nomilk3 days ago
Great concept if applied to other products. For example it's quite common to travel to countries with low labour costs to save on dental work.
Earlier this year I did “upload tourism”, travelling from Australia (where uploads are painfully slow) to Thailand where they were 50x faster. Got my 2Tb done in 3 days where it would have taken half a year back home. Easily justified the cost of the plane ticket and accommodation.
In fact, it saved money: telstra 7 x 300gb plans ≈ $2100 Vs flight ($350) + accommodation ($500) + incidentals = ~$1000.
~$1k saving and free holiday
mschuster913 days ago
> Earlier this year I did “upload tourism”, travelling from Australia (where uploads are painfully slow) to Thailand where they were 50x faster. Got my 2Tb done in 3 days where it would have taken half a year back home. Easily justified the cost of the plane ticket and accommodation.
So basically, never underestimate the bandwidth of an airplane filled with SSDs?
Seriously though, I get that uploads to The Cloud can be slow from Australia, but do you guys not have any sort of unlimited data plans?!
Piskvorrr3 days ago
Data limit doesn't seem to be the main bottleneck: "Got my 2Tb done in 3 days where it would have taken half a year back home." (emphasis mine)
bigiain3 days ago
Back in he day <wavey lines> I did 3 annual round the world trips from Sydney with 6 80GB hard drives in my carryon luggage - to replace the Raid1 arrays in our colo-ed web servers in London, Dallas, and Palo Alto. We only had 56kbps of bandwidth back then - it would have taken a couple of weeks of saturating out internet connection to upload one of those 80GB drives to the prod servers.
onnimonni3 days ago
Using a Starlink dish would propably have been cheaper?
Upload speeds are not as good as download but 2 terabytes should be uploaded in 2 weeks and 4 days with Starlink 10Mbps.
If you want to be very cheap you could do this in your 30 day trial period and return the dish afterwards but I'm assuming you have similiar upload needs often so keeping the dish is propably better.
Two42 days ago
Test comment please ignore
dewey3 days ago
Finding someone at a university, office or maybe library seems like an easier and more environmentally friendly option.
nomilk3 days ago
The problem with this is guarding the laptop during the days/weeks (e.g. if you leave your laptop in a university library, even just momentarily for a bathroom break, it could go walking). There’s also the cost/hassle of enrolment (or sharing an existing student’s login).
dewey3 days ago
I was more thinking of asking a friend to upload it on some gigabit connection. Not days then.
theturtle323 days ago
Why TF is data upload so slow in a top tier country like Australia?!?
lysp2 days ago
Former government sabotaged it by making national build-out with a random mix of technologies focusing on copper instead of fibre.
red-iron-pine2 days ago
newish country, spread out population, undersea cables, plus Telstra + Murdoch getting the government to gut plans to improve things (e.g. the NBN).
hnthr_w_y3 days ago
A greater saving trick I've found out recently, with even greater gains than saving on cigs is not buying cigs at all.
kazinator3 days ago
Indeed. If you don't plan on smoking them, you have to sell the cigs to make this work. Flight costs $N, so you buy enough cheap cigs here and sell higher there so that you make $N back, plus commission for your effort.
hgomersall3 days ago
Presumably then you also have to factor in the cost of fines weighted by the chance of getting caught?
rendx3 days ago
The site is about mere 10 packs. Some jurisdictions allow the personal tax free import of even more than that. Within the European Union, for example, it is 800 cigarettes = 40 packs (200 cigarettes = 10 packs from outside EU). Assuming the "old/classic" size of packs with 20 cigs each.
soneil3 days ago
It's worth pointing out that the personal allowance is usually for personal use, intent to sell does not come under personal allowance.
Usually this is near-impossible to enforce, but attempts to organise/aggregate these (which I initially thought this site was going to attempt) do raise your odds.
kazinator3 days ago
That will likely quickly make it impractical. How much you can make per unit is pegged by the price differential, where the only way to make more is via volume. The probability of getting caught scales super-linearly with volume, unfortunately, and the consequences also.
Furthermore, the medium in question (passenger flight) places practical limits on volume, and raises likelihoods for getting caught. E.g. a large suitcase full of cigarettes is much riskier through an airport, than the same amount of cigarettes tucked away among a lot of other stuff in the back of a 1 ton truck going over the border.
mosselman3 days ago
Wow, infinite free travel.
jcmp3 days ago
Love it, I actually saw that sometimes its cheaper to fly from Europe return to NYC take the bus to Delaware and buy a new Iphone or MacBook than buying it in europe. Could be a nice extension
qingcharles2 days ago
We used to do this a lot in the late 80s when it was 99 quid return flights from London<->NYC. Levi's jeans were at designer prices. Swiss watches, ship the boxes separately. I bought my first HDD at an Egghead in Boston in, I think '88, which was vastly cheaper than UK prices due to the dollar exchange.
dewey3 days ago
Turns out that avoiding taxes is saving you money!
PreInternet013 days ago
Sure, if you find smoking doesn't reduce your lifespan enough already, subjecting yourself to the additional indignity of flying Ryanair (proud Boeing 737 MAX customer!) should definitely do the trick.
hgomersall3 days ago
Pfft, I'm definitely going to take up smoking just so I can get these amazing free flights! Honestly, I can't believe Ryanair don't use this in their marketing material.
Mashimo3 days ago
> https://www.smokescanner.com/ is currently categorized as Pornography
How does that dumb ass FortiGuard firewall come up with this? AI?
throwup2383 days ago
Smoking hot scanners are one of the leading causes of time theft and reduced productivity!
jordemort3 days ago
Assuming you can find someone who wants to buy a one-off carton of foreign smokes for full price from some stranger
_tk_3 days ago
When I was younger - and the limit for transporting 10 packs of cigarettes were higher - it was considered impolite to not tell your friends who smoked, when you were making a trip across the border. Even families of non-smokers regularly imported great amounts of cigarettes for their friends and relatives who smoked.
wink3 days ago
Not "impolite", but when we had a company weekend in the bordering Czech republic there were definitely people importing 10x10 packs by asking non-smokers to hold some for the border crossing.
bauruine3 days ago
I assume it's for people who smoke.
Hamuko3 days ago
Would reselling duty-free fags even be legal? Because it sure doesn't feel legal.
Freak_NL3 days ago
It's illegal in a number of countries. In the Netherlands you may only import fags for personal use; reselling is explicitly prohibited. The amount of fags imported is limited too — tools like this one pretty much have to assume the user will illegally import their cigarettes. For the UK any amount over 200 cigarettes means VAT will have to be paid.
dnh443 days ago
The 200 cigarette limit is quite new. I believe that until recently there was no limit as long as it was for personal use.
Anyway I’ve never noticed anyone declaring their cigarettes at customs so I think it just one of those rules that never gets enforced.
soneil3 days ago
The limit for duty-free has existed for a long time (in 2002 I bought a a 5x10x20 pack on my way out of the country, and was warned I wouldn't be able to bring it back. This is quite a distinct memory as I remember quite proudly telling them I wasn't coming back!)
I believe what's been lost is the "booze cruise" intra-EU option (where tax has been paid elsewhere in the EU) where the limit is "for personal use", an incredibly vague limit where the onus is on you to convince customs that you have no intent to sell.
metadat3 days ago
I saw it enforced on the show Border Patrol.
jasebell3 days ago
Could the code be open sourced? I care about whiskey much more.
teo_zero3 days ago
Brilliant!
I wonder if there are other goods with similarly high gaps in price.
soneil3 days ago
Within the EU at least, "sin taxes" work well for this because carrying them across the border for personal consumption is the only legal workaround. For most other things, if they're notably cheaper in another EU country, I can just order it from that EU country.
For example, I'm in Ireland (relatively HCOL), and I regularly visit Slovakia (relatively LCOL). When I used to smoke, it was 3.30/pack in Slovakia and 12.50/pack in Ireland. I could legally bring 40 packs back with me, so €368 to be saved - back then that would not only cover flights, but also a couple of nights in a half-decent hotel. (sunken-cost assumed, obviously).
But to compare, for example, an m3pro macbook pro, the difference is €100 - at which point you're really only juggling the difference between 23% and 20% VAT rates.
Outside of europe the gloves come off. Brazil, for example, has famously high import duties - so smuggling the same macbook to Brazil would have a much greater pay-off.
fbdab1033 days ago
Outside of luxury goods, I suspect the best arbitrage is found in items with high taxes. For which governments are usually not too keen on allowing untaxed imports.
postepowanieadm2 days ago
If you enjoy smuggling stories: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jin_Ling
luke-stanley3 days ago
Anyone else notice it continually making lots of requests per second to ryanair.com, even when the page is idle? It uses a lot of bandwidth. I doubt this is GDPR compliant! I can imagine the ICO or HMRC taking an interest! Not the kind of interest anyone wants though! Flight price arbitrage is a fascinating mash-up idea, but this particular angle has dodgy ethics and legality though. Seems like talented work with some bugs, but why mess with the tax man?
downbadop2 days ago
fixed ;)
downbadop2 days ago
USA! Fuck GDPR!
luke-stanley2 days ago
I'm in the UK, it shows UK flights with prices in pounds, GDPR does apply, even if it's not hosted in the UK.
antihero3 days ago
This is awesome, can it be expanded to include local prices as well? Also rolling tobacco
20after43 days ago
I think this activity would be completely Illegal in the USA. Crossing state lines with more than a couple of packs of smokes can land you in prison for a long time.
mypalmike3 days ago
Same in the UK if you don't declare and pay taxes. Source: Cigarette smugglers were caught on every episode of "Customs UK".
postepowanieadm3 days ago
UK Customs had full page adverts in Polish newspapers warning potential cigarette smugglers. It was hilarious.
newzisforsukas3 days ago
> Crossing state lines with more than a couple of packs of smokes can land you in prison for a long time.
Is this actually true? I don't see any sources vouching for this claim from a quick search.
qingcharles2 days ago
I spent some time working on the defense of a heroin dealer who was moving huge quantities of drugs, but clearly the DEA didn't see him as a big enough target at the time. Once he mentioned to an undercover that he would be interested in moving cigarettes the ATF went nuclear trying to take him down. I wouldn't want to get on the bad side of the ATF, they have an alarming amount of resources apparently, when they are poked.
erickj3 days ago
Cigarette smuggling has a few aspects and each state while give it different priority based on its own economic incentives. But for a glimpse at the federal level, the ATF says [1] their justification is interested in enforcement (among other things) of:
"Illegal possession and/or transportation and distribution of more than 10,000 unstamped (non-state tax-paid) cigarettes."
This is mostly a tax revenue issue. Some other interesting info at the state level can be found at https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/cigarette-taxes-cig...
tldr; it will almost certainly take more than transporting "a few packs" for personal consumption to get in trouble in the "land of the free" at the federal level, however each state will he more or less aggressive depending on its own priorities
1. https://www.atf.gov/resource-center/fact-sheet/fact-sheet-to...
wink3 days ago
I think there's a huge gap between "if you allow 10 packs and the person brings 20" and actual smuggling. The former is probably technically that, but I doubt many people were caught for those numbers, or it's their own fault for trying to save 10 bucks.
fbdab1033 days ago
My quick skim of the site did not show a time duration. Can I move 9,999 cigarettes per day? Or is it a lifetime kind of allowance?
Not a smoker, but vaping seems like it would avoid so much hassle. Buy a barrel of the stuff and be set for the rest of your life.
mschuster913 days ago
> Not a smoker, but vaping seems like it would avoid so much hassle. Buy a barrel of the stuff and be set for the rest of your life.
That's why Germany introduced an insane tax on liquids [1]... but not just on nicotine shots that you add to base liquid, or aroma shots, but on the base liquid itself.
So while you can definitely go ahead and buy PG/VG wholesale without the tax, the moment you add nic shots or fill it into your vape, you commit the crime of tax evasion. Utterly ridiculous and shows just how much pull Big Tobacco still has on politics.
Side note: there's quite the scare of Big Tobacco going around of vape liquid being toxic and whatnot... it's bullshit. The base liquid and aromas have all been known and used for decades in ordinary disco foggers and hazers. The only dangers around vaping are nicotine itself and shoddily manufactured liquids like the infamous deadly cannabis extracts from a few years ago that contained leftover oil contaminations.
blahyawnblah3 days ago
I believe stuff like that is "at a time"
readthenotes13 days ago
https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/cigarett...
I suppose if you bring a moving band's worth of cigarettes across the state line, you're going to have to do some mighty fast talking to convince people that you weren't planning on reselling them
bauruine3 days ago
The site is about 10 packs.
20after43 days ago
I don’t have direct references but I know someone who was prosecuted for bootlegging. I live in the state with the lowest cigarette tax (Missouri). People will routinely cross the state line from Arkansas to buy both cigarettes (lower tax) and alcohol (most of northern Arkansas counties are dry.)
swedishPerson13 days ago
Great work! I love it LOL