Live data from Hacker News

Suspension of inbound parcels from China and Hong Kong

about.usps.com

231–240 of 610 posts

Re: Suspension of inbound parcels from China and Hong Kong

#231
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting rid of de minimus exemptions made it impossible to assess duty on the volume of packages coming in. So they just won’t accept packages at all.

And forgo the revenue? Or, do the other carriers do a better job of meeting the imposts?

> And forgo the revenue?

There's no revenue. The postage fees you pay (if you pay them) on Chinese goods are paid to China Post (or whatever Chinese shipping company), and USPS doesn't see a cent of it. And still has to deal with a frankly insane amount of packages from China.

It's not just a US problem. PostNord (Scandinavia) imposed a mandatory fee on all packages arriving from China until they reached an agreement with China Post (?) to get some of the money people pay for shipping

Re: Suspension of inbound parcels from China and Hong Kong

#232
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I literally do not know how the electrical and firmware engineers will do their jobs now if we cannot receive packages from China As a software engineer who works closely with electrical and firmware engineers I know what you are saying is completely true. The question is how did we let it go this far? Why has there never been serious Western alternatives to JLCPCB, PCBWay, JLCCNC etc.? Has anyone asked themselves h…

> The question is how did we let it go this far? Because allowing countries to maximize their comparative advantages is great for economic growth. It doesn’t make sense for every nation on earth to have their own copy of every industrial sector. We don’t need all nations to manufacture their own jet engines, oil tankers, t-shirts, and Tylenol. Trade is good. The idea that China is a major security threat is basically…

> The idea that China is a major security threat is basically brand new.

And as far as I can see, that idea comes from China simply having grown its economy to a size comparable to that of the USA, nothing else?

But everyone during the Chinese miracle growth (from 1980's to today) expected China would've become the largest economy in the world by the 2020's. I guess people just didn't really take that seriously until it actually became true?

Re: Suspension of inbound parcels from China and Hong Kong

#233
post #120

This is going to utterly fuck so many R&D projects at my company. We actually do large-scale manufacturing of industrial valves in the USA. But a lot of our prototyping involves working with Chinese suppliers and getting small batches of samples / prototypes / revisions sent in packages on airplanes. I literally do not know how the electrical and firmware engineers will do their jobs now if we cannot receive packages…

>I literally do not know how the electrical and firmware engineers will do their jobs now if we cannot receive packages from China As a software engineer who works closely with electrical and firmware engineers I know what you are saying is completely true. The question is how did we let it go this far? Why has there never been serious Western alternatives to JLCPCB, PCBWay, JLCCNC etc.? Has anyone asked themselves h…

Prices in the West are maximized with the goal of reaching the peak point on the supply vs demand curve. Prices in the East, and China in particular, are minimized [presumably?] with the goal of maximizing longterm marketshare. One of the easiest examples of this is water [1] because it's a relatively low-labor, low-processing industry. Yet a bottle of water in the West tends to cost about 700% more than a bottle of water in Asia. As a result of this I can buy a bottle of water in the middle of the desert in the Mideast for a tiny fraction of what I'd pay in Michigan which, alone, has ~20% of the entire world's fresh water supply.

This is also why GDP is extremely misleading. PPP is supposed to account for these differences but often is often wrong by a rather wide margin for many critical industries.

[1] - https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/bottled-w...

Re: Suspension of inbound parcels from China and Hong Kong

#234
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually it's user flags. There's more than enough Trump supporters that between them and the folks who will flag anything political that it takes a HUGE number of upvotes to overcome that. Technically @dang does have mod control to remove things as well as prevent user flags from suppressing something. As far as I know the second power is used much more commonly, to prevent something controversial but clearly on-topi…

Here's a subthread from yesterday where I went into this in depth: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011 . Past explanations: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... . If anyone has a question that isn't answered at those links, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.

another question I had was what are your thoughts on spinning off a politics.news.ycombinator.com or some other official link from here, and letting the people that want to do politics have a space separate from the main site?

Re: Suspension of inbound parcels from China and Hong Kong

#235
post #93

The speed at which all of this is happening is astounding Is this all improvised or was there a big list of stuff to do ahead of time? If the latter, does anyone have a copy of that list? Alternatively, is anyone keeping track of what's already been done so far?

This is (probably?) related to the de minimis exemption, so here is the section of Project 2025 which provides bullet points for dealing with that:

- Stop Communist China’s abuse of the so-called de minimis exemption, which allows it to evade the tariffs for products valued at less than $800.

- Reinvigorate and expand the DHS crackdown on the CCP’s use of e-sellers (including third-party sellers) and the shippers and operators of major warehouses such as Amazon, eBay, and Alibaba to flood U.S. markets with counterfeit and pirated goods.

- Strategically expand tariffs to all Chinese products and increase tariff rates to levels that will block out “Made in China” products, and execute this strategy in a manner and at a pace that will not expose the U.S. to lack of access to essential products like key pharmaceuticals.

- Systematically reduce and eventually eliminate any U.S. dependence on Communist Chinese supply chains that may be used to threaten national security such as medicines, silicon chips, rare earth minerals, computer motherboards, flatscreen displays, and military components.

- Significantly reduce or eliminate the issuance of visas to Chinese students or researchers to prevent espionage and information harvesting.

- Prohibit the use of Communist Chinese–made drones in American airspace.

- Provide significant financial and tax incentives to American companies that are seeking to onshore production from Communist China to U.S. soil.

- Prohibit Communist Chinese state-owned enterprises from bidding on U.S. government procurement contracts (for example, contracts for subway and other transportation systems).

- Ban all Chinese social media apps such as TikTok and WeChat, which pose significant national security risks and expose American consumers to data and identity theft.

- Prohibit all Communist Chinese investment in high-technology industries.

- Prohibit U.S. pension funds from investing in Communist Chinese stocks.

- Delist any Communist Chinese stocks that do not meet Public Company Accounting Oversight Board standards or, alternatively, close off the Chinese “A shares” stock market to U.S. investment and deregister U.S.-sanctioned Communist Chinese companies.

- Prohibit the use of Hong Kong clearinghouses as transit points for American capital investing in the Chinese mainland.

- Prohibit the inclusion of Chinese sovereign bonds in U.S. investors’ portfolios.

- Sanction any companies, including American companies like Apple, that facilitate Communist China’s use of its Great Firewall surveillance and censorship capabilities.

- Order the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Department of Justice to contract with U.S.-owned and U.S.-operated artificial intelligence companies that are capable of detecting, identifying, and disrupting both the domestic groups’ and CCP influencers’ social media operations and funding streams using public information as a rapidly available offensive measure.

- Compel the closure of all Confucius Institutes in the U.S., which serve as propaganda arms of the CCP.

- Hold the CCP accountable for the COVID-19 virus, which almost certainly originated as a genetically engineered virus from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and do so through the establishment of a presidential commission or select congressional committee that would investigate the origins of the virus; its various costs, both economically and in human life; and the possible means of collecting damages from the CCP, which are likely to rise to the trillions of dollars.

Re: Suspension of inbound parcels from China and Hong Kong

#236
post #160

Anyone got a non-intuited, horses-mouth reason why? I suspect (ie, intuit) that its actually an attack on the USPS, not on China. The party of government doesn't like the post office, and this is to teach us not to like the post office either. I guess if they stopped using electric cars, they might like the post office again.

[flagged]

Re: Suspension of inbound parcels from China and Hong Kong

#237
post #231
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And forgo the revenue? Or, do the other carriers do a better job of meeting the imposts?

> And forgo the revenue? There's no revenue. The postage fees you pay (if you pay them) on Chinese goods are paid to China Post (or whatever Chinese shipping company), and USPS doesn't see a cent of it. And still has to deal with a frankly insane amount of packages from China. It's not just a US problem. PostNord (Scandinavia) imposed a mandatory fee on all packages arriving from China until they reached an agreement…

Sorry I responded to a comment which mentioned duty assessment. If this UPU/international postal union settlement rate stuff, that's not duty, it's a global model for cost reconciliation.

> Getting rid of de minimus exemptions made it impossible to assess duty on the volume of packages coming in. So they just won’t accept packages at all.

Re: Suspension of inbound parcels from China and Hong Kong

#238
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I literally do not know how the electrical and firmware engineers will do their jobs now if we cannot receive packages from China As a software engineer who works closely with electrical and firmware engineers I know what you are saying is completely true. The question is how did we let it go this far? Why has there never been serious Western alternatives to JLCPCB, PCBWay, JLCCNC etc.? Has anyone asked themselves h…

> The question is how did we let it go this far? Because allowing countries to maximize their comparative advantages is great for economic growth. It doesn’t make sense for every nation on earth to have their own copy of every industrial sector. We don’t need all nations to manufacture their own jet engines, oil tankers, t-shirts, and Tylenol. Trade is good. The idea that China is a major security threat is basically…

>>The idea that China is a major security threat is basically brand new

You're kidding right?

Re: Suspension of inbound parcels from China and Hong Kong

#239

This is going to utterly fuck so many R&D projects at my company. We actually do large-scale manufacturing of industrial valves in the USA. But a lot of our prototyping involves working with Chinese suppliers and getting small batches of samples / prototypes / revisions sent in packages on airplanes. I literally do not know how the electrical and firmware engineers will do their jobs now if we cannot receive packages…

Well add a mid ship point in Mexico, Canada, or Japan.

Re: Suspension of inbound parcels from China and Hong Kong

#240
post #120

This is going to utterly fuck so many R&D projects at my company. We actually do large-scale manufacturing of industrial valves in the USA. But a lot of our prototyping involves working with Chinese suppliers and getting small batches of samples / prototypes / revisions sent in packages on airplanes. I literally do not know how the electrical and firmware engineers will do their jobs now if we cannot receive packages…

>I literally do not know how the electrical and firmware engineers will do their jobs now if we cannot receive packages from China As a software engineer who works closely with electrical and firmware engineers I know what you are saying is completely true. The question is how did we let it go this far? Why has there never been serious Western alternatives to JLCPCB, PCBWay, JLCCNC etc.? Has anyone asked themselves h…

In a world based on mutual respects instead of trading wars, there should be no point to redo everything again in every country. If one country is very good at doing something, why try to re-implement it again?
Post reply on HN