It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription • Hacker News Board

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

#291

Post by derefr » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 5:02 PM UTC

yunohn wrote: post #238

derefr wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, presuming you don’t work 7 day weeks, you could just go during working hours on the weekend. Again, who needs glossy photo prints with a 24 hour deadline? What for?

> glossy photo prints with a 24 hour deadline? What for? Why do you assume that’s the /only/ thing someone would want printed? Quite odd, considering the declining popularity of print photos.

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.)

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

#292

Post by derefr » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 5:11 PM UTC

yunohn wrote: post #289

derefr wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, what you say is true. I come from South Asia, and I live in NL, so I fully understand this perspective. But rather, in the scope of this discussion, having a printer at home when you can afford one, makes a lot of sense from a cost/time angle.

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.

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

#293

Post by brewdad » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 5:42 PM UTC

lostlogin wrote: post #213

NortySpock wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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.

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

#294

Post by kalleboo » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 5:52 PM UTC

yunohn wrote: post #188

derefr wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 bein…

Driving 20mins in a polluting case, just to print a few pages? I think you’re the one missing some perspective here…

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)

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

#295

Post by kalleboo » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 5:55 PM UTC

zizee wrote: post #62

glenngillen wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 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 wo…

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)

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

#296

Post by taurath » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 6:01 PM UTC

lwansbrough wrote: post #182

taurath wrote: post #54

> 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 ca…

> 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…

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.

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

#297

Post by yunohn » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 6:03 PM UTC

kalleboo wrote: post #294

yunohn wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Driving 20mins in a polluting case, just to print a few pages? I think you’re the one missing some perspective here…

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)

Why are we discussing this situation for people who only print once a year? That sounds like an absurd premise.

There’s lots of inkjets now that don’t suck, and don’t need much opex or capex. Some don’t need cartridges, they have refillable containers.

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

#298

Post by yunohn » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 6:05 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #292

yunohn wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, what you say is true. I come from South Asia, and I live in NL, so I fully understand this perspective. But rather, in the scope of this discussion, having a printer at home when you can afford one, makes a lot of sense from a cost/time angle.

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 t…

Nobody is advocating this for people who can’t afford it. We’re talking about those who can and do need to print often.

I don’t know why we need to argue on about the poorest people who can’t afford it? Sounds like a rhetorical discussion honestly.

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

#299

Post by 542354234235 » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 6:33 PM UTC

yunohn wrote: post #219

berkes wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I’m not sure why you’re dismissing life as “poor planning”. Shit happens, things need to be done, you can’t plan everything.

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.

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

#300

Post by dailyanchovy » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 6:56 PM UTC

hyperman1 wrote: post #280

benhurmarcel wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A simpler solution is to set up https://nextdns.io/ on the TV. You can easily block the ads.

Correct. But where's the fun in that? 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…

I like you