431–440 of 508 posts
[1] http://www.upu.int/en/activities/terminal-dues-and-transit-c...
> This is great news for U.S. sellers, especially eBay sellers. Exactly the intended consequence. Why should US taxpayers subsidize shipping costs for products to come from China? It made no sense at all in today's economy unless the only thing you care about is paying less for your goods regardless of the consequences, which I don't think is a majority position of adults today.
"Zero tax dollars used. The Postal Service receives NO tax dollars for operating expenses and relies on the sale of postage, products and services to fund its operations."
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The fact it went on this long is the confusing part to me. Why didn't anybody come and say "Hey! This is weird. Let's stop this" before 2016?
Probably a combination of Politics, not-rocking-the-boat (generally), and a question like yours. With globalization increasing as it has in the past few decades a lot of the old shipping and carriage agreements become counter productive.
I'm sure most would expect "Globalization" as an idea that was generally in the air would have influenced those who took the actions here as well as the people allowed those actions to happen (which had to include quite a number of US officials).
The thing is that definitely involved a huge amount of money flowing in various directions and so I tend to believe a portion of people making this and allowing this to happen were considering the interests involved also. Especially, some people (small US operations) were screaming about this from the start, why it was hard for them to be heard is worth considering.
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is there any reasonable metric by which China is not a developing economy? Here's one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi... Here's another: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)
By those metrics, Bangladesh is more developed than Luxembourg. That's not what I'd call "reasonable." You have to normalize by population.
You can’t even compare cities to cities, since even an entity like Beijing is structured and defined so differently from how we define a city like NYC or Chicago.
This is why I stressed the ethnocentrism of it all. It’s a country that has developed tremendously but not at all in the same way that we have traditionally defined development in the western sense, and a lot of that comes from its size, its historic dynastic cultures and their political structures, and its population (count and local densities).
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A long time ago, USPS signed an insane sweetheart deal for free shipping from China, thinking that it would help US companies ship to China. But for many reasons (labor laws, environmental laws, go subsidies) outsidee of shipping costs, US-China post package shipping (not heavy industry whatever), is absolutely massively imbalanced. Chinese shippers massive privilege over US domestic shippers (shipping to ISo custome…
>despite shipping from China being obviously more expensive in real world resources. 3 weeks container shipping on a super container ship vs. even cheapest truck shipping ?
Container shipping is ridiculously cheap. See e.g. https://www.joc.com/maritime-news/capacity-cuts-keeping-asia.... Seems around 640 USD from Shanghai to North Europe as per above article/source. This for a 20 foot container. A lot of containers are 40 foot. US has loads of 45 foot containers.
If you'd go very far inland you wouldn't use a truck though; either a barge (inland vessel) or a train.
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That still doesn't explain why it's so cheap. Planet money did a pod cast on it. Some guy selling some product could buy a Chinese knockoff of his product (including shipping) for cheaper than it costs him to ship his product from his local post office to his house in the same town. (excluding the cost of the product) Think about that. The product plus shipping across the world is cheaper than shipping across town. h…
I think it's because they are buying space that otherwise would be empty, and maintain an elastic buffer of packages to fill those spaces as they become available - the outgoing mail containers on planes are likely booked and paid for months in advance so the people paying for them will happily take 20% of their normal rate to fill the rest of them at the last minute
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How does that deal with customs and inspections?
Originally they didn’t collect much data and used manifests on the individual packages, but for the past 5-6 years they’ve a computer system to enter package info, it’s basically a Google Sheet, and they show the manifest like any other shipping company. They’ll occasionally get a thorough stop but it’s up to chance as anything when at a trusted, high-volume border crossing. If you’ve a Nexus card and nothing to decl…
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Americans: Basically invent the modern internet including just about every major service and store. Non-Americans: AMERICANS ARE ONLY GOOD AT COLLECTING RENT, AMIRITE? Oof owie I forgot Silicon Valley was in Europe.
Whoa, this breaks a whole bunch of the site guidelines. Would you please review them and stick to the rules when posting here? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: we've had to ask you this a bunch of times before. If you continue ignoring these requests we will ban you. Also, I'm pretty sure jrockway is super American—not that it's relevant here, because you can't attack another user based on where…
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> Maybe If prices are raised as significantly as suggested, you think they'll only maybe make more revenue? If the sales completely stopped, or there was a mass exodus (eventually) to Amazon there may not be an increase, but this seems fairly unlikely in the short term. > If USPS is going by your house every day, how much do their costs go down if they have 1 less package to drop off? Dividing total costs by packages…
Americans should pray that USPS doesn’t only worry about the short term.
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The postal service has beenbadly run for decades, with excess deliveries - once a day. Make delivery once a week and chageextra for daily delivery. As e-mail sucked away letters the USPS staff all stayed employed with fat wages as well as fat pensions. Now those excess people and unfunded pensions have sucked USPS dry and allowed UPS and Fedex etc to craft specialized services to dan lots of $$ from the system. Deliv…
This aggressively selects against the elderly, the poor, and rural and even many parts of suburban living. I am not, as a rule, particularly fond of rural or suburban living due to free-rider problems, but as long as we choose to subsidize those lifestyles, a prompt and rigorous postal service is necessary. And as long as we have poor (and old) people kept out of the technological race, it is incumbent upon us to not…
Why is our society responsible for subsidizing rural dwellers' lifestyles anyway? Note that I'm not talking about people living in small towns. These people choose to live this way because our society subsidizes their lifestyle, and don't actually need to live there. People who do (e.g., farmers) don't need any subsidy as they make enough money to afford living where they do. I grew up in the rural South; these people aren't actually contributing to the economy in any way, they just like living in the middle of nowhere, and are enabled by cheap gas prices and the subsidized provision of many services.