing both. This is pretty sime stuff.
> This is a kid. He is smart. He looked at the problem from a new angle. He came up with a nice hack. Presumably we want more kids with more of a hacking spirit.
Yes, this kid is smart, and smart is good. But smarter is better. I don't understand the problem.
Yes, he is a kid, but I believe that the best way to show respect to a kid is to treat him like an adult. The article mentions that he was encouraged to publish in the Journal for Emerging Investigators, and it goes on to say that this journal has the same standards as academic journals. The whole point of this exercise is to treat him like a grown up in the grown up world, because that's the best way of showing respect to a kid.
Therefore, it is in fact your comment that is more disrespectful to the kid than the other comments which are pointing out flaws with his proposal.
The people saying he failed finding the "correct" solution are underestimating the challenge in getting people to change their behaviors so radically.
of course, the same could be said for changing the font, but hey, baby steps.
ps: i don't actually agree with the font switch idea. less ink means lower readability in marginal situations (at night, after photocopying 3x, etc etc)
this is why i prefer reddit comments to hn - sure, they can be rambunctious and troll-heavy, but the insightful comments are mostly free of that overlay of sneering cynicism. here's the top reddit comment on the story, pointing out that the idea is not new:
He's right: Chanel No. 5 perfume costs $38 per ounce, while the equivalent amount of Hewlett-Packard printer ink can cost up to $75.
Most offices that I've seen use laser printers. Toner isn't cheap but it's cheaper by several orders of magnitude over the ink in an inkjet printer they're using for the comparison here.
the GPO's efforts to become more environmentally sustainable were focused on shifting content to the Web.
This is the right answer. It's a permanent solution to a long-term problem.
Teen to government: Change your typeface, save millions
What he's really saying is: "Spend millions changing your typeface, maybe save millions." There are laws that dictate how forms and paper must appear. Changing the font could have many unintended consequences that will need to be studied and tested for, probably by high-priced consultants. And of course you'll have to test if the new forms are as readable by low-vision citizens and people with other disabilities.
But have to hand it to a 14 year old at least thinking about this stuff.
> Toner isn't cheap but it's cheaper by several orders of magnitude over the ink in an inkjet printer
True, but this doesn't actually matter. A lot of toner will still be being bought by schools & governments, and that toner could be used more efficiently by the font switch this student describes.
Additionally, if you take the annual budget a school spends on toner, and take the % less ink used by Garamond than Times New Roman (which could have been calculated using inkjets), you'll end up with the real saving figure, which we can safely assume will be non-trivial.
Saving printing pigments (ink/toner/latex/whatever) makes more sense as printing systems get more "professional". It's almost useless on a cartridge-based inkjet printer, because those generally track something like "pages printed" to determine when they're "empty". Usually, they're not empty at all: the manufacturer wants to make sure you have a good experience rather than wring out every last drop. Some laser systems will track actual toner usage, and thus could benefit from cheaper fonts; some won't, since they estimate like the cheap inkjets. As you get bigger, and load your ink in bulk, then actual usage savings starts to really work.
So generally: Mass-printed forms you can save ink based on font. Office printing, maybe.
And, yes, ink does get much much cheaper in bulk. If the savings calculations are based on consumer inkjet prices, they're way inflated.
Also, 38*2 = 76 > 75. So... he's wrong, as far as this particular comparison goes. I know that's not the point---that the point is the order-of-magnitude comparison. But _someone_ at CNN needs to be checking this kind of thing, right?
You're thinking like a computer scientist, with infinite precision. "twice" is only one significant figure; 38 * 2 = 80; round 75 to one significant figure to compare, and you've got 80 = 80.
I would not trivialize it. Isn't there another way to look at this? If this kind of information becomes common knowledge and everyone picks the correct font wouldn't the overall ink savings for the whole world be even more significant? I know I am stretching it a little but I hope you see what I am trying to say.
He may have used the federal government in the U.S. as an example of the amount of ink that would be saved, and the money it would save, but really, it's just a data point.
However, a school or small business may read this and save thousands this year.
Wait a minute his school is using ink? I didn't think people at home even still used ink printers. Pay the extra $30 and get a laser printer you cheap bastards! It prints way faster and you'll save $30 within weeks.
It's a silly comparison anyway. If that's what it costs to produce ink then that's what it costs. However, I'm sure there's a premium price put on ink no matter what it cost.
The problem with this kind of initiative is that it uses humans difficulty with recognizing the scale of large numbers.
We see a savings of $400 million and think "we should do this!" But it's a drop in the bucket even if it were that much of a savings.
If each government employee needs to change their font, or needs to set it as the default font, or needs technical support to configure the defaults in their word processor. If IT needs to modify images to use this font as a default. Just these actions are going to cost a significant portion of that $400 million when you consider it across the millions of federal staff.
This also assumes things like the government is actually paying for ink or toner in quantity, instead of, for instance, holding a contract with Xerox who charges per impression rather than based on how much ink you use.
It also assumes that there is no difference in legibility between the fonts. That people with vision impairments will not have difficulty with reading the document.
An easy way to think about whether an initiative like this is reasonable is to think about whether it makes a lot of sense for any individual to do. Do you think you, individually, could realize any significant savings by changing your fonts? If it only makes sense when millions of people do it at once, and even then only when certain assumptions are met, and then only saves a few dollars per person per year, then it actually is more likely to cost a lot more in overhead to make sure it happens than it will ever save.
"But it's a drop in the bucket even if it were that much of a savings."
Yes, everything is a drop in the bucket when looking at the Federal bugdet and the current debt of 17.5 trillion [1]. However, a 14 year old kid has a well thought out and proven plan to save money. Where do you recommend we start? The drops fill up the bucket faster than you think.
Actually there's a small handful of things that are the drivers of the debt: stupid tax cuts, stupid wars, issues with Medicare and a few other things; the drops don't add up, they just distract
- It's not just that it's a "drop in the bucket", but that the savings will just be spend on some other frivolous project when Congress looks at the budget. (It ain't going to science grants, I can tell you that.)
Drops in the bucket can at least accumulate, and then grow exponentially over time (when applied to debt). But when you just blow any savings, that doesn't work.
- You don't even need to jump to legibility or vision impairment problems: simple "weirdness" issues will balloon the cost. Politically influential benefit recipients might not like "everything looking different" on their Social Security check statements, and push back.
An example of something similar that actually happened: tax in the UK was temporarily lowered from 17.5% to 15% or something and it cost more to reprogram cash registers and computers than the 2.5% savings.
“What is any ocean but a multitude of drops?”
-David Mitchell
If it is possible reduce costs in many different areas of Government spending, wouldn't the savings add up to a significant amount?
I don't know if this is a minority viewpoint, but I believe that constant improvement is necessary for the betterment of our society. It's definitely a slippery slope, one could argue that rehashing the same things leads to beating a dead horse - but as technology changes and improvement happens in a multitude of different fields, the overall savings of this improvement would be unknown.
While human beings are fallible, I don't see why this suggestion isn't something to look more closely at from those with authority in the matter.
First, I like the kid's methodology. You can eyeball the various differences between font X and font Y, and see that the same passage printed in one is going to take more ink than the other, but how do you quantify the difference? He came up with a clever hack to relate an easily measurable attribute to a not-so-easily measured one.
Second, intentionally or otherwise, he managed to divorce the savings ratio from the type of ink being used--whether you laser-print, inkjet-print, or press-print your text on paper, you're going to use x% less ink or toner with one font versus another.
However, the selection of a font should take things into consideration besides the relative amount of ink needed to produce a body of text. Human and machine readability should also be significant concerns. And I would like to point out that a cost savings of $136 million represents less than two seconds worth of spending at the US governments current spend rate of $3.5 trillion per year. I don't know about anyone else, but I can't even imagine that level of spending!
While this is arguable clever,
a similiar concept has been known for ages to traditional printers.
There is a whole class of typefaces optimized for high speed, low cost/low quality printing, which pre-compensates the letterform for expected ink bleeding, so called Ink Traps[1][2]. They are highly optimized for a specific printing method, the font size and the paper-quality used, and don't translate well to non-ink based printing.
The problem with current desktop publishing fonts is that they can't possibly be optimized for every single use case on screen and for all of the myriad types of printing so robustness while maintaining legibility is key. Especially if the product is expected to be photocopied I would always go for a reasonable bolder weight, uncondensed typeface rather than losing information.
Also make sure the 8 is distinct enough from a 6 [3] (Times New Roman beats Arial by lengths in this aspect)
I don't wanna be the asshole here, but something tells me the GPO is not paying HP prices for "ink" - they're almost certainly using toner-based systems that vastly reduce the incremental cost per page. According to the LoC, a single day's Congressional Record averages 272 pages, so printing 2500 of them A DAY is 500,000 pages. At that point, you'd be worrying about how many inkjet printers you were throwing away every day...
According to the article, they spend over $400 million a year on ink. It doesn't matter whether that's inkjet, or laser, or what. If they use 25% less of it, they'll save 25%.
Interesting and subtle change. However it will likely be net negative. Most high volume copiers/printers are laser and/or covered by a cost per copy maintenance agreement. Meaning that most organizations pay the same price for a page regardless of how much toner is used on that page.
Contrast this with the cost of enforcing a single font family across millions of systems and documents. There are a large number of unseen costs here. Imagine 10 years from now some vendor responding to an RFP for healthcare.gov v2.0. The government insisting that the source code be converted to garamond for the weekly status reports. The HN posts that day will be about how ridiculous of a requirement this is.
I was just thinking that there was no analysis of the cost to roll out Garamond to all the machines and software in the federal government – I imagine it would be quite expensive.
Remember the Details! Below are tips to assist you in meeting the requirements on font, font size, margins and spacing. Be sure to follow the format in the instructions and label sections as requested.
Use an Arial, Helvetica, Palatino Linotype, or Georgia typeface, a black font color, and a font size of 11 points or larger. (A Symbol font may be used to insert Greek letters or special characters; the font size requirement still applies.)
Type density, including characters and spaces, must be no more than 15 characters per inch. Type may be no more than six lines per inch. Use standard paper size (8 ½" x 11) . Use at least one-half inch margins (top, bottom, left, and right) for all pages. No information should appear in the margins.
as contracts expire, market forces will come into play. Their vendor should be selling them "Use this font and we'll cut your cost by $1M" (and pocket the diff).
I would say a 14-year-old could achieve this is pretty impressive. While we give credit to his creativity and relative scientific investigation of this matter, things shouldn't be stretched too far as to recommend everybody to adopt this font everywhere. In this case, this seems the case. A printed document is meant to be read, and it is unclear if using the said font will have any impact on readability, and other usability issues.
Think about it: for the sake of optimizing ink use, the trivial solution is 1) Use the smallest font sizes possible 2) Use the 'thinnest' font that arguably uses the least ink. However optimizing a single varible in this way is clearly not desirable, because it defeats the goal of printing documents. A document is meant for someone to read, no? :)
Personally I prefer the original font. The thicker letters would likely photocopy better too.
I use a Brother printer that cost me £40 2-4 years ago.
I can buy 20 cartridges from Amazon that work perfectly for just £12.90 with shipping on Amazon Prime. That's 65p each.
A single original Brother cartridge can easily cost £16.44 from Amazon or £7.62 each when bought in a pack of 4 (I think the largest quantity they sell together).
So these copy cartridges are over 10x cheaper.
I've used them ever since I got this printer with no ill effects. The printer still makes create printouts and prints photos great too. I've heard that perhaps they break your printer faster than original cartridges but if this is true when I'm happy to just spend the extra £40 ever few years to just buy a new printer. I'll still have saved far more than that on ink alone (I print quite a lot).
If anything perhaps this is the solution to cheaper printing instead?
Also, random note. Once I went a Korean friends house and they had a normal inkjet printer with 4 gallons of ink in large pots of top of it. These had small tubes feeding down into the cartridges. They never had to replace the cartridges and they would never run out of ink. Apparently this is quite common in Korea although I've never seen it before or since myself in the UK.
From googling it was something like this:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/PrinterKnow%C2%AE-Compatible-Continu...
Although they had much larger ink containers. It seems it's called a "continuous ink system".
It's pretty cool to look into anyway, even if you don't do a huge amount of printing.
Yes, CIS is quite popular in Asia where inkjets aren't as prone to nozzle clogging but toner-based printers suffer from the more humid climate.
Buying generic ink in bulk quantities is also much cheaper than individual cartridges (you can buy a whole LITRE of ink for the price of an original cartridge for some printers), and you can even dilute it a significant amount if you don't mind slightly reduced saturation - I've run 10:1 black dilution in my CIS and the output looks only very slightly greyish.
Some printers have EEPROMs on the cartridges to deter refilling/CIS systems but the Chinese have produced "modchips", self-resetting cartridges, etc. to get around this; some can even reflash the firmware, presumably with one that has all the checks patched out.
Yeah, but Garamond is tougher to read, and ink prices are artificial anyway. If less money is made on ink then printers will become more expensive again - or more likely the price will just be raised more since it doesn't have much relation to the cost anyway. Printer makers actually put chips in their ink cartridges to prevent refills and cost effective generics after all. It is more of a DRM thing.
How about: "Prevent predatory and abusive pricing shenanigans by large corporations and instead create some workable semblance of a free market, save millions for yourself, save many further millions for your employers/voters, and have the warm glow of doing your alloted job to some minimum standard".
Corporate pricing shenanigans and barriers to market performance are some of the least important factors in what costs money and ails society. How much freer of a market do you want? Anyone who claims that barriers to market freedom are important are either confused or dangerously deluded. Real liberty is abolishing corporations altogether because trying to fight corruption within capitalism is pointless. It's time to end problems at their source, not exacerbate them.
I've tried it long ago. Back when consumers could only afford poor-quality inkjets, the hopeless ink smearing actually worked to this font's advantage.
I visited the site and still have absolutely no clue what it does or what they offer. I know I can buy a Home Pack but I don't actually know what it does. Apparently, it can save me money somehow but I am still none the wiser.
It does show plants growing from piles of coins. Is it a fertiliser?
The government isn't going to abandon printing entirely, ever. There are too many people who need access to documents who don't have printers, too much information that is too sensitive to email back and forth, and too many government offices with small one-off forms that visitors need right away. Besides, let's look at the cost of electricity, maintenance, insurance for broken and stolen devices, upgrade costs, and how pissed people will be when X system gets hacked and their info is stollen. I'm sorry, but paper is here to stay for a very long time.
My kids school sends home a ridiculous amount of paper. Here's a way to save a ton more money: stop. It's 2014, we don't need paper to send information home in most cases. Email or put it on a website.
Unfortunately there are still people with children of schooling age that can't use computers that well or don't have email. I know several. I also know some people without internet access at home. I don't think we're too far off being able to replace paper with email in this case though (5-10 years max).
Why not just provide both options, and letting people choose? It's not a terrible administrative effort to just send some via email and print out others.
I've put my mind to this question for a few hours over the past couple of years and, yes, I do think the administrative effort is "too much" [for Primary School children, 4-11). There would need to be some further incentive for schools to try it.
For the school the costs are probably greater in producing the letter - if any printing is required then the personnel costs are going to be approximately equal up to the point of direct distribution. Instead of sending 32 letters to each class (all classes are <32 in my kids school) then they will need to count the letters in to bundles and label for the class they are to be received by. The teacher/assistant will then need to consult a list to ensure the right students receive the letter, a potentially changing list, rather than simply give all students a letter to take.
Initially up take is likely to be low IMO. There will also be a lot of issues with parents not reading all letters or having technical problems. The letter-in-bag is very hard not to deliver for primary-age children and the school can look in the bag to see if it's gone - getting notice of email letters having been seen is possible but less robust IMO.
Currently my kid's school don't de-duplicate for siblings. They could do that and, I estimate, save may be ~10% of material costs immediately. I think the administration of that is similar to how you'd have to administer who isn't receiving letters by email.
Schools face another option - allow advertising on letters (which I generally disprove of FWIW). That way income is likely to dwarf the theoretical savings via reduced toner use.
Then they have to track WHO to give papers too and who not to. And also sending a kid home with info doesn't require parents to be tech adept or to check their email often which a good number of people don't.
Yes they have a profiles some where but the hassle comes when it's time to hand out bulk info to the kids, teachers or whoever has to go check the list then make sure that every kid on that list gets one. Way simpler to just and them out to everyone.
The argument here is that while it may be simpler to do it one way or the other, there might actually be savings to be had if enough people opt for the digital method.
It's not like these documents don't already exist in a digital format. The "challenge" would be maintaining the mailing list.
Many families in many areas don't have computers or reliable access to the Internet.
I have a few friends that teach in Virginia, about 5 miles from DC, who've gone so far as to spend their pocket cash on Craigslist-found laptops so they have a few they can either have in the classroom or give to some of these families.
So, yes, your school does need paper to send information home.
At last survey, roughly 15% of the families attending my child's school do not have regular access to the internet, and/or prefer receiving paper copies.
That being said, my child's school offers the option of paperless, has a school blog and online calendar, and is technology-progressive.
On a personal note, I don't turn my computer on at home very often. I work all day in front of one, when I'm done, I'm done. :D
It's not obvious that it would save a ton more money. TCO for a laser printer and a good copier versus email and a website is not a a simple question, especially when one considers the size of the the organization. New York City public schools can afford to spread the cost of some serious IT, on the other hand a private school of 200 students cannot, and the fixed overhead costs of maintaining a website and archive of documents may outstrip the marginal savings.
If you want to make sure someone to get a message, paper is the easiest and cheapest way to do so.
You can put stuff on a website, but people must actively go there. You can email it, but not everyone checks their accounts daily. Or... you can print out a piece of paper and say "hey kid, give this to your parents!"
My school district spends about $250M/year. They spend about $100k on paper. Go optimize something that matters.
By putting things on paper and handing them to you, they're fulfilling a duty of giving you legal notice of things so you won't sue them later for failing to tell you about _______. Sure, they could and should put it on a website/send it by email, but then they'd also have to get your consent for tracking every document that you read and so on...a system which wouldn't be accessible to everyone who isn't as computer-capable. Some people would want things on paper anyway, which will mean a dual system and more administration to manage both.
Government often seems less efficient than business because government entities don't have the option of dropping their most difficult customers or setting a cap on their cost-per-customer expense; they're mandated by law to serve everyone, which means they'll typically go for the cheapest solution with the greatest legal defensibility, like sending out notice on paper. Even if they wanted o abandon the paper system tomorrow, they have to get almost universal agreement among the public they serve before doing so.
Stupid idea. This works for YOU but not other parents.
My husband is still living in the stoneage and doesn't use email. He actually has an email address, but doesn't check it, ever, not once in the last several years. He doesn't even know what's in his inbox. He pays his bills over the phone. My mother also doesn't use email, she never even got an email address until 2 years ago, and never uses it. She still pays all her bills with a paper check and snailmail. A growing number of children are being raised by their grandparents[1][2], thus an older generation.
Some people don't have internet access, nor do they even care to have internet access.
How should one know that the website is updated? Email? Well, you aren't going to get everyone to read their email. Text message? Many people don't have cellphones (especially old people), and if they did, I know several people who don't have a texting plan, so they'd be paying extra for those messages. Some people don't have cell service at home. My mother still can't figure out how to text, or if she's got a message. I know it seems simple, but she just doesn't get it. Phone calls? Well now you got a big infrastructure to build, test, and maintain for automatic phonecall system.
"Johnny has been doing inappropriate things in class" is somewhat sensitive information. If you want to put it on the web, you're going to have to create logins, passwords, make sure that it is up to security standards, and deal with parents who can't reset their password.
When I was going to primary school (over a decade ago!) the "IT facilities" were beyond outdated, poorly maintained, and just not up to par in any respect. We were still using floppy disks, which were an old technology even then. Are we going to update every school with the latest equipment? At taxpayers cost. Train the staff and teachers to use a new system? Maintain the infrastructure?
Not everyone lives their life online. Get out of your own worldview for a second.
Paper is easy, simple, and solves problems. If it isn't broken why fix it?
[2] In an interesting twist, not that it has ever come up, but my mother once said she would love to raise her grandchildren. She gave her reasons as she is now older, thus much wiser. She has way way more money now then my siblings and I ever had growing up, so money issues wouldn't be a problem like it was when we were growing up. She is now retired, so she would have all the time needed.
She runs the mailing lists on a volunteer basis. Each classroom has a list. Each class list is subscribed to the grade list. Each grade list is subscribed to the all-school list. If this went across the whole district, the school lists would be subscribed to the district list.
All lists are moderated; they're used only for announcements.
Each year, the first flyer to come home is the "how to subscribe for your kids" sheet. The benefits are clear: less paper, faster delivery, no depending on the kids to pull it out of their backpacks to show you. The lunch menu goes out as a PDF. The PTO announces events that way.
Setting it up in the first place takes a couple hours and the cooperation of the school secretary; getting the school IT involved turned out to be a big lose. At the beginning of each year, there's an hour or two of reconfiguration -- new teachers, retiring teachers, that sort of thing.
If you don't sign up for it, you get paper. More than 80% of parents sign up.
Are you thinking, sure, you live in a fancy school system? No. More than half the kids who go to the elementary school qualify for free lunches. 78% of the US has internet access at home. Parents of school-age children disproportionately have cellphones and are willing to take email.
And no, you don't put "Johnny has been inappropriate in class" on mailing lists.
What you've said may reduce paper but will not get rid of it.
From your figures, 20% of parents do not sign up and 22% of the US does not have internet at home. These are non-trivial numbers. Also, your wife runs the lists on a volunteer basis so the cost of her time is not accounted for. It's great that there's a system working for you but that doesn't mean it would work elsewhere.
Sometimes I want important messages to come via paper. I get through so many emails a day that one from school might easily get lost in a busy day whereas a letter would always stand out.
>More than half the kids who go to the elementary school qualify for free lunches
Fancy school to me. :)
100% of the children in my elementary school got free lunch. We didn't have recess or a playground because we couldn't afford it and there really wasn't a place to put a playground anyway.
Who says paper isn't broken? The only argument I see for paper in your comment is that a segment of the population are unwilling to use anything else. According to available statistics on the matter, we can assume that is around 20%. What about the 20% who only use paper because we're not given any other option (I count myself among that group)? How did the first 20% become a more powerful group and why are the remaining 80% of us letting them hold us back from realizing the advantages of electronic systems?
This reminds of the dot matrix printer days, remember those? My 24 pin dot matrix printer had several print modes and one of them uses a 7x4 matrix to form a letter and less force for pushing the pins onto the ribbon.
I never really made any measurements, but I remember its documentation mentioned a savings of up to 40% of ink. The normal mode of the printer is NLQ [1], so it would be quite big when compare to NLQ.
I was there, then. I remember the eco modes, however I think there was a speed benefit too so 'NLQ' really was just for posh letters to people, code printouts were in eco mode just because of the time required to print at NLQ.
I also remember the paper with tractor wheels and the possibilities for wasting paper. To print one page tended to need three sheets as the print head was some inches below the tractor wheels. To print that one page would require a form feed to get to the start of a page, another to get to the end of the printed page and a third form feed to make sure some paper was in the rollers. Brilliant printers though, I would prefer one for occasional printing rather than a dried out inkjet.
While it may look better on paper, in the sample in article I'd much rather be reading a form printed with Times New Roman than Garamond. Seems a bit easier to read
Instead of paying people for typesetting new forms and letters you could instead pay people to typeset these in a digital format. Of course it would be smart to use less ink in case someone wants to print these. That's what I meant.
Think of all the time that would be spent in meetings, all the time it would take to re-configure documents and processes to use the new fonts, then all the little stuff down the road like some OCR system doesn't pick the new font up, handling complaints from people that the new font is too hard to see...
Not to say it's not a good idea, there's just potentially a lot of side effects.
I think $100M per year makes up for those side effects.
There will always be people whose workflows are interrupted by a new change, and legacy systems that don't like it for their own reasons. There are already systems in place to handle their complaints, because this is an expected part of any change in a large organisation, and is barely worth mentioning.
There are legal requirements to publish many things as Paper, so the Fed will be in the business of printing for a long time.
I think for this solution to work they should actually consider even more extreme type faces, font sizes, and shades of gray. How are we to know that just making the letters "weight" lower wouldn't have the same effect?
Clearly we should commission a team of 12 experts to study which fonts cost the most to print, their legibility by a group of 100 Americans who represent the diverse age and backgrounds of American Citizens, and how fast they can read them, factoring their average wage to also value the man power cost of the new fonts.
To this end I'm submitting to my senator a proposal that outlines a $1 billion earmark for research in to the cost savings available through a mandate to use an alternate, but yet undetermined font. Additionally to avoid copyright issues on fonts, $4 billion will be set aside to find a team to create a new public domain font that will be accessible to anyone.
In as soon as 5 years we should have a new font selected, and as early as 2030 all new documents will be printed in the new font. Lastly all existing public works will be reprinted in the new font. We expect completion of this project by 2050.
By 2050 the war with Russia, and China should be over, and the United States of the Northern Hemisphere will be operating in only one language Chinglussian. All documents will be printed in this.
Adding the additional characters that Chinglussian requires should only cost another 8 Bitcoin. (the rate of inflation on BTC is expected to be practically infinite as all the worlds wealth packs in to 40M coins). We have already reserved those 8 Bitcoins, so as long as they aren't lent to another group in the next 35 years the proposed budget will account for that.
My $0.02 on why this wouldn't fly- he's examining the problem from a bird's eye view, ie, the entire government expenditure.
Documents, however, are printed by teams, usually small one's for whom even a 30% ink savings wouldn't make a dent compared to the money they spend elsewhere. Thus no motivation for each team, and thus no major movement to change behavior. If the teams are anything like ones that I've been a part of, a lead will look at a document printed in Garamond, proclaim he doesn't like it/can't read it, and ask for it to be reprinted in readable format.
I shared this with my students. We're learning about typefaces and graphic design right now. Some of these comments picking about a 6th grader are pitiful. We want to encourage these ways of thinking -- not nitpick
I do not want to encourage shallow, not-thought-through ideas so we can fluff the ego of children. The problem is not that we're encouraging kids, the problem is that duller adults prefer simple ideas to working ones.
This was actually a well thought out idea. He took the time and tried to do some research and analysis. While some of his conclusions were off, this is a great way to learn and think. But publicly humiliating him (which I think is the result of the media response), we're telling kids that if you make an attempt, you're going to be ridiculed. I don't know if you've ever been in a classroom, but one of the biggest problems is that kids feel like they can't fail because they'll be labeled as an idiot. Calling the ideas of a 14 year old trying to solve a problem "shallow" is pretty sad. I understand why kids don't want to tackle topics in mathematics and computer science with attitudes like this.
Would it even save the govermnent much money? Sure, if I print in a thinner font on my laser printer, the ink will last longer. But if I'm printing thousands of the same document, the print company will charge me exactly the same price regardless of what font I use, of whether I use big blocks of colour, or any other consideration of how much ink I use.
I suspect that when printing at scale, the cost of ink varying by font matters little or nothing. It's certainly less important than other considerations in choosing a font: ease of reading, what tone it sets, etc.
Clever kid, but not a real solution to a real problem. Printers using ink cost orders of magnitude more per page than printers using toner. Reworking all the governments forms would cost billions.
How could there possibly be "no" to this from the Fed. Govt? If you don't need to print, then don't print. If you print, then print in a way that saves ink / toner. Why not? How could the Federal Government possibly object? It's a "Yes And" solution (to use Improv Comedy lingo). If you need to print, do it in a way that saves money. There's no reason not to.
The most obvious objection would be that Federal Government does not, in fact, print everything in Times New Roman to begin with. I just reached into my filing cabinet and grabbed some random documents from my 'Taxes' folder; turns out the IRS communicates mostly in Helvetica or some similar Sans Serif font.
this whole story is based on the implicit assumption that nobody in the government has ever thought about this issue before. As so often, that assumption seems quite inaccurate.
> If you print, then print in a way that saves ink / toner. Why not? How could the Federal Government possibly object?
Because there are other considerations with print besides ink/toner costs of printing. Like readability (including readability in the presence of real-world printing errors, since that means less chance of extra prints being made at additional cost.)
Rather than attempt to get millions of people to manually change fonts, just make "Skimpy Print" a layer that fits in between the print button & the printer driver?
200 comments and only one person has observed that this whole font silliness is superseded by a print driver setting that has been standard for decades.
There's always going to be a more efficient way, but when nobody else is doing anything actionable, who cares?
Congrats to the kid, he got his 15 minutes of fame. I hope it will motivate him to continue improving this world. The benefit for the rest of us is that hopefully with all of this attention, someone more qualified will come along and actually start some significant changes.
This was done by the UW-Green Bay years ago (among many, many others, I'm sure) and was featured in Dan Lewis' "Now I Know" newsletter about a week ago. ( http://nowiknow.com/ )
Still a worthwhile thing to report, I guess, but somehow manages to still be very "the media is clueless"
Actually I think a better cancel options built into printers / printer drivers would save far more. Loads of times that I have wanted to print one page, and ended up with a whole multi-page document.
And is it really necessary these days that Acrobat comes up with a different print dialog from Firefox, which is different from another one?
Instead of changing the font on screen for documents can Printers have a setting that would allow all printing to happen in Garamond or one of the cheaper to print fonts? That way you have best of both worlds. Your screen fonts will be what you like while your printed font will be the cheaper one.
Man, I wish I would have had that kind of support and encouragement by my school when I was 14. They were far more concerned with streamlining for the state standardized testing. I maxed out their math assessment test and all I got was a pat on the back... "Meh, fuck it", I learned...
This feels very much like greenwashing, selling you a product that makes you feel like you're doing something positive for the environment which actually has extraordinarily minimal impact. I'm sure there are a thousand things a person could do to lessen their impact before toner usage becomes a priority.
I would be very irritated if anybody handed me something with compromised readability (letters filled with holes) to save a fraction of a penny in toner.
I have noticed this numerous times, where something is sold as green, but at the end of the day, it produces more consumption, not less. Biofuels are a perfect example in my opinion, as they are just burning more crap and polluting the air. Only if the fuels are grown on what was previously concrete does the whole green argument about biofuels make any sense.
Eh? Your criticism makes no sense. Burning a fossil fuel means taking an existing source of captured carbon and releasing it into the air. Using biofuels means burning the fuel, releasing carbon into the air... then recapturing the carbon in the next batch of fuel to be grown. Plants don't just spring out of the ether - they're made of carbon, taken from the air. It's a zero sum game, unlike fossil fuels. No concrete required.
So a tree is growing before biofuels were developed. Say biofuels did not get developed, the tree is still there converting carbon dioxide to oxygen and hydrogen. (Generally a positive thing for the environment).
Now someone develops biofuels. Convert the tree to biofuels, and burns them. One less tree, more CO2 (generally a bad thing for the environment). Whats difficult to understand about that?
Now if you plant another tree on what was a piece of concrete, and burn that, THEN you have a zero sum game. I imagine most of the biofuels are being grown on lands which previously had (non-biofuel) plants growing rather than on concrete.
Stop being fixated on reclaiming concrete. If you clear a section of forest for crops and burn the harvested wood, you have one carbon release. Now you grow crops for biofuels, you capture some carbon back. Convert to fuel and burn it, another carbon release. Grow crops again and you have sequestered the carbon again. Overall, you get the net effect of one large carbon release.
But you can't do the same with fossil fuels - all fossil fuels are carbon releases, and that carbon is never recaptured by the process. The 'green argument' is that after setup, there is little in the way of new carbon being introduced, which is very much not the case with fossil fuels.
Separating your recyclable garbage doesn't mean you don't still generate non-recyclable garbage and throw that out, yet doing this has helped reduce strain on landfills and has had a host of other benefits. From your argument here, because we don't turn recyclables back into the original oil or wood they came from, it's not worth doing.
I guess it is a balance between having the carbon in / on the ground, or in the air in CO2 form. Encouraging people to burn biofuels will only put more of it in the air, or is there some evidence of less fossil fuels being burnt since biofuels were developed?
Trees and plants are a short term carbon sink, rotting releases most of the carbon back into the air.
(So a tree does store carbon as it grows, but there is probably a sensible separation between a few hundred years in a tree and geologic carbon. "Biochar" is one idea towards sinking carbon, the charred material doesn't rot as quickly.)
I think you're overemphasising Unidan's comments. Unidan is talking about plantations of trees, not crops (edit: trees have a much greater reach and ability to pull nutrients from the ground). Yes, if you clear a forest for the crops the first time you get a net release, but after that, you're basically recycling carbon. True, you might get a small amount of carbon drawn from the soil, but the vast bulk of a plant's mass comes from carbon in the air.
In any case, it's still far, far better than having the entirety of the carbon in the fuel pulled fresh from long-term stores - the maligned 'green argument' above.
(edit: I am also a biologist by training, though not an ecologist as Unidan claims)
Biofuels are an awful example because biofuels are complicated. The carbon accounting for growing bio-fuel crops vs. food crops vs. not farming, vs. managing the land for environmental purposes.... the pollution accounting by replacing petroleum with bio-fuels... the complex production costs and effects. Some biofuels are certainly better than others, but I don't think anybody with domain knowledge would propose none of them have positive impact.
Reducing fuel consumption is a separate issue from choosing the best fuel source, conflating the two isn't productive.
The body of most printed stuff is typeset in serif fonts because it improves legibility. Even on my fairly low definition e-reader, reading a book in a sans serif font feels weird. Moreover, the stroke width of sans serif fonts is usually fairly unvarying, which seems to offset what you gain by ditching the serifs:
http://www.matthewrobinson.co.uk/Measuring-Type
This topic just irks me, it's sounds clever at first, but anyone who has just a little education in print publishing (anyone who knows what CMYK stands for) should be aware that there are way better ways make an impact on the amount of ink used (not to say, saving money).
- If they would use something like InDesign they could print everything in 50% Black
and could instantly save 50% no matter what.
- Even worse is Rich Black[1] printing which wastes 3 times the amount of ink/toner namely CMY instead of K (black).
- That the costs of getting something printed by an actual print service company by printing press are surprisingly low given digital print ready delivery and break even pretty fast, especially for colored prints, where the quality is also vastly superior.
- any school or organization of similar or bigger size should use professional office grade black only laser printers for all default print jobs, which should keep cost way below 5 cents/page. At all costs stay away from consumer grade inkjet printers. And get only one! office grade Inkjet printer with big and per color replaceable cartridges which pretty fast compensates for it's initial cost and is also superior to color laser printing.‡
This study completely omits to differentiate between text and graphic type printing yet makes this quite thoughtful remark:
In addition, fonts may be chosen with a specific purpose in mind (e.g. aesthetics), but posters and other graphical design in which font type could have meaningful impact would usually be printed on a color printer. Color toner ink costs for printing were not tested in this study.
Another related way of saving ink is the following: when an assignment is photocopied from a book, a black border in the periphery is sometimes printed. This black border gets copied, leading to a large wastage of ink. “Whiting out” the black periphery would further reduce
the ink usage in the school district. This impact would be in addition to what was investigated in this study
Let the kids have Comic Sans if they want to, but let them know what it cost what it needs to print their essays on inkjet printers on a rainbow colored background. Normal text covers only between 2.8%[2] to 5% of a page. In other ways a page with fully colored background can easily use more than 60 times (100/5 * 3 Colors) the amount of ink than a simple text page.
Yes. There are some things that people can't realistically do without. I worked as a stringer for the local paper for some years. In this capacity, I covered local water / sewer authorities. The typical cycle went like this. The authority raised rates to meet their costs. People used less to try to cut theirs. The authority took in less money; so they raised the rates again.
Also, in the US, these contracts go to the lowest bidder. The bidding process is not exactly always the most honest and truly competitive.
The combination of these two things is why I fully expect ink prices to go up.
Ink and printers are complementary goods. A person can't buy whatever ink they want, they need the ink that goes with their printer. At the same time, if ink prices go up $5 per cartridge, few people will go out and buy an entirely new printer.
Inelasticity of demand from complementary goods comes into play when the complementary good is relatively very expensive or difficult to replace.
Consumer printers cost about the same as an ink cartridge or two. Consumers aren't "stuck" paying for more expensive ink if manufacturers decide to start screwing them on the price.
[edit: wanted to add this]
Even with the ridiculously complementary goods of automobiles and gasoline, more expensive gas shifts consumer demand away from gas guzzlers.
I don't... how do I put this nicely.
This is a kid. He is smart. He looked at the problem from a new angle. He came up with a nice hack. Presumably we want more kids with more of a hacking spirit.
I hope he doesn't read Hacker News.