Temporary suspension of acceptance of mail to the United States • Hacker News Board

Re: Temporary suspension of acceptance of mail to the United States

#301

Post by estimator7292 » Mon, Aug 25, 2025, 9:52 PM UTC

pessimizer wrote: post #227

bsimpson wrote: post #198

There was chatter about this in one of the NYC subreddits over the weekend. Apparently ending the de minimus exemption is closing the grey market for e.g. sunscreen; places that used to sell Japanese sunscreens on American shelves no longer are. There's a frustratingly long list of goods that the US decided to put requirements on in previous generations, and then stopped maintaining. Sunscreen is one; other countries…

I don't understand the argument that it's bad that the government is suppressing grey markets in goods that aren't approved in the US. I get it from a selfish point of view, as in I want a particular helmet and I think the design is safer, so I'm upset when I can't have it at the price I want it. I don't understand it as a political argument. If our government isn't meant to do anything, shut it down entirely. Don't…

You can have either a free market or a market tightly controlled by a government plus all the cronyism that entails.

We generally refer to the latter option as "communism"

Re: Temporary suspension of acceptance of mail to the United States

#302

Post by lolc » Mon, Aug 25, 2025, 9:59 PM UTC

khuey wrote: post #132

helloooooooo wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think anyone here has yet come to the realization that ending rampant consumerism is the whole damn point of the tariffs.

The "point" of the tariffs is that Trump likes tariffs. There's nothing more to it than that.

Why cut off your thinking there? I can think of many reasons why he would like tariffs. Two off the bat:

- Allows claiming various benefits like onshoring production, or reduced taxes. This is for the voters.

- Allows threatening other countries' industries with tariffs unless they invest in his friends' enterprises. This is for him.

Re: Temporary suspension of acceptance of mail to the United States

#303

Post by ModernMech » Mon, Aug 25, 2025, 9:59 PM UTC

aworks wrote: post #291

ModernMech wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're honestly asking what's the point, the literal answer is the entire federal government has realigned itself to support Trump's ego. That's literally its entire purpose now, without exaggeration. If something is bad for Trump's ego, it will not happen no matter how good it is for the country. Conversely, if Trump wants something to happen, it's going to no matter how bad it is for the rest of us. Or at least…

I read an article in Foreign Affairs that calls this "personalism."

This one I presume? https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/new-dictators

Notice the date -- 2016. This has been brewing for a long time, and I will never forgive / forget that the people who recognized it and called it out early [1] were mocked and ridiculed to no end. They were shunned in their professions, called alarmists, and liars. But they were right the whole time, they were just ahead of the curve. If we had just listened to them, this could have all been avoided.

[1] https://medium.com/@Elamika/the-unbearable-lightness-of-bein... (also from 2016, as far as I know the first person to make the connection between Trump's narcissism and his inevitable attempt to become a dictator. She predicted January 6 five years before it happened just by pattern matching his personality disorder to dictators of the past).

Re: Temporary suspension of acceptance of mail to the United States

#304

Post by Retric » Mon, Aug 25, 2025, 10:00 PM UTC

arghwhat wrote: post #276

Retric wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It benefits the wealthy by applying to a smaller percentage of their spending. You can easily avoid all tariffs on a 100 million dollar yacht built outside the US, and you don’t pay it for a personal chef etc.

Most wealthy people are not billionaire wealthy. Billionaire wealthy pretty much manage to avoid all taxation, progressive or not, so the comparison is moot. They just trample on everyone else.

Billionaires still pay property taxes etc so it’s worth separating how regressive various tax schemes are.

Re: Temporary suspension of acceptance of mail to the United States

#305

Post by bsimpson » Mon, Aug 25, 2025, 10:06 PM UTC

Scoundreller wrote: post #294

ericmay wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Closing these de minimus exemptions is making it harder for discerning consumers to buy higher quality goods than are currently available in the US right now. Everything has a trade-off. On the other hand, it also prevents companies from dumping artificially cheap and crappy goods (TEMU) on US markets and making it nearly impossible for others to compete. Unsuspecting consumers buy a super cheap (subsidized) crap p…

My counterexample is that I sell mid-high end vintage bicycle parts. There’s about a 0% chance of Shimano or Campagnolo bringing that production to the US because they haven’t made this stuff in several decades. I’ve now jacked my US shipping prices to account for tariffs. I’ll probably lose all US sales. US buyers probably won’t realize that ~5-10% of its supply has disappeared for these parts. They also may not rec…

I bought a pair of motorcycle boots this way. It was a brand that isn't routinely imported into the US. The seller was a dealership near the Canadian border. It was something like they stocked them in London, Ontario and sold them from their Detroit subsidiary.

Re: Temporary suspension of acceptance of mail to the United States

#306

Post by ericmay » Mon, Aug 25, 2025, 10:09 PM UTC

ljsprague wrote: post #299

ericmay wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Closing these de minimus exemptions is making it harder for discerning consumers to buy higher quality goods than are currently available in the US right now. Everything has a trade-off. On the other hand, it also prevents companies from dumping artificially cheap and crappy goods (TEMU) on US markets and making it nearly impossible for others to compete. Unsuspecting consumers buy a super cheap (subsidized) crap p…

>the Korean version (which I use) Beauty of Joseon?

Yea that’s what I use!

Re: Temporary suspension of acceptance of mail to the United States

#307

Post by monero-xmr » Mon, Aug 25, 2025, 10:14 PM UTC

tzs wrote: post #238

monero-xmr wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t see why we should allow 0% imports but be shut out of exports. Yes yes according to some chart this is actually a good thing but I find it unfair. For centuries the theory was mercantilism which is the highest imbalance of trade in your favor is good. The last century was Keynesian “deficits don’t matter” where taken to its conclusion, the worst possible imbalance is good, because that means they have to rein…

> I’m open to the experiment where targeting a balanced trade with all countries as the goal Do you mean balanced trade as a whole, so it would be OK to have deficits or surpluses with individual countries as long as the total surpluses match the total deficits? Or do you mean trade with each individual country should be balanced?

I would be interested in balancing trade with each individual country, with magnitude of deficit taken into account (i.e. a tiny island country would have vastly less impact than China).

Tariffs artificially increase costs of goods with another country. That should incentivize purchasing the goods from other countries, with the cheapest being our own. Of course we have very high labor costs, and lack a huge supply chain, and on and on. But China only 50 years ago had very little of the same, and America systematically de-industrialized, teaching other countries, moving the kit, and so on, until we lost the ability to make things at scale cheaply ourselves. But the same thing can happen in reverse, there is nothing inherently impossible about having Americans build and run factories, with the benefit of robots and AI and all the latest tools.

Re: Temporary suspension of acceptance of mail to the United States

#308

Post by bsimpson » Mon, Aug 25, 2025, 10:20 PM UTC

johnbrodie wrote: post #269

bsimpson wrote: post #198

There was chatter about this in one of the NYC subreddits over the weekend. Apparently ending the de minimus exemption is closing the grey market for e.g. sunscreen; places that used to sell Japanese sunscreens on American shelves no longer are. There's a frustratingly long list of goods that the US decided to put requirements on in previous generations, and then stopped maintaining. Sunscreen is one; other countries…

The DOT standard isn't good, but the US doesn't disallow helmets that meet other standards. You can buy Bell and Alpinestars MIPS helmets in the US today, no gray market needed: https://www.revzilla.com/mips-motorcycle-helmets

You're on a tangent of a tangent, but:

Old school helmets use the philosophy that in a crash, you want your head to be harder than its opponent.

New school helmet use the philosophy that a helmet should absorb or deflect as much energy as possible, so that energy doesn't get translated to your brain.

They are actually diametrically opposed. Fortnine (the same channel I linked earlier) has a video on the SNELL standard. Its origins are as a beefier version of the DOT standard. They recently found themselves at a crossroads where it's impossible to both meet SNELL and meet ECE 22.06 (today's state-of-the-art standard). They ended up bifurcating SNELL into two standards: one that meets old DOT-based SNELL, and another that basically says "if it's 22.06, they can call it SNELL variant B." It was the only way they could keep the SNELL brand alive across both halves of the transition.

Re: Temporary suspension of acceptance of mail to the United States

#309

Post by philwelch » Mon, Aug 25, 2025, 10:21 PM UTC

jacobolus wrote: post #230

philwelch wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which is still current statutory law, empowers the president to set tariffs. There’s an argument that Congress didn’t have the power to pass that law, but they did.

In my understanding, this is only applicable when "an article is being imported into the United States in such quantities or under such circumstances as to threaten or impair the national security". But "national security" is pretextual in this case.

National security is one of the primary motivations for wanting to protect American industry in the first place; it’s hardly pretextual. And even if it was, the law states that whether or not national security is threatened is up to the judgment of the Secretary of Commerce.

Re: Temporary suspension of acceptance of mail to the United States

#310

Post by philwelch » Mon, Aug 25, 2025, 10:25 PM UTC

anigbrowl wrote: post #261

philwelch wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

De minimis allows people to evade tariffs by simply drop shipping each individual product all the way from China or wherever, so long as the retail price is below the threshold. I’m skeptical of tariffs in general but if you’re going to have them, it makes sense to close the loopholes.

Baby, bathwater. For every person abusing it by splitting shipments (easily detectable and prosecutable) I'd bet there are many more taking their first small steps into entrepreneurship with goods or parts worth $100 or $500.

Splitting shipments is different from drop shipping. Splitting shipments would be if, instead of moving a whole container of goods from a Chinese warehouse to a US warehouse, you just mail each item over by itself. Drop shipping is when you mail each item directly to the end customer.