What many may not realize is that there's a thriving industry in sending passengers on planes for the sole purpose of them taking things from A to B.
Years ago, you could get discounted flights to Europe where you couldn't check in any luggage. Why? That allowance was taken up by documents for various clients. This was usually quicker than any courier services at the time.
I've had friends who worked in the oil and gas industry. One story I was told was where parts were desperately needed to repair a drill bit on a gas platform. The best option? Someone would fly halfway around the world, drive to a particular factory, wait for the parts and then fly back. This was cheaper and faster than any courier service, even if you spent $10,000+ on the ticket.
This was exacerbated because a person with 200lb of machine parts could walk through customs where a shipment might get stuck in customs for weeks. And each day of non-operation cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Some years back, there was a "can't happen" problem with a telephone switch, such that the problem had "contaminated" the running databases on both processor cards, and the system was no longer capable of recovering itself. It needed a new card, and it needed it yesterday.
The manufacturer scrambled it down to the local airport, where they bought it a passenger ticket on the next plane out. While it was in the air, they arranged for an express courier in the destination city to pick it up from the airport and break the speed limit all the way to the phone office. Whereupon the driver asked the recipient which driveway to use because "the one that looks like the main entrance doesn't look like it's meant for truck traffic".
Truck? What?
Evidently the courier service heard the declared value of the shipment and just assumed it must be enormous, so they sent a semi. This enormous truck had picked it up and had been hurtling down the road, empty, with a pizza-box-sized parcel on the floor of the cab, where it would be safer.
It’s hilarious because as I was reading your story, I assumed the exact same thing. I was picturing how they got some giant telephone switch on a flight and imagined a giant machine on the window seat.
I would’ve been part of the chain that got a semi out to deliver it.
One time someone in our family needed drugs delivered on a very time sensitive basis.
The specialty pharmacy fucked around and found out. I social engineered my way up the chain of command, interrupting the medical director’s dinner. They ended up hiring a courier to fly it halfway across the country. A dude showed up the doorstep at 4AM (four hours before it was needed) with a box packed with dry ice. The poor courier dude had a three hour cab ride, which probably cost more than the drug.
I made the courier and driver breakfast and coffee. The courier was fascinating, he had great stories and basically had a career mostly built on corporate screw-ups.
There are opposite versions of that story where the drug is a specialized 1-off custom living biological product (often a patient's own engineered immune cells). An entire company's years of effort and existence are tightly coupled to a patient's survival, and sometimes they're hundreds of miles apart.
Those plane tickets, with coolers of ice in hand, are crazy to me.
And yeah, there are those cases where batch 1 was sent 'on time' with Courier 1 who didn't realize what they had, and let it thaw. And so backup batch 2 was sent 'super-express' with Courier 2 with minutes notice.
The existence of these kinds of things makes me both happy and sad.
Happy - human technology is capable of these things.
Sad - only the hyper-wealthy can afford it.
Hopefully in 20 years treatments like these will be accessible to 'commoners'. So much progress has been made in the last 50 years that I wonder what the next 50 hold.
> I've had friends who worked in the oil and gas industry. One story I was told was where parts were desperately needed to repair a drill bit on a gas platform. The best option? Someone would fly halfway around the world, drive to a particular factory, wait for the parts and then fly back. This was cheaper and faster than any courier service, even if you spent $10,000+ on the ticket.
I was a summer student at a company that manufactured top drives for drill rigs. My days were mostly spent filing drawings and preparing documentation packages. One morning when I arrived at work, the head of the department asked me, "do you have a passport?"
He gave me a package of documents, an 18" machined steel rod and tickets for a flight that was roughly three hours from takeoff.
After driving home to pick up my passport and then across town to the airport, I didn't have enough time to check bags or even read the documentation I'd been given. I guessed the value of the part being 'under $1000' and US customs took me aside. While I was waiting, I read the documentation and discovered it was worth ~$50, though customs let me go before I could tell them.
Shockingly, I didn't have any trouble at security carrying the metal rod. I stepped onto the plane and they closed the doors behind me.
I was told that the downtime cost around $100,000 per hour, and that I was bringing the second replacement part. The first one sent was too small, which delayed repairs by a day.
In any case, that was my first (and thus far only) visit to Grand Junction, Colorado. I was kind of surprised that Canadian customs gave me way more hassle on my return the next day, despite that I had all my documents in order by then.
About 10 years ago I worked for a vendor of PCIe cards that were mainly sold to OEMs as a component of systems with 6- or 7-figure price tags. One of our customers discovered a critical bug that required reprogramming an FPGA on the card to fix. There were hundreds of cards in inventory at the customer's contract manufacturer's locations in Singapore, Scotland, and Texas. They stopped all three production lines and demanded we send someone to the locations to reprogram all of the cards.
So I was on a redeye that night from California to Texas with a Shuttle Cube w/PCIe slot and an ESD wrist strap under my arm. After reprogramming all of the cards in Texas it was back to the airport to catch another overnight flight to Scotland. Then after doing those cards it was on to Singapore, but I did get to stay one night in a hotel in Scotland since the soonest flight was the next morning. After doing the Singapore cards it was one night in Singapore and then back to California. Around the world in 5 days.
I'll throw in my "strange things flying on planes" story.
An ex-girlfriend worked for a large yogurt manufacturer. One of their manufacturing plants had an issue with "the culture" (the bacterial culture used for fermenting the yogurt, that is). She said product was exploding out of containers in the incubation rooms.
The operators decided to sterilize the plant and bring a sample of bacterial culture from another of the company's plants. An employee was paid to ride in a first class seat beside a temperature-controlled container of bacterial culture.
Decades ago, my university's solar car team had a problem at the competition. Their super light magnesium wheels were cracking and failing. The team's biggest supporter and a true pioneer of CNC machining, Chuck, started calling around to local machine shops to see if anyone could turn some new wheels out of aluminum. He found one machinist who agreed to do the work, but laughed because he knew there wasn't any aluminum billet large enough anywhere in the state. Chuck made a few more phone calls, and an hour later there were 4 large aluminum billets on their way from Michigan in a Cessna. That machinist had a very long night!
Of course, the team decided not to use those aluminum wheels and instead tried to round off any sharp edges on the remaining magnesium ones. Another wheel broke and the car was damaged too much to continue competing.
Fair enough, but I think I still would have used the Al wheels. They used known defective wheels, wrecked their project, didn't cross the finish line and potentially upset a big supporter. Not the kind of thing I'd do in a startup, at least.
Look at me though, judging people's decisions on the internet through a second hand story.
Chuck actually recently published a book, documenting his career within CNC machining. He started a company whose product became the gold standard for CNC software for decades.
I imagine it was identified as one of several possible solutions, and the team pursued more than one solution in parallel. As a non-mechanical engineer, I personally would have voted for the aluminum.
>> And each day of non-operation cost hundreds of thousands of dollars...
My close relative worked off shore for decades. Sometimes a down large production platform is a MILLION dollars an hour. Flying someone anywhere with a $250,000 part in their hands is nothing. There are entire industries built around "getting things to the rig/platform" faster.
I'm surprised that I haven't heard of small jets (fighters/jet trainers) being used for commercial courier services (although there are instances of military jets transporting organs for transplant, https://apnews.com/article/c1309c58720c78347c1ebbbade56d35d).
They can be privately owned and operated, are very fast, and tend to have hundreds of kilos of payload capacity.
Unless you have supercruise capability (which only four fighters in the world have) flying supersonic consumes and enormous amount of fuel, so flying any distance at supersonic speeds pretty much requires aerial refueling. IIRC you also need special permission to fly supersonic in US airspace. If you're limited to subsonic speeds then there's really no advantage provided by a fighter. Private jets can fly at similar high subsonic speeds (0.9-0.95 mach or so) and are usually cheaper and more efficient to operate than fighter jets.
David Nott’s book War Doctor includes a tale of him being called in to perform urgent surgery in central London, having just finished a flying lesson in Essex. He apparently called 999, asked for the Police, and after explaining the situation a car was despatched to take him at high speed through traffic. Sadly I don’t have the sort of career that would ever justify that but it sounds like great fun.
Interesting. I've seen similar "convoys" of police cars with a motorcycle platoon etc with them many times. I assumed it was some VIP. I never considered it might be a organ transplant!
I do wonder if they'd do that today - save one person's life by ploughing through central London at 70mph? There are so many cyclists and pedestrians not paying attention - it would feel safer to just helicopter it over?
They would normally have used the police helicopter back then too, but it was grounded due to a recent crash.
London now has an air ambulance service, which it didn't at the time- though the air ambulance also have some impressively fast cars (Skoda Octavia vRS IIRC) for when conditions don't allow the helicopter to fly.
My understanding is that unless you actually keep a jet on standby (which has its own costs), it is surprisingly difficult to beat commercial airliners on speed if the clock starts ticking now. You can always board the next flight, but with private jets it takes time to a) find a free jet and b) prepare for the flight. Of course, the more non-standard journey you have, the more edge the private jet gets.
There’s also just a lot of commercial jets everywhere. Even if you kept private jets at every airport in the world you’d be out of luck if you needed to deliver two parts from the same location.
This is more due to safety and security requirements of the package than the economics or shipping itself. FedEx and UPS will be very happy to ship you something for a steep discount without any assumed liability, but there would be no takers for it. Providing a trusted chain of custody for the package all the way from point A to B is the real value add.
Well, “pay a dude to carry it onto and off a plane” is also a chain of custody arrangement of sorts, you just wouldn’t normally expect it to be cheaper than a company specializing in such.
It wouldn’t be if you regularly did it. But in emergency “work has halted” type of scenarios, you have plenty of labor standing around doing nothing already. And, they’ll take the task way more seriously than any courier would.
This was over the Christmas-New Year period. There was a real risk of a shipment getting stuck in customs for days or possibly even weeks. An arriving passenger's luggage doesn't go through that same process. I mean it's obviously still checked by customs but it's done so immediately.
I don't know about that... shipping heavy and/or large stuff becomes very expensive even without insurance (= no assumed liability). Big shippers get big discounts from UPS and FedEx so as the little guy you get screwed by price discrimination. Airlines are a much more competitive market.
I think you can still get chain of custody, though. I have a laptop for anything touching prod and while the chain of custody needs to be kept for physical security, the value of insurance for my company is negligible. It's probably cheaper and easier for them to just eat the cost if something happens during transit than to try and deal with an insurance claim.
Another case is for shipping products to customers. With how insurance works, the insurance would cost you more than just sending the item again. However, proof of delivery is really nice for if a customer claims something was never delivered.
Back in 2000, our SF based company had a server in a datacenter in the UK die. The quickest and cheapest way to fix it was to have our IT guy take a replacement server in a suitcase and fly to the UK to replace it.
Can verify, I've seen engineers flown out with parts to oversee repairs. Just looking at a flight tracker site and looking at how much checked baggage costs should show you it's an obvious choice.
Customs in most countries is hilariously broken, they can seize or sit on your stuff for months with no recourse and no due process.
> I've had friends who worked in the oil and gas industry. One story I was told was where parts were desperately needed to repair a drill bit on a gas platform. The best option? Someone would fly halfway around the world, drive to a particular factory, wait for the parts and then fly back.
This is normal in the IT industry. For high-value customers, vendors would be expected to fly in parts as needed. As just one example, I had a server flown in by a major reseller when the delivery service (UPS, IIRC) lost the original and the project was going to miss a critical deadline. HP's 6 hr CTR (call to repair) warranty guarantees your hardware will be restored within 6 hours of your call to support. It includes a local inventory of parts so that they can effectively replace the server if needed.
I once worked on a project with a steep late delivery penalty. We had already scheduled a "hit shot" truck, which is a dedicated semi, usually a team of 2 drivers, that drives directly, no stops, to the destination. We had scheduled it and it was 3 or 4 days to get from Denver to NYC. We were late, frantically building and assembling hardware and so just weren't ready when the truck came. We shipped the large pieces, large empty stainless steel shells in a mostly empty truck. We then took the extra 2 days to assemble the rest of the hardware and air freighted it at $50k extra cost and 1 day to get there. Basically we bought 2 days on the project for $50k and just barely made our delivery deadline.
Likewise some airlines don't even require someone to fly. I knew someone that would ship very expensive camera gear to film productions directly with an airline. They would check the cases and send it off. Someone would just go and pick it up. Obviously only really works if you're not dealing with customs.
I thought terrorists had done the "check your bag and don't board" thing enough for it to be disallowed. But maybe this story took place a long time ago?
Many (most?) large airlines take cargo directly like this. It's not so much "check your bag and don't board" as it is "consign this cargo shipment" which happens to be taken on the same aircraft as passengers and their luggage. Unlike checked luggage you need to declare the contents of the packages etc., and presumably there is security screening.
TSA has limits and they’re pretty strict with wanting to know what’s being shipped. You can’t even ship over a pound without being subject to background checks and approval.
A flight isn’t the only way either. Around here, a team of two brothers with a van will charge several thousand to transport parts at a moments notice to anywhere in the US, Canada or some of Mexico. They drive non-stop, one drives while the other sleeps.
Maybe not exactly a thriving industry, i.e. more like a niche.
Anecdotally I once had to fly to another EU city (some 1,200 km distance), get a rented car, drive to the house of the vendor at night (he took the pieces home after we phoned him at like 5 PM on a friday, a good reason to be friends with people) then drive to another city to be able to take an early flight back next morning.
The items were (at the x-ray machine in the airport) a bit suspect (they were drilling bits for a tunneling machine, in practice looking a lot like hand grenades) but I managed to convince the police they were spare parts/consumables.
But that was years before checks at boarding gates were tightened (yes, we could bring a water bottle) I wonder if they would pass today.
> What many may not realize is that there's a thriving industry in sending passengers on planes for the sole purpose of them taking things from A to B.
So someone out there must have made a courier-as-a-service website for this?
Sign up some people to be on standby, with a passport and a list of countries they have visa for, list them with their current location.
Person signs up to potentially make a few grand if they get the call.
Firms who are in need of a person throw in the money and the tickets.
Does that work? If I need something carried by a person from London to NYC today, what do I do?
Delta Airlines has their DASH service. Under 16 ounces, anyone can ship with them. Under 100 pounds, you will need to be a known shipper with the TSA. It's available on basically any regularly scheduled flight of theirs.
We used it on a contract job in Tennessee once, to get a replacement UPS sent. Expensive, but worth it.
all airlines have something like this. it used to be called "counter to counter"; drop off and pick it up at the airport.
my story, about 1988. we had a system in Omaha with a broken power supply (it was big, say 6U, custom voltages). there was a spare in Rapid City, and downtime was charged by the hour.
no problem, took the spare in a box to the airport. they told us it was too big for counter to counter; but a ticket could be purchased and it would be put on the plane. No, problem.
"Give me a coach ticket to Omaha."
"Sorry sir, those are all sold. We do have a first class ticket available."
"In that case, OK"
Super secret things often go this way too, to avoid potential loss or theft.
I was working on the demo software for the on-stage reveal of a certain super secret cell phone from a certain manufacturer. Every time the phone had to have its firmware updated or the hardware switched out some guy had to come to my office and carry it back in-person to the HQ.
I remember one time I wrote the codename of the device on the outside of the anonymous box because I was worried the courier person might end up just leaving it at the reception at HQ and then the box would get opened by someone who shouldn't be seeing it. I thought having the codename on the outside would at least let it get routed internally to the team working on it.
I got a very, very angry phone call from someone at certain manufacturer swearing and cursing at me saying that someone could have seen the name and everything would have been exposed, blah blah. Total bullshit.
In the end the demo went ahead successfully in front of a world-wide audience. The live demo was supposed to be loaded onto some certain servers, but time ran out and it ended up running off a PC in my business partner's closet over his home DSL. A certain CEO was not aware of this as he held the device on stage. Watching the event on a stream from the BBC was a pants soiling moment.
Back in the day I upped the RAM
and put a set of virtual machines on our VP of Marketing’s laptop with copies of our staging server, db, data… the works. He just started it up and browsed away.
He loved doing demos without a network connection etc. Back then WiFi was always restricted and hot spots too slow.
> That allowance was taken up by documents for various clients. This was usually quicker than any courier services at the time.
They were still a courier service. I once sat next to a guy (in first class!) who was accompanying checks to Hawaii. Yes, not so long ago they had to physically travel to the issuing bank. He was basically retired so he did this to travel, around and earn some money.
At the end of the flight they let him leave first. He told me they would let him off and he would go down to the tarmac to watch the cargo hold be unlocked and make sure the cargo wasn’t tampered with.
I’ve also had someone hand carry electronics to / from a customer. Sometimes it’s just easier.
In the Amiga community we have the legend of "Joe Pillow". That was the name under which the airline seat was booked, that would hold the precious Amiga prototype that was used to demo the machine at CES '84.
Surprisingly - clearing customs in many countries can be done by a random person who is willing to take a trip out to the airport and just pay brokerage and customs fees directly. I was in Jamaica and had some telecom gear fedexed to me - I went to pick it up but didn’t have the appropriate tax ID number to do so - I was able to head to downtown Kingston, provide my passport, they gave me a TRN (kind of like a SSN) and I went back to customs, paid the $20 or so and voila - I had the device clearing customs in the same day. I often wonder if it’s that straightforward in other countries. I do know if you hire a customs broker, in say Mexico (which fedex can’t clear customs for you - unlike say Germany) - the customs broker will end up charging you $1500 in fees to clear a $1300 NUC.
It is that straightforward in most countries — I've done this exact thing many times. You save a lot of money, but you can sometimes waste a lot of time, and if your shipment is at all complicated you need quite a bit of specialist knowledge (which is why the brokers exist).
Somewhat related to the original topic and this flight tangent, apparently fresh flowers are delivered by plane due to the combination of lightness and requirements for fast delivery. They almost act like an anti-ballast, filling up space that is otherwise unused but without adding much weight.
I worked for an oil and gas company for a very long time, and frequently saw something similar, but not quite the same.
I didn't see anyone specifically put on a plane to collect a part - but there was no need, as the field team were flying around all over the place anyway. So, a manager would accost someone going from Aberdeen to Houston, for example, and ask them to put a 10kg part in their luggage on the return journey. Then the part would get dropped off at the Aberdeen facility, and put on the next chopper to the offshore platform that needed it.
Sending human remains! I recently discovered it's cheaper to go in person with someone's ashes in your hand luggage on an international flight than to have them sent by air (actually, you can't send human remains by postal service or courier), and much easier too. I wonder whether anyone offers it as a commercial service (maybe as a side income?). It's too bad you can't take cadavers with you on flights, the cost of that is murderous.
Happens (although less often now) in Formula 1 as well - brand new parts being sent over in a private jet, or commercial, to test and race that weekend.
While the tweet is correct ("It is physically impossible to exceed the 70-pound domestic weight limit for a small flat rate box") the shortened title here which omits the word "small" is very misleading. The USPS offers a variety of sizes of flat rate boxes (https://www.usps.com/ship/priority-mail.htm#flatrate), all of which have the same 70 lb weight limit. It's only the "small" that cannot be overweight. The two mediums and the large can exceed the limit with dense contents. Perhaps the title could be changed to omit "physical" and add back "small"?
I don't think "physically" is redundant. It could be legally impossible, or practically impossible.
I played around with the title and character limit for a minute, and managed to get: "A small flat-rate USPS box's weight limit is physically impossible to exceed". How's that?
That sounds awkward to me. The best way to shorten titles is to omit words - then you keep the prosody of the original.
I've taken another crack at it. Now someone will complain about USPS being missing, but "flat rate" implies someone's rate, and it's not as if USPS is a misleading surprise.
(Submitted title was "It is physically impossible to exceed the weight limit for a USPS flat rate box".
First edit was
"It is impossible to exceed the weight limit for a small USPS flat rate box".)
p.s. If anyone wonders why HN spends so much obsessive energy getting titles right - I wondered that for years, too. Then it eventually made sense: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20429573. It's like this tiny corner of the universe where one's voice can be heard and correctness actually matters.
That's my theory anyhow. All I know for sure is that the beast likes it if you soothe it about titles.
Perhaps use „Small Flat Rate Box“ rather than „small flat-rate box“, to bring it in line with usps website and indicate that it’s the name of a specific product.
I usually cringe when people show me mainstream news titles (I attributed it to a good literature teacher who taught me to read someone's agenda and bias), but it might also be getting used to that calmed "bookish as PG said' tone here.
Perhaps there would be some value to extending the allowable length for titles, but having a soft limit equal to (or even slightly less than) the current one? If over the soft limit there could be a message that it's preferable to shorten titles to under that length if it can be done without losing useful information.
In theory that way you still get titles shortened where possible, but don't have to wrestle with this kind of issue. Of course the cost is added complexity, so likely not worth it. Maybe just increase the limit then?
I have occasionally thought of writing code to allow this (sort of a 'burst' feature for occasional exceptions) but the 80 char limit is not a real problem in practice. In fact it functions as a classic creative constraint.
> In fact it functions as a classic creative constraint.
If I might play devil's advocate a bit—aren't submitters not supposed to be creative in titles?
"Unless it's misleading or clickbait", yes, but I don't think there's a correlation between click-bait and length. I feel like a lot of titles get edited because of the character limit.
(fueled by three amazing strong coffees in Ginza and the first idle moments on the interwebs I've enjoyed in a long long time)
HN: one of the last remaining Great Good Places of the Internet, a lone tavern in an iconic gateway town to the now not-so-wild west.
Beyond the western borders of this little town, the tech gold rush has both expanded to epic proportions, affecting all the economies in the world, and also gone through enough booms and busts that the phrase "gold rush" seems somehow off.
As more and more young'uns join and jaded veterans return to throng the tavern alike, it often seems to be on the brink of either exploding with the largest gun fight in history, or jumping the shark [1].
The secret is the man at the corner of the bar @dang, always around with a friendly smile and a towel on his shoulder. The only sheriff in the west who still doubles as the friendly bartender: always polite, always willing to break up a fight with kind words and clean up messes himself.
Yes a cold-hard look from him is all it takes to get most outlaws to back down, yes, his Colt-45 "moderator" edition is feared by all men, but the real secret to his success: his earnest passion (some call it an obsession) for the seemingly sisyphean task of sustaining good conflict - letting it simmer but keeping it all times below the boiling point based on "the code":
"Conflict is essential to human life, whether between different aspects of oneself, between oneself and the environment, between different individuals or between different groups. It follows that the aim of healthy living is not the direct elimination of conflict, which is possible only by forcible suppression of one or other of its antagonistic components, but the toleration of it—the capacity to bear the tensions of doubt and of unsatisfied need and the willingness to hold judgement in suspense until finer and finer solutions can be discovered which integrate more and more the claims of both sides. It is the psychologist's job to make possible the acceptance of such an idea so that the richness of the varieties of experience, whether within the unit of the single personality or in the wider unit of the group, can come to expression."
May the last great tavern in the West and it's friendly bartender-sheriff live long and prosper.
----
[1] - I hope I didn't jinx this by writing this "ode" :)
The described practice sounds like it would make HN an excellent source of training data for a machine learning model to generate appropriate titles for a piece of long-form content.
That's a great question. There's solid phases you can create at extreme pressure that remain stable or metastable at STP, like the diamond allotrope of carbon. I don't know of any examples that retain a high density at low pressure. Is it possible for something like that to exist?
There was a suggestion that hydrogen metal could be metastable at low pressure -- it would be much denser than molecular hydrogen -- but it looks like that's controversial:
edit: Turns out diamond is ~70% denser than other forms of carbon, so that's sort of an example. Though its density is pretty low in absolute terms (~3.5 g/cm³).
If there was a material which could handle the internal stress, sure. That material probably doesn't exist.
Like a balloon exists at STP despite being internally at higher pressure, but balloons also pop. Tempered glass also exists and significantly higher pressure and likewise explodes. Often metal structures will retain some stress (sometimes quite high) after manufacture.
The amount of energy released at some of those other materials if they had the magical property of staying together... would be terrifying if popped.
I have a 115lb shipment of small metal parts that needs to be across the country before Wed. Both FedEx and UPS quoted me ~$750 to ship it in a 12"x8"x8" OSB box via 2-day shipping. Fedex one rate boxes have a weight limit of 50lbs. The small boxes are $31/ea to ship. I just finished breaking the shipment up into 3 parts. Heck, next day would be ~$300.
There's a reason for it. Package sizes and weight limits are optimized for workers who are going to carry them. So yes in your case the total weight loaded on to the truck or plane may be the same, but loading/unloading 3x40 lb boxes and carrying them to your front porch is very different from doing the same with a single 115 lb box.
Airlines work the same way. 2x50 lb bags cost $30 each. One single 100lb bag has a $200 surcharge.
Usually large items go through an entirely different delivery network because the whole parcel delivery chain will be designed around weight limits - I.E. that weight might not be able to go through the automated sorter, and there is very limited capacity for manual workarounds for individual parcels.
Let me recommend pirateship.com for discounted USPS/UPS rates. Not affiliated, just a happy customer.
It gives me a UPS 2nd day air quote of $338.90 from 27518 to 95050 for a 12" x 8" x 8" box weighing 115 lbs. That's supposedly 66% off retail ($1000.12).
But as sibling comment mentions, think of the person delivering a 115 lb package. I semi-recently shipped some treadmill parts to a recycler and they went via three boxes (the recycler paid for them).
Negotiated FedEx and UPS rates are often 90% off the retail price or better. If you can get the box sent from a shipper that has a daily pickup from UPS and reimburse them, you may save a great deal of money.
Semi related - a few months ago, while not fully sober, I was aimlessly browsing through Amazon and ended up owning a set of two 1.5inch cubes - one aluminium, one tungsten.
It’s kind of a silly purchase considering it’s a lot of money for 2 metal cubes, but it’s honestly very impressive just how heavy that small cube is - both objectively, and when compared to the aluminium cube.
Also makes for a great talking point when having guests over.
When I heard that the crypto millionaires were buying Tungsten cubes for fun, I checked into the prices. Amazon lists a 1.5" cube (weighs 1 kg) at $199 and a 4" cube (that weighs 18.9 kg [0]) at $3499. There's no way I'm spending that, but I will admit to wanting to experience their density for myself.
If one can wait for shipping, I recommend ordering (directly?) from Alibaba.
I was able to buy a 2" tungsten cube from Alibaba for $312 after shipping. It was cheaper than any (re)sellers I found on Amazon/eBay/webstores. It came out to 137% more tungsten for only 56% more cost. $39.00 per cubic inch versus $59.26 per cubic inch.
Having it next to an aluminum cube of the same size is fun.
You can get large pieces of tungsten (well, tungsten alloys since pure tungsten isn't very machinable it isn't that widely used) pretty cheaply by contacting a machine shop directly.
People putting listings on amazon are exploiting what a particular market will pay.
I wish I was a millionaire. I could fulfil my wish of owning replica of IPK that is small cylinder of Platinum-Iridium weighting very very close to kilogram.
Before the standard was changed, I spent a while trying to get one of the prototype silicon sphere kilograms-- slightly misshapen would have been fine-- without success.
International Prototype Kilogram, the mass which used to be the reference standard for the kilogram until it was redefined to be based on fundamental constants a few years ago.
I have a part off an aircraft (nobody seems to know what part or what aircraft). I imagine it's partially tungsten since it's not much bigger than a 4x4 cube and has to weigh close to 50lbs.
It's not shaped like a prism. It has some functionality to it (there are mounting points and a pivot of some sort). Also, I think it came from a military aircraft, so not a 747.
I bought one of those cubes off Amazon and use it as a paper weight. Was like $200 or something. It’s an excellent value for its quality as a conversation starter.
I do a little TIG welding. The electrodes are made of mostly tungsten. (Tungsten is used for its high melting point. Lanthanum or some other elements are often added to raise the melting point somewhat.)
The electrodes aren't very big, but the density is definitely weird.
It's not the heaviest thing in the world, but it's probably the heaviest thing a person could buy a practical cube of. The main metals heavier than lead are gold, iridium, mercury, platinum, tungsten, and uranium.
Uranium is a comparable price and density to tungsten, but buying iridium is gonna be at least 50x the price for something 10% denser.
6 hours later, I'm an idiot who read density instead of price.
Funny thing is, while Depleted Uranium is about the same density as tungsten, it's also a fair bit cheaper (for major nuclear governments) because it's an otherwise nearly useless byproduct of the uranium enrichment process, and there's around a million tons of it sitting in storage worldwide.
Also, since the density of tungsten and gold are so close I guess tungsten gets ordered a lot by people intending to forge the counterfeit gold bars...
Since I discovered the availability of anvils on Amazon, I have always wondered about the economics of shipping them.
Right now, I can order a 66lb "Happybuy" anvil for $153 with free prime shipping. One assumes that the $153 includes the cost of shipping it all the way from China in the first place.
For comparison, a similarly sized anvil from a reputable local dealer costs $949 plus tax and shipping at the lowest rate (UPS standard) is $93.
Two things: 1) that "anvil" is cast iron or potentially at that size, semi hollow steel. It's not great for doing anvil things and will likely break, whereas the "reputable" one is cast steel or wrought iron, both of which are much much much tougher for beating on. 2) The more interesting thing here is the market for kettlebells and other heavy weights -- they can go up to hundreds of pounds, though typically top out around 100 lbs. Kettlebells that prime ship are all cheaper than any reputable manufacturer since they use their own logistics. I've unfortunately graduated to sizes that the main suppliers don't list on Amazon (40kg+) which have to be paid for UPS shipping and a non-trivial portion of the cost is the packaging to prevent damage to something that heavy. At this point, when I need to buy a new round of them, I'll be driving to the manufacturer in Ontario (including expensive Canadian gas and bridge fees) because that's cheaper than shipping more than one...
I own a gym and it's always amusing to see the delivery guys struggle with deliveries of kettlebells and plates. If I see the truck pull up, I always run in and ask some of the gym guys to help carry the things in.
I realize I don't understand much of the life of someone so strong, but how do you wear out a 40+ kg kettlebell often enough to have a thought-out replacement plan?
I assume the new round would be of heavier kettlebells as OP continues to develop strength? If not, I’d also be interested in knowing how one wears out kettlebells!
For posterity, several days late, upgrading to larger bells or getting a second 40kg to do exercises with a 40 in each hand (double kettlebell). If I ever wear one out, I'll be shocked.
The transportation from China probably isn't the issue. Google suggests that moving a 40-foot shipping container across the Pacific Ocean costs several thousand dollars. You can fit a whole bunch of anvils inside a shipping container [citation needed], so the cost for this part of the journey may be pretty low.
On the order of $10k to ship a 40,000lb, 40ft shipping container from China to LA without insurance now, prices have increased a lot recently. So the per item cost into the US is around $16 on the low end for this anvil. But then there are other costs associated with shipping something to the amazon warehouse once the container gets to the US, and amazon will either charge a fee or require the seller to split the shipment to different states. It costs about $2-$3 a mile to ship a container across the US by truck or train, and less than truckload shipments are generally more expensive per item. And they need to pay someone, or pay amazon to put labels on everything, handle/repackage damaged items. Or another $5-$10 to ship it to the warehouse.
Amazon negotiates with UPS and other couriers, and they have their own shipping service, so their merchants pay a lot less than the "retail" cost for shipping to amazon customers. For that 66lb anvil, amazon charges ~$35 for fulfillment including picking, packaging and shipping. About 50 cents a pound. Amazon also charges other fees including the commission/referral on the sale, storage, etc that are mostly not based on item weight, this is about $20 more for a $150 sale.
Retail cost to ship a 66lb anvil UPS from LA to SF would be about $90. With a regular commercial discount about $65, more for longer distances and less for shorter. If you are in the business of shipping a lot you can negotiate a slightly better rate than $1 a pound.
I once bought a band saw from Amazon with free shipping. (I didn't have Prime, it was just regular free shipping.) I could have bought it locally, but I didn't have a convenient way to get it home.
In my case, free shipping didn't turn out all that great; it was damaged when it got to me. Fortunately I was able to get free replacement parts from the company.
I suspect Amazon probably lost money on that deal since they had to hire specialty movers, but who knows?
"Free" shipping of that sort of thing tends to be factored into the selling price. I'll occasionally find large, heavy items on Amazon that are 20-30% more than in a local store for this reason.
My in-laws bought us a cast iron outdoor pizza oven one year from Amazon. It probably weighed close to 200 lbs and they had to ship it twice because the first guy dropped it off the back of the lift on the truck while unloading it at our house. I don't know how much Amazon actually spent on our free shipping but they certainly lost money on the deal.
This reminds me of a guy in 2007 whose curiosity got him to cram around 34kg (75lbs) worth of lead bricks into the Japanese postal service's ExPack 500 flat-rate envelope, which had a supposedly 'impossible' limit of 30kg (66lbs) and were usually not checked for weight when sending. The post office clerk wrestled with it and eventually agreed to ship the thing. He didn't actually send it though.
On the other end of the spectrum is lightweight, but bulky stuff. I sold things like this for a time, some time ago. Would get a fair amount of grief from customers who would use the simpler UPS/Fedex calculators on the weight only and complain that I padding shipping prices. But UPS and Fedex charge "dimensional weight" for these types of shipments, and you have to use a more complicated formula.
Out of curiosity, what kind of weights were they? I was under the impression that it has been phased out of many uses because of high toxicity (including via skin absorption when handling it)
I'm a tennis racquet tech (side gig) and we use spools of Pb tape for weight and balance tuning of frames. It's uncoated, so following installation I (a) scrub my hands down with a brush and dish detergent and (b) shellac the tape where it is on the customer frame with two coats of clear nail polish.
They make rubber adhesive strips with four or five wee bits of tungsten in them, but they are too expensive for general use, nor do they offer the precision you get from a continuous length of lead tape. They are also too thick to install on the handle pallet under the grip, which is no problem with lead tape since it's about 0.3 mm thick (rough guess, I haven't actually mic'ed it).
Yes, wash your hands after handling gun rounds (especially after firing them). Both the bullets and the primers are usually manufactured with lead. Also, don't use shooting ranges with inadequate ventilation.
Yes, I do wash my hands with lead-off. That's to prevent me from ingesting the lead. My question was about skin absorption, not whether or not the lead actually gets on my hands.
They are, but as a diver I will never touch them unless they look in proper shape and are the types wrapped in some other material. Some fishy dive centers will have the old style raw lead blocks..
You breath TEL whenever you go near an airport. That's a far more pressing concern than incidental exposure through contact. If that's your threshold you may as well isolate from zinc and copper too.
Yes, USPS offers a range of free Priority Mail and Priority Mail Express boxes and envelopes. You only pay postage when using them; sometimes flat rate (as in the box being discussed here), and other times by some combination of distance and dimensions/weight.
Flat rate is particularly interesting because the single rate applies, as implied, regardless of weight or distance. I sell a product that is 3 lb and fits into the aforementioned padded flat rate envelope. This means that I can ship it to the farthest reaches of Alaska or Guam for the same $8.45 (USPS commercial rate) as to any other US address.
Not part of the USPS small box story, but I ordered a bundle of steel plates that unfortunately fit through our mail slot on our front door, and absolutely destroyed the ceramic tile floor when the delivery person dropped them through that slot.
I, too, felt bad for the guy until I saw him toss it on his shoulder like it was nothing, carried to the garage and gently set it down. Not a big guy, either. :-)
The UPS person who delivered my full size punching bag was not super thrilled. 100 lbs and 150cm tall odd shape. I wish I was there when delivery happened as I was prepared to tip them for the inconvenience.
My dad made a black walnut coffee/end table for me, and instead of waiting for the next time he drove out here, he decided to ship it via FedEx. It was like 100 lbs, but due to the very large size and somewhat wonky shape, he then built a plywood encasement for it with some used carpet to keep the epoxied table from getting scratched. It was quite a sight to behold. The FedEx guy had no problem hauling 100+ lbs of large, awkward object, but he was curious as can be as to what on earth he was delivering.
I ordered a couple 70 pound blocks of tungsten. They were each double boxed and still somehow managed to slip through the first box. Might have been both amusing and annoying to handle those boxes.
My friend worked at UPS. He said you could always tell when someone had bullets shipped because of the rattle and heavy weight. He said those were probably the most common heavy shipment they saw.
Couldn't read the Twitter post with NoScript, and didn't want to turn it off, but I verified the claim. Forgive me for working in cubic inches, but those are the unit measures specified on the USPS web page: https://store.usps.com/store/product/shipping-supplies/prior...
So the volume of the box is 82.6669921875 cubic inches. Assuming we're shipping a block of Tungsten at 0.7 lb/in^3, then our shipment would weigh 57.86689453125 lbs, which is less than 83% of the maximum allowed weight of 70lbs.
I wonder how closely my results agree with the Twitter post...
Should have said densest substance on Earth. Fill it with neutron star and you’ll be approx. 30 trillion kg overweight.
Had to post this correction before @neiltyson popped in with an "Actually..."
I don't have anything to plug, so just try to be a little bit better than normal if you happen to think of it, but don't make a big deal out of it--no one's asking you to be a saint.
It’s always been strange to me that people ship bullets Willy nilly, my dad buys his yearly supply at once and this last year they delivered them to the wrong address. The people brought them to him but it just seems weird to allow shipping weaponry and not even verifying that it’s delivered to the correct person.
Funny story, I had the opposite experience this morning. I was putting together a care package for a friend, which included a box of ammo for a rifle we'd enjoyed shooting together. I was just about to take it by the post office when I thought I'd check if I was supposed to mark it in some special way or something, and promptly discovered that this was ILLEGAL. With rather frightening penalties. But UPS would cheerfully take it.
This struck me as the most frighteningly bizarre, arbitrary and pointless rule I had heard in a long time, and I spent a while trying to fathom the logic of it.
I suppose it isn't really a surprise - laws surrounding weapons reflect two conflicting views and intuitions, on the one side that they are inherently scary and suspicious, on the other that they are unremarkable if handled responsibly. I wish our laws reflected a neighborly attempt by the two groups to live together and avoid unsettling the one and persecuting the other. Alas, they flip randomly between the one view and the other, managing to cause these issues for BOTH groups!
Completely legal to ship, you just have to pay a hazmat fee which restricts how the box is shipped and a big label goes on the outside showing that it is ordinance. Similar to shipping a lithium battery has to be declared with a phone number to call.
A distinction which blew my mind as I had had the ammo shipped to me recently, and it would never have occurred to me that there was a problem, so long as it was packaged safely.
Did in person deliveries via plane quite a bit in the 90s. Was working for the worlds largest semiconductor company.
Most staggering example was trying to get a very very small box of engine controller CPUs from Penang Malaysia to an auto plant outside of Philadelphia to get there before 8am shift start. Only way to make it work was hand carry from Penang through Singapore to Anchorage, clear customs and then rented Learjet to Philly.
Penalties for late delivery were massive. In this case had we been a couple hours later would have resulted in cascading loss of production resulting in auto union people needing to work during their summer shutdown and quite large cost.
Semiconductors are different from other parts. They take a long time to manufacture. And, sometimes you think you've made them but they just die for whatever reason. If you want to make a new factory it takes years too. I wonder if the auto companies have learned to keep some semiconductors around just in case. Oh wait. No.
Ah ah. But 745 hours of free internet is a bit less impressive and catchy.
(edit: changed from 744 to 745 to take long October months with winter hour changes in account, add a second to that if you want to be sure about leap seconds)
The only way to produce a higher density metal at standard pressures and temperatures would be to get it to go through some sort of allotropic transformation to a crystal structure that is more tightly packed, but the ordinary solid phase of most metals is usually (relatively) close to its limits due to atomic structure already. Most of these alternatives are only stable at high pressures or unusual temperatures or both, and they may very well be less dense than the common form.
Depends how you measure it. Any X kg/lbs of matter here on earth is still that same X kg/lbs everywhere in the universe. Assuming the scale being used to weight is correctly calibrated to whatever planet it's in, it would still show up as the same amount of kg/lbs.
This is why simple balances are such a brilliant idea despite their simplicity. You don't need to calibrate to the local conditions, if I have a 250g mass on one side, and I put something on the other side and it balances, that's 250 grams, done. Only the (often provided with the balance) prototype masses need to be calibrated and that can be done by experts far from your local environment.
Until as recently as 2019 this approach - using a prototype - was the only extant mass definition, the prototype kilogram lived at a specialised laboratory and its clones were used around the world to define mass (yes including the pound if you're an American).
[ Today instead the Planck constant is defined to be exactly 6.62607015×10^−34 kg x m^2 per second and it's possible to build devices such as a Kibble balance to estimate what the kilogram is from knowing this definition, the better your Kibble balance the better the estimate ]
Depends upon what you set out to measure. lbs is specifically a unit of force. kg is specifically a unit of mass. It is a category error to equate these as measures, although (in many places) an everyday convention to do so on Earth.
IIRC the English unit for mass is the slug. If the tecnical limit is 70lbs or so, that is must technically be read as lbs force -- aka force of gravity which varies with location.
Incorrect. The avoirdupois pound (lb) is historically a unit reflecting the long conflation of mass and force, but the modern unit of that name is expressly a mass unit that is a derived unit of the kilogram. The corresponding unit for force is the pound-force, (lbf).
If I remember right, given that free neutrons aren’t stable and have a very short half life, it would be explosively unwise even if it was physically possible.
Yes, a free neutron decays to a proton, an electron and an electron neutrino with a half life of 879 seconds. This decay releases 0.8MeV of energy (mostly in the form of kinetic energy of the electron).
My back of the envelope calculation shows that 1 gram of neutronium (approximately a mole) will release 43MW of energy continuously. Multiply that by 10^14 (the number of grams of neutronium per teaspoon) and the resultant energy release would be unimaginably huge. 'Explosively' does not even begin to describe it.
Years ago, you could get discounted flights to Europe where you couldn't check in any luggage. Why? That allowance was taken up by documents for various clients. This was usually quicker than any courier services at the time.
I've had friends who worked in the oil and gas industry. One story I was told was where parts were desperately needed to repair a drill bit on a gas platform. The best option? Someone would fly halfway around the world, drive to a particular factory, wait for the parts and then fly back. This was cheaper and faster than any courier service, even if you spent $10,000+ on the ticket.
This was exacerbated because a person with 200lb of machine parts could walk through customs where a shipment might get stuck in customs for weeks. And each day of non-operation cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.