![]() The kid who dies with the most toys, wins. ![]() And car-elevators and private jets and all the rest plus more to one-up the other rich kids. ![]() Papa John has his own golf course so the other economic opportunists must have their private golf course to be successful. But the big shiny point is that most never learn and many develop brand-loyalty even as they are being screwed to the wall.Įxpect it. Why make a good product at a fair price when you can trap customers ignorant of details kept secret until they do wise up? At that point they 'have invested' and continue to be victims until they become ex-customers. But of course it was the Unions that destroyed the car companies, not their predatory planned-obsolescence design practices set up just to squeeze wads of money from the pwned consumers. That not to mention the frames were flexy crap made to take a beating which robbed the rider of energy with every turn of the cranks.Īnd yet the US car industry made them look almost normal. You had to buy -every- part from them at jacked-up prices and every part weighed more for the same strength by design. Even the threads on the bolts and frames were a special (less efficient and heavier) non-standard form. Every part of their mediocre-at-best bicycles was made non-standard so that every part had to be bought at a Schwinn shop. I never had one because I was too lucky back then being too poor to get one. I remember learning about Schwinn bicycles in 1973. The drives used non-standard cabling to include special lines there only to ensure that even more overpriced drives had to be bought from Tandy.Īs years went by they slowly changed to use more standard parts when they learned to bury the hooks deeper but then from fixing Dell, Leading Edge, Gateway, etc PC's, I learned that the "buy here and we OWN YOU" practice is common among Big Name Brands. The card slots were 1/8th inch shorter than standard so you -had- to buy Tandy cards at over 3x the price of standard cards. So nice and cheaper than other stores, right? Well there were nasty gotcha hooks built in. While it was cheaper than the average 'store-bought' model, it still cost about 50% or so more than what you could build yourself once you knew some simple tech. It was inferior to PC-XT clones built from standard parts. In the 80's Tandy (Radio Shack) sold a PC-XT called the TRS-80 that we tech-heads called the Trash-80. ![]() That's Yet Another Reason to keep to Open Source design. And still they don't ensure that for the much-extra cost they don't ensure trouble-free operation. I would guess the ID chip is to keep people from buying their feed stock elsewhere at a more reasonable price. I see Cubex starting at $2500 with cartridges for $100. ![]() It's the old "razors and razor blades" gambit, except that you have to pop 3 grand for the "razor" before you start shelling out for the overpriced "blades". Unfortunately, what he also found was that the cartridge had been designed such that opening it without following the correct (but undocumented) special procedure would break the ID chip that straddles its two halves.Īnd, of course, the ID chip is not on offer as a separate item: you have to buy a whole new cartridge. Which he did: just like on WeedWhackers, the filament had jumped the spool and gotten itself jammed. Having encountered the same symptoms with WeedWhackers, the client decided to pop open the cartridge to see if he could fix the hangup. After the first 8 or 10 hours of printing, the feedstock decided it wanted to be "stock", instead of "feed": it refused to come out of the cartridge. They are expecting you to do that and have hefty return fee and a non-printable part in there, which you can only buy off some grey market.ĭon't laugh: it's true. ![]()
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