Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

US Announces Withdraw From Postal Treaty

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 380 posts

Re: US Announces Withdraw From Postal Treaty

#321

Post by colechristensen »

anjc wrote: post #91
colechristensen wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This will benefit the likes of Amazon more than anyone else. A _huge_ chunk of Amazon is low effort Chinese clone / drop shipped crap or straight up forgery. I don't feel sorry for /r/entrepreneur denizens' loss. It will help the kind of small business with core competencies revolving around producing things and hurt the kind of small business with core competencies revolving around buying things on Alibaba and sell…

> People who actually wanted to do things well... You think intermediaries (e.g. dropshippers) can't add value to a supply chain? I don't know why you'd be so uncaring about /r/entrepreneurs when these are generally just people trying to get by as best they can. Having said that, this treaty withdrawal is still a good idea.

Absolutely intermediaries in supply chains can add value.

can being the operative word. Amazon, New Egg, WalMart et al. opening themselves up to a certain sort of very low effort intermediaries sucks quality out of their platforms and makes online shopping a minefield of avoiding knockoffs (sometimes with Amazon impossible, to the extent where there are certain things you just shouldn't buy) and fake or paid-for reviews.

Fixing artificially low shipping won't kill this sort of behavior but it will make it easier and more profitable to compete against.

Re: US Announces Withdraw From Postal Treaty

#322

Post by Spooky23 »

ikeboy wrote: post #311
Spooky23 wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? epacketEMS is a class of mail with tracking. How is it unrelated?

ePacket rates are negotiated directly, not set under the UPU treaty which the US is planning on exiting. The USPS makes a profit on epacket shipments [0][1], but loses money on UPU inbound shipments. The two aren't directly related. [0] https://www.uspsoig.gov/sites/default/files/document-library... , page 6 table 2 [1] https://www.uspsoig.gov/sites/default/files/document-library... , footnote 17

Awesome! I appreciate the info.

Re: US Announces Withdraw From Postal Treaty

#323

Post by krona »

CodeWriter23 wrote: post #307
krona wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm. It might be possible for one person to create wealth without another person losing it. Almost as though it wasn't a zero-sum game. Just a theory.

Please illustrate one example of how someone (not the Fed firing up the presses) can make money without someone else giving them money.

I didn't mention money.

You don't need to have read The Wealth of Nations to know that it's possible to increase the GDP of a country without decreasing the overall savings. Service driven economies are the best example of this.

Re: US Announces Withdraw From Postal Treaty

#324

Post by dang »

JPKab wrote: post #174
boomboomsubban wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those areas made far more than they invested, and China needed that huge investment because those three areas had already spent a century exploiting it for profit.

[flagged]

> But feel free to mouth the CCP line of China being a great victim

This crosses into nationalistic flamewar, which we ban accounts for, so please don't do it again. More generally, please don't post aggressive snark here, or any snark.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: US Announces Withdraw From Postal Treaty

#325

Post by dang »

datavirtue wrote: post #177
hef19898 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sheer volume China, and other Asian countries, are producing in the electric industry pales any impact this treaty could have. I seems to me that this treaty gained significance due to e-commerce. Thus it impacts consumer orders, not industrial ones. So the only parties to be impacted are online retailers (and every private sender). Not sure how that would impact the current global work-share in any measurable wa…

...and the manufacturers that make the things that people order. Your thinking is blocked at the first order level. Keep trying.

Personal attacks will get you banned here. We've warned you about this before, so please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't do it again.

Re: US Announces Withdraw From Postal Treaty

#326

Post by Spooky23 »

eiaoa wrote: post #253
Spooky23 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was also a policy decision driven by necessity. Nixon didn’t go to China for the lulz, China was going down a bad path dangerous to the west and western business was hitting a wall in many ways as well.

> It was also a policy decision driven by necessity. Nixon didn’t go to China for the lulz, China was going down a bad path dangerous to the west and western business was hitting a wall in many ways as well. My understanding is that Nixon went to China to create a another pressure point on the USSR. The Cultural Revolution was bad, but mostly for the Chinese.

Sure, but applying pressure on the Soviets is a bullet point that covers a lot of ground.

Think about the scale, scope and impact of the Apollo program, which ultimately was done for similar reasons.

Re: US Announces Withdraw From Postal Treaty

#327

Post by baybal2 »

specialist wrote: post #318
baybal2 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, every few years, there is a reevaluation. Last one was in 2016.

Huh. Very interesting. I have a notion that all decisions should auto expire and be explicitly renewed. Because it's so hard to cull outdated or revisit / repair suboptimal rules. Inspired by stuff like IP/TCP leases and cache TTL. But your example of the powers that be waving thru a bad rule refresh suggests my notion won't be sufficient. Thoughts?

Well, the process did exactly what it was required to do, to classify countries by income levels. China is not that rich, not even passing as a newly industrialised country.

Were it to pass as such, say, Kenya and many other African countries would've too.

Re: US Announces Withdraw From Postal Treaty

#329

Post by icebraining »

justinmchase wrote: post #288
icebraining wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary, it's debunking the rosy picture that developing economies can afford developed-economy levels of worker protection.

I don't think you successfully debunked it. You asserted without merit that working in sweatshops is better than subsistence farming, this is both false and a false dichotomy.

It wasn't me, but in any case, that was just an example; even if untrue, it doesn't invalidate the point that choice is the important part.

Re: US Announces Withdraw From Postal Treaty

#330

Post by nil_pointer »

gmiller123456 wrote: post #302
nil_pointer wrote: post #293

This video does a good job explaining the bad position we were in prior to leaving the treaty: https://youtu.be/DkckYLBCNfI

Even if we assume the information in that video is correct, just charging the extra $1 or so for delivery would not cause any significant number of jobs to the US. Firstly, the movement of jobs from the US to China pre-dates consumers wide availability of ordering packages straight from China. Secondly, factories in China shipping a lot of products aren't going to be sending their entire inventory in the small $2-$3…

To clarify, it has cost the Post Office nearly $60 billion dollars, which falls onto US tax payers.
Post reply on HN