Isn't that how market economies are supposed to work?
By default, consumers are their own best regulator. You buy only the bread that tastes good, and that shoes that fit, so the market will provide, etc.
It's a small step from there, to outsourcing part of that to a middle men like Costco. Costco benefits from their reputation with customers they got from those efforts.
Similar for product reviews on independent websites or magazines or even on Amazon.
It's only in exceptional circumstances that 'consumer regulators' can not be private entities.
And much of the time, we get lots of government regulation that could be done by private entities just fine or better. But to be honest, lots of that regulation is still 'good enough', so it doesn't do that much harm. Two examples to illustrate:
Germans like to eat raw minced pork. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mett So there are rules in Germany that all pork sold has to be save to eat raw. In most other countries, people don't share that peculiar preference, so the government regulations on pork are less strict.
I hold that even in the absence of specific regulation, the German market would provide Germans with pork that's safe to eat raw. Companies would just put a little sticker on their meat that tells you, that it's safe to eat (and normal existing rules about truth in advertising would make sure the sticker is trustworthy).
The second example: thanks to harmonised EU rules you can put palm oil in your chocolate without loudly declaring it and still call it chocolate on the packaging. (You just have to mention the palm oil in the fine-print list of ingredients.) By and large, German customers don't like palm oil in their chocolate. So German supermarkets mostly only carry 'proper' chocolate. So we private companies regulating the German chocolate market, to give consumers what they want.
By default, consumers are their own best regulator.
You buy only the bread that tastes good, and that
shoes that fit, so the market will provide, etc.
This only really works if the product is cheap and most people can afford to try lots of competitors, or if the consumer is sufficiently knowledgeable.
It works pretty well for bread or chocolate: most people can afford to try different brands until they find one they like. No knowledge required.
It works less well for relatively expensive items like printers with relatively hidden pitfalls that require a some level of domain knowledge and research to comprehend before purchase. Most people can't buy a different printer every week until they find the one they like, and outside of the HN crowd many (most?) people don't have the domain knowledge to research a tech product properly.
Obviously third-party review sources (Wirecutter, Consumer Reports, whatever) can mitigate this somewhat but they are subject to their own biases.
The second example: thanks to harmonised EU rules you
can put palm oil in your chocolate without loudly
declaring it and still call it chocolate on the packaging.
(You just have to mention the palm oil in the fine-print
list of ingredients.)
To me an ideal solution for printers or other cloud-dependent tech devices would be along these lines. I don't think HP's behavior should be outlawed, but there needs to be standardized messaging/warnings telling the consumer that:
1. the box contains a device that is nonfunctional unless consumers pay an ongoing subscription fee
2. what that fee is
3. a warning and the manufacturer can essentially brick the device at any time by intentionally discontinuing support or going out of business
Yeah. Excellent point. The free market hardliners' counterargument is that "well, it's not in companies' best financial interest to sell poisonous chocolate, so we can trust them not to do it to the best of their ability."
But that assumes consumers can tell when they're being poisoned. If a person drops dead immediately after eating a candy bar... sure, that's pretty obvious. But long-term harms can't be easily attributed to a single product.
The free market is a very very useful tool. So is government regulation. Both of them also are wholly inadequate on their own.
That's a motte-and-bailey fallacy. Someone might even agree with you that this kind of minimal and general regulation is useful (eg 'no labeling poison as food'). But that doesn't mean that all the other regulation is necessary nor useful.
Someone might even agree with you that this kind of minimal
and general regulation is useful (eg 'no labeling poison as food')
Please consider a more realistic example. We're not talking about taking a jar of rat poison and labeling it "chocolate" and the need to prevent this with a law.
Think of the more general cases of adulterated foods and/or foods with unacceptable levels of harmful chemicals whose like mercury, arsenic, etc. These are things that consumers cannot practically check for.
A reasonable free-market response might be that if consumers really think this is important, they will pay more for products that have been vetted by some trusted third party and therefore the government is not needed. There could even be multiple such third parties and consumers could vote with their wallets for the one(s) that they find best. This already exists in a sense in the form of organizations that certify food as halal, kosher, etc.
I don't totally disagree with this, but I think it is ripe for corruption and monopoly in ways that a well-functioning government is not.
But that doesn't mean that all the other regulation is
necessary nor useful.
Nobody is claiming that all existing regulation is necessary or useful. That is not a good-faith interpretation of anything anybody is saying.
> This only really works if the product is cheap and most people can afford to try lots of competitors, or if the consumer is sufficiently knowledgeable.
It also only works if there are lots of competitors. With tech that is often not the case. You probably only have a handful of consumer printer manufacturers to choose from and if all of them decide to pull the same shit (because its more profitable) then you're SOL.
You’re literally arguing with someone advocating for consumers to be provided with enough information to be able to make decisions for themselves. They’re not saying they want the government to ban these practices, just to make them non-deceptive. Which is a role the government has performed successfully in the past: see the Pure Food and Drug Act.
> Governments are very good at making pronouncements but they are slow and often no more expert than the consumer. Consumers can correct their mistakes much faster than bureaucracies can.
Here in New Zealand we have some legislation called the consumer guarantees act. It’s gold, and has all sorts of gems. My favourite is that things I buy should last an amount of time commensurate with the price I paid.
For example, my iPhone was replaced at 3 years for a faulty home button and my Stihl saw had its motor replaced at 3 years. It’s amazing. I see the sort of warranties available in other countries and wince.
> The second example: thanks to harmonised EU rules you can put palm oil in your chocolate without loudly declaring it and still call it chocolate on the packaging. (You just have to mention the palm oil in the fine-print list of ingredients.) By and large, German customers don't like palm oil in their chocolate. So German supermarkets mostly only carry 'proper' chocolate. So we private companies regulating the German chocolate market, to give consumers what they want.
Except, Hershey has been using vegetable oils in Chocolate in the US, due to lower costs and lax regulation, for decades. It hasn't stopped them at all and is the primary reason the cheap commercial chocolates in the US "taste like vomit", to foreigners.
The vomit taste comes from butyric acid, I believe - which seems to be a breakdown product of milk:
The process is a company and trade secret, but experts speculate that the milk is partially lipolyzed. This produces butyric acid, a compound found in substances such as Parmesan cheese which stabilizes the milk from further fermentation. This flavor gives the product a "tangy" taste that the US public has come to associate with the taste of chocolate …
My understanding was that butyric acid was a byproduct of the overall process. I am not an expert at all though, so thanks for the correction.
I think that just further reinforces the point though, that the market doesn't correct for a (generally regarded) subpar product, on its own. It requires external influence; whether it be regulatory, cultural, health-based, etc.
Americans prioritized the price over the accuracy of the product, and at this point the "vomit" flavor is what Americans prefer. Same deal with other foods full of oil like American cheese. Same thing with other artificial ingredients like gums (cream cheese, ice cream, etc.).
These foods are deeply ingrained with the culture now. It's much more complex than just having an opinion about how things are made and assuming that opinion is correct.
Just because a vocal minority complains about the quality of a product doesn't mean the majority agrees or stops buying it. People vote with their wallets.
This is just moving goalposts based on your weird biases. Even on an almost 1:1 comparison, you're handwaving away because "Americans just like shitty food".
OP claimed that the market would balance things out when given subpar foods. When Hershey first made these subpar chocolates the market didn't correct it, despite OP's claims. Just like how the market didn't correct meat glue use in Europe, until it was regulated out.
> OP claimed that the market would balance things out when given subpar foods.
No, I never claimed that. The claim that I wanted to make is the one that sublinear made: the market provides what the people care enough about that they are willing to pay for.
Eg Germany has good pork and decent chocolate in mainstream supermarkets. But the boil-in-bag rice those places sell would make your average Asian through up a little.
Consumer regulation does the least harm, when it is the least necessary: when the mainstream consumer already agrees with it, and when it's reasonably easy for knowledgeable people with different tastes to side-step.
Eg the German 'Reinheitsgebot' purity law has some strict rules about what you can put in your beer and still call it 'Bier'. But it doesn't actually restrict the knowledgeable consumer: your supplier can concoct whatever they feel like, they might just have to get creative with the name.
If Americans like 'shitty food', that's up to them. Who are we to judge them?
Your point might apply if Lindt, Ghirardelli and Guitard weren't the most popular chocolates after Hershey's; all considered pretty high quality. That's like saying "Germans like shitty meat because you can buy cheap, low-quality sausages at the corner store" (which I can attest to myself, anecdotally).
The point being, a lack of regulations allowed for low quality chocolates that are available and some people purchase. There's no reason to believe the same wouldn't happen in other countries; Germans, French, Japanese, etc aren't somehow more enlightened about food.
I never made a statement towards my personal preference for or against regulations, because it's moot to the topic.
I simply was countering the claim that regulations were unnecessary to block the production and sale of low-quality foods, based on cultural merits (or, in general).
If my personal opinion matters at all, I'm a hardline libertarian on any issues that directly affect (to avoid going down a conversational pigeonhole of obesity affecting the medical system, or otherwise) solely the individual.
Drug consumption, food, prostitution (e.g. a single person/entity choosing to sell their body/intimate services to another person/entity in a consensual and legally protected manner), personal data encryption, etc: zero regulations, beyond commercial ones forcing full disclosure by corporations ("our food was sprayed with these pesticides", etc)/the authority entity (full disclosure on STD testing by sex work provider and consumer).
Trafficking (including the less savory forms of sex work, such as pimping and brothel work that constitutes servitude/slavery), gun ownership/sales, drug sales, fraud, employer relations, tenant protections, etc: regulated (including banning, in many cases) in favor of the general public.
If someone is fully aware that Hershey's has butyric acid and vegetable oil in it, and still chooses to consume it; go for it. If Hershey's add a heavy carcinogen to their recipe which increases general risk for cancer, probably should regulate it. It's a muddy line, but it's like they say about porn: "you know it when you see it"; and one feels like a clear societal problem.
It's more like saying that Germans like shitty meat because the best selling kind was the cheap, low-quality sausages at the corner store. Your attestation is the cherry on top.
It's not the Hershey's chocolate bar that this impacts, and makes it taste of vomit, as already mentioned it's the soured milk that causes that. The extra vegetable oils impact the white chocolate more obviously.
Have you tried American white chocolate, like the white Kisses? Candles have more flavour.
My grandparents used to have a fruit bowl that looked extremely tempting. However there were not real fruit, and even though I was a child, that waxy tasteless mouthful of disappointment has never left me.
My MIL has white chocolate kisses (and those grim white chocolate mint ones) every Christmas, and they remind me of that same day if I ever feel like I might have been too hard on them and try one.
Candles might have dripped melted wax on some birthday cakes, in my past...
(( But even so, I can't say any kind of white chocolate tastes like or has less taste than candle wax. White chocolate has distinctive tastes...which I don't like, and stubbornly refuse to believe the tosh that it's chocolate. ))
I'm from the US and I've had this same thought about American chocolate tasting like vomit. I figured I was just overly sensitive to the taste, sort of like how coffee smells like skunk sometimes.
> In the Victorian era, alum was used along with other substances like plaster of Paris to adulterate certain food products, particularly bread. It was used to make lower-grade flour appear whiter, allowing the producers to spend less on whiter flour. Because it retains water, it would make the bread heavier, meaning that merchants could charge more for it in their shops. The amount of alum present in each loaf of bread could reach levels that would be toxic to humans and cause chronic diarrhea, which could lead to death in young children.[26]
> ... by the early 1800s, the practice of adulteration had become so common, nineteenth century people developed a taste for fraudulent substances in their food and drink and often did not realize anything was wrong with what they were ingesting until it was too late.
> [Bread adulteration] gradually came to an end with government action, such as the 1860 and 1899 Food Adulteration Acts in Britain.[29] America had a more difficult time ending these processes of adulteration, however, as various states had varying policies regarding bread making.
The customer isn't the regulator here though, Costco is, and Costco can only do so with market power.
People aren't picking Costco because Costco has the best printers, they're buying their printers at costco because they're already at Costco buying groceries and clothing.
It's the same thing with apple -- monopolizing power gives corporations regulatory power.
> normal existing rules about truth in advertising would make sure the sticker is trustworthy
Take out one regulation, while leaving another overlapping regulation, and the regulation still works? This is switching the conversation to which regulations are the most effective, rather than saying that regulations are irrelevant.
I know multiple people who buy electronics at Costco specifically because they know it’ll be a safe buy, a direct result of Costco pushing these kinds of requirements. Reputational value that the actual tech company itself has lost
Agree 100%. For example, in the UK they extend the manufacturer's warranty on TVs to five years and have a reputation for being very straightforward to deal with when things go wrong.
The last several monitors I’ve purchased have been from Costco and exclusive to Costco.
Same with Samsung TVs. Unfortunately Samsung’s smart TV stuff is worthless, but the panels have been just fine.
I abandoned HP’s trash products awhile back. I found that replacing my HP printers with Brother’s mid-range laser printers have been a fantastic upgrade for the price.
> People aren't picking Costco because Costco has the best printers, they're buying their printers at costco because they're already at Costco buying groceries and clothing.
You could say that about every individual item Costco sells: people don't go specifically to Costco to buy socks.
People don't go to Costco specifically to buy celery either. Etc.
> Take out one regulation, while leaving another overlapping regulation, and the regulation still works? This is switching the conversation to which regulations are the most effective, rather than saying that regulations are irrelevant.
Maybe. General regulations like 'no lying in ads' or 'contracts need to be honoured' are better than specific regulations like, 'bananas that bend more than 5cm are banned'.
I'd love if the market fixed all these product quality
issues, but it doesn't.
Yeah. Free markets only work when consumers are educated and sufficiently informed enough to make good decisions.
The problem is that a consumer relies on thousands of products a year and it is a practical impossibility to be educated in all domains of knowledge. You can't have deep knowledge of transport, healthcare, technology, food, and a thousand other things.
It's even crappier than that. There are loads of products that don't see the commercial light of day. Vested interests work very hard to suppress competitors before it even gets to the point where consumers have a meaningful choice. In other areas, gatekeepers (e.g. supermarkets) make decisions on behalf of the consumers, often actively suppressing information that might damage other product lines.
And yet, someone was arguing in a comment here that a focussed government body couldn't be better than the individual! I'm sure they wouldn't make the equivalent argument wrt code...
I feel like everybody understands this deep down inside, but free market fanatics have some major insecurity issues and are simply afraid to admit that maybe they can't be experts in literally every category of consumer product
Also they skipped history class and are unfamiliar with all of the toxic and disgusting shit companies used to adulterate their food and medicine with
If you think it's impossible or merely undesirable for a society to have experts in public employ working for the greater good then... okay. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'm certainly not going to change your ingrained beliefs. But hopefully you can learn to understand others' views. What I'm seeing is the typical tendency to misrepresent others' beliefs as some sort of all-encompassing faith in "bureaucrats." Wrong.
Markets are useful and proven tools. So are rules.
Trouble is that in many cases the food industry has rebased what was once the normal product as 'premium' and charges a higher price for it. A good example is bacon.
No food manufacturer us going to sell the 'normal' product as just that and label the cheaper one as somehow inferior.
On a side note, it irks me that a certain brand of mayonnaise (made by a global chemicals company), which calls itself 'real mayonnaise' lists its top two ingredients as vegetable (not olive) oil and water. Not exactly a classic start to how the original was made.
Check how many minutes the average worker had to labour in yesteryear to afford 100g of 'normal' bacon, and how long it takes today's workers to afford the same quantity of 'premium' bacon.
> No food manufacturer us going to sell the 'normal' product as just that and label the cheaper one as somehow inferior.
This sounds quite plausible if you go by the wording on the package. But the design can be quite telling.
a lot of retailers have their own lists of demands.
walmart has had plenty of walmart-specific model numbers.
it typically leads to more confusion over what a customer is buying. the model number proliferation and the typical act of using the short form names leaves it feeling closer to gambling.
Because if the market had been providing them what they did want (clean meat of any kind) that act wouldn’t exist. Prior to that act the American people thought they were getting a clean product, a few journalists and a government investigation later it was concluded broadly that the meat packing industry was failing.
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair ended up being a major catalyst, there were a lot of claims by the meat industry that the book’s account was overblown, but as evidence piled up regulation was demanded.
Markets only work when everyone is forced to be on a level playing field. Sometimes you need regulation to provide some minimum proof of this, sometimes market players themselves find it desirable even, otherwise new market entrants can make a much much lower cost product that relies on market ignorance of what people are buying (so what if all the meat is packed by people on their death bed and sick… my margins are better).
I think you need to explain why in the United States chocolate is shitty and meat is toxic, as well as why Germany doesn't have regions with poisonous drinking water, nor health clinics where you can simply declare yourself in need of large amounts of highly addictive opiate painkillers in order to receive a prescription.
American mainstream consumers have weird preferences, I would guess?
It's perfectly possible to buy decent chocolate in the US. Eg Lindt and Ritter Sport seem to be widely available. (They are far from the best chocolate, they are just decent-enough brands that I remembered at the top of my head, and could verify with a quick web search are available in the US.)
How toxic is that meat actually? What are your sources? How do you know it's more of a problem in the US than in Germany? (Americans like to complain about their products. But we get American beef here in Singapore, and it's generally ok. Typically not as good as the Japanese or even Australian stuff, but good enough.)
> [...] nor health clinics where you can simply declare yourself in need of large amounts of highly addictive opiate painkillers in order to receive a prescription.
The stories I heard are rather the opposite: the political and regulatory backlash against the alleged 'opioid epidemic' has been so bad, that it's hard for people who legitimately need painkillers to get a prescription.
I suspect the US is a big country, so both accusations can be true at the same time. Even if the problem is tiny in relative terms, because of the size of the country, in absolute terms you will find plenty of cases of both failure modes.
You seem very in denial about a lot of this. Obviously 'weird preferences' do not really explain these issues (I note you completely ignored the case of heavy metals in drinking water, hard to explain as a 'consumer preference' for cheaper but unusable water.) So you've chosen to pretend that well documented things do not exist or are trivial.. Libertarian Germans often have to tie themselves in knots to pretend that all the elements of their high-trust society would exist without paternalistic government, when it's enough to compare their society to most others in the world to establish the opposite!
What country does Ritter Sport come from? Is it considered luxury chocolate in that country?
The huge differences between husbandry and meatpacking standards in the United States and Western Europe are extremely well known. Most US meat products are not allowed to be imported to the EU because of this. I'm surprised you need a 'source' for this widely known fact pattern (which in fact, you yourself mentioned in your comment above - pork in the US can not be eaten rare). What US meat is exported is generally a completely different standard than what's sold domestically.
The ready availability and aggressive marketing of opiate painkillers in the US continued for around twenty years, many of it based in 'pain clinics' whose only service was writing scripts for pills. Such clinics do not exist in Western Europe. The govt cracked down on these at a point where addiction was endemic in some regions. The problem was demonstrably not 'tiny in relative terms'.
Lindt? There may be better brands, and I've actually seen someone gag on the 70% dark Lindt that I favour; but "far from the best" seems to me an idiosyncratic view.
I guess that still doesn't explain why consumer preferences need to be conveyed through a strongman like Costco?
Is Costco really doing anything other than selling the more expensive version which you could buy anyway?
If not it suggests Costco is acting as some kind of hired protection, which definitely doesn't sound like an optimal supply choice scenario in an ideal market.
They don’t need to, it just happens to be in the best interest of Costco, so Costco inserts itself.
People buy larger ticket items at Costco because they trust it to work, with a return policy that makes it a safe bet. So Costco needs to sell products that don’t get returned in order to make this strategy work.
They are creating a trusted environment where you can buy things that don’t suck. That has value. If it was the mafia they would require you to shop there.
Costco is also saving themselves money by making sure that people don't return HP printers because they don't work. When you have a known liberal return policy that is a feature of the membership, you have an incentive is to make sure that customers don't want to return those products.
So, I see it less as a trusted environment and more as a seller motivated to make sure returns don't hit their margins. A consumer-positive/trusted environment is still be a good thing for consumers, regardless of if the creation of that environment was motivated by the bottom line.
>By default, consumers are their own best regulator. You buy only the bread that tastes good, and that shoes that fit, so the market will provide, etc.
This theory only holds if the consumers are fully informed about their options in the market - which isn't the case, else everyone would buy their printers & TVs at Costco.
> So there are rules in Germany that all pork sold has to be save to eat raw.
Are you sure about that? Supermarkets do sell Mett and normal minced pork separately with the latter usually having an indication that it is only to be consumed cooked.
This would match the Wikipedia article you linked which mentions that
> Unless pre-packaged, the German Lebensmittelhygiene-Verordnung ("food hygiene/health directive") permits mett to be sold only on the day of production.
> I hold that even in the absence of specific regulation, the German market would provide Germans with pork that's safe to eat raw. Companies would just put a little sticker on their meat that tells you, that it's safe to eat (and normal existing rules about truth in advertising would make sure the sticker is trustworthy).
Yeah fuck that. Companies regularly make a mockery of any truth in advertising laws - something being proven misleading in court and something misleading actual customers are very different things. Food safety is not something you can leave up to for profit corporations.
>Isn't that how market economies are supposed to work?
Well people are supposed to be able to vote with their wallet, and reward businesses that supply what the customer wants.
This assumes perfect knowledge from the consumer though. And actionable signals.
The question is, do consumers value a printer with a usb port, how much is it worth to them, do they have a choice in the matter?
You could view your chocolate example the other way. If you do like palm oil in your chocolate, you don't have the option of buying it. 'ideally' there would be a palm oil alternative so that consumers have a choice. But this also highlights another shortcoming of the market economy. There are negative externalities to Palm oil production, externalities that the market seem incapable or unwilling to fix.
I suppose you could argue that is why Germans don't want palm oil in their chocolate, but this isn't an outright ban, so palm oil could still pop up in other things.
> This assumes perfect knowledge from the consumer though.
Not at all. Imperfect knowledge is enough most of the time. Consumers will reward companies that are transparent and trustworthy over a long time.
> The question is, do consumers value a printer with a usb port, how much is it worth to them, do they have a choice in the matter?
Indeed, consumers have to make their own trade-offs about whether they value having a USB-port.
> If you do like palm oil in your chocolate, you don't have the option of buying it.
It's legal, and available, if you look for it. (Even before the rule change in Germany it was legal, you were just banned from calling the product 'chocolate'.)
> There are negative externalities to Palm oil production, externalities that the market seem incapable or unwilling to fix.
Since those negative exernalities are still around, you could equally blame the government or Santa Claus for not fixing them.
The 'market' does some of that fixing: customers who often pay a premium for 'ethically' sourced products that don't include palm oil. And there are producers who oblige them.
Most, but not all, of those externalities occur in the palm oil producing countries. It would make sense for the people most affected to eg vote to put taxes and subsidies in place to internalise those externalities. (Alas, many of those places also have corrupt and incompetent governments.)
This is a pretty wild omission of all of the food safety regulation out there. Regulation we got because the "let each consumer get sick enough to change their behavior" approach turned out to have some flaws that people did not like.
The bread that tastes good to most is the one that has shitloads of sugar added. Good for the company bad for people.
Salmonella only hurts a few people and not the company, and skimping on cleaning gives execs bigger bonuses. There's tons of regulations that are good and well intentioned.
Shit, even with your example of chocolate in the US capitalism got us shitty ass Hershey "chocolate". Why would that happen ya think?
> The bread that tastes good to most is the one that has shitloads of sugar added. Good for the company bad for people.
In all the places I lived, you can buy different kinds of bread. My taste buds prefer bread without sugar added. (And that's also the most common kind in Germany, where I grew up.)
If you need a nanny that bans you from consuming sugary bread, please hire one.
(There might be some laws in Germany that ban you from calling stuff with too much sugar in it 'Brot', but you can still make it and sell it under a more creative name. So no regulation keeps this kind of product off the market in Germany.)
> Shit, even with your example of chocolate in the US capitalism got us shitty ass Hershey "chocolate". Why would that happen ya think?
The market provides what customers are willing to pay for. I don't know why mainstream Americans have weird taste in chocolate.
Germans get the kind of chocolate they are willing to pay for. And Americans get the kind of chocolate they are willing to pay for.
As far as I can tell, it's perfectly legal to sell Hershey's in Germany. (You might just have to get creative with the name, I'm not sure.)
There's about as much 'capitalism' in German chocolate as in American chocolate.
Lest you think everything is great in Germany, they have their own weirdness. Eg in mainstream German supermarkets you can't find the quality of rice that would be acceptable in eg Singapore. You'd have to go out of your way to a specialist store and pay a premium.
It's perfectly legal in both Singapore and Germany to sell low quality rice. Mainstream Germans just don't care enough.
>If you need a nanny that bans you from consuming sugary bread, please hire one.
Reading through some of these comments makes me wonder why people still hold this sort of opinion. Companies are actively attempting to screw you over like hiding the functionality of a printer behind a sticker. It's active deception. Are we all to become experts in everything and join all the specialty forums? Where is the time to make an informed decision coming from? Do you think consumer protection agencies formed because consumers were being told all the relevant information to make an informed decision?
Why do you need that time? You just buy the printer that an expert you trust suggests to you.
That expert could be your knowledgeable friend, it could be a review in a blog or it could even be a retailer like Costco.
Having a reputation for recommending quality products is valuable. And if they screw up a few times, they can lose it quickly. So they are going to be careful and protect it. (Or rather, the retailers that keep their reputation are those who have been careful.)
LOL, most liberatrains are not even aware how deeply they depend on the "nanny". Starting with law enforcement and capturing those who counterfeit money.
Ahahahaha, 19th century banks had tiny circulation of their own Mickey Mouse notes, compare to global reach of the dollar. Now who would police the banks, lol who would arbitrary decline the notes in case of low liquidity?
You mean by far and away the cheapest possible chocolate and bread money can buy? The chocolate and bread the majority of us grew up with because it was cheaper than dirt and it was all we could afford?
Why do you think healthier options have been flooding shelves for 20 years now? We’re getting wealthier, and our standards are going up. Don’t make the mistake of mandating your standards onto others ‘for their own good’. Sometimes availability is the goal, not the quality of a good.
Or ignoring the cost of those standards, as measured by a corresponding reduction in goods produced proportional to the additional effort those standards require.
Consumers can only make a choice if there is a choice.
If nobody sells a TV that doesn't spy on you and play ads because of collusion, or simply because it's the single best profit optimizer, how do consumers regulate the market? The only option is for nobody to buy a TV ever again, which clearly won't happen.
Capitalism requires external regulation, otherwise we get monopolies and collusion that remove choice so that consumers have no option other than to pay too much for something that doesn't work well enough.
"The market" isn't a fairy godmother with your best interests in mind. It's a senseless machine that can only optimize for more paperclips forever. It's fundamentally incapable of doing anything else without external input.
> If nobody sells a TV that doesn't spy on you and play ads because of collusion, or simply because it's the single best profit optimizer, how do consumers regulate the market? The only option is for nobody to buy a TV ever again, which clearly won't happen.
Someone can start a new TV producing company to break the collusion. Or even just make a clever router that filters out the spying.
> Capitalism requires external regulation, otherwise we get monopolies and collusion that remove choice so that consumers have no option other than to pay too much for something that doesn't work well enough.
Real world regulation is responsible for more monopolies and collusion than 'capitalism' ever was.
Yes, you can come up with some nirvana regulation that's perfect. Just like we can come up with some 'nirvana' scenario for the market that's perfect. That doesn't prove very much either way.
> "The market" isn't a fairy godmother with your best interests in mind. It's a senseless machine that can only optimize for more paperclips forever. It's fundamentally incapable of doing anything else without external input.
The market is consumers and producers interacting. They provide the 'external input'.
If consumers want paperclips and are willing to pay for them, that's what they get. If consumers want quality products, that's what they get.
There are better pain killers on the market these days, if you are looking for a 'perfect product'.
Btw, heroin partially became popular as a re-creational drug because smoking opium and pot was banned. Just like the American prohibition of alcohol led consumers to switch from beer to hard liquor, because less bulky drugs are easier to smuggle.
Thanks. That looks perhaps like an instance of what the grand-father comment described:
> I mean, it's on-brand; if the USA has bad things from too much privatization, it's poetic for the solution to be more privatization.
The municipality of Flint that's mentioned in the article still was in charge of providing water. They just outsourced parts of that duty. More privatisation might have helped. Who knows?
I think his point is that markets work through competition. If we have 10 different companies running pipes to every home in Flint, all run by separate companies, then we might be set. But with one, market mechanisms don't work, so a market fundamentalist ideology leads to bad outcomes.
Very approximately, Americans spends about 20% of their GDP on healthcare. Britain spends about 10%. Singapore spends about 5%. (Those numbers include both government spending, like on the NHS or US Medicare and private spending.)
The NHS looks good compared to the broken American system. But it's a spendthrift compared to Singapore.
Healthcare outcomes in Singapore are no worse than in the US or UK.
Costco has incredible leverage over their suppliers. I worked for a supplier previously and they forced changes to our packaging including labels, cases, and pallets to make things easier for them. I have no doubt that Costco could give HP or Sony an ultimatum like this to dictate functionality or just not carry their brand.
As far as I can tell it was always structured as a normal business, albeit one requiring an annual membership fee: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costco
Does Costco do "business"? It buys merchandise from suppliers, sells to people. It's incorporated. Its shares are traded on the NASDAQ. Yes, evidently, it partakes in business.
Is it owned by the public (the state), or by private persons? Private persons.
Even if you somehow banded together all Costco members (i.e. people who paid membership fees to be able to ship there), you wouldn't be able to force the board of directors to resign (other than via boycotts etc.).
For a clearer example, Sam's Club has a similar membership, but that's well-known to be owned by Walmart…
And when there are real co-ops owned by customers around the world. Which require investments to get membership. And often you get that investment back if you leave.
HP printers come in an "e" model, which requires an Instant Ink subscription (but is cheaper - effectively subsidized by the subscription), and a non-"e" model that is unlocked (but costs more). Just don't buy the "e" models if you're shopping elsewhere.
In general, the reason Costco sells electronics with different model numbers is so that you can't price match them to/from other retailers. Sometimes a few minor features get removed as well to lower the overall cost.
> Just don't buy the "e" models if you're shopping elsewhere
Ah yes, “just” add another highly specific thing to your memory so that sometime unpredictable in a next x years you don’t get completely screwed by the giant corp. And for all those people who don’t spend their days on a computer reading HN, sucks to be you, HP got ya.
The sarcasm in this comment isn’t directed at you (thanks for sharing the ‘e’ tidbit) - I’m just so so tired of giant corps actively trying to screw the consumer at every possible turn. It makes shopping for anything besides the absolute basics exhausting.
I think they mean on the other side: using the Costco prices to go over and get the printer for even cheaper at BestBuy.
Edit: I was just thinking a little more about this and wondering "wait, why would they want to stop people from doing that?" Best hypothesis: you see the Costco price and you know that it's going to be the best price you're going to find on that; there's no reason to shop around, if you want it you just go to Costco and get it.
If Costco would ban all electronics products that phone home, gratuitously depend on servers (which is now most IoT products), and/or spy on the user... I might have to become a lifetime citizen of Costco.
Out of curiosity, do you happen to know the differences for the Costco Sony TVs?
It may have changed recently but last I knew Sony TVs had few if any ties to Sony services, come loaded with basically unchanged Google TV, and are perfectly happy to be used as fully offline "dumb" TVs. If that holds true for current Sony TVs it's hard to imagine what would be different in Costco versions.
Out of curiosity, do you happen to know the differences for the Costco Sony TVs?
On a related note, the LG TV I bought at Fry's Electronics was a Fry's-only model.
Investigating it, I found out it was actually a Brazilian model with the built-in DVR disabled for the American market.
I thought about trying to hack it to enable the DVR, but realized it would have to connect to the internet to retrieve program information, and there's no way I'm going to let my TV connect to the internet.
(And before a bunch of HN smarty pantses tell me it will just latch onto a neighbor's wifi, that's not possible in my building, as we're all on the same building-wide VLAN, and you have to register a new device's MAC address in the portal to allow it in. I'm also too high up to pick up any street-level wifi.)
1) Tenants are required to use building wifi? Nobody can choose to use cable/dsl and run their own wifi AP?
2) Eventually some sneaky TV vendor is doing to work out a deal with a cell phone network to periodically run cell phones in wifi AP mode so they can retrieve telemetry from TVs that aren't connected to the internet. You could even wait for the phone to be connected to a charger, if you wanted to be nice and not drain the battery.
Tenants are required to use building wifi? Nobody can choose to use cable/dsl and run their own wifi AP?
No DSL or cable because the building was never wired for POTS or cable. The building runs Cat6 and satellite TV to every room, and it's included in the rent. Why would you pay for another service when you're getting 250/250 service plus video at every large wall?
And what happens when some idiot like me double nats and plugs an access point in.
It is not really a big deal, and to be honest it sounds like the ideal multi tenet building wiring. put a baby IX in the basement, run high quality cable to each location. and let the tenants figure out what they want.
But the point is networks are complicated versatile things. and just because there is no real need for a private access point does not mean there are no private access points.
And what happens when some idiot like me double nats and plugs an access point in.
Then the IT guy figures it out. It's a large apartment building, not a campground. We're not left on our own.
He actually lives in the building and if you need help, that's what he's for.
For example, if you're elderly, or if you have something you want to hook up that doesn't have its MAC printed on the outside, you make an appointment and he handles it for you.
Isn't this what amazon's Whispernet is for? Always on low power bluetooth listeners embedded in echos and other amazon devices. If the TV supports it and you don't have an echo it can use your neighbor's echo/internet to send telemetry data.
Now imagining somebody planning to use metallic conductive paint on their TV, grounding the paintjob...and eventually painting the whole flat with it (with ordinary paint on top, for appearance).
> And before a bunch of HN smarty pantses tell me it will just latch onto a neighbor's wifi, that's not possible in my building, as we're all on the same building-wide VLAN, and you have to register a new device's MAC address in the portal to allow it in.
Extremely unlikely that LG would be doing this, but at least theoretically the TV could listen for communication from other devices and then reuse a MAC address from an authorized device when that device is not around.
Don’t even worry about it. No one has ever been able to provide any proof of a TV doing that. At this point it’s just a spooky tech tale akin to the hitchhiker with the hook in the back of the car.
Because I am an idiot I like to run an open accesspoint.
The only user* so far has been the neighbors samsung tv sending status updates. I should probably be a better person and block it.
*probably because I am not a complete idiot and the open network is throttled down to just about unusable. enough perhaps for a webpage and a message but pictures are unpleasant and video is right out.
Hard to say, the link is slow enough that video is unpleasant. But sure, it could have been someone fiddling around in the config when they first got the tv(onboarding process?) but does not have any streaming services so does not care that the link is garbage. But I think the tv was just happy to find a open network and started using it for telemetry.
Are you under the impression that airplane wifi reaches the ground, or that apartment buildings are 20,000 feet tall? Even if that was true, planes move at hundreds of miles per hour, so clearly you're not posing a serious argument.
A Cessna 150 cruises around 100. Cessna 172s are used regularly for scheduled commercial service, and cruise under 150. No issue putting a small wifi ap in one of those. If you want I can turn on my phone tethering next time I go flying to prove my point.
Plenty of small aircraft cruise around doing survey work over cities all day every day.
Look at project loon from google, those guys travel around at an airspeed of nil providing internet.
Currently, I'm not convinced there is a difference. There used to be, in that some Sony TVs would require an out-of-the-box firmware update in order to enable all features, but the Costco models didn't.
But I don't think that's true with the current generation.
I feel like people get hung up on silly things. What does "enable all features" mean? Does it mean using the smart tv features? I feel like that's pretty reasonable.
I say as someone who just bought a sony tv, declined all features, and just use an hdmi input from an actual computer. Very pleasant experience. Can't say I've ever seen a TV that doesn't actually allow you to do this.
I had a Vizio that only let you change inputs and volume, everything else only worked through a phone app that worked over the internet. This included things like picture/sound settings and input labels.
I hated that t.v. And was glad it died prematurely.
Just don't ever give your tv the wifi password. I have a thousand times more confidence at microsoft will keep the xbox operating system up to date and reasonably secure (yes, it has ads on the homescreen) than I do that any smart tv vendor will still support their crap OS in 5, 7, 10 years from now.
Use an xbox or a PS5 to drive the TV and run the apps on that.
My TV and the few IoT devices I own are all on their own wifi network under their own subnet. I don't care what happens on that network. Maybe routers should come with similar automatic features to sequester unsecure IoT devices from everyday users' networks.
The issue isn't (primarily) your TV abusing the local network. The issue is your TV sending all your viewing habits back to the manufacturer to sell them, including by doing video recognition on videos being played through HDMI inputs.
I think I was mostly referring to keeping things secure with updates, or lack thereof with TVs. Pihole does a good job of keeping ads and nonsense off my Sony TV. Netflix, HBO, Amazon, etc already know my viewing habits and probably sell it to each other for all I know.
That is so much compute work. How could they do that realistically on a TV? I plug my computer into the HDMI and now they are looking at everything I do?
I don’t think there’s any difference currently. I have a one-generation old Sony TV that I bought from Costco in Canada, and it’s the same model as is sold in Canada outside of Costco.
This kind of bullshit has gone on for years, notably in the mattress industry. Mattress companies are famous for simply slapping different model numbers on the same mattresses sold to each retailer, to undermine price guarantees.
No doubt HP, Sony, and who knows who else pulls the same shit with merchandise sold to Costco.
I wonder if it's possible to cross-flash firmware to unlock other models. I highly doubt HP is spending the money to create an entire new different set of models just for Costco.
I thought all major shops got differently numbered models from major suppliers. This allows the shop to say it is a unique model only available from them.
I thought it was so a store could say they'll match any competitor's price on the same model, only to find that store is the only one to carry that model number.
But the sticker has an icon in the lower left corner that suggests it should be pulled off?
Here is a reply from the Mastodon thread that seems more plausible:
> @steeph @netspooky They're not hiding it, they're getting you to set up the printer over wifi, and only use the USB port after that. It seems if you use the USB port straight away it'll only print up to 20 pages then stop. They do this to get you to opt into hp+ and lock the printer in to use official toner. That's why the printer is so cheap
The choice is when you buy it. The models with "e" at the end are less expensive, sometimes significantly so, than their hardware-identical non-e counterparts, but they are locked in to the HP+ service in firmware.
As far as I can tell there is no option to "buy out" an e model to remove the subscription requirement. Given HP's history I suspect once this annoys the wrong person it'll turn out to be pretty trivial to break, but for now if you feel the need to purchase a new HP product you should definitely avoid the ones with an e in the model number.
AFAIK Brother hasn't tried anything like this (yet?) and they're cheap so if they fit your needs I recommend them.
Brother rejected my 3rd party toner on the MFC-L3750CDW after an automatic firmware update. Fuck them, I said at the time.
Then I bought a far cheaper second-hand Brother printer, turned off firmware updates, and have continued using 3rd party toner. So only kind-of fuck them, I guess, because their printers do the job pretty well.
But I am glad I switched to mono, because the colour MFC would have cost AUD$550+ on genuine toner (3 colour + 1 black). Too much for casual usage once a month.
> Brother rejected my 3rd party toner on the MFC-L3750CDW after an automatic firmware update.
Damn, that sucks, I'm happily using my old Brother printer and was thinking about second one. Did it not let you override that warning in service mode[1]?
[1] Brother printers have a hidden menu where you can set cartridge values to different ones than read by printer's sensors. Godsend if you are using very cheap 3rd party cartridges, as they sometimes report their capacity as 0%. The way to access it depends by model, for OP's model I found https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6lsUBu1TDg
My Brother combo laser printer/scanner just flashed a message about some "firmware update, features have been removed" but I can't tell what they were and don't notice anything different with the basic scan/print I do. Other than that, its worked pretty well.
I have a similar printer and I think it was just for setup, I remember it saying you can use USB after the initial setup but you need to keep it connected to WiFi as well or something
I agree. I get the impression that the intended message is "USB not necessary" rather than "unavailable". I can imagine that many users seeing the USB port would think that it is required (since it was on older printers), not understanding that WiFi-only is an option.
Mugging pensioners is a line of work that people get into when they're too ethical for the printer industry.
HP is one of the worst offenders, but the others aren't much better.
I bought a dirt cheap (~$100 AUD) Fuji Xerox CP105b colour laser printer about 10 years ago and it still works fine. No crapware in the drivers, no cartridge lockouts, no bullshit. Super crisp print jobs. I fear that when it breaks, I won't find another deal like that.
I bought a cheap Brother laser printer 20 years ago, and it works great today. Just plug in the USB cable, and it works on a modern machine with no extra drivers or software. (It's old enough that it still also has a parallel port on it.)
I recently replaced the toner and drum with third-party ones, and they work fine - no vendor lock-in.
Searched for a Brother comment to reply to - found it, thanks! :-)
I don't do a lot of printing, but when I do it's for a real need and I just want it to work. So I got another HL-L2375DW (mono full duplex laser) last year to replace my first which I gave to my ex after separation/divorce - a perfect little unit, not a trace of HP-level BS anywhere to be found. It goes to sleep with minimal power use, and wakes up when needed, even weeks or months between each use - can print straight from my Samsung phone with no extra driver install needed, as well as from PC naturally. I've just set it up on the Wifi, but it also has a network port + USB. Perfect.
It was only around 200 AUD; mind you the included toner wasn't the biggest but I only need it for occasional use so it's still going strong. I'll probably get their big drum when it eventually runs out (that's what I did with my 1st, ex printed a lot more than I) and whilst I could go 3rd party I'll just buy theirs anyway to support them in a small way.
Maybe there is Brother astroturfing going on, but I've had a similar excellent experience with a Brother LaserJet. It uses 3rd party toner and drums without a problem, rarely jams, prints high volume quickly, is stupid simple to install, and has no software lock.
> It seems people are reporting that Brother has stared rejecting third party ink.
This seems to be a recent development so people who bought a Brother 5 or more years ago won't have run into that bs yet (like who updates their printer firmware, seriously).
So its more likely genuine users (that includes me) recommending products that have worked well for them.
I'm not very happy with my 2375. It somehow lost the wifi connection (pc doesn't see it but printer display shows online) and no amount of resetting got it back. Thank god for the USB cable...
And the drivers were acting weird even before that
I got to the point where I actually buy brother ink for my old brother printers, because it is not that expensive and I really don't want them to go out of business.
Right! I’ve got an ancient Brother myself and I feel like paying for it again, for the same reason. I recently upgraded to windows 11, downloaded the official driver and everything worked perfectly within a few minutes. They’re holding the line against BS. No, I do not want to connect to your cloud thing to print a file from my computer, thanks.
It’s super easy to setup CUPS to do AirPrint nowadays. I have a small container on my Proxmox box that just runs CUPS and talks to the printer over the network.
I know that’s not accessible for the tech un-savvy, but it’s there for those of us that are.
I thought they went to big pharma to figure out new ways to milk old medicine for vast profits. Think about it: how many drugs sell for prices substantially below the price of printer ink by weight, by volume and by just about every other parameter you might want to use, including manufacturing costs.
What is it about printers where all the makers exhibit the most egregious dark patterns, the flakiest products, and the worst software design in the drivers, out of any tech product? Is the toner in the air giving them all brain rot?
Xerox is the way to go - I got a VersaLink c405 at the start of the pandemic - it's not cheap, but no rubbish in the drivers, accepts third party toner without complaint and most parts are serviceable.
I got a Samsung clp-320 color laser printer about a decade ago for $150 and, same as you, it's given me no issues both USB and network (local only). It even works from phones on my wifi which is nice.
In Germany we have "Mogelpackung des Jahres" ("Cheat packaging of the year") by the consumer center/protection organisation for example that points out companies that abuse shrinkflation
Shame is a big driver of achieving cultural/behavioral alignment, the same has to be done with corporations if they misbehave.
While legal entities do not care, their employees and customers can be capable of that. Make every such infraction public so the companies' reputation, brand and profits correspond to the morality of its actions. Systemic failures like these need systemic fixes.
Maybe it would be a good idea to force companies to publicize product return rates, so managerial brainfarts like these get rewarded accordingly.
Same for a Brother black-and-white laser. Not a Brother ink printer. Not a Brother color laser printer. A Brother black-and-white laser.
Now maybe things have changed. But I bought my Brother MFC-8890DW back in April of 2011. It is still going strong. In that time period I have replaced the toner once. But I have only printed 3,768 pages in that time. So 314 pages per year.
It is the best type of printer for my use case which is infrequent printing. Ink type printers aren't the best options if you might have 90+ days between printing jobs. I also really like having the scanning and photo copying features that mine has. And the Ethernet connection makes it so anyone in the house can easily print.
Brother printers have went this way too. Mine incessantly complains about low toner even when I use brand new ones because they aren't brother branded.
1. Make sure that the printer is on while changing the toner or it will not know that a change was done.
2. Speaking from experience doing support for a lot of them, brother* printers are notorious for not realizing the toner (even with originals) was changed. There are ways to reset the counter though(Holding two buttons while powering on). It's usually mentioned in the manual.
After a recent firmware update my Brother inkjet refuses to print b&w (yes it has a full black cartridge and this was never a problem previously) because one of the color inks is empty. Brother the Good is a thing of the past.
Sure, but previously this printer explicitly supported black only modes with no regard for the other inks. Brother decided it was easy money acting like the other makers, and this is likely to percolate to their other products.
> I was thinking maybe I moved the printer and it is not level?
Unlike the inkjet where it shines a little LED through the cartridge (covering with black electrical tape makes it think it's always full), laser toner I think has an id chip on the cartridge and the printer just maintains an internal counter as to guess when it'll run out. Reset that, and make sure the option is turned off that stops it continuing to print once low (networked models have a webpage you can go to to turn these from stop to just warn).
That's actually great information because it has been driving me crazy. I put in a brand new cartridge and it still complains. I assumed it was non-OEM BS.
There appears to be a thriving secondary market for pre-enshittification Brother laser printers. I wonder if anybody maintains a list of the "good models?"
Other people are commenting that Brothers are getting kind of enshittified like these HPs have been know to do forcing people to use "HP+" and subscribing to ink on their discounted models.
Print them at your local pharmacy or somewhere else that will do color photo prints. Not worth the hassle, in my opinion, to have a color printer (ink or laser).
Canon. A whole range from 'enthusiast' to 'professional' (I love my Image Pro 1000, but I make a sideline hustle from photography - it's entirely overkill for most - but there are more budget friendly models).
Although Epson doesn't quite have a stellar reputation wrt user friendliness, my WP4515 has worked great for like 7-8 years so far. It's also perfectly supported by Linux.
Not sure if the above can be still relevant as that model has been superseded by newer ones.
Is anyone familiar with a solid open source printer hardware project?
Given all of the issues with printers over the years (driver compatibility, ink cartridge drm, things like the above post), I’m curious if there is a reason open source printer hardware is not more common.
My assumption would be the complexity of the print mechanism / tolerances / balancing.
There are plenty of open-source 3D printers but doesn't seem to be any 2D ones.
That said, I think open-source firmware for existing 2D printers would be a better idea, perhaps with a controller board to retrofit into existing mechanisms since I suspect they've heavily used crypto to lock out alternative firmware. Driving the two axes is relatively simple, but RE'ing printhead signals and driving those are probably going to be the most difficult part.
In general the hardware on a 2D printer is simply more difficult than most or all of the OSHW stuff.
Paper handling is hell (there's a great magazine article from a few years back on the Xerox division who handles this... they're wizards, the lot of them). Hardware, software, and environment dependent.
Everything needs to be RIPped but that's the sort of thing which software is really good at and which is well suited to open source.
For an inkjet driving the nozzles is the nasty bit. First figure out which ones to fire when, then you have to actually do it. I'm told by those in the know that this really just can't be done well enough in software, you need the timing control of FPGA/ASIC solutions. So, very doable, but hard.
Laser printers have difficult drum and transfer belt issues but solutions are mostly copyable from existing products. Driving the laser diode itself is pretty easy (admittedly I've worked with laser guys, but still). The hard bit is pointing the laser in the right direction, with either spinny prisms or galvos. Or you could forgo the laser in favor of an LED array but I don't think anyone (Oki?) ever got great results out of that. Overall a B&W laser is probably the easiest thing to start with.
That all said, everyone knows China's reputation in the hardware space: clone, clone, clone. And yet, how many Chinese printers do you come across? There's probably a reason for that. It sure isn't lack of skill.
For an inkjet driving the nozzles is the nasty bit. First figure out which ones to fire when, then you have to actually do it. I'm told by those in the know that this really just can't be done well enough in software, you need the timing control of FPGA/ASIC solutions. So, very doable, but hard.
To get a rough idea of the frequencies involved, consider a 1440x1440 DPI printer, with a 12" wide axis and 1" swath. Assume the printhead can move across the full 12" around 5 times per second (this is really fast), for a standard 8.5x11 portrait print this turns out to be around 1 page every 2.2 seconds or 27 pages per minute; at this speed the printhead is moving at 60 inches per second, so for 1440 DPI each nozzle needs to be pulsed at 1440x60=86400kHz or an 11us period, which is not that fast in terms of digital electronics. However, if you're firing 1440 nozzles in parallel, then the total throughput of the data that needs to go into the printhead goes up to 124.416MHz, or closer to 500MHz for all 4 colours, but this is easily parallelisable.
That said, those numbers are probably on the high end and represent a fast printer; I'm not even sure any consumer inkjet can do full-colour 1440 DPI at 27PPM.
True enough, but it turns out you can't fire a nozzle with a 50% duty cycle TTL signal... it's more complicated than that. More analog. More annoying.
Most of my knowledge here comes from very peripheral involvement with a project to repurpose an inkjet printhead to do Something Else™ (sorry, NDA here). The printhead high priests just scoffed at any kind of software control over the firing process, and that was that.
Or just use an FPGA. They're not really that hard. Just different from the open hardware community's usual go-tos and the tooling can be kind of crappy.
I've often wondered about an open printer design. My current printer uses inkjet cartridges which contain the print heads (HP 45/78). That would seem to be most of the difficulty, already made available in a commoditized off the shelf package.
I've heard paper picking can be kind of a black art, but I'd think a community could iterate fast enough to get it at least passable, or just suck it up with single sheet feeding in the beginning. And it's not like commercial printers are foolproof.
Then there's motion control, which is already the bread and butter of the 3D printing scene. Perhaps not initially good enough to align 600dpi over multiple inches repeatably for photo quality, but I'd think it would be fine for business forms and whatnot that people end up having to print.
Most modern color laser printers actually use LED arrays. If your laser printer has the same speed (pages/second) for b/w and for color, it's very likely using an LED array.
The printer I got from brother is definitely using one LED array per color.
I assume the print-head and paper-feeding are the hardest parts, but I would absolutely be interested in exploring how to liberate 2D printing into an open-source ecosystem just as 3D printing has an ecosystem...
> My assumption would be the complexity of the print mechanism / tolerances / balancing.
I once sat on a chairlift with a lawyer who had represented one of the big printer companies and he explained that printers are the perfect storm of: hardware, software, firmware, chemistry, physics, fluid dynamics, paper science, and (yes) lawyers.
The larger companies have put billions into R&D, hence them continuing to pull the crap we see every other month on HN.
I am always sure to mention this whenever there's talk about printers.
We _need_ an open source printer. Ideally a monochrome laser with an automatic paper feeder.
For most, it would be the only printer in consideration when in the market for a printer. This is true even if the specs were just at the level of early 90s printers.
Even if buying something else, the mere existence of this printer would keep printer brands honest. They get to be scummy because they know we have no alternative.
The fact that there are (formerly) "secret agreement[s] with governments to ensure that the output of those printers is forensically traceable" in the form of the Machine Identification Code[0] suggests that it could potentially be difficult for an open-source 2D printer to gain traction.
Printing is hard. Printing fast is harder. The main reason printers still suck, 40-odd years later, is because it's really hard, at least in the consumer market, where you don't expect regular service, and there's a race to the bottom in terms of price.
this question comes up on a lot of the "printer rage" threads <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal...> and my recollection of the majority of the substantial discussions seem to imply that there are patents which are a major obstacle to any such effort, above and beyond the general "hardware development is its own specialization" problem
Now, what I don't know (and don't recall seeing) is whether that's true of every jurisdiction or if it's just a US-centric problem and the EU could have their revenge by having an open printer that US consumers couldn't buy :-/
I thought patents were 20 years. At the time, in the early 2000s, I thought the HP Laserjet 4000 was a tank. Is there any reason someone would be prevented from replicating a circa 2003 model printer?
I mean you would think printers would be THE opensource hardware project as printer hate has been a ongoing issue for as long as people have been attaching them to computers. I mean a shitty closed source printer driver is what acted as the impetus for Richard Stallman to start GNU and peicemeal trying to replace the Unix. it would seem like printing would be the prime target for opensource.
My personal take is: Why bother?! It is a dying marked. Most private people don't need a printer. Just go to a convenient store, for that one print every other year. And for the high volume business side there are still good enough commercial options.
A monochrome laser printer is useful for USPS shipping, because they pick up at the mailbox. I also print icons for confusing switches around the house (light / fan / garbage disposal) and attach them with clear tape. I recently made a "This Hyundai vehicle is equipped with a push-button ignition" window label to deter TikTok thieves.
Inkjets are junk, because the ink dries up within a year. I'm still on my original laser toner from 2007.
You don't need triple digit dpi technology or a stacked paper feeder for shipping labels.
And I don't see why a dot matrix printer would be that hard to make.
The hardest part would be the ink ribbon, and compared to e.g. an inkjet head that's low tech (plastic foil ribbon coated with essentially laser toner).
I would also venture to say cost. Printers use pretty specific parts and making enough generic versions with all tooling would likely mean unit price is closes to the more expensive side. And then you might as well get one from that price range.
They are complex machines with complex parts. And to have those priced sensibly needs volume. Like how many injection moulds would you need? And then you would have one factory equipped.
That article reads painfully like a "how can we screw over our customers" discussion was exposed.
On a more positive note, it used to be somewhat common for cheap no-name Android phones, mainly based on Mediatek SoCs, to boot from an internal removable microSD card, along with the "official" external removable one next to the then-standard removable battery and dual SIM slots. They disappeared rather quickly once eMMC became the norm, likely in a next revision of a reference design.
I bought a NAS a fee years back. Was a fully functional computer complete with 4x usb, hdmi, and Ethernet. Only the ethernet was exposed until you cut the case away.
Cut the case, installed truenas, never looked back.
HP sucks, but that sticker has instructions on where to start to peal it away.
They're obviously trying to get the whole family to wirelessly print with all their devices via WiFi to use up ink. And not just connected to dad's boring household accounting desktop.
Yes, and get the printer on the network where it can download new DRM behaviors to screw the users out of more ink. So far they retroactively added banning 3rd party ink, disabling ink once it gets too old, and of course not letting you print black if one of the other colors is out.
What gets me is large parts of HP was cut (calculators, test instruments, laser printers, etc), not because they weren't profitable, but instead because they weren't as profitable as selling ink.
I still wish printers continued to have parallel ports and something relatively standard and simple like ASCII+ESC/P2 compatibility. Instead we got a morass of complexity with proprietary protocols over USB and extremely user-hostile printer firmware.
I bought one of these because it was like $30 and needed it to print off some stuff with color. I had immediately taken the sticker off even realizing until after the fact that they try and limit it to WiFi only. It worked immediately plugging it in to USB on my Linux laptop, so yea.. I guess its only there for people that don't know better?
I think this is the key part... I haven't installed a printer driver from the manufacturer in years. Using CUPS through my Mac or Linux machines "just works". The crazy bloatware drivers are almost always associated with Windows, so if you're using Linux or a Mac, there isn't much of a risk here, is there? Linux even more so...
Why do people even buy HP printers? I gave up on them a decade ago when I had to download some 300MB “driver” on a clients PC, which of course installed a crapload of other stuff on it.
Reminds me I still need to fix my laserjet 1020. No-nonsense laser printer for those two or three sheets I print each quarter, without having 90% of your ink just evaporate or dry up.
It's paper jamming when I insert more than one sheet at a time. I ordered a new pickup stamp and roller already. Unfortunately the pickup stamp was the wrong type and didn't fit, and the roller alone didn't fix it. I just don't print often enough for it to be annoying, but one day this thing will go again. One day....
Back in the day, my primary school paid the printer company (I think it was Epson at the time) $400 (which was a lot of money back then) to "upgrade" the school's (we only had 2 printers for the whole school) printers from black and white to colour. Lo and behold, he opened it up and flipped a single dip switch.
Think of the children! There are hordes of bad men out there printing illegal material, sharing it hand to hand, and doing unimaginable things with it. It must be stopped!
"To cook the frog one need to slowly increase the temperature so the frog will not feel stress but relaxation, and when the temperature exceeds some point, the frog will not have strength to jump out"
As apparently this cruel recipe probably even does not work in case of this amphibian, it is really great metaphor and it really works in case of people. People can get accustomed to every inconvenience one can imagine, as long as it is accompanied by additional "convenience" attached to it. No cash - you don't need to take money with you. No cable printing - you can print without cables. Ink subscription - you can always have any amount of ink you want (as long as it does not exceed certain amount of pages)
HP are scum but I have to say the most reliable laser I've had is an HP LaserJet Pro M148 and it wasn't expensive. No jams, everything works, no crapware. Done 7000 sheets on it. The only thing you have to do is ignore the low toner warning as it'll do a few hundred pages after that kicks off.
This is a vast contrast to the cheap inkjet I got from them before which was drop kicked all the way to the trash after it died replacing the first cartridge.
I had a Brother laser before them and the thing used to jam all the time and ate drums.
Their mistake was to make the sticker distinguishable from the background plastic. Inquisitive people will always remove the sticker to reveal the tempting secrets behind.
I just remove stickers because I hate all manner of visual distractions. If I could find a way to remove etched in / painted on logos from from computer hardware I'd do that too.
Got a (pretty good) apron from William Sonoma but it had the logo sewed on with a huge patch, had to painstakingly unstitch it to get a pretty apron without any branding emblazoned across the front.
It's been awhile but I've always taken the logos off the front of the optical drives in my desktop builds. Takes like three wipes with some acetone and now you have a very clean look. Very few companies are willing to spend money on robust branding for whitebox goods so it's often very easy to remove logos from stuff like conference swag.
I bought a pencil case for work off Amazon and it had a bright red patch with the company name on it, just some sort of absolute nonsense combination of consonants and vowels. One minute with an xacto blade cut the stitches and I was left with an acceptable quality pencil case.
My personal pet peeve is the branding car dealerships place on the cars they sell. I asked one sales person if I was going to get a monthly check from them for the advertising services I was providing for them. He thought I was joking. While I've never used a seam ripper to remove a logo from an article of clothing (kuddos to them), I have removed the license plate covers and decals from my car in front of the sales person that assumed I was joking before accepting the car.
Hehe, same here. I asked for a discount if they wanted to put their branded license plate holders on the car. No discount? Ok, I'll bring my own (they're like $5 each so no problem there). It's kind of weird that a dealer gets to use your vehicle to advertise, it's not like they built the car or something, they're just a middle man.
I forced them to agree to not apply the sticker to the car I ordered for delivery to the dealer. I got in in writing from the sales rep.
When I went to pick up the car and it had their stupid sticker on it. They had to remove it and redo the clear coat at their expense.
Some car dealers have installed private car washes. Come in for a free wash, any time, as long as you own the car and are displaying the dealer plate. So at least in that case they're "paying" for the advertising.
Last time I purchased a car, I told the salesperson that if there's any dealer logos or whatnot on it, I will not accept delivery. There was a license plate frame, it was very quickly removed.
My stitch cutter is my favorite tool. I got mine from a surgeon in the hospital, before that I used one that is used for sewing, but the big one is a lot quicker.
Even with the sticker, there's also a USB logo visible. It seems like this is not HP trying to trick the user into using wifi by hiding usb, but just letting them know that this thing supports wifi.
My cable modem has a sticker that looks very much like the surrounding plastic. I’d never have noticed if reviews hadn’t pointed it out. Apparently hides three extra ethernet ports for situations with multiple static IPs or with link aggregation. (Things that aren’t needed for the typical residential modem user.)
Disregarding the anti-consumer part of this, HP instant ink is a pretty good deal. The 910 3-pack on Best Buy is $36 for me, and claims a 315 page yield. Instant ink, on the other hand, offers 100 pages for $6/month, making it about $20 to achieve the same yield of pages.
And with the rise of digital records, most people could probably live on the $1/month plan where you get 10 pages and can rollover up to 30 pages with every extra 10 pages costing $1 when you need it. It'd take 3 years of not printing a total of 315 pages to lose money on Instant Ink compared to the price of the new cartridge (I'm on the grandfathered $1 15 pages/month plan).
Yes! There are few things as pleasant as having no subscription services to worry about. Bills are plentiful enough as it is, I'm in no hurry to add to them. I love one-time purchases.
I just typed コンビニ into Google. I'm in Chicago, and bless, it understood exactly what I wanted and gave me a map of all the local convenience stores (and handily translated their names to Japanese to boot).
We have a very similar printer and I wondered if we had the same sticker. We do, but I obviously peeled it off ages ago because it was stuck randomly to the back of the printer and the USB port is already accessible. I seem to recall having to really mess about with the printer at some point as it stopped functioning with whatever HP online ink scam software it was originally running with. It now just AirPrints.
You'd need no hardware redesign, just not install the connectors during manufacturing. You might need to adjust the automated QA actually.
There are lots of parts not installed in electronics if you disassemble something and examine it. The reasons can be multiple, cost saving, using the same PCB for different similar products, etc.
I fins it fascinating that the verge is litterally just embedding a single toot and call that a presse article on which they put ads… How is that not a blatant copyright infringement of the OP? It's not like it's a short citation for illustration, the embeded toot is the entire content here!
I had 4 off-brand ink cartridges that suddenly wouldn’t work in my HP inkjet printer. Pissed me off so much I went out and bought a $350 Epson printer. Never again HP. Why did you turn evil :’(
Now I want to buy an HP printer, use it in wireless mode with a bogus account, and print 1000 pages a day of 4chan screen shots and posters that say "HP SUCKS."
I'd love to see a website where, if you are a verified buyer of a product, you can throw a virtual brick through a corporation's window, and there is a "brick count" top list
That's why the Costco HP printers are often models exclusive to Costco.
(They require a similar thing of Sony televisions, which is why Sony TVs have slightly different model numbers at Costco.)