Hacker News: MagnumOpus

New comment by MagnumOpus in "How to defer US taxes"

MagnumOpus — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 22:12:32 +0000

Why should your children not pay tax on the valuables that they acquired without any work, when everyone else has to earn money and both pay income tax and then pay sales tax to acquire the same jewellery?

(And you don’t enter into the equation. You are dead by the time the taxation happens.)

New comment by MagnumOpus in "How the Turner twins are mythbusting modern technical apparel"

MagnumOpus — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 21:52:16 +0000

Yes. They were talking about 8,000 metres of altitude. (Talking about Mallory should have been a clue too.)

New comment by MagnumOpus in "How London cracked mobile phone coverage on the Underground"

MagnumOpus — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 11:07:29 +0000

One might even suspect that the particularly nice parts of London are full of NIMBYs who successfully petition against the eyesore of mobile masts being put up…

(Circumstantial evidence is that a particularly extra nice part of central London has no tube station, ostensibly to keep the riff-raff out, and is the only area with a proposed station on Crossrail 2 that voted against having a new station!)

New comment by MagnumOpus in "The longest Greek word"

MagnumOpus — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 07:37:40 +0000

Hckrnews.com is a far better frontent. Implemented the long line fix, and also preserves topics that were upvoted to the top and subsequently flagged to death by bot farms or the owners.

New comment by MagnumOpus in "HSBC blocks its app due to F-Droid-installed Bitwarden"

MagnumOpus — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 12:43:08 +0000

Many European countries still have their own (single-country) versions of debit cards - EC card/giropay in Germany for instance - and they are often accepted more widely than credit cards.

But international travel becomes painful. (Hence EC cards are co-badged as a fall-back with Visa Debit or Maestro, impossible if you are sanctioned.)

New comment by MagnumOpus in "USD share as global reserve currency drops to lowest since 1994"

MagnumOpus — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 18:38:56 +0000

No, this is an artifact of Russian reserves getting frozen in 2022 and autocracies the world round getting more careful about having all their eggs in that basket.

The PRC’s SAFE is selling dollars and buying gold in a very covert but absolutely massive fashion, and most likely, so are many other countries in a smaller way.

New comment by MagnumOpus in "The e-scooter isn't new – London was zooming around on Autopeds a century ago"

MagnumOpus — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 19:21:45 +0000

Nitpick: it is one life per year for the billion invested. Which after the typical metro infrastructure lifespan of a century is actually viable because the cost for a working-age US life in medical and other contexts is probably around the $10mn ballpark.

(Assuming financing happens cheaply by the federal state rather than via PPP grift; and assuming that $50bn is the number, which in NYC is an underestimate by a factor of at least five…)

New comment by MagnumOpus in "My car charger can boil water really fast [video]"

MagnumOpus — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 17:27:37 +0000

No need to rewire anything - just get a universal plug adapter for NEMA 6-15P (or whatever your kitchen outlet is going to be) from Amazon, plug it onto the UK plug of your kettle, and Bob’s your uncle. (The building inspector doesn’t need to even see your kettle and plug.)

New comment by MagnumOpus in "Google Revisits JPEG XL in Chromium After Earlier Removal"

MagnumOpus — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 13:22:14 +0000

It has both lossy and lossless modes.

New comment by MagnumOpus in "OpenAI Moves to Complete Potentially the Largest Theft in Human History"

MagnumOpus — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 17:14:39 +0000

Bloomberg reported last year that Sam is angling for the board to give him 7% of the company, and the board was seriously discussing it. The optics weren’t right at the time, but you can rely on something being in planning.

Sam doesn’t do anything for free, even though he is already a billionaire 2-3 times over.

New comment by MagnumOpus in "YouTube Just Ate TV. It's Only Getting Started"

MagnumOpus — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 17:19:15 +0000

Capitalism is supposed to have perfectly competitive goods to be efficient. IP protection - especially the obscene century-long protection of copyrights - renders capitalist competition into monopolistic competition, which no longer maximises consumer surpluses. Hence mandatory licencing can increase benefits for society - and in the past such models worked - e.g. for radio. Today, the only reason content conglomerates get away with it is that they can pay of sufficiently many legislators.

New comment by MagnumOpus in "US hits $38T in debt. Fastest accumulation of $1T outside pandemic"

MagnumOpus — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 17:50:42 +0000

COVID was a black swan, the completely irresponsible and unnecessary redistribution from taxpayers to company owners that was the PPP was a choice. (One that most other governments worldwide didn’t make.)

New comment by MagnumOpus in "Sodium-ion batteries have started to appear in cars and home storage"

MagnumOpus — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 13:16:38 +0000

That is very very variable. In the last five years, raw lithium carbonate world market prices have been swinging from $10/kg to >$70/kg and back. So right now LiFePo is getting cheaper, but if lithium explodes in price again, battery prices will rise too.

New comment by MagnumOpus in "M5 MacBook Pro"

MagnumOpus — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 15:55:34 +0000

Macbooks shipped to Europe don't ever touch US ground (and I'd wager 99.9% of their parts don't either). So US tarriffs should be irrelevant - and the EU doesn't have big China tarriffs outside of EV and solar panel anti-dumping retaliation.

New comment by MagnumOpus in "The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain"

MagnumOpus — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 13:20:32 +0000

The utility will bill the 40p/kWh to its industrial customers (and residential customers on “agile” smart meter tarriffs), and the customers can decide whether they need the power even at 40p, or whether they shut down their bitcoin mine/aluminium smelter/EV charger/floodlights for those two hours.

In the longer term, price spikes like this incentivise the building of batteries - which might be marginably profitable most of the time but profit big time (and help big time) in periods of price spikes.

New comment by MagnumOpus in "The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain"

MagnumOpus — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 13:16:29 +0000

“Marginal pricing” is just how a market economy works.

If there weren’t marginal pricing, nobody in the private industry would build more wind farms or submarine power lines or battery capacity - which are lucrative because they produce peak-time power cheaper than imported gas — and these are the things that will drive power prices down eventually.

New comment by MagnumOpus in "Disk Prices"

MagnumOpus — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 10:46:46 +0000

That’s not the EU’s fault, is it? At best the import taxes (if any) are on the EU. VAT is added by your country, and if something is more expensive after everything than importing it yourself, that’s on a lack of competition in your marketplace…

New comment by MagnumOpus in "Don’t Look Up: Sensitive internal links in the clear on GEO satellites [pdf]"

MagnumOpus — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 14:11:19 +0000

At least since the mid-1990s Echelon revelations in the EU parliament anybody who cares knows that Bad Aibling (and similar stations all across Europe like Bude/Morwenstow in the UK) had been operated by the NSA in collaboration with US Army intelligence (if the official name of “18th United States Army Security Agency Field Station” didn’t clue you in.

Officially it has been transferred to the BND; experience suggests all data from there still goes straight back to Fort Meade… (And in exchange the BND gets some morsels back on people _they_ are not allowed to spy on publicly.)

New comment by MagnumOpus in "Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels"

MagnumOpus — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 10:11:29 +0000

Incorrect. The decision was made by the SPD (leftist)+ Green coalition government in 2000, and was a condition by the Greens to enter the coalition (and then was adopted by an SPD chancellor who later took a job with Gazprom).

When the conservatives got back into power a decade later, they started to roll back the nuclear exit. But during the panic after the Japan tsunami this policy became unpopular so the conservatives reversed course and stuck with the disastrous Green policy.

But make no mistake, if the Greens did not make it into government, the Atomausstieg would never have happened.

Subjects to read for details:

* “Atomkonsens” 2000 and “Novellierung des Atomgesetzes” 2002, Kabinett Schröder,

* “Laufzeitverlängerung deutscher Kernkraftwerke”, 2010, Kabinett Merkel II

* “13. Gesetz zur Änderung des Atomgesetzes“ 2011 post-Fukushima, taking back the 2010 extensions

New comment by MagnumOpus in "Europe Can No Longer Ignore That It's Under Russian Attack"

MagnumOpus — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 12:52:36 +0000

> the Russian state very quickly tucked its tail in after that

Russia retaliated by disallowing tourism to Turkey in the summer of 2016, causing about $5 billion of damage to the Turkish economy.

https://carnegieendowment.org/static/media/images/202105-Pri...