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It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

calpaterson.com

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

#121

Post by ashtonkem »

NortySpock wrote: post #21
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…

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 with…

If you’re technically skilled, you could always make a print server out of a raspberry pi.

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

#122

Post by ashtonkem »

gruez wrote: post #79
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.

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.

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

#123

Post by ashtonkem »

gruez wrote: post #105
PostOnce wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-…

>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.

Meat freezes very well, and can often be bought in bulk. Vegetables tend to last longer than milk in my experience.

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

#124

Post by noisy_boy »

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…

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).

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

#125

Post by paranoidrobot »

NortySpock wrote: post #21
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…

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 with…

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.

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

#127

Post by coopsmoss »

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…

It used to be the norm. Why did the "milk man industry" go under? Could it not compete with bulk buying milk once refrigeration became the norm?

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

#128

Post by Danieru »

hug wrote: post #96
nimbius wrote: post #53

>it looks like a product but secretly a subscription Surely this isnt about playdate.

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 creat…

> 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_.

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

#129

Post by toyg »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #5
eric4smith wrote: post #3

Hehe - disposable razors (with the removable head) are also a kind of subscription. Good piece. So many things are hidden subscriptions these days, even when they don’t have a need to be. It’s so obviously a money grab.

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…

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.

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

#130

Post by otherme123 »

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…

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.

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