So I wake up this morning with a craving for turkey stuffing. No, not the home-made kind but some instant brand. With more man-made ingredients than a neutron bomb. Even the local ants don’t recognize it as food. See that package? Had 670 calories so it’s a good thing I could only finish half of it. It probably has something to do with completing those taxes and feeling the need for reward. Even though I plan ahead for how each investment will affect my taxes (it is a fool who doesn’t), my return each year gets more complicated. That will soon stop.
I drove the automobile [during the week] for a change. Needing various things up from the shopping plaza at Oakwood, it was also an opportunity to get shocked at the prices of office consumables. That has to be the racket that is the least affected by recession. An ink refill kit cost me $24 and I know there isn’t five bucks worth of plastic and liquid in that box. Did I mention that refilling has become so lucrative that the local pharmacies now do it.Moons ago, I praised a new ink product that had very low prices. It is called “Ink Station” and has the logo of a gas pump saying that photo printing is finally affordable. This, to me typifies the market. Once they got in the door, their prices soared up to what the others were charging. I won’t consider refilling cartridges commercially simply because the obvious controlled element is that ink supply. They’ve got it so a refill costs over half of a new cartridge.
Look at what Dell tried. They altered the shape of their cartridges so that you had to buy them online from Dell. Now I see several companies quickly adapted their cartridges to fit. So, it is an ink oligopoly and the key must be some difficult to copy phase of the ink manufacturing process. The worst two companies are Hewlett-Packard and Epson. HP makes cartridges with anti-refilling features and Epson embeds a chip that measures when the tank is empty. It requires an expensive device to reset that chip.
What? Oh, sorry. An oligopoly is a business dominated by a few large companies who pretend to compete by advertising a lot, but are really bound together to prevent new entrants. Like Ford and Chev. What? I told you before, they do it by campaigning for “safety standards” in Washington that make it too expensive for newcomers to start a factory. The cars are just as unsafe as ever because they give idiots a false sense of security.
I encountered a new virus today, called XP Antivirus. What a clever name. When you do a registry search during the elimination process, you will get tons of legitimate files with both those terms. So you have to go looking elsewhere. XP Antivirus takes self-infestation to the next level, it embeds itself under a different file name and calls the script off the Internet. It disables both your native anti-virus and if you have it, sets Spybot into a frenzy. In the end I got it, but the bad news is that it was somehow using explorer32.exe as a vector. You cannot use Internet Explorer again without reinstalling the whole system. No big deal, IE is primitive and problematical. Use Opera.
Return Home
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
