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From the people who brought you:

Biden Tax Rule Would Rip Billions From Big Fortunes at Death

and

Richest 100 Americans Would Pay $78 Billion Under Warren Tax

I think that billionaires are bad for democracy, and that Bloomberg is not aligned with our interests as non-billionaires.

  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-04/biden-tax-rule-would-rip-billions-from-biggest-fortunes-at-death

  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-01/richest-100-americans-would-pay-78-billion-under-warren-tax


This even works for some non-antique cars. Jeep Wranglers (TJ generation) and Mazda Miatas (NA generation) have both appreciated somewhat in recent years.

Of course, no one's getting rich when a car appreciates from $5000 to $6000 or $3000 to $3500 over a few years. Net of repairs it's probably break-even. But it's nicer than losing value :)


This might be a different Ask HN, but does anyone have suggestions on avoiding the content farm stuff? Searching reddit works, but amounts to being trapped in a walled garden.

I've found a lot of great stuff on random independent websites (i.e. https://woodgears.ca/, http://gizmology.net/) that have no Reddit presence. Filtering those out is a great loss.

Something like the Yahoo Directory (hierarchical tree of hand-sorted topics) could work, but that's long gone.

Thoughts?


Sometimes I visit miilionshort.com to search for something when google isn't cutting it. They have options to leave out the top 100/1000/100000/1000000 websites (By Alexa rank I believe), so I will try playing with the options to get something useful. It's not always fruitful, but I've found many nice things this way that would've been buried on google.


I've started going directly to page 4 on Google searches if I don't see Google's scraped answer at the top.

Starting at 4 seems to cut a lot of the SEO and content farms.


Google used to offer the ability to filter out domains from your results, but they haven't for years now.

I suppose a client side extension could do the trick. It might be a good option for a side project if anyone is feeling generous with their time.


There are browser extensions that bring back the "Discussions" filter that Google removed a few years ago. Unfortunately niche forums aren't really popular these days so you end up with older results.


I'm actually using Bing/DDG more because there's less content farms. It gives me less relevant results most of the time, but discovery is better.


On a quick and dirty look, I don't think those figures are right. Here's what I found for 2020:

USPS 2020

  Revenues & Expenses
  Package revenue:  $28,537M
  Overall revenue:  $73,123M
  Overall expenses: $82,309M
  Net profit:      -$ 9,176M

  Mail volume - pieces per year
  Packages:         ~6.4B
  Marketing mail:   ~75B
  First class mail: ~54B
  
The press release listed all volumes as changes and percents - I've made a quick effort to back out approximate total volumes. Data from https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2020/1113-...

Fedex

  Revenues & Expenses
  Package revenue:  Unknown
  Overall revenue:  $69,217M
  Net profit:       $ 1,286M

  Mail volume - pieces per year
  Packages:         ~4.6B
  Marketing mail:   N/A
  First class mail: N/A
Packages are presented per day, but only count operating days (255/yr) The source I found split expenses up into cost of goods sold/SG&A/other/operating. I'm not clear what each one means and don't want to misrepresent - try the link! Data from https://www.fedex.com/en-us/about/company-structure.html and https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/FDX/fedex/financia...

So USPS carries more packages, as well as insane volumes of mail that UPS/FedEx won't. Despite the significant volume differences, expenses are within 20% between the companies.


Thank you for looking into this!

That was very informative!

I'm going to look a little deeper into it but that makes me feel better about the efficiency of the post office now.


This was an excellent and informative post. The USPS really gets hosed by the fact that they are required to have a fixed price for the most rural, low-density locations that UPS and FedEx would never deliver to.


Here's a NASA blog with slightly more detail:

https://mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter/status/296/mars-...

> An issue identified earlier this month showed a 15% chance for each time the helicopter attempts to fly that it would encounter a watchdog timer expiration and not transition to flight mode. Today’s delay is in line with that expectation and does not prevent future flights.


I'm not sure what was on the Shuttle tank, but other vehicles carry hydraulic fluid (for engine gimballing) & hydrazine (for small thrusters). They're usually vented at the end of a mission to safe the vehicle.

If you're wondering about practicality, Skylab was a Saturn V tank. Unlike the external tank suggestions, Skylab was built on the ground and never had fuel in it. But it was basically the same structure as the Saturn's third stage. Like ISS, Skylab had some micrometeorite shielding outside of the main tank.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylab

More recently, Nanoracks has looked at refurbishing ULA's Centaur upper stage into a habitat. Like the Shuttle, Centaur runs on a H2 + O2 cycle. Their plan is to lift an equipment kit onboard the Centaur. They'd cut a hole after the end of the mission and use on-orbit welding (not mature yet) to install all the floors/decks/airlocks.

https://nanoracks.com/in-space-outpost-demonstration/


No nastiness on the Shuttle tank; gimballing and RCS were left up to the Shuttle itself. It's basically just two tanks and some plumbing.


Thanks! I looked at some tank drawings, but couldn't tell if they were omitting auxiliary tanks for simplicity's sake. Didn't want to say anything inaccurate.


There are similar limits on photos/video. MMS photos are resolution capped at ~1MP, and videos have are compressed to be barely legible.

iMessage transfers photos/video at their native resolution.

Which means that if three iPhone users send photos in a group chat, everything's great. Add one Android user and all four are degraded to MMS quality levels.

I think my next phone will be by Apple, specifically so I can enjoy the seamless image/video sharing the rest of my family has. Probably a few generations back - I don't need the fancy cameras and screens.


I mentioned it in a different comment, but take a look at Syncthing. It does mesh-style backup to synchronize a folder between multiple machines. That provides robustness against hard drive or PC failures, and it's easy to add an offsite node for extra confidence.

You can use Takeout to bulk-download photos: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/9666875?hl=en

I don't know if you can automate syncing Google Photos to a local disk. Wouldn't be surprised if there was.

(edit: Wow. Lots of people wanting to help! I wasn't expecting two sibling responses.)


Depending on what you need, a NAS + Syncthing is much simpler than the linked article. Building a PC isn't hard, and keeps prices down. These days, a RPi 4+2 USB HDDs would run circles around the motherboard on my NAS.

Syncthing is a great continuous backup solution. I use ~/NOTES as a scratchpad, and it updates automatically between my various computers. It gives you pretty granular control over shares, and I back up critical stuff to a cloud provider.

That said, there's no calendar/email/notes. XigmaNAS is built on FreeBSD, and will happily run NextCloud or a photo gallery or whatever.


Syncthing is great, but the lack of first party iOS client drove me to Nextcloud.


I've found http://neverssl.com very helpful for captive portals. It does what you'd expect - hosts a HTTP-only page that allows captive portals to work correctly.

Since it's only ever HTTP, it sidesteps the certificate errors or HTTP downgrades that normal sites are hit with during captive portal interception.

I am curious what happens to captive portals as HTTPS adoption rises. Some OS's (Android, OSX) already detect captive portals and launch a lightweight webview.


Yep, I use neverssl.com, when I remember it. Though, mostly I use example.com, since that works without SSL as well. I guess now I'll need to remember to type http://example.com .

Based off my experience, more and more captive portals appear to be letting the requests the OS makes to captive.apple.com or whatever through but still try to present a captive portal to the user. I can guess as to the motivation, but as a user it's danged annoying.


Thanks for this. I never can remember URLs like this but I always remember chicken.com. It's sad day to see it go away.


I'm French-Canadian I use http://perdu.com [1] (Perdu is lost in French).

It's a light funny page i've found about 10+ years ago but it's HTTP and helpfull for captive portals.

[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perdu.com


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