![[1035] The Fourth Circle Of Hell](/comics/2018-11-22-1035-the-fourth-circle-of-hell.png "[1035] The Fourth Circle Of Hell")
I’m not bitter of anything, nooooooo…
Here is a repost of the most interesting parts of the latest Kickstarter update:
PDFs in full resolution
I have decided to offer all PDFs in their original full resolution!
The reason for this is that I was not satisfied with the display quality of the originally offered reduced resolution in a test. This would have been contrary to my goal to offer the best possible product. You can think of it as reaching a stretch goal that has never been announced.
Artist reactions
I have sent a PDF of the art book to the featured artists and here are some reactions:
- “I have downloaded the sample and that is an awesome art book!”
- “The book is looking great, Oliver!”
- “BRUUHHH THIS BOOK LOOKS FIIRRREEE!!! Love it! U done so well putting this whole project together. […] Thanks again for adding my fan art in this amazing project. I’ll be getting a copy of this book myself!”
- Boss: Richard, as you know we need to ship these twenty parcels to our customers in the Netherlands by the end of this week.
- Boss: One option is we could ship them with USPS’ Priority Mail Express International™ service.
- Richard: Certainly.
- Boss: Or you could drive to New York, fly to Amsterdam with the parcels in your luggage, rent a car at the airport, drive around in Holland to deliver the parcels, stay two days in a hotel, fly back to New York, and drive back home.
- Richard: You gotta be kidding me–
- Boss: … Which would be $476 cheaper according to my calculations.
- Richard: — Wait, what…?
- Scrooge McDuck: I’m in awe, but also slightly repulsed.
- Sign: United States Postal Service – A Flintheart Glomgold company
- Caption: Example calculationTrip costs:
Gasoline: $60 for 400 km in the United States at $0.80 per liter + 400 km in the Netherlands at $1.93 per liter.
Flight: $389 for a round trip from New York to Amsterdam on 4 December 2018 and back on 6 December 2018 with Norwegian Airlines.
Baggage fees: $114 for one carry-on bag at 10 kg and two suitcases at 20kg each.
Rented car: $179 for an Opel Astra station wagon from SIXT for two days.
Hotel: $179 for two days in the XO Hotels Couture, Amsterdam.
Miscellaneous: $132 for additional fees and costs.
$1059 in totalPostage costs:
$1,535 for 20 parcels at $76.75 each.
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FYI, I’m sure UPS would be more expensive. I bought goods from the USA. Neither the seller nor I expected UPS to toss in a ‘customs brokerage fee’ of 35 dollars. The goods were 45 dollars, the shipping 25 dollars, so DIE UPS!
@ Paeris Kiran:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viDL2W0HcJw
Well, it would be cheaper if the person doing the delivering worked for free….
RobK wrote:
He’s likely paid on a salary basis, which means there’d be no difference on the paycheck at the end of the month after doing this deed, than there would be on the paycheck at the end of the month if he didn’t do this deed.
Ivresse wrote:
Except for the part where the company is paying someone a week’s worth of salary to go roadtripping. Instead of doing their actual job.
I’m missing John D. Rockerduck here.
The obvious solution is to pack all the packages in one box and ship that, then have someone on the other side unpack it and post them locally.
You can get even cheaper. First of the 1.93 per liter is ridiculous. it usually is 1.50 or 1.60.
Second sixt is one of the most expensive car rentals. Go with green-wheels or something like that.
Fela wrote:
rjberg wrote:
I’ve announced ten days ago that I will print the books for international customers in Germany. Please don’t spread misinformation in the comment section.
Arjen wrote:
That’s Dollars, not Euro.
For books – media mail with usps.
It says it is slower but for packages within the USA it is still something reasonable.
Poll your kickstarter people on timeline vs price preferences?
Was Wondering who the reaper got to do his taxes for him.
Trying to work your calculations. You state “$60 for 400km at 80¢/litre”. Best I can reverse-engineer, 400km is about 250 miles. 1 US gallon is just over 3.75 liters. The average American sedan gets about 20 miles per gallon, so you’d use approx 12.5 gallons of gasoline. Current price today (11/22/18) in Orlando, FL, USA is right at $2.40, so the calculations would be
distance divided by rate of consumption = fuel units consume, or 250/20 = 12.5
fuel units consumed times cost per fuel unit, or 12.5 x $2.40 = $30, or half of what you computed.
— bottom line – You save $30 MORE by taking the trip. Is that enough to buy me a copy of the book?
US international shipping rates are broken, whether it’s the USPS or a courier. In many cases they seem to have a flat rate for international packages, whether it is travelling 100 km across the border to Canada, or several thousand km around the world to Australia.
Back when I was painting lead miniatures, it was cheaper to ship them air mail from England (to Canada) than surface mail from the US.
Last year it was cheaper to ship a book from Finland than from the US.
If you think that’s bad, try overnight with Fedex or UPS. I work the counter at a post office and a good 2/3 of the time someone storms off after hearing our prices, they return after having been to the other guys. Usually in a different person’s line.
@ William Bloomer:
You hit on the thing that is most unrealistic about this episode, even counting the lack opportunity cost being factored into the delivery-method calculation: almost no one in the USA would think about gasoline in liters, and certainly not for domestic travel (within the USA). Maybe some day, but no guarantee because the USA is weird.
Most likely, liters and kilometers would be used for the Netherlands side of the trip since there’s no unit conversion needed that way (just currency conversion), but miles and gallons would be used for the USA side of the trip. Again, because there’s no unit conversion needed that way. International flight could go either way with pounds or kilograms for luggage.
Now for my two cents on pinching pennies. xD
If one empty suitcase and the carry-on bag can be placed inside the other empty suitcase, that would only be one piece of luggage on the return trip.
I don’t think that calculation works out…
it assumes he would have been earning 0$ for the company during the same time..
it has to be assumed that employees are part of some profit generating activity..
unless that activity is worth less then that amount saves this will not work out.
@ Novil:
My apologies, should not have speculated.
Cpt. Obvious wrote:
As another person pointed out you have to be careful with that. Even if UPS shows you a
lower price for shipping when you send, if it crosses any borders they will hit it with a very
huge “brokerage charge” that the receiver has to pay.
An example from when I was a (more active) VHS fansub distro ordering blank tapes
from a custom tape spooling company:
http://fansubs.ca/ups.txt
Needless to say if I run into a mail order company that will only ship by UPS I try to see
if I can get the item from another company that does use the post office. I even changed
all my credit cards to have my billing address as my PO Box so nobody has a physical
address for me, that usually goof proofs things so nobody can “accidentally” use UPS
after saying they will ship postal. (It has happened, problem with companies where the
order takers and the people that pack the boxes are 1000s of miles from each other so
nobody knows what is happening in the other department.)
As for practical ways of reducing shipping cost it is usually best to just chose a
slower/cheaper class of mail service but still use the post office. In the old days
I used “surface mail” but I understand that has gone by the wayside due to the risk
of pirates hijacking the ship with the mail on it. There is usually some cheaper
variant under some name available. (Which every country’s Post Office has a
different name for.)
Forgetting Food Costs.
Uhm 20 book sized parcels to Amsterdam are $624.84 FedEx International Priority one with no account. Go to a shipping counter that has a discount. The company I work for it would be $282.53 and that is for all twenty parcels. Just saying.
What about Richard’s personal luggage. I doubt he’s wearing the same clothes for a week.
@ Knagie:
I think it’s probably different fees based on drivers wages, due to the different wage laws in each country.
You forgot to blame the Republican Party for passing a law in 2005 (just before the Democrats took over in 2006) to drag the USPS into debt and choke it out of existence so that Republicans could privatize it. The USPS has been laboring in debt ever since and jacking shipping costs when it can to keep afloat.
@ Paeris Kiran:
No, they absolutely are NOT.
The new Ducktales is excellent. You are wrong.
Though I wonder if the company would grant extra money to Richard considering he may need a babysitter to watch after Sandra while he’s away. As for paying him for the time he’s taking to do this, if he is paid on a salary, then I believe they can make him work overtime for no extra pay.
myth buster wrote:
a) he is a geek
b) the trip is less then 2 weeks
-> no change required
Not sure if someone proposed that solution already but he could also ship all packages together to a single address in the Netherlands and from there ship everything to the recipient’s address — that would be much cheaper 🙂
@ Vidad:
Ah ye during the flight, but I’d have to assume there’s quite a bit of driving that car they’re having him rent for 2 days 😉
Wow! This true? Interesting…
@ Titan:
‘current’… those designs continue to be the designs in the comics which exist and are still being made…
As an old reader of the Scrooge comics, this just warms my heart 😀
Oh, hey, if they’re 400 km from NYC, that narrows down their location a lot! That means they must live in the Northeast.
(Reminds me of the old saying: to an American, 100 years is a long time ago. To a European, 100 miles is a long journey.)
@ Yellow:
Sorry, I didn’t mean KIckstarted comics, but rather the whole shipping issue once the comics were created. I’m sure both he and Willis had to deal with overseas shipping. Granted it was probably FROM the US to the rest of the world, but there could be parallels that might be useful here.
Eledore wrote:
Probably doing some sight seeing while he’s here.
I would
AAAAAAAH!!!
What the hell?!
@ Formedras:
new dt ‘glomgold’ is only completely repulsive because they chose to write him like that…
in the comics he starts out as scrooge’s equal in every way, including morally, and then becomes a villain, if first a remorseful one who knows he’d disappoint his mother. if dt wanted to give glomgold depth it’s right there in the comics. instead they went with ‘lol he’s so dumb and fat and evil and wants to kill kids and be a creep to women because scrooge was a jerk to him when he was a kid which… led to him inventing a fake persona what’
(but i think a disney cartoon can’t make the villain truly sympathetic or scrooge truly nasty like he often is in the comics… instead it gotta be more clear good vs evil and scrooge will be there to give the kids lesson in how Capitalism is Good at the end of the episode)
@ BjarkeForch:
Programmers are generally on salary, not paid by the hour.
Well, it is exactly how brazilian mail service works.
For an example: sometimes is cheaper to fly and buy something abroad them order by internet.
depends on currency exchanges.
One of the things that doesn’t help our postal rates is a law called the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006, which has a provision in it that *requires* that the USPS pension fund be paid for a full *75 years in advance within 10 years* to the tune of about $5.5 *BILLION!* (It basically means that the USPS will *always* run at a deficit.) The basic purpose of the law was to make the USPS unable to compete with UPS and FedEx — which, by the way, are apparently *still* more expensive to ship with than the USPS.
https://thinkprogress.org/a-manufactured-crisis-congress-can-let-the-post-office-save-itself-without-mass-layoffs-or-service-4da965b2bc63/
@ Phil:
That is because postal service fees are regulated by an international committee, so imports from third world countries are subsidized. Currently, China is still listed and charged as a third world country under postal regulations.
Not to mention, you’d have to drive an Opel Astra
Wait, what, no compensation for the courier? Surely a week away from home is worth at least $500.00 😉
@ Titan:
better real original versions than current fakes 🙂
Economy is full of this counterintuitive stuff.
We could apply the same strip’s logic to this: going to New York from Brazil, staying there for two days, buying one iPad and coming back is cheaper than buying the same iPad from a brazilian store.
Even if you’re screened out and have to pay taxes at the airport customs.
The only problem is that, right now, we probably wouldn’t be able to get there. But this is another story.