a buck to print 15 pages a month on the customer's printer is a sweet deal for HP. It's pure profit and likely adds up. 6 months from now they'll bump it to $1.29 and some executive will get a multi-million dollar bonus.
A typical inkjet cartridge prints around 190 pages. So at 15 pages per $1 this is like buying cartridges at $13 a piece, except way more complicated and obnoxious. Cartridges normally cost around $20 so it is still a slight savings if you're willing to deal with the hassle of counting your pages every month.
For me however, I give that whole plan a giant middle finger. That's way too much headache and hassle for a $7 savings.
toner cartridges last forever. I've only used 3-4 over the past 20 years, including the replacement stored for years after I bought it my printer because I assume they would pull that intro-cartridge horseshit but they didn't - they still won!
>> makes enough to afford renting a 1bed apartment in a good area
In most cities in the US this is not the definition of wealthy or even well off. living with roommates to save 10K a year does sound like one step above poverty.
When I lived in the bay area, lots of my friends lived in shared accommodation because they actually liked living with other people. Saving money was a side effect. They usually bought a place when they got married or not long after. That's not poverty.
Maybe I am just a frugal person, but to me, if you told me I could get a post-tax extra 10k a year switching from a 1bed apartment to a roommate situation I would always take it as long as I could find reasonable people to live with. I was pretty far from poverty when I made that decision in the SF bay area. And again, I just said they could afford a 1bed apartment, not that this was the max they could afford. You're not being charitable with interpreting my reply.
"dismisses fears that the surcharge will drive companies out of the city, saying the tax is modest in comparison to the cost of moving a business."
...until it's not. Amazon has shown us there are lots of attractive jurisdictions ready to shower companies with tax incentives to relocate; SF feels like a city that's enjoyed the benefits of many factors not directly of their making and they could be in for a strict reckoning. We will see...
What I took away from the Amazon pageant was that companies choose locations mostly by access to natural or social resources (educated workers, in Amazon's case). Same as always. But big companies can humor more towns to gin up bidding wars.
He's not exactly an engineering manager, but he's definitely part of that 1% who don't meet your rule, so it actually fits within the standard perspective.
I fear I will jinx my 20-yr-old hp 1200 laser jet that's on maybe it's 4(?) toner and hooked up to our home network via a parallel port to usb adapter. It's yellower than an 8-bit computer but still prints great and fast. One of my best tech purchases ever; I'm glad I resisted the lure of color inkjet and spent 3x much for a b&w laser.
foobar2000 is deceptively complex, it's probably the most complex and featureful music player. It's not bloated with stuff like online service integrations or whatever, but it is not basic, especially when you consider its plugin ecosystem.
Do you think agriculture hasn't moved into a post-industrial age? Modern farms are tightly integrated into a global supply chain from imputs to product and definitely need to work on the same standardized schedule as the rest of the world.
