It took a 14 year old kid to discover that the federal government can save an estimated $136,000,000 annually by simply deciding to print all documents with a Garamond font. The reason? The font uses thin strokes and therefore less ink than other fonts. Since Hewlett-Packard ink costs twice as much per ounce as Chanel No. 5, there is a lot of money to be saved by cutting down, even marginally, on how much ink each character consumes.
So, give it up for Suvir Mirchandani from the Pittsburgh area of Pennsylvania. He’s a smart kid.
I’ve no doubt there are zillions of ways of saving money for the government. Would be great if liberals were to put together a competition among teens to find stuff like this. Why should Republicans get all the credit for wanting to shrink waste (when in fact they couldn’t give a rat’s ass about waste).
Not remarked on is the extent to which the ridiculousness of the patent laws has created printer ink that is more expensive than French perfume. And enshrined that monopoly for long periods of time.
The kid is leaving out somethings.
Ink isn’t really ink now. Most user toner which is a metalic/plastic and then fused to the paper with a corona wire. This is great for printing things in bulk or really fast, but the tech is pricey.
Thus those business class and even personal printers they sell you that last decades… those and the parts for them are sold at a massive loss. So if there was some massive movement to reduce toner consumption, HP would have to massively jack the prices of their printers and repairs to keep from going under.
There are printers that still use ink, and it’s cheaper than toner. But they don’t have the image quality, reliability, durability, up time, or speed of toner type printers.
This is true for most tech in your office and life. It’s either sold at a loss or at incredibly small margins and the entire business model depends on service contracts and the like to make it even remotely viable.
There are a lot of things that need to change with regards to tech, but it’s not going to save much money. If we stop externalizing the actual cost of things which tricks us into purchasing things we can’t afford, build things to last rather than be tossed every few years, and pay people a proper wage to do it the price is going to go through the damn roof. That’s why headphones that fall into all of the above start at a few hundred a go to a few thousand. Computers would go back to costing well over five thousand dollars to start as well.
When people make a proper product it tends to be for the 1% only on the consumer side and sends the bean counters at your job screaming. The entire concept of disposable phones tied to a service contract like the iphone, or servers/printers sold at a loss and the profit taken over course of ownership is a way to get around this.
You think this is a good idea, till the initial purchase price of everything goes up several times and you get sticker shock.
Beyond the economics, (and I haven’t read the article,) the example shows the cheaper font is much thinner and harder to read for people who don’t have the eyes of a 10 year old.
Moving to a san serif font would likely be cheaper too, but there’s more to preparing a document than the printing cost.
Still, it was a good project. It would be nice, though, if headline reporting on things like this in the popular press didn’t always get reduced to “OMG! Egghead government experts are stupider than school kid and are wasting a bazillion dollars!!11”
Cheers,
Scott.
I’ve worked in military, government contractor, non profit, and private sector IT. It’s the same in all of them. You buy shit the company sells at a loss and then they make their profit off contracts and upkeep.
You can get around this, but you pay so much up front only the 1% of companies can afford it. The price goes up several hundred times at minimum in upfront cost. Since most contracts and business plans are long term it makes more sense to buy cheap and pay through the teeth long term… unless you’re like fucking GE/IBM.
This is why antics over the cost are stupid. Pay massively upfront, or pay in upkeep. You can’t do both cheap. What you pick depends on your cash flow and business plan.
In the end, everyone loves externalizing the cost. It brings electronics to the middle class they can’t afford, it lets your company pay off as money comes in.
Given the executive salaries and the high expected rate of return on tech stocks by investors, I don’t buy the poor-mouthing about business models.
And because the Department of Defense accounting systems are so screwed up as to be unauditable, the idea that we know the across-the-board cost of anything the government does that involves more than the issuance of a single check (like payrolls and Social Security) is laughable. And the intelligence community is essentially off-budget for this kind of analysis. There are much more opportunities for government savings there–running to the tens of billions of dollars.
All of which goes to show that the concern about the deficit all along was a tactic to screw ordinary people out of their earned or short-term emergency benefits.
Times New Roman is a manly, strong font. It’s a downright AMERICAN font. It would be just like Obama to take the advice of some foreign kid and switch to a weak, French-sounding font like Garamond.
Yeah! Freedom fonts! That’s what we need!
We need more adults like this.
136 million is peanuts. Is this font viable for people whose vision isn’t that great?
I use it a lot in work I do with local organizations. It’s not unreadably light. The issue that is not mentioned is font size. A lot of government documents use abnormally small fonts; that seems to be the current cost-cutting strategy–more words per page.
I use Preton ink saver software. It saves me a lot of money on ink because it gives me precise control over how much ink I use.