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It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

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Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

#71

Post by bsilvereagle »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #58

He mentions "Smart TVs". I always thought you could just buy a SmartTV and not connect the internet and have a dumb TV. Nope. HDMI changed that. I bought a TV a few months ago and it started showing adverts because it was connected to the internet through my ROKU via HDMI. That's right, you can't even have a dumb TV anymore. Someone needs to make an HDMI internet filter, stat. But Adobe? That smells like extortion.

> Someone needs to make an HDMI internet filter, stat.

Bunnie's NeTV is off to a good start!

https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?cat=17

Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

#72

Post by JasonFruit »

benesch wrote: post #24
dsr_ wrote: post #16

Printers. Yeah. 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…

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 pr…

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.

Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

#73

Post by Danieru »

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...

Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

#74

Post by gruez »

Danieru wrote: post #73

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…

>It seems so counter intuitive to punish companies for building capital. After all capital and acculumation of capital is what pushes productivity.

OTOH, wealth taxes seem to be gaining popularity in the western world. Maybe we're going full circle?

Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

#75

Post by dhosek »

glenngillen wrote: post #56
derefr wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which is probably only 20% of us here 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, FedE…

> 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 b…

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.

Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

#76

Post by dhosek »

Lammy wrote: post #67
dsr_ wrote: post #16

Printers. Yeah. 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…

> If you need color printing, send it to a printing company. There might even be a local one. Middle-tier option: Walgreens Photo. Last time I wanted to print an 8x10" it cost $4 and I picked it up an hour later.

For photos, Walgreens definitely beats at-home printing.

Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

#77

Post by gruez »

NortySpock wrote: post #35
ludocode wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ha…

"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.

1. obviously you don't put sensitive docs on that usb drive

2. autoruns haven't worked on USB drives since windows XP SP3. The risk of getting a virus in this case is minimal.

Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

#79

Post by gruez »

Waterluvian wrote: post #2

A lot of good thoughts in here. The one I personally want everyone to take away is that most plastics are not recycled. Unless it’s glass, fibre, or aluminum, you are lying to yourself if it’s going into the blue bin. Glass-contained milk delivery seems great. Someone needs to start a company. Sure it won’t be sexy or use AI but it’s useful. I have a local co-op that delivers local produce. It’s amazing to see a pile…

>Glass-contained milk delivery seems great

...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.

Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

#80

Post by eurleif »

gruez wrote: post #77
NortySpock wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

1. obviously you don't put sensitive docs on that usb drive 2. autoruns haven't worked on USB drives since windows XP SP3. The risk of getting a virus in this case is minimal.

https://null-byte.wonderhowto.com/how-to/make-your-own-bad-u...
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