Show HN: SmokeScanner – Using cigarette price arbitrage to find free flights
smokescanner.com
smokescanner.com
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
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.
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?!
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.
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.
How does that dumb ass FortiGuard firewall come up with this? AI?
Anyway I’ve never noticed anyone declaring their cigarettes at customs so I think it just one of those rules that never gets enforced.
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.
I wonder if there are other goods with similarly high gaps in price.
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.
Is this actually true? I don't see any sources vouching for this claim from a quick search.
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
"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...
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.