Ask HN: Two General Relativity Questions

Background: I have a BS in physics. I understand special relativity fairly well. General relativity... I've been in the same building as people who understand it, but I have a faint inkling of the basics.

My questions:

1. "They" say that when you cross the event horizon of a large black hole, you don't notice anything special happening. I interpret that as saying that locally, spacetime looks like you're in a gravitational well (within, but not at the bottom). But that means that you should be able to send light from just inside the event horizon to just outside the event horizon, because viewing the local spacetime, there's nothing there that makes that harder than sending light the equivalent distance uphill in any other gravitational well.

What's wrong with the above reasoning?

2. We think that a quasar is a massive black hole with an accretion disk. We use the redshift of spectral lines to determine (via the Hubble Constant) how far away they are. But that accretion disk should be some distance down the gravitational well of the black hole, so the spectral emissions should also be gravitationally redshifted. I suspect (but do not know) that how much they are gravitationally redshifted depends on the mass of the black hole. How do they work out how much of the redshift comes from distance?