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Caveman_in_a_suit ago

It's always been like this, since before the Internet when elites owned almost all newspapers, wire services, tv stations, book publishing, magazines, and radio. It's only relatively recently that the herd broke out of containment where they could discuss, develop, and research ideas without governing controls. It's just taken the elite about 20 years to catch up enough to reinstitute the same historic controls in this new medium of communication.

TheTrigger ago

All of history has been a version of this game of cat-and-mouse. Even since before the Catholic church started hoarding knowledge. I honestly think that, aside from price-gouging: this is part of the reason why printer ink is still so artificially expensive. Sometimes, prohibitively so. For no other reason than to discourage people from mass-producing their own self-published books and easily disseminating them— without having to pay their pound of flesh to the jewish media cartel.

cthulian_axioms ago

In fairness, inkjet liquid is no small feat of engineering. The higher quality the image you want, the smaller the ink droplets (or toner particles) have to be. Getting liquids to spray out in micrometer-sized droplets of consistent size, without clogging the nozzle head, is surprisingly difficult.

Laser toner, on the other hand, is basically nano-dust.

TheTrigger ago

I won't pretend to know everything about the various different manufacturing processes of printer cartridges. However, even goddamned Teslas got cheaper, over time. I do know a lot about assembly lines and modern production floors, for a few different types of factories, due to the type of work I used to be in. And one thing I know for certain is that, overtime, things always get more streamlined and less expensive.

It's inevitable. Even if it's a hack-job, you're taking on a new client, and things are running relatively inefficiently: you will, eventually, figure out a way to bottom-out your cost-per-unit, to the bare minimum. I refuse to believe that the manufacturing process for said ink/toner hasn't vastly improved, since the '90s, to the point where it make the lack of a price-drop conspicuous, to say the least. Especially considering its demand.

Then there's all those gray-area shops which used to pop up, all the time (and are harder to come by, these days, for some reason), that would sell off-brand ink/toner. And it would be just-as effective, if not moreso, than the brand-name one. Places who could refill your cartridge for $5, instead of paying $50 for a new one.

Printer manufacturers went to war with these people, the same way Apple is going after phone-repair shops, now. I see the trend, and something tells me that the high-price for ink, to this day, is absolutely 100% artificial.