TimBurr

5 years agodiscuss

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

TimBurr

5 years agodiscuss

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 :)

TimBurr

5 years agodiscuss

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?

TimBurr

5 years agodiscuss

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.

TimBurr

5 years agodiscuss

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.

TimBurr

5 years agodiscuss

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.

TimBurr

5 years agodiscuss

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/

TimBurr

5 years agodiscuss

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.

TimBurr

5 years agodiscuss

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.)

TimBurr

5 years agodiscuss

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.

TimBurr

5 years agodiscuss

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.

TimBurr

5 years agodiscuss

A few examples in the blog post stood out to me - both refine ambigous letters to clear ones, which demonstrates concerns other folks were talking about in this thread.

In this one, i's are nearly illegible, but are corrected. It appears to be correct here, but could be wrong.

https://blog.adobe.com/hlx_fa6ee5a67d3f2e5b1945745176e6b955e...

This one's weirder. In the original, I can't read many of the letters. It looks like G[EL]NE[XR]A[IL]DI[ER][XK][IT]OR - lots of guesses. The enhanced version is GENERALDIREKTOR (I think). At any rate, it's much more confident in the spelling than I am, as a human.

https://blog.adobe.com/hlx_a337d462293b51f4d91182cbbebf68cf4...

TimBurr

5 years agodiscuss

I set up a personal mailserver a few years back, and have hit a lot of painpoints. The main ones were software complexity (setup) and dealing with blacklists (ongoing).

Setup for a normal mailserver requires Postfix (SMTP send/recieve), Dovecot (IMAP mailbox management), SpamAssassin, a webmail frontend (Roundcube), something for user management (MySQL + PHPMyAdmin for me) and a generous amount of glue. Things like DNS records, config files, spam rules and classifiers, etc).

Blacklists are far more annoying, especially w.r.t. GMail. I use a DigitalOcean node, and some of their IP ranges are blacklisted due to past spamminess. Depending on the provider, there may or may not be a bounce email, and may or may not be a whitelisting process. I've even seen mixed results within GMail. I can send from my custom domain to my GMail without trouble, but emails to a friend using a custom domain on GMail are dropped silently. (That's the worst of self-hosting, I think. Silently dropped messages are way harder to detect than a mailer-daemon block notification.)

Long story short, it's a mess :)

On the flipside, similar commercial plans (3 domains, 20GB shared storage) run $30/mo or so, which is way more than I'm willing to spend on a vanity email. Sounds like a similar story for mailing lists.

I'd give self-hosting a shot and see how it goes. Since mailing lists are opt-in, users will know if they aren't receiving what they signed up for, and are likely to reach out for support help. That's different than conventional email, where a silent drop and no reply are hard to tell apart for the recipient.

Hope that wasn't too much info/text, and good luck!

TimBurr

5 years agodiscuss

That's a similar spirit to Rockstar and Enterprise - they're joke languages to poke fun at employer requirements. Rockstar actually looks fun to play with, in a code-as-art sort of way. :)

https://codewithrockstar.com/

https://github.com/joaomilho/Enterprise

TimBurr

5 years agodiscuss

Thanks for the reference! I'll have to read about those more.

Sounds like that also eliminates any fuss with oil/fuel ratios, since they're introduced separately.

TimBurr

5 years agodiscuss

You're asking really good questions :)

In my layman's understanding, those are related. Playing with the piston dimensions limits (but doesn't entirely prevent) fuel/exhaust mixing. Unburned fuel in the exhaust makes them dirty.

The site says:

> ... This expels the exhaust gasses out the exhaust port, usually located on the opposite side of the cylinder. Unfortunately, some of the fresh fuel mixture is usually expelled as well.

Another factor - since the fuel enters through the crankcase, it needs to be mixed with oil for lubricating the moving parts. That oil burns when it gets to the combustion chamber. Pretty sure that also increases unwanted emissions.

It's entirely possible modern CFD and chemistry could improve on those issues... I'd be curious if anyone else knows about recent R&D on two-strokes. They're hard to beat on power-to-weight.

TimBurr

5 years agodiscuss

If you like this, you'll probably enjoy Elmer's Engines. It's an old book full of steam engine plans, designed for people who are new to machining.

I used some of them as blueprints when I took drafting in high school.

http://www.john-tom.com/html/ElmersEngines.html

TimBurr

5 years agodiscuss

I know you mentioned exercise, but it doesn't have to be a huge commitment.

I try to bike 30 mins a day. Pre-covid, that meant biking to work and back. (I'm lucky to live close to work.) These days, I take off for a 5 mile ride around lunch.

That half-hour helps stabilize my mood, and refines my focus the rest of the day. Tying the change to a daily routine (like commuting) makes it easier to stick to.

Also, changes of scenery. Especially right now, it's easy to feel trapped at home. Going for a bike ride or driving out to the woods occasionally helps my balance.

TimBurr

5 years agodiscuss

That would be true iff prices were disclosed upfront and the pricing model was clear. I had a hospital experience recently where the surgeon provided one bill, the hospital a second, and the anesthesiologist a third.

Only the surgeon's pricing was available ahead of time. The hospital provided an invoice at the time of surgery, marked as "SUBJECT TO CHANGE". The anesthesiologist himself didn't know how much his services would cost.

Three weeks later, we're still watching invoices and insurance claims roll in.

Medical tourism is a direct testament to inflated charges as a systematic problem. Finding a hospital with non-inflated costs requires crossing international borders.

TimBurr

5 years agodiscuss

Speaking of Asimov, "The Dead Past" explores government controlled research, which the article proposed as one defense against black-ball ideas.

Without spoiling too much, the story revolves around suspected government suppression of a time-viewing device. The story's pretty easy to find online; the link below lists books it appears in.

http://www.asimovreviews.net/Stories/Story046.html

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