Buy a Brother monochrome laser with duplex, an ethernet port, and BRScript/3 (their PostScript clone). Even if you're sure you will never need one or more of those features, get them all. Wifi and Bluetooth and NFC are strictly optional, and probably not worthwhile.
If you need color printing, send it to a printing company. There might even be a local one. It will be done at a higher quality, with better ink and good paper, than you can do at your office or house -- unless you are big enough to utilize a whole flock of printers, or you are a professional. If you are a pro, you don't need this advice.
There should be a law that states for any subscription product I should be allowed to buy a fixed-term version with no auto-renewal. In the past two days I've had the following experiences:
* Wanted to buy a Font Awesome "Pro" license for their icons. The only way to do this is a 99/year subscription. Reading the fine print says that I can buy it and cancel it the next day and still have lifetime access to the version at the time of my purchase. Why make me jump through the hoops?
* I wanted to support a writer on Substack by subscribing for a year. But I can't, I can only start a perpetual sub. So I subbed and canceled 1 day later. Then I got a "why did you cancel?" email. I didn't really
* I saw a cool open source project I liked and wanted to donate. They only had a Patreon link. Patreon only has recurring subs. So I had to email them and ask for their PayPal so I could send them $100.
I really wonder how much of SaaS revenue is people who have forgotten to cancel. I would guess 25% industry-wide.
In similar cases (me not wanting to recurring payment to happen) I just create a new virtual credit card in Revolut and dispose it right after purchase.
Passing a physical credit card info to services is like giving them universal key to my house. After some years I don't know who does have a key to my house, and I'm just living with fear that someday I find an empty house.
I got one too, so I found out which site was giving the ads, then created a script to do all kinds of invalid traffic on their port. Every hour or so I do 20 malformed HTTP requests on the ad server, after which their firewall locks me out for the rest of the day. The TV traffic gets locked out too as it shares my IP address. Presumably I violate some laws in some country on the other side of the planet, but as I don't respect shariah law I already did that anyway ;-)
I only get non-animated mostly black ads for a product named timeout now.
Wow. Mind blowing. I am real big on the never give my TV WiFi password but just recently bought a new TV. It’s been getting firmware updates and I could not figure out how. Got the latest HDMI 2.1 for the XBox.
It seems blocking/removing Pin 14 or cutting the wire should work [1] So yes, a simple passive HDMI ethernet filter should be possible. You can also buy cables without ethernet, but then you also need do verify it actually isn't present.
I knew ethernet was in the spec, but this is the first time I heard it actually works.
Can't you configure the ROKU to not create the bridge interface or whatnot to the HDMI? Or doesn't it give that kind of control and will just connect no matter what?
It's much more likely that your TV either has some ads preloaded or it just joining an open WiFi network. While Ethernet is part of the HDMI standard, no products were ever released that support it.
TVs, I'm crossing my fingers my new Sony (android) delivered soon lets me turn off all the ads. My old Sony (also android) did. You have to turn off notifications for every app. and, given android's tons of little applets it can take a while to turn them all off manually with the remote. Maybe someone who knows android better can tell me some magic shell script that will turn them all off.
I could also replace the home screen/launcher with another. I tried it and got it to work, forgot why I stopped using it though.
As for Adobe, there are plenty of apps that will open adobe formats. Certainly Photoshop and Illustrator. It's possible you'll lose access to some features though. I agree, it feels like extortion.
They used to have to create features I want to entice me to upgrade. I upgraded photoshop about once every 4 years for $200. Now it's $120 a year so more then 4x the cost and I haven't seen a feature I cared about in over a decade at least except (1) updating to new OS versions and (2) HEIC support, which under the old plan I would have happily paid for the upgrade. It's not a tool I use daily though. If it was might feel less bad. My artists friends all seem to be fine with the price tho.
Semi-Off-Topic but related to Opex vs Capex: One of the weird aspects of Japanese tax law is the Capital Assets tax.
Every year your local city taxes any capital goods at 1.5%. What is a capital good? Anything which takes multiple years to deduct. A couple examples: Cars, Machines, Factories. A couple odd examples: desks, chairs, TV, elevators.
In the past other first world countries had such capital goods taxes but removed them. It seems so counter intuitive to punish companies for building capital. After all capital and acculumation of capital is what pushes productivity.
I suspect it, as so many other aspects of Japanese tax law, is about solving perverse incentives: no one goes around misclassifying opex as capex when there is a capex tax...
My US county (Wake County, NC) has such a tax... worse even.
Each year I have to catalog every pencil, pen, paperclip and ream of paper in my office. The desk, tables, shelves, printer ink, bottle of windex, each of my books, even individual USB cables all need to be listed. I need years acquired and purchase prices for every little object owned by each of my 4 businesses.
Each summer, a tax bill shows up for my personal property.
I generally don't mind taxes. I really don't. But this one I hate. It's such a colossal waste of time that I can't even hand off to an accountant.
When I moved to US in late '90s, my mentor told the Milk distribution story/change (NY/NJ). During his grandfather times (I am sure around 1950/60s, Milkman used to enter the home and check how much milk is needed and change the bottle. With time, few crimes and privacy concepts started coming into picture, the milks bottles were left outside.
And now Amazon wants to enterr your home to do exactly what milkman used to do 60-70years back.
speaking of coming into your house (and completely off topic), TIFU by using a KeyMe kiosk. I needed a copy of a key. I expected it was a mechanical copier which I'd seen before. Instead it's some kind of digital kiosk that scans the key and then, sends the info to their servers and they mail you a key.
In other words, they have a database of people's keys and the address those keys belong too. I feel so stupid. Time to change my locks.
Interesting point about car PCP financing at the end of the article. I bought a car through a PCP a few years back (a new 2013 Mazda) and it seemed fairly humane:
- Nominally 0% interest (albeit we paid sticker price of the vehicle with no discount).
- Deposit + payments such that the car was never 'under water'. In fact, subject to some heavy caveatting about its condition, I think we could have handed the car back and walked away from the agreement at any time, something almost unheard-of in American-style car loans.
- At the end of the PCP period, there was still a big balloon payment, which is how they get you rolling onto a new car+contract of course. But it was a known quantity that was possible to save up for, and due to the monthly payments, as mentioned above, being of sufficient size, the balloon payment was much less than the cost to buy the same car in same age/condition/etc on the open market, so it made sense to pay the money and keep the car.
There are a couple of things I find interesting about the above. One is that I perceived some benefits from the monthly payments being larger rather than smaller - when considering time value of money etc this is presumably irrational. But people do seem to genuinely suffer from upside-down car loans, where they could 'afford' the payments but find themselves trapped making them on an un-sellable vehicle. I guess what I'm saying is the payments were set at a level where I could actually afford the car. The other interesting thing is how easily the formula could be tweaked to make more expensive cars look affordable, and to incentivise rolling onto another contract. The flip side is that such tweaks let the purchaser have a lower payment, or a nicer car for the same payment, but might not be in the purchaser's rational best interest.
> My favourite example of this are the "smart" televisions that one day decided, all on their own, to start showing their adverts: a new, recurring psychic cost for their subscribers, who had thought they were owners.
Nice perspective, never thought about it that way. My hate for the companies that do this has been renewed.
Great article. One minor point of disagreement I have:
> For Adobe's subscribers, the lock-in is considerable as access to their existing bank of files and documents is contingent on continued payment.
Losing access to uploaded files isn't really a relevant factor in paying for an Adobe subscription. Their cloud storage is an afterthought, and they can all anyways be trivially exported. The lock-in comes from the software itself. We must have Photoshop, and there is no other way to get Photoshop than to pay Adobe every month till you die.
I don't think he meant losing access to cloud storage. He meant losing the ability to open your files. It makes little difference whether you're storing the files yourself because you can't open them without Photoshop.
also, once you realize you hardly use photoshop and cancel your subscription, you get a fat cancellation fee. so do you pay the cancel fee, or "maybe I'll need photoshop, who knows?"
This would sound strange but the biggest subscription I pay annually (which does not seem like a subscription) is my DMV registration renewal fees. It comes around $300+ every year out-of-the-blue in my mailbox and I realize then that is indeed a subscription for a product which is my Car that I never thought about.
From a practical persepctive you are indeed correct. In 99.9% of cases - the DMV are effectively a subscription expense you need to pay to use your car.
But they're not actually a subscription to your car; the fees are a subscription to the roads and associated infrastructure, which do need constant upkeep.
If you had a vehicle which was only used off-road (for example, on privately owned racetracks) and was only transported on a trailer then you would not need to register or insure it. For track motorcycles it's even relatively common to buy/sell them used without a title - so $0 fees to the government. Obviously exact laws on this may vary depending on location.
Property tax has to be more than that. Even if you don't own your residence, whatever the landlord passes through to tenants is going to be more than $300 a year.
Fun story: My adult daughter lives at home. She does our shopping and came home one day with a toilet bowl brush that was "revolutionary" (my words based on her excitement about it) because it is refillable and can be used to clean the outside and the inside of the toilet.
Recognizing this as a refill subscription, I forbade its use. It sits there, unwilling to be thrown away, and unable to be used. If not for the receipt being lost, it would have been immediately returned!
If anything requires repeated payments to be useful, it's a subscription.
This was a great read, but even better was the link to an article by Nicholas Lovell at the end. I love reading thoughtful analysis of the video game industry. What a goldmine!
> 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 capitalism producing better outcomes - the effects of concentrations and imbalances of power is something that is frequently left out of those debates.
I think that we should try to strive for a world where good and moral business sense is better rewarded than great business sense.
> At the end of their 4-5 year contract these secret renters are bamboozled at the dealership and convinced to just "roll over" their deal onto a new car with much the same monthly payment and, again, no ownership. It costs considerably more to do this great rigmarole than just to buy outright.
Unfortunately I couldn't find data on how much of these cars were leased by companies (where it makes sense to lease that 7 series BMW for the C-level exec) and how many were leased by consumers.
In any case, the why is the important thing: 70% of Americans don't have more than 1.000$ in savings (https://www.statista.com/chart/20323/americans-lack-savings/), and probably 90% of Americans require a car because public transport is inefficient and/or unusable for their daily lives. These people don't have a realistic choice between taking on debt or not taking on debt (they need a car and don't have savings), and the result is an immensely profitable racket - the market for consumer car loans alone is 1.17 trillion $ (https://www.statista.com/statistics/453380/outstanding-autom...). Even at a measly 5% interest that's 85 billion $ a year that banks extract from the poor (and likely more, given that lower credit scores yield over 10% interest!
Despite having the capital, both of our cars were purchased on finance deals. For my car (3yo at purchase) an outright purchase was the same price as total cost of finance, so I financed. For my partners car (new) it worked out significantly cheaper to finance as they 'match' the scrappage deal of the old (very broken) car.
Whilst most finance deals are scams, there are good ones. In our case double dipping on scrappage and sourcing a second hand car from a cheaper geography certainly played a part; and for once I'm sure I'm not deluded - with a family member running their own dealership we had quite the inside look at alternatives.
That said, an ongoing profiteering racket is servicing and associated consumables. Most independents are cheaper, though it does take work to find a good one - you have to check the quality of alternative consumables.
I just canceled one of my credit cards and then started getting DOZENS of emails from services warning me that they were canceling soon. It is absolutely stunning to me how many different subscriptions were flying under the radar. Sneaky sneaky!
Huge shoutout to Adobe for making a stellar product but come on... I need it for so much that it is basically like paying rent.
Another product that does this: video games. Games like Destiny are sold at full price and then ALSO require semiyearly purchases to retain access to the content you bought. Technically each purchase cycle provides new content, but you always lose access to something you had.
[+] [-] dsr_|4 years ago|reply
Herewith, my standard advice.
Buy a Brother monochrome laser with duplex, an ethernet port, and BRScript/3 (their PostScript clone). Even if you're sure you will never need one or more of those features, get them all. Wifi and Bluetooth and NFC are strictly optional, and probably not worthwhile.
If you need color printing, send it to a printing company. There might even be a local one. It will be done at a higher quality, with better ink and good paper, than you can do at your office or house -- unless you are big enough to utilize a whole flock of printers, or you are a professional. If you are a pro, you don't need this advice.
[+] [-] habosa|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] srigi|4 years ago|reply
Passing a physical credit card info to services is like giving them universal key to my house. After some years I don't know who does have a key to my house, and I'm just living with fear that someday I find an empty house.
[+] [-] ianai|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Waterluvian|4 years ago|reply
Unless it’s glass, fibre, or aluminum, you are lying to yourself if it’s going into the blue bin.
Glass-contained milk delivery seems great. Someone needs to start a company. Sure it won’t be sexy or use AI but it’s useful.
I have a local co-op that delivers local produce. It’s amazing to see a pile of naked produce show up in a repurposed apple crate.
[+] [-] SavantIdiot|4 years ago|reply
Nope. HDMI changed that.
I bought a TV a few months ago and it started showing adverts because it was connected to the internet through my ROKU via HDMI.
That's right, you can't even have a dumb TV anymore.
Someone needs to make an HDMI internet filter, stat.
But Adobe? That smells like extortion.
[+] [-] hyperman1|4 years ago|reply
I only get non-animated mostly black ads for a product named timeout now.
[+] [-] conductr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] labawi|4 years ago|reply
I knew ethernet was in the spec, but this is the first time I heard it actually works.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDMI#HDMI_Ethernet_and_Audio_R...
[+] [-] bsilvereagle|4 years ago|reply
Bunnie's NeTV is off to a good start!
https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?cat=17
[+] [-] arp242|4 years ago|reply
Can't you configure the ROKU to not create the bridge interface or whatnot to the HDMI? Or doesn't it give that kind of control and will just connect no matter what?
[+] [-] jacobkg|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] realityking|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greggman3|4 years ago|reply
I could also replace the home screen/launcher with another. I tried it and got it to work, forgot why I stopped using it though.
As for Adobe, there are plenty of apps that will open adobe formats. Certainly Photoshop and Illustrator. It's possible you'll lose access to some features though. I agree, it feels like extortion.
They used to have to create features I want to entice me to upgrade. I upgraded photoshop about once every 4 years for $200. Now it's $120 a year so more then 4x the cost and I haven't seen a feature I cared about in over a decade at least except (1) updating to new OS versions and (2) HEIC support, which under the old plan I would have happily paid for the upgrade. It's not a tool I use daily though. If it was might feel less bad. My artists friends all seem to be fine with the price tho.
[+] [-] thunkshift1|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rahimnathwani|4 years ago|reply
An HDMI splitter might do the job. I can't imagine that both output ports would support two-way communication with the input: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B079LMPSKS/
[+] [-] amelius|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matheusmoreira|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joenathanone|4 years ago|reply
That is really cool but also very scary.
[+] [-] Danieru|4 years ago|reply
Every year your local city taxes any capital goods at 1.5%. What is a capital good? Anything which takes multiple years to deduct. A couple examples: Cars, Machines, Factories. A couple odd examples: desks, chairs, TV, elevators.
In the past other first world countries had such capital goods taxes but removed them. It seems so counter intuitive to punish companies for building capital. After all capital and acculumation of capital is what pushes productivity.
I suspect it, as so many other aspects of Japanese tax law, is about solving perverse incentives: no one goes around misclassifying opex as capex when there is a capex tax...
[+] [-] dangrossman|4 years ago|reply
Each year I have to catalog every pencil, pen, paperclip and ream of paper in my office. The desk, tables, shelves, printer ink, bottle of windex, each of my books, even individual USB cables all need to be listed. I need years acquired and purchase prices for every little object owned by each of my 4 businesses.
Each summer, a tax bill shows up for my personal property.
I generally don't mind taxes. I really don't. But this one I hate. It's such a colossal waste of time that I can't even hand off to an accountant.
[+] [-] gruez|4 years ago|reply
OTOH, wealth taxes seem to be gaining popularity in the western world. Maybe we're going full circle?
[+] [-] Ballu|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greggman3|4 years ago|reply
In other words, they have a database of people's keys and the address those keys belong too. I feel so stupid. Time to change my locks.
[+] [-] DJBunnies|4 years ago|reply
Determining what you need replaced and fulfilling it != secure delivery of what you ordered yourself.
[+] [-] rm445|4 years ago|reply
- Nominally 0% interest (albeit we paid sticker price of the vehicle with no discount).
- Deposit + payments such that the car was never 'under water'. In fact, subject to some heavy caveatting about its condition, I think we could have handed the car back and walked away from the agreement at any time, something almost unheard-of in American-style car loans.
- At the end of the PCP period, there was still a big balloon payment, which is how they get you rolling onto a new car+contract of course. But it was a known quantity that was possible to save up for, and due to the monthly payments, as mentioned above, being of sufficient size, the balloon payment was much less than the cost to buy the same car in same age/condition/etc on the open market, so it made sense to pay the money and keep the car.
There are a couple of things I find interesting about the above. One is that I perceived some benefits from the monthly payments being larger rather than smaller - when considering time value of money etc this is presumably irrational. But people do seem to genuinely suffer from upside-down car loans, where they could 'afford' the payments but find themselves trapped making them on an un-sellable vehicle. I guess what I'm saying is the payments were set at a level where I could actually afford the car. The other interesting thing is how easily the formula could be tweaked to make more expensive cars look affordable, and to incentivise rolling onto another contract. The flip side is that such tweaks let the purchaser have a lower payment, or a nicer car for the same payment, but might not be in the purchaser's rational best interest.
[+] [-] matheusmoreira|4 years ago|reply
Nice perspective, never thought about it that way. My hate for the companies that do this has been renewed.
[+] [-] paxys|4 years ago|reply
> For Adobe's subscribers, the lock-in is considerable as access to their existing bank of files and documents is contingent on continued payment.
Losing access to uploaded files isn't really a relevant factor in paying for an Adobe subscription. Their cloud storage is an afterthought, and they can all anyways be trivially exported. The lock-in comes from the software itself. We must have Photoshop, and there is no other way to get Photoshop than to pay Adobe every month till you die.
[+] [-] ludocode|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] infogulch|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] legohead|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gordon_freeman|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] the_pwner224|4 years ago|reply
But they're not actually a subscription to your car; the fees are a subscription to the roads and associated infrastructure, which do need constant upkeep.
If you had a vehicle which was only used off-road (for example, on privately owned racetracks) and was only transported on a trailer then you would not need to register or insure it. For track motorcycles it's even relatively common to buy/sell them used without a title - so $0 fees to the government. Obviously exact laws on this may vary depending on location.
[+] [-] odux|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nonameiguess|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gmac|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CRConrad|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bjarneh|4 years ago|reply
Guilty as charged.
[+] [-] geocrasher|4 years ago|reply
Recognizing this as a refill subscription, I forbade its use. It sits there, unwilling to be thrown away, and unable to be used. If not for the receipt being lost, it would have been immediately returned!
If anything requires repeated payments to be useful, it's a subscription.
[+] [-] datenhorst|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrfusion|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moss2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taurath|4 years ago|reply
I think its interesting to meditate for a moment on the great amount of meaning in the closing sentence here. Great business sense by this definition seems inherently immoral and extractive rather than productive for one. Secondly the it seems quite the antithesis of competition under free capitalism producing better outcomes - the effects of concentrations and imbalances of power is something that is frequently left out of those debates.
I think that we should try to strive for a world where good and moral business sense is better rewarded than great business sense.
[+] [-] mschuster91|4 years ago|reply
And yet, about 1/4 to 1/3rd of new cars are leased (https://www.statista.com/statistics/453122/share-of-new-vehi...), and probably more than that are financed by actual loans.
Unfortunately I couldn't find data on how much of these cars were leased by companies (where it makes sense to lease that 7 series BMW for the C-level exec) and how many were leased by consumers.
In any case, the why is the important thing: 70% of Americans don't have more than 1.000$ in savings (https://www.statista.com/chart/20323/americans-lack-savings/), and probably 90% of Americans require a car because public transport is inefficient and/or unusable for their daily lives. These people don't have a realistic choice between taking on debt or not taking on debt (they need a car and don't have savings), and the result is an immensely profitable racket - the market for consumer car loans alone is 1.17 trillion $ (https://www.statista.com/statistics/453380/outstanding-autom...). Even at a measly 5% interest that's 85 billion $ a year that banks extract from the poor (and likely more, given that lower credit scores yield over 10% interest!
[+] [-] Normal_gaussian|4 years ago|reply
Whilst most finance deals are scams, there are good ones. In our case double dipping on scrappage and sourcing a second hand car from a cheaper geography certainly played a part; and for once I'm sure I'm not deluded - with a family member running their own dealership we had quite the inside look at alternatives.
That said, an ongoing profiteering racket is servicing and associated consumables. Most independents are cheaper, though it does take work to find a good one - you have to check the quality of alternative consumables.
[+] [-] vvarren|4 years ago|reply
Huge shoutout to Adobe for making a stellar product but come on... I need it for so much that it is basically like paying rent.
[+] [-] voiper1|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alien_|4 years ago|reply
So true!
[+] [-] gpt5|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrootabega|4 years ago|reply