Kinda, but a CRT literally doesn’t have precise pixel targeting in the way an LCD does. Instead, you’re telling the electron gun to draw red for a little while, and it paints what it paints.
Very true. I’ve started talking to older generations about their Socialism Security checks. “That’s different! The government taxes me and then… uses it… to support me when I’m not making money… Oh.”
Lots of people detest socialism until you show them how they’re already benefitting from it. I’m not even really pro-socialism, except in the simplified case where you have a number line with “capitalism” on one end, “communism” on the other, and “socialism” as the range in the middle. I definitely wouldn’t want to live on either end of that spectrum, and a mixed economy where private enterprise handles wants with a government handling needs for those who can’t do it on their own — i.e. socialism — is a reasonable alternative.
Social Security is a really bad example though. It doesn’t support a living wage, and everybody depending on it would have been better off if they could have invested those taxes instead.
I don’t really appreciate being assumed to be a troll just because I’m holding a contrary opinion. That’s very much against the guidelines of this site.
I think if you are the type who is interested in digging up comment history you’ll find plenty of comments from me that show that I’m pretty much a regular person who has respectful conversations.
I apologize if I didn’t follow the popular “corporation bad” narrative. Like, I do recognize that ink is grossly overpriced and all that. At the same time, I don’t really think we are held hostage by printer companies these days. I buy ink once a year or less and it’s not even a laser printer. It isn’t a significant expense or inconvenience.
Sounds a bit disproportionate. If you do that, you better hope the vendor's CEO and your company's CEO are not golfing buddies.
And in my mind, one email alert or pop-up to all current users letting them know the service is going away (in case they had not been told which is as I've said before often the case in large orgs) is very far from the definition of spam.
Conversely, I would not work for a CEO who would block me from doing my job duties. I'm hired to do a job. If I can't do that job, there's no point in being here. Other companies will pay me for my judgment.
If this happened in real life, I'd say "Joe," (because I'm on a first-name basis with the CEO and chat with him daily), "we had to block communications from Tom's company because they're pulling some bonkers stuff. You might let him know that he's pissing off customers right and left and needs to knock it off."
And yes, this is 100% the definition of spam. It's literally unsolicited commercial communication. Sending these mass instructions to flood the local IT admins is an enormous breech of trust.
It’s not cheapness. My kid couldn’t print her homework because I was low on cyan. It’s not that I don’t want to buy more ink, but that the thing I was printing only needed black. If it weren’t a color printer, the output would’ve been identical and it wouldn’t have needed cyan.
Alternatively, the printer allows you to keep going regardless of status of the print ink and then the printer gets bad reviews and complaints about bad print quality.
Your unpreparedness on your kids’ homework isn’t the fault of the manufacturer. I can’t blame Ticonderoga if I run out of pencils.
If you ran out of black ink you’d be similarly in trouble.
> Your unpreparedness on your kids’ homework isn’t the fault of the manufacturer. I can’t blame Ticonderoga if I run out of pencils.
That analogy doesn’t hold up. You have other colour pencils at hand, but you can’t use them because the blue pencil is worn down. Let me use my goshdarn pencils.
Because it has a different ink formulation that’s designed for mono-colored printing.
Let’s make another analogy: two wheels fall off my car. You tell me “hey, motorcycles exist, you can still use that car!!”
But my car isn’t a motorcycle, it’s a car.
If you buy a printer that requires two cartridges to function then you keep both cartridges filled to keep it functioning.
I’ve always felt like this whole discussion has mostly surrounded people who are penny pinching to an extreme level that doesn’t make sense. You didn’t run out of color ink because you never printed in color. And if you never printed in color you wouldn’t have bought a color printer. You’ve gotta refill your color ink eventually.
This is the same thing as people who add water to their liquid hand soap to try and make it last longer. It just makes the soap gross and saves 10 cents at best.
The reason to buy a colour inkjet printer is that it's the cheapest thing you can get your hands on. Usually because the various education systems throughout the world somehow fail to centrally handle printing of course material. Either that, or you're one of the couple of dozen people who prints photos, and additionally in the subset that hasn't also decided to pay for someone else to deal with the cursed product category.
After a quick check I found the "HP Deskjet Plus 4130" new for 350 NOK (so about 37 USD, which includes 25% VAT and a 2 or 5 (probably 5) year warranty mandated of the vendor). Seems similar to the others that come up when sorting by price on one of the local price comparison sites. So 70 USD would for most people appear to be about twice as much money up front for something that needs to produce the bare minimum and otherwise be easy to dust.
Is there some kind of information asymmetry at play where in 2026 customers can’t comprehend a more expensive printer being a lower cost in the long run?
And here we are talking about a difference in cost of roughly $35 or the price of a meal for 2 at Chipotle.
Would you say that it’s unfair that the Toyota Prius costs more to purchase than a Nissan Sentra but the Prius costs less to operate due to having much better fuel efficiency?
Are consumers somehow unable to understand why they might choose invest more up front?
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