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Suspension of inbound parcels from China and Hong Kong

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Re: Suspension of inbound parcels from China and Hong Kong

#561

Post by 8note »

transcriptase wrote: post #166
JohnBooty wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know it's absolutely not the point of your post and you don't mean 15 years as a literal prediction but I thought about it anyway and damn, 15 years is pretty optimistic. Think about how long it took China to become a manufacturing giant. It would take the US even longer to get back to that. The US would have to do what China did, with additional challenges such as: - overcoming environmental regulations - a more d…

I think you’ve, intentionally or not, hit on a critical point that most like to ignore while passively accepting that “China is simply where things are manufactured”. As if that wasn’t the case until about the time the median HN reader was born. Some will attribute it to the proximity of factories to one another, collaboration between those in adjacent industries, culture, government intentionality, a general lack of…

> Canada implementing carbon pricing and phasing out coal domestically while simply shipping it to Asia instead

Canada's carbon pricing is to incentivize buying stuff that has less carbon emissions. there's nothing particularly holier-than-thou about it, its just there to get the infrastructure to swap.

Re: Suspension of inbound parcels from China and Hong Kong

#562

Post by ben_w »

Evil_Saint wrote: post #541
inetknght wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's funny because I've thought it is the same for years and I'm happy to see someone else post a comment about it instead. Perhaps you'd like to elaborate on why you think it's not the same.

The Golden Gate Bridge is a public bridge and a destination for suicidal people. Foxconn is a place where people live and work. Not accessible to the public. Where is the overlap?

Foxconn is the same size of the combination of all of San Francisco on one side of the bridge with quite a lot of the small settlements on the north side.

Treating Foxconn as "a company" is fine for legal purposes, but it's on a scale of "one of the larger incorporated cities, close to the top 10" by US standards — or indeed "South Dakota". (Similar population, but Foxconn's revenue is about 3.7x South Dakota's GDP or 81% of San Francisco's GDP).

Re: Suspension of inbound parcels from China and Hong Kong

#563

Post by s1artibartfast »

markus_zhang wrote: post #441
s1artibartfast wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was expecting a how-to, not preconditions. It is very hard to devalue assets and jobs that are valuable in fact.

Yeah I think it's very hard. Wealth redistribution is essentially a revolution, and successful revolutions rarely occur before a war with external states.

I would argue that war increases the factual value of workers. It isn't a moralistic redistribution.

It is hard to fight against economic reality, like low market value of highly replaceable labor. However, situations can change that increase demand or make labor more scarce. War is one of those situations.

Now I think that binding social contracts are garbage and used to crush peoples lives for vapid soundbyte.

The only way to ensure social collaboration is positive sum is by keeping it keeping it voluntary. When people have no opt out, they are mercilessly exploited, if not by corrupt politicians, then by a majority whenever they can.

Re: Suspension of inbound parcels from China and Hong Kong

#564

Post by yladiz »

account42 wrote: post #468
catherd wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DHL B2C shipments to the EU are generally held in customs until the duty is paid, which makes it slow but ensures DHL isn't left holding the bag when people decide they don't want to pay unexpected import duties. That's (historically) not the case for US B2B shipments. For those, DHL pays the duty as the shipment goes through customs and then sends an invoice after the parcel is delivered.

> DHL B2C shipments to the EU are generally held in customs until the duty is paid That used to be the case here in Germany until recently when they started paying the duty for you and then demand it at pickup along with a "small" markup (up to 1000% when the duty was low) for a service you never asked for.

I agree, if the information is available electronically they should just automatically process it with no fee (I assume this is how it’s handled most of the time anyway). At least you can opt out of the process, but then you’re responsible for filling out all the forms, which suck since ATLAS is not a nice system to work with. Maybe in the future they’ll get rid of this admin fee.

Re: Suspension of inbound parcels from China and Hong Kong

#565

Post by eru »

neom wrote: post #465
HPsquared wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similarly the UK is pretty much the poorest Anglo country. It seems to be a pattern where the most ambitious/productive types "boil off" to where there is more opportunity. I suspect this pattern is reflected with most diaspora groups.

It also begets the other, a place that has that opportunity attracts people who want to work, people who want to work build opportunity, attract more people, etc. Once you're in a death spiral of people who don't want to work and you're not specifically building socialism, you end up in this half functional dead state like my country (Canada). I always say, I honestly don't care if we do communism or capitalism just…

The best run and most successful socialist country ever was East Germany.

Even by global standards (compared against all countries) it did fairly well. By socialist standards it did really well. By German standards, it did so much worse than Austria, Switzerland or West Germany.

I don't think you want that for Canada. And that's pretty much a best case outcome.

Re: Suspension of inbound parcels from China and Hong Kong

#566

Post by eru »

lazylizard wrote: post #517
eru wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going a bit on a tangent: I grew up in Europe, but am now living in Singapore. It's interesting: despite all the PRC's advances and progress in the last few decades, they are still the poorest Chinese-majority country. You can go even wider, and look at countries with sizeable Chinese minorities, like Malaysia or Thailand, and I think you will find that the average ethnic Chinese person there also makes more than the…

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Chinese how to quantify "by and large"? there's not many chinese people outside china and most of them left china in the last 100 years in search of better lives. and usa and singapore are rich?

USA and Singapore are stinking rich, yes.

> [...] there's not many chinese people outside china and most of them left china in the last 100 years in search of better lives.

Wikipedia says:

> Overseas Chinese people are people of Chinese origin who reside outside Greater China (mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan).[20] As of 2011, there were over 40.3 million overseas Chinese.[8]

40.3 million is quite a few. And they form significant minorities in many South East Asian countries.

But you are right that eg Germany or South Sudon don't really have enough Chinese people to really say much about them there.

Re: Suspension of inbound parcels from China and Hong Kong

#567

Post by eru »

grumpy-de-sre wrote: post #424
numpad0 wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't know about China specifically, but "working ridiculously hard" is just "working" if everyone around is doing the same and you had no points of comparison. If you've seen enough people graduating into non-working class, or you have had yourself, that changes your perspective.

I guess that would add credence to the culture element. All of east Asian shares in this practice really. Given a structure/framework in which to work productively, they tend to really crush it economically. However it seems this often comes at the expense of other aspects of society (underemployment, low fertility rates, elder poverty, deflation etc).

Looking broader at South East Asia, the Chinese minorities in countries around the region are know for working hard and being successful, often more so than other locals.

Re: Suspension of inbound parcels from China and Hong Kong

#568

Post by cguess »

ranger_danger wrote: post #528
ndom91 wrote: post #437

Looks like they've flip flopped already: > Effective February 5, 2025, the Postal Service will continue accepting all international inbound mail and packages from China and Hong Kong Posts. The USPS and Customs and Border Protection are working closely together to implement an efficient collection mechanism for the new China tariffs to ensure the least disruption to package delivery.

[flagged]

oooooh 2004 burn! Relevant!

Re: Suspension of inbound parcels from China and Hong Kong

#569

Post by mrbigbob »

catherd wrote: post #340
relistan wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d deem it extremely unlikely that US customs processing or the express carriers will be able to handle that overflow in anything like a reasonable timeframe.

Could be. The carriers do already have practice ramping up and down for Christmas and Chinese New Year so it seems plausible they could absorb significant extra volume in whatever time it would take to negotiate the leases on the extra flights they use during those times. For that matter customs processing also has experience managing the same surges. I'd believe we might have some sort of own-goal planned for custom…

you do know how they "ramp up" right? All the big ones hire thousands of temp holiday workers then let them go shortly after. do you think they are going to hire thousands of full time workers for these roles. most of them since the pandemic have enjoyed record profit from already increasing shipping rates. this would be a perfect excuse for them to do it more

Nothing more American than the government attempting to kill competition so multi billion dollar corporations can get richer

Re: Suspension of inbound parcels from China and Hong Kong

#570

Post by K0balt »

Symbiote wrote: post #529
K0balt wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do R&D in the Dominican Republic. Like most nations in the USA orbit, we receive our eastern imports via the USA via transshipping. This is also disrupting the nascent technology industries in the Caribbean and the Latin-American diaspora. For us specifically, it will increase our logistics costs by multiples and lead times by weeks. I expect this will result in substantial schedule misses and cost overruns.

Perhaps new transshippers in Canada or maybe Mexico could take the place of the Americans.

Perhaps. For now, it looks like we get a reprieve.
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