{"id":403,"date":"2012-01-18T10:35:36","date_gmt":"2012-01-18T14:35:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/?p=403"},"modified":"2012-01-18T11:51:52","modified_gmt":"2012-01-18T15:51:52","slug":"403","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/2012\/01\/18\/403\/","title":{"rendered":"Wednesday, 18 January 2012"},"content":{"rendered":"

09:35 –<\/span> I was going to black out this site today in sympathy with the SOPA\/PIPA protests, but I couldn’t figure out how to turn the whole page black. If SOPA\/PIPA does pass, I’ll have to make some changes around here, starting with disabling comments.
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I’m still cranking away on my final pre-editing pass of the lab sessions. There are quite a few missing images, which I’m just putting in placeholders for for now. I created a to-be-shot images list, and I’ll go through and shoot those in a batch.
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USPS introduces a new regional-rate box today, to join the current RR Boxes A and B. The new RR C box is considerably larger\u201412x12x15\u201d (30.5×30.5x38cm)\u2014and might actually have been useful had the USPS not priced it ridiculously high.
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The smallest RR box, A, requires postage at the Priority Mail 2-pound level, and can be used for up to 15 pounds. The mid-size RR box, B, which is what I use for kits, requires postage at the Priority Mail 4-pound level, which means it costs me $5.81 in postage for relatively nearby destinations up to $14.62 for zone 8 (the west coast, Hawaii, and Alaska). It can be used for up to 20 pounds. The new RR Box C is priced at the Priority Mail 17-pound level, which means it would cost almost $15 to send to nearby destinations and about $45 to send to zone 8. It can be used for up to 25 pounds. That’s not a very good deal, considering that the large flat-rate PM box (12x12x5.5\u201d, up to 70 pounds) costs only about $15 to send to any address in the US, including zone 8.
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There’s a lot of discussion about this new box on the forums frequented by eBay sellers and other vendors. Many people thought the 17-pound rate was a typo, and that USPS really meant to say the 7-pound rate. That might have been reasonable, but as it turns out they really did mean the 17-pound rate. In effect, the USPS has made this new box useless other than for a very small percentage of shipments: those that weigh between 18 and 25 pounds, are too large to fit a large flat-rate box, and are going to distant addresses. Otherwise, it’s cheaper to use UPS or FedEx. Sometimes far cheaper.
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If USPS had been smart, they’d have made the RR box C a 12x12x10\u201d box with a 25-pound limit and priced it at the PM 7-pound rate. That box would have been very useful and very widely used. But a RR box C that costs from $14+ to $45 is simply a non-starter.
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\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

09:35 – I was going to black out this site today in sympathy with the SOPA\/PIPA protests, but I couldn’t figure out how to turn the whole page black. If SOPA\/PIPA does pass, I’ll have to make some changes around here, starting with disabling comments.\n<\/p>\n

I’m still cranking away on my final pre-editing pass of the lab sessions. There are quite a few missing images, which I’m just putting in placeholders for for now.<\/p>\n

 » Read more about: Wednesday, 18 January 2012  »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-403","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-kits","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=403"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}