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Comment by zizee | Hacker News Reader

I too am in Australia, but 15 minute drive into a small town without a print shop. Perhaps Australia is a oddity, and most people/places worldwide do in fact have easy access to a local print shop, but I am guessing the grandparent is seeing things from the perspective of a north American and in my experience it is a relative safe bet that the north American experience does not usually translate to the rest of the world where the majority of people live.

FWIW my 20% number was pulled out of the air and based on very rough knowledge of HNs userbase.

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Where I live in Asia, every convenience store (in any decently sized city, 24 hours and a 5 minute walk) and any major supermarket has a copier/printer. The convenience store ones also tend to have for-pay online features (photo prints of K-pop/J-pop idols, music scores to print)

> I am guessing the grandparent is seeing things from the perspective of a North American

No, I’m basing this on extensive travel experience in Africa, South America, and South Asia. If a town has anything resembling a hostel, then it is also 100% likely to have a copy shop or an Internet cafe with a printer.

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I think the actual failure of shared model here, is that there are people here who think something being 20 minutes away by car is “inconvenient.”

Folks, where I used to live, the nearest thing other than a farmstead was an hour away by car. And I still would have had my photos printed in town rather than owning a shitty inkjet printer (that would have been used so little that it would have required maintenance before every print.)

Driving 20mins in a polluting case, just to print a few pages? I think you’re the one missing some perspective here…

I said "20 minutes by car"; I didn't say driving. Americans like to measure things in by-car distances. What I meant was "an hour's walk" or "45 minutes by bicycle."

I didn't own a car where I used to live. Whenever I needed anything in town, I walked two hours to town. (When I eventually got a bicycle, it was a big upgrade!) And this was convenience to me.

Many people, in many places in the world, live this way. It is a uniquely-first-world perspective to think that "living far from town" means living in some self-sufficient "own one of everything you need" farmstead/mansion. For most people, in most of the world, living far from town just means commuting to town, on foot, all the dang time.

People in most of the rural parts of India, or Nigeria, or China, still commute on foot to a town-center-ish area to get water. Together, that makes up most of the population of the world! You think these people should own color printers? When they only barely have electricity? No; in the rare, rare case that such a person would need to get a physical photo printed, they'd walk however long it took to get to "the big city", and from there, they'd go to a dang print shop.

Honestly, I think people are having a severe failure of imagination in this thread, if they think that the various different kinds of developed nation that HN users live in, collectively make up "80% of the world."

Yes, what you say is true. I come from South Asia, and I live in NL, so I fully understand this perspective.

But rather, in the scope of this discussion, having a printer at home when you can afford one, makes a lot of sense from a cost/time angle.

But for most of the world, the cost calculus doesn't work out, because inkjet printers are shitty and break down, and use up their super-expensive color cartridges to print B&W prints. (And laser printers don't work well in humid climates, so good luck using a color laser.)

It's the same reason that in most of the world, you don't see people using those shaving razors with disposable razor-blade cartridges. They're too expensive over time, compared to a straight-razor / safety razor that can be sharpened.

If you only ever need to print, say, five photos in your entire life, it's fine if each one takes a three-hour round-trip walk to town and the equivalent of a day's wages. That'll still be lower TCO than printing every B&W text report you ever need to print on a color inkjet, and so needing to feed it a new yellow cartridge every few months just so it can keep putting microdots on the paper.

Nobody is advocating this for people who can’t afford it. We’re talking about those who can and do need to print often.

I don’t know why we need to argue on about the poorest people who can’t afford it? Sounds like a rhetorical discussion honestly.

20 minutes by car has a lower carbon output that one ink cartridge (which is about the consumption when you realize once a year that you need to print something and the old cartridge has the yellow nozzle dried out)

Why are we discussing this situation for people who only print once a year? That sounds like an absurd premise.

There’s lots of inkjets now that don’t suck, and don’t need much opex or capex. Some don’t need cartridges, they have refillable containers.

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