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Temporary suspension of acceptance of mail to the United States

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

#341

Post by Symbiote »

timr wrote: post #85
someotherperson wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So execute it for China alone. The issue is that these blanket actions are lazy at best and exclusively populist.

> So execute it for China alone. The issue is that these blanket actions are lazy at best and exclusively populist. Same argument. If there's a country that doesn't get tariffs, that country will very quickly become the leading global exporter to the US. It's the same thing for the "penguin island" that everyone mocked: if you put high tariffs on every place but penguin island, it will soon be Penguin Island Logistic…

Exports have a country of origin declared.

If I post something from Denmark to Canada, they want to know the origin of the goods. If it's China, the China tariffs (if any) apply rather than the Denmark/EU ones.

If the declaration is incorrect, the goods can be siezed or returned.

Penguin Island is a nature preserve (the whole thing), no one is building anything.

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

#342

Post by Symbiote »

SequoiaHope wrote: post #47
dcchambers wrote: post #35

Semi-related: I make orders from Amazon Japan a couple times a year - shipping to the US isn't cheap but it's nice that Amazon has always handled import taxes/customs/everything else involved in international shipping. Other than taking longer, it's basically the same experience as ordering from Amazon domestically. It's a shame that the ending of the De Minimis Exemption and other tariff-related stuff from the curre…

Didn’t it already end for China? They just add the tax on top of the shipment price and pre-pay it.

The European post services are complaining that there's not yet an electronic system set up for them to pay these tariffs on the recipient's behalf.

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

#343

Post by phil21 »

ericmay wrote: post #242
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…

> 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 tradeoff here is “pay the middleman markup tax” for the most part.

Instead of getting cheap Chinese made clothing for $5, you now get to pay Walmart $17 for the same thing.

If we are going to outsource production in order to save on consumer goods costs, the consumer should be the one reaping the surplus - not capital. Properly informed buyers were quite capable of getting quality product out of China for a tenth of the cost of exactly the same thing stocked on major retailer shelves here.

While there are certainly abuses of the current system, it would be best to close those loopholes vs. just give a bunch of profits to giant companies for effectively doing nothing more than having scale and volume. If you’re lucky they may do some curation too.

Not everything was Temu or Shein. Plenty of smaller factories basically going direct to consumer in a win win sort of scenario. They get paid more, and the customer doesn’t pay any middlemen.

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

#344

Post by akimbostrawman »

wnevets wrote: post #128

How can you be an American and not be embarrassed by this? Is stopping the "woke mind virus" really that important to you?

Turns out if you subvert, mock and disenfranchise people long enough at some point they have enough.

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

#345

Post by arp242 »

ethbr1 wrote: post #226

Hot take: good The de minimis treatment has been abused beyond original intent. Specifically by China, but you can't fix that without fixing the general case. Fast fashion and other low-value drop air shipping across oceans is ecologically insane: as a planet we literally can't afford to keep doing this. And the US, by virtue of population + relative consumer wealth, is the biggest customer for this. Furthermore, the…

On the general point about fast fashion etc. I don't disagree, but vague haphazard unclear regulation no one knows how to comply with is not "good" in any way. It's sloppy banana republic (McDonalds republic?) governance that's making a joke out of the entire country. I'm not American so I don't really care as such, but you know... it's not good. It's just bad governance on a very basic level.

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

#346

Post by mcintyre1994 »

I saw, I think in another comment thread here, that US customs doesn't allow sending into the US with unpaid tariffs and then having the US recipient pay the tariff. That's how it works in the UK (at least for personal shipments) and I assumed everywhere. I'm guessing that's why they'd suspend shipments here, because they'd have to deal with all the logistics of paying the tariff themselves, and presumably charging the local sender.

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

#347

Post by hippo22 »

zymhan wrote: post #332
zahlman wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not whataboutism. The argument described in GGP would apply the same way to GP's case. Cigarette taxes are a sales/consumption tax (specifically one aimed at discouraging consumption, but cigarettes are addictive) and they are necessarily, inherently regressive, for the simple reason that people with orders of magnitude more income and wealth cannot feasibly spend proportionately more on cigarettes.

It's bringing up an entirely unrelated topic as some sort of "gotcha". Cigarette taxes were not part of the GGP's comment. I.e. a red herring > The communication intent is often to distract from the content of a topic (red herring). The goal may also be to question the justification for criticism and the legitimacy, integrity, and fairness of the critic, which can take on the character of discrediting the criticism,…

No, it’s not whataboutism. The original comment made a single argument: regressive taxes are bad. I provided a counter example: the cigarette tax is an example of a regressive tax that is good. This invalidates their argument. That doesn’t mean their position on tariffs is wrong, but they’ve provided an insufficient argument to support their viewpoint. There’s also an implicit corollary that they don’t fully understand tariffs if this is their position.

Whataboutism would be something like someone from the US arguing that China’s treatment of Uyghurs is bad, and someone from China countering with “well, what about America’s treatment of Native Americans?” The Native American argument isn’t a counter example of the Uyghur argument. Both positions can be true. It’s unrelated. That’s not the case here. You can’t be anti-tariff purely because it’s a regressive tax and also be pro-cigarette tax.

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

#348

Post by derivagral »

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…

> buyers think they’re buying domestic

This is hard to tell from the discussion, but are you defending this practice?

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

#349

Post by prime_ursid »

voxl wrote: post #338
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…

Everything does not have a tradeoff. This philosophy alone is bullshit.

Sometimes the tradeoff is that someone gets richer / inflates their ego while most people’s lives get worse in a tangible way.

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

#350

Post by Gud »

nine_k wrote: post #188
zahlman wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Democracy" is the form of government; you are speaking of voting systems, which are an implementation detail, and not in the same natural category. "Alternatives to democracy" are things like despotism, monarchy, communism, fascism etc.

Aristocratic republics have been doing quite well for some time: Florence, Venice, Genoa in the Mediterranean, much of the Hanseatic league and places like Novgorod, and later the Dutch Republic, in the north.

well for whom?
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