Here’s a headline that caught my eye: Printer ink tops $1000 a barrel. The situation is dire. According to UK news source News Biscuit, “In some parts of the world, people are having to print out documents
in blue or even green ink, continually having to pause to over-ride the
irritating instruction from their bleeping printer to change the black
ink cartridge.”
Well, I found the article by way of Fark. And it gradually dawned on me that News Biscuit is a parody news source, approximately as reliable for actual news as The Onion is stateside.
But it had seemed so plausible. So I Google-news-searched “printers ink” and found an actual news article on the subject, Why printer ink is so expensive, at the Christian Science Monitor. According to this article, printermaker sources say that printer ink “costs thousands of dollars per gallon.” I looked it up and did the math for you; this means that printer ink is worth at least $42,000 a barrel. That’s all.
“‘Typical ink development might have five PhD chemists working on it for several years, and of course an army of technicians,’
says Nils Miller, an ink and media senior scientist for HP. ‘And that was just to develop it.’” Oh, ok. That explains everything.
Forget oil. Forget water. World War 3 may be a printer ink war.
“‘Typical ink development might have five PhD chemists working on it for several years, and of course an army of technicians,’
says Nils Miller, an ink and media senior scientist for HP. ‘And that was just to develop it.’” Oh, ok. That explains everything.
Forget oil. Forget water. World War 3 may be a printer ink war.