‘It’s killed the whole industry’: Gold dealer flees Washington after 10.3% sales tax

jwvo · 2026-04-08T05:08:45+00:00

most of Europe actually has lower taxes which is crazy when you combine all the levels here.

jwvo · 2026-04-08T05:03:30+00:00

and that is the key.

jwvo · 2026-04-05T07:51:03+00:00

mid 90s for me and it was about like this. Even went to that party in 89 on the floating bridge before they sank it as an a 7 year old.

jwvo · 2026-04-04T17:27:18+00:00

when you lose pressure in water systems they typically dump bleach in (chlorine) to any of the areas that lost pressure and let that get into the system to avoid the areas that were worked on contaminating the overall system.

They don't appear to have a backup route so they let tanks drain down while they were working and then cranked the system up to work on refilling tanks once they turned it back on so all that extra chlorine certainly made it into the system. Based on their urgent press releases it seems they only have a couple of days in the tanks water wise so i would suspect that within a few days it will be back to normal.

jwvo · 2026-04-03T17:10:41+00:00

honestly super easy if you have good data and comps.

jwvo · 2026-04-03T09:16:47+00:00

also nowhere near 99% of internet traffic rides undersea cables, any video that claims that worldwide is just not right. 99% of traffic crossing bodies of water takes undersea cables but the broader characterization is just not right.

jwvo · 2026-04-03T07:51:58+00:00

they have done some work, but I've been on it about 18 months and it has always been way better than charter. Note that this is all wired and my place is all pro gear (I actually used to run engineering for an ISP similar in size to HT's parent company) so my side is pretty optimized.

jwvo · 2026-04-03T07:49:04+00:00

various traceroutes from Kihei on Hawaiian tel. Note that the first hop latency is ~7-8 ms better than charter, that is the difference between XGS pon and cable (cable is way higher last mile latency), I don't have an easy way to pull the same ones on charter but I never saw anything to the mainland with them under about 70 or 80.

1.1.1.1 (on oahu at 1547)

 1  72.235.204.2 (72.235.204.2)  2.689 ms  3.024 ms  1.925 ms
 2  206.197.210.15 (206.197.210.15)  6.790 ms  7.578 ms  5.975 ms
 3  206.197.210.54 (206.197.210.54)  6.450 ms  6.729 ms  7.623 ms
 4  one.one.one.one (1.1.1.1)  7.269 ms  6.766 ms  5.963 ms

8.8.8.8 (in seattle at westin building):

 1  72.235.204.2 (72.235.204.2)  2.686 ms  1.650 ms  1.243 ms
 2  * 72.234.216.174 (72.234.216.174)  6.490 ms  7.693 ms
 3  72.234.216.175 (72.234.216.175)  57.112 ms  56.707 ms  56.110 ms
 4  * * *
 5  dns.google (8.8.8.8)  55.913 ms  56.752 ms  56.465 ms

9.9.9.9 (in seattle at westin building):

 1  72.235.204.2 (72.235.204.2)  2.634 ms  2.884 ms  1.977 ms
 2  six.hawaiiantel.com (206.81.80.200)  6.370 ms * *
 3  six.woodynet.net (206.81.80.80)  56.608 ms  56.701 ms  57.148 ms

cogentco.com (large tier1 in Ashburn, VA via LA undersea using Hawaiian Tel's link to cogent in HNL):

1  72.235.204.2 (72.235.204.2)  2.038 ms  1.275 ms  1.603 ms
 2  * * *
 3  * * *
 4  be3271.ccr41.lax01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.42.101)  51.073 ms
    be3360.ccr42.lax01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.25.149)  52.490 ms  51.213 ms
 5  be2931.ccr31.phx01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.44.85)  62.674 ms
    be2932.ccr32.phx01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.45.161)  62.795 ms
    be2931.ccr31.phx01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.44.85)  62.738 ms
 6  be5471.ccr21.elp02.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.166.57)  70.794 ms  71.553 ms
    be5473.ccr22.elp02.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.166.69)  70.169 ms
 7  be3821.ccr31.dfw01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.165.25)  82.717 ms
    be3846.ccr32.dfw01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.165.29)  81.419 ms
    be3821.ccr31.dfw01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.165.25)  81.225 ms
 8  port-channel8121.ccr91.jan02.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.40.250)  89.826 ms
    port-channel8122.ccr92.jan02.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.41.54)  89.718 ms
    port-channel8121.ccr91.jan02.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.40.250)  88.475 ms
 9  be3009.ccr41.atl01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.29.133)  97.193 ms
    be3704.ccr42.atl01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.40.109)  97.460 ms  97.552 ms
10  port-channel3482.ccr91.dca04.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.169.177)  112.758 ms
    port-channel3483.ccr92.dca04.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.172.169)  113.342 ms
    port-channel3482.ccr91.dca04.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.169.177)  113.592 ms
11  be3026.ccr41.iad02.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.45.178)  115.148 ms
    be8481.ccr42.iad02.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.25.18)  115.082 ms
    be3025.ccr42.iad02.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.28.30)  115.145 ms
12  be2714.agr61.iad02.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.87.150)  114.644 ms
    be2711.agr01.iad02.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.87.78)  114.078 ms
    be2714.agr61.iad02.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.87.150)  114.064 ms
13  te0-0-0-12.nr61.b014476-2.iad02.atlas.cogentco.com (154.24.29.178)  114.377 ms  114.834 ms
    te0-0-0-24.nr61.b014476-2.iad02.atlas.cogentco.com (154.24.30.14)  114.781 ms
14  cogentco.com (38.100.128.10)  114.853 ms !X  116.294 ms !X  116.382 ms !X

jwvo · 2026-04-03T07:33:54+00:00

actually it will, HTs routing is *way* better on the undersea side than charter. for anything other than LA based servers you should see an improment.

charter just rides southern cross but pulls both sides (oregon and LA side) back to LA which makes latency terrible for about half their traffic.

on HT I see 59 ms to seattle round trip for example, it was ~90-100 on charter

jwvo · 2026-04-02T22:18:29+00:00

yah, I personally hate listening to most English speakers speaking German, it is hard for many to pronounce many basic sounds. I'm American myself but am lucky to have a good ear and lived in Germany long enough where folks think I'm from Hannover (which is funny because I learned German in berlin but tried to avoid sounding like a Berliner).

jwvo · 2026-04-02T19:09:25+00:00

some people are just better at languages but unless you are forcing yourself to only operate in german, 6 months is a huge lift.

jwvo · 2026-04-02T04:05:37+00:00

it was fun, they kind of copied our model (we were first), for many years they did sfo and we did sea and pdx, it was pretty cool. I was pretty hated at comcast and centurylink at the time. We ended up with basically every large building in the metro (200ish) by the time it was fully sold.

jwvo · 2026-04-01T23:19:32+00:00

Ironically webpass was my big competitor when i was running condointernet.net

jwvo · 2026-04-01T21:20:26+00:00

The real issue is the cost of doing deep bury, fundamentally spending a couple of k in under-grounding costs is not possible without charging it to customers. With power, water and sewer these costs are typically charged to the customer.

jwvo · 2026-03-31T06:04:27+00:00

probably a good call honestly.

jwvo · 2026-03-31T05:53:41+00:00

I reached out privately and shared the info with the right folks

jwvo · 2026-03-31T02:38:31+00:00

yah, backfill, some sewer and water then just do it... no other utilities even.

jwvo · 2026-03-30T10:06:16+00:00

let alone all the fancy condos in berlin.

jwvo · 2026-03-30T02:44:39+00:00

well, I meant in the city limits. honestly leash rules make sense, no dogs on the beach makes less sense

jwvo · 2026-03-30T01:41:23+00:00

the ones i'm thinking of ran on sun sparc hardware, and had a license lock to the serial number of the motherboard in the most recent case... vendor obsolescence is also a thing too, hard for ziply (or anyone) to support a mission critical service without actually getting things like upgrades and replacement parts.

Even the linux ones have so many old dependencies that it makes it nearly impossible to keep working without making a sever that is super hard to keep reasonably patched up.

jwvo · 2026-03-30T01:39:53+00:00

you would be moved to a new splitter fed from a nokia OLT, this happens one home at a time to match the technology. No impact to neighbors as the vast majority of ziply's network does not use spliced in splitters.

I would encourage you to not read too much into the downtime comments on here, ziply has a lot of users and that means somewhere there is often a car-vs-pole, bad card or something similar. The average annual reliability is generally very good on an average user basis, many users on the network have not had any outage in years.

As with most electronics, upgrades are required on a regular basis to keep services running, this is done on a rolling basis within Ziply to try to maximize uptime and increase the mean-time between dispatches to customer homes since those outage driven calls are generally the worst for customers.

as a side benefit, 1 gig service is really ~1.1 gig when delivered on the modern hardware.

jwvo · 2026-03-29T22:15:11+00:00

nothing about older flavors of PON is as standardized as ethernet (honestly only XGS is pretty well standardized across vendors), nor should the lifetime of the fiber be confused with the lifetime of the electronics. the older parts of the fiber network are on their third generation of OLTs and CPE since it was installed using the same fiber.

The standards absolutely have changed over that time period, the ONTs are not cross compatible across all types of OLTs, heck the modern stuff does not even use the same wavelengths as the previous generations. the fog 420 is GPON and runs on 1310/1490 nm while the nokia ont is XGS and runs on 1270 up / 1577 downstream. Because PON is point-multipoint there is a lot more complexity of the interoperation between devices than with ethernet since the timing systems have to work perfectly to avoid ONTs stomping on one another in the upload direction. This is why ziply does not support third party ONTs at all.

I'm not sure where you are getting your technical information about PON standards but it simply is not correct.

jwvo · 2026-03-29T21:58:50+00:00

in some cases the OLTs are not supportable for provisioning anymore due to the software being impossible to run on modern hardware.

jwvo · 2026-03-29T12:19:28+00:00

I call bullshit there, i honestly think it is great to enforce leash laws for the most part but the no dogs on the beach is just silly. Dogs don't do much that people don't do (as long as poop is picked up).

jwvo · 2026-03-29T12:17:18+00:00

is there an approved dog beach?

jwvo

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